Sounds & Fury

We Surrender (Administrative Note)

We can't continue to fight the good fight any longer; the fight against the use of the grubby and singularly ugly pop terms, blog, blogging, and blogger, by using instead their original forms: weblog, weblogging, and weblogger. The use of the pop form of those terms in all media is now so pervasive that one can succeed only in appearing hopelessly antique or reactionary, and even risk being misunderstood, by an insistence on using the original form of those terms. So, from this date forward, we'll be referring to blogs, blogging, and bloggers on this webl ...., er, blog (Lord!, that hurt!). No point playing Don Quixote any longer in this matter.

Score another win for pop culture.

Oh Dear

Weblogger Kelly Sedinger of Byzantium's Shores didn't much appreciate this barb of mine (and I'm certain he's not alone):

This may be the most clueless thing ACD has ever posted. Rather than actually address the suggestion that Greg Sandow is making, he instead goes for the cheap-shot insult.

[...]

[ACD] decides to make fun of the Entertainment Weekly readership, as if Sandow is suggesting that classical music needs to appeal to that crowd or some such thing.

[...]

As near as I can tell, ACD simply skimmed Sandow's post, saw the words "Entertainment Weekly", and fired off his post without devoting one more second of thought to it than that.

Oh dear.

I in fact singled out that specific remark of Greg Sandow's for skewering because it's both typical and emblematic of the gone-berserk equalitarianism that animates Mr. Sandow's and his kind's solution to the getting-a-wider-audience problem they see facing classical music today; a solution that embraces the thinking that a new audience for classical music can be created from the ignorant masses if only classical music would adopt the methods and techniques of popular culture to make classical music easier to understand and more inviting for them.

Quite apart from the sheer lunacy of that sort of thinking, at its bottom lurks the even more lunatic notion that classical music's present core audience is essentially no different in cultural substance and native proclivities than the core audience for, say, rock music, or C&W, or you-name-the-pop-music-genre, and, worse, that classical music itself is not inherently of any more value and worth than the music of any pop genre; a notion not only lunatic, but perfectly idiot.

Were it merely that the thinking and its at-bottom notion were lunatic there would be little problem. Lunatic thinking and ideas have always been legion. The problem arises when the Greg Sandows of this world agitate for, and become activists in putting that lunatic thinking into actual practice. Witness, for exemplary instance, the Concert Companion as it was conceived, and as it's being implemented today (this prior post of mine suggests an actual beneficial use to which the device could be put).

Were the thinking of Mr. Sandow and his like-minded colleagues and sympathizers in this matter to gain real currency to any meaningful degree in our culture, it would serve only to blunt and blur essential and inherent aesthetic distinctions and sensibilities, and diminish and cheapen that which is unique to, and distinguishing in both the classical and pop realms.

But, then, the destruction of all hierarchies, both natural and culturally determined, is the real aim of all levelers, is it not.

Extensions To The Mozart Effect

This little list should put a smile on your face.

And You Wonder Why Classical Music Is In Trouble

(Note: This post has been updated (1) as of 11:18 PM Eastern on 27 Apr. See below.)

From professional music critic, content provider for, and champion of the horror known as the Concert Companion, and teacher at Julliard, Greg Sandow:

But I ... remember what Entertainment Weekly was like, when I worked there first as music critic, and then as senior music editor. Their readers just loved to read about what went on behind the scenes in movies, TV, and pop music. I can't understand why classical music fans should be any different — especially since these backstage things often explain the musical choices that classical music organizations make.

See? Classical music fans should be no different from the celebrity- and celebrity-gossip-besotted morons who read publications like Entertainment Weekly.

With friends like this, classical music needs no enemies.

---

Update (11:18 PM Eastern on 27 Apr): See here for comment on the above, and my response.

Would You Buy An Opera DVD From This Man?

Chief music and opera critic of The New York Times, Anthony Tommasini, is, I see, at it again.

