Anne-Sophie Mutter – Vivace
A film by Sigrid Faltin
Released 2023
Extras: Conversations with Roger Federer
SWR Classic SWR19133BD Blu-Ray [122]

Interviewer: What are you expecting from this film? What do you hope it may achieve?…

Anne-Sophie Mutter: That’s a bold question… I must admit that I’ve not given it any thought. It’s… an attempt to bring classical music out of the shadows and place it at the heart of society, where it belongs: in our everyday lives.

I’m pleased that that particular point was clarified right at the beginning of this documentary, because otherwise I might have wondered what the purpose of Anne-Sophie Mutter – Vivace actually was. Even so, the first comparison that came to mind once I’d seen the whole thing was with the Lives of the saints – those uncritically hagiographical biographies produced all over medieval Christendom by busily scribbling teams of monks. In spite of their widely differing origins in place and time, each Life tends to follow one of just a few pretty uniform patterns. Some describe their central character demonstrating remarkable and distinctive signs of holiness virtually from birth. In pagan times, such precocious children often don’t last too long. A more frequent storyline introduces, for dramatic effect, an unexpected volte-face whereby a would-be saint enjoys a relatively pleasant and even self-indulgent existence until forced to re-examine their life and change direction by a traumatic event or some sort of divine revelation. Thereafter, they often venture forth into the wider world to spread the word, acquiring, in the process, a group of admirers or disciples. The morally-improving climax to such a story frequently sees the central character overcoming a final test (often involving some inventively gruesome form of physical torture) while resolutely maintaining his or her sang-froid and general benevolence, before passing away in an appropriate odour of blessed sanctity.

While Sigrid Faltin’s documentary may have been produced on modern film rather than medieval vellum, the trajectory of Ms Mutter’s life emerges as strangely reminiscent of that of one of those medieval saints. Distinctive signs of youthful individuality may easily be found, for instance, in various interviews recorded as she was passing from childhood into her teenage years. Even by the age of 10 she appeared a precociously self-assured Wunderkind, charming the camera with knowing smiles while claiming never to have felt nervous before any public performance. Home-schooling and social isolation (we are told that she had no childhood friends of her own age) may explain why she came across in these interviews as completely lacking in any sense of humility or self-awareness. While the camera mercilessly picked up a degree of arrogance that verges on priggishness, she gave the impression of being completely oblivious to the unfortunate impression that she was making:

Interviewer: Would you also play first violin in an orchestra? Or only as a soloist?

ASM: Only as a soloist…

Interviewer: And if this didn’t work out, what would you do then?

ASM [giggles]: Obviously it will work out. If it didn’t work out, I don’t know… But why shouldn’t it work out?…

Interviewer: Do you just play [music] together [with your family] or do you also perform with other young people?

ASM: No –

Her brother: There are no good players –

ASM: – in the neighbourhood.

An occasional hint of the child-that-might-have-been did, it’s true, occasionally manifest itself, such as when she informed an interviewer that she’d be as happy with a radio-controlled model car as with her violin. Nevertheless, in her early media appearances she generally presented an image of a preternaturally serious and focused adult who’d been trapped in the body of a young child.

The earliest pivotal point of her life came at the age of 13 when she impressed no less a figure than Herbert von Karajan (“It’s impossible to speak of talent,” he said of her later, “it’s simply genius at work on the violin”). He quickly became her mentor, promoter and even, it seems, an adviser on her couture. Thereafter, Ms Mutter rapidly developed a successful international career, in the course of which she married a much older man – age, she believes, makes people far more interesting and hence attractive – and produced a couple of children who she clearly adored. Her life up to that point appeared to have been an unbroken sequence of successes and triumphs, utterly unclouded by trouble or difficulty.

Then, at the age of just 32 and with the classical music world at her feet, Anne-Sophie Mutter endured the most testing time of her life. While it may not have been a moment of divine revelation of the sort appropriate to a medieval saint, it was, she explains, sufficiently traumatic to have transformed her into an entirely different person. The death of her husband, Detlef Wunderlich, a man with whom she was clearly very much (“madly”) in love, after only six years of marriage forced Ms Mutter to reassess of her life so profoundly that she now concludes that “I think I became human only when I was a widow”. Her loss seems, indeed, to have acted as a catalyst that encouraged her out of the comfort zone that she had previously inhabited. Thereafter, she increasingly engaged more directly with the wider world whether as a musician, the manager of her own career, the mother of her children or latterly, as we shall see, something of a social activist.

