Nathalie Stutzmann on Bruckner

Nathalie Stutzmann had been working flat-out for twenty days straight but was still fizzing with energy and excitement when we grabbed half an hour in July to discuss her superb new live recording of Bruckner's Symphony No. 4 with the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra - the French-born Swiss conductor was deep in preparations for the Bayreuth Festspielhaus premiere of Wagner's Rienzi, which took place last weekend (184 years after the opera's first performance in Dresden). 

Austro-German Romantic repertoire has always occupied a special place in Stutzmann's affectations, and we spoke about the kinship between the soundworlds of Bruckner and Wagner, the joys of bringing Bruckner to an audience (and orchestra) who rarely get to experience his music live, and the challenges involved in making his 'cathedrals in sound' resonate as they should - as well as touching on why institutional misogyny kept her away from the podium until middle age, and a recent uplifting encounter with a pioneering female musician in her eighties who was the subject of a 2023 Netflix film...

Has Bruckner always been a composer you’ve loved, or was he an acquired taste for you?

I’ve always been fascinated by Bruckner, but my deep dive into the symphonies happened fairly recently - and I proceeded with care! When I listened to them, I founded too often that it was difficult to grasp the architecture of the symphonies. Despite some of the beautiful interpretations I heard, I still thought it wasn’t clear enough, and if I don’t understand the structure of a piece then I don’t know how to build it with an orchestra.

When I was preparing to conduct Nos. 7 and 9 for the Bruckner bicentenary I spent days on end with my head in the scores, and suddenly something clicked into place: I understood how each movement and symphony was built on a mathematical level, and the careful planning that had gone into each phrase and shape. And what started out as an intellectual puzzle quickly turned into real love. If you find the right way, the right colours, the right tempo, this music becomes completely mesmerising – you lose all sense of time when it’s well done, and that’s what I tried to achieve.

How much of a Bruckner tradition is there in Atlanta? Were any of the musicians coming to his music for the first time?

It was absolutely new for about half of the orchestra, including my wonderful first horn who is so important in this symphony!  Bruckner isn’t played so often in America, so there was a marvellous sense of discovery from the musicians and audience alike. They didn’t come to the symphonies with the inherited tradition of the sound that my European orchestras bring to the table, and I found it very exciting that nobody was thinking ‘Oh, this is how we’ve always played Bruckner’. The learning curve in the initial rehearsals was quite steep, but once we’d done the work together there was an incredible freshness and colour to the music which was exactly what I’d dreamed of.

By the time we made this live recording I’d been working with the orchestra for two years, and one of my aims when I started in Atlanta was to build up an Austro-German Romantic sound together: it’s my core repertoire , and it’s the base for any major symphonic orchestra. I’ve always loved it, and they were so hungry for it after not playing much for many years.

When I first suggested doing this festival in Atlanta for the Bruckner bicentenary, the marketing team thought we’d scare everybody off and nobody would come! But they did come - and not just from Atlanta, but from all over America. Bruckner lovers are a bit like Wagnerians in that respect: they'll travel a long way to hear the music they love. It was a very special moment, and I hope that comes to light on the recording.

What is your stance on the infamous ‘Bruckner Problem’ concerning the multiple versions of each symphony, and how did you decide which ones to use for your bicentenary festival?

Honestly, I just choose the one I prefer! Of course I studied the original in detail, because it’s helpful to see how Bruckner’s thought process developed: I’m always interested in first versions from a musicological point of view, but it doesn’t necessarily follow that the first incarnation of a score is the best or most authentic. I know there are Bruckner fans out there who are very insistent that you should always use the original edition, but personally I find this version of No. 4 much more fully achieved.

Wagner is another composer who figures heavily on your schedule: do you feel much kinship between his orchestral writing and Bruckner’s, especially in the Fourth Symphony?

Yes, very clearly. We know that Bruckner absolutely adored Wagner for his entire life: he even wrote his Third Symphony in tribute to Wagner, and he was devastated when Wagner died. Of course there are strong similarities in the orchestration, but even more striking is the way they both handle climaxes – many movements in Bruckner’s symphonies last around twenty minutes, but there’s only one climax and if you don’t manage to hit it right then the whole thing is sunk! (Look at that incredible coda in Symphony No. 4, which I think is one of the most extraordinary codas in the history of music: it lasts for around five minutes but there’s only one climax). You have to build the momentum with such care and intention in Bruckner, whereas with Wagner your job is just to keep the horse under control until the rider arrives, so to speak! 

As you know, I’m fully immersed in Wagner right now and I’m feeling these parallels acutely… The big difference with Bruckner, though, is that so much is built on Bachian foundations – the sense of line, the chorale-type writing and the rhythmical elements are all so firmly grounded in Bach, and you only hear that on very rare occasions in Wagner.

