Sounds & Fury

Board Of The Ring

There's little call and no demand for a new online discussion board devoted to the music-dramas of Richard Wagner, much less one devoted to a single work, Der Ring des Nibelungen. That notwithstanding, with the impending opening of an eagerly (some would say anxiously) awaited major new production of the cycle by Robert Lepage for the Metropolitan Opera the premiere of the first installment of which, Das Rheingold, will be presented on 27 September, and the premiere of the second installment, Die Walküre, scheduled to be presented seven months later on 22 April of next year, it occurred to us that Ring aficionados might find useful a central location to discuss the work and this new Met/Lepage production. Toward that end we've just set up a new online discussion board, Board Of The Ring, for that very purpose. It can be accessed at the following URL:

http://boardofthering.freeforums.org/

We invite all interested parties to visit Board Of The Ring, register (registration is free, fast, and painless), and contribute their thoughts (or questions) on both Der Ring des Nibelungen and the new Met/Lepage production.

We look forward to seeing you there.

Beats Us

We've been following for the past month-and-a-half or so the bizarre case of the purported "lost" Ansel Adams negatives discovered by one, Rick Norsigian, who claims he bought the sixty-five glass plate negatives at a garage sale in Fresno ten years ago from an unsuspecting seller for $45, and which negatives he and his handpicked experts estimate are worth some $200M. Since Norsigian's public announcement of the discovery, the provenance of the negatives has been called into question by other experts, most of whom, unlike Norsigian's handpicked experts, have no ax to grind, and the controversy continues up to the present day.

The question we have is, Of what artwork value are the negatives even were their authenticity not in dispute? Answer: Pretty much zero except to highly skilled photography experts who might derive a satisfying or even thrilling aesthetic experience merely contemplating their technical and compositional excellence if the negatives are indeed the work of Adams himself.

But the core of Adams's aesthetic genius resided not in his creation of the negative, but in his creation of the print from that negative. While it's true that a fundamental element of Adams's working procedure involved what he called the "previsualization" of the finished print while examining the scene to be shot on the ground glass of his camera, and the subsequent necessary adjustments of exposure time and the development of the negative in the darkroom, Adams considered the negative to be no more than a detailed blueprint for the finished work, that finished work being the print. Or as Adams, a gifted pianist, put it metaphorically, the negative is but the [mute] score; the print, the [audible] performance.

Well, Adams is dead and no longer available to "perform" his negatives. Others may do "performances" of those negatives, but those performances can never be an Adams performance, and are therefore worth, aesthetically and monetarily, but a pittance of an original Adams as works of art. So whence the gigantic money valuation of Norsigian's find even if the negatives prove authentic as no museum or gallery, not even the most avid wealthy private collector, would pay anywhere near $200M merely to own the negatives?

Beats us.

Disheartening, Not To Say Perverse

[Note: This entry has been updated (1) as of 1:29 PM Eastern on 31 Aug. See below.]

After reading numerous verbal descriptions and viewing numerous production photos of the new Eurotrash production of Lohengrin at this year's Bayreuther Festspiele — the sometimes-called "Rat Lohengrin" due its costuming of the chorus in rat costumes complete with full rat-head and rat-face masks — we felt it time to say goodbye to the 134-year-old Festspiele. As we then wrote:

[I]t's been a long and checkered career for the Bayreuther Festspiele, both artistically and otherwise, since its establishment in 1876 and today the oldest music festival extant, and perhaps it's now time to remember fondly its past days of artistic excellence and glory, and bid a final farewell. After all, nothing lasts forever.

Among our reasons for bidding the Festspiele farewell was our conviction that,

[T]he new co-directors of the Festspiele — Wolfgang Wagner's two daughters, Katharina Wagner and her half-sister Eva Wagner-Pasquier — are not only little inclined to satisfy the demands of that...requirement [viz., the disavowing of Eurotrash Regietheater stagings], but seem intransigently committed to flying in the face of that requirement, as was their father before them, in the false and perverse belief that it is just such stagings that will guarantee the future outside-Germany relevance and importance of the Festspiele.

