OK, my friends, I accept I may have made an error of judgment by making a musical stopover in Amsterdam. @abkquan puts it very nicely: “Here the problem is the opposite to Vienna: what to include instead of what to exclude.”
The Netherlands is a nation of performers – and painters of course – but composers are thin on the ground. It doesn’t have its equivalent of Sibelius, Nielsen or Grieg, a composer who came to symbolise 19th-century nationhood. I feel there is probably a good PhD thesis to be written explaining why.
But we have made our bed and now must lie in it. The great thing about @abkquan is that he does not give up. “I’ll tentatively put forward Louis Andriessen, whose pungent De Staat is widely considered a minimalist masterpiece.” De Staat is a setting of and commentary on Plato’s Republic, and has been brilliantly deconstructed by Guardian writer Tom Service. Immerse yourself in it, and you will find yourself perplexed, inspired, seduced.
I was also fascinated by Andriessen’s De Stijl, which Service describes as “a boogie-woogie tone-poem inspired by Piet Mondrian’s work”. De Stijl is the third element in De Materie (Matter), Andriessen’s four-part exploration of life, the universe and everything, which was composed in the 1980s. Service considers it his masterpiece.
Andriessen’s radicalism stems from his democratic philosophy of music-making. In that sense, he is a typical child of the 1960s in Holland, which was at the forefront of the cultural revolution that swept the world at that time. He does not favour one musical form over another. He reveres Stravinsky, but also adores Count Basie: you can hear both in his syncopated, jazz-inflected scores.
The fact that the Netherlands does not have a great musical tradition freed up Andriessen and his fellow Dutch modernists. They had to construct their own musical landscape. They faced what they saw as the conservatism of Dutch orchestras, especially the great Royal Concertgebouw orchestra in Amsterdam. In the late 60s – the era of sit-ins and assorted happenings – Andriessen and Co were happy to disrupt performances by the Concertgebouw to further their demands for more adventurous programming, apparently letting loose toy frogs in the middle of concerts. Those were the days! I rather like the idea of Mahler’s Third Symphony, say, played to an accompaniment of the croaking of an army of toy frogs.
Another Dutch modernist of Andriessen’s vintage (and 60s enfant terrible status) is Reinbert de Leeuw, who broke a 40-year (!) compositional silence in 2014 with Der nächtlige Wanderer, a wonderfully haunting piece (complete with barking dog) that was given its UK premiere at the Proms last summer. De Leeuw – teacher, pianist, composer, musicologist – is, like Andriessen, a gloriously unclassifiable figure, but he is certainly very Dutch in his intellectualised view of music and the inspiration he draws from other art forms – Der nächtlige Wanderer is inspired by a Friedrich Hölderlin poem.
Now we start struggling. @thesecretorganist offers Jan Pieterszoon Sweelinck’s organ music, though he doesn’t sound entirely convinced. “The first piece by Sweelinck I ever heard was a wonderful little jewel called Hodie Christus Natus Est,” he says. “It’s still my favourite of his pieces, although I wouldn’t say it sounds particularly evocative of Amsterdam.”
Sweelinck is an important figure in Europe’s musical evolution, but a somewhat recherché one – a late 16th-century organist and teacher who was probably the finest keyboard player in Europe before Bach and helped open the way for the emergence of baroque styles of playing. He also composed many keyboard and vocal works. In Holland’s flat musical landscape he stands out as a giant.
@abkquan offers Alphons Diepenbrock, a composer and conductor who swam successfully in the cross-currents of late 19th-century musical life, effecting a sort of marriage of Wagner, Mahler and Debussy. He was particularly noted for his song settings. Hölderlin clearly appeals to the Dutch spirit, because his poem Die Nacht is one of Diepenbrock’s most notable compositions. @abkquan is also keen for us to listen to Im Grossen Schweigen, a tone poem for baritone and orchestra drawing on the composer’s interest in Nietzsche.
One other Dutch composer worth mentioning, though the Amsterdam connection is weak, is Unico Wilhelm van Wassenaer, an 18th-century noble and diplomat whose amateur compositions are extremely enjoyable, especially his Concerti Armonici, which until 1980 were thought to be the work of Pergolesi.
Van Wassenaer was his own severest critic and did not want the concerti published – one reason for a succession of misattributions over the next two centuries. “Some of them are tolerable, some middling, others wretched,” he wrote. “Had they not been published, I would perhaps have corrected the mistakes in them, but other business has left me no leisure to amuse myself with them, and I would have caused their editor offence.”
Despite these intriguing individual composers, the real strength of Dutch music lies not in composition but in performance. The Concertgebouw has been one of the great musical forces in Europe since its foundation in 1888, and has formed long relationships with some of the world’s finest conductors: Willem Mengelberg for the little matter of 50 years; Bernard Haitink for almost 30; Riccardo Chailly and Mariss Jansons for more than a decade each. In its hall, the Concertgebouw, it also has one of the most evocative venues in the world, once experienced never forgotten.
As @fleetfootkid notes, Holland’s contribution to period performance has also been considerable over the past 50 years, thanks in particular to recorder player and conductor Frans Brüggen and organist, harpsichordist and conductor Ton Koopman, both wonderful players who combined a quest for authentic performance with a raw energy that communicated itself to a wide public.
All then is not lost for Amsterdam and for the Netherlands generally. It may not be Vienna, but it has done its bit and I will (almost) defend myself from the accusation by @Repons that this was an odd choice.
If all else fails in the case for my defence, there is always – as @fleetfootkid points out – the theme music to Van der Valk, the 1970s ITV detective show set in Amsterdam. The Van der Valk theme was written by Dutch composer Jan Stoeckart (masquerading under the pseudonym of Jack Trombey), and got to number one in the UK charts in 1973, which is more than Beethoven ever managed.
Next time we’ll look at Berlin, the last stop in our post-referendum series on European cities. All musical associations gratefully received. I’m assuming this is going to be a little less challenging than our tour of Amsterdam, though in the end I found the quirks of this week’s journey rather engaging. Thanks to those who offered signposts.
Previous cities in this series: London | Paris | Venice | Helsinki | Prague | Hamburg | Rome | Vienna
