Sounds & Fury

The Play's The Thing

(Note: This post has been edited as of 2:16 PM Eastern on 31 Oct to clarify an insufficiently detailed paragraph concerning Hamlet's "antically brutal and cruel" behavior towards Ophelia.)

Piqued by a PBS airing of a taped version of Kevin Kline's production of the play (not a production for the ages by any stretch, but a mostly respectable one nevertheless with Kline in the title role), I've spent the last few days with that paragon of plays, Hamlet, a work I've not engaged in earnest for decades now.

The first thing that struck me was how much of the dialogue I remembered verbatim. Had it been a piece of music I'd not heard in decades but remembered verbatim there would have been little cause for surprise. I've a quirk of brain circuitry that simply works that way without any conscious effort on my part. No such quirk exists for me when it comes to words which, no matter how impressive, seem not to take root in that fashion, although I unerringly remember their sense. My conjecture is that there's something about the language of Hamlet (and of Macbeth as well, for which I found the same holds true for me) that registers unconsciously in my brain as a kind of music, the words taking on the characteristics of musical notes, figurations, phrases, etc., and so activate that quirky memory circuitry of mine in tandem with whatever circuitry is responsible for retaining the sense of the words.

What next struck me, or, rather, struck me afresh, was what an oddity is Hamlet's charge to Horatio and Marcellus on that windswept battlement (or so I imagine it) just subsequent to Hamlet's interview with his father's ghost, to which charge Hamlet makes them swear obedience; an oddity that Shakespeare makes a central element of the play:

Here, as before, never, so help you mercy,
How strange or odd soe'er I bear myself,—
As I, perchance, hereafter shall think meet
To put an antic disposition on,—
That you, at such times seeing me, never shall,
With arms encumber'd thus, or this head-shake,
Or by pronouncing of some doubtful phrase,
As 'Well, well, we know'; or 'We could, an if we would';—
Or 'If we list to speak'; or 'There be, an if they might';—
Or such ambiguous giving out, to note
That you know aught of me:—this is not to do,
So grace and mercy at your most need help you,
Swear.

At this point in the play we might assume that Hamlet has some unspoken strategic plan in mind to avenge his father's murder which requires he assume an "antic disposition" in order to carry off; a plan we'll learn the details of later. But as we later learn, not only does Hamlet's feigned madness have no strategic value to him vis-à-vis the accomplishment of his vengeance, but apparently was never imagined by him to have had such value even as he declared his intention to act it out (he never speaks of it again in this connection, either to others or in soliloquy, nor at any time gives so much as a hint of what he might have had in mind originally as to its purpose). Further, as we later discover, in its effects it actually works against him — could in fact only work against him — in the accomplishment of his vengeance.

What could Shakespeare (or Hamlet, for that matter) have been thinking? One rejects immediately as preposterous the idea that Shakespeare willy-nilly carried over from his original source material — primarily an ancient Danish chronicle (in French translation) compiled by one Saxo the Grammarian, from which a now lost play was made that had a popular run in London a few years before Shakespeare took pen in hand to make his Hamlet — the device of the avenging hero feigning madness, and then attempted in Hamlet to make of it the best he could even though it didn't really fit his reworking of the plot.

As I've said, the idea is just too preposterous to entertain. In that original Danish chronicle (and the now lost play based on it) the feigning of madness by the hero (Amleth, by name, of which Hamlet is an anagram, and an almost homophone) does indeed serve a central and clear strategic purpose in the hero's avenging of his father's murder. In Shakespeare's Hamlet, however, that feigned madness serves Hamlet no such purpose, nor is it even treated as part of some well-conceived plan gone bad. In Hamlet, the hero's feigned madness seems, at best, well, simply logically and dramatically superfluous, even pointless, albeit marvelously colorful, in terms of its serving some central purpose in Hamlet's plan to wreak vengeance on his father's murderer, if indeed plan he ever had.

Nowhere in print reference materials to hand nor on the Internet can I find a discussion of this curious business. The intent behind Hamlet's announcement of his future feigned antic disposition as well as his later acting out of that intent seems, in terms of the intent itself, to have troubled neither scholars, readers, nor play-goers, but seems to have been received and accepted by them as something that needs neither examination nor questioning, which, given the gazillions of words spilled in analyses of Hamlet and Hamlet, is itself a fairly curious business. Not even the great A.C. Bradley, I discovered, in his classic, Shakespearean Tragedy (1904), thinks the question of intent worthy of discussion or even mention.