Even the soprano Karita Mattila, who sings Eva gloriously [in the Met's DVD of Wagner's Die Meistersinger], is not always helped by close-ups. Onstage this blond and vibrant artist convinced you she was the very young, impressionable and winsome daughter of a medieval German shoemaker in Nuremberg.

Is that a fact.

Curiously, Mattila convinced me she was the very young, impressionable and winsome daughter of a medieval German goldsmith in Nuremberg, Pogner by name. The town's shoemaker, and one of the opera's central characters, Hans Sachs by name, has no children, or at least none that play a part in Die Meistersinger, and is in fact himself in love with Eva.

This is the very same Anthony Tommasini who, in his review of a performance of Wagner's Die Walküre a few years ago, would have it that the Wälsung twins, Siegmund and Sieglinde, were separated at birth, thereby making nonsense of critical portions of Siegmund's dialogue in Act I, and even more critical portions of Sieglinde's dialogue in both Acts I and II of the opera, to cite just one other example.

Typical Tommasini.

Staging Wagner's Music-Dramas

It occurs to me that while I've spilled a great deal of virtual ink on this weblog savaging (justifiably, in my view) Eurotrash Regietheater stagings of Wagner's operas and music-dramas and the execrable vandals and hijackers responsible for their creation and presentation, I've said next to nothing about just how stagings of these works, the music-dramas in particular, ought to be accomplished beyond my declaring they ought to be realizations of the dramatic spirit and sense of Wagner's original idealized theatrical vision as reflected in his stage directions and that of the music and texts.

I'm by no stretch of the terms either an imaginative creative artist or stage director or designer, but in what follows I'll try to make more specific what's involved in realizing the dramatic spirit and sense of Wagner's original idealized theatrical vision, and then briefly lay down the central principle of mise en scène applicable to all Wagner's music-dramas* (as opposed to the operas) by singling out one of them for discussion: the tetralogy, Der Ring des Nibelungen, as that work presents the most formidable staging challenge of all Wagner's works (of the music-dramas, for example, staging Tristan is, by comparison, a piece of cake, and Parsifal, if not quite a piece of cake, no indigestible dumpling, either).

In approaching the immense problem of staging the Ring, one must at the very outset admit to oneself that as colossal a dramatic and musical genius as Wagner was, his genius did not extend to solving, or even dealing with, the manifold problems — even impossibilities — inherent in accomplishing a physical realization of his idealized vision on the stage, the copious and explicit stage directions in the scores of the four works notwithstanding. This is made painfully clear (although never so stated) in the diaries of Richard Fricke, Wagner's devoted and hugely capable assistant stage manager (Wagner himself was the stage manager) for the first complete cycle of the Ring presented at the first Bayreuth Festival in 1876 (Fricke was officially the "ballet master" even though nothing resembling a ballet plays any part in the tetralogy), in which diaries Wagner can be seen to be a man almost beside himself with indecision and dismay about just how things ought to go, or could even be made to go, in transforming his idealized vision of the Ring into the cold, hard reality of an actual stage presentation, and in consequence driving just about everyone involved with the production to near distraction, not to mention resulting in the mise en scène of that first Ring being, for the most part, an illusion-shattering and drama-distracting failure even down to the costumes the final design of which baldly disregarded Wagner's explicit instructions to Carl E. Doepler, the costume designer, to make the costumes "a creation wholly of your own imagination," and "from a cultural period that is remote from any experience or reference to an experience."

The principal problem in staging any of Wagner's music-dramas is directly and intimately bound up with their very nature. Since in Wagnerian music-drama the music, and in particular the orchestral music, incorporeal as it is, contains and is the expressive transmitter of the very interior core of the drama itself as opposed to merely providing mood-setting or -enhancing accompaniment for a drama whose interior core is contained in and transmitted by other means as with, say, a movie or the typical Italian opera, any attempt to echo that incorporeal dramatic interior core by concrete visual representation will serve only to blunt that core's expressive power by unavoidably competing with that core's main transmitter: the music. Such concrete visual representation can, at its most dramatically successful, be no better than superfluous, and at worst, distracting or even confusing. In the matter of concrete visual representation of the drama in Wagner's music-dramas, the texts, as sung and mimed by the singer-actors, provide all the concrete dramatic representation necessary as those sung and mimed texts are the narrative- and fact-explicit armature about which the entire drama is constructed.

