Back to the concert hall – at last!

On Wednesday evening, after an all-too-long absence, The Other Half and I finally made it back to the concert hall for a socially-distanced programme at the Barbican.

It had been a long time coming: our last live concert was on 6 December 2019, also at the Barbican, for a recital by Russian pianist Arcadi Volodos, who performed a programme of works by Liszt and Robert Schumann.

 

By the end of that year, we’d been to five concerts/recitals (plus four operas together – one further one for me – and one play). Hopefully, this doesn’t make me sound like a dilletante in the culture vulture stakes.

 

Yet I had realised by late last autumn that while concerts were hardly an everyday experience for us, they were the form of entertainment outside the home that I missed most deeply. Perhaps there’s a sort of spiritual basis for that? Whatever.

 

On Friday 11 December last (my birthday, as it happens) I’d optimistically booked tickets for the Barbican on 10 January, for a recital by the wonderful young British pianist Benjamin Grosvenor. That went the way of all flesh only shortly thereafter, as London was plunged into tier three – and then the whole country into lockdown three.

 

As I said, the return has been a long time coming – and not least for all the musicians and backstage and front of house staff. The UK government, as with all bombastic, flag-shagging, populist regimes, seems determined to play down and denigrate the arts in general, irrespective of what they give to the country as a whole – even in terms of being a major attraction for tourism and, therefore, a big earner for the economy.

 

But hey ... if we had a half-way decent government in Westminster, it’s possible that we wouldn’t be where we are now.

 

Anyway, Wednesday was one of three socially distanced concerts at the Barbican being given by the London Symphony Orchestra, under conductor laureate Michael Tilson Thomas, and featuring Yuja Wang on piano.

 

The programme opened with the five very pleasant minutes of The Last Spring by Grieg, from his Two Elegiac Melodies, opus 34.

 

Then came Ms Wang to the stage for Rachmaninov’s second piano concerto – the Brief Encounter one.

 

After 35 minutes of that, we were served up Beethoven’s fifth symphony – synchronicity allowing that it takes the same time to perform.

 

It was a relatively short concert with no interval, but superbly chosen. Both of the main works are iconic – or at least, have iconic musical moments and phrases that possibly do the full works a disservice.

 

Personally, Rachmaninov’s first piano concerto is my favourite and I have rather dismissed the second because of the over-familiarity of its theme.

 

But here, it became new, the musical quotes back in context and not dominating the whole. Wang’s playing can be both muscular and exquisitely delicate. It was a glorious performance.

 

I teared up so often, but I remain slightly unsure as to whether that was the music itself, the performance and/or simply Being Back. Probably a full house. It had the feeling of a religious experience (and I do actually know what those are like!).

 

The Beethoven was a revelation for similar reasons to the Rachmaninov. Freed from being reduced to that brief, opening quote, the symphony becomes so much more. Not least, it can be viewed as a sort of struggle between the Classical and Romantic eras of western music that Beethoven bridged – and indeed, created the bridge between.

 

The first movement has a sense of the revolutionary – a hint of sturm und drang. The second then seems to leap back to a more courtly approach.

 

Only a week or so before, the OH and I had listened to a classic von Karajan recording of the sixth symphony, The Pastoral, on 180g vinyl. There, it is so easy to comprehend Beethoven, in effect, painting pictures in music. Here, you feel the struggle to reach that – and that is fascinating.

 

This week’s concert also made me consider my relationship with Mozart and why I don’t want to spend much time with his music. It’s as though Beethoven brought the emotion – and Mozart avoided it.

 

That’s a slightly simplistic view, of course – but not that much. My favourite piece of Mozart – and it’s one of my favourite pieces of music per se – is the requiem. But I think that’s because it has real emotional heft rather than simply being a bonbon for a not-very-intelligent emperor. 

 

The playing throughout was wonderful. Ms Wang is a superb pianist – I have ordered several of her recordings on the basis of what we saw and heard.

 

I’ve been shielding for much of that last year – and fortunate enough to have been able to work from home throughout. It’s not all been bad, but it’s not all been great either.

 

And getting back to hear music like this, played like this, was special almost beyond belief.

All badged up

The overarching message from today’s exercise in re-badging my leather jacket, now returned from the cleaners, seems to have been that you can make statements without appearing to do so.

I started badging it some years ago, seeing it as a very personal form of ‘rock chic’ and absolutely refusing to add any obviously ‘political’ badges.

