‘Egmont’ for now via Dudamel, Cate Blanchett and Jeremy O. Harris
It began with Beethoven.
Bright yellow T-shirts reading, in raspberry type, “¡Bienvenido Gustavo!” marked Gustavo Dudamel’s first concert as music director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic the first Saturday afternoon of October 2009 at the Hollywood Bowl. Eighteen thousand tickets were distributed free for a performance of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, an Angeleno “Ode to Joy” broadcast worldwide. The exultant young Venezuelan conductor’s message was: There is no North, South or Central America. We are one.
We are now in “Gracias Gustavo” season, and times, we are daily reminded, they are a-changin’. But what remains consistent is that Dudamel begins again, in the first month of his six-month homestretch as L.A. Phil music director, by dwelling on the composer he says has meant the most to him since his earliest days as a kid conductor in Caracas. His first major recording boasted startlingly propulsive performances of Beethoven’s Fifth and Seventh Symphonies, with the uproarious Simón Bolívar Youth Orchestra of Venezuela, recorded 20 years ago this month. In August, Dudamel will end his L.A. Phil tenure as he began it, with Beethoven’s Ninth at the Bowl.
Through these two decades, thick and COVID-lockdown thin, Beethoven has been Dudamel’s composer of uplift. This weekend he confronts, for the first time, Beethoven’s daunting mystical and mystifying “Missa Solemnis.” In following weeks, he will pair Beethoven symphonies with two of the most arresting and original of the dozens of new works he has premiered in Los Angeles — Gabriela Ortiz’ Glitter Revolution ballet score, “Revolución Diamantina,” and the first part of Thomas Adès “Dante” ballet.
To begin the Beethoven month at Walt Disney Concert Hall, however, Dudamel turned to another Beethoven work that has long obsessed him, the rarely heard complete incidental to Goethe’s tragedy, “Egmont,” which has the ever-relevant theme that matters most to Dudamel — the profound joy that arises from victory over injustice. For this, he had the assistance of actress Cate Blanchett and playwright Jeremy O. Harris.
Here, too, Beethoven serves as a musical, spiritual and political touchstone. “Egmont” comes in the middle of Beethoven’s career, his heroic period. The historic Egmont was a Flemish general, a hero to his people in the Netherlands who attempts to serve the 16th century Spanish emperor, Philip II, and rife for Goethe’s romanticizing. A remarkable polymath, Goethe himself served as an advisor to Weimar’s Grand Duke, brilliantly balancing political compromises with literature’s highest spiritual callings. He admired the spirit of liberty, for instance, yet opposed the French Revolution and supported Napoleon, believing that ensuing populist disorder would then, as it turned out, require autocracy.
Goethe’s Egmont must learn to love before he can act to defend his people against Philip. The hero goes to his death at the point of self-realization that only in sacrifice may he ascend to and become a symbol for glory.
In the play, which begins as historic epic and becomes, for Goethe, increasing personal and interior, Egmont gains perspective on the complexities of his place in politics by contemplating nature and being. Among Goethe’s many passions were scientific study. He immersed himself in the natural world and befriended the pioneering German environmentalist, Alexander von Humboldt.
It could, thus, have been hardly coincidence that Dudamel opened the program with the premiere of “Humboldt’s Nature” by Venezuelan composer Ricardo Lorenz. The five-part, 25-minute symphonic poem for a large orchestra rife with percussion follows Humboldt’s account of his journey to Venezuela in 1799.
Symphonic glitter sets the stage of New Andalusia. Guacharo birds shriek. Latin rhythms take us to coastal regions. Sandy percussion accompanies a journey up the Orinoco River. Throughout, Lorenz’s orchestra, imaginatively colored, reflects vast nature. But the score ends with the shock of humanity, as Humboldt encounters enslaved Cubans.
The one thing Goethe lacked was a sophisticated ear for music (and possibly sound). But Humbolt’s account could practically be the starting place for Beethoven’s “Egmont,” begun a decade after the Venezuelan encounter. In the popular overture, elicitation of tumult concludes, with startling exhilaration, in the kind of grand Beethovenian triumph that never fails to excite. The incidental music, though, offers needed theatrical context. That includes two songs for Egmont’s love, Klärchen, four entr’actes, a melodrama for Egmont as he approaches his execution and, powerfully as only Beethoven can, a battle cry.
Goethe has never lost relevance. Matthew Bell’s new biography, “Goethe’: A Life in Ideas,” has given Germany’s Shakespeare new attention. One of the greatest plays of our time, Tom Stoppard’s “Arcadia,” confronts Goethe’s “Elective Affinities” with our own elective affinities. One of the greatest operas of our time, John Adams’ “Doctor Atomic,” contemplates the creation of nuclear weapons as the functioning of a latter-day Faust, Goethe’s most lasting creation.
“Egmont,” too, readily speaks to us and it has been on Dudamel’s agenda for years. While performances of the complete play with the incidental music are rare, a half-hour concert version, also rare but less so, proves effective. Dudamel did it with the Berlin Philharmonic in June, a performance of which can be viewed on the orchestra’s Digital Concert Hall. The narrator is a young Austrian actor, Felix Kammerer, who is riveting (as he is in Guillermo del Toro’s “Frankenstein”). He adds a slight introduction revealing Egmont’s indecisiveness, but otherwise sticks to Goethe.
Cate Blanchett narrates Beethoven’s incidental music to “Egmont” with Gustavo Dudamel conducting the Los Angeles Philharmonic at Walt Disney Concert Hall.
(Elizabeth Asher / Los Angeles Philharmonic)
Harris, who is the author of “Slave Play,” has other elective affinities. He has created a new, effusively angry text for Blanchett. It begins as a dirge. Battalions are gathered on the banks of Portland, Ore.; Bethlehem; Charlotte, N.C.; Tehran; Minneapolis; Brussels. The Egmont Harris references is the historical one, not Goethe’s. The text become a bald call for action.
Much of it was lost to the audience, since reverberant amplification gave heroic heft to Blanchett’s voice at the cost of intelligibility. But her intensity, whether seated on the lip of the stage, where she begins, or standing in the organ loft where she winds up at the end, spoke for itself.
Beethoven’s music improves Goethe, extracting its humanity and frailty, and Dudamel’s performance probed its profound inevitability of good triumphing over evil. Soprano Elena Villalón added lithe touch to Klärchen’s songs, sung in their original German.
But Beethoven can do little for Harris’ and Blanchett‘s agitprop. Theirs is the necessity of the moment to act rather than indulge an Egmont who has to feel before he can respond. Although Blanchett was the joyless conductor in the film “Tár,” her curious little dance in the organ loft at the moment of musical triumph may have meant recovered joy or simply that the world, in which we are no longer one, has gone crazy.
Equally peculiar was a performance of Schumann’s Piano Concerto that served as transition from “Humboldt” to “Egmont.” One of the concerto highlights of Dudamel’s music directorship in L.A. is a performance, eight years ago, of the concerto’s mood-shifting eloquence, for which he and Mitsuko Uchida were in wondrous accord.
This time, the soloist was the stellar emerging pianist Yunchan Lim, who keeps to himself, either lost in dreamy reverie or, like a jumpy teenager, in ferocious attack mode. Having little choice, Dudamel let Lim be. Like Egmont, Lim’s glory may one day arrive when he can express purpose for his actions.
