Lo, How a Rose E’er Blooming

I think we have agreed that a slap in the face is never a good thing. When a conductor hands one out during a break, it is an inexcusable assault and abuse of power. It's just a shame that we're talking about a conductor whose influence in the world of music could hardly be more lasting.

We travel back in time. To be precise, to the early 90s of the 20th century. We are in the dormitory wing of Altenburg Abbey in Lower Austria. This part of the building had several special features. One of the most important was its size. If you were fast enough, you could run along this long straightaway with just enough distance between you and your pursuers to seek shelter in one of the toilets at the other end. Now you just had to sit out all the threats banging against the insurmountable door. It must have been around 35 years ago that I once again stayed in one of these “shelters” and hoped for the patience of my pursuers to quickly evaporate. There was a second positive peculiarity. The dormitories of the “elders” were just around the corner. If you had a good standing in this milieu, it sometimes happened that one of the elders solved the problem for you. I was hoping for the same thing that day, as I could hear loud classical music coming from one of the sixth form dormitories.

My hopes were quickly fulfilled. “Get lost, or I'll be silent! This sentence signaled that my opponent had to give up and that I would soon be free again. At least as long as I stayed within the sphere of protection. To avoid falling into the clutches of the hunter, who was probably waiting somewhere in one of the thousand hiding places, I decided to join the group of “iuvenes”.

They all stood in amazement around the absolutely legitimate successor to a ghetto blaster, equipped with an ultra-modern CD drive. An almost indescribably ugly structure that also shone with pointless lighting effects. We heard the “Magnificat” by Johann Sebastian Bach. It was a recording from 1985, with a version in radiant D major blasting out of the overtaxed speakers of this plastic horror. Even having ascended into nirvana, I would never be able to forget this strange stylistic melange. I joined the group and listened. I had never heard anything like it, nor could I believe that these people singing were also a choir like us. The shredding brass, the incredible brilliance of the singers and the daring tempo, coupled with this passionate dynamic, are still unrivaled for me today. I didn't understand a word, as the text was in Latin. Then we get stuck on “Fecit potentiam”. We start again and again. “Okay, that sounds great, let's do it again.” The tenor sounded as if it were a single voice. The timpani turned into an anvil and the trumpets set about finally settling any unanswered questions about who was about to show their might. If there were any lingering doubts in people's hearts, they had to be led into a radiant light and dispelled forever. I would like to mention at this point that of course other music of the time could also generate such enthusiasm. Nirvana, for example, was establishing Seattle as a music capital, and Axel Rose had made short leggings socially acceptable. This is just for the sake of completeness, so as not to paint the wrong picture.

So thirty-five years later, the conductor who has had a significant influence on my musical life to date is handing out a “wadschn” and coming to Vienna a year later with a Christmas program. WTF? I'll say a few words about his catharsis and the at least very open and guilt-conscious way he dealt with his misconduct at the end, don't worry. To be honest, I didn't really hesitate for long when Sir John Eliot Gardiner's at least biggest fan offered me the chance to go to this concert together. It's worth mentioning that we hardly ever missed a concert in our student lives and knew every recording by heart. Our contacts at the unfortunately closed Virgin Megastore in Mariahilfer Strasse came in handy.

In addition, probably filled with Christmas sentimentality, I decided that this seemed to be the perfect opportunity to experience this together with my son. Of course, I had a particularly unrealistic idea of this concert evening, which was in the spirit of my youth, which I would drag there in “cloned” form. I decided not to say anything judgmental about the wonderful program that awaited us, probably so as not to undermine any epiphany. Of course, people asked me questions and pestered me, but I stuck to my own guidelines. Slowly, however, he began to feel a certain discomfort, as he naturally had to assume that he would be served bland music in a bland environment with bland people. In addition, it had not escaped his notice that a classical concert could take up a lot of time. After all, people were seated close together and the opportunities to escape were naturally very limited. The idea of visiting a typical Viennese pub before the concert to make sure he had enough to eat and drink might have alleviated this fear, but at least made it bearable.