Over the last few years, it’s attracted plenty of comment and enquiry. Perhaps counter-intuitively, I think it says more about me and what I believe in than if I’d dressed the jacket in rather more obvious pins.

Loosely, there are themes. And as Thomas Mann once said: “Everything is politics”.

So here’s a guide to my newly badged jacket.

From top left (approximately) – travel is good. We start with a flag pin representing Lübeck. This was my destination as a 50th birthday ‘thang’: I’d never been out of the UK on my own before this and it was a (long overdue) rite of passage to prove I could travel to ‘Abroadland’ all on my own.

I chose Lübeck because of Mann and Günter Grass and because I’d spent around 10 years teaching myself a bit of German so felt a certain confidence in the idea that I might be able to communicate at a basic level.

It was a fabulous and seminal trip.

Füssen? More German stuff – Bavaria; the Alps; simply gorgeous. Ties in with the edelweiss pin.

Then Thomas Mann – I have spares ope this pin; that’s how important it is to me. I loved Buddenbrooks … but then I read Death in Venice and my mind was well and truly blown.

The travel section includes Collioure – of course – plus Vienna, Sorrento and Sicily: all are special to me.

Beethoven is crucial: I love classical music and Ludwig in particular. And his 250th birthday is next year, so it would be poor tom leave him out.

That Concorde? A lovely pin, bought in Folkstone, together with a Spitfire pin. But at present, wearing a Spitfire could send out all the wrong signals, while this suggests European co-operation.

The Royal Opera House? Well, if you read this blog regularly, you’ll know why.

The Haring ‘resist’ pin? Haring at Tate Liverpool was my art revelation this year and resisting the Establishment and racism and bigotry in general is good.

The birds? Well, I saw a kingfisher this year and interacted with a raven (my absolute top bird). I love corvids in general, including those beauties, magpies. Red squirrels – only seen in Germany and Austria – but wonderful nonetheless.

Stephen Sondheim is a god, Star Wars is a big part of my cultural life, along with The Wizard of Oz (and as some of you will know, I’m a ‘friend of Dorothy’), while Captain Haddock represents comics and cartoons, and Shakespeare … well, I ‘dig’ The Bard big time.

This is how to make comments about yourself but leave others imply enjoying the colour!

Uchida and Haitink prove a massive hit

Mitsuko Uchida – musical genius

There are too few days and too few hours and two few minutes, of course, but having said all that, I don’t go to enough concerts.

It was 2008 when we managed to catch one of Daniel Barenboim’s cycle of Beethoven sonata concerts at the Royal Festival Hall.

As the music began, everything else simply disappeared: imagine being at the centre of a leap to warp speed in an episode of Star Trek. There was just Barenboim, his piano and me.

It was the most personal experience that I have ever had – and light years away from listening to any recording, no matter how good. It took Beethoven away from the polite academics and restored to him the passion and the fire that saw him build the bridge that led from the Classical period to the Romantic one.

Last night, at London’s Barbican, the experience was not much different, as the London Symphony Orchestra, with Bernard Haitink in charge and Mitsuko Uchida at the keyboard, gave us old Ludwig’s piano concerto 3 in C minor.

Penned in 1800, it was first performed in 1803 with the composer as soloist. In three movements – conventional at the time – but when it was premiered, the composer had barely sketched in the final stages of the final movement and played them from memory.

Thus it was an ‘unfinished’ work.

Here, Uchida gave us a performance of exquisite playing: firm and yet light of touch; music to set the nerves tingling; perfect phrasing and a glorious sense of the ebb and flow of the piece. And alike absolutely heaving with emotion.

The second movement in particular was simply sublime.

And the orchestra, with which I have been less than enthralled on previous occasions – not least during during Valery Gergiev’s time, as he actively wrecked his own reputation as some sort of conducting ‘great’ – was on very fine form under the vastly more restrained but powerful baton of Haitink.

At 88, there are no wasted gestures from the maestro. If he has to take it slow moving between podium and back stage, it is without doubt clear that he retains the knowledge and musical understanding of decades.

That really is the best that I have heard from the LSO – and that was a band that, during the second half, need a bunch of its horn players top switch to Wager tubas.

Bernard Haitink – musical genius

Note: they’re not really part of the tuba family but they are fabulous in tone.

Acoustically, incoming director Simon Rattle has supported a new concert venue for the capital and the LSO, on the grounds of the acoustics, being not great.

For the Beethoven, in my opinion, they were superb. For the Bruckner – one could tell he has a point ; certainly when a full-blown Romantic sound is required.