Well, that last gave me instant pause. Surely, I must be missing something; something no careful reader ought to have missed. And so I began my examination of the play anew to see whether I could discover for myself what that something might be by consulting the sole authority on such matters: the text of the play itself. And what I discovered is that the original intent behind Hamlet's announcement of his future feigned antic disposition is discernable, but neither that intent nor his acting out of it serves any clear or central strategic purpose in the accomplishment of his vengeance. Both, however, serve a single and singular tactical purpose, the key to which is to be found in Hamlet's soliloquy which follows immediately his father's ghost departs his company on that windswept battlement.

Ay, thou poor ghost, while memory holds a seat
In this distracted globe. Remember thee!
Yea, from the table of my memory
I'll wipe away all trivial fond records,
All saws of books, all forms, all pressures past,
That youth and observation copied there;
And thy commandment all alone shall live
Within the book and volume of my brain,
Unmix'd with baser matter: yes, by heaven!

Hamlet is here not merely swearing that from this point forward he will have but a singleness of purpose until vengeance is done, but that he will literally not even so much as think on anything else.

There's, however, a single impediment to his making good this self-sworn oath: Ophelia. What's to be done about Ophelia? Or more properly, what's to be done about Hamlet's love for Ophelia; a love already declared (to Ophelia), and a love we've every reason to believe from Hamlet's own words in Act V is absolutely genuine and deeply felt, and, from the implication of Ophelia's own words in Act III, and some of the songs she sings under provocation of her now disordered mind in Act IV, a love that's returned, or, rather, wants to be or would have been returned in kind by Ophelia had Hamlet's declarations of love proved honest, honorable, and true and not what her brother and father had made it out to be.

But Ophelia is a pure, innocent, unworldly child. Hamlet can't make her privy to what he's learned from the ghost; cannot even so much as hint at the appearance of the ghost. In short, he can't enlist even her ear for solace in the dread business before him, much less enlist her help in carrying it out. And so he must make an end to this love both for his own part and for Ophelia's if the ghost's

...commandment all alone shall live
Within the book and volume of [Hamlet's] brain,
Unmix'd with baser matter....

What to do?

Put on an antic disposition, that's what; so antically brutal and cruel (to Ophelia) that Ophelia will learn to be repulsed by his mere presence, and that will be an end of it for them both. Or so I take it Hamlet imagines. And why not merely brutal and cruel (which would accomplish the same end) rather than antically brutal and cruel? So that after the deed of vengeance is done, and Hamlet has no further need to wipe from his mind his love for Ophelia and hers for him, he can say to her, mutatis mutandis, as he did to her brother, Laertes, in Act V,

Was't Hamlet wrong'd [Ophelia]? Never Hamlet:
If Hamlet from himself be ta'en away,
And when he's not himself does wrong [Ophelia],
Then Hamlet does it not, Hamlet denies it.
Who does it, then? His madness: if't be so,
Hamlet is of the faction that is wrong'd;
His madness is poor Hamlet's enemy.

And so Hamlet sets about being antically brutal and cruel towards Ophelia in the only acting out of his antic disposition in the entire play which is other or more than the mere bandying about of wild, cuttingly witty, purposefully ditsy, or maliciously toying one-liners with various of the play's other characters, which bandying about serves Hamlet no purpose whatsoever in the accomplishment of his vengeance except to further confirm for Ophelia while she lived the genuineness of his madness. That his feigned antic disposition also might work to the detriment of that accomplishment and, worse, is something which the distraught Hamlet apparently didn't think through, and with tragic consequence.

Bradley says that in the matter of Hamlet's love for Ophelia he (Bradley) is, "unable to arrive at a conviction as to the meaning of some of [Hamlet's antic] words and deeds [addressed to her]," but declares that on two points there can be no reasonable doubt: 1) that "Hamlet was at one time sincerely and ardently in love with Ophelia," and 2) that "[w]hen at Ophelia's grave Hamlet declared,

I lov'd Ophelia; forty thousand brothers
Could not, with all their quantity of love,
Make up my sum.

he must have spoken sincerely," and that Hamlet used the past tense, "lov'd", "merely because Ophelia was dead, and not to imply that he had once loved her but no longer did so."

