Sounds & Fury

More On The Matter Of Eurotrash Wagner

Word has reached me there's a story making the rounds of the German press to the effect that the engagement of Christoph Schlingensief by Bayreuth Festival chief honcho Wolfgang Wagner to design and direct the Festival's just-premiered new production of Parsifal was instigated and relentlessly championed by Herr Wagner's 26-year-old daughter, Katharina, herself a producer and director of her great-grandfather's operas, and rumored to be slated to mount a new production of Die Meistersinger for the 2007 Bayreuth Festival, and, further, to succeed on his retirement her now 84-year-old father.

If all true — and it all sounds all too true to me — this is not good news. Katharina is a dyed-in-the-wool Eurotrash devotee who is herself already responsible for a truly loathsome Eurotrash Fliegender Holländer done in Würzburg in 2002, and just the thought that she is influencing productions at the Bayreuth Festival even while her father still maintains the reins there is chilling. Even more chilling is the prospect of her succeeding her father as head of the now 128-year-old Festival.

What makes that accession a very real even if not certain possibility is the encouraging reception and acceptance more and more afforded Eurotrash productions by the influential critical press. One has only to read the majority of the German press's reception of the new Schlingensief Parsifal — from all descriptions as grotesque a piece of Eurotrash as one might wish for or fear — to be convinced of the truth of that statement.

And that encouraging reception and acceptance of Eurotrash by the critical press is not limited to the European press, nor a new, just-this-year phenomenon. Here, for instance, is an article written for Andante two years ago by Anne Midgette, music critic for the New York Times, on the subject of Regietheater (Director's Theater), more often than not the more technical and polite name for Eurotrash, using as example the above mentioned Katharina Wagner production of Holländer.

Wrote Ms. Midgette:

[A] one-line description doesn't do justice to the [production's] concept, and the many details that backed it up. No, there weren't any sailing ships here, and there wasn't even any redemption; the Holländer is beaten to death by xenophobic skinheads. But sitting in the theater, you saw that, yes, Senta could easily be the misfit in high school who dresses funny and obsessively listens to strange music on her Walkman. Ms. Wagner, 24, found a way to have the opera make sense in the terms of her generation. The inner logic she created for the piece held water; and it was closely linked to the music. Nearly all the German critics, like me, arrived prepared for disaster (Ms. Wagner had never staged an opera before), and nearly all of them - with the exception of the F.A.Z. and a couple of other smaller papers - found, as did I, that it was valid.

Excuse me? Valid? And "closely linked to the music" (whatever Ms. Midgette here means by that)? Valid as what? Certainly not as a realization of Richard Wagner's dramatic and aesthetic vision as set forth in the text, music, and mise en scène of Holländer. I submit that those who attend a production of a Wagner opera or music-drama are entitled to see and hear a realization of Wagner's vision — Richard's, that is, not Katharina's.

Let me remark quickly at this point to immediately and preemptively blunt the classic and invidious retort of those Eurotrash aficionados and defenders who sneeringly characterize as reactionary the views of people such as myself that I am not saying that a valid realization of Wagner's vision need be clothed and made manifest in the traditional garb of 19th-century Wagner productions, or that Wagner's own staging and stage directions be adhered to dogmatically, slavishly, or at all. What I am saying (and have said before, and often) is that no matter how contemporarily clothed and made manifest the production might be, it must at its core be a realization of Richard Wagner's vision — his Konzept, as expressed in text, music and mise en scène, not the Konzept of the director or producer of a current production.

Let me also quickly remark that Ms. Midgette might seem to have the advantage of me in that she actually attended the production in question whereas I did not. But one need not have actually attended this production to know with absolute certainty that a Holländer where "there [aren't] any sailing ships," and where "there [isn't] even any redemption," and where, in the end, "the Holländer [the character] is beaten to death by xenophobic skinheads [at the instigation of Senta's in this production brutish, pimp father]," and where "Senta could easily be the misfit in high school who dresses funny and obsessively listens to strange music on her Walkman," is not, by even prodigiously progressive-minded stretch of the imagination, a realization of Richard Wagner's vision. That Konzept is wholly Katharina Wagner's, and like all Eurotrash directors she, without hesitation or compunction, hijacks, vandalizes, and does lethal violence to a work of genuine art for her own self-involved and self-important reasons and purposes.

(Things are actually much worse, and more mind-bogglingly imbecile in this production than the above more-than-one-line description suggests. In this production Senta is a victim of a brutal, macho society, beaten up by her current boyfriend Erik, and sold by her pimp father to the Dutchman. And it all takes place in a world peopled by corrupt, violence-prone machos, sitting around in a red-light-district bar(!) in baseball caps and open shirts with only two things on their minds: power and money, while Senta walks around dressed up like a Barbie doll to please her macho, pimp father, Daland.)*

Might I suggest to Ms. Midgette, and to others in the critical press as well, that before they next think of praising a Eurotrash Wagner production they first consider that, although there would be no dramatic or aesthetic gain or benefit whatsoever from doing so, and while, depending on how skillfully it's done, it may do no real or fundamental violence to a conventional Italian opera like, say, Tosca with all the necessary time and place changes made to the sung text to have it take place in, say, turn-of-21st-century New York instead of turn-of-19th-century Rome — a 21st-century New York where, say, Cavaradossi is a programmer of software games, Scarpia a powerful and exploitative electronics venture capitalist, and Floria Tosca herself a flaming rock star and all that implies — the same sort of approach cannot be taken with any of Wagner's canonical works (those works from Holländer forward), and most particularly and most especially none of the great masterworks after Lohengrin. If nothing else, taking that sort of approach with a Wagner opera results in making concrete and "freezing" a particular aspect or reading of the work, thereby robbing it of the very thing — the essential characteristic — that establishes it as the transcendent work of art that it is: its power to resonate in multiple domains, and at multiple levels of meaning, all at once. Additionally, all Wagner's works, even one as early and immature as Holländer, have an organic one-ness of text, music, and mise en scène that will brook no deconstructionist diddling without becoming grotesque caricatures of themselves at best, and perverse and grotesque corruptions of their creator's dramatic and aesthetic vision always.

* Production details culled from reviews appearing in the Agence France-Presse, and Deutsche Presse-Agentur.

TOFs And Wagner

In keeping with this Wagner time of year, an extension of the remarks made in my last post.

Responding to an eMail of mine on a Wagner list wherein, with the exception of Das Rheingold, I declared the Karajan recording of Wagner's Ring a "perverse joke" because of Karajan's bizarre conceit that Wagner — even mature Wagner — should be made to sound as intimate and lyrical as Verdi, a TOF (True Opera Fan; like a teenage movie fan, only worse — much worse) lodged objection, and went on to cite his reasons, all of which had to do with the singers involved.

How did I know the responder was a TOF? He went on, and on, and interminably on about the singers and the singing, that's how. The principal (but not sole) distinguishing hallmark of the TOF is that he's convinced opera means Italian-form opera, and is therefore about one thing and one thing only: the singers and the singing. Whenever one encounters a critique of a performance of a mature Wagner work (i.e., those works post-Lohengrin) that dwells interminably on the singers and the singing, one can be certain one is dealing with a TOF, and safely dismiss the critique as being near-worthless. TOFs imagine that the works of the mature Wagner are nothing more than Italian opera writ large and sung in German; a bit like saying the noble elephant is merely a piddling rock hyrax, only bigger and with a trunk.

The mature Wagner operas (more correctly called music-dramas) are, of course, nothing of the sort. They're animals of a different order altogether from Italian and Italian-form opera, and share with them only the technical apparatus of performance: an orchestra and conductor, singers, a sung text (libretto), an orchestral score, and mise en scène. Beyond that they've nothing in common.

If one were pressed to choose the principal element of a Wagner performance — that element on which the success or failure of the realization of the work most depends — the choice, hands down, would have to be the orchestra. Without a first-rate orchestra with a first-rate Wagner conductor on the podium, not merely a first-rate conductor, nothing — and I do mean nothing — can save the performance from being second-rate at best; not even were all the sopranos Nilssons, all the tenors Melchiors, and all the bass-baritones, Papes. By contrast, a performance of an Italian opera with a merely competent orchestra with even a mere accurate time-beater on the podium would prove just dandy if less than ideal so long as all the voices were superb.

Why it that so? It's so because Wagner's music-dramas are about the drama, the core of which resides within the orchestra, while the typical Italian opera is about the singers, the "songs," and the singing almost exclusively, everything else being at bottom mere pretext and platform.

Perhaps you doubt my word on this (as I'm fairly certain you will). If so, may I suggest to you the following little thought experiment.

Imagine a first performance (first so that one could not mentally fill in anything missing) of, say, Verdi's grandest grand opera, Aida, done in a house with an almost non-existent budget; so much non-existent that all it can afford beside the singers' fees are a piano and piano-player. The singers, however, are the very best; superb voices all.

Despite the absence of all the normal operatic accouterments (i.e., the "platform") it would still be experienced as a coherent, comprehensible, even an almost satisfying performance notwithstanding its being way less than ideal, wouldn't it?

You betcha it would as the core Italian-form opera elements (i.e., the "songs," and superb voices singing them) would remain intact, and the musical and dramatic coherence and sense of the work, such as it is, largely preserved.

Now imagine a first performance of, say, Walküre, or even worse, Siegfried, under the same set of constraints.

What's that? You can't?

Neither can I.

I remember a particularly revealing discussion I once had with a knowledgeable TOF — in my experience, one of the most knowledgeable, and an opera professional to boot — concerning the long period of silence and out-of-spotlight time a certain famous soprano would have to endure as Isolde in the last part of Act II of Tristan und Isolde (i.e., subsequent to the so-called Liebesnacht episode), having but a few lines to sing near the act's very end. The discussion turned on how difficult that must be for a performer, but, I suggested, Isolde must never do anything during that time to detract or divert attention from the important business going on around her.

The TOF fairly bristled at the suggestion. I mean, you could almost see the hair rise all spikey-like on his head so incensed was he. I paraphrase his retort as best I can remember it: "That's ridiculous!" he huffed. "Even when she has little to do or sing, do you expect a singer of _____'s stature to just sit there and be self-effacing? She must be permitted to display the temperament and star dramatic qualities for which she's world-famous!"

I at first thought the man was making some sort of ironic joke. A perverse joke, to be sure, but a joke nevertheless. Turned out, no such thing. He actually intended that idiot remark in earnest, and not only saw nothing amiss with it, but thought it perfectly obvious.

And that's the point, actually. To a TOF it would be perfectly obvious, and nothing about it at all amiss. And the TOF would be right if the opera concerned were, say, Traviata and not Tristan, Wagner's most densely organic and metaphysical music-drama.

What's most astonishing to me some 120 years after Wagner's death, and some thousands of performances of his mature works worldwide, is that presumably knowledgeable opera-goers, even opera professionals who ought to know better, still don't get the distinction. For them a rock hyrax is always a rock hyrax, even when it's a noble elephant.

And that about says it all where TOFs and Wagner are concerned, and really all that need be said.

