FAITHFUL HEIR : Conductor Christoph von Dohnanyi

Commonweal, Dec 15, 2000 by Benjamin Ivry

When debates are heard about music and morality, the focus is usually on how some musicians, like conductors Herbert von Karajan and Wilhelm Furtwangler, collaborated with the Nazi regime and yet managed to produce beautiful recordings while doing so. The spiritual depth of symphonic performances might not depend entirely on a maestro's personal virtues, but there are instances where that is at least partly the case. Donald Rosenberg's new book, The Cleveland Orchestra Story (Gray & Co., $40, 752 pp.), brings one such example to light.

Christoph von Dohnanyi (b. 1929), who has led the Cleveland Orchestra for nearly twenty years, is a conductor of the highest skills, acclaimed for his performances of music by Bartok, Richard Strauss, and Brahms. Scheduled to leave his job in Cleveland in 2002, Dohnanyi has created a legacy of recordings that are still generally underappreciated, if sales are any indication (Decca canceled his rendition of Wagner's Ring midway when profits proved disappointing). But certain indisputable recorded high points, like a Bruckner Sixth Symphony (Decca) or Schumann's Third Symphony (Decca) remain. Dohnanyi is among those conductors who place the music and its emotional message first; many others, who claim this is their goal, are in fact grandstanding for public approval, drawing attention to themselves at every measure. While taking advantage of the Cleveland Orchestra's renowned string and brass sections, Dohnanyi's interpretations retain pliancy and verve, and never bog down in podium egomania. Nor do they suggest a rigidly controlled universe, in which the conductor has laid down the law so vehemently that the musicians, and thenceforth the music, dare not breathe.

Hard work and a lifetime of preparation have apparently resulted in a lack of performance nerves that can mar other conductors' work. I recall arriving at Paris' Chatelet Theatre a few years ago just five minutes before a concert performance of Strauss's massive allegorical opera Die Frau Ohne Schatten. Only just ahead of me in entering the theater from a mind-clearing stroll was the evening's conductor, Dohnanyi, who had obviously prepared the performance so well that he could afford the luxury of a brief last-minute ramble in central Paris. In that situation, most other conductors would have been sweating bullets in their dressing rooms.

These musical and human virtues are audible in Dohnanyi's work, but can their source be identified, at least in part? In his history, Rosenberg reminds us that Dohnanyi also played a unique historical role a half-century ago as the beloved nephew of Protestant theologian and martyr Dietrich Bonhoeffer (1906-45). Dohnanyi's father Hans, and his uncles Klaus and Dietrich, were all active in the anti-Hitler resistance in wartime Germany, and all were imprisoned and executed near the war's end. Young Christoph, busy with music lessons, wrote faithfully to Bonhoeffer in prison, as his uncle marveled in a letter to Hans von Dohnanyi: "A letter from Christoph has just come. It's surprising how he keeps thinking of writing. What a view of life a fourteen-year-old must get when he has to write to his father and godfather in prison for months on end. He cannot have many illusions about the world now; I suppose all these happenings must mean the end of his childhood."

Dohnanyi's childhood may have ended with the murder of his family, but his creative growth survived. Rosenberg implies that this may be because the family undertook music-making as a positive act against evil. The Bonhoeffers, a bourgeois Berlin family, enjoyed at-home evenings of chamber music and choral singing. Immediately after Bonhoeffer was jailed, his family sent him a music score of Bach cantatas. After thanking his aunt for the gift, Bonhoeffer wrote, "I often think of that lovely song by Hugo Wolf which we sang so often lately, 'Joy and suffering come by night, and then depart at your bidding to tell the Lord how you experienced them.'"

In his letters, which are modern spiritual classics, Bonhoeffer often likens human experience to music, as when he compares the fragmentary nature of life to Bach's unfinished Art of Fugue: "If our life could be the weakest reflection of such a fragment, if in itself only for a while the ever-more diverse themes could harmonize so that we might maintain a great counterpoint from beginning to end, so that all we need do is sing the chorale, 'I advance to Your throne,' then we would no longer complain about our fragmentary life, but rejoice in it." Bonhoeffer also insisted on the importance of humor, what he called hilaritas, in Mozart, Wolf, and other creative artists, "which I feel is an expression of the confidence they have in their works, of their bravery, and the challenge they throw out to the world...."

This assimilation of music as a fundamental source of courage and inspiration must have affected young Christoph. His development as a musician set him distinctly apart from other Cleveland Orchestra conductors, like the notorious George Szell, a "nasty and unforgiving man" known to his musicians as "Doctor Cyclops." In a chapter titled "Music and Morality," we learn how Szell's colleagues referred to him as "a cold, cold sonofabitch" and called his reign on the Cleveland podium "the Third Reich," a considerable irony as Szell himself was a refugee from Nazi-occupied Europe.