George Hunka

Notes and comment

Category: Music

  • “The eternally unwinnable War of Liberation”

    Page 12 (right) of Ludwig van Beethoven’s original Ninth Symphony manuscript. Source: Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin.

    I’m looking forward to Thursday night and the opening night performance by the Philadelphia Orchestra of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony in D minor, under the baton of Yannick Nézet-Séguin. Premiered in Vienna in 1824, this symphony, certainly among the finest achievements of the human imagination, is also among the world’s most familiar, especially its fourth movement; and indeed, “the Ninth is the work most often used to solemnize an important event — the opening of the United Nations, the signing of a peace treaty at the end of a war, the fall of the Berlin Wall,” as Harvey Sachs has it in his book about the symphony. “It has been used as a battle flag by liberals and conservatives, by democrats and autocrats, by Nazis, Communists, and anarchists.” A celebration of the tenacity of the human spirit, yes — but because of those Nazis, Communists, and anarchists, that celebration seems to call for some thoughtful distance between ourselves and how we perceive the work. To paraphrase Nicholas Cook’s excellent monograph about the Ninth (which unfortunately I do not have in front of me), it may be that the Ninth is so familiar to us that we have lost the ability to hear it, especially in 2026. Well, I will try to listen to it, and to hear it, on Thursday night.

    As I listen I will bear Harvey Sachs’ observation about its Romantic, revolutionary reputation in mind:

    The conjunction of Beethoven’s last symphonic masterpiece with crucial works or events in the lives of so many other outstanding artists made 1824 a particularly fertile year. …. The fact that the Ninth Symphony, Byron’s death, Pushkin’s Boris Gudunov and “To the Sea,” Delacroix’s Massacres at Chios, Stendhal’s Racine and Shakespeare, and Heine’s Harz Journey and North Sea Pictures all futhered, in one way or another, Romanticism’s rear-guard action against repression underlines the significance of that speck of time. And perhaps these brief glances at those artists and their states of being at that moment will have helped to remind readers — as they reminded this author — that spiritual and intellectual liberation requires endless internal warfare against everything in ourselves that narrows us down instead of opening us up and that replaces questing with certitude. Nearly two centuries later, the world still overflows with people who believe that truth not only exists but that it is simple and straightforward, and that their truths — be they political, religious, philosophical, moral, or social — constitute The Truth. Federico Fellini’s characterization, a generation ago, of the fascist mentality as “a refusal to deepen one’s individual relationship to life, out of laziness, prejudice, unwillingness to inconvenience oneself, and presumptuousness” describes the obedient adherents of most prefabricated beliefs, everywhere and at all times. The others — the disobedient, the nonadherents, those who think that the world is not easily explained and that human experience does not fit into tidy little compartments — are still fighting the eternally unwinnable War of Liberation. Until our sorry species bombs or gluts itself into oblivion, the skirmishing will continue, and what Beethoven and company keep telling us, from the ever-receding yet ever-present past, is that the struggle must continue.

    I fear that the meaning of this struggle, too, is provisional, especially given the contradictory, sometimes perverse human spirit.

    My good friend Bruce Hodges takes a look back at the recorded history of Beethoven’s Ninth here.

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  • J. C. Bach, Mozart, Schubert

    The Chamber Orchestra of Philadelphia, in rehearsal.

    My dance card for September seems to be rapidly filling up. On September 25 and 26, the Chamber Orchestra of Philadelphia opens its 2026-2027 season with Mozart 40, a triple bill of music spanning the half century or so between the late Baroque and middle Classical periods, a span quite appealing to my own musical affections. David Hayes will lead the orchestra in Mozart’s 1788 Symphony No. 40 in G minor, which Charles Rosen called “a work of passion, violence, and grief” in The Classical Style; Hayes will follow this with Johann Christian Bach’s 1760-or-so Symphony in G minor, Op. 6 No. 6, “arguably the darkest and most dramatic he composed,” said Tom Service in the Guardian in 2014; and the program will close with Schubert’s Symphony No. 5 in B-flat major, D. 485 of 1816, a conscious tribute to Mozart. “O Mozart! Immortal Mozart! what countless impressions of a brighter, better life hast thou stamped upon our souls!” went the slightly (though understandably) over-the-top appreciation Schubert wrote in his diary that year. Tickets are available now at this link.

    The rest of the Chamber Orchestra’s season looks similarly enticing, with a holiday presentation of three Brandenburg Concertos and an all-Haydn evening of his early symphonies on the schedule. More about the season here. A series of intriguing discussions about Bach and Beethoven accompanies this year’s concerts.

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  • Free Bach in Philadelphia

    St. Mark’s Episcopal Church in Philadelphia.