Engaging Wagner

A reader writes,

Thanks to your links, I've been listening to the webcasts from the Bayreuth Festival. I've always had a problem listening to and understanding Wagner's later operas, though I'm a big fan of Tannh[ä]user and Lohengrin, and listen to those operas often. I've always thought the reason for that is that Wagner's operas are so closely tied to the theater that unless one actually attends a live performance of the more complicated later operas, one can't really understand them, and something of Wagner's genius is lost.

Your thoughts?

It's quite true that Wagner's works post-Lohengrin are theatrical (i.e., of the theater) to the very bone, which is to say one can't experience them with any degree of real comprehension by simply listening to the singing as one can in the case of conventional opera. More to the point, Wagner's mature works (called music-dramas to distinguish them from his earlier works which are all operas in the ordinary sense of the term) each constitute an organic dramatic unity that must be experienced in toto to be really understood.

One need not, however, attend a live performance to experience that dramatic unity. In fact, given the nature of most live performances of Wagner's works today one is well advised to stay as far away as possible from the theater (witness, for pertinent instance, the just-premiered Bayreuth Parsifal). What one must cultivate is the capacity to visualize in the mind's eye the drama that's being played out in libretto and music. Wagner, who built better than even he knew, put all that's necessary into the score itself, and anyone with even a modicum of imagination need only learn that score (i.e., music, text, and stage directions) to construct his own theater of the mind that, while listening to a first-rate recorded performance on the stereo, will serve at least as well as, and probably better than, anything one is likely to today encounter mounted on the stage of any opera house in the world.

In such an undertaking, however, there are certain peculiarities of music-drama (as opposed to conventional opera) of which one needs to be aware. For instance, unlike conventional opera, one must at all times know pretty much verbatim what the characters are actually saying when singing as it's not "songs" they're singing, but dialogue, much like the spoken dialogue of a staged straight drama. The importance of that verbatim knowing becomes immediately clear when one considers that Wagner's music-dramas never traffic in soap-opera melodrama and cookie-cutter plots, and to have only the gist of what the characters are saying when singing as one can do without penalty with conventional opera is a guarantee of becoming hopelessly lost in, or missing completely, the often intricate and subtle narrative twists, and the equally intricate and subtle web of interwoven dramatic and psychological complexities that are fundamental components of all Wagner's mature works.

Further, and perhaps most importantly, and once again unlike conventional opera, without knowing what the characters are actually saying when singing, one will miss totally the dramatic, psychological, and emotional gestalt of the organic union of text and music as that music issues from the orchestra wherein resides the very core of the drama itself. That locus of the dramatic core of the work, and the gestalt of the union of text and music, are the unique and most salient characteristics of music-drama; what separates it from conventional opera, and indeed what constitutes music-drama's very raison d'être. In the music itself is the core of the drama, while the sung text provides the necessary concrete particulars and narrative details which are at once both the drama's armature and context which particulars and details music alone is incapable of conveying.

All of which is to say that while one can in large part engage Wagner's early works in just the same way one engages an opera by, say, Bellini or Donizetti, or even much of Verdi, for the mature works that simply won't do, and attempting that sort of engagement is an ultimately empty exercise; a virtual guarantee of missing most of what Wagner offers.

If this engaging of Wagner sounds a daunting, even forbidding, undertaking, it's so only in the telling. Wagner's colossal genius makes it all almost automatic in the doing. All that's required of the audience (i.e., you) is the desire and will to undertake the engagement.

Aha! (Bayreuth Update III)

(Note: This post has been updated (1) as of 6:15 PM Eastern on 1 Aug. See below)

I now know why the audience reception of the Schlingensief Bayreuth Parsifal at its 25 July premier was mixed rather than an overwhelming flood of boos and whistles sans any applause at all.

Take a look at these:

Every square inch of the stage is so densely populated by the architecturally inappropriate, and so densely busy and cluttered with all manner of symbolic bric-a-brac and personages cum arcane whatevers that the audience simply couldn't fully take in or even comprehend what it was looking at, even though sensing that it was all somehow very wrong. And so some played on the safe side and applauded so as not to appear totally stupid or ignorant just in case all that grotesque crap turned out to actually have something to do with Wagner's Parsifal, while others threw caution to the winds, and loudly booed the absurd visual assault just on general principles.

Gads! What a contemptible horror, not to say prodigious P.O.S., it all looks to be.

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Update (6:15 PM Eastern on 1 Aug): Jens F. Laurson of Ionarts has a different take on this production.

Bayreuth Update II — The Schlingensief Parsifal

(Note: This post has been updated (4) as of 5:22 PM Eastern on 1 Aug. See below)

The new Christoph Schlingensief production of Parsifal (25 July) got a mixed reception from the audience, which was lots better than I'd expected. Some scattered applause and one boo at the end of Act I (when all should have been silent); lots of applause, and a few scattered whistles after Act II; and a huge amount of booing and whistling at opera's end, but a fair amount of applause as well.

I still have no idea what sort of outrage Schlingensief actually perpetrated (I know only that outrage it surely was), but I'm certain this week will bring detailed descriptions in the media from a number of sources.

I wouldn't dare attempt an authoritative critique of the performance itself as with that diaphanous score most of the details played softer than mezzo forte were difficult or impossible to hear on the streaming audio Webcast. What I can say is that Boulez turned in what must be one of the fastest Parsifals on record (surprise!), and from what I could hear of the orchestra (which wasn't nearly enough), turned in a reading that was about as nuanced and subtle as a hockey puck. The crude sound of the brass was most especially annoying, as was Boulez's special speeding-up of anything in the score that even hinted at the sacred or transcendent.

Boulez says he was "warned by Wieland Wagner" about how slow tempi in Parsifal make the work "go dead." Boulez doesn't seem to understand the difference between slow tempi in Parsifal taken by any old conductor, of which Boulez is one, and the slow (i.e., proper) tempi taken by gifted Wagner conductors which only clock slow overall compared with Boulez, but which have always the forward-pressing internal pulse and almost bar-to-bar adjustments of tempo absolutely necessary to the proper realization of this score; more so than any other of Wagner's works.

Wagner's contemptuous appellation of "quadruped" for four-square conductors of his works most assuredly applies to Boulez — in spades.

The singers were all merely competent, so nothing to rave about there, either good or bad. The Parsifal had a marked baritonal quality to his voice which simply sounded "wrong" in Acts I and II, but worked OK for Act III. The Gurnemanz tried to give his part life by dramatic vocal inflection, but merely ended up sounding like a ham. Kundry screamed her way through the latter part of her Act II appearance, but was otherwise OK. Amfortas made it through I and III in a competent way. Ditto the Klingsor in II. Actually, he was the best of the lot.

Charles T. Downey of Ionarts has checked in with a few remarks on the production, among which was the following.

"Doesn't ACD realize that Boulez 'saved Parsifal'," he [CTD] asked impishly....

Uh-huh. See above for my assessment of that rescue.

As we knew he would, A. C. Douglas ... had already pronounced the failure of the Schlingensief production, because the tenor singing Parsifal criticized it.

Not quite, Charles. A.C. Douglas pronounced that Schlingensief would proffer a perverse piece of outrageous crap. (Such crap is hardly a failure for the likes of a Schlingensief. It's considered by such as he and his ilk as a triumph if only the audience boos loud and long enough.) That pronouncement of mine was made two days before I knew the outraged tenor had expressed his outrage.

Credit where credit is due, please.

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Update (5:22 PM Eastern on 1 Aug): I comment further here on Boulez's realization of the Parsifal score in this production.

Update (5:00 PM Eastern on 27 Jul): Financial Times (London) critic, Andrew Clark, checks in with his impressions of the Schlingensief Parsifal.

Update (8:40 AM Eastern on 27 Jul): Glorioski! I've just discovered (after four years!) that my computer speaker system has an output jack for headphones. That means I can now listen to what comes across on streaming audio Webcasts at the full proper volume. The live-feed Parsifal Webcast of 25 July commented on above will be rebroadcast 1 August. I'll be listening. Maybe this time I'll be able to hear all I could not on the live feed. Stay tuned.

Update (6:05 AM Eastern on 27 Jul): New York Times music critic Jeremy Eichler weighs in with his impressions of the Schlingensief Parsifal here. For those of you who can read German fluently (I, unhappily, cannot), here's a linked listing of reviews in the German press.

The Mind of a Postmodern Director

It will come as no revelation to any of my regular readers that I've often expressed my extreme displeasure with — my contempt for — postmodern, or so-called Eurotrash, productions of the great Wagner masterpieces and other masterpieces of the stage by other creators from times past, and laid the primary blame for such at the feet of self-involved, self-serving directors who thought their "vision" more important, more worthy, and more pertinent than that of the stellar geniuses responsible for the creation of those deathless masterpieces. It never once occurred to me, however, that the motivation for the outrageous vandalism of such directors could in fact stem from their basically well-intentioned if egregiously wrongheaded and ill-considered desire to do a work better justice, and that perhaps I may in past have been a bit shortsighted in the matter generally.

Or was I?

The breakthrough in my thinking on Shakespeare [writes stage director Michael Bogdanov] came with a lavish production of Romeo and Juliet in 1974 at the newly opened Haymarket Theatre in Leicester....

[...]

In rehearsal the story had been coming over hard, clear and very exciting. [...] When the production moved from the rehearsal room and arrived on to the stage, somehow the clarity and the hardness, the linear quality of the story, had gone. What was more, audiences weren't responding to either the production or the play. At the last moment, after the very final preview, I cut the whole of the end scene, where the Friar recaps the story for the benefit of Escalus and, after the death of Juliet, I switched to a press conference around the unveiling of the two gold statues that Capulet and Montague erect to the memory of each other's child.

Rock music built to a climax during a blackout and, when the lights came up, the entire company was assembled in modern dress in front of Romeo and Juliet, now dressed in gold cloaks and masks standing on the erstwhile tomb. Muzak played: "Fly Me to the Moon" . . . Escalus, the Duke, read the prologue as an epilogue from a cue card, as if inaugurating at an unveiling ceremony. The main protagonists were photographed in front of the statues, shaking hands, the Nurse holding up a rope ladder, Escalus attempting to bring about the familial reconciliation with a three-way hand clasp. The smile of Jimmy Carter handing over the presidency to Reagan.

The transformation had an extraordinary effect. People in the audience shouted, people walked out, people cheered, people bravoed, people booed, and I thought: "For three hours they have been bored out of their minds and suddenly something has challenged them. A moment of real theatre."

[From a reprint in The Guardian of an edited extract from Shakespeare: The Director's Cut, by Michael Bogdanov, published by Capercaillie Books.]

"Suddenly something...challenged them. A moment of real theatre"(!)? What is that? Some sort of joke? One hardly knows whether to laugh, weep, or rage. Is Bogdanov being willfully simpleminded? Self-delusional? Or just plain lunatic. Or is he simply offering up a veiled and disingenuous apologia for his own self-involved, self-indulgent corruption of a masterwork.

