The Ideal Listener

The Ideal Listener

I should like to suggest some of the qualities that I believe make up the ideal listener. Let us suppose that we are at a concert; our two immediate neighbours must serve as representatives of typical listeners. One experiences music almost entirely through his emotions. He is thrilled by sound itself; the weight of a Tchaikovsky climax overwhelms him; the sensuous beauty of a Brahms slow movement affects him like a good claret; he finds Mozart charming, if a little lightweight, loves the songs of Schubert but finds his instrumental music a trifle over-long, admires and respects Beethoven sometimes to the point of idolatry but considers the late quartets to be above him. His enjoyment of music is genuine, enthusiastic, committed and personal, and not in any way to be despised.

    Beyond him sits our paragon, the perfect listener. He shares all of our immediate neighbour's enthusiasms, but his reactions are constantly enhanced by the subtleties in the music and in its performance. Let us look into his mind for a moment to see the equipment he brings with him to increase his rapport with the music. The programme tells us that we are hearing a Beethoven quartet, the first of the Op.59 set, and gives us a good deal of information about Count Rasumovsky, to whom the work was dedicated. It gives the date of composition, 1806, and the story of the quartet's publication. In its analysis of the four movements it draws particular attention to the Russian folk-tune in the finale, incorporated into the score by Beethoven in order to delight his Russian patron. (Incidentally, and with deference to our musicologists, would our enjoyment of this piece be affected in any way if the opus number was to be changed to 52, if the Count had been a Slovakian ambassador named Silicowsky, if the final tune had been a Moravian folk-song and so on? Of course not.)

     What then do I expect my ideal listener's reaction to the music to be? In general terms, to appreciate every moment in the composition that has some special significance, not in the analyst's sense, like a dead moth pinned on a board, but as part of the whole interwoven tapestry of music. These strands are so complex and multifarious that the very first bars of this quartet might be said to reach back to early Haydn and forward as far as Sibelius. The accompanying figure is pure Haydn, but the cello theme starting so unexpectedly on the fifth note of the scale has a curiously modal flavour that shows us intimations of the opening of Sibelius' 3rd symphony.

     This sense of period, this awareness of the very feel of time, will extend beyond the realm of music, so that one identifies with the intellectual climate of the age. Music is a sort of time machine, enabling us to experience vicariously the emotions and thoughts of men long dead; but it should also help us to be more in tune with the paintings, architecture, literature and poetry of the age from which it comes. Listening to Beethoven we become sensitive not just to music but to the whole flavour of his era.

Excerpt from Antony Hopkins' Introduction to 'The Larousse encyclopedia of music' edited by Geoffrey Hindley