John Williams: Live in Vienna

Thank you so much!

Guten Tag — ladies and gentlemen — Meine Damen und Herren.

Ich spreche nicht Deutsch.

Sie erlauben mir, in English fortzufahren?

I will be very happy to tell you then how happy I am and honoured

to be here in your fabulous city

and in this what is called, deservingly, a temple of art,

and to stand before your very great orchestra,

whose invitation to me is certainly one of the greatest honours of my life.

Any musician...

Any musician accorded the privilege

of standing in front of this group of musicians is one greatly honoured.

And I treasure this moment.

Also joining us today is Anne-Sophie Mutter, who you all know.

You certainly know that Anne-Sophie Mutter is many things.

She's one of the world's greatest violinists,

she is a wonderful mother,

she brings honour to her country.

And in going to Australia and to Asia, South America, North America, Europe,

she's indeed a very great world citizen.

And it's again an honour also and a privilege

to welcome to the stage Anne-Sophie Mutter.

So thank you very much.

What is coming now is the end of “E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial” —.

Many of you will remember the film.

It was directed by Steven Spielberg.

He and I have been working together for, I think, 44 years, something like that.

And it has been like a very good marriage.

We haven't had any arguments.

We don't have to talk to each other every day.

So far it's working very, very well, I hope!

This end of “E.T.”, you'll hear the music,

it begins very quickly, in an agitated way,

when the little earth children are on their bicycles. They're trying to get E.T. back

to the spaceship so he can go back to his home.

And they are pursued by the police and they go quickly on their bicycles,

faster, faster, faster, achieving what we can imagine is “escape-gravity” velocity!

Maybe a physicist here will tell us,

35-miles-an-hour — something like that — Escape?

And they've escaped the gravity speed and fly over the moon —.

And we accept it perfectly! It seems very natural.

They land very gracefully on the ground, you remember, and set E.T. down.

And then there's some sentimental music coming at the end,

which accompanied the dialogue between E.T. and his little earthling friends

as E.T. departs.

And then at the end of the music,

there's a fanfare and flourishes from the orchestra that complete the film.

What I love about these kinds of concerts is that

you can hear the orchestra

and you can hear the contribution that all of our orchestras make to these films.

We go to the theatre and we don't notice the virtuosity

that's been put into the soundtrack.

And now we have one of the greatest orchestras in the world doing it for us.

You can imagine a composer's delicate vanity, being able and satisfied

by having the orchestra play it without the distraction of the film!

All the notes aren't covered up by spaceships,

or horses' hooves, or dialogue or whatever —.

The enemies of music! I shouldn't put it that way, but...

This is the end of, the orchestra's contribution to the end of the film “E.T.”.

Thank you ladies and gentlemen. A word or two about “Star Wars”,

all nine of them.

When we first began this project in 1977,

the writer, director, producer George Lucas, who you're probably familiar with,

gave us no indication at the time that there was to be a second film.

So, I watched the film,

and I saw Luke and Leia, and I thought they were two attractive young people.

And they were doing their comedy scenes and their action scenes.

So I made the assumption that at the end of the film and in their future,

they looked to me like they might become lovers

and be parents, and have a life together.

And two years later, the second film, George Lucas says to me,

“No, no, no, they're not lovers, they're brother and sister”!

So I was off by a little bit, but nevertheless we play the love theme.

This is one of the themes from the second film, “The Empire Strikes Back”,

that will be included in this little triptych that we'll do.

And then finally the “March” from the very first episode.

We've just completed the ninth one — I think it's in the theatres here now —.

So we've put a bow on it, which I think,

at least from my own personal point of view and contribution,

that will be a nice tidy number — nine.

So here are three little pieces from “Star Wars”. Thank you.

Thank you.

This little piece is from a film, “Cinderella Liberty”,

by Mark Rydell some years ago,

played by Marsha Mason, who's a fantastic actress.

And it was the story of a girl, a very simple, straight line in her life,

and she made a few wrong choices and another few wrong choices

and her life became unravelled. It was very sadly sweet and very beautiful also.

This is the theme from “Cinderella Liberty”.

This little piece is from “Tintin” and it's a sword fight.

I don't know how you say it in Deutsch? Sword fight.

In the cartoon they tease the feathers with the tip of their swords,

never cutting.

And you will hear these little feather twists in this little piece, “The Duel”.

I have been so pleased to visit with the Vienna Philharmonic.

|t's a dream for me — one of the great orchestras in the world

with a tradition that one feels immediately.