After studying the menu on the website and the fact that we tended to be vegetarian in terms of our diet, I realized that there could be difficulties on this point too. In short: all kinds of offal and bone dishes were not our thing. Bratwurscht, it was going to be a great evening. Well, we were definitely in the wrong restaurant. The menu was bursting with classic Viennese meat dishes. Just giving the impression that his eating habits had anything to do with “V” at the beginning would end in an epic ejection. All around us, great lovers of this cuisine were obviously feasting on these strange dishes. However, I was assured by all the brave members of our group that all the dishes served - some of the names alone sounded hard to bear - had tasted excellent.

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Yes, the large hall of the Wiener Konzerthaus is simply impressive. So were our seats. We were practically sitting next to the musicians. My dear friend had given me these tickets as a present and had spared no effort, and I had only realized this at the last moment. So the surprise was a success.

First impression: we have all aged, the conductor most of all. I tried to imagine this old man slapping another man in the face and what could have led to this escalating act of violence. That's when it started. “Schwingt freudig euch empor” BWV 36 The cantata was premiered in Leipzig on December 2, 1731 for the 1st Sunday of Advent. My son turned to me to give me his first insight: “It's really bad that you can hear everything here without microphones.” I nodded in the affirmative and chalked this up as a small initial success. Then, a few minutes later, came a second observation worth sharing. He had noticed Michael Niesemann. A wonderful oboist who was completely absorbed in the music. It was a real pleasure to listen to and watch him. Everything becomes three-dimensional in a concert like this. The abstract takes shape here because you see people achieving the incredible feat of touching our hearts beyond our imagination.

To my astonishment, the obligatory sharpening and scratching only started shortly before the break. I had actually expected it earlier. Politely and careful not to disappoint me in my exuberant enthusiasm for this wonderful music, he asked: “Tell me, how long does a concert like this normally last?” I grinned at him, he did the same and finally I offered to leave. For my sake, he acted as if everything was fine. A mega scramble for small sandwiches and champagne later, a sound rang through the aisles and warned everyone unmistakably to take their seats slowly. Well, the chance to escape was gone and we were back in our seats. The second part followed.

I mention Neil Brough here because I have rarely heard such finely conducted trumpet playing. Okay, he's practiced a lot in his life. To conjure up such a soft tone from a baroque trumpet leaves you speechless. My son recognized it immediately, watched him with wide open eyes and then gave me a sympathetic look. Zack, there it was, the next good moment. The joy I felt was not selfish, no, certainly not, but rather the obvious realization that music was not a matter of course. Music is not like air, which is simply there, but it is contained in the air, invisible and demands something of us before it reveals itself to us. It certainly sounds trite and the kitsch is undeniable. Nevertheless, it is true. You have to extract the music from nature. It doesn't happen on its own. Finally, Bach offered us the opportunity to practise with the cantata “Unser Mund sei voll Lachens” BWV 110.

Lost in thought and asking myself again and again why this old man had to give a slap in the face, the sound of the applause rang out and brought me back all at once. Never-ending, it offered me enough time to listen to myself. How should I imagine such a situation? A concert like this, a moment, a wrong word, a thoughtless statement. In my head, I pictured this person raising his hand, and I imagined the faces and reactions of the others, who probably shouldn't expect such a thing. Then it slowly became quieter and he began in a pleasant voice and wished us all a Merry Christmas. He had also brought a small present. “A present?” ”How nice.”

What followed was what I would describe as one of the most beautiful and impressive moments I have ever experienced at a concert. It was as if all facets of light could be made to resound. So clear and glassy was the effort that this choir was able to conjure up to perfection. This was only possible if you could control your voice and not stop at yourself. This required an incredible degree of openness towards the other singers. “A rose has sprung.” I, and I'm sure others felt the same way, was left breathless. I have sung this song in Praetorius' choral setting countless times. But never heard it like this. And suddenly I was back in the dormitory, the feeling of absorbing something with my child's senses had set in. I was amazed and firmly convinced that I could set the subtle elements of the magic around us in motion with the power of my thoughts alone. “Are you crying?” my son asked. “Yes!” was my answer. “Why?”, the logical next question. “Because I'm glad you can hear it too!” Two singers in the choir had visibly not even tried to fight back the tears, which was strangely touching and unifying. This mighty hall and all the people in it remained silent and this simple and therefore so ingenious melody combined everything into a perfect moment.