Just like one of our medieval saints, during the course of her career Ms Mutter gained a legion of admirers. The film allows us to see her interacting with a few of them at some length. An accompanying booklet essay informs us that she personally selected all of them as “people who are either familiar with her or whom she would enjoy talking to”, so we may, I think, deduce that Ms Mutter may have exercised a fair degree of control over the making of this film, a suggestion further supported by a throwaway line elsewhere to the effect that she’d insisted on viewing (and approving?) the finished documentary before its release.

The first category of guest interlocutors comprises, as one might reasonably have expected, figures with whom she has collaborated professionally. John Williams and Jörg Widmann are both composers with whom she has worked closely, while conductor Daniel Barenboim and Lambert Orkis, the pianist who has performed with her for 35 years, also have appropriately musical matters to discuss.

Ms Mutter’s other two choices for conversational partners are, however, more unexpected. She is, it seems, a huge tennis fan who, at one point, scheduled her concerts so as to allow her to attend nearby tournaments. We discover that in a particularly exciting match at Wimbledon in 2009 she was the hitherto-unidentified crowd member who gave an excited scream that was captured for posterity by BBC TV – a moment that’s been pulled from the archives and is shown again here. She even jokes that she only agreed to make this documentary at all because of the opportunity it offered to meet one of her sporting heroes for the first time. That turns out to be the world champion player Roger Federer and he receives top billing among the contributors even though it appears that he isn’t actually much of a classical music fan at all: after attending (his first?) concert he expresses astonishment that there was no applause between pieces’ individual movements and to having been taken aback by a fellow concertgoer’s outrage when he whipped out his camera during the performance. Still, having chummily agreed that he and Anne-Sophie will address each other with the friendly “du” rather than the more formal “Sie”, he ends up signing his name on her violin case, which thrills her no end.

Finally, we see the violinist in conversation with New York magician Steve Cohen. Just as Ms Mutter – and her tennis-fan son who had sat in on the Federer conversation – had attempted to argue that musical and sporting performances had significant characteristics in common, here she puts forward a rather more tenuous suggestion that conjuring is an art that has an affinity with music. As she makes clear, she’s a great fan of Mr Cohen’s slickly impressive prestidigitation and sleight of hand. Somewhat disappointingly (or maybe not), he, on the other hand, can be heard expressing no opinion whatsoever on her digital dexterity.

Given that Ms Mutter is, thankfully, very much still with us and performing a large number of concerts all over the world every year (a recent stint, we learn, took in 30 concerts in 30 different places over just 32 days), we don’t need to take our literary analogy forward to the point where she suffers the modern equivalent of a final session with red-hot pincers in the emperor’s dungeons. No, in 2023 she is still, happily, at the spreading-the-word-and-evangelising stage – though in this case it’s not the gospel that she’s promoting but a very modern mix of political and social activism. In one of the disc’s extra features she observes that “Anyone in the public eye has a responsibility… of sometimes making yourself heard. Then you need to give serious thought to where you stand… It’s incredibly important to use your voice”. Ms Mutter is, we discover, a passionate advocate of a variety of progressive causes. Though she never uses the word herself, she emerges as a very positive exemplar of the term woke as used in its correct sense of having being awakened to the world’s issues and to the need to address them. She wishes that she had given up eating meat years ago, buys only organic produce while decrying its plastic packaging, worries about the global footprint of her concertizing while planting trees to compensate for it, considers that Greta Thunberg is very much a good egg and is a fervent advocate for regular physical exercise to improve one’s health and wellbeing. For the past 25 years she has promoted her own Foundation that helps young string players establish their careers, while also engaging in an increasing amount of charitable work. The regular benefits that make up, she reckons, as many as one in ten of her concerts these days, raise substantial sums of money. Some of that is directed to big causes, including child victims of the Yemeni civil war, refugees around the world and professional musicians denied work by Covid. Some of the rest funds smaller projects such as the restoration of the roof of Ms Mutter’s local church.

These days, then, Ms Mutter conforms very much to the template of what we expect a modern musician to be. She is completely at home in front of the camera and comes across as charismatic, self-composed, engaged and articulate – a filmmaker’s gift, in fact. Though certainly always in command, she is friendly, rather than aloof and egocentric. She is also very much part, as she says, of the wider community.She’d no doubt be an entertaining dinner-party guest – though she’d almost certainly turn down my own invitation as I invariably serve meat. It’s the unfortunate case, however, that behaving like most other musicians – and decent people in general – do serves to make her somewhat less interesting as the subject of a documentary. Thus, as it turns out, the glimpses that we had of the younger Anne-Sophie in those old 1970s interviews prove, in many ways, rather more eye-opening. Just as modern medievalists mine the Lives of the saints for throwaway information that their monkish authors considered insignificant at the time, so that old material unearthed from the archives for this documentary proves an unexpected treasure trove. One positive result is that we get to see some brief filmed moments of a supremely talented child prodigy performer. A few potentially troubling issues also arise, however. The viewer is forced to confront the issue of how an individual’s upbringing impacts upon the formation of their character – and while the adult Ms Mutter may profess to believe that the hothouse form of childrearing that she experienced was acceptable, I wonder how many others today will agree. The archive material also offers a fascinating snapshot of the aloof, even condescending demeanour which elite musicians – even juvenile ones – may have thought it acceptable to adopt 50 years ago, but which, in today’s more egalitarian society, would surely see them mocked by their peers and hung out to dry by the media.