It seems to me that any honest, conscientious director, on finding that when his production of a work by Shakespeare (Shakespeare, for chrissake!) "moved from the rehearsal room and arrived on to the stage ... audiences weren't responding to either the production or the play," would look for fault elsewhere rather than come to the astonishing conclusion that Shakespeare or his centuries-acknowledged, timeless and universal masterpiece was somehow the culprit for not speaking to a contemporary audience. After all, we're here talking about a play that in its unadulterated form has captured the imagination and riveted the attention of countless numbers of audiences for more than four centuries now. What strange and anomalous circumstance could possibly have accounted for its sudden failure to do so at the Haymarket Theatre in Leicester in 1974?

Golly. That's a tough one to suss out. I'll take a stab at it, though, by suggesting that perhaps the failure was neither Shakespeare's nor the play's, but entirely that of the director and his actors. I mean, that doesn't sound an at all unreasonable suggestion, does it?

Well, perhaps to Mr. Bogdanov and his brethren it would.

We're in peril today, boys and girls, of seeing, at the hands of such as Mr. Bogdanov, the disappearance of all that's great and meaningful in our beyond-price legacy of stage masterworks from times past. By the attempts of such auteurs as Mr. Bogdanov to peddle their own by comparison piddling and inconsequential "vision" at the expense of those masterworks, and in place of the vision of their creators, and by directors / producers resorting to mass-market prole-pandering to attract a larger audience for their productions, we'll not have to wait for a biblical Armageddon to bring an end to our civilization.

Isn't that saying too much? I mean, get real. They're only stage works we're talking about here; mere entertainments, and ancient into the bargain. Should we be even the least bit concerned?

Mere entertainments, and ancient indeed. Like the blood that courses through our veins is a mere salty, liquid remnant of our ancient ocean-borning, and nothing more.

Should we be even the least bit concerned?

Not exactly.

Afraid is what we should be. Very afraid.

Bayreuth Update

Two days before the Bayreuth Festival's opening performance — the new Christoph Schlingensief production of Parsifal on 25 July — it seems the shit has already begun to hit the proverbial fan.

As I wrote a couple days ago (22 July):

This year the Festival will open on 25 July with a new production of Parsifal by the postmodern avant-garde German director Christoph Schlingensief (his first-ever opera production) which, I can say in advance without knowing anything whatsoever about what this guy has cooked up, and with no fear of being in error, will be a politically charged and grotesque perversion of Wagner's timeless masterpiece.

As I said, no fear of being in error.

None whatsoever.

---

Update: Charles T. Downey of Ionarts comments. And I further comment here.

A Mystery Elusive Of Solution

(Note: This post has been updated as of 27 Jul at 10:26 AM. See below)

Quite some years ago I was involved in a catastrophic motorcycle accident that left me bed-bound for almost a year. In an effort to ease my forced confinement, my then father-in-law brought a gift: the Doubleday edition of The Complete Sherlock Holmes. Although I managed a smile of gratitude, it crossed my mind that in buying me that collection of stories the not-so-old man had suffered a premature Senior Moment. A copyeditor for The New York Times, he and I had discussed literature often, and he was well aware of my distaste for, and contemptuous dismissal of, genre fiction in all its forms, yet here he was presenting me with two volumes worth of the stuff. Perhaps, I thought, it was a joke of some sort I hadn't quite caught on to, or perhaps he'd had not merely a premature Senior Moment, but gone stone-cold barking mad.

I decided to defer immediate judgment on the matter. As I was a virtual prisoner with nowhere to go and nothing but time on my hands, what could it hurt to at least give the things a read, or a try at a read, as the case might be. Time enough later for a final decision on the question of my father-in-law's mental competency.

So, beginning at the beginning, I turned to the opening novella-length story, A Study in Scarlet, and began to read.

In the year 1878 I took my degree of Doctor of Medicine of the University of London, and proceeded to Netley to go through the course prescribed for surgeons in the Army.

What odd but curiously pleasant syntax was the thought that immediately crossed my mind. The thought passed, I continued to read.

Having completed my studies there, I was duly attached to the Fifth Northumberland Fusiliers as assistant surgeon. The regiment was stationed in India at the time, and before I could join it, the second Afghan war had broken out. On landing at Bombay, I learned that my corps had advanced through the passes, and was already deep in the enemy's country. I followed, however, with many other officers who were in the same situation as myself, and succeeded in reaching Candahar in safety, where I found my regiment, and at once entered upon my new duties.

In context, just the names seemed to bristle with an exotic energy. Encouraged, I read on — for the next two days straight with almost no sleep, during which time I read all sixty stories — all 1300 pages of them — and then went back to start reading them all over again.

I wasn't sure at just what point I'd become hooked, and even less sure of what it was that hooked me, but hooked I was, and the mystery of how that came about is for me today still a greater mystery than any Holmes and Watson ever undertook to unravel; one that, even after all these years, remains elusive of fully satisfactory solution.

Of one thing, however, I was certain: these stories were not litraschur. Heart of Darkness is litraschur. The Dead is litraschur. The Half-skinned Steer is litraschur. But The Adventure of the Speckled Band, or even the almost-novel, The Hound of the Baskervilles? No way. Not, at any rate, outside the halls of academe with its postmodern lit courses in which novels such as Stephen King's Pet Sematary and Spiderman comic books are considered litraschur.

But there I was — and here I am. Hooked on works of detective fiction. Genre fiction. Prole-pandering-barely-worth-the-paper-they're-printed-on pulp fiction!

So, how to explain it. I mean, it really does require some sort of explanation. But as I've said, I can't explain it in any fully satisfactory way. Yes, it's true Conan Doyle makes astonishingly real his two central characters and the milieu in which they lived and worked; so real that one finds oneself needing to ferret out, when they're not explicitly given (and just to be certain, even when they are), the exact dates and physical locations of the stories' action. One somehow feels a compelling need to know that. And, yes, the stories chronicle a friendship rare today, and perhaps rare at any time. And, yes, the era of Holmes and Watson is wonderfully intimate, warmly romantic, and altogether appealing, especially to a 21st-century American. And, yes, the totally self-reliant character of Holmes is individualistic and nobly aristocratic, and his consummate skill in, and dedication to his profession superhuman even if somewhat unbelievable, all of which is laudable, inspiring, and exciting of admiration. The Holmes-Watson canon is all these things. But that's still not explanation enough, although it's surely an essential part of it.

The best I can muster as explanation — and I'm fully cognizant my best is thoroughly inadequate — is that the Holmes-Watson stories, even though technically detective fiction, each have the quality of being a chapter of a great and heroic if urbane saga; tales told orally around a pre-literate communal campfire; tales that tell of a time when a man's individual actions had comprehensible, direct, and immediate effect on his environment and those populating it without mediation, mitigation or intensification by technologies the workings of which are comprehensible only to experts; tales that tell of a time when one could "learn at a glance to distinguish the history of [a] man, and the trade or profession to which he belongs"; a time when "by a man's fingernails, by his coat-sleeve, by his boots, by his trouser-knees, by the callosities of his forefinger and thumb, by his expression, by his shirt-cuffs ... [his] calling is plainly revealed."

Such a time is now long past, and we know we'll never again see its like. We feel a quick pang of sorrow at that, and silently mourn its passing knowing there's nothing for it. We find, however, that we can be granted a meaningful measure of solace and pleasure by a well-told saga of its days of glory which saga is the Holmes-Watson canon. And that, I think, is the secret of the power of these stories, and an at least partial explanation for why a literary elitist such as myself senses something magic about them, and can find himself hooked helpless by that magic.

Too facile an explanation? Well, perhaps. But as I've said, the best I can muster.

---

Update (27 Jul at 10:26 AM): Weblogger Rick Coencas of Futurballa comments.

Whose Gold Is It Anyway?

For lovers of Wagner's music-dramas, worldwide, it's that time of year again: the opening of the annual Bayreuther Festspiele. This year the Festival will open on 25 July with a new production of Parsifal by the postmodern avant-garde German director Christoph Schlingensief (his first-ever opera production) which, I can say in advance without knowing anything whatsoever about what this guy has cooked up, and with no fear of being in error, will be a politically charged and grotesque perversion of Wagner's timeless masterpiece. New Yorker music critic and weblogger Alex Ross will be covering the event (I don't know whether to extend him my best wishes or my condolences), and I look forward to his reports, both in print and on his weblog, The Rest Is Noise.

Following the Schlingensief Parsifal (on 27 July) will be presented Das Rheingold, the first music-drama of Wagner's epic tetralogy, Der Ring des Nibelungen, in the now four-years-old Jürgen Flimm production (the production frequently, and with cause, referred to as the Flimmflam Ring), wherein the Nibelung dwarf Alberich curses and forswears love forever, takes a lump of gold from its resting place atop a rocky peak at the bottom of the river Rhine, forges it into a ring which confers upon him unlimited power, and thereby sets into motion the chain of events which is Wagner's Ring.

Conventional readings of Alberich's initial deed have it that he stole from the Rhine the gold from which he forged his ring, and, indeed, throughout the texts of all four music-dramas Alberich is referred to as a Räuber, usually translated as robber or thief. But the German noun Raub, which ordinarily means robbery, has, when used poetically, another meaning as well; namely, rape or ravish (i.e., seize and carry off by force, or despoil), and it seems to me, within the context of the Wagnerian mythology of the Ring, that poetic meaning more correctly and more accurately characterizes Alberich's seminal deed. How can one be accused of stealing that for which he's paid in full and paid a terrible price and is therefore his very own?

The gold of the Rhine — the Rhinegold — cannot be said to be owned by anyone at music-drama's opening. It's certainly not owned by the three Rheintöchter. They're merely its appointed guardians (more about what that entails anon). While the Rhinegold can be said, in a poetic sense, to be owned by the Rhine itself, and the gold's resting place atop a rocky peak at the bottom of that great river its natural home, it's not its eternal home, for as the Rheintöchter inform Alberich, the magic to forge the Rhinegold into the ring of power is his who is willing to forswear love, the clear implication being that such a one is entitled to take the Rhinegold for that purpose, and therefore become the owner of both gold and ring.

What, then, did the guardianship of the Rheintöchter entail? Surely, it did not — could not — entail their taking physical measures to prevent the removal of the Rhinegold from its resting place atop that underwater peak at the bottom of the river. The very idea is absurd. It would seem, then, that their guardianship could have entailed nothing other than their informing any prospective fancier of the Rhinegold that only one who first forswore love would be entitled to it. Such a warning, as is made clear in the text of Das Rheingold, was considered by the Rheintöchter to be more than sufficient to ward off any prospective taker of the Rhinegold, for who in that primal, pristine world would even so much as consider doing such a thing given the condition required?

Alberich, that's who, and only because cruelly, if innocently, pushed to the deed by the unthinking behavior of the Rheintöchter themselves in response to his attempts at wooing them. In that sense, the Rheintöchter can be said to have failed, wantonly and abjectly, the principal mandate of their guardianship by themselves creating a condition that all but ensured their guardianship's failure.