On this evening, the human somehow also revealed itself. The desire for knowledge, for justice and a purpose. The concert program was of course a church music program, so this combination was only natural. The special pathos is inextricably interwoven with this music and cannot be separated even by the strongest-willed agnostic.  The song “Es ist ein Ros' entsprungen” in this four-part movement is 416 years old. It goes back to an even older hymn. So for so many years, people have been singing and playing a piece that arose from the thoughts and feelings of an individual. Long after the moment of its creation, this creation still moves us. The germ, the origin is of such epochal resonance and is defined in hundreds of hours of practicing, failing and overcoming. It reveals itself in working together and for each other. Where you won't find it, however, is on some server in Silicon Valley.  It does not manifest itself in an algorithm, a model or an artificial neural network, no matter how complex. Why not?

How easy we are to get excited. The mathematical foundations for all this gold-plated bullshit were created by people who wanted to develop something meaningful in the eternal spirit of science. But the period of time that lies ahead of us has already come to an end, this finale will be a disappointment, we will have created images of ourselves that show us how far we have moved away from a sustainable approach to ourselves. Put simply, technology helps us to build “Billy shelves”. Ever faster, ever better shelves that look more and more the same. We care less and less about the deep cuts in the woods and the full warehouses with more and more shelves. The main thing is to prove that we can manage all these processes more precisely and efficiently. At some point, we forget why we are doing this at all. The machines become ever more monstrous and we stand in front of them in amazement and pride. This is not real progress. True progress is not an end in itself. No, it arises from necessity. This necessity can certainly benefit from technology. There are countless examples of this. In medicine, science and technology, the increased efficiency of technology will produce great achievements. Bringing the voice of a dead musician back to life and generating it from itself is by no means one of them. Neither is practically shortening the path to mastery. The negative effects would be unforeseeable. It is therefore natural to make a connection between our cultural history and the present, especially after such a concert.

For me, it is absolutely disconcerting how far we have socially distanced ourselves from certain normative and consensual realities of life. Or to put it another way: it is difficult for an emphatic and intelligent person to imagine how readily creative potential has been outsourced to completely ignorant hands. There are many different origins or incentives that initiate, accompany, promote and conclude a creative process. Depending on the circumstances of our lives, the source can be found within us or in our so-called environment. The anthropological process behind this is highly complex and is made up of many aspects of our personality. It often happens surprisingly quickly and the creation sees the light of day in just a few moments. On the other hand, there is the emergence of a force that absolutely demands expression, but without allowing it to happen lightly. In between there is a smorgasbord of shades of gray. Hard-working creators whose work process is subject to constant repetition, as well as copiers who make a copy of their idea for so long, adding small changes to it before they are satisfied or exhausted and accept that they have reached the end. Procrastinators, dawdlers, vapor talkers, surprises and an infinite number of others can be encountered when studying the human creative process. All the basic resources that our brain provides in these moments and that also inspire us so much, such as the ability to juxtapose different harmonies that are subject to a rule in a multitude of combinations, to form a melody and a rhythm within them and to adhere to an extremely complex set of rules. The combination of this highly technical and mathematical approach and a religiously fueled inspiration and motivation made Johann Sebastian Bach's incredibly differentiated works possible. So the so-called personality with all its facets is responsible for this. Understanding this still harbors mysteries that one would expect to be hidden behind the visible and audible. A kind of magic that poses riddles and has inspired musicians and listeners all over the world for many centuries. Nothing can be created that has no personality. And despite all these otherwise manipulative forces that act on us like magnetic fields and tug at our souls through their actual inability to be someone, something truly magical happened at the end.

On the way home, I suggested we stop off at MacDonalds. That had always been the custom after concerts.  My son asked me not to, because he felt it wouldn't be right after this experience. We decided to go home slowly and enjoy the atmosphere. That was the biggest surprise and joy of the evening for me.