    It looks like I got here just in time: Now in its second year, the Philadelphia Bach Collective is an ensemble offering free performances of Bach cantatas at the St. Mark’s Church in Philadelphia’s Rittenhouse Square, and it’s just announced its 2026-2027 lineup. The first concert of the year, on Tuesday, September 22, at 1:00 pm, pairs Bach’s Jesu, der du meine Seele: BWV 78 with Telemann’s Concerto for flute and strings, TWV 51:G2. I’ll certainly be there, but I’ll especially be there in March, when the Collective joins with the New York vocal outfit TENET Vocal Artists for a rare Philadelphia performance of Bach’s St. John’s Passion. Spikier and darker than St. Matthew’s Passion, St. John’s Passion comes close to broody opera, and I suppose Bach has me there; I have fond memories of hearing it earlier this year in Vienna. I’ll very much look forward to revisiting this, one of the great masterpieces of the Baroque and, as such, one of the great masterpieces period.

    The Philadelphia Bach Collective is the brainchild of co-artistic directors Steven Zohn, Heather Miller Lardin, and Rebecca Myers, who put together the organization to “[make] the music of Johann Sebastian Bach accessible and relevant for audiences across Philadelphia … [and] offer regular opportunities to hear Bach’s cantatas in an accessible, informal setting.” Free weekday concerts of Bach? Sounds suspiciously European to me. And not only to me; the Philadelphia Inquirer‘s Peter Dobrin wrote last year that the Collective’s concerts are “the kind of thing that, had you experienced it in Paris or Berlin, would make you say you wished we had that back home.” WRTI’s Meg Bragle called it “a gathering of friends and an invitation to the community” in this profile of the group.

    More information about the Philadelphia Bach Collective is here, and tickets are already available for the March St. John’s Passion. I won’t miss it.

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  • Four by four

    Bayreuth Festspielhaus.

    My books have yet to be unpacked, so in the meantime I’ve been busying myself with celebrating the 150th anniversary of the first Bayreuth festival and the first production of Richard Wagner’s Ring cycle in its entirety. (You can’t say I don’t know how to have fun.) While at the moment I don’t have 16 hours to devote to all four operas again, I’ve been enjoying Eric Schulz’s 2012 four-part, six hour documentary The World of the Ring on Deutsche Grammophon’s Stage-Plus platform, an ideal introduction to the Ring which even has something for those who already know it well. Fortunately it ranges across a wide variety of approaches to the operas, from a look at Christian Thielemann’s rehearsals with the Wiener Staatsoper to Laurence Dreyfus’s more musicological musings to a really stunning set of observations from the late pianist Stefan Mickisch. The first part, about Das Rheingold, can be found here, and more information about the series is here. If you can possibly find a way to see it, I encourage you to do so.

    The Ring is a tetralogy, and though the number three supposedly possesses certain magical and mystical qualities, the number four appears to do so for German-language culture — at least the German-language culture I have special affinities for. Arthur Schopenhauer’s The World as Will and Representation is composed of four long sections; and Hans-Jürgen Syberberg’s landmark Hitler: A Film from Germany stretches its four parts over seven hours. A more impressive coincidence is that these works over more than two centuries have been commenting on and challenging each other. We would not have the Ring that we have (not to mention Parsifal and Tristan und Isolde) were it not for the inspiration that Wagner found in the sage of Frankfurt, and Syberberg’s film wraps its aesthetic concerns around both of them.

    Because each of them invites the spectator, the reader, the listener to approach from not only — and not primarily — an intellectual but also an emotional and sensual perspective, perhaps it’s appropriate to characterize each of them as symphonic in structure and intent: even Schopenhauer and Syberberg emerge from a conception of music as an internal human dynamic that reaches beyond language. Wagner himself seems to have particularly posited Beethoven’s Choral Symphony, performed at the start of the Bayreuth festival every year, as a cornerstone of his own operatic edifice. These four-movement works, by their very substantial size and difficulty, the interweaving of idea and sensuality both within each and among themselves, reach beyond their status as exemplars of German culture to confront human experience itself with their challenges and questions.

    When I do eventually get my books back up on a few shelves, I may delve more deeply into this. I have a retirement coming up, and that 16 hours of Wagner is up there on my list.

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  • Quasquicentennial

    Or, to be rather less threatening about it, the Philadelphia Orchestra is celebrating its 125th anniversary this year. The orchestra is very closely associated with the historic Academy of Music, which is where I saw them in my youth, and my first visit to the Kimmel Center last year suggested that the new hall is fully worthy of the orchestra, acoustically and architecturally.

    Enthusiasts for the orchestra can tune into WRTI this Sunday at 1:00 pm Eastern for the start of a special two-week celebration, “examining the evolution of ‘the Philadelphia Sound’ through the performances and comments of the conductors who have nurtured it,” as WRTI host Melinda Whiting at this web page has it. Sunday’s program begins with the earliest years of the orchestra under Leopold Stokowski and carries through to the orchestra under Eugene Ormandy and Riccardo Muti; next week the celebration picks up with a look at the orchestra under Wolfgang Sawallisch, Christoph Eschenbach,  and its current music and artistic director Yannick Nézet-Séguin.

    You can livestream WRTI’s programming directly from its home page. For a little more context, look up Bruce Hodges’ insightful introduction to the Philadelphia Sound, which reveals that it’s about more than the string section.

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