As if to confirm that conviction, we today read the following reports from two European news sources concerning the late Christoph Schlingensief, perpetrator of perhaps the most Eurotrashy piece of Eurotrash to ever sully the stage of the Festspielhaus:

The Richard Wagner opera festival [sic] was winding up on Saturday for this year with a performance of Die Meistersinger von Nuremberg [sic] with the festival dedicating the final performance to theatre director Christoph Schlingensief. [...] "Schlingensief has set a lot in motion," opera festival spokesman Peter Emmerich told the German Press Agency dpa. As a result, all the festival employees and performers wanted to pay tribute to him on Saturday. [The Earth Times]

And,

[Schlingensief] fought and won the right to put a dead hare on stage at the Bayreuth Festival in Bayreuth, the Richard Wagner opera extravaganza, when he staged Parsifal there in 2004. Although viewed with a mix of praise and disdain, his production was credited with giving the staid festival a much needed lift.

Paying tribute to him this week Katharina Wagner, the festival’s co-director, said, "His Parsifal was a turning point for Bayreuth, from both the interpretational aspect and the way of working. After Schlingensief had been here, everything became more open, more flexible." [The Arts Desk)]

Truly disheartening, not to say perverse.

---

Update (1:29 PM Eastern on 31 Aug): There occurred on a venerable opera forum the following exchange between another member and us in response to our above entry. We quote it here verbatim and without further comment. The other member's two comments have here been italicized, and our response to each posted immediately below each comment.

This seems to me a (not to say perverse) misreading of what amounts to an in memoriam. Nobody involved here is praising the "product" of Schlingensief's "Parsifal" production unreservedly.

The Bayreuther Festspiele gesture as articulated by Emmerich and Katharina was indeed intended as an _in memoriam_ for Schlingensief. And that's *precisely* what made it so perverse as it chose to memorialize a stage director who declared proudly two years after the fact (and therefore no advance avant-garde hype) that it had been his intent with his Bayreuther Festspiele production of _Parsifal_ to "reconcil[e] Nietzsche with Wagner by negating Wagner's silly Buddhist dream."

If it wasn't perverse of the Bayreuther Festspiele to memorialize such a creature, then perverse is a word bereft of any meaning whatsoever.

However, part of the mission of Bayreuth is experimentation in how to present Wagner theatrically, and an essential element of the idea of experimentation is [the] concept that one can learn more from a bold failed attempt than one can from a more conservative success.

Yes, part of the Bayreuther Festspiele mission is "experimentation in how to present Wagner theatrically," and it's a laudable enterprise. But when the Festspiele chooses to hire Eurotrash vandals and thieves such as Schlingensief and Neuenfels who have NO intention of "present[ing] Wagner theatrically," but whose sole intention is to present their own respective "vision" theatrically by hijacking what Wagner wrote and twisting it to their own purposes, it in no way fulfills the goal of that laudable Festspiele enterprise, but is instead a gross perversion of it, and precisely that which makes (made) their stagings the unmitigated Eurotrash they indisputably are.

Ideal Law & Order Cast List: A Silly Season Post

We probably shouldn't confess this publicly, and it's somewhat off-message, but it's the End Of Dog Days and the Silly Season, and so we'll confess that we've been a huge fan of the TV series Law & Order (the "mother ship" series, not its spinoffs) since its debut. As all the world knows, the series was cancelled by NBC this year after twenty continuous years on the air, the longest running crime drama in TV history and, along with Gunsmoke, TV's longest running drama series ever. Just between us chickens, near the end of its run the series had gotten somewhat rote and stale and it was time to go. Actually, for us, it was really time to go by the close of Season 15 although the series had its occasional moments over the next two years or so (the final three years were an unmitigated disaster).

