Letters from Vienna #27
The word “Ersatz” means replacement or substitute and was taken up by the English language after British POWs received replacement bread (Ersatzbrot) during the war. It was made of the lowest quality flour, potato starch, and sawdust while substitute coffee (Ersatzkaffee) was conjured up with the aid of acorns, chicory or grain. When used in German the word has no negative connotation but when used in English it connotes: fake, phoney or poor quality.
For me listening to a YouTube video or a CD of a concert is no ersatz for the real thing. Paul Valéry can write all he wants about “the amazing growth of techniques” and Walter Benjamin can discard “creativity”, “genius” and “mystery” to the dustbin of history or claim that reproduction “captured a place of its own among the artistic processes” or Adorno can say in all seriousness that he would rather think a Beethoven symphony through in his head than hear one played but this is all ultimately nonsense. There can never be replacements for real, live performances.
There are those who confuse film with theatre but they are two fundamentally different animals just as film and TV cannot be truly compared. Peter Kubelka once pointed out that one can “humiliate” TV as much as one wants but film remains, for him at least, sacred. It allows for no distractions, which is why the invisible cinema he created underneath the Albertina museum is completely and utterly black.
I have posted video links below of two performances given by Evgeny Kissin and I wrote in 2013 about how a concert he gave was: “awesome” “inspiring” and “divine”. “How is it possible” I wrote then “that every single concert of his I have experienced has been extraordinary? At what point does the extraordinary become ordinary? Is he the greatest living pianist since Sir Alfred Brendel retired?”
I tried to convey my feeling with words in the hope of inspiring others to go to his concerts. At the very least I hoped that this might stimulate a modicum of interest. After all: not everyone knows that Evgeny Kissin even exists.
Kissin not only exists but is a cultural phenomenon, a “putty” if you will, who helps us form a cultural and social connection to others. Thus, I was able to discuss Kissin with a Russia artist in St. Petersburg (who remembered him when he was still a child prodigy) and with a pretty girl, who remembered him from her time in Moscow. Art unites and helps us form social bonds in an age when such things are rare and increasingly tenuous (see letter #17).
How can one compare a video with the real thing? Is this not misleading and ultimately a falsification? Is it morally justifiable to recommend reproduction? Yet, one hopes that something, if only a very pale reflection, will somehow shimmer through.
Of course, there are moments of bliss when listening to a recording, as Woody Allen says in one of his films. In this instance he was listening to a Jazz record and everything fitted perfectly in that one moment (it could have been what Handke might refer to as a moment in life that is truly “successful” (geglückt)).
Live music, whether a pop or classical concert, has a physical effect on one. Nikolaus Harnoncourt, once talked about how he could see, from his vantage point on the conductor’s stand, how people were literally, physically moved by the music he was conducting; they were rocking back and forth. This is not merely a matter of emotion although emotion plays a key role in music. As Kissin has pointed out: “Of course, a child cannot yet understand music, it feels it.” Music is, after all, as Ferruccio Busoni pointed out: sonorous air. It is not merely an idea but is a physical manifestation of energy, which can only be termed divine.
It is Thursday night on February 17th 2022, and at this moment in time Kissin is performing Johann Sebastian Bach’s Toccata and Fuge d-Moll, BWV 565 yet I am not permitted, on account of the irksome, illegal and unconstitutional restrictions on my visits to concerts, to be in Musikverein to actually hear it; I am annoyed. One of the most sacred events in my yearly musical calendar has been desecrated by the philistine, profane and barbarous government. The sooner it is banished the better.
Art does not make us better or more “moral” or more “civilised” (one can be a Nazi and love music). Music helps school one’s concentration, cultivates one’s reason, emotions and phantasy and develops parts of oneself left desiccated by the contemporary obsession with superficial style, status and sterile technology.