OUT OF TIME: The vexed life of Georg Tintner
Tanya Buchdahl Tintner
University of Western Australia Press
REVIEW: Shirley de Kock Gueller
It was January 1966 when conductor Georg Tintner and his second wife, Cecelia, arrived in Cape Town.
Tintner, an Austrian-born Antipodean, had arrived to audition for a post with the Cape Town Municipal Orchestra.
His schedule was full – eight weeks of concerts, serious ones on Thursdays and lighter fare on Sundays, as was the pattern in those music-rich days.
His final concert with Spanish pianist Alicia de Larrocha over, the Tintners left for London, barely settling before hearing the Cape Town job was his.
Not all the musicians loved him but the reviews were good and that September, aged nearly 50, he was back here, about to embark on the first really secure job he had ever had. Sadly, a year later it was over; he felt stifled by apartheid.
It hadn’t been a trouble-free time. As a committed and uncompromising vegan in canvas shoes, opposed to apartheid, Tintner was an easy target. One story even had him eating the flowers at a reception.
His antipathy towards apartheid never abated.
Tintner came back to Cape Town just once more: he was brought out to open the Spier Festival in 1996, when he conducted the Cape Town Symphony Orchestra with soloists Andrea Catzel, Angela Gilbert, Jannie Moolman, George Stevens.
Biographies by those who are closest can be hagiographies and, while Tanya Buchdahl Tintner, 36 years his junior and his third wife for more than 20 years, loved and respected him, she makes it clear he was no saint. She has unlocked so many of his frailties that sometimes one winces for him – and her.
After his death in Halifax, Nova Scotia, in 1999 she embarked on her journey of detailed discovery of the time before hers with him. Tintner had cancer.
His young wife had “given him her youth” and he wanted to spare her a life as his nursemaid, so he took his own.
The result is a remarkable, well-written and frank book, part musical journey and part personal exploration, the good and the bad reviews and relationships and intimate details both sourced and cited.
His was a bittersweet life.
His major triumph came, for him, too late – his recordings of the Bruckner Symphonies, made when he was deep in his 70s, were acclaimed universally and have sold nearly 600 000 copies.
The disappointments were many – positions and engagements promised but not delivered and, most particularly, that he never composed music as he had wished to.
He had spats with men in high places and disagreements with powerful organisations.
But he’d sung in the Vienna Boys Choir and shaken hands with Richard Strauss.
Tintner moved in the world of Webern and Schoenberg, and in the glory of pre-war Vienna before he left for New Zealand.
On the personal front, he must have been a complicated husband. He was, after all, “a man with his own agenda” and everything took second place to music.
He broke all of his own covenants with his beautiful English girlfriend Sue – no marriage, no children and free love.
He married her, fathered four children, and for 27 years didn’t speak to the man Sue had had a brief fling with.
He also harboured guilt about her for the rest of her life.
His second wife was a frustrated cellist who bore three more children.
That marriage soon fell apart and, although he saw very little of any of his children, he supported them into their 20s.
Tintner’s musical integrity was unfailing. His most cherished books were his scores, all he needed for his rich inner life.
His widow has done his memory justice.