Speaking of which, did it require much of a mental reset when you pivoted from singing Baroque music to conducting Romantic repertoire?

Quite the reverse: it actually felt like coming home, because Austro-German Romantic music has always been such an important part of my life. I studied bassoon and piano when I was growing up, and I fell in love with Brahms, Schumann and Schubert’s piano works when I was very young. I have German and Swiss roots, so I’m equal parts Swiss, French and German - maybe that explains why I feel such a close affinity with this repertoire.

And it dominated my life as a singer too: most of my career revolved around Liederabends, the Mahler symphonies and song cycles, and things like the Brahms Alto Rhapsody. I was the first woman to record the complete Lieder by Robert Schumann, and I also did all the big Schubert cycles and the Brahms lieder as well as lots of Fauré, Chausson, Poulenc, Debussy, Ravel etc. I think a lot of people associate me with Italian Baroque repertoire and with Bach, but that was something I only started to explore towards the end of my singing career: I’ve always thought of myself as a Romantic singer, never as a Baroque specialist. 

Was conducting something you always aspired to do, or did the impulse come later in your career?

The seeds were there from childhood, because I grew up as a musician rather than a singer – I only switched from bassoon and piano because my parents were opera singers and encouraged me to take voice lessons. Because I had this rare, special voice type of contralto, people immediately took notice and I started winning prizes more or less straight away. But conducting was something I always wanted to do, and I did try when I was young – I enrolled in a conducting class, but the misogyny was terrible and I remember hoping that society would eventually evolve towards more gender equality if I bided my time. So I waited.

Thankfully things have finally started moving in the right direction, but it’s easy to forget how recently that shift has happened: when I went to see symphonic concerts as a teenager, there were maybe a couple of women playing in the orchestra if you were lucky. Most countries have a better balance these days, but forty years ago it would have been a huge leap to have a woman on the podium when there were only a couple on the platform!

I recently had a lovely time conducting the New York Philharmonic, where I met the incredible double-bass player Orin O’Brien who was their first female member: there’s a wonderful documentary on Netflix about her called The Only Girl in the Orchestra. Orin started when Bernstein was Music Director, and she had to put up with guys saying she’d only got the job because she was beautiful…

Orin came along to my concert and we got talking afterwards – she’s 84 now, and she was saying it’s always a bit of a challenge when you’re the first one to break the mould, but women are here to stay now and we’re testimony to the fact that obstinacy does open things up.

Bruckner’s music has historically been characterised as distinctively ‘masculine’ by some musicologists - do you see any basis for that on the page, or have we moved beyond this kind of essentialist framing today?

I wasn’t actually aware of this until people started telling me that I was one of the first women to record Bruckner, so maybe that perception is still there. Of course the orchestration is huge, but that’s also true of Wagner…You do need to be physically and emotionally strong to conduct this music, but I have absolutely no time for the argument that women aren’t as strong as men – I’d like to see a man giving birth! 

What Bruckner really needs is a calm, authoritative presence on the podium: I’m lucky that this is how people relate to me, but it's not necessarily how people relate to women in general. The other day I was watching an interview with Christine Lagarde, one of the most powerful women of her generation – she’s seventy years old now and she was saying ‘I’m still always expected to smile!’. So any bias or preconceptions I face in my job aren’t specific to women conductors: they’re about how we perceive women in leadership roles more generally. I push back against it for sure, but I never take it personally because it’s the same the world over: the only place where I don’t really encounter this kind of thing is in Scandinavia where they're much more progressive.

You’re gearing up to conduct Rienzi at the Bayreuth Festival later this month - how are preparations going?

It’s a crazy challenge, but a super-exciting moment: we’re making history, because it will be the first time Rienzi has ever been performed in the Festspielhaus. It’s extremely tiring and extremely challenging - in fact everything about this piece is extreme! - but of course everything is challenging at Bayreuth, but even more a “new” piece where every potential difficulties will be new and has to be solved quickly for the Festspielhaus. 

And it’s such an important part of Wagner’s legacy, because without Rienzi there would be no Ring Cycle and no Parsifal. It’s fascinating to see Wagner working out ideas as a young composer, but there’s already so much of his particular genius on display. It’s a joy to see the enthusiasm of the cast, orchestra and chorus in discovering this piece at last, and I hope that the audience share that enthusiasm when it opens: fingers crossed that these performances will mean that the opera gets more outings, because there are some incredible moments in that score. The premiere will be live-streamed in German cinemas and broadcast on TV because it’s the opening of the festival, and it will also be filmed for Deutsche Grammophon, so I’m hopeful!

The Bayreuth Festspielhaus premiere of Rienzi is now available to stream on Stage+, and will be released on DVD and Blu-ray in the coming months.