By this reasoning — the only reasoning that makes ethical sense within the ethical context of the world of the Ring — it's clear Alberich is by no stretch of the term a thief. He paid, and paid most dearly, for his right to take the Rhinegold from the river for his own, and forge from it the ring of power, which ring is without question his and his alone as the very title of the tetralogy itself (The Nibelung's Ring) proclaims. There's but a single thief in Das Rheingold, and that's Wotan, chief god and maker of laws. When, in Scene 4, Alberich declares that the ring is as much his own as his head, eyes, and ears, and hurls at Wotan — who's just about to forcibly extract the ring from Alberich's finger for his (Wotan's) own use, which he does in the next minute — the charge of Schächer (thief, not, it should be noted, Räuber), he speaks nothing but the truth: technically, legally, and ethically.

So, whatever unpleasant and unsavory things Alberich may be, thief is not among them.

When I informed members of a Wagner list of my intention to post here an article making the case that Alberich was in fact no thief at all in the matter of the Rhinegold, one replied, "If you can get Alberich off that rap the Michael Jackson defense team want to hear from you. NOW!"

My number's in the book.

One Helluva Fiddler

A few years have passed since I last sat down to listen to the reading of Bach's six Sonatas and Partitas for Unaccompanied Violin done by violinist Rachel Podger (in two volumes, here and here), and hearing it again reminded me afresh of what a first-rate talent Ms. Podger is, both as a fiddler and musician. Hearing these recordings again also caused me to search for my weblog remarks on this reading, and — most egregious oversight! — there were none. I hasten now to correct that unforgivable omission.

First, a dispelling of some unfortunate notions that might be provoked by the hyped manner in which these recordings have been billed and promoted.

Rachel Podger is billed as a Baroque specialist performing on a "Baroque violin." Quite apart from the fact that, except for minor details of configuration, there is, per se, no such instrument, this sort of hype instantly conjures a picture of a pasty-faced, gruel-blooded little wonk, performing on an instrument with a sound about as rich and subtle as a kazoo, who will do everything in her power to rob the music of anything remotely musically expressive, and turn in a performance done at breakneck tempi and with a superabundance of gratuitous pseudo-Baroque ornament (pseudo because conceived by a 21st-century musical imagination and sensibility). Which is to say, produce a reading fit for nothing other than the rubbish bin.

None of the above is the case with this reading. Ms. Podger's instrument, from the sound of it, is of the classic Cremona school, strung with gut rather than steel-wound strings. In other words, the kind of fiddle we're all used to hearing, but with a warmer, very slightly more nasal sound. As for Ms. Podger herself, no pasty-faced, gruel-blooded little wonk she. Her playing glows with robust good health, and is as full-blooded and expressive as any produced by the famous fiddlers of the Auer School (Heifetz and Milstein being the most well-known of that group). So you can retire any HIP performance images you might have in advance harbored concerning this reading.

As Shiva is the destroyer of worlds, the six Sonatas and Partitas for Unaccompanied Violin are collectively the destroyer of fiddle players. No fiddler dares even approach them unless his technique is nothing short of formidable. But that's only the first requisite. If you're a concert fiddler typical of the current generation whose technique is certainly formidable, but whose readings of the repertoire are replete with the grafted-on expressive schtick of the Auer Gang (sorry, couldn't resist) as it too often is, you'd best stay away from this music, for if you attempt it you'll be revealed instantly for the musically empty shell that you are.

Ms. Podger, however, has nothing to fear on any count. Her technique is formidable indeed; formidable and secure to the point of transparency. And there's no schtick or grafting-on of anything in her reading of these works. Her playing is muscular, lyrical, sinewy, sweet, or impassioned as the music variously requires, with the overarching principle of the poetic always and prominently in evidence. From the mystical Adagio of the G-minor Sonata, to the furious Allegro Assai of the C-major; from the playful Corrente of the B-minor Partita, to the majestic and profound Ciaccona of the D-minor, everything resonates right and true. There's no greasy kid stuff here, and no heroic, Romantic posturing à la ... just about every other non-Baroque-specialist fiddler who has recorded this work, the second Milstein reading alone perhaps excepted. This reading will take some getting used to for many brought up on 20th- and 21st-century readings of these six sonatas and partitas (especially of the Ciaccona), but will repay a hundred-fold the slight adjustment required.

Ms. Podger is one helluva fiddler, and a first-rate musician into the bargain, and I can't praise too highly this reading, both to those for whom this music is familiar, and to those coming to it for the first time.

Do buy and listen to these recordings. It will benefit you both mind and soul alike.

(A quick note concerning the audio of the recordings themselves: Both volumes employ an acoustic a bit too reverberant for my tastes, Volume 2 seemingly more than Volume 1, but it's in no way intrusive or even close to being inappropriate, and so no barrier to one's listening enjoyment.)

The End of the Properly-working Dog

Some years ago I said to myself, "Self," I said, "you really ought to sit down and write a novel. No, not the Great American kind. Something a bit more modest. A nice little murder mystery, perhaps. Shouldn't be too difficult, and pretty much everyone likes to read a good murder mystery, right? Of course right."

And so I sat down and wrote a nice little murder mystery. A neat, by-the-formula, by-the-numbers genre piece, more manufactured than written, the genre I chose called in the biz a "cozy". Piece of cake, actually, even though I'd never so much as read a murder mystery before.* Not all the way through, anyhow. That might be evidence of a streak of snobbishness in me, but I tend to think not. It's simply that each time I attempted to read, say, even a Christie (that master of the so-called puzzle mystery or whodunit, and the fons et origo of the cozy), I had the identity of the murderer, and why he (or she, or they) dunit, by page fifty. I mean, what was the point of reading further?

So now I have this nice little small-niche murder mystery written, and the next thing to do is sell it. This, it turns out, is not a piece of cake. No more direct-to-the-publisher with your precious manuscript, its pages still damp with your blood, sweat and tears. No more a reading by a qualified editor or editorial assistant to determine its suitability for publication. The major houses don't maintain the staff necessary for that anymore. They now depend on agents to perform that function for them, and won't even look at a fiction manuscript by an unknown author unless submitted to them by a bona fide agent. It's the publishing house's almost-guarantee the manuscript is, at minimum, of publishable quality and worth at least a look. Ninety-nine percent of fiction manuscripts submitted to agents for consideration aren't, by the way, as dismaying and disheartening a piece of news as that might be for starry-eyed wannabes.

And what primarily determines whether a fiction manuscript is of publishable quality? Strange to relate, not the quality of the writing. That's some way down on the list of requirements. At the top of that list is how well the manuscript will sell when made into a book. If an agent determines a fiction manuscript has high potential in that regard it's ipso facto publishable. If not, not, even were the quality of its prose and construction such that it might have been written by a latter-day Joyce.

Is something wrong with this picture?

Just about everything, as a matter of fact. It's classic tail-wagging-the-dog, but it's what today overridingly controls the acquisition and market practices of major publishing houses; in the U.S and Britain, at any rate.

You might be tempted to ask if things were ever any different. And the answer would be, yes, they were. During the era stretching from the turn of the 20th century up to the early 1940s; the era that saw the emergence of the great American publishing houses — Knopf, Random House, Scribner's (begun in an earlier era, but whose zenith period as a book publisher began during this era), Simon & Schuster, etc. — things were different indeed. Those houses were founded and run by men who first and foremost loved books. Great books especially. Books whose most salient characteristic was the stellar quality of their writing. And these men held as their primary role the sale of those books to as many people as possible, not only to make as much money as possible, but because they were great books. Which is not to say those men were any less ruthless and conniving than their most crass commercial brethren, both then and today. But it was their love of books rather than profit that turned them into publishers in the first place instead of purveyors of you-name-the-product, the manufacture and sales of which would have brought them far more filthy lucre with far less trouble than they could ever earn by making and selling books.

This is a properly-working dog, and these men not only did good, but made a great deal of money doing good.

So, what happened? Why is the dog now working ass backwards, and what made it work that way?

The facile answer is corporate greed, and while that answer may be facile, it has much to recommend it as the answer that most pointedly and most accurately answers the question. The men who founded those great American publishing houses are of course all gone now, their houses purchased and run by huge, multi-national corporate entities, and with them has gone the dedication to the Great Book — that is, the Great Book as understood in that era of great books. Great Book today means any work of fiction that sells, or has the potential to sell, at minimum, 50,000 copies in hardcover, and the threshold number for admission into that exalted category is fast rising.

So, what chance, then, my nice little small-niche murder mystery given numbers appropriately scaled down for its niche (genre) market? Not much as it turned out. And three agents tried peddling it, two of them first-rate, seasoned veterans. And what was the remark most heard against it by publishers? Too literary(!), which was, I'm certain, merely their more polite and dignified way of saying — their code for saying — no sex, car chases, shootouts, perverted acts, and things blowing up. Or to not put too fine a point on it, a slow-paced and boring read.

Well, I get it. I understand perfectly, and I can see their point.

In a pig's eye I can.

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* I'd read all the Holmes-Watson tales, of course, dozens of times. But that classic saga is something quite apart, and in substance and spirit not to be classed as belonging to the genre of the ordinary murder mystery.

Of Gods And Men

Of all the postmodern idiocies floated in today's culture perhaps the most idiot — and most pernicious — is the leveling mindset that insists on denying authorship of an artwork to the creator of that artwork. Expression of that mindset typically goes something along these lines (extracted from the blogosphere):

[T]here's little that peeves me as much as the determined hero-worshipping that seems so strong a part of the modernist/romantic ethos — all that titanic-genius, lone-creator crap.

A little reality, please. We all depend on inherited forms and techniques, as well as on the work of others; we all need a culture within which to operate; we all count on and learn from friends, family, spouses, teachers, audiences, partners, associates, etc. Nobody comes up with everything.

[...]

[Y]ou'd think that by now people would be comfortable with the idea that not all artworks are the product of a single individual. An extreme example: the temples at Angkor Wat, built by thousands of hands over many centuries.

[...]

[Why is it that some people are] devoted to viewing their favorite artists more as gods than as people?

All sounds perfectly rational and reasonable, doesn't it. I mean, who, for instance, could argue with the truth of what's stated in that second graf? Certainly not I. Problem is, it completely misses, and is in fact totally irrelevant to, the fundamental nature of creative genius, the very idea of which is repugnant, even anathema, to this leveling, ressentiment-laden (using the term in the Nietzschean sense), postmodern mindset. Genius — even transcendent genius — is but a Romantic myth, says that mindset; a myth that must be jettisoned along with our wonder and awe at, and devotion to, the proven deathless masterpieces of so-called genius (which term postmodernists almost unfailingly enclose within scare quotes) so that we may "progress" unhindered by the myth of the genius of their creators. It troubles that postmodern mindset not one iota that it's in manifest opposition to the clear witness of history

That witness tells us that, without exception, every genuinely great work of art is indisputably the product of the mind of a single, almost preternaturally gifted individual, Angkor Wat or, more pertinently, Chartres very much included, notwithstanding that "thousands of hands over many centuries [or, in the case of Chartres, many decades]" were responsible for turning the concept of that single individual — that unique creative genius — into stone-hard reality.