The cancellation of the series had little effect on viewers such as ourself as L&O lives in syndication on cable TV (TNT), and not a day goes by that one cannot see at least a couple episodes of the series, and so we can easily get our L&O fix daily if we wish. That we've seen most of the 456 episodes over the past twenty years makes little difference as, for us, L&O is quite a bit like comfort food and we never tire of it, especially the second half of each hour-long episode which, in the L&O formula, is the Order or lawyer and courtroom part of L&O, the first half of the hour being the Law or cops-'n-robbers part (yes, we know, the labels should be the other way round, but that's how the series defines them in its opening credits).

As with all TV series, the running main characters are of utmost importance, and over its twenty years L&O has been notable (some would say notorious) for changing one main character or another almost every season of the series's existence, there being only two times in the series's twenty seasons when the entire cast of main characters remained the same for two consecutive seasons. Constant viewers quite naturally have their best and worst candidates for each of these main characters of which there are only six: Police Commanding Officer, Senior Detective, Junior Detective, District Attorney, Executive Assistant District Attorney, and Assistant District Attorney. We of course have ours, and have over the years compiled our ideal cast list for those six main characters — not as easy a job as it might seem at first.

Tossing the worst of the lot was, of course, no problem at all. Instantly out of the running were (and we here use character names, not the names of the actors who portrayed them):

Detectives: Nina Cassady, Nick Falco, Cyrus Lupo, Kevin Bernard
DA: Nora Lewin
Exec ADA: Michael Cutter
ADA: Paul Robinette, Serena Southerlyn, Alexandra Borgia, Connie Rubirosa

Choosing the best of the lot, however, proved difficult because there was no hands-down best in any of the six main character slots although DA Adam Schiff (played by veteran actor Steven Hill) who was DA for the first ten of the series's twenty years came pretty damn close as he was the quintessential Manhattan DA, modeled, or so it's said, on longtime and legendary Manhattan DA, Robert Morgenthau. We also had a problem choosing between EADAs Ben Stone (played by Michael Moriarty) and Jack McCoy (played by Sam Waterston) as Ben Stone reminded us more of a Main Line Philadelphia prosecutor than a Manhattan one.

That being said, herewith our Ideal L&O Main Character Cast List (character name followed by the name of the actor in parentheses):

Police Commanding Officer: Capt. Donald Cragen ((Dann Florek)
Senior Detective: Sgt. Max Greevey (George Dzundza)
Junior Detective: Mike Logan (Chris Noth)
District Attorney: Adam Schiff (Steven Hill)
Executive Assistant District Attorney: Ben Stone (Michael Moriarty)
Assistant District Attorney: Abbie Carmichael (Angie Harmon)

Yes, we know. Except for Abbie Carmichael, that's the original L&O cast. We didn't intend it that way. That's simply what the list ended up being. So sue us.

We of course also have our favorites among certain recurring characters such as judges and defense attorneys, but that's a list for another posting, perhaps at the End Of Dog Days Silly Season 2011.

So, there you have our Ideal L&O Main Character Cast List. What might yours be? We open comments for a week for any who would care to share.

Say What? Crocodile Dundee Hounded For Unpaid Australian Taxes?!

The Australian Taxation Office is after Crocodile Dundee for millions in unpaid taxes, and has forbidden him to leave the country until the debt is settled in full.

Say what? Dundee is singlehandedly responsible for bringing tens-of-millions, perhaps even hundreds-of-millions, into the coffers of the Australian national treasury, and for, no matter how implausible, making Australia and Australians look attractive to the rest of the world via his three Crocodile Dundee films and his many commercials on behalf of Australia and Australian-produced products. The bloody Australian government ought to be nothing but grateful to the man and declare him a national hero. Instead, they persecute (and might even prosecute) him.

Harrumph! Gross Impertinence! as Nigel Bruce's Dr. Watson would say.