But as that drama is made for presentation on the stage, it requires a mise en scène within which to play itself out. As with any stagework, the mise en scène of a Wagner music-drama is comprised of two principal elements: the human (and, on occasion, animal) actors, and the representation of the physical context in and through which they operate and move. In the Ring, Nature itself at its largest scale is the central and overarching physical context, and therein lies the fundamental staging difficulty presented by the tetralogy. The problem, even today, but especially in Wagner's time, of accomplishing a convincing naturalistic realization of that central physical context within the bounded physical space of the stage, no matter how large it may be and no matter how sophisticated the stage machinery, should have been immediately apparent to Wagner, and the solution to the problem reflected in his stage directions. Wagner, however, seems to have taken no notice of the problem much less its solution. In the heat of creation, oblivious to the reality of the problems engendered by such mechanical matters, he instead wrote those stage directions as if he expected that by the sheer force of his genius a way would be found to make convincing their naturalistic realization when the time came for actually mounting the work on the specially built stage he always visualized for it. As noted above, however, no such way presented itself, and Wagner found himself ultimately in much the same near-impossible position as do producers and directors of the Ring today with far more crude and far fewer technical resources available to him with which to deal with it.

In short, what Wagner had done when writing the Ring was to visualize the work cinematically decades before such a thing was even imagined rather than in terms of what was physically possible naturalistically within the circumscribed space of a theatrical stage and its limited technical and mechanical means. Interestingly enough, even had that as yet unknown medium been available to Wagner in all its 21st-century glory, he would have quickly found that it presents constraining problems of its own, at least one of which is every bit as difficult, even as insurmountable, as the most difficult problem he faced in mounting his magnum opus on the theatrical stage: make convincing within the relentlessly realistic medium of film, actors singing their dialogue.

So, what's to be done today in presenting the Ring (and, by extension, and mutatis mutandis, any other Wagner music-drama*) on stage? In my long-considered opinion there's but one wholly adequate way to handle the thing, and it can be expressed in but a single word: abstraction.

Quite easy to say, quite difficult to accomplish dramatically and aesthetically convincingly. I know of but one director who actually managed to accomplish that: the brilliant director and stage designer Wieland Wagner in his first post-war staging of the Ring which staging I witnessed at firsthand in Bayreuth in 1958. It was Wieland's genius to come up with what was essentially Regietheater at its very best and set a new standard for Wagner productions worldwide, showing what could be done by the use of inspired modern stagecraft in the service of Wagner's own idealized dramatic vision, that last being the key to this production's great artistic success.

With Wieland taking his (unacknowledged) cue from the groundbreaking work of the brilliant Swiss stage designer Adolphe Appia (1862-1928), the production's almost total absence of stage furniture, its use of non-period-or-place-committal costumes, and the creative use of lighting to model and shape space and the characters who inhabit it, Wieland — taking his grandfather at his word when in 1853 he declared that the yet unwritten music of the Ring "shall sound in a way that people shall hear what they cannot see" — created a neutral "frame" or "matrix" for the tetralogy, so to speak, that permitted the music itself, working in tandem with the text and the audience's own imagination, to fill in all the missing stage furniture as if it all were right in front of the audience's eyes. It was a brilliant stroke, a stroke of genius even, as it made manifest to the audience in the most intimate way imaginable Richard Wagner's deepest interior vision of the Ring while rendering Wieland's properly transparent.