Citizen Kane, to use a more contemporary and closer to home example, involved the labor of dozens of talented craftsman to realize as a film. But without the ordering concept and vision of the creative genius of Orson Welles it would never have been the supreme work of cinematic art that it is, or even have existed at all. Ditto in spades the symphonies of Beethoven, or the plays of Shakespeare, or the music-dramas of Wagner. The examples are virtually inexhaustible, and the examples supporting the ressentiment-laden claims of the postmodernist levelers, nonexistent.

That "[w]e all depend on inherited forms and techniques, as well as on the work of others, [and] ...need a culture within which to operate" is indisputable. The difference is that, unlike the rest of us, the mind of the creative genius alone has the capacity to assimilate it all, and, godlike, transform it — transfigure would be the more apt term — into a new and transcendent reality; one capable of providing the rest of us with our only glimpse, however fleeting, of what we, for want of a better term, call the Divine.

"The very rich are different from you and me," said Hemingway famously. In no human domain is that more true than in the domain of the creative. The very rich — and very rare — in that domain are, of course, the creative geniuses, and they are as different from you and me as we are from a houseplant — or a god.

Get over it.

Firsthand Witness: Wagner Rehearsing the Ring

Late in 1872, four years before the first Bayreuth Festival, Richard Wagner wrote to longtime member of his inner circle Heinrich Porges,

I have you in mind for a task which will be of the greatest importance to the future of my enterprise [i.e., the Bayreuth Festival generally, and the first performance of Der Ring des Nibelungen specifically]. I want you to follow all my rehearsals very closely...and to note down everything I say, even the smallest detail, about the interpretation and performance of our [sic] work, so that a tradition goes down in writing.

The result was the book Die Bühnenproben zu den Bayreuther Festspielen des Jahres 1876 (The Stage Rehearsals for the Bayreuth Festival of 1876), which was first published in installments in the official Wagner journal, the Bayreuther Blätter (1881 and 1896), and the English translation of which (by Robert L. Jacobs) was first published in 1983 by Cambridge University Press under the title, Wagner Rehearsing the Ring (unhappily, now long out of print).

That Porges was thoroughly qualified to make such a record is beyond question. He was not only a long-time member of Wagner's inner circle, but an expert musician and music critic, a learned scholar, and intimately familiar with the score of the Ring. And as for trusting what he wrote, it goes without saying that before first publication (in the Blätter) every part of his work was vetted either by Wagner himself, or by the Blätter's editor, Wagner factotum Hans von Wolzogen.

I recently finished reading a copy of that Cambridge University Press translation (literally a copy; I spent an hour at the library Xeroxing the entire book as there was not available even so much as a single copy of the volume on the used book market), on which there here follow a few random thoughts and impressions.

My first random thought is that no conductor, no producer, no director, no singer, no scenic designer, no anyone ought to be permitted to have anything to do with a production of the Ring before first committing to memory and total understanding what Porges records in this book, and then swearing a sacred oath to never, on pain of horrid mutilation and death, depart from what's there written, remembering that what Porges recorded were Wagner's directions and insights on the Ring and its performance, not his own. I take special pleasure in saying this as everything I read in this book accords perfectly with my own independently arrived at views, and I'm not in the least above a little self-congratulatory backslapping and trumpeting on that count.

Some examples (this on the prelude to Das Rheingold, the Ring's first music-drama):

[A]n instruction given by Wagner for the performance of the main theme illustrates this difference between mere display of feeling and a truly artistic delivery [here Porges quotes the opening theme from the Rheingold prelude]. He wanted the high notes of the horns, especially the climactic G of the widely arched melody, to be played "very tenderly and with sustained softness", and this to apply to every subsequent repetition. The players must consciously counteract here the natural tendency to make a crescendo on a rising progression; only then will the figure have the desired quality of ideal freedom. Furthermore, sustained softness will serve to clarify the overlapping deliveries of the theme in the [opening] complicated passage for [the] eight horns.

Regarding the orchestral prelude as a whole, built on a single E flat major triad, Wagner insisted that its huge crescendo should throughout create the impression of a phenomenon of nature developing quite of its own accord — so to say, an impersonal impression. Nothing must be forced; there must be no sense of a conscious purpose imposing itself.

Wagner gave especial attention to the harmonic figurations of the strings' accompaniment to Woglinde's joyous song just after the rise of the curtain. They should be as pianissimo as possible. The unexpected conversion of a powerful crescendo into a piano† created the effect of a transformation of the waves of water into a single human figure...

†[Porges's footnote]: The device, frequently used by Beethoven, of a sudden pianissimo after a crescendo is of the utmost stylistic significance in that it can be regarded — so it seems to me — as a direct expression of that control of form over matter which Schiller held to be the supreme function of art.

[all emphases mine]

(Regarding my above bolded portions: The "sustained softness" and "subsequent repetitions" comments refer solely to the eight horns, which begin p (piano), and after bar 40 or so are all marked immer p (always piano) which remains in force for the entire prelude. The "huge crescendo" comment — i.e., huge in extent as the crescendo builds slowly from the very beginning of the prelude to its end, and builds almost solely as a consequence of Wagner's preternaturally brilliant orchestration even though that slowly-built, prelude-long crescendo is nowhere notated — refers to the orchestra overall, excluding the eight horns. The "conversion of a powerful crescendo into a piano" comment refers to the entire orchestra for the final seven bars of the prelude, and to the final bar opening onto Scene 1 in particular, where crescendi are actually notated.)*

As invaluable a record as this book is, however, one cannot shake the feeling that Porges has shortchanged posterity in recording but the tiniest fraction of what he could have recorded, thereby largely failing Wagner's mandate to "...follow all my rehearsals very closely...and...note down everything I say, even the smallest detail, about the interpretation and performance of our work, so that a tradition goes down in writing."

Porges's failure notwithstanding, this volume is the only systematic firsthand account we have of Wagner's own handling of the musical and dramatic performance sides of this monumental undertaking, and we ought to be grateful for even small such gifts. (There are other more or less desultory firsthand accounts of the first Bayreuth Festival by various members of the production team and cast from the perspective of their own specialties, but none of the systematic nature of Porges's effort.)

Porges's record was quite rightly written for working professionals — moreover, for working professionals already thoroughly familiar with the scores and texts of the Ring operas — and so what Porges records (with copious musical quotations) are Wagner's own directions which are supplement to the directions notated in the scores themselves, which scores are already more densely notated with musical direction than any other pre-20th-century score of my experience.

What strikes one most about Wagner's Porges-recorded directions is how often Wagner calls for subtle measure-by-measure (sometimes even note-by-note, and sometimes not-so-subtle) adjustments of the "main tempo," and even of the actual notated rhythm, in order to achieve the dramatic and psychological effects he desired. That's in perfect keeping with Wagner's perennial excoriation (as recorded in anecdotes, and in his writings) of those conductors he referred to as "quadrupeds," with their foursquare, slavishly "by the book (score)," realization of his scores.

One example from the book is particularly telling in this respect.

Porges records Wagner's handling of Siegfried's Trauermusik (funeral music) from Act III of Götterdämmerung, the fourth and final Ring music-drama, thus:

The unison passage [here Porges quotes the opening two measures of the Trauermusik proper] requires especial attention. By making a powerful crescendo and slightly altering the time-values of the rests to make them uneven, thereby bringing them alive, Wagner gave those two bars a quite extraordinary significance.... Regarding the performance of the funeral music — that unique heroic lament in the style of the ancient epics — Wagner gave no further directions. To a creation such as this, those words of Goethe, "If you do not feel it, never will you find it," are more than usually relevant.

Just so, and that intuitive "feel[ing] it" by conductors of what's hidden beneath and between, so to speak, what's written in the printed score is precisely what I've elsewhere and often characterized as their possessing the "Wagner Gene".

It was of some interest to me to note (as well as a source of some pride as it again confirms my thinking independently arrived at) that of the available recordings of the Ring with which I'm most familiar, it's clear that Solti has read Porges's record, and either committed to memory, or notated into his own copy of the score, everything said there, so perfectly does he follow Wagner's directives as recorded in this book, while Karajan, Böhm, and even, at times, Levine (whose Wagner readings are nothing if not meticulous) have either not read that record, or reading it, have largely ignored it or were otherwise incapable of incorporating its directives into their own realizations.

In summing up, I can't urge too strongly those with more than a passing or listener's interest in the Ring to somehow acquire a copy of this invaluable record, if for no reason other than to gain some small insight into the inner workings of the colossal musical and dramatic genius responsible for the creation of Der Ring des Nibelungen.

---

* Those wanting a fuller explanation of the dynamics of the prelude to Das Rheingold can read my detailed account here.

From The Inbox

This new weblog receives a volume of eMail disproportionate to the size of its present readership, a fair percentage of that eMail of the indignant or outraged poison-crayon sort. Every once in a rare while, however, an eMail arrives that's a pleasure to read if for nothing other than its thoughtful reflections and deep-felt passion, whether we agree or disagree, in whole or in part, with its substance. Such a one (in response to this post) is the following eMail from reader Tim Buck, which I here quote in full, and post without comment.

Like you, I reject the notion that a continuum extends from the great to the merely popular. It is, rather, the case of one being incommensurable with the other. A chasm separates the two. You have identified the side which contains greatness as having to do with transcendence, and I think more needs to be said; further inquiry into the nature of transcendence would be helpful. You spoke of an aspiration beyond "the quotidian world of experience," as opposed to "the here-and-now entertaining."

But what lies behind this aspiring [to] transcendence?

[Weblogger] George Hunka brought up Schopenhauer's aesthetic of World-as-Will, with the work of art an instance of numinous contact. Schopenhauer spoke of this instance as a kind of timeless state, where the artist and audience penetrate into an egoless thatness of the Will (perhaps the Tao?). Hunka states that this penetration can be an act of redemption. Maybe it is a way of escaping what Heidegger called "everydayness."

But I detect in your and Hunka's approach something that I would call metaphysical neutrality. To aspire merely to supersede the quotidian or to blend the phenomenal with the numinal, both seem to leave out what Unamuno wrote about in his book, The Tragic Sense of Life. I think the fuel driving the urge to transcend is angst, a prompting of the tragic. As consciously exemplified by van Gogh (or subconsciously manifested in the raving products of Adolf Wolfli), a deep-seated spiritual, existential dislocation is at the root of the transcending impulse, and the impetus for making and responding to great art.

Granted many great works seem to belie such an ethic of pathos, but I propose that even Bach’s Goldberg Variations or Schubert’s Trout Quintet, Corot’s landscapes or Monet’s gardens, Natasha’s dance in War and Peace or Mynheer Peeperkorn’s gestural and verbal idiosyncrasies in The Magic Mountain; even in these moments that are flush with naive joy, humor, and immanence, there is an undercurrent of the bittersweet; a subtle recognition of the distance between the human and the divine. In short, an unspoken acquiescence in the tragic.

Levinas approaches reality by discussing the Other. And I think that is what great art points to and is really about — making a clearing for the Other, for Otherness to be present. It marks out the antipodes of being, and in doing so brings to mind the fact of intrinsic alienation. Popular culture, on the other hand, is all about assimilation; about negating the Other. This populist leveling and negating of the Other is, I think, a collective, self-supporting cowardice, eschewing the tragic for a mobbish and blithe spiritual amnesia.