Sure Bet

Here is the lede sentence of a Guardian article on Katharina Wagner and the Bayreuth Festival that appeared in the Music section of the paper: "Wotan, father of the gods, has just kissed his daughter, Brünnhilde, to sleep and left her to burn alive." We posted a comment that read: "That's one helluva lede sentence for a Wagner-related piece. Which ignoramus is responsible for that grotesque absurdity? The author [one, Kate Connolly] or her editor — or both?"

Five will get you five-hundred that richly deserved snarky comment — the very first to be submitted on that piece — never sees the light of day.

Terry Teachout Gets It Right — Mostly

Although hardly a critic to look to when the subject is classical music except it be a biographical matter, The Wall Street Journal's drama critic, Terry Teachout, got it right on the Rosenberg-Cleveland Plain Dealer affair — mostly. His suggestion that the awkward business should have been resolved not by The Plain Dealer effectively firing Mr. Rosenberg from his long-held position as the paper's classical music critic and sidelining him to the Siberia of its general arts and entertainment beat to cover everything except the city's premier arts organization, the world-famous Cleveland Orchestra, and replacing him in that position with a younger and not nearly as experienced and qualified staff member, they instead should have...

...ordered the two men to split the assignment of covering the [Cleveland Orchestra's] concerts right down the middle. Criticism is not an exact science, and the paper would have done its readers a service by regularly publishing contrasting points of view on the city's No. 1 cultural venture.

What Mr. Teachout got wrong — astonishingly and perversely wrong considering his profession — is this:

When the critic of a one-paper town decides that (in Mr. Rosenberg's words) "mediocrity takes up residence . . . when Mr. Welser-Möst is on the podium," and when his reviews of the orchestra's concerts consist in large part of variations on that grim theme, the editors of his paper have to ask themselves a tough question: At what point does so oft- repeated an opinion become predictable and redundant?

Excuse us? Is Mr. Teachout here suggesting that Mr. Rosenberg should have varied his opinion of Mr. Welser-Möst's on-podium performance as the orchestra's music director simply to keep that opinion from becoming "predictable and redundant"? The very idea is patently absurd. The question that should have been asked by the paper's editors is not what should be done about Mr. Rosenberg, but what should be done about Mr. Welser-Möst, for unless the editors had hard-evidence cause to suspect that Mr. Rosenberg harbored some sort of personal animus toward Mr. Welser-Möst that was contaminating his critical assessment, the editors should have adopted the position that their expert's opinion on the matter should be taken with the utmost seriousness as rendering such expert opinion is precisely what expert critics like Mr. Rosenberg are hired for and paid to do. Instead, The Plain Dealer and its editor, Susan Goldberg, did what they did, and came out looking like perfect asses — or worse, craven capitulators to the will of vested business and political interests.

Christoph Schlingensief Ist Tot

Christoph Schlingensief, notorious among Wagnerians for his grotesque 2004 Bayreuther Festspiele Eurotrash Parsifal, is dead of lung cancer at age 49 according to a report by The Earth Times. We'll refrain from making further comment in conformity with the principle of de mortuis nil nisi bonum.

A Response To Philip Kennicott

Were a patient presenting with symptoms of amnesia to submit his case to a neurologist, the diagnosis would almost surely be one that involves some degree of organic brain damage, temporary or permanent, but one for which no corrective surgical or chemical treatment is yet available. Were that same patient to submit his case to a psychoanalyst, the diagnosis would almost surely involve the psychodynamic phenomenon of repression that may or may not be susceptible to correction by an intense and rigorous psychoanalysis.

That sort of specialist diagnostic bias was the very first thing that leapt to mind on reading the article written by Washington Post culture critic Philip Kennicott published in the September 2010 issue of Opera News titled, "Ring Ideal". Were that article written by anyone other than someone with Mr. Kennicott's professional credentials, we would have simply shrugged our shoulders and shaken our head at the purblind specialist bias displayed in almost every paragraph of the piece, and taken no further note of the matter. We Wagnerians are pretty much inured to biases on the part of non-Wagnerians. But given Mr. Kennicott's credentials, and given as well the opera-world prominence of the publication in which the article appeared, that's not possible in this case, and so the following response.

