Edward Gardner

Scofield: Edward, you are certainly not one of those academic musicians living in an ivory tower. You are deeply rooted in the real world of putting on operas and concerts. The experience of 10 years in a major company, like the English National Opera based in London, teaches you a lot of hard lessons about programming, doesn’t it?

Gardner: Yes, it does. And there are mysteries of programming. Take Debussy’s Pelléas et Mélisande as an example, anyone who comes to it has a life-changing experience. But getting them through the door in the first place is difficult. And that’s such a sadness to me, I would go to every single performance in a run of Pelléas when I was studying, I can only see brilliance, and beauty, and excitement in that music. But you’re right, I find connecting with an audience is one of the great fundamentals of my job, and I love it, and it frustrates me when it can’t happen, or it frustrates me when we perform the piece which I’m passionate about or I’m an advocate for, and it hasn’t spoken through to the audience. It’s something I think about very much.

Scofield: Yes, you’re absolutely right, and I think one of those hard lessons learn, if you are music director of a big opera company, maybe not a small company dedicated to producing less popular or just new works, the works of the early 20th century need to be rationed sparingly to the audience. Otherwise they just won’t show up at the theatre. That’s the fact, isn’t it?

Gardner: But you can turn that on its head and say if all you’re giving an audience is repeats of Tosca and La Traviata, your audience will die out, because you’re not educating them, or you’re not giving them enough of a wide range to carry on. There’s a tightrope between all this. Because you can’t just do the ten most famous operas all the time. Because that audience is finite, and you’re not building anything. So, if I had the solution to this, I would be running at a profit making opera company somewhere in the world, but there isn’t one, so…

Scofield: It doesn’t exist!

Gardner: But this is what we all think about all the time really, is how to keep this incredible art form attractive, approachable, brilliant, not elitist but somehow excellent all the time. It’s a huge discussion.

Scofield: Yes it is. And Schoenberg, he really began the trend that taught us many of these hard lessons. Because a lot of musicians absolutely love his music, but let’s face it, he is hard to sell to large numbers of opera ticket buyers. Where does his reputation stand in the world today, as an opera composer, considering that he is never going to sell as much as Verdi, Mozart, and Puccini?

Gardner: Yes, this is, of course, another big discussion. I’m going to frame your question in a slightly different way, in that he is a scary name because of where he took composition, and tonality, and atonality, it is root from late romanticism. But what I love about the music is that we put together his late romantic, beautiful lyric, voluptuous piece, this enormous tone poem which wouldn’t scare anyone off. It’s a beautiful narrative in a warm, late, romantic style of this story, brilliantly portrayed, the way he writes the narrative into the story is really exceptional. And then, we have Erwartung, a grittier, more expressionist, more difficult harmonically and tonally world, where Schoenberg has made this decision. He’s made this leap into well microtonality and atonality, and my argument is that, you can take both pieces in the same way, and listen to them in the same way, and one piece should feed into your appreciation of the other. And if you listen to Erwartung with the text, and I really try to perform it not at all as an academic exercise in inviting newcomers to modern music, but as a deeply expressionist, extraordinary narrative of this young woman, lost in the forest. And I would encourage your listeners to listen to this piece with the text, with the translation of the text, and listen a few times, and see what you can get out of it. Because it’s a difficult journey, also you say orchestral musicians love Schoenberg. They love the beauty, and they love the brilliance of him, but that doesn’t come on one go. And a lot of this of our world doesn’t come on one listening. Give it time and I’m sure you get more and more from it, because there’s intense beauty, and a transcendental beauty painting of fear, terror, worry, in this piece. It’s second to none.