Would I venture to suggest that perhaps Dr. Bradley (who would have disagreed with my above thesis) might have been able to arrive at a conviction as to the meaning of all Hamlet's antic words and deeds addressed to Ophelia had it been clear to him whence and for what purpose they issued?

Well, perhaps even I would not dare go so far.

Apropos Absolutely Nothing

Hotshot stock market analyst being interviewed a while ago on the stock market segment of a TV news show for the purpose of explaining why the stock market rallied in the last 90 minutes of trading from being down more than 200 points most of the day to being down only 10 points at the close:

TV Interviewer: So what happened in the last 90 minutes?
Hotshot: Programmed buying by institutions.
TVI: Programmed buying?
HS: Yes. The computer trading programs used by the big institutions were programmed to kick in and buy when the indices and the prices of certain individual stocks dropped to pre-programmed levels.
TVI: Was there a wide market ratio of stocks being bought and sold at that point?
HS: There was no selling. Only buying.

Amazing trick, that last. I wonder how that's done.

Classic Postmodern PBS-think

So I tune to PBS for this wildlife film on eagles. Great birds, eagles. Splendid birds. Majestic birds. Birds of prey and born killers. During the course of the hour-long film, however, with the exception of a few hapless fish, there wasn't so much as a single scene showing an eagle nailing its prey. Oh, there was lots of gliding, soaring, stooping, and terminal swoops to the attack. But the camera somehow never managed to capture the eagle doing what it does most elegantly: grabbing and killing.

Well, perhaps, the wildlife photographer was ham-handed. Or slow on the trigger. Or just plain lazy. Or perhaps it was simply the case that the camera just happened to always be in the wrong position, or run out of film at the decisive moment.

Right. When pigs fly. It's just PBS being PBS, protecting our delicate sensibilities and the innocence of our children against beholding such raw, lethal violence, and forestalling any enmity against that noble bird that might be engendered by our witnessing it doing its brilliant, breathtaking equivalent of our picking up a piece of meat at the local supermarket.

Classic postmodern PBS-think.

And an insult as always.

A Proper Resolution: An Update

Our brief comment on the dispute between author Deirdre Bair (be certain to read Ms. Bair's response posted as an update to that comment) and German publisher Knaus Verlag (owned by publishing giant, Random House) with its implications for the publishing industry worldwide concerning the German-language edition of Ms. Bair's new biography of Carl Gustav Jung has finally been resolved in Ms. Bair's favor, as it should have been.

Our congratulations to Ms. Bair on her important victory.

And Speaking of Dr. Atomic

No, not the opera, but the subject matter of the opera.

Sort of.

Since childhood I've been something of a mathophobe, a coinage of mine to denote a psychoneurotic condition wherein the sufferer virtually breaks into a cold sweat on encountering any mathematical symbol less familiar than those of the four arithmetic operations. That pathetic condition notwithstanding, I've forever had a deep fascination with the principles, derivation, and implications of the fundamental laws that govern the physical processes of the universe. As all such laws are expressed in the abstract symbolic language of mathematics, however, indulging that fascination makes life for such as myself something of a tough proposition. We must either thread our way, stoically and painfully, through expert accounts of physical theory, gleaning what little we can along the way, or content ourselves with reading pop expositions which mostly simplify to the point of almost deception while producing in us a false sense of real comprehension.

Every once in a very rare while, however, there appears in print a treatment of this esoteric domain that meets the impossible challenge of explaining substantively in nonmathematical language the principles of a physical theory in a way that neither overwhelms the nonmathematical intellect, nor simplifies to pap the theory's inherent complexities. My best experience of such a treatment is Lincoln Barnett's 1948 (rev., 1957) The Universe and Dr. Einstein, an amazingly slender volume that substantively lays out the principles, derivation, and implications of special and general relativity in nonmathematical language so straightforward, even though at times poetic, that one emerges with a genuine understanding of Einstein's revolutionary, world-transforming contributions to our knowledge of the universe and The Way Things Really Are. In its scant 118 pages, The Universe and Dr. Einstein, with astonishing lucidity, takes the reader from Einstein's first thought experiments leading to the mind-bending principles and implications of special relativity (and the most famous equation in history: E=mc²), through the even more mind-bending principles and implications of general relativity, all the while sparing the reader no fundamental or important details, but setting everything out in illuminating language comprehensible to any intelligent layman.