As even given today's formidable stage technology a convincing, non-distracting, and dramatically non-enervating naturalistic realization of the Ring's central and overarching physical context is a clear impossibility within the bounded space of a theatrical stage with its limited mechanical and technical means, and, further, that the result of any attempt at doing so will ultimately compete with the main transmitter and carrier of the drama, the music, one is, as consequence, ineluctably driven to adopt the solution of realizing that central physical context by way of suggestion, which is to say, abstractly. That, in turn, dictates that the realization of every detail of the physical context of the entire work, costumes very much included — the work's entire non-human mise en scène, right down to the stage and costume decorations (all of which should be kept to an absolute minimum in any case) — be similarly handled, the style of abstraction a task for the director in collaborative effort with the producer, stage designer, and music director to ensure that not only is the result aesthetically resonant and dramatically expressive, but that it recognizes, accepts, and subordinately supports rather than fights against or competes with the dramatic centrality of the music and is at all points consonant with the dramatic spirit and sense of Wagner's original idealized theatrical vision as made manifest in the scores (music, text, and stage directions).

Such a task is daunting enough to test to the fullest the courage of any honest (as opposed to self-serving and self-indulgent) director and production team. I confess it would so test mine even given my ego, and even were I gifted enough to attempt it in any capacity whatsoever. But daunting a task as it may be, it offers, in my less than humble opinion, the best hope for realizing fully the immeasurable richness of Wagner's scores as well as the manifold veins and layers of meaning residing in the work's forever unplumbable depths.

---

* I exclude from this general statement of staging principles Wagner's sole "comedy" among the music-dramas, Die Meistersinger, as that work, both in its music and text, is a case markedly and fundamentally apart dramatically from the rest of Wagner's mature oeuvre. Being a special case, it requires special handling in terms of its staging, that special handling a subject for another, separate article altogether.

Benedict XVI

(Note: This post has been updated (1) as of 2:50 AM Eastern on 21 Apr. See below.)

I have rather high expectations of this Pope. From all I've heard and read, he's, IMNCO*, exactly the right choice for the Church vis-à-vis his stance on Catholic doctrine. And the single most important act he could undertake (again, IMNCO) is to restore the Latin Mass, and make it mandatory for all the world's Catholics. Of the very great damage done the Church by Vatican II, the most damaging single decision was to OK the celebrating of the Mass in the vernacular of whatever country it was celebrated.

Dreadful decision from any standpoint one chooses to view it.

*In My Not Christian Opinion

---

Update (2:50 AM Eastern on 21 Apr): Alex Ross quotes a commentator on the new Pope, and comments:

[It's not] likely that we will be hearing much twelve-tone music in the Vatican. According to a paraphrase by a commentator, Benedict disapproves not only of "pop (a manufactured commodity)" but also of "rationally constructed high-brow music (an elite, degenerate form of 'classical' music)."

Do tell. I confess Benedict XVI is looking better and better to me with each new revelation.

Good To Hear

Here's good news. Now, if only we can keep the troubled Philadelphians from, again, even considering the possibility....

Just When...

...you thought things couldn't get worse for cinema as an art form.

Elegy

[NOTE: This entry has been edited as of 12:45 PM Eastern on 17 April to add explanatory footnotes.]

In my brief review of the telecast of the Met's production of Die Meistersinger, I wrote — parenthetically without giving it a second thought, and merely as a matter of fact — that, "the Met is today perhaps the only major opera house in the world where one can still see Wagner's operas and music-dramas realized as Wagner envisaged them."¹ Reflecting later on that matter of fact, the full implication of the thing struck me with unwonted force. What, I asked myself, does that mean for those who've no prior experience of these timeless, universal, and deathless works of art in their original form, and who today have almost no opportunity of ever seeing them realized as their creator intended them to be realized, and therefore lack any proper point of reference?² It's quite as serious a problem as would be, say, having the plays of Shakespeare available to the general public only in versions utilizing modern settings and with dialogue in modern English, the opportunity of reading and/or seeing them performed in their original form nowhere to be had except within the confines of a single institution. When viewed in that light, the true magnitude of the gravity of the situation today vis-à-vis Wagner's operas and music-dramas makes itself instantly manifest.

