2024-09-11 10:54:32
In forty years, he has built a position on the European music scene similar to that of Herbert von Karajan, who was his mentor. Christian Thielemann is one of the world’s most sought-after conductors, not only because of his extraordinary orchestral and operatic performances, but also because he gives concerts mainly in Germany and Austria. Despite the vehement urging of the quartermasters, he has not flown across the ocean for some time.
The sixty-four-year-old German will be one of the main stars of the Dvořák Prague festival on September 18. He will perform with the famous Vienna Philharmonic in the Rudolfinum.
When he was a guest of the same show for the first time eight years ago, he came with the ancient and excellent Staatskapelle Dresden orchestra, which he led for 12 years. He sealed the era this summer with sold-out concerts at the local Semper Opera House, and the orchestra subsequently named him honorary chief conductor. Together, they not only shaped the musical life of the Saxon metropolis, they also performed regularly at the Salzburg Easter Festival for ten years.
The Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra has twice chosen Christian Thielemann to conduct its popular New Year’s concerts, with 46 million viewers watching this year’s concert broadcast worldwide. In addition, they recorded award-winning sets of symphonies by Ludwig van Beethoven and Anton Bruckner together. The collaboration was strengthened this spring when the musicians granted Thielemann honorary membership in their association – the Austrian ensemble has an unusually democratic model of management and, despite custom, operates without a chief conductor.
Another constant in Thielemann’s career is his work in Bayreuth at the festival dedicated to Richard Wagner. Since his debut in 2000, he is the only living conductor to stage the complete canon of the composer’s music dramas.
Apprentice years
He has been close to this author since childhood. Thielemann comes from a cultured West Berlin family. When his Wagner-loving parents took him to the opera Valkyrie for the first time, he did not react like a normal child. He liked her.
Christian Thielemann will perform in Prague only for the second time. | Photo: Marco Borrelli
Later he studied several instruments, the piano, the violin, the organ attracted him. In the end, he decided to try conducting, and for advice, he went straight to the blacksmith for advice. “I approached Herbert von Karajan after the rehearsal and he devoted about a quarter of an hour to me,” recalls Thielemann about meeting one of the most respected conductors of the 20th century.
He was sixteen and had just discovered Wagner’s opera Tristan und Isolde for himself. “But Karajan told me something about singers, accompaniment and the Merry Widow,” he recalls. The Merry Widow is an operetta by Franz Lehár from the beginning of the 20th century.
The young adept did not understand what he could learn from the “fallen” genre of operetta. But he took Karajan’s advice and actually got a position at the German Opera as an accompanist, i.e. a pianist who studies their parts with the singers.
Then came years of apprenticeship in smaller theaters in Gelsenkirchen, Karlsruhe, Hannover and Düsseldorf. “It was a big school. Singers and conductors in the area have to master an operetta one evening, Wagner the next and Verdi the third,” recounts Thielemann. “Karajan was right. Tristan may take longer, but purely technically The Merry Widow is more difficult to conduct,” he admits with hindsight.
Step by step he progressed from the position of second conductor to the position of music director at the Nuremberg State Theater.
He also became Karajan’s assistant. “Toward the end, he exuded a calm authority. He could sit in a chair, move the baton just slightly and it played,” he recalls of the teacher, who died in 1989. He was 81 years old. “One thought that there was nothing wrong with conducting after all. But then you try it and find out that you are light years away from that model,” says Thielemann.
Christian Thielemann conducts Richard Strauss’ Suite from The Pink Cavalier, with the Berlin Philharmonic playing. Photo: Dieter Nagl | Video: Berlin Philharmonic
Heroism is complicated
In 1997, he returned to his native Berlin, where he took up the post of music director of the German Opera. He quit after seven years due to budget cuts. He was then music director of the Munich Philharmonic until 2011. Several times he found himself shortlisted for the position of head of the Berlin Philharmonic, but the choice fell on Simon Rattle and most recently Kirill Petrenko.
Berlin is still destined for him. Despite talk of a rivalry between him and Daniel Barenboim, the director of Berlin’s second opera Under the Limes, it was Thielemann whom the octogenarian Barenboim called in 2022 when he had to withdraw from preparations for Wagner’s Ring of the Nibelung opera series for health reasons. Success followed, and from this month Thielemann leads the Berlin State Opera. He replaced Barenboim in the position after thirty years.
At the Dvořák festival, Prague with the Vienna Philharmonic will perform the Scottish Symphony by the German romantic Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy, inspired by places connected with the life of Queen Mary Stuart, and the monumental opus Life of a Hero by Richard Strauss.
This symphonic poem, composed for a gigantic cast, calls for a much larger stage than Dvořák’s Rudolfinum Hall. At least sixty-four strings, five trumpets, six horns, double brass, a whole battery of drums – Strauss masterfully uses all conceivable combinations and sound effects.
Although the German composer did not suffer from excessive modesty and once declared that he “could set a spoon to music”, Life of a Hero does not tell about him. At the center is the idea of heroism and various situations or reactions to the theme of heroism.
“Strauss’s hero is likeable, he is not an aggressive character,” believes Thielemann, who will publish an entire book about this composer in German in a few days. He draws attention to several interesting places in the score. “In the part called Battle, I suspect that the creator wanted to prove to her how well she can play instruments,” he says, for example.
The hero’s life is very difficult for the horns and the solo violinist. Most of all, it is usually a great spectacle for the audience. And if the listener gets lost in the various sound or thematic layers or climaxes and does not catch all the essentials? “It doesn’t matter, heroism is complex, that’s why Strauss’s music is also complex,” forwards Thielemann.
On the other hand, the ear will certainly not miss the final chord of the fifty-minute symphonic monument. Strauss entrusted it to the winds only, and according to Thielemann it is “the most beautifully instrumented chord in the history of music”.
This year, the Vienna Philharmonic awarded Christian Thielemann an honorary membership in their association. | Photo: Niklas Schnaubelt
The performance will start at 8 p.m. At exactly half past eight, the conductor begins his ritual of dressing for the concert. He is a stickler, he admits. “I know how long it will take me to get dressed, and during that half hour I play the concert program by ear,” he adds.
However, according to his own words, he is gradually giving up on pedantry. He no longer dwells on every failed phrase in exams. “I am becoming more and more tolerant of imperfections. Joy and spontaneity disappear by checking every detail,” adds Christian Thielemann.
Video: The actuality of 1968 is scary and sad. It’s happening again, says the star of the movie Waves
“Especially now, the film could resonate because of what is happening in Ukraine,” says actor Vojtěch Vodochodský, who plays the main role in the film Waves. | Video: Team Spotlight