It was a really fine performance. This is big music. We have eight French horns that become four – and then four Wagner tubas (which are mis-named), but which, irrespective of name, have a fabulous richness of tone.

Bruckner, dying as he was, dedicated this work to God. Yet it has a sense of raging against the fading light, before the sweet and calm resolution with which we are left (this too was unfinished).

Fabulous stuff, certainly, though one could be forgiven for having a sense that the composer enjoyed a certain post-Wagner sense of creating ‘noise’ rather than ‘music’.

Not that that is bad under the circumstances, but it does suggest a dying of the romantic light.

Still, we are left with only one conclusion – that in such a venue, Beethoven, played by one of the world’s greats, sounds better than a lesser work.

And if you ever needed an incentive to get to a concert – take it from this. Because the experience is beyond what most get to know.

Germany and the complexity of memory

VW Beetle at the British Museum. Ink on A5 paper, A Kendal

It is perhaps one of life’s little tricks that, having grown up in a rabidly anti-German home, I should become a Germanophile.

One of the contributory factors was history. Studying for my O’ level and bored to tears with the Corn Laws (well, who wouldn’t be?) the course that probably gained me a pass was Bismarck and German unification. Because it was the one course that absolutely fascinated me.

Some 20 years later, during a stint at the online version of the Guardian, I was subbing an article by its then Berlin correspondent, John Hooper, about the Lange Kerls, Friedrich Wilhelm I of Prussia’s extraordinary regiment of particularly tall men.

It was far from being the same period as that which I’d so enjoyed studying in the 1970s, but it reminded me of that. In the next few days, I started hunting in bookshops for books on Prussia; the start if an affair that would grow to encompass an ever-wider area of history.

And even now, I will judge a bookshop on the basis of whether or not its history section contains anything beyond the Nazi era.

So when it was announced that the British Museum was hosting an exhibition on Germany: Memories of a Nation, it was always going to be a must-see.

Neil MacGregor is director of the museum, and his own previous works include A History of the World in 100 Objects. Here, the exhibition itself was built around a substantial new tome by MacGregor, plus an acclaimed BBC Radio 4 series (which I missed), and takes a similar approach.

I’m not sure that I went expecting to be educated as such, but more that I went in anticipation of seeing things, in the flesh, that would provide a visual companion to some of what I’ve read in the past 14 years or so.

Having walked up the steps of the Reading Room, past a VW Beetle and a fragment of the Berlin Wall, the exhibition proper begins with a brief explanation of how Germany has not long been that; that it shares more borders with other countries than any other European nation, that its borders have been more fluid than those of other nations and, indeed, that there was, for most of its history, no such thing as a common and single ‘Germany’.

All this I – and The Other Half – was familiar with. Which made me realise that I’d probably never attended an exhibition with as much base knowledge as I already had in this case.

But to be honest, I don’t think that we were the core target audience.

The exhibition sets out, it seems to me, to convey a wider picture of Germany than that which has been dominant in the UK since 1939.

The Blacksmith of German Unity, print

You cannot, of course, omit the Nazi era, and the exhibition does not, including a range of exhibits from a pre-war anti-semitic poster to a 1935 sheet of a cut-out Hitler and marching brown shirts for children.

Here too is a replica of the gate to the Buchenwald concentration camp: wrought iron; small, like a garden gate, with its motto, ‘Jedem das Seine’ (‘to each what is due to them’) facing inward for the prisoners on the parade ground to see every day; a motto, one could feel, that is even more sinister even than the famous ‘Arbeit Macht Frei’ (‘work makes you free’) of Auschwitz, Dachau or Sachsenhausen, where it was facing outwards to be seen by those arriving at the camps.

But the designer of the Buchenwald gate, Franz Ehrlich, had learned his art in Bauhaus: the lettering was, unlike that elsewhere, an obvious nod to the modernism that Hitler considered ‘degenerate’.

And that motto could be seen in another way, as meaning that the guards, the torturers and the killers would, one day, get what they were due.

It is a perfect illustration of the complexity of German history.

MacGregor explains in the accompanying book that one of his aims was to examine how Germans see themselves and their own national story, a quarter of a century after it’s latest incarnation came into being with the fall of the Berlin Wall.

There are many things that could be viewed as strange omissions – and all of us with some knowledge would doubtless be able to cite a few.

Personally, I was surprised to see no mention in the exhibition itself of Thomas Mann, although he’s in the pages of Neil MacGregor’s book of the same name. There’s no Günter Grass in either.