It might be thought I rhetorically overstate the case in making the above comparison. Nothing could be farther from the facts of the case. Today's postmodern realizations of Wagner's operas and music-dramas (the so-called Konzept productions of Regietheater (Director's Theater), more commonly — and justifiably — referred to as Eurotrash) so distort the originals as to make them wholly unrecognizable as Wagner's creations were it not for the music itself being so well known. Even at that, one could almost be forgiven for imagining that some enterprising producers cum opera composers manqué have concocted musical stageworks of their own invention, but incompetent to write the libretti and music for them, simply hijacked Wagner's.

For Wagnerians such as myself (i.e., those devoted to Wagner's stageworks rather than to Wagner himself, as opposed to Wagnerites who, cult-like, practically worship Wagner the man, and regard his stageworks primarily as the outward manifestation of his personal character and ideas), perhaps the most galling thing of all is recognition of the fact that the genesis of those grotesque Eurotrash productions has its roots not in some underground, avant-garde byway, but within the walls of the Bayreuther Festspiele itself, the birthplace of the first full performances of Der Ring des Nibelungen and Parsifal, both under Wagner's own direction.

Long before Wagner first codified his ideas on opera in two major theoretical works of his Swiss exile (The Art-work Of The Future, 1849; and Opera and Drama, 1851), he considered drama to be opera's central concern, with all opera's elements existing solely to be put in the service of the drama's realization. That's one of the reasons (not, however, the only one) Wagner insisted on writing all his own libretti rather than set to music libretti written by others. And so it was no surprise that when he finally achieved his dream of having his own opera house built from the ground up to his own specifications in a location of his own choosing, and dedicated to presenting his own works exclusively where he would have total control of all aspects of production, he gave primacy to realizing to perfection the drama at the core of those works.

Thus, from its very beginnings, the Bayreuther Festspiele gave pride of place not to the music-makers (until the 1930s, for instance, the conductor's name was not even listed on the playbill or in the program book, and he had no say whatsoever in the shaping of the productions in which he took part), but to the producer, stage manager, and director; all three roles filled originally by Wagner himself.

Is it any wonder, then, that Regietheater would ultimately find a natural home within the hallowed walls of the Bayreuther Festspiele?

And who was the very first there to break totally with Bayreuth tradition and Wagner's original stagings of his works, and replace them entirely with his own? None other than Wagner's grandson, the hugely gifted producer, stage designer, and director, Wieland Wagner.³ His so-called New Bayreuth production of the Ring — first presented in 1951, and subsequently each succeeding year thereafter through 1958 (and about which I here write as firsthand witness Wieland's staging of Die Walküre still being for me the most perfect staging of that work of my experience) — was Regietheater at its best, and set a new standard for Wagner productions worldwide, showing what could be done by the use of inspired modern stagecraft in the service of Wagner's own idealized dramatic vision, that last being the key to this production's great artistic success.

With Wieland taking his (unacknowledged) cue from the groundbreaking work of the brilliant Swiss stage designer Adolphe Appia (1862-1928), the production's almost total absence of stage furniture, its use of non-period-or-place-committal costumes, and the creative use of lighting to model and shape space and the characters who inhabit it, Wieland — taking his grandfather at his word when in 1853 he declared that the yet unwritten music of the Ring "shall sound in a way that people shall hear what they cannot see" — created a neutral "frame" or "matrix" for the tetralogy, so to speak, that permitted the music itself, working in tandem with the text and the audience's own imagination, to fill in all the missing stage furniture as if it all were right in front of the audience's eyes. It was a brilliant stroke, a stroke of genius even, as it made manifest to the audience in the most intimate way imaginable Richard Wagner's deepest interior vision of the Ring while rendering Wieland's properly transparent.

Unhappily, this wasn't to last. Along with Wagner's physiognomy, Wieland inherited as well Wagner's monstrous ego, and it wasn't long before he began not only to replace Wagner's original stagings with his own, but Wagner's original idealized vision as well, and thus did Regietheater as Eurotrash first insinuate itself within the Bayreuther Festspiele where it still reigns supreme to this very day influencing Wagner productions everywhere.