I think the tragic-transcendent state of mind is a rare one. It blooms naturally in whom it blooms. It can’t be taught. It’s a condition of the soul. The relation of the existential to the foundational can’t be presented in didactic formulation nor impressed upon another via hierarchical manifestos. It simply grows organically through slow, spiritual accretion, or it doesn’t come at all. It is composed of a web of experience and exposure: awakening to injustice, to the holiness of melancholy, to intuitions and intimations of divinity lurking behind the prosaic feints of Nature.

You mentioned in a different post how we might influence things for the better by exposing children to and blanketing them with classical music at an early age. I really don’t think that would do much good, not unless a web of connections were also woven into the project — art, literature, philosophy, etc. — an encompassing web of greatness with its deep impressions and implications of the tragic. But, really, how does one teach angst?

In our vulgar culture, things have gone too far. There is no hope for a systematic engendering of the transcendent impulse. A rare few [who possess it] will always [manifest themselves] because a rare few have always been infected by "the sickness unto death."

On a closing note, I’ve always wondered about the relation between great art and authoritarianism. An equalitarian society seems unlikely to produce anything of excellence, whereas in more constricted environments many great artists emerged. My instinct is to discount any positive relation; that we should promote kingly or priestly rulers over the many in order that great art might appear. But maybe there is a negative relation: being under the thumb of those who are profligate in their immanent banality might inspire a transcendent reaction in the artist to become the true arbiter of reality. A kind of artistic resentment. Perhaps our present degraded culture with its increasingly semblance-only democratic institutions will light future fires of tragic, resenting reaction in one or a few angst-ridden artists, composers, or writers, with [the result that] works of great art [will] once again [begin] filtering into a questionable world.

Mysteries Of The Universe, Part I

I don't think it inordinately immodest of me to say I'm a fairly bright guy. So how come on those rare occasions when I'm forced to deal with things involving physical labor I morph into a moron? And not your regular old garden variety moron either, but one prone to multiple wounding accidents.

My new bookcase arrived a little while ago. It has to be assembled (surprise!). I look at the instructions — which, mercifully, are straightforward, clearly printed and with illustrations, and written in passably coherent English — and see immediately that the design of the bookcase is so clever that anyone with the IQ of a rabbit could put the thing together in less than half an hour, and with little more than a moment's thought. There is, however, one thing those clever designers of this cleverly designed bookcase haven't anticipated.

Me.

I begin by preparing the various pieces for assembly, and note they're really heavy. Six three-foot by one-foot by one-inch thick particle board shelves with woodgrained veneer both sides and front edge. Ditto the two six-foot by one-foot by one-inch thick side panels. I don't like the weight of them. Not while I have to work with them, that is.

Putting this misgiving aside, I next start screwing the 12 so-named cam bolts into the 12 thoughtfully pre-drilled holes in the side panels. Piece of cake. When I finish, I proudly survey my handiwork. The work part is just dandy. The hand part, however, isn't. In wielding that lethal weapon, cunningly benignly named a Phillips screwdriver, I've managed to tear a round, quarter-sized strip of skin right off the palm of my hand in the process of applying pressure to the instrument's handle.

This is a less than salutary omen.

After surveying the damage, I wash and bandage the wound. Hurts like hell, but John Wayne-like, I courageously soldier on.

Next, I go about inserting the 12 cams into their 12 pre-drilled holes in the three fixed shelves (bottom, middle, and top). This requires no tools except, at times, a light tap with the butt end of the handle of the aforementioned lethal weapon. I complete the operation, and escape unscathed and proud as punch at how neatly I've accomplished the job.

Now comes the fitting of the cam bolts into the cams. I position all the pieces — the three fixed shelves and two side panels — in their proper alignment by the slick expedient of balancing them on their edges against various pieces of furniture which I've moved and pressed into service for the duration. I then proceed to go about inserting the cam bolts of the side panels into the cams of the shelves, a maneuver vaguely akin to the aloft refueling of a fighter jet by a flying tanker.

Instant catastrophe. All the nicely edge-balanced pieces clatter hard and noisily to the floor, one of the side panels smashing down on my stockinged foot, right on that top part the name of which at present escapes me, but the pain of which when struck doesn't.

Nursing my wounded and fast-swelling foot, I commence hurling manifold curses at the offending piece and all its brethren, and continue the litany of curses until it strikes me that I'm hurling curses at insensate objects, at which point I decide it's time for a break.

A cigarette and two scotches later, I'm stoked for battle. I reposition all the pieces, confident now I've got their number, and know just how to deal with them. And — mirabile dictu! — all the cam bolts slide into their respective cams neat as can be, and without so much as a whimper. I give each cam the required half-turn necessary to lock it, and, Voila!, a structure resembling a bookcase emerges.

Only something about it doesn't look quite right. Seems one of the side panels, behind my back and out of my sight, has managed to turn its rear, unfinished edge forward.

Bloody side panel! Not only did it get me again, but there it sits, pert as you please, mocking me.

I, however, remain perfectly cool. I'm not going to give it the satisfaction. I patiently unlock all the cams on that side, flip the side panel right way round, reinsert the cam bolts, and relock the cams.

Now everything looks right.

Almost.

I check the illustration of the finished bookcase.

The kick panel, the bloody kick panel! I forgot to insert the bloody kick panel at the bloody bottom of the bloody bookcase! And, no, it can't just be sort of slid in. The whole bloody bookcase has to come apart, the bloody kick panel inserted with its bloody dowels positioned to fit into the bloody pre-drilled holes in the bloody side panels, and the whole bloody thing again put together.

I begin to get the sinking feeling it's not merely the battle I'm losing here, but the whole damn war. Like Monty Python's Black Knight, however, I refuse to admit defeat. With a stoicism that would have done Zeno proud, I patiently and methodically unlock all the cams, pull apart all the pieces, insert the kick panel with its dowels in place, reassemble the whole thing, and again lock all the cams.

Now I've got this puppy right.

Not in this life. With the kick panel in place, I can now see at a glance which end of the bookcase is the bottom. It would have been better had I seen that before I positioned the shelves. As it is, I've positioned them with the cam side facing up, and the cams plainly visible in all their not-intended-to-be-seen glory.

You of course know what that means. Right. Everything has to come apart again, the shelves flipped right way round, and the whole thing again reassembled.

About this time I'm thinking some yogic breathing exercises would be just the ticket.

No help. Should have paid more attention back in the '60s. All I can manage now is a bout of seriously involuntary hyperventilation, and make a dash for the kitchen to locate a paper bag to breath into. I find one, and five minutes later I'm again breathing normally, and again set about doing the drill I've by now learned so well I could do it while asleep. After another ten minutes I'm done, and the bookcase completed.

Except for the back.

This, it turns out, is a thin sheet of black Masonite, finished on one side — the side intended to face in — with a woodgrain pattern to match the rest of the bookcase. The sheet gets nailed to the rear edges of the side panels and fixed shelves with about ten gazillion itty bitty nails. Nails, of course, require a hammer, an instrument of truly prodigious lethal possibility. But I'm determined and obdurate. I will use the hammer, and I will make it submit docilely to my need and purpose.

Uh-huh. Of course I will.

What's that? Which digit was it? The crucial one, of course. The ol' opposable thumb. It, too, now hurts like hell, but I think the thumbnail will eventually grow back good as new.

Or so I've been told.

At day's end, however, though I'm bruised and broken, I'm not beaten, for there proudly stands my new bookcase in its assigned place against my living room wall, doing easily and without complaint what respectable bookcases have done for ages. So what if the back panel facing me is black instead of woodgrained. No-one would notice anything amiss except you and I, and I, for one, am determined to maintain silence on the matter.

Christopher Alexander: Another View

Some time ago, I read a passionately enthusiastic encomium of A Pattern Language, a best-selling 1977 book on architectural design by architectural theorist Christopher Alexander. I've not read the book, but one thing makes its worth instantly suspect: The book was (and apparently is still) a best-seller; "among the most widely read architectural books of all time." That the book was (is) a best-seller makes its worth instantly suspect because, well, it's a best-seller. Best-seller means mass-market acceptance, and we all know what that means: Populist gibberish, more likely than not.

Reading the at-length overview of Alexander's ideas in the balanced and fair-minded article written by Wendy Kohn for The Wilson Quarterly amply confirms that suspicion.

[Alexander's] fame rests on A Pattern Language — a book that appeared 25 years ago—and a stream of subsequent writings. Translated into six languages and often one of the 1,000 top-selling titles on Amazon.com, A Pattern Language is among the most widely read architectural books of all time, and is commonly called a design "bible." When it appeared in 1977, Architectural Design magazine [not an architectural journal] declared that "every library, every school, every environmental action group, every architect, and every first-year student should have a copy." Today, it has legions of devotees, some of whom simply value its practical advice, while others savor its New Age speculations. The enthusiasts include yuppies fixing up their country houses in Vermont, gray-haired do-it-yourselfers in comfortable shoes, and ponytailed counterculturalists. Real-estate agents proudly present copies to their clients once the deal is done and renovations are about to begin.

[...]

In 253 individual lessons, or "patterns," A Pattern Language shows how to weave together a "language" of patterns to form everything from window seats to cities in ways that satisfy the human need for functionality and beauty. It breaks places down into component parts, such as fronts and backs, stairs and floors and windowsills, or roads and parking lots and stores. It then describes how to make a good rendition of each particular part and how to assemble the parts into a whole. The text speaks directly to "you," in plain language, about where closets should go in your house (between rooms, on interior walls) and where sports facilities should go in your town (scattered throughout, easily visible from the street). It's a book of architectural recipes.

Uh-huh. Got it. Architecture by Lego™ — architecture Of The People, For The People, By The People.

And then there's this from Alexander himself:

It [Alexander's way of building, called by him, and the title of one of his popular books, The Timeless Way of Building] is so powerful and fundamental that with its help you can make any building in the world as beautiful as any place that you have ever seen.

It is so powerful, that with its help hundreds of people together can create a town, which is alive and vibrant, peaceful and relaxed, a town as beautiful as any town in history.

Without the help of architects or planners, if you are working in the timeless way, the idea is that a town will grow under your hands, as naturally as the flowers in your garden.

There you have it. We don't need no steenkin architects. And no steenkin artists, either. We're all architects and artists, we just don't realize it — that is, unless we let Alexander show us the way.

Manifestly, what one is dealing with here is a superannuated relic from the Utopian, quasi-Marxist, rabidly (and hypocritically) equalitarian Age of Aquarius, complete with "mystic crystal revelation, and the mind's true liberation," as the '60s hit song had it.

In short, as I'd already intuited, a panderer of New Age populist gibberish.

Want to see what results when putting Alexander's "timeless way of building" into practice?

Here y'go (this one in California):

What's that you say? Looks like something European from a few hundred years ago?

Au contraire. Timeless is the word you're looking for.

If that's not enough for you, there's more, and even worse, of this cozily familiar retro stuff. Just take a look here.

