Weekly SpinOn:
The Sound of Silence

Music can never be completely silent (John Cage’s 4′33″ politely excluded), but it can approach silence. This playlist looks at moments where sound is reduced and dynamics are restrained. Like a city after fresh snowfall, familiar surroundings remain, but their character shifts as everything becomes muted. What emerges is a quiet in-between space, where even small sounds are clearly exposed.

 

Track 1: Mass in B minor – Agnus Dei – Johann Sebastian Bach
Christa Ludwig · Berliner Philharmoniker · Herbert von Karajan

Our first track from Bach’s Mass in B minor is not only calm, but the piece is quite literally the sound of silence. The core of the mass was composed during a documented period of enforced silence, when public music-making was forbidden. In early 1733, following the death of Elector Friedrich August I of Saxony, official court mourning was declared in Dresden. From mid-February until early July, no music was allowed to be performed. During this period, Bach composed the Kyrie and Gloria of a Missa, which later formed the foundation of the Mass in B minor. The work was written at a time when sound itself was suspended.

But the story would be too good to be true: the Agnus Dei was composed and added much later, as part of Bach’s gradual assembly of the complete Mass. Although it belongs to a later phase, it fits the topic of this playlist perfectly, because it is one of the most restrained movements of the work.

Scored for a single alto voice and orchestra, the movement unfolds slowly, with limited harmonic movement and little contrast. The text — “Agnus Dei, qui tollis peccata mundi, miserere nobis” (“Lamb of God, who takes away the sins of the world, have mercy on us”) — is repeated without variation, reinforcing its character as a plea rather than a statement. There is no sense of progress or resolution; the music circles around the same words and gestures. It is the plea of one person in solitude, addressed to God on behalf of all mankind.

This recording was made in 1974 at the Jesus-Christus-Kirche in Berlin for Deutsche Grammophon. Herbert von Karajan conducts the Berliner Philharmoniker in a traditional, large-scale Bach interpretation typical of the mid-20th century. In this movement, the vocal line is carried exclusively by Christa Ludwig, whose alto voice remains calm, steady, and closely aligned with the subdued orchestral sound. In the opening of our playlist The Sound of Silence, the theme is thus interpreted as a single, quiet voice standing out against a hushed background.

 

Track 2: Water Music Suite – II. Air – George Frideric Handel
Berlin Philharmonic · Herbert von Karajan

For this second track, the focus shifts from silence as lonely prayer to silence as quiet contentment. Instead of the inward tension of Bach’s Agnus Dei, Handel’s Air shows the calm of someone at peace with the world, an atmosphere that matches the snow-covered street on this week’s playlist cover.

Although the Water Music was originally written for a festive occasion at the court of George I, this second movement, an “Air,” has a distinctly different character. When heard on its own, it now feels more like an evening walk through a peaceful city, when snow softens every sound, and the world seems to move in slow motion. This has much to do with the typical features of a Baroque Air: a moderate tempo, a regular, almost walking pulse, and a simple, song-like melody that avoids sharp contrasts, giving the music a naturally restrained, peaceful profile.

Handel was never at the centre of Karajan’s repertoire, and when he conducted this music, it was more often in concert than in the studio. The Water Music survives in only two recordings under his direction, both made for EMI in the 1950s. The track chosen here comes from the later 1959 recording, featuring the Berlin Philharmonic instead of the Philharmonia Orchestra from the earlier recording, which brings a smooth, glowing orchestral sound to music originally conceived for the open air.

 

Track 3: Symphony No. 5 – IV. Adagietto – Gustav Mahler
Berliner Philharmoniker · Herbert von Karajan

For the third track, silence becomes a precondition for the music itself. Gustav Mahler demanded absolute quiet while composing and withdrew to small composing huts in the countryside, where every external sound was kept away so that he could hear only the inner sound of the work he was writing. In this atmosphere of retreat and concentration he created the Fifth Symphony in 1901–02, at a moment of intense personal change that fed directly into the work’s mixture of darkness and radiance. Karajan later spoke of the “great tragedy” and “great tragic sense” in Mahler, especially in the first movements of the Fifth, after which, in his words, “all you can do is let the music flow.”¹

​

The Adagietto stands at the heart of this symphony like a suspended, private confession. Scored only for strings and harp, it avoids the large brass and percussion sections, and its long, arching phrases often thin out to the edge of audibility, as if protecting the fragile stillness Mahler needed when he composed. Karajan shapes the movement as a broad, continuous line, close to a “song without words” in the spirit of the Rückert‑Lied “Ich bin der Welt abhanden gekommen,” so that the music feels less like an episode in a large symphony and more like a self-contained meditation on distance, love, and farewell.​

Mahler entered Karajan’s recording career relatively late. He had conducted Mahler as early as the mid‑1950s, beginning with performances of Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen during a 1955 tour of the United States, but he only turned to the symphonies in depth in the 1970s, explaining that he had previously “steered clear of Mahler” because he did not yet have the palette of orchestral colours he felt was necessary for this music. The recording used for this playlist is his only studio recording of the Fifth Symphony: Karajan and the Berlin Philharmonic taped it in the Jesus‑Christus‑Kirche in Berlin between 13 and 16 February 1973, with the first release later that year. In the Adagietto, the church acoustic, the late‑Karajan string sound, and his preference for long, sustained lines combine to create exactly the glowing, concentrated atmosphere he associated with Mahler’s tragic world.

​

Track 4: Adagio in G minor – “Albinoni’s Adagio” – Remo Giazotto 
Leon Spierer · David Bell · Berliner Philharmoniker · Herbert von Karajan

Although the title says so and the public still knows this piece as Albinoni’s Adagio, the real story begins two centuries after Albinoni’s death, in the hands of the Italian musicologist Remo Giazotto. In the late 1940s he finished a handwritten score for an Adagio in G minor “after Albinoni”; a visiting friend, conductor Ennio Gerelli, spotted the manuscript, quietly took it away to study, and in 1949 sprang it on the world as Adagio in sol minore di Tomaso Albinoni, without warning its author. Only later did Giazotto step forward, publishing the piece under his own name and claiming that it was based on a long‑lost fragment he had once seen in the Dresden library—a bass line and a few bars of melody that no one has ever been able to find again. Today most scholars assume the Adagio is essentially Giazotto’s own creation, wrapped in the perfect cover story: a Baroque masterpiece rescued from the ruins, whose supposed source has disappeared just enough to keep the legend alive.

Karajan’s recording turns this elegant hoax into something like a slow‑motion suspense film. Music depends on two basic parameters: sound and time. The ear and the brain connect one tone to the next, and only when this chain is tight enough does it form a clear line, a phrase, a piece. Here, Karajan stretches both elements to the brink. The Berlin Philharmonic plays at an almost impossibly slow tempo; dynamics stay near a whisper, the organ glows rather than speaks, and the string lines are drawn out until they feel weightless. There are moments when the harmony seems to hang in mid‑air, as if the next chord might never arrive, and the listener is forced to hold the thread internally so that the sequence does not collapse into isolated sounds. It is as if the music itself were about to evaporate: one fraction softer, one heartbeat slower, and the Adagio would slip back into the silence from which its dubious manuscript supposedly emerged. As the final track, this “Albinoni” closes the playlist like the last page of a thriller—the moment when you realise the beautiful Baroque lament you have been hearing is, in truth, a 20th‑century invention that survives by living permanently on the edge of disappearance.

—  Pia Bernauer (Karajan Institute, Salzburg)