david robertson
in conversation with joshua cody

California-born conductor David Robertson was educated at London's Royal Academy of Music, where he studied French horn and composition before turning to orchestral conducting. Appointed music director of the Ensemble Intercontemporain in Paris in 1992, he has gained international recognition for his exceptional affinity with both twentieth century music and a broad operatic repertoire. He made his Metropolitan Opera debut the season prior, in a production of Janácek's The Makropulos Case, and is the new Music Director of the Orchestre National de Lyon as of the 2000-2001 season.

Joshua Cody, artistic director of the Ensemble Sospeso, spoke with him in Paris in February 1997.

We’ve been speaking French, but I had imagined that we'd carry out the interview in English.

Well with Nicolas Mosley's Efforts at Truth you're carrying there, I would imagine that your grasp of English is rather advanced.

I don't know if I can say that! Do you know the book?

No, I don't. I've heard of him, but I've never read him. I like reading essays, and when you read essays you invariably find other names: reading Edward Said, I came across Erich Auerbach, and when I read Auerbach, I came across… you know, all of these things tend to bifurcate, and go off in different directions. I like this, because in music, one gets to a place where one knows a great number of things, and can at least start to have the feeling that one actually knows most of what there is to know. This is really dangerous, in any field. I think that one always must build "failsafe" types of structures, where you will constantly force yourself to open yourself up to new stimuli and to se remettre en question, to place yourself in a position where you're constantly reinquiring about many different aspects of what you're doing.

Have you composed music?

Yes, up until the time that I took over the Ensemble InterContemporain, and since then I have simply not materially had the time to write the things down on paper..

I've never heard your music.

I don't think anybody has. I made a decision based on a short but, for me, very important meeting with Kubelik. It was a master class, and I didn't know him at all well, but I had the opportunity to ask a couple of pointed questions to which he gave, being the type of person he was, roundabout answers which nevertheless approached truth. He spoke about the fact that he also composed, but felt that his position as a conductor made it somehow not correct for him to put his own works before the public, when there were so many composers who didn't enjoy such access to programmation and orchestras. Now this is not a critique of colleagues such as Eötvos or Boulez, mainly because I feel these are principally composers, not conductors, although they are wonderful conductors. I am really looking through the other end of the telescope. Composing is very important to me in the sense of inquiry, not only in finding solutions to problems, but looking at the perception of problems which, often in compositional terms, are not problems at all. For instance, a question of phrase lengths, of the amount of time a chord needs to sound, will pose itself very differently in Mahler than in Bruckner, even though thirty years ago one lumped the two composers together, which appears quite remarkable now. I can continue to understand what composers go through, the difficulties that might arise in the realization of their works, because I've sat behind blank sheets of manuscript paper.

So I continue to say I'm a composer, even though I don't have many works performed, I don't put them in front of the public. A number of performers ask me for pieces, which I write, and they do play and record them, but composition is not something at which I work with anything like the effort with which I conduct. Perhaps later I'll be able to return to composition with something like a proper proportion.

How would you compare the roles that knowledge of technique play in the case of a composer versus a conductor?

I would define composing, essentially, to speak in metaphorical terms, as trying to grab something a bit like a butterfly, and fixing it on a piece of paper without losing its butterfly quality. Of course in a museum this butterfly, with all its color, a thing beautiful to behold, is stuck through with a pin and placed under glass; its butterfly quality—precisely, color dancing in flight—is lost. I think this is the problem for a composer: you hear in your head something that might not even want to divulge itself in terms of twelve tones, or even in smaller intervals; something that might not want to give its spirit over to the sound of a musical instrument. How do you translate it? How do you deal with your own personal hermeneutics, your own personal way of interpreting what you've heard into a language that people who don't live in your personal world will understand?

This is a problem in all creative arts, on an individual level, for a writer, a painter, a composer, a dramatist, a choreographer. But for the conductor, the problem comes down to recreation: how to recreate the composer's recognition of the material in the minds of the audience. The audience should have the sense of hearing something for the first time, but recognizing something of their own experience, which allows them to connect with it. We read a passage in Joyce or Proust and it's language we understand, even though we might not have articulated it; it's the sense of seeing something again, something we have felt, but have not been able to articulate.

It's a recognition.

Yes, exactly. I like the word "recognition" in this sense. I think that's why we call a musician an "interpreter:" a musician interprets, in the sense of a translator, standing between a Russian and a Japanese. The translator knows it's a very tricky business, because he realizes the number of things that will have to be pared down as he goes from one language to another. The conductor has the translator's responsibility; he knows things the composer has imagined that, in some cases, will be almost impossible to bring off.

For example?

A specific example in contemporary music would be Helmut Lachenmann's piece that I did for the twentieth anniversary concert of the Ensemble InterContemporain. The work has sounds that are very, very soft; the surface of music disappears, as if it were human figures that have disappeared, leaving only shadows. And these shadows might be difficult to perceive under certain lighting conditions, just as elements in the Lachenmann piece might be difficult, or impossible, to perceive under certain acoustic situations. If you want to perform the piece, there might be certain things that you must betray—an act of treason—while at the same time getting across something of the idea.

For example, there are noteless passages in the work scored only for breath, but breath orchestrated for different instruments, and thus modulated, a little like an aeolian harp. Now it was very interesting performing the work with the Ensemble Moderne, because they are used to playing this work in very large halls, where Lachenmann's notion of pianissimo is mindless, inaudible, beyond the fourth row. It's a bit like the translator trying to convey to the resident of Kyoto the Russian mania in St. Petersburg created by that city's six months of darkness, followed by six months of light: it's not possible. You can get something across, but in order to achieve real comprehension, you would have to transport the Japanese geographically into another realm—much like moving an audience member in the concert hall, for the Lachenmann piece, from row fifty-eight to row three.

That was one reason why we performed the Lachenmann piece in the Cité de la Musique, where we could play the dynamics correctly. But this is a constant situation in music: an opera, for example, where the singer has a voice different from that which the composer intended, and suddenly the accompaniment must be lightened. Or a composer of the past who imagined something which was beyond the instruments of his time, and tried to solve the problem within those limitations: now we have instruments corresponding to what he imagined, but not to what he wrote.

The Eroica symphony.

The Eroica symphony, the bassoon solo of The Rite of Spring. These are questions which are unanswerable, but you need to look into them as much as possible, accept the choices which will open certain avenues and close others, and then try to balance and harmonize these decisions.