But also, with the privilege of coming, I had the concern about

whether the orchestra would be comfortable with this style of music,

and how they would interpret it;

the idiomatic aspects of it would be something that they would not be grasping.

And I couldn't have been more happily surprised.

It was brilliant for me, the way they did it.

They understood the phrasing in a way

that I thought was particularly of a certain idiom of film music,

which I know they don't play very often.

So I have to compliment the orchestra on their great virtuosity

and fantastic ability to cover all styles of music,

including one that I don't think they play very much.

Their virtuosity and ability to adjust is an amazing part of their art.

And for me, as a guest, a surprising one and a very happy surprise.

The reason why I started to play the violin is Beethoven.

So there we are in Vienna.

Actually it was the Beethoven Concerto which I performed at a very early stage

here in Vienna with the Vienna Philharmonic and Karajan.

Vienna used to be — it still is — Such a breeding ground

for European history

in terms of painters and writers, but also composers, obviously.

Alban Berg is another great hero,

which I fell in love with when I was a rather grown-up violinist.

But for me being here now in Vienna after having done most of the big repertoire

in this fabulous hall, which just turned 150,

being here with you and playing with probably the world's greatest orchestra...

It's a dream come true.

Somehow knowing that you in your studies

had also so many roots in European culture...

I think you shared the same composition teacher with Andre Previn?

- Yes. - Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco.

So, I mean, Europe travelled to your country

and set foot in California during the Second World War.

Because many of Europe's and Austria's great composers

had to flee the Nazi regime.

Then in California there was this seed of European music replanted.

And, as it happens, you also write for film.

André once, I thought, beautifully said that Korngold didn't sound like Hollywood,

but rather that Hollywood after a while, after Korngold had been there,

suddenly sounded like him.

The level of composition, which probably always was very high

but was very much influenced by these great composers like Ernst Toch

who was a great friend of Honegger.

So where do you see the relationship between

where you have spent most of your life, in America, in California,

and the great European tradition which has gone to America?

In a way we all know that music is of course a global language.

Anne-Sophie, probably I wouldn't be in Vienna now

had it not been for André Previn bringing us together.

- Because I met you through André. - That's true.

Here in Wien, I look around this incredible city

and I say to people that are here, that have lived their lives here

and look upon it every day, it could be routine.

I wish the Viennese people could borrow my eye for one minute

to look at the city on a beautiful day with my eyes

and never having seen it before.

|t's the most incredible monument to a history that we know.

But it is a physical evidence of this centuries-old history

that we couldn't replace in terms of art and craft and so on.

We just were in the National Library to see a few Beethoven scores.

Of course, coming from the United States, which is a very young country,

probably this building is older than our country.

But seeing the city is an affirmation of the history that we have studied.

And we can realize that three or four or five hundred years

of a certain common thinking and behavioural norms

that the society in Vienna, in Austria, shared for so long

presents a history of an organization socially that is so envious.

We cannot go back to an imperial system, and we don't want to do that.

But this is a physical manifestation, evidence of a certain kind of cooperation

- and unified thought... - which left great artistic treasures.

I think the impression that you can get here, you study it a little bit,

maybe will suggest to us the kind of solutions to our governance we need to find.

And in terms of music, my God...

I ask myself, why, Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Mahler, Schoenberg, Berg...

Everybody coming to this one place. It's like the heart of...

|t's a difficult question to answer, why it happened.

Because of the wealth of Vienna to invite composers to write for them, you see that.

And how does it feel for you to be here with all that history?

For me it's almost unreal. What I wanted to do, Anne-Sophie,

was only go to some street that Beethoven was on and breathe the air.

Maybe it will help me and give me some idea of how to write music.

Finally your line of symphonies is coming! - Yeah, maybe!

It is enormously profound for anyone interested in music.

And for you to conduct the Vienna Philharmonic,

here in this hall, which just turned 150 years?

How does that feel? How is the acoustical sensation for you?

I mean, obviously we all have heard them on recordings

and you have worked with them in the States.

But here in this hall,

how is that when everything comes together in their home?

It's something one feels.

Of course we have wonderful orchestras in the States, we all know that.

They're technically amazing.

But just the last day here in Vienna,

to spend a few hours with this orchestra, one senses,

they're brilliant players.

They have accommodated to this style of music,

which is not classical, which they wouldn't play every day.

However, the ambiance of the hall and one's sense of history

and whatever's in the instruments that the players were only children.

But now they're grown up with something that they share,

some kind of common cultural heritage they share, that's not even verbal.

And if you think that instruments pass hands over generations.