Less personally but more surprisingly, there’s no mention that I can recall of music – and Germany provided two of the trio of composers who all singlehandledly changed the course of classical music. Setting aside Mozart as Austrian, that still leaves Beethoven and Wagner, whose absences seem particularly strange if one is attempting to convey that wider picture.

One can only guess that it was assumed that this was a known part of German history and culture, although the different ways in which, post WWII, these two composers have been treated can itself offer an interesting way of exploring MacGregor’s themes.

It is, I think, rather a butterfly of an exhibition: a gentle flit across a period of history that is largely unknown to most Britons.

Yet that lightness is deceptive, and in the selected objects there are plenty of things to fascinate, intrigue and even stun.

Napoleon's hat from Waterloo

You will not often, for instance, see an edition of Martin Luther’s own translation of the Bible into German, with his own handwritten version of Psalm 23 and his signature on the facing page, dated 1542.

That’s the sort of thing I find stunning.

And then there was one of the remaining 48 copies of the Gutenberg Bible from 1455, with its still-immaculate Gothic type.

Both these Bibles serve as a reminder of the linguistic and democratic impact of the Reformation – no matter how much the latter was to shock and appall Luther himself.

Among the other objects that hit one like a hammer is one of Napoleon’s hats, taken as war booty from his abandoned carriage after his defeat at the Battle of Waterloo.

There’s an intriguing iron and terracotta statue of Bismarck, showing the Iron Chancellor as a blacksmith, standing at his anvil, crafting a united Germany.

Next to it is a copy of Marx’s Capital, volume one, presented to the museum by the author himself, who had spent many an hour working in the old reading room.

A Bauhaus cradle by Peter Keler (1922) – a design still being produced – shows how good design is good not simply because it looks good, but because it works well too.

There’s a stage design for the original production of Brecht’s Mother Courage, plus Dürer’s Rhinoceros (1515) and then a vast Meissen porcelain version (1730).

If Isaac Habreacht’s 1589 ‘portable’ Strasbourg clock is incredible, then the astronomical compendium by Johan Anton Linden (1596) is simply astonishing.

But one of my particular personal highlights was the chance to see Tilman Riemenschneider’s Four Evangelists, stunning wood carvings from 1490-92 from an artist/craftsman I’d encountered before only thanks to Andrew Graham Dixon’s The Art of Germany.

Carved from the traditional lime wood, they are quite beautiful – not idealised, as you’d expect with the Renaissance, but with real, human faces. Unbelievably, they were, at one point in their history, painted. Fortunately, that has been very carefully removed.

Riemenschneider's Four Evangelists

But Riemenschneider’s own story – whether historically accurate or not – is entirely in keeping with part of MacGregor’s aim. Legend has it that, in the German Peasants’ War of 1525, as a city councilor of Würzburg, Riemenschneider took the side of the peasants. After their defeat, he was arrested and his hands broken. What is certain is that no work of significance by him exists after that year.

How you see it – what you choose to believe – is all very much about how we construct the wider stories of which we are parts.

That Thomas Mann, for instance, chose to believe the story of an heroic Riemenschneider siding with the peasants tells you something about Mann himself – not about whether it really did happen or not.

On the way out, passing the VW Beetle once again, it occurred that one can see the same duality there too: once hailed by Hitler as ‘the people’s car’, its later links with flower power and hippies effectively made it ‘entartete auto’. Which is really rather pleasing.

If this feels in some ways a very small exhibition, it leaves you with a sense of something far, far larger. On a practical level, you will need at least 90 minutes to really get the most out of this – and on the basis of what I’ve read so far, the book is vital to really extending knowledge and understanding of the exhibits and their context.

In asking about Germans and the construction of national memory, MacGregor opens the door to asking everyone else to do the same.

In England at this time, that would be every bit as pertinent an exercise.  

• Germany: Memories of a Nation is at the British Museum until 25 January 2015

Death in Vienna

Portrait of Ria Munk III, Klimt

In the beginning is Beethoven and in the beginning is the end.

The National Gallery’s new exhibition, Facing the Modern: The portrait in Vienna 1900, is, on the surface, a look at the portraiture of the cultural centre of fin-de-siècle Mitteleuropa.

This is not, though, a city of Strauss waltzes, but a haunting look at a clash of old and modern, life and death, at Europe’s heart.

We start with the mask of Beethoven’s face taken after his death in 1827.