An authentic tour de force this slender volume, and happily now again in print thanks to a soon to be available reprint (128pp, release date: January 2006) by that indispensable publisher of beautiful, affordable, large-format reprints of music scores, Dover Publications. This book is one that ought to be in every intelligent person's library, and consulted often if only for the pure pleasure of reading an authentic masterpiece of the genre.

But today, the many-times confirmed theory of relativity is pretty much garden-variety, used-every-day stuff in the worlds of physics and mathematics. In physics and mathematics today, the New Big Thing is something rather unthreateningly called string theory (or, more correctly, superstring theory).

And just what's that all about? Well, everything, actually. It's an attempt at a theory Einstein spent the last three decades of his life trying to derive: a Theory Of Everything (TOE), called by Einstein a Unified Field Theory; a series of mutually consistent equations that would seamlessly unify the laws of general relativity and electromagnetism, and in the process perhaps even bring an end to or make irrelevant the irreconcilable incompatibilities between the two principal theoretical pillars of modern physics, general relativity and quantum mechanics. Einstein failed in his quest, and at the time, and for some time after, was thought more than just a little eccentric for even embarking on such a quest. But today, half a century after his death, TOE has become the Holy Grail of physics, and string theory is being trumpeted as its incarnation.

But why the need for TOE? I mean, we already have proven-to-work theories; one that explains the workings of gravity and the very large (general relativity), and one (quantum mechanics) that explains the workings of the very small (for all the stuff in-between we have the still valid centuries-old theories of Newton which work spectacularly well for all ordinary-sized, commonly experienced physical phenomena), and so if you've a question that needs answering in the domain of the very large you use the equations of general relativity, and in the domain of the very small, those of quantum mechanics.

So, what's the problem? The problem is that the two theories are mutually incompatible, and seem to be telling us that underlying the workings of the universe are two totally independent, fundamental underlying realities depending only on scale, and that what's true of one is not true of the other.

Intolerable. Impossible. Ridiculous. If theory says that's the way reality really is, then that's the signal — the red-light, alarm-bell signal — that something is amiss with theory, not the universe. What's needed is a theory that accounts for all physical phenomena in a mutually consistent way regardless of scale. The difficulty is that when a marriage of the equations of general relativity and quantum mechanics is attempted it results in absurd offspring. More specifically, any attempt at the marriage of the equations of the two theories invariably gives infinity as an answer when such an answer is pure gibberish (e.g., an infinite probability).

Enter string theory. It seems to have the promise of explaining all physical phenomena in a mutually consistent way regardless of scale by its possessing the ability to adjust the equations of general relativity in just the right way (because, unlike quantum mechanics, an accounting for gravity is native to string theory) so that a marriage with the equations of quantum mechanics is a natural result, and it begins this magic by replacing the static, ultimate lower size zero-dimension point particles of classical theory (i.e., relativity and quantum mechanics) that are supposed to constitute the underlying irreducible fundamental stuff of the world with spatially extensible, one-dimensional vibrating filaments or strings whose extensible size is, on average, on the order of what is called the Planck length, an incredibly tiny number (10^-33 cm), the vibration patterns of which underlie and determine the properties of the fundamental building blocks of all matter and energy; in short, underlie and determine the properties of all the world stuff.

Talk about mind-bending! String theory is all mind-bending — way more so than general relativity — and horrendously complicated and complex; so complicated and complex that its equations have never been able to be put into finished, precise form, physicists having to make due with approximations to those equations. To a mathophobic layman such as myself it all seems incredibly messy, inelegant, and impossible to understand, that last something which, with the help of the guiding hand of Lincoln Barnett, relativity most emphatically is not.