Mr. Kennicott's thesis that,

Like the Pyramids, or the Great Wall of China, the Ring cycle exists as if by miracle. But unlike those wonders of the world, the forces that sustain it are entirely ephemeral, subject to the vicissitudes of fashion and the economy. Wagner's Ring could disappear in a matter of years, or decades, if the zeitgeist turned sour,

depends on several premises, most of them dubious at best, and most due Mr. Kennicott's manifest purblind specialist-biased view of the work to hand (be it remembered, please, that Mr. Kennicott is a culture critic, not a critic of classical music and opera even though both come within the purview of his umbrella specialty).

For instance, there are these following notions put forward by Mr. Kennicott who, astonishingly, like any hack writer with a pop understanding of both Wagner and the Ring, considers the Ring "an over-scaled work [that] might have [been] nibbled...down to size a century ago, if Wagner and his minions hadn't so thoroughly intimidated the conductors, impresarios and fans who carried its torch into the future."

According to Mr. Kennicott,

• "There doesn't seem to be a single trend in the cultural ether that bodes well for the long-term endurance of this fifteen-hour work. Today, even respectable novelists strive to comply with the book-club-friendly 300-page limit, and films are toxic at the box office if their directors can't tell a story in less than 100 minutes. Allegory is also out of fashion, perhaps even archaic. Clarity, accessibility and irony define most new aesthetics of storytelling."

• "The nexus of nineteenth-century intellectual passions that give the Ring its overarching coherence have mostly dwindled into dust. Revolution has lost its luster in an age when unified economies bring the world into ever closer though never perfect communion."

• "Wagner's Ring, more than 130 years after its premiere, still benefits from the dutiful largesse that well-trained audiences used to feel in the presence of the avant-garde."

• "[I]s [the Ring] really analogous in its riches to the birth of modern consciousness in Shakespeare or the comprehensive psychological atlas of Proust? [...] Two forces in particular...have kept the Ring alive. There is the reactionary fidelity to Wagner...[and]...the almost equally longstanding willingness of artists to break with that fidelity and reinterpret the work, as if the Ring were always about something else...."

The above notions (and there's one more to follow that arises from the same purblind specialist bias — and it's a doozy — which we'll address momentarily), are all notions that could be held only be someone who 1) hasn't paid proper attention to the Ring, or 2) imagines that the drama of the Ring is made manifest in and transmitted via its text (libretto), or 3) has no comprehension or grasp of what lies below the immediately accessible visible and audible surface of the work, or 4) any combination of the foregoing.

To keep this entry within our self-imposed blog entry word-length limit (a limit it will nevertheless exceed by a bit in any case), we won't here rebut further the above notions point-by-point, but move on to that doozy of a notion we above referred to, for, as if the above notions were not wrongheaded enough, we then have from Mr. Kennicott the monumentally purblind grand notion that,

[T]here is an Achilles heel to the Ring, a weakness that could suddenly deflate the singular and inspiring power it has retained despite all its absurdities, its extraordinary longueurs and its punishing demands on those who stage it, sing it and watch it.

Keep your eye on Siegfried. If the status of Siegfried begins to change for the worse, the whole Ring could come crashing down with him. He is the cycle's most problematic figure, its most volatile element. For decades (especially since World War II), he's been both its hero and its antihero, attractive and odious at the same time, and somehow perpetually in motion between these extremes. As long as we can suspend judgment about the character of Siegfried, the Ring can go on. But if, in the future, audiences reject him, Götterdämmerung [sic] for the Ring could come at the end of Die Walküre.