The cast is not the finest: so scared was he of poisoning that he insisted that his demise should be followed by a postmortem. Both the damage done by that process and by the time lapse between death and the casting mean that the ‘final expression’ – the aim of a death mask – has been blurred.

Yet still it retains power; a face pinched by pain or the fire that always consumed the composer.

This is all context: the absorption with death that becomes pronounced as we encounter later works started long before the works that constitute the core of this exhibition and before Freud, whose own work seems to hang over the paintings.

Contextually too, Beethoven was one of the fathers of German romanticism. Like the artists of the Vienna Secession, whose work follows, Beethoven kicked down the old and created a new artistic language.

The Secession understood this and its 14^th exhibition was dedicated to the composer.

The exhibition has left some critics grumbling about the context of that mask, and about how the exhibition as a whole is arranged – in other words, not chronologically. But this has benefits for the visitor.

For instance, seeing Oskar Kokoschka’s 1909 Portrait of Lotte Franzos hanging right next to Hans Canon’s Girl with a Parrot from 1876, presents an unusual opportunity to grasp what a shock the modern must have been to a public weaned on an art form that was as constrained by convention as society itself.

We move through rooms covering different themes, from initial context to the family to Jewish identity in the city to death.

The Family (Self Portrait), Shiele

Although Gustav Klimt, Egon Schiele and Kokoschka are well represented here, the exhibition has brought together work by a number of other artists, including Jewish and female ones, to create a wider picture

The presence of works by Teresa Ries (a self portrait of great self-confidence), Broncia Koller and Elena Luksch-Makowsky all make the point that women were involved at the highest levels of artist endeavour and were exhibiting as such. It’s subsequently that they appear to have been largely forgotten.

But death is a dominant theme here: so often the outcome as the modern and the old collided; as anti-semitism rubbed against the flowering of secular Jewish artists, intellectuals and businessmen; as Vienna became a magnet for émigrés from central and eastern Europe; as liberalism collided with conservatism; as people started to question religious conventions and social mores, and as individualism warred with the subjugation of the id in the name of society and family.

But to begin with, there is death and convention.

Passing through the rooms, we discover Friedrich von Amerling’s Antonie von Amerling on her Deathbed from 1843, Franz Eybl’s The Artist Franz Wipplinger, Looking at a Portrait of his Late Sister, from 1833, Gyula Benczúr’s Portrait of Empress Elisabeth from 1899 (painted a year after she was assassinated, and representing her some 40 years earlier, portrayed against a stunningly-realised background of gold) and even Emperor Franz Joseph on his Deathbed, by Franz von Matsch from 1916.

There’s work by Richard Gerstl, who killed himself when 25, after a short affair with Schönberg’s wife, and was only later recognised as a seminal Austrian Expressionist.

Of the Klimt works, while two early ones are astonishing for their photographic quality, the latter ones exhibited here all seem connected to death.

A deathbed portrait of Ria Munk (1912), after she had shot herself in the heart, aged 24, following an affair, sets the scene for one of two posthumous portraits of her that is displayed here.

And then a pastel of Klimt’s dead infant son, Otto Zimmermann, together with a photograph of the child in a coffin.

Such postmortem photographs were so popular in the Vienna of the time that the government enacted a law banning the presence of corpses in photographic studios.

Portrait of Amalie Zuckerkandl was being worked on even as Austro-Hungrary itself was in its death throes, and was unfinished when Klimt himself died in 1918.

As if reflecting those ends, you look at this work and sense that you know where Klimt’s characteristic gold would have gone, but while the spaces are there, they remain ungilded.

But death had not had its fill of this portrait: Zuckerkandl herself would later be murdered in a Nazi death camp.

And then there is Schiele.

Ah yes: this notoriously ‘difficult’ artist.

The Family (Self Portrait) dominates a room – light years away from the chocolate-box sentiment of Alois Delug’s The Markl Family (1907) that hangs just a few metres from it (another illustration of how effective the design of the exhibition is in presenting stark contrasts).

Schiele’s gaunt figures, blank-eyed, stripped almost of flesh and with brushstrokes that could be the underlying muscles; angular, and devoid of what the artist considered to be aesthetic hypocrisy, seem to be the perfect visual metaphors for a Europe brutalised and shattered by the war that was finally grinding to an exhausted halt.

Death mask of Gustav Mahler

Later, there is Schiele’s Portrait of Edith Schiele, dying, from 1918 – just days before his own death, also from the Spanish flu.