Ms Mutter is, it goes without saying, one of the world’s greatest violinists so it does seem somewhat bizarre that we are offered only paltry snippets of her performances. I imagine, however, that the intended audience for this film is a general one and that it was feared that viewers might have been alienated by any sequence of violin playing lasting longer than the time accorded to Mr Cohen the magician. Fortunately, a quick bit of internet research reveals that quite a few of Ms Mutter’s performances have been preserved on DVD, allowing plenty of opportunity for interested viewers to go on to explore her oeuvre more thoroughly. They include discs of Mozart’s violin concertos, sonatas and piano trios, two performances of the Beethoven concerto – one conducted by Karajan and the other filmed at the memorial concert after his death, the same composer’s complete violinsonatas, the Brahms violin sonatas and a couple of showpieces in a New Year’s Eve concert from Berlin. There’s also a mixed programme in which, according to promotional material that seems to be aimed squarely at a “yoof” market, she, Lambert Orkis and “Mutter’s Virtuosi” may be seen “at one of Berlin’s hottest new venues… in this first-ever live recording from DG’s ground-breaking ‘classical-goes-clubbing’ series” (hmmm, I wonder whatever happened to that particular series, then?)

This is an attractive, well-shot film that’s very easy on the eye. Indeed, its lengthy sequences of Ms Mutter hiking up and down her local mountainsides would make a fine calling card for her regional tourist board. If you are not a German-speaker, you will need to switch on the subtitles before you start watching as there is dialogue from the very opening.

At more than half an hour in total, the disc’s three “bonus” features are quite substantial, although they are not specially-shot episodes but simply material from Roger Federer’s conversation with Mrs Mutter and her son that wasn’t included in the main documentary. The first, entitled “The violin as a house pet”, sees them discussing and comparing the characteristics of violins and tennis rackets – not a line of thought that’s of much general interest, I’d have thought, although I’d concede that both objects are made of wood and have strings. The second, “Adrenalin and age” covers winding down after the stress of a performance or match. Roger, we discover, likes a warm shower whereas Anne-Sophie prefers a massage. Their discussion further encompasses the physical aches and pains that inevitably come to performers as they age, as well as the occasional difficulties of being a public figure. When it comes to their audiences or spectators, both agree that they’d be happy for fans to be more demonstrative, though they draw the line at annoyingly distracting flash photographers. In the third feature, “What remains?”, they discuss life after retirement and the need to both keep themselves as fit as possible and to find some sort of post-career purpose. They conclude that involvement in charitable work is probably the most rewarding activity for someone in their situation and it turns out that the admirable Mr Federer was an even earlier starter than Ms Mutter in that respect, for he set up his own Foundation at the age of just 22.

Observant readers with good memories may recall that at the beginning of this review I reproduced an exchange between an interviewer – presumably Sigrid Faltin herself – and Ms Mutter. When asked what she saw as the purpose of taking part in the film, the violinist gave a perfectly reasonable answer. However, what I omitted to tell you was that she had also been asked another question at that point: What are you afraid of? It was something to which she never actually responded and, having now watched the whole film, I’m not certain that she ever has. Anne-Sophie Mutter, as far as I can see, is someone who’s rarely, if ever, experienced the sensation of fear. That in itself may well be an important contributory factor to her professional success. It may also be an important clue in helping to understand the manner in which she has lived her whole remarkable life.

Rob Maynard

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Contributors
Roger Federer
John Williams
Daniel Barenboim
Jörg Widmann
Lambert Orkis
Steve Cohen
Richard Wunderlich

Production staff
Writer and director: Sigrid Faltin
Camera: Jürgen Carle
Sound: Michael Kirn

Video details
BD-50 Blu-ray disc
Picture format: HD 16:9
Sound format: PCM stereo and DTS Master Audio 5.1
Region code: A, B, C
Language: English, German; Subtitles: English, German, Japanese, Korean