And if one has any doubts concerning Alexander's '60s demagogic cum fascist proclivities and provenance, one has only to read this by Ms. Kohn:

It comes as no surprise [to learn from Alexander's friends, acquaintances, and I daresay, enemies] that Alexander is not tolerant of others' ideas. He has a reputation for fits of anger, showers of insults, and storming from rooms when opposed.

and this from one of Alexander's former students:

"Chris's answer to my doubts about The Timeless Way of Building was to say 'Find out your psychological problem that prevents you from agreeing.' His technique is to attack one's motivation for questioning."

to dissolve any doubts.

What's that? Where did Alexander teach?

Why, at the University of California, Berkeley.

Imagine that. Who woulda guessed.

Not uninterestingly, after reading some dozens of reader comments on Amazon.com concerning the two above mentioned books by Alexander, I discovered that some of the books' biggest fans are not those looking to build a house, but designers of computer software.

Sounds crazy, yes?

Well, no, actually. Wendy Kohn made note of the fact in her above referenced piece, and after Googling a fair number of articles describing the sorts of design problems and their solutions dealt with in these books (and do keep in mind, please, I've read neither book), and as a one-time dabbler in object-oriented programming, it very much sounds to me not so crazy. It would seem rules that result in the sort of retro-design houses Alexander trumpets on his website are nevertheless capable of producing superior software code.

There's a lesson to be learned there somewhere, but I can't quite put my finger on just what it may be.

Finally, it might be asked how I can make critical comment as I have in this post without ever having read Alexander's two books.

About like this:

I once publicly savaged a new production of Wagner's Parsifal by declaring it a "grotesque perversion," and suggested the Konzept director be very slowly boiled in oil, then drawn and quartered (also slowly) for perpetrating such an outrage on a paying public. I stated clearly and up front that I hadn't seen the production, but had relied merely on a description of its physical features (mise en scène, costuming, stage action, etc.), act by act, from several sources that could be trusted to straightforwardly report what they'd seen in reliable physical detail. I was, of course, immediately accused of blowing hot air (to phrase it genteelly).

My answer to my accusers was that one does not have to actually attend a production of Parsifal where the Grail Knights are clothed in WWI uniforms, celebrate the third act ritual of the unveiling of the grail in a 20th-century railroad shed complete with steel tracks and a choo-choo train cum steam locomotive, and where, at opera's end, Parsifal walks off along those tracks out of the shed and into the sunrise hand in hand with Kundry, to know with absolute certainty that the production was precisely as I had declared it sight unseen.

Similarly with Alexander's two books. No matter how valuable and on-target — even surpassingly brilliant — his design principles may be per se, his categorical assertion that utilization of those principles cannot do less than produce a genuinely beautiful piece of architecture, and his further assertion — nay, insistence — that those principles in the hands of ordinary people is a viable alternative — is in fact preferable — to the design work of gifted architects, is nothing other than what I declared it text unread: New Age populist gibberish. And I need know nothing more about his design principles to know that with absolute certainty.

Had Alexander instead suggested, for instance, that gifted architects might benefit in terms of, say, clearer aesthetic vision and / or efficiency in developing their designs by use of his principles, that would have been something quite different, and would not have called forth so much as a word from me pro or con without my first having made a detailed study of those principles, and perhaps not even then, depending on how well I understood them and could relate them to contemporary architectural practice.

See now how that works?

Clear And Present Danger

Consider, please, the following observation:

The mark of a cultural highbrow nowadays is a cheerful readiness to embrace the lowbrow. In these playful, perverse, postmodern times, no one wants to be branded an elitist, especially the elites. There isn't a junior professor of cultural studies who doesn't dream of twitting his stodgy elders by showing that Madonna ranks with Mozart or that ''Star Wars'' is an improvement on Wagner's ''Ring'' cycle.

—from a New York Times book review by Walter Kirn of Stephen King's new "literary" opus, Everything's Eventual.

That's as neat an epitome of our present cultural environment as you're ever likely to read. Is it any wonder, for instance, that today classical music radio, and the classical music recording industry are all but moribund? That National Public Radio — that thirty-years-old bastion of high-grade programming presumed free from the strictures and pressures of ratings and money-grubbing commerce — has, for the express purpose of attracting more listeners and thereby increasing donations, recently made the decision to dump a major portion of its cultural programming in favor of more news, news-talk, and expanded coverage of the pop culture scene? That the previously high-minded, uniquely informative, and at times fairly lofty Sunday Arts & Leisure section of The New York Times, our national "Newspaper of Record", two years ago forced out its erudite editor, John Rockwell — who despite his wrongheaded and lamentable devotion to the concept of the equality of importance of high and pop culture nevertheless possesses refined tastes in the arts, and so maintained the section's high-minded quality even while including selected coverage of pop-cultural events — in a shakeup that saw him replaced by someone (John Darnton) of considerably lesser erudition who was devoted to even greater and wider coverage of the pop-culture world?

No, no wonder at all. The rampantly promiscuous equalitarianism, and ferociously adamant populism so insidiously infecting every domain of our culture today looks on such developments as a Good Thing; a movement in the proper and necessary direction, and long overdue. Like the first narcotic rush of a powerful opiate, it feels so surpassingly right, good, true, and pleasurable that its ultimately poisonous effects are unthought of, unseen, even unimagined.

We're all in the deepest sort of trouble, and seemingly unconscious of the corrupting danger that threatens not merely from all sides, but from deep within our intellectual and spiritual selves; a danger that if unchecked will eventually overwhelm all that's lastingly valuable and nourishing in our cultural life, the resulting ineluctable impoverishment of which will sound finally the death knell even of the very ground of our present civilization.

Overwrought? Alarmist? Would that it were so. When we today have two generations of young (and now no-longer-quite-so-young) people who are all but totally ignorant of the great music and literature that for centuries past have nourished and informed our intellectual and spiritual lives; generations who imagine that pop and rock music; fantasy, sci-fi, and other genre novels, and even Spiderman comic books are what culture is all about — a notion that today is actually given academic imprimatur at the university level, and afforded sanction, even encouraged, by our critical and cultural elite — you may be certain there's much about which to be alarmed. It's not that such pop-culture artifacts are in themselves harmful or evil, but rather that they're a danger when elevated to a level in the hierarchy of things cultural to which, by any sober and informed reckoning, they've substantively and aesthetically no rightful or justifiable claim.

An elitist view, you say, and undemocratic. Why, yes. It's indeed both. But so-called high culture (to distinguish it from the popular sort) has always been elitist and undemocratic, and can be nothing other. There's just no getting around it. Great Art in all its forms is, and has always been, an elitist and undemocratic enterprise, not by design but by nature. To condemn it on those grounds is as inapt and mindless as to condemn, say, Julia Roberts (or you-pick-the-beauty) for being fabulously beautiful when, overwhelmingly, most others are not.

And so having declared the problem, what, then, is the solution? I can suggest only a beginning, and that is a return to the cultural sanity that existed prior to the grotesque populist cultural upheaval that began in the mid-1960s as an adjunct to that era's then needful if excessive political upheaval.

But that return can begin only when our genuine cultural and intellectual elite — i.e., those who by native intellect, education, and experience know the Real Deal and its what-for — drop their currently fashionable pose of being champions of the common, and again start telling it as it really is rather than as the common man wants it to be, and perhaps even as the elite themselves wish it were.

As I say, it's only a beginning, but as with all journeys a first step must be taken if the journey is to be embarked upon at all.

Loomings

Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul...then I account it high time to get to sea....

So Ishmael. More prosaic, I, at the first damp and drizzly November day of each year, account it high time to plunge once more into the pages of Melville's enduring masterpiece, there for a time to sweetly perish deep sunk in its overrich language, crowded detail and incident, and mystic, metaphysical loomings, as would Tashtego, falling head first into the great Heidelburgh Tun of a beheaded sperm whale, have sweetly perished deep sunk in its sweetly fragrant spermaceti but for the circumstance of that leviathan's capacious case having been almost completely baled of its unctuous contents.

Melville's epic yarn of crazy old Ahab's monomaniacal, God-and-Heaven-challenging quest for vengeance against the inscrutable but reasoning thing behind the pasteboard mask of the visible object that was its agent, which visible object was Moby Dick, never fails to engage and enthrall no matter how many times revisited. Most now will aver, as do I, that if there be such a thing as The Great American Novel, Moby-Dick is hands down it, pace Mr. Twain and his Huckleberry.

How, then, to explain the prominent coming on stage of that quintessential American tale that most strikingly un-American, un-Christian, "muffled mystery," Fedallah? And how to explain the quintessentially American Ahab's singular, trusting, and dependent intimacy with him?

Stubb, "wise Stubb," seems all but convinced that Fedallah is the very Devil himself in disguise, with his tail tucked up and coiled away in his pocket so as not to give himself away, and there on board the Pequod to conduct a bargain with mad Ahab concerning the finding and killing of the White Whale. Most modern views agree with Stubb's assessment, preferring, however, to explain Fedallah in less literal, more symbolic terms as a representation of the demonic in the world.

But, surely, that's not entirely sufficient as explanation as Fedallah would then be but a mere superfluity in the context of the tale as one need do nothing more than clap an eye on crazy old Ahab for a surfeit of the demonic enough for several worlds.

Good and necessary reason there must be, however, for the prominent place given this sinister, un-American character in this most American of tales. Nothing in Moby-Dick is there without good and necessary reason, and Fedallah no exception.

Melville himself, through Ishmael, is not parsimonious with his clues touching this spectral Parsee, two of which pretty much give it to us outright:

• Meantime, Fedallah was calmly eyeing the right whale's head, and ever and anon glancing from the deep wrinkles there to the lines in his own hand. And Ahab chanced so to stand, that the Parsee occupied his shadow; while, if the Parsee's shadow was there at all it seemed only to blend with, and lengthen Ahab's.

• But though his [Ahab's] whole life was now become one watch on deck; and though the Parsee's mystic watch was without intermission as his own; yet these two never seemed to speak - one man to the other - unless at long intervals some passing unmomentous matter made it necessary. Though such a potent spell seemed secretly to join the twain; openly, and to the awe-struck crew, they seemed pole-like asunder. If by day they chanced to speak one word; by night, dumb men were both, so far as concerned the slightest verbal interchange. At times, for longest hours, without a single hail, they stood far parted in the starlight; Ahab in his scuttle, the Parsee by the mainmast; but still fixedly gazing upon each other; as if in the Parsee Ahab saw his forethrown shadow, in Ahab the Parsee his abandoned substance.

Just so. Fedallah as Ahab's inmost spirit and animating principle, and Ahab as Fedallah's American avatar. What need has Ahab to speak aloud in words to his inmost spirit and animating principle, or it with its American incarnation?

No need. None at all.

Melville puts Fedallah aboard the Pequod not for the tale's benefit, but for ours, by making flesh in the Parsee's unsavory presence that sinister, un-American spirit — that "cruel, remorseless emperor ... that against all natural lovings and longings ... recklessly [makes one] ready to do what in [his] own proper, natural heart [he] durst not so much as dare" — the better for us to grasp and understand just how coolly and unconcernedly it drives mad and consigns to perdition all whom it possesses.