And more death masks follow, like a frame of the exhibition: of Klimt, of Schiele, of architect Adolf Loos and of the composer Gustav Mahler.

The latter, made in 1911, is unusual in that it was cast by an artist, Carl Moll, and includes much of Mahler’s head and neck as well as his face. The detail is staggering: eyelashes and pores on the neck: it as though you are looking at the composer himself, sleeping.

There are aspects of this exhibition that seem full of life as opposed to death.

Moll’s Self Portrait in his Study, from 1906, may on the surface be conventional, but it has some interesting touches and is beautifully executed.

Gerstl’s Portrait of Lieutenant Alois Gerstl (1907) seems to have something of both van Gogh and Chagall about it.

Schiele’s Portrait of Albert Paris von Gütersloh (1918) has the same blank look of The Family (Self Portrait) from the same year, but his subject sits, utterly modern, against a red and gold background that recalls to mind the icons of Orthodoxy.

There are other patches of the gold that is so familiar in the work of the Secession, as behind the head of the subject in Koller’s Nude Portrait of Marietta (1907), but also in Isidor Kaufmann’s Young Rabbi (1910).

Anton Romoko’s portraits of Isabella and Christoph Reisser from 1885 both hint at the same thing in their blank backgrounds, while some of Kokoschka’s earlier backgrounds do something similar, with their mix of reds and golds.

It is the exoticism of the East blurring into the West.

Portrait of Heinrich Mann, Oppenheimer

Max Oppenheimer’s Portrait of Heinrich Mann from 1910 obviously attracted my attention as a fan of Lübeck’s literary family.

There’s the discovery that Arnold Schönberg was not only the creator of the 12-tone scale, but a painter of some note.

Works by Ferdinand Georg Waldmüller from the pre-Secession era show, however, that not every artist was trapped completely in conventionality.

Gerstl’s Nude Self Portrait with Palette from 1908 (the year of his suicide) is striking too – not least for its apparent prefiguring of Schiele’s angularising of the human body.

And the exhibition as a whole is fascinating because it offers the chance to see how European artists outside France and Spain (Matisse and Picasso, in other words) explored, dissected and made the anew.

If I have a quibble, it is the odd way in which sex is treated – or rather: not.

It’s skated around: mentions that Klimt fathered a number of children by several mothers, and of painters and subjects and their affairs.

One can, in Schiele’s 1912 Portrait of Erich Lederer (left), even see a harbinger of Weimar androgyny.

Yet Koller’s Nude Portrait of Marietta is the point at which the curator chooses to inform of us that it is ‘different’ from other nudes of the era in being ‘non-sexual’.

Which is one interesting – not least, as, in our time, we seem increasingly to be seeing any nude as sexual: see the moral panics that have been thrown up by pictures of naked children being snatched by the police and the photographers arrested, even when they are the parents.

Yet there seems also in this an attempted rejection of the fact that human beings are also sexual beings. However much some may try to pretend otherwise, we view our fellow humans at least partially in terms of sex.

In fin-de-siècle Vienna, as in so many other places and at other times when conventions were being torn at, the rejection of sexual conformity was a vital part of that. And in a Freudian world, and one where individuality is being explored and old beliefs dumped, this seems even more the case.

In Schiele’s oeuvre it’s impossible to miss this.

In 2007, at the Barbican’s Seduced: Art and sex from antiquity to now, works by both Schiele and Klimt were included.

It’s difficult to see how, for instance, Schiele’s Two Girls Embracing (1915) can be seen as pornographic – the gaze from the two women is a challenge to the viewer as voyeur. And Eros, from 1911, of a male nude with vast, erect penis and, again, a challenging look at the observer, does not seem intended to arouse.

Perhaps, rather, they confuse in their lack of shame, and the frankness and boldness of that challenge.

But if Nude Portrait of Marietta is a portrait, then so, surely, is Eros.

That is, however, a relatively minor quibble.

If you expect a Vienna of gaiety and Strauss, this may not be for you. But Facing the Modern is an intellectually challenging exhibition and one that brings great rewards on that score. Gemma Blackshaw deserves great credit for her work on it.

And it’s also an exhibition that will, I suspect, stay in the mind for a very long time to come.

• Facing the Modern: The portrait in Vienna 1900 is at the National Gallery, London, until 12 January. Find out more here.

Wagner and me

It’s difficult to know when it started, my relationship with Wagner. And no, I don’t mean the X Factor entrant.

