Le Figaro’s renowned music critic focuses on his passion: the symphony orchestra. It’s a passion that has turned into an object of study: here is where Dr. Merlin, rigorous researcher, meets Mr. Merlin, enthusiastic journalist whose writing is a reference for every music lover.
TL: You are watching musicians wearing two hats: as critic and as researcher. How do you marry the two different activities?
CM: For a long time, I considered the two activities to be more or less incompatible. In point of fact, I’ve drawn a fairly wide separation between my university work and my journalism: at university, I’ve never talked all that much about what I was doing in the newspapers or on radio, and vice versa. The two worlds do tend to view each other with mutual mistrust. For academics, describing a work as being journalistic is, I believe, the ultimate insult! It’s often considered synonymous with a lack of rigour, with lightness, stylistic effects, etc. Similarly, when Jacques Doucelin hired me for Le Figaro in 2000, I was already a lecturer at Lille University, and when he mentioned to his management colleagues that he was considering me, an academic, they immediately assumed that I was going to be boring, sinister, unreadable and so on. So there’s a reciprocal reputation that is not great in either milieu. For a long time, I kept the two separate, with a long-held belief that listening and critical judgement came from the journalism side while, when it came to research, I should stick to more solid, less ductile subjects.
When L’Avant-Scène Opéra brought me in to create some discographies, I started to change that opinion. Of course, it wasn’t proper academic work, as my university colleagues lost no time in reminding me. None the less, L’Avant-Scène Opéra is a serious publication, very thorough, and when I wrote the big discographies for frequently recorded works like Carmen or Le nozze di Figaro, I was doing so with the head of a researcher. The idea of the magazine was to be comprehensive, including versions that had never been republished. For any given work, that required assembling all the recordings that were ever made, by way of dealers who specialise in unreleased LPs and all the record shops in Paris. In short, a proper research task. I then realised that these discographies couldn’t be anything other than what a reader usually expected, namely to advise on a reference version, or perhaps the three best versions of a work. So that created an opportunity to write a proper history of the interpretation. At this point, criticism joined the aesthetic and historical attitudes of the researcher, showing how interpretation had or had not changed over time, or how highly different aesthetic choices sometimes occurred during the same era.
More recently at university, when I embarked on some work to become accredited as a director of studies of research, I wanted to combine my speciality of German studies (because I’m first and foremost a German specialist and not a musicologist) with my love of music and especially of the orchestra. At that point, I started reading the history of the Vienna Philharmonic and I allowed myself to combine purely historical work with critical elements. I proceeded not just to follow this orchestra through its history (its internal functions, the way it recruited musicians) but also to look at its way of playing. That’s something that one usually steers clear of, kept for a few brief words at the end. But I wanted to engage in some deep thinking about the “Viennese style”, and it seemed to me that it was helpful that I was simultaneously a researcher and a critic. The only problem was that I came out with far more questions than answers: 500 pages later, I still don’t know what the Viennese style is, or even if there is one! But still, I’ve asked the question and shown that it was often more an intellectual construction than an audible reality. It’s tied to stereotypes, cliches, to an argument about orchestral sound that one hears today that goes “the identities of orchestras have been lost, there is globalisation…” It’s something that's up for argument! What’s interesting is to verify it by listening.
Faced with this argument, do orchestras look to cultivate a unique identity, or is there now a sort of quest for a universal interpretation?
That’s a subject one can get obsessed about, an area in which there are surely more questions than answers. Still, there are some clear pointers. For a start, except for some countries like Russia or some of the Asian ones, recruitment has become an international business. If I remember correctly, the Berlin Philharmonic has players with 25 different nationalities. From that point, does it still make sense to talk about a German orchestra? Musical apprenticeship has also become globalised: today, a young musician doesn’t get trained in just one place, they won’t do all their study at the Paris Conservatoire, the University of Music at Vienna or the Juilliard School: they’re encouraged to travel and to take advice from other teachers, which opens them up to a greater diversity of style. I think the 21st century orchestra usually tries to have the widest possible stylistic palette, to do justice to the different styles of music. That was Simon Rattle’s typical reply whenever people accused him, sometimes harshly, of having ruined the Berlin Philharmonic’s sound and that since his tenure, there wasn’t a German sound any more. He replied quite simply that he didn’t want an orchestra with a German sound, but he wanted an orchestra that sounded French when playing French music, German when playing German music and Russian in Russian music. The way I see it, that’s a somewhat contemporary point of view which speaks of a musical concept of today that’s not about regret or promotion but simply of observation.