Possessed by such a horror, wonder ye, then, at mad Ahab's anguished cry, "Is Ahab, Ahab?" And would ye not cry as much thyself for thyself were thee so possessed?

HIP — Or Not

(Note: This post has been edited for clarity as of 5:45 PM Eastern on 27 Jul.)

Along with a host of changes political and cultural, the early 1960s brought with it an increased interest in, and performance of, so-called "early music," a term referring originally to music of the Baroque period (c. about 1600-1750) and before, which was later extended to include music written during the Classical period (c. beginning around 1750 or thereabouts, and extending into the first quarter of the 19th century). With this new interest there arose simultaneously a movement dedicated to performing this music as it was performed at the time of its creation utilizing instruments of the period or modern copies thereof as well as performance styles and practices declared period-appropriate.

The movement first went under the inoffensive name of Early Music Movement which name, however, soon morphed into the decidedly offensive designation, Authentic Performance Movement, thereby implying, of course, that performances of early music not in conformance with the movement's tenets were, by very definition, inauthentic. When referring to this movement its critics quickly took to enclosing the term authentic in scare quotes, and so the battle lines were drawn and the battle begun; one which continues up to this very day, albeit with less acrimony and a softening of both sides, the movement now self-defensively going under the cleverly devised stealth name of Historically Informed Performance (HIP, get it?), a perfectly innocuous because meaningless title as it's applicable to all responsible performance of music of any and all non-contemporary periods.

Most insufferable about the HIP movement, as with all such movements in any domain whatsoever, are its True Believers in that such always insist on unwavering adherence to the movement's tenets; consider the movement, themselves, and the movement's followers and supporters morally superior entities; and count as reprobates and cultural barbarians all who reject or register objection to the movement's doctrinaire tenets and agenda.

Informed objection to the tenets and agenda of the HIP movement are manifold, and run along lines aesthetic as well as specifically musical. Chief among the informed objections is the objection that no amount of scholarly research, no matter how thorough, can result in authentically reproducing performance conditions today that are the equivalent of earlier periods, not the least difficulty being the utter impossibility of reproducing a period-authentic audience. There's also the lesser, but still potent, objection that the available historical evidence is always fragmentary and therefore modern-day performance based on this evidence always involves modern-day musical and intellectual imaginations and sensibilities, a further — and insurmountable — bar to genuine period-authentic performance. And then there are those objections grounded in the question of whether, in the first place, it's even desirable to strive to attain a period-authentic performance.

For my part, I'm among those music-lovers who, in agreement with many performing musicians, believe profoundly in the idea that every piece of music is an individual work of art (i.e., an individual-created aesthetic work, good or bad) that possesses an inherent aesthetic and musical nature more or less readily discoverable absent any knowledge of, and independent of, period performance practices or the social and cultural milieu existing at the time of the work's creation. And while, that belief notwithstanding, I've a certain sympathy with certain HIP objectives, I find certain of its motives as well as performances done in compliance with its doctrinaire tenets largely suspect.

My initial encounter with a HIP-style performance was the first-ever "authentic" performance of Messiah recorded for a major record label. It was done for RCA Victor in the mid-1960s by Robert Shaw with the Robert Shaw Choral (the names of the soloists and the orchestra elude me at the moment). The performance was breathtaking technically, but thoroughly bloodless musically and emotionally. As things developed over succeeding years, it almost seemed that this provided something of a template for much HIP-compliant early music performance, and that raises certain troubling questions.

Such as, Why, for major instance, are doctrinaire HIP readings almost always done at tempi significantly faster than is the norm for modern-day mainstream readings of the same works, especially in light of the fact that the scores for music of the Baroque period and earlier include no tempi indications of any kind? And intimately connected, Why are doctrinaire HIP readings so markedly absent the expressivity and nuance characteristic of modern-day mainstream readings of earlier music? Surely it can't be the case that scholarly research has uncovered the astonishing fact that all period early-music performance was uniformly arid emotionally, or that human emotion and response to music then was of a markedly different character from now. The very idea is manifestly absurd. Further, the typically breakneck tempi of a doctrinaire HIP reading suggests that performance groups of earlier periods were technically of the sort that could handle routinely and adeptly such breakneck tempi when all the best evidence suggests that the typical performance group of earlier periods was largely inferior technically compared with the technical proficiency of today's typical performance group. (I pass over as too ridiculous for consideration in the original period performance the well-known performance "trick" that music played over-fast covers up a multitude of performance inadequacies vis-à-vis the music itself.) Additionally, doctrinaire HIP tempi seem to fly in the face of the fact that instruments of earlier periods were much less easy for hands, fingers, and lips to negotiate securely and accurately at speed than their present-day descendants.

Clearly, there's a decided stink in the air concerning this business.

So, is there good and plausible justification and explanation for this seemingly historically insupportable doctrinaire HIP practice of breakneck tempi cum emotionally arid performance? Well, I can think of one, much as I wish it weren't so plausible: a commercial and ideological staking out of turf. For an audience, nothing segregates a HIP performance more quickly and more surely from its mainstream competition than those breakneck tempi cum emotionally arid readings. And nothing could be a more clear and forceful rebuke of the mainstream "Romantic tendencies" so reviled by the HIP ideological cognoscenti.

Two hits for the price of one, so to speak.

Cynical, you say? Well, perhaps. But if there exists a less-cynical, equally good and plausible justification and explanation for this doctrinaire HIP practice that seemingly hypocritically and ignobly flies in the face of the historical evidence, I'd like to know what it might be. I, for one, can think of none except, perhaps, that such readings conform to and suit our 21st-century musical sensibilities rather or more than the musical sensibilities of the periods to which HIP performances purport to be true. That, at least, has the virtue of being an honest justification.

---

UPDATE: Classical music critic Jessica Duchen comments.

I Saw The World End

On and off over the past few months, I've been reading Deryck Cooke's I Saw The World End (the title is taken from a line in an ultimately rejected closing scene of Götterdämmerung), an unfinished study of Wagner's great tetralogy, Der Ring des Nibelungen, Cooke's untimely death in 1976 preventing its completion. The book was first published in 1979, and my coming to it so late is the consequence of my ordinary practice of never reading any analysis of an artwork until I've worked things out for myself to the fullest I'm able as only then can I be certain that my ideas were formed by a study of the artwork itself, and not by sources after the fact and external to it.

And a good thing I followed my ordinary practice in this case as Cooke, an incisive and perceptive Wagner scholar and first-rate musicologist, is almost irresistibly persuasive. In this volume — which volume deals only with the texts of the first two music-dramas of the Ring (Das Rheingold and Die Walküre), Cooke's death preventing analysis of the texts of the remaining two and a planned but not-started second volume to have dealt with the music of the entire tetralogy — Cooke examines the sources consulted by Wagner in his construction of the texts for these two music-dramas, and demonstrates through truly encyclopedic scholarly research and informed conjecture how Wagner condensed, altered, conflated, and shaped the wealth of mostly mythological material at his disposal into a unique entity of his own invention, creating, in the process, a living mythology of his own making (that last contention mine, not Cooke's); an astonishing feat never before or since equaled. What is to me dismaying, however, is Cooke's categorical conclusion from his researches that

The central reality that [Das Rheingold] is concerned with...is the social and political history of mankind.

and that Das Rheingold,

...was intended as, and stands as, an allegory of the social and political world we live in...; and is nothing else.

That idea is, of course, nothing new. Wagner himself, in his first prose sketches for Das Rheingold, was of much the same mind (his thinking was altered radically by the time he came to write the first music for the Ring). And George Bernard Shaw, in his witty, tendentious, and ultimately silly reading of the Ring — the thinly veiled socialist tract, The Perfect Wagnerite — came to pretty much the same conclusion.

Can Das Rheingold be read at that level? It can indeed. As Cooke himself says, "one can in fact interpret [Das Rheingold] as symbolizing practically anything one likes...." But an interpretation at that level is a relatively trivial and earthbound one, and the music — wherein resides the essential core of the drama in all Wagner's music-dramas — argues against such an interpretation, or against such an interpretation being anything more than an interesting if trivial aside or sidelight.

Anyone proposing seriously to put forward such an interpretation of Das Rheingold's "central reality" has to contend with two extraordinary episodes in the music-drama that give substantive lie to such an interpretation: the orchestral prelude to Das Rheingold, and the "tremendous, breathtaking surprise," of the "most unexpected of all the unexpected events in the Ring," as Cooke himself put it: the mystical and foreboding rising in Scene 4 of Das Rheingold of she who "know[s] whatever was, whatever is, [and] whatever shall be"; the primordial earth-goddess, Erda.

Erda rises to warn Wotan, in ominous words and to compellingly ominous music to match, to give up Alberich's ring (which Wotan has just stolen from the hapless Nibelung), and flee its curse, presumably the curse placed upon it by Alberich. But that's not what Erda really means as Wotan will discover later, and about which we'll learn from his great Act II monologue in Die Walküre.

Why would Erda, the very incarnation of Nature itself — a pervasive power in the world of the Ring — rise to involve herself in the affairs of gods and men if what was concerned were merely their social and political machinations and development, both of which are the quotidian concerns of gods and men exclusively? The manifest and inarguable answer is: she wouldn't. The very idea is absurd. It's something far more dire that provokes Erda into making her extraordinary and never before made appearance to the gods. Alberich, as a condition for being empowered to forge the gold of the Rhine into the ring of unlimited power, was first required to transgress Nature's most sacred and fundamental law by cursing and foreswearing love forever. That cursing and foreswearing is the Ring's "Original Sin", so to speak, and that primal sin is reified and made palpable in the ring Alberich has forged. Were the corrupt and evil power entailed by its forging permitted to pass into the world, the world's end, along with the gods', would be the ineluctable consequence, and it's this and nothing else that provokes Erda to make her extraordinary appearance.

Hear me! Hear me! Hear me!
All that is shall come to an end.
A dark day dawns for the gods.
I charge you: Shun the ring!

And then there's the astonishing prelude to Das Rheingold, with its clear intimations of First Creation, and its establishing of the vast, cosmic time scale not only of Das Rheingold, but of the entire tetralogy. Why a prelude so cosmically portentous to a drama whose "central reality" is concerned merely with the essentially quotidian and earthbound "social and political history of mankind"? Again, the very idea is thoroughly and patently absurd as Wagner himself came to realize when setting pen to paper to write the prelude to Das Rheingold, the first music written for the Ring.

One cannot help but conclude that Cooke, by his extensive researches into the biographical background of, and sources for, the Ring, has been led astray by that which is extrinsic to the artwork itself. I've previously, here and elsewhere, more than once declared that all genuine works of art, and most particularly those works of art which are the products of authentic genius, are totally self-contained entities, and require nothing extrinsic to themselves to be understood, all that's required for such understanding being contained within the artworks themselves. Cooke, it would seem — even Cooke, who in matters Wagnerian I know knew better — was simply besotted with his scholarly researches, and so permitted the merely extrinsic to distort his understanding of that which is expressive of all that's central, and of what essentially matters and has real meaning where a genuine work of art is concerned: the voice of the completed artwork itself.

A caution for arts scholars everywhere, and in every domain of art.