It’s been there for a while, most often hovering in the background, but occasionally hoving into clearer view.

First, it was only in the vaguest outlines, formed from a CD of The Other Half’s, a collection of overtures and preludes, together with the famous Liebestod from Tristan und Isolde, although I really didn’t ‘get’ that at the time.

With Herbert von Karajan conducting the Berlin Phil, the first piece that grabbed my attention was the overture to Die Meistersinger von Nurnberg.

Oh, what a glorious thing that is – and the resolution still sends me somewhere a little different.

On our trip to Berlin, four years ago, a visit to the Philharmonie to see the same orchestra, under the baton of Simon Rattle, moved me further on again.

After the world premiere of a piece by Matthus Sammer, the rest of the concert was highlights from acts II and III of Götterdämmerung. The singing bits didn’t really grab me, but the orchestral sections left me gasping, as though a g force had picked me up and shoved me back into my seat to hold me there, in rapt attention.

As we left the concert hall, The Other Half asked how I was: “Just trying to teach myself to breathe again,” I managed to reply.

A year or so later, we caught a televised version of a Covent Garden production of Das Rheingold. Now I had a sense of the music and the theatricality combined.

The next stage – although not quite immediately – was the purchase of a Ring cycle: Solti with the Vienna, since that seems to be regarded as the best. When you're going to splash a lot, it pays to research first.

Off and on in the intervening years, I have made limited efforts to start listening to it, but never got very far.

And then, because the nature of some work I’m presently doing means that I need to block out anything else, yet still have a good half of my mind free, I put it all on my iPod and started from the beginning.

We’d not quite caught the very opening of Rheingold, and when I heard it – the 30-second single note; the rumbling of the Rhine as it builds from the source – I was stunned.

And suddenly, listening to one of the operas with no outside interference, the vocal passages changed. In context, they made sense and were far more ‘musical’ than I had previously understood.

Over coffee a few weeks ago, I observed to The Other Half that there was something daemonic about the music (I use that spelling quite deliberately). Yet at the same time, I’'s almost religious. That is – religious without the religion.

I know that it affects people differently, but it gets me right in the gut. And I suspect that that is, in large part, why people feel either wild love with or detestation of it.

Bach, for instance, wrote beautiful music, but it doesn’t ravish you emotionally. Wagner's music can do precisely that.

I don’t think he’s entirely alone in that: there are passages of Beethoven that, played in a certain way, have a huge emotional power.

A few months before we attended that Berlin concert, we were lucky enough to catch one of Daniel Barenboim’s nights at the Royal Festival Hall when he was doing the entire cycle of Beethoven’s sonatas.

I’ve loved old Ludwig since I was introduced to his music at school, but I had never seen or heard it preformed in such a way.

The huge hall faded away and it became something utterly and entirely personal. This was not Beethoven the Polite, this was Beethoven the Passionate, Beethoven the Angry, Beethoven the Inflamed.

In general, we seem so often to treat ‘serious’ music ... well, rather too seriously. But that night, with Barenboim (a Wagner fan, incidentally), the music was given back life and a soul, complete with deep, dark depths.

But back to the extremes that only Wagner provokes.

Just yesterday, on the forum part of a serious national newspaper, someone observed that “no right-thinking” person could like it.

Some of the comments in favour were every bit as over the top.

What other composer has ever triggered such extreme responses?

Of course, much is made of Wagner’s own anti-semitism and the Nazis’ love of Wagner.

My perfect role?

But with the former, do we so damn Milton, say, for his support of Cromwell’s massacres in Ireland or Debussy for being inclined to domestic violence?

And the works themselves are hardly riddled with it – unlike, say, the racism and anti-semitism and sexism of Ian Fleming’s Bond books. Yet who suggests we should forgo 007?

There are great ironies in Hitler’s adoration of Wagner. Let's take the Ring cycle: one of the key themes of that great arc of a story is that of the destructive nature of power and the search for it. Hardly the stuff of the Third Reich.

Indeed, in a slender volume entitled The Perfect Wagnerite, first published in 1898, revolutionary Fabian and erstwhile music critic Bernard Shaw expounded a theory of the Ring as being essentially socialist in nature.

Now it’s a downright irritating read in many ways – essentially for Shaw’s incredible ability to be patronising and pompous – but it is an interesting thesis non the less.

And even if one doesn’t go the whole way along that analytical route, it certainly suggests that the works are far removed from how we have come to imagine them through the prism of national socialism.

Not that the extreme negativity about Wagner is new or dates from after WWII – far from it.