Subsequent to Wieland's premature death in 1966, his brother Wolfgang, up until then the business side of the partnership (although he did mount several uninspired productions of his own in the period spanning 1951-1966), attempted to step into Wieland's shoes, and prove himself his brother's equal or better; something he truly imagined himself to be. In fairly short order, however, he was forced by the critical response to his work to accept the clear fact that not only was he not his brother's equal or better, but his vast inferior, and so, for the sake of keeping the Bayreuther Festspiele afloat, he came up with the fatal notion of inviting directors from outside the domain of opera to create new "heterodox" realizations of his grandfather's works for presentation at the Festspiele.

First came the disastrous and idiot Marxist Tannhäuser of East German avant-gardist Götz Friedrich in 1972 that so distorted Wagner's original that were it not being presented at the Festspielehaus with Wagner's music and with copious program notes in the house's program book, the opera would have been impossible to comprehend, not to speak of impossible to recognize as Wagner's opera.

But the real watershed moment in the Festspiele's permanent descent into the malodorous mire of Regietheater as Eurotrash came with Wolfgang's engagement of the Wagner-ignorant, avant-garde Frenchman Patrice Chéreau whose visually arresting, Shavian-socialist Konzept of the Ring set its opening work (Das Rheingold) in late-19th-, early-20th-century industrial Europe (England?), with Wotan and the gods as exploitative capitalist captains of industry, Alberich and the Nibelungs as a put-upon and exploited proletariat, and the Rheintöchtern as beguiling street tarts. That imbecile production and the following three — all just as imbecile but each set in a different historical period — opened the floodgates to all manner of postmodern idiocies in the realization of Wagner's stageworks, and since then the productions of the Bayreuther Festspiele have been among the most grotesque — often the most grotesque — of the manifold Konzept productions of Wagner's great stageworks worldwide.²

Thus has been the fate of the institution that Wagner established for the express purpose of providing the world model performances of his stageworks as he originally envisaged them. That institution, dedicated as it is exclusively to the works of Richard Wagner, should have been the one place in the world where audiences could experience Wagner's works realized as Wagner intended them to be realized (see Footnote 2 below). Instead, it's today left to the Met to fulfill that role among the world's major opera houses, and as that institution is anything but dedicated exclusively to Wagner's stageworks, it won't be long before commercial pressures and institutional vanity force it to join the ranks of the rest of the world's opera houses where those stageworks are concerned, and capitulate to the rage for Regietheater as Eurotrash. What's to be done then?

Much as I wish it were otherwise, I've no viable answer to that question nor any realistic solution to the central problem and can only mourn the circumstance of those who will never have the opportunity to experience Wagner's great stageworks realized as they were meant to be realized by their creator, and mourn as well the worlds of opera and the arts that will be immeasurably impoverished by the lack.

---

¹ I'm told the Seattle Opera is another major opera venue where one can still see Wagner's operas and music-dramas realized as Wagner envisaged them, but I've insufficient knowledge of those productions, and so can make no comment regarding them.

² By this I do not intend to even suggest that Wagner's stageworks ought to be realized by slavish adherence to his 19th-century ideas of mise en scène. What I am suggesting is that those stageworks ought to be realized by adhering assiduously to the dramatic spirit and sense of Wagner's original idealized vision as made manifest in the music and text to create and shape the mise en scène. One can, for instance, at one extreme, as did Wieland Wagner in his brilliant 1951 Bayreuth production of Das Rheingold, choose to represent the seabed of the great primal body of water that opens the Ring by displaying onstage a totally abstract "frame" or "matrix" that lets the music in tandem with the text fill in the details for the audience's imagination, or, at the other extreme, display onstage through the magic of modern optical trickery a vast body of real water within which the Rheintöchtern and Alberich do their cavorting as did Peter Hall in his 1983 Bayreuth production. What one cannot do and still be true to the dramatic spirit and sense of Wagner's original idealized vision as made manifest in the music and text is to display onstage a simulacrum of a man-made 20th-century reservoir and hydroelectric dam to represent that great primal body of water as did Patrice Chéreau in his 1976 Bayreuth production of Das Rheingold. I trust the difference will be immediately clear to the reader.