But help for all laymen, mathophobic or not, is at hand. Brian Greene, in his 1999 book, The Elegant Universe, attempts to do in 448 pages for string theory what Barnett did in 118 for relativity. Greene's not nearly as successful as Barnett, but that's not because Greene's not as skillful a writer, but because string theory is whole orders of magnitude more complicated and complex than relativity, not to even speak of the fact that even string theorists themselves don't fully understand the theory. But Greene's successful enough notwithstanding his often annoying, almost pitchman-like advocacy of string theory as almost certainly The Way To Go despite the utter lack (and perhaps ultimate utter impossibility) of direct experimental confirmation of the validity of its theoretical constructs, and the (at present) impossibility of even expressing its equations in finished and precise form. (The PBS Nova miniseries, "The Elegant Universe", based on Greene's book, and hosted by Greene himself, suffers, unlike the book, from its clumsy attempts at simplification via common-experience examples with its elaborate, gimmicky, involved, and ultimately silly pop stagings and graphics. I realize I'm probably in the minority in my objection to the handling of these common-experience examples, but I object nevertheless.)

For the layman wanting to understand the basic principles of string theory, however, this book is as good a primer as can be imagined even if, in its later chapters, one has to work one's way through the difficult and gruesome details of the more arcane aspects of string theory, and I can recommend it if not with the unbridled enthusiasm that accompanied my recommendation of Barnett's volume on relativity.

I confess I've a secret wish and suspicion that string theory — with its fundamental requirement of a 10-dimensional space-time universe (as opposed to our 4-dimensional one; and N.B., string theory doesn't merely predict a 10-dimensional space-time universe; it requires it), and its fundamental non-disprovability — will turn out ultimately to be the bust some few physicists think it will turn out to be. I intuitively don't like its messy, complicated, exercise-in-masturbatory-mathematics feel, in the same way I intuitively dislike the probabilistic basis of quantum mechanics. (I'm in good company vis-à-vis the latter. Einstein, one of the founders of quantum theory, was distrustful of quantum mechanics for the same reason which provoked his famous statement that, ultimately, he was convinced God "does not play dice.") In short, from this mathophobic layman's vantage point, string theory seems but a complexly elaborate sandbox in which theoretical physicists can play about for decades without getting bored while seeming to be engaged in something on the verge of revealing the true nature of the reality underlying all the physical phenomena of the universe, and the true nature of the reality underlying the very universe itself from its birth to its ultimate death, if indeed it can be said to have either.

But perhaps when the final equations of string theory — all five(!) string theories — are finally derived, solved, collated, and experimentally confirmed under the construct called M-theory (which requires an 11-dimensional space-time universe — don't even think of asking!), those equations and what they describe will prove string theory as simple, elegant and, more importantly, as inevitable as relativity. I have my mathophobic layman's doubts, but if that day ever comes — and today the smart money in physics is betting that it's a matter of when, not if — man will truly have succeeded, in the words of Stephen Hawking, in reading the very mind of God.

Neat trick, that, although a consummation I'm not entirely convinced is devoutly to be wished.

What The Little Birdie Told

Those familiar with Wagner's tetralogy Der Ring des Nibelungen know that in Act II of Siegfried the eponymous hero slays the dragon Fafner by thrusting his newly-forged sword Nothung into the wretched beast's heart. Hearts being what they are, this turned out a quite bloody affair, and some of that blood found its way onto Siegfried's sword-wielding hand and seemed to burn his fingers, whereupon he reflexively put his blood-spattered fingers into his mouth to cool them, after which he found that suddenly and magically he could understand the speech of the woodbirds whose constant twittering priorly sounded to him merely like the twittering of any old woodbird. Seems, however, one particular woodbird has a special interest in Siegfried and his welfare, and has lots of important stuff to tell him, all of which will prove eminently good counsel, and even work to save his life.

So, what's the deal here? What interest could a woodbird have in counseling Siegfried, or any other human for that matter, about anything? In Wagner's score this one particular woodbird is identified merely as a woodbird (Der Waldvogel). Nothing there to identify it as some special sort of woodbird, nor is there anything much in the extensive Wagner literature to identify it as something special beyond its possessing certain conventional and expected fairytale or saga characteristics that set it apart from real-life woodbirds.

Or is there?

Why, yes, indeed there is (but, then, if you've read this far, you knew that already, didn't you).