In Buddenbrooks, first published in 1901, Thomas Mann has the church organist refusing to accompany Gerda in playing Wagner. It is morally repugnant to him.

There's an irony here too: in effect, it was being considered, by some, to be 'degenerate' – decades before the Nazis used 'entartete' as their excuse to ban and burn and persecute.

So we’re back to personal responses.

German romanticism – of which Wagner can be viewed as the apotheosis – has elements of a death wish about it: a longing for oblivion.

That culture was still around well into the 20th century – Brecht’s poem from 1919, Ballade von den Seeräubern (Ballad of the Pirates), is a perfect example.

And Wagner goes further, reaching for many his most troubling level in Die Walküre, with the incestuous love of Siegmund and Sieglinde, even though they know they are brother and sister.

I wonder if all this – the death wish element of German romanticism in general and of Wagner’s pushing back of conventional boundaries in particular – prefigures the beginnings of an understanding of psychoanalysis and an imaginative experimentation with exploring the deeper parts of the human psyche?

As the hold of formal religion diminished, and as philosophy – and German philosophy was hugely important in this period – moved toward something more existential (we see this explored at length in Buddenbrooks), then these darker aspects of human nature were being explored in a different way, outside the safety of conventional religion.

They reach their high point in the 20^th century, in philosophical questioning of whether the act of suicide is our only real possible act of free will.

Yet nobody seems to view such angst as though it was a contributory factor in later genocide.

Further, it seems inaccurate to me to characterise this fascination with death as being somehow entirely secular.

It’s hardly far away from western Christianity, which has spent centuries creating a worship of death and suffering: not simply in the figure of Christ crucified, but in so many of the martyrs of the church.

Think only, for instance, of all those painted representations of St Sebastian, erotic even in his suffering; dotted with arrows yet gazing ecstatically at the heavens, knowing death will come soon and transport him somewhere better.

The issue, then, seems to be partly the decline of religion, which can be seen to allow such sentiments and musings. And these were opportunities that Wagner, among many others, took.

But moving on, his influence is as wide-ranging as it is possible to be.

We owe him a debt of gratitude for so many things, from the decision to dim auditorium lights before a performance to, some would say, stream-of-consciousness literature (Joyce, Woolf etc).

And that’s without even beginning to name all the composers who were themselves influenced by his work: Mahler, Richard Strauss, Debussy, Berlioz, Bruckner, Tchaikovsky, Schoenberg … it’s a very long list.

It’s easy to forget that his influence moves into the realms of popular culture and not just ‘high art’.

Wagner was the first person to use a leitmotif: a recurring theme, often very brief, that appears throughout a work to suggest something particular to us.

So forget the ‘Tristan chord’ and think 1975, Stephen Spielberg and a score by John Williams. Think Jaws and think boom boom boom boom boom boom boom boom … a leitmotif, and one that everybody knows, even if they haven’t seen the film (me).

And that’s without mentioning how authors such as Thomas Mann took up and used the leitmotif in a literary sense.

But to bring this back to where we began.

I hope to see a Wagner opera – in the flesh – later this year.

But the weekend’s viewing of the New York Met’s latest production of the power of this Das Rheingold left me in no doubt of his extraordinary genius.

And tdoay, on this 200^th anniversary of his birth, I find myself more and more drawn to both listen more and learn more.

Yet even for an apprentice acolyte, there is a sense of stepping into unchartered territory, because with Wagner, everything is about the personal response. And that is always going to involve an feeling of risk.

Going right back to the beginning of this piece, I mentioned the Liebestod from Tristan und Isolde. Now, until very recently, I had not got caught up in this particular piece.

But then, as I was warming to it, I came across YouTube footage of a clearly dying Von Karajan conducting a concert performance, with the great Jessye Norman singing.

And if you needed any convincing of the almost orgasmic (le petite mort?) infectious nature of Wagner’s music, then here it is.

At the end of this extraordinary performance, Karajan – haggard and having had to sit in order to conduct – slips off his stool; takes Norman’s hands and kisses them.

There – right there – is death and love and beauty, bound up between reality and art.

And like so much else in Wagner, it is intoxicating and awesome and frightening and alluring all at once.

Little wonder then, that his music has, legendarily, driven people to madness.

And little wonder that, even today, he divides opinion more violently than any composer before or since.

* For further reading, I heartily recommend Bryan Magee’s very short, but wonderfully written, concise and utterly fascinating Aspects of Wagner.