³ Before Wieland there had been scattered non-Bayreuth-traditional productions of Wagner's music-dramas and operas outside Bayreuth since the turn of the 20th century — most notably the Mahler-Roller Vienna Tristan of 1903 which is marked by some as the birth of Regietheater in opera, and the Klemperer-Dülberg Krolloper (Berlin) Holländer of 1929. But their influence wasn't widespread, and was taken notice of mostly within the theater's theoretical arena.

The Met's Die Meistersinger: The Telecast (And DVD)

I just finished watching my tape of the Met Die Meistersinger telecast; a telecast I would have missed entirely had it not been for a chance hearing on WQXR (The New York Times's classical music FM station) of a single promo for its airing. WNET, New York's PBS outlet, aired nary a word of promo for the telecast, or none that I saw, and I watch that channel in prime time almost exclusively. The Met production — a traditional staging of the work (the Met is today perhaps the only major opera house in the world where one can still see Wagner's music-dramas realized as Wagner envisaged them) — was marginally enjoyable, generally speaking, but there were a number of problems, that notwithstanding.

First, someone needs to remind tenor Ben Heppner (the Walther) that he's playing in a Wagner music-drama, not a Verdi soap opera, and can't go about gesticulating with those all-situation-all-purpose Italian opera cartoon gestures. They might pass as OK, even be expected, in Italian opera, but they merely make one look ridiculous in a Wagner music-drama. And the man really has to do something about his weight if he wants to play the role of the young hero, Walther von Stolzing. In this production, Heppner makes von Stolzing look older than both Sachs and Pogner.

Heppner was in fairly good voice for this performance, and that voice has baritonal-ripened a wee bit since I last heard him which makes it more appropriate for this role. What was not so good was that he had to dub in after the fact almost all his upper-register notes, and the dub job was quite apparent.

Thomas Allen did a superb job as the weaselly Beckmesser, and Renee Pape, a first-rate if not exceptional job as Pogner. Ditto James Morris as Sachs. Karita Mattila as Eva was beyond mere praise on all counts. I'm beginning to think this woman must be one of the greatest gifts to opera of the last half century: an intelligent, gifted actor, a first-rate singer, and beautiful into the bargain. It doesn't get much better than that.

Unexpectedly, conductor James Levine had some serious pacing problems with his reading, in the first act particularly, and the whole reading was rather a bit too plodding, I think. Surprising, actually, as Levine, always a meticulous Wagner conductor, has, in the last few years, grown into a genuinely tempi-and-pacing-fluid Wagner interpreter; an ideal too rarely encountered today where the absolutely wrongheaded — musically, dramatically, and stylistically — Boulez-inspired, light-touch-transparent-and-precise reading of Wagner's scores seems to be the in-fashion norm everywhere.

As for the sets, they were of a naturalistic bent, and generally pretty nifty, although I would have preferred a slightly "abstract-crooked" look for Act II Nuremberg rather than the straight up-and-down look of this production. Ditto the too-crowded and space-deficient Act III meadow set. That scene needs to have room to "breathe" visually, and give the impression of a vast open space with the town of Nuremberg suggested in the deep background. This representation was far too constricted and claustrophobic.

And the Met needs desperately to get a new stage director. Stage movements in this production, both individual and en masse, were truly clunky and amateurish throughout. I do think director Otto Schenk really has to be asked to pack it in, and call it a day. In this production, for instance, the brilliant second-act riot finale turned out deadly wooden, and the all-white costumes (meant to represent nightshirts) of the crowd of Nurembergers didn't help, either. Made that crowd end up looking like nothing so much as a pack of Casper The Ghosts, and that great, vibrant concluding ruckus, a boring, meaning-empty mess.

I'm glad I taped this telecast, however, as it's a document of sorts. But I sure as hell would never lay out $39.99 (PBS price), or $29.99 (Amazon price) for the commercially available DVD. I've better places to spend my always-in-too-short-supply funds.

