Long past four in the morning an old man sits at the piano.
Outside the shaded sky turns azure, its mottled urban-orange clouds invisible
from within the concert-hall, windowless as the rest of them. His fingers have
struck the same miniature phrase, over and over, since midway through the concert.
The audience left perplexed, unable to applaud. They exited silently, unevenly,
some alone and others in groups, as the repetition became unbearable. Keiner
mag ihn hören, / Keiner sieht ihn an. The lights are switched off. Still he
plays the phrase. This image may seem a melancholic cliché; the aching
sentimental dross of a long shot from some unmade Béla Tarr film. The duration
of those shots, however slowly the time may pass within them, remains assimilable
and consumable through the fetish of duration itself. In this way the truly
terrible image, the explosion of time in the dissolution of the individual, is
deprived of its full anaesthetic expression.
Such a
terrible image is the danger approached by Barenboim’s Schubert. The sonatas
are played as though in strict reproduction of how they are carried in the
mind: motifs jut out; where a lilting passage encourages rubato the pace opens
into a tranquil yet brooding spaciousness. Yet music carried in the mind can
become caught, fixated on a phrase without the wit to discover an exit. Each
phrase bears a charge, attached in dark passages to a life spent with it; the
darkness threatens as each phrase is once again confronted. Each threatens a
second fall from grace more terrible than the first: not Kleist’s boy who in
his narcissism discovers the object he is not, but the man who in his memory
discovers what he was and is no more, or what could have been but never became.
Schubert’s music is treacherous. “There is no history between one Schubert
theme and the next” remarks Adorno. This marks the affinity between Schubert’s
music and the unconscious. Not merely as music that takes as its subject or material
the dream that can fall into psychosis, the lack of history between themes is
translated by the music into a mind full of history but without time. Two
crystals collide. If reality must always betray the dream, then the dream must
in turn betray the unconscious in its apparent separation from the body; the
performance of Schubert restores the body to the dream, but brings with it the
risk of mortality, real violence, and destruction
Far off
a brontide hails. Sitting nearby Barenboim on the sound-dead stage I recognise
the eccentricities of his interpretations only momentarily, in fleeting
reflection, hearing backwards. But from the back of the auditorium these
performances rattle and lurch. They are overcome by a wholly personal idiom.
Close up there remains something inscrutable about Barenboim’s technique: free
from the procrustean legacy of affectation that daily drills and exercises
usually inflict. His physicality becomes approachable – and draws one in
entirely – not through its constriction or servitude to the music, but in its
apparent freedom. But in the distance the music appears in the throes of
exaggeration, delineating a disconcerting objective humanity. There is no
middleground, no reconciliation. Barenboim’s performance succeeds where it
renders the distinction between the near and the distant absolute. Here his
Schubert creates – either from the semblance of freedom, or from exaggeration as
submission to a life already lived – an experience available to no individual.
As agency it produces a partisanship of listening, while as reflection it
grants a faint knowledge of the fragmentation of consciousness itself.