Sounds & Fury

Will The Real Putz Please Stand Up

The focus of the Teatro Nacional de São Carlos's new production of Wagner's Das Rheingold may be Alberich's three-foot-long dong, but the real putz in this production is Eurotrash vandal Graham Vick whose handiwork it is.

Alberich is exceptionally well-endowed. Rejected by the Rhinemaidens, he rocks on his haunches, cradling his metre-long member. For a moment, when he swipes the disco-ball Rhinegold from these blue-frocked party-girls, self-castration looks likely. But no. He keeps the appendage, and it reappears in Nibelheim, thick as a man and as wide as the stage.

RTW risible T here.

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Heartening?

[Note: This post has been updated (1) as of 4:53 PM Eastern on 1 Jun. See below.]

I don't know quite what to make of this should-be-heartening article by Allan Kozinn for The New York Times. In it, Mr. Kozinn, by means of statistical argument, confidently sets about laying to waste the numerous and manifold reports of classical music's imminent demise in our culture. His conclusion that classical music today is alive, well, and kicking, however, seems to have about it a nagging and persistent aura of disconnect with experienced reality. Statistical arguments notwithstanding, it's manifestly clear as a matter of everyday experience on all fronts that classical music is today more marginalized in our mainstream culture than it's ever been since, say, the turn of the last century; so much so that ignorance of classical music and everything connected with it has become a matter of indifference, or even of some bourgeois and populist pride, rather than embarrassment or shame.

I suspect the fundamental flaw in Mr. Kozinn's conclusion — and fundamentally flawed I'm certain it is even though I can't offer any