From <em>Gravegifts</em>
In our hours of drift and idleness we have taken to rereading some Ulven. In the prose book Gravegifts (Gravgaver, 1988) Tor Ulven commented on the 22 November, 1953 recording of Brahms’s “Tragic Overture,” in which Arturo Toscanini (1867-1957) conducted the NBC Symphony Orchestra in Carnegie Hall for 14 minutes and 7 seconds.
“In these old recordings it seems as if he [Toscanini] tries to play as fast as possible in order to incorporate as much music as feasible before death’s arrival: Brahms’ mild, pastoral serenade in A major rushes furiously by under the ageing orchestral tyrant’s baton as if it was a matter of putting an end to the slow, sunny hours of life as quickly as possible; as if in a fit of nervous rage he had commenced to tear up the entirety of the calendar’s summer leaves in order to arrive more quickly at a different summer, somewhere else. [...] I existed in these roughly 14 minutes while Arturo Toscanini, a former cellist, conducted a tragic overture that contained -- and still contains -- a wisdom to which I must at that time have been a complete stranger, since we would have to survive blindly and without question for years before we attain the level of reflection necessary for us to understand that life essentially is impossible, and by that time it is already too late to become unmade and to never have existed. Thus, we have never seen a newborn resign to destiny and reject the temptations of life (such as milk) with a tired wring of the hand, or to nostalgically long back to a distant past as non-existent.”
Translated by Torgeir Fjeld.
Posted 19 Nov, 2021. Modified 7 Mar, 2026.
