No artist I have ever known had more professional dedication than the great Swedish dramatic soprano, Birgit Nilsson. I had the good fortune to hear her prior to her Metropolitan Opera debut as both Isolde and the Walküre Brünnhilde. The Tristan performance in the summer of 1959 at the Bayreuth Festival influenced my whole life. I had never heard anything like her voice or her commitment to the words. Just as hearing Maria Callas in London some six years before had opened up new avenues of thought to me in what a great artist could accomplish in opera, the Bayreuth Tristan illustrated to me how powerful Wagner could be. It didn’t hurt that Wolfgang Windgassen sang Tristan and Wolfang Sawallisch conducted, but it was the experience of Nilsson’s vocal and theatrical personality that literally left me speechless. I remember as if were yesterday that when the curtain fell on the first act of that Tristan, I went out of the Festival House and walked the whole hour intermission saying nothing to anyone. I knew that I had heard and seen someone unique, an artist who would make Wagner not only accessible to many but who would be a dominant force in opera.
As the years went on and I began a journalistic career, and in due course through a lot of interviews and meetings, I grew to realize that Nilsson’s performances came from constant attention to detail, to dedication, and to just plain work. I never came into her dressing room without seeing her open score, marked and ready to go for the next act even though she had sung the opera a hundred times. Her humor also pervaded all of her relationships. Unlike a lot of artists of her fame, she never to me seemed to take herself seriously; she had fun and never exhibited either false modesty or a demand for praise.
Sadly, as General Director I never brought her to Seattle Opera. She retired about the time I went to Seattle, and it never worked out that she came even to attend opera in our city. Until shortly before she died, we communicated by letter, and her sense of humor and sharpness of intellect remained intact. I begged her to come out in 1998 when we presented a new production of Tristan und Isolde with Jane Eaglen and Ben Heppner singing the title roles for the first time, but it never proved possible. I treasured my relationship with her, one of the most remarkable artists and people whom I have had the pleasure to know.
When she died in 2005, her will created a foundation directed to make an award every few years of a million dollars to a person or organization that had by themselves made a significant lifetime contribution to classical music or opera. Her good friend and adviser, Rutbert Reisch, was named as the head of the Foundation, and he was instructed to appoint five knowledgeable music business professionals to make the decision on the award. She emphasized what she wanted by designating the first recipient, Placido Domingo. I lay out the groundwork for what the Foundation does because it has often been criticized for giving money to those who are not in financial need. Whether that was the right course or not, her will dictates the terms of the award, and a decedent’s will is inviolate.
The five members of the board represent five different countries in which Ms. Nilsson often performed. Riccardo Muti became the Board’s first choice; the Vienna Philharmonic, our next second prize winner, received the award last week in Stockholm. Because of the importance of the award—the largest in music—and because of Ms. Nilsson’s having been a Swedish citizen, the award is always presented in Stockholm, and the King of Sweden has in each case physically presented the award.
My wife and I on a visit to Europe after my retirement last August came to Stockholm for the ceremony. It was a very interesting two days. Sweden is not on everyone’s itinerary, but it is a thriving, sparkling city and in my experience after four trips here a very inviting and gracious one. Built on the Baltic and a busy port, Stockholm has as much water surrounding and intersecting it as Amsterdam.
The morning of the award ceremony, October 8, there had been a press conference formally announcing the winner followed by press interviews. The President of the Philharmonic and his immediate predecessor accepted the award and in a very gracious speech told what the orchestra members had decided to do with the million dollars. The Vienna Philharmonic, a self-governing body for many years, chooses its conductor, plans its schedule, and does everything for itself that is usually the function of a board-appointed executive or the board itself.
In accepting the award, Andreas Grossbauer, the orchestra’s president, announced that the musicians had voted unanimously to spend the entire amount on building a site for their archives and for digitizing them. The Philharmonic dates from 1842; the archives go back into the late nineteenth century. The archive will be open to scholars and the general public. This was a significant decision because as soon as the award was announced, there was an outcry about the Philharmonic’s pro-Nazi past from 1933 to 1945. Like many organizations in Germany and Austria, it took a while for the Philharmonic to own up to its collusion, but for the past twenty years it has done so. Both Grossbauer and Clemens Hellsberg, the former chief executive of the orchestra, stressed that making the archives available and easily accessible to the public will not only disclose a lot not known about the times of Gustav Mahler (1896-1906) and, later, Richard Strauss, when each was its music directors but would fully expose what the orchestra did during the Nazi period.