Just to briefly refresh your memory on some background, you'll remember that Siegfried's mother, Sieglinde, gave birth to Siegfried in the depths of the forest where she'd taken refuge after the slaying of Siegfried's papa Siegmund, her twin brother and husband, by the hand of Sieglinde's previous husband, Hunding, with the help of the intervention of the god Wotan, Siegmund's own papa. Present at the birth was the Nibelung dwarf Mime, brother of that arch-Nibelung, Alberich, whose forging of a magic ring from the gold of the Rhine set into motion the entire cosmic drama that is Der Ring des Nibelungen. Almost immediately after giving birth to Siegfried, Sieglinde dies, and Mime then takes it upon himself to raise the now orphaned infant whose name his mother had bestowed upon him almost at the moment of her death.

Mime is, of course, no altruist or humanitarian. Rather, he instantly recognized just how special was this infant, and just how valuable and useful he would be when grown to young manhood in securing for Mime the golden Nibelung hoard now in the possession of the fearful dragon Fafner, the transformed giant from the tetralogy's first opera, Das Rheingold, which hoard includes not only the magical Tarnhelm whose magic enabled Fafner to transform himself into a dragon, but Alberich's all-powerful ring itself.

Now, back to that woodbird.

Although given no identification in the score other than Der Waldvogel, this particular woodbird seems to know an awful lot of detail about the history of the Ring saga up to this point, and how best to take advantage of that knowledge. Further, this woodbird is assiduous in passing on to Siegfried in the form of explanation, counsel, or warning just what details he needs to know about just when he needs most to know about it.

Serendipity? Happy coincidence? Cheap deus ex machina tactic? Not a bit of it. Rather tip-off number one that this particular woodbird is something other and more than your ordinary, regulation fairytale or saga woodbird despite having no identification in the score other than Der Waldvogel.

And then there's this to consider.

In Act I of Die Walküre there is heard for the first time (in the orchestra) a four-measure leitmotif at the point when the twin Wälsungs, Siegmund and Sieglinde, first dimly sense a bond of sympathy between them more familial than erotic or romantic although at the time neither has so much as an inkling they're siblings. That leitmotif has, for better or worse, been variously labeled by different commentators, and for the sake of convenience we'll here refer to it by the best of those labels and call it the Wälsung Bond motif, or simply WB. What's interesting about that motif in Siegfried is that though neither Siegmund nor Sieglinde, both being long dead, play any part in Siegfried, in the fairly brief episode within which take place the encounters between Siegfried and the woodbird in Act II of that opera the WB motif is heard in the orchestra no less than nine times, and always in the same connection. It's first heard in Act II of Siegfried while Siegfried, resting under a linden tree after first entering the forest — the very same forest in which his mother died giving him birth — ruminates thus after speculating to himself what his father might have looked like ("Ha! Like me, of course!" he concludes):

But what did my mother look like?
I can't imagine that at all.
Like the roedeer's surely shone
her soft lustrous eyes,
but far more lovely!
When she bore me in sorrow
why then did she die?
Do all men's mothers
die of their sons?
That would be sad indeed!
Ah!, if I her son could see my mother,
my mother,
a mortal woman!

Immediately following which, guess what then makes its first appearance. That's right. Our little woodbird, one that Siegfried's never before encountered, gaily twittering away in birdsong (in the orchestra); birdsong that at this point Siegfried can hear only as birdsong as he's not yet met up with Fafner and his magic dragon blood.

"You pretty bird!" cries Siegfried.

I never heard you before.
Do you live in this forest?
If I understood its sweet song
it would surely be saying something to me,
perhaps about my dear mother!

Perhaps indeed.

And from that point forward whenever the WB motif is heard in Act II (again, in the orchestra) it's heard only in some connection with our woodbird, as in this act no more mention is made of Sieglinde.

Now, I don't at all mean to suggest that Wagner intended anything so crude as making the woodbird a reincarnation of Sieglinde, or her shape-shifting ghost or anything of that cheap supernatural sort. What was intended here is whole orders of magnitude more subtle; so subtle that to put it into words would be the ultimate crudity, which is precisely why Wagner depended on his music to do for him what his words could only have made vulgar. Nevertheless, Wagner did provide us one enigmatic clue in words.

