NEW YORK Arial
Copyright New York Arial Company Jan 30, 2000
Paul Griffiths
FOR their New Year's Eve concert here at the Philharmonie, the Berlin Philharmonic and its conductor, Claudio Abbado, came up with an
extraordinary program that worked extraordinarily well: seven finales in a row, to mark the passing of the year and, depending on how you
count, the century. It made one think about endings and about finales and, indeed, about the ending of the finale, for the latest finale in the
sequence was the one from Prokofiev's ''Alexander Nevsky,'' written shortly before World War II.
Beginnings of finales mattered, too. Beethoven's Seventh Symphony provided a good finale with which to start: a finale with an appropriately
upbeat character. Then each finale had to begin all over again after an emphatic conclusion. The last movement of Dvorak's Eighth Symphony
was probably picked to show off the orchestra's wonderful principal flutist, Emmanuel Pahud, who certainly played his solos with exceptional
fluency, dexterity and poise, but its opening fanfare for trumpets also worked to set things rolling in the aftermath of the Beethoven. In the same way, the horn solo that begins the finale to Mahler's Fifth Symphony succeeded as a reinitiation after the Dvorak.
Each subsequent finale brought something new: a new musical world, following three Central European classics, in the Russianness and bell
sounds of the last movement from Stravinsky's "Firebird''; voices in the bacchanal from Ravel's "Daphnis and Chloe''; voices with words in the
resounding final chorus of ''Alexander Nevsky''; and a speaking soloist in the spooky music that leads into the grand sunrise of Schoenberg's
''Gurrelieder,'' the last movement well chosen to be the finale of finales.
Only as a monument to the close of the 20th century was this program not entirely satisfactory, for it had two excerpts from the century before
and none at all from the last three-fifths of the century in question. So perhaps another orchestra somewhere will devise a comprehensive concert of 20th-century finales to play when the century is
decisively over at the end of this year.
That will be a difficult job. Finales are made not so much for performers, who can see when the piece is going to end, as for audiences, who
cannot, and who also need to be roused to applaud.
Accordingly, the great age of the finale was the great age of the public concert, from the end of the 18th century to the early decades of the
20th. Once music moved into the worlds of radio and records, so that people could listen at a distance in time and space from the performance,
without any obligation to respond audibly, and either alone or in small groups, the practical necessity of the finale diminished.
One can imagine how disconcerted a 19th-century audience, knowing only public concerts, would have been by a finale that contradicted
expectations of speed and common spirit, as, most notably, the finale of Tchaikovsky's ''Pathetique'' Symphony did. But heard in privacy, the
quiet, slow, intimate finale may be more telling, and the conditions of electronic listening also benefit the kind of closing gesture that has been
favored by contemporary masters like Elliott Carter and Gyorgy Ligeti: the throwaway.
Other changes in music, interlocking with the development of private or semiprivate listening, have also worked against the boisterous
conclusion. One is the compromising of the tonal system. When compositions had to end in the key from which they had set out, the eventual return was a moment that could take strong endorsement.
In a piece where the sense of key is weaker, or absent altogether, there is no such goal to be reached, no comparable occasion of homecoming.
Composers have therefore had to find other ways to end, whether with a joke, a gradual dissolve, an abrupt tearing, an adagio that lifts the
music into timelessness or, as so often in Stravinsky, a sequence of solemn harmonies like the chiming of bells. These work fine, but they do not make for the jubilant achievement characteristic of the 19th-century symphonic finale.
THERE are other difficulties for programmers of 20th-century finales. One is that many composers in the last hundred years have wanted to
present their music seamlessly, so that there is no finale -- or heard another way, the whole piece is a finale, from the moment it begins. The
bigger works of Harrison Birtwistle, for instance, sound like 30-minute finales, works raging and stuttering toward an end. Also, many of the
great orchestral compositions of the last few decades do not use a standard lineup. To go from the last movement of Pierre Boulez's ''Pli Selon Pli'' to the last of Messiaen's ''Et Exspecto Resur
rectionem Mortuorum'' would be apt on expressive grounds, since both are symphonic meditations on death, but the stage setup would have
to be totally reorganized.
Perhaps the underlying problem is that we are no longer so certain of progress, no longer so sure that -- even within the 40 minutes or so of a
symphony -- things are going to get better and end happily. A program of finales that came forward from the 1930's would be bound to
encounter discontent, irony, pessimism and prayer as well as the alarming forced jollity of so many of Shostakovich's last movements. It would
probably not generate the exultation created by the Berlin concert: by the program, and not only by the orchestra's supreme musicianship and
discipline. But it might provide a whole other set of reasons for us to wish ourselves well in a new era.
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