AustLit

'When I spoke with Christoph von Dohnànyi about what he’d chosen to conduct in Sydney, there was no mention of symphonies and concertos. Rather, he spoke of men. As if arranging places at a dinner party, he told me he never ‘put Bruckner with Beethoven, he’s better with Mozart’ but that, this time, he’d decided to put him with Berg. Speaking as if he knew them, he explained that Berg and Bruckner shared a mentality, but took a different approach to life. Bruckner looked inward, his ideas centred in themselves, whereas Berg asked a lot of questions. Why did this have to happen? Why did this wonderful woman have to die so young? As Dohnànyi painted it, I imagined that if they met in heaven they would discuss romance long into the afterlife. For that was the reality: even though Dohnànyi spoke of them in present tense, he could not restore them to the present. All he had were their scores and the secrets bound up in them.'  (Introduction)