Heretofore, whenever the woodbird responded to an entreaty by Siegfried for advice, it always responded directly with straightforward, facts-only counsel or warning. But after the woodbird has informed Siegfried of the sleeping Brünnhilde whom the woodbird says is his for the taking, Siegfried, inflamed by he knows not what at the prospect, inquires of the woodbird, "What shoots so swiftly through my heart and senses? Tell me, sweet friend!" the woodbird, seemingly oblivious of his question, and speaking almost as if to itself alone, responds:

Gaily in grief I sing of love.
Blissfully from woe I weave my lay.
Only lovers know its meaning.

Decrypt that cryptic, seemingly non sequitur but strangely resonant response to Siegfried's inquiry as best you can. Wagner depended on you making the attempt.

On The Special Appeal Of Wagner's Mature Art

By successfully giving expression to a universal, highly erotic longing for the unattainable [Wagner, in his mature work,] provides [that longing] a certain degree of satisfaction. Not just in the world of our imagination, but in the world of oceanic, unbounded feeling that music makes it possible for us to inhabit we are enabled to confound the reality principle, experience the disallowed, live the impossible. It is as if our most heartfelt but also most hopeless yearnings were, contrary to all possibility, met. A wholeness that is unachievable in life is achieved nevertheless, and in actual experience, because music of this greatness ... is a directly felt experience as profound as any that it is possible for us to have. So the feeling is one of incredible and incredulous fulfillment; a satisfaction that finds itself unable to believe itself. People have always been seized by the inclination to use religious or mystical language [to describe] it; language as extravagant as the music itself. This is because they are in awe of their own experience.

—Bryan Magee, The Tristan Chord

Portrait Of A Lucky Man

Ionarts's Jens F. Laurson posting this, this, this, and this while I was in no frame of mind to post anything about anything, and, as insurance, was nowhere near a blog-posting keyboard.

At this remove in time and temper, however, I find those DVD reviews to be merely somewhat, um, eccentric. De gustibus, and all that, you know — or something equally nonconfrontational.

As I said, a lucky man.

Brief Take On The New EMI Tristan

I've heard this new studio recording only once, and that by webcast by WQXR several weeks ago (I've no intention of buying the actual CD set until the effect of the clever hype surrounding its making dissipates, and its price drops accordingly). Generally speaking, we don't do CD reviews here, but this CD set is a special case because of Placido Domingo singing one of the title roles — a role his voice type, experience, and temperament would seem to ill-qualify him for — and because of EMI's hyping of this studio recording being perhaps the very last of the breed ever made.

Music critic and blogger Alex Ross of the New Yorker got it, I think, mostly right in his brief review for that publication. Wrote Alex:

Domingo pulls off some amazing feats of interpretation in the third act: one line after another is given a heartrending spin. Elsewhere, particularly in Act II, he sometimes sounds oddly wooden, and self-consciously careful in his articulation. The endless love music never goes over the brink into delirium. (Compare Domingo with Wolfgang Windgassen on the legendary 1966 recording from Bayreuth — a Heldentenor in heat.) When René Pape comes on at the end of Act II to thunder the role of King Marke, he seems to be giving Domingo a primer in the dramatic recitation of German. Nina Stemme, the Isolde, is a singer of deadly precision, firing off consonants as if they were bullets. But she lacks both the ravishing warmth and the lacerating rage that characterize the perfect Isolde. (She comes closer than most, though.) Mihoko Fujimara and Olaf Bär are miscast as Brangäne and Kurwenal. Antonio Pappano coaxes awesomely voluptuous sounds from the Covent Garden orchestra, but there's something labored about this effort, as if the cast were too consumed by the imaginary burden of making the Last Opera Recording to make a living, breathing one

As I've noted, I essentially agree with what Alex wrote although I would have given a different explanation for Pappano's "labored" reading of the score (I would have called that reading self-conscious, with a slight smell of the lamp about it). And that would be that it's clear Pappano knows intellectually how a correct reading of Wagner's language and rhetoric should sound, and tried his utmost to realize it in performance, but as it's not native to him musically (i.e., he lacks what I've frequently termed the "Wagner Gene") his intuitive sense of it, and his sense of how to realize it naturally, are therefore absent. Mihoko Fujimara, lovely though her voice is here, has Brangäne sounding more like Isolde's naïve younger sister than her wiser, older waiting maid, and Olaf Bär's Kurwenal has none of that character's hardy gruffness vocally or dramatically (he sometimes sounds eerily exactly like Domingo's Tristan) which robs that critical role of its essential central characteristic. As Alex remarked, two roles badly cast.

I would add only that Alex neglected to roundly condemn Rolando Villazón's absurd Verdi-heroic-tenor-aria rendering of the simple seaman's ditty that opens the opera. Villazón's disproportionate vocal grandstanding should never have passed muster in a studio recording, but is something one sometimes (often?) hears in the opera house when a second-string tenor tries to make the most of his only solo (sung twice, or, more precisely, one-and-a-half times) in this five-hour, three-act opera. That sort of Italian-opera-tenor grandstanding makes the short but important little opening ditty sound perfectly preposterous musically and, worse, dramatically, and sets the opera off on the wrong foot right from the get-go.

Bloody Italian-opera tenors!

The Wages Of The Pop-cultural Mindset

Regular readers of this blog know that professional music journalist, composer, teacher, and blogger Greg Sandow has frequently been on the receiving end of our expressions of opprobrium for his repeated misguided and perverse if well-intentioned notions concerning the garnering of new audiences for classical music via the mass appeal tactics and practices of popular culture, and for his mindless championship of the idea of the equality of importance of pop and so-called high culture and the need to not draw lines of demarcation between the two. Perhaps more clearly than anything he's priorly written, his recent thoughts on the just-premiered John Adams / Peter Sellars opera, Dr. Atomic reveal the smallness of vision, and wrongheaded, postmodern, pop-culture-infected mindset that make possible his stance on these issues. Writes Mr. Sandow:

Haven't all these issues [treated in Dr. Atomic, and as per commentary by its creators, Peter Sellars and John Adams], and Oppenheimer's ambivalence about bringing the bomb into the world, been discussed over and over and over again, for decades? [...] We all know what Oppenheimer created; we all know how the bomb was used. What kind of new thoughts do we get from being reminded of that now?

Far better, I'd think, to explore how all these issues play out in our world now. Or, as in the '50s film Hiroshima mon amour, probe how the threat of mass destruction affects our individual behavior. Or, I'd think, even more powerfully than anything anyone could have done in the '50s, how the acceptance of mass destruction changes us.

So again, with all respect to Peter [Sellars] and to John [Adams], if you want to know why new operas tend to be irrelevant, look no further than this supposedly relevant one. Opera simply isn't an art form anybody looks to for discussion of important issues.

[...]

[H]as there ... been any new opera that's as current, deep, and probing as The Sopranos? Or, in the realm of comedy, as Curb Your Enthusiasm? Or even the SciFi Channel's Battlestar Galactica, which is sometimes conventional TV, but sometimes also far beyond that, with wrenching sexual perversity only one of many things that emerge in the wake of a massively destructive terror attack. TV, it seems to me, is by any honest artistic measure miles ahead of just about any new work any opera house is offering.

Well, I've not seen Dr. Atomic either, but I can see that Mr. Sandow declares all this with perfect earnestness, oblivious of the understanding that had Adams and Sellars followed Mr. Sandow's suggested path in the conception of their new opera by making it specifically here-and-now-relevant as opposed to their clear attempt at a realized operatic conception of Project Trinity as embodying those timeless and universal mythological concerns and themes that make it relevant to all times and cultures, what they would have ended up with would have been just another ephemeral, simpleton-appealing, unimportant, eminently disposable pop-culture event such as, well, The Sopranos, or Curb Your Enthusiasm, or Battlestar Galactica.

Mr. Sandow, I think, as well as others of his ilk, needs to take a sabbatical to do nothing but rethink seriously and deeply his wrongheaded notions on all these matters instead of repeatedly plunging ahead spouting his perverse, simpleminded, pop-culture-infected ideas of the way things ought to go and be.

A Note Of Thanks (Administrative Note)

Thanks to all those who sent expressions of concern regarding my announcement of last month. They were much appreciated.