There is of course not a single member of the orchestra today who was playing in that period, but in discussions with the two men and in their statements I am convinced that they really want to make all the dark history available. They also will lay out the difficulties in getting the orchestra to accept women players of which there are a good many today (presently one of their concertmasters is a woman). They want to show that they have done everything they can do to rectify any wrongs done in that period. I make this point only because when I was interviewed after the press conference, almost every journalist wanted to know if the board had considered the history of the orchestra. The answer is that of course we had, and I for one would never have agreed to giving the award if I was not convinced that the Philharmonic wanted to make a clean breast of what it had done and had proved conclusively that today’s orchestra is free of Nazi and anti-Semitic thinking.
Before the musicians spoke, Reisch spoke about the Nilsson foundation and about Ms. Nilsson’s desire to give a different kind of award and about her respect for those who not only excelled but had actually made a difference in classical music. Curiously, the Nobel Prizes are awarded in the same concert hall and were given on the days surrounding this celebration; although they don’t involve music, they too are awarded for remarkable accomplishments. The evening was very definitely Swedish as Ms. Nilsson would have wanted, it opened with a full-throated rendition of the Swedish National Anthem sung by the majority of the audience. I had never heard it before, and it sounded both easier to sing and more melodic than most such pieces.
No one could question the quality of the Philharmonic’s playing on this occasion. Led by Maestro Muti (who gave a fine speech on his relationship with and feelings for the Philharmonic), the full orchestra played Liszt’s The Preludes in a performance that seemed to me to draw everything possible from the piece. The well-known dark Philharmonic sound was there, but the impeccability of the strings, brass, winds and percussion as well as Muti’s supercharged leadership completely lived up to the orchestra’s reputation; I can’t remember a more exciting orchestral performance.
After the presentation of the award by the King, we saw the end of the Liebesnacht from Tristan und Isolde with Nilsson and Jon Vickers, filmed from the side stage at Orange in one of their few dual performances of Tristan. The concert ended with Muti leading an orchestra-only Liebestod. Few sopranos, even Ms. Nilsson, could have been heard over the sound the group made, but it worked. For the first time in my life the orchestra successfully replaced the soprano. The musicians, obviously inspired by the moment, played as eloquently as I have ever heard the music performed.
At the banquet afterwards in Stockholm’s oldest hotel, the Grand, a group of four members of the orchestra, plus Yefim Bronfman, played the first and third movements of the Schumann Piano Quintet, again a performance both inspired, muscular and sensitive at the same time. The banquet, served to what seemed like four hundred in a very ornate room, astounded me in its quality. I have never had better food at a public occasion.
It was a remarkable and extraordinarily well-planned day in Stockholm. The quality of musicianship, the total professionalism of everything connected to this event would have delighted Birgit Nilsson.
While I agree that no strings can be attached to the awarding of the Birgit Nilsson Prize, I feel that the Vienna Phil has created an important precedent in declaring the altruistic way in which the million dollars is going to be spent. Let´s hope that future winners will bear this in mind.
It is a pity that German literature on the involvement of artists with the Nazis is not being translated into English. First and foremost, I with to mention Clemens Helsllberg´s book “Demokratie der Könige”. It contains exhaustive information on the history of the Vienna Philharmonic, including abundant information on the Nazi period. Surely there may be more to write about it, but nobody should believe the orchestra has been trying to hide info on this issue.
Otherwise understand Richard Osborne frustration. For God’s sake, what does the “Viennese Style” means in this time and age? Who on earth can discover in recordings of the Vienna Phil the participation of Asian players lowering the particular style the orchestra presumes to have? Racial or ethnic prejudices are not only unethical; they never represent true facts.
Readers should know that my above comment was only an addenda to a much longer post outlining why the VPO should not have been given the award. The orchestra has the lowest ratio of women in the world, and since agreeing to hire them in 1997, it has had the lowest ratio of women as new hires of any orchestra in the world. I also noted that one of the jury members is also known for an overt act of sexism. This is addition to the above mentioned problems with racism.
I agree that Hellsberg’s book was fairly candid in addressing the orchestra’s Nazi past. In 1996 I began publishing articles in English that addressed the orchestra’s Nazi past and how some of those racial values continue to this day. These articles played an important role in raising consciousness in the international community and helped lead to the Philharmonic’s new found openness of the last couple years.
Hellsberg’s book was very helpful in my work, especially since the orchestra would not allow outsiders to see their archives. His book, however, has glaring omissions, such as the Philharmonic reissuing its Ring of Honor to the Nazi war criminal and mass murderer Baldur von Schirach in 1967. The principle force behind that incident was Helmut Wobisch, the orchestra’s first trumpet and chairman at the time who was an unrepentant Nazi. Why was an unrepentant Nazi elected to be the orhcestra’s Chairman? We still have no comprehensive information about how long Nazi members remained in the orchestra and how they continued to influence its employment practices which still affect the orchestra to this day.
I hope this comment will be posted.