Transforming A Horror Into A Boon

A discussion concerning opera house supertitles and surtitles took place on an online opera forum in which I sometimes participate. There were, of course, the usual yeas and nays, with all the usual reasons given pro and con. My snarky contribution to the discussion:

For those who consider opera supertitles and surtitles yet another philistine development of the MTV age (and I number myself among them), it's as nothing, a mere trifle, when compared with this pop-culture, prole-pandering horror.

And then, in an epiphanic flash, it struck me. While the Concert Companion in the concert hall is a genuine horror, there really is an appropriate and proper place for the device: in the home, keyed to a specially prepared classical music or opera CD or DVD coded in manufacture to deliver the proper signals to the Concert Companion.

How great is that for classical music and opera newbies?

Pretty damn great, if you ask me.

Patience (Administrative Note)

Resolving a week-long computer problem.

Almost there.

Patience.

More From Talvi

More great fiddle stuff from Seattle Symphony Orchestra concertmaster and weblogger Ilkka Talvi of Of Men And Music.

It is every violin teacher's dream and nightmare: what to do when we end up with a truly gifted student? By this I just don't mean a youngster whose fast fingers fly across the fingerboard, but especially a player who seems to understand what music is all about, someone whose sound commands immediate attention.

More likely than not such a student is not your typical wunderkind because that type, although being able to play with great technical ease, is usually spoon fed every detail by his/her teacher, with barely no attention given to the art itself. Everything is done by imitation, not by recreating art on one's instrument. Child prodigies often burn out early, have their nervous breakdowns in their late teens or early adulthood, and are completely helpless without a teacher guiding them, even at an age when they themselves should be the ones teaching.

Playing the violin should not be a circus act, nor should a student be happy just copying down every fingering, bowing and special effect from the teacher's music. I have known enough cases where the individual already has a career of sorts as a soloist and yet they can barely read music.

Oh!, the memories.

RTWT here.

Sondheim's Passion: The Telecast

As I've noted before on this weblog, I'm no lover of Broadway musicals; not even the best of them. But since the experience of my first Sweeney Todd (also via a telecast) I am, at least, more than mildly interested in making the acquaintance of anything Stephen Sondheim has had a major hand in creating. Which is why I tuned into PBS's live telecast last night of a semi-staged version of Sondheim's Passion. Unhappily, I can say nothing meaningful or intelligent about the work because half of it was missing.

No, I'm not referring to the fact of the work being semi-staged. I in fact rather suspect that this work staged in that way is a damn sight more effective than any naturalistic staging could be. For an intensely intimate and inward-looking work such as Passion, a full naturalistic staging could result only in adding unnecessary and distracting clutter, which is never a good thing in any case.

No, I'm referring to the fact that Passion is more opera than Broadway musical (it's been billed as a "chamber opera," which, as far as I can tell, is as good a description as any). And as opera, the thing of central importance is, of course, the music wherein, if it's an opera, "chamber" or otherwise, worthy of the name, resides the very core of the drama: dramma per musica, as genuine opera is called. And the above referred-to half that was missing in this telecast was none other than the orchestra, precisely as was the case in the above referred to telecast of Sweeney Todd.

From what little I could gather, Passion, like Sweeney, calls for a full orchestra (albeit a smaller full orchestra, I think, than that called for in Sweeney) which provides the work one of its major "voices," not some dinky pit-band combo playing merely inconsequential oompah-pah Italian opera accompaniment for the singers. In this telecast that orchestra was just this side of totally inaudible making the vocal lines sound disjointed and almost melodically nonsensical, with a sameness of shape, contour, and style of declamation that was deadening.

And so, looking forward as I was to the telecast of this work, and to writing about it here, other than the above there's nothing more I can say about Sondheim's Passion and last night's semi-staged telecast of it beyond expressing my fervent wish that those at PBS responsible for the audio portion of this telecast be consigned to the deepest regions of broadcasting hell, and there be made to listen for all eternity without going deaf to a rock band playing at their constant and normal earsplitting 120dB fortissimo, bereft of any hope that the sound level will subside for even an instant into inaudibility.

Idiots

I post this link absent any comment. You work out to whom the title of this post refers.