It's not just that he's the central figure of well more than half of the Ring cycle, or that everything, musically and dramatically, leads to his birth and death. And it's not only that he embodies the worst political and personal traits that bedevil Wagner's reputation as a man — the anti-Semitism evident in Siegfried's treatment of Mime, or the blithe and hollow murder of Fafner in dragon form. Siegfried, the young man who forges, seeks, seduces and betrays, is also Wagner's dramatization of the artist. In Siegfried (and his forebear Tannhäuser), Wagner articulated a vision of artistic license. In Siegfried, the notion that the genius can be forgiven anything is enacted — and it is precisely that code of free conduct that has protected Wagner, and his works, from hostility that would have sunk any ordinary opera. For as long as audiences play the Siegfried game — suspending judgment, loving and hating him, but never banishing him — Wagner's Ring will continue to thrive despite the great tide of forces that oppose it.

[...]

[Siegfried] was supposed to be the great instantiation of freedom, absolute freedom, anarchic and beautiful and capable of bringing down the old corrupt orders. But we live in an age deeply uneasy about the side effects of that freedom, whether manifested in political instability, social disruption or environmental degradation. We must, by necessity, become ever more dependent on each other, ever more circumscribed in our old liberty to consume at will, move about at will, despoil and destroy at will. Can Siegfried be relevant in the age of teamwork, recycling and volunteerism? Does dragon-slaying have any poetic resonance in an era of oil spills that can destroy in a few weeks an entire ecosystem?

The problem child is now the elephant in the room, and it will be hard for Wagner-lovers to continue the old apologia. Siegfried must be reinvented if the Ring is to continue in its old form. Otherwise, he will begin to seem ever more repellent, ever more irrelevant. And the Ring will no longer be sacrosanct and exceptional. It will be merely a product of its time, its characters both familiar and foreign, like the cardboard kings of opera seria and the unhinged hysterics of bel canto. [...] That doesn't mean the Ring will disappear. But it will become what it has always been, despite the mostly successful efforts of its partisans to claim otherwise. It will be an opera, just an opera — a lot longer, but essentially the same as any other.

There are so many things wrong with almost all of that, and almost the entirety of that wrong due a gross (and given the author, just this side of an unbelievable) failure of fundamental understanding, that we hardly know where to begin to demolish it.

Let us begin with this little bit of nonsense.

Mr. Kennicott speaks of "[The Ring's] absurdities, its extraordinary longueurs and its punishing demands on those who...watch it."

What "absurdities"? There are none unless, like a philistine, one rejects the entire fictive core and edifice of the work. What "longueurs"? There are none unless one approaches the work as if it were "just an opera [that's] essentially the same as any other," which is indeed an absurdity. And, What "punishing demands on those who watch it"? There are none unless one insists on traversing the work's entire fifteen-or-so hours via DVD at a single sitting, in which case the "punishing demands" are made not on one's attention and involvement, but on one's derriere.

In short, these are all baseless objections that could be hurled at the Ring only by one thoroughly antipathetic to the audacity behind the creation of the tetralogy and what it's fundamentally about which most emphatically is NOT the trials and woes and tragic end of Siegfried, notwithstanding that's what Wagner had intended originally. What it's about are the trials and woes and tragic end of Wotan, Siegfried's grandpapa (it's not for nothing Wagner renamed the final music-drama Götterdämmerung), who is clearly "the cycle's most problematic figure, its most volatile element," and who forever (not merely "for decades (especially since World War II))" has been "both its hero and its antihero, attractive and odious at the same time, and somehow perpetually in motion between these extremes," not Siegfried, and who is the central tragic hero of the cycle, even when he's not physically present onstage; the character about which "everything [in the Ring] musically and dramatically" revolves, leading ultimately to his and the world's end. For by the time Wagner's single, three-act, French-style Grand Opera, Siegfrieds Tod, became the four-music-drama cosmic tetralogy Der Ring des Nibelungen, Siegfried had become little more than a naïve, boisterous, reckless, not-too-bright adolescent hotshot, and a mere helpless pawn caught up ineluctably in the prior machinations of Wotan, the Ring's central tragic hero. Anyone who managed to miss that or who has dismissed it, willfully or otherwise, has, as we've above suggested, not been paying proper attention to the work at the very least, or, worse, has taken his understanding of the work from what's been written about it rather than from addressing what's made manifest in the work itself.

Today, as in times past and into the foreseeable future, we readily look with an at least understanding if not altogether admiring eye on the Siegfried of Siegfried. He's dramatically just what we expect and want him to be and we'd be hugely disappointed were he anything other (and I here pass over largely in charitable silence the preposterous notion that anyone other than a PC-contaminated ideologue or an outright Wagner ignoramus would see in Siegfried "the worst political and personal traits that bedevil Wagner's reputation as a man," and imagine Siegfried as displaying Wagner's "anti-Semitism evident in Siegfried's treatment of Mime, or the blithe and hollow murder of Fafner in dragon form"). It's a cardinal failure of Wagner's that, when writing Götterdämmerung, he refused adamantly to let go of that Siegfried, and by that refusal fairly made nonsense of the idea of Siegfried as a heroically tragic "free hero". Siegfried's death is in fact pathetic rather than heroically tragic as the Siegfried of the Ring as we have it possesses no genuinely tragic dimension whatsoever, his majestic and deeply moving Trauermarsch notwithstanding. If we as audiences "play the Siegfried game" at all, it's a game of pretending we can take the Götterdämmerung Siegfried seriously as the heroically tragic "free hero" Wagner intended him to be instead of the naïve, boisterous, reckless, not-too-bright adolescent pawn Wagner made of him, a failure we examined in some detail in our February 2005 entry, "The Trouble With Götterdämmerung".

And so the "singular and inspiring power" of the Ring depends not one whit more on how we respond to the character of Siegfried as Wagner has drawn him than it does on how we respond to any other of the principal characters other than Wotan himself, as Siegfried is but a helpless pawn in Wagner's colossal drama despite his onstage time, not the lynchpin tragic hero of the piece, and therefore no "Achilles heel to the Ring" even were one to grant Siegfried's imagined lack of "relevance" to "an age of teamwork, recycling and volunteerism"; an age in which "[w]e must, by necessity, become ever more dependent on each other." In fact, in such an age, tales of fearless dragon-slayers, reckless adolescent pawns or not, are more relevant than ever and resonate more powerfully because they serve to remind us what it means to be a genuine, fearless individual in a world of herd animals. If the Ring does indeed have an "Achilles heel" it resides solely in its huge cost to mount properly, and in its requirement of absolutely first-rate performers of a special sort, from conductor down to the most minor of singer-actors.

But, then, Wagner knew all about all of that, and in spite of it persevered to create his deathless and timeless masterpiece — deathless and timeless even in the face of "the vicissitudes of fashion and the economy" — rather than capitulate to the insistent demands of a reality comprised of mortals made of lesser stuff and infinitely lesser genius.

New Discovery

As regular readers of S&F are aware, we're not exactly fans of most so-called New Music with its obsessive concern with process and sound per se and its lack of concern with sustained, coherent, perceptible, and comprehensible musical narrative. Every once in a great while, however, we come across what is almost an anomaly today in new concert music: a genuinely haunting piece of New Music whose musical narrative grabs one from the first measure, and holds one fast through the last.

Listen:

Surely, some heretofore undiscovered or as-yet-not-widely-known contemporary composer worthy of note, right?

Wrong.

It's a Justin Bieber thing (yes, that Justin Bieber; Justin Bieber the pop phenom) — slowed down 800 (eight-hundred) per cent. Here's the original.

We're not at all sure what this says about process, but that it says something worth noting is indisputable.

(Our thanks to Gawker via Daniel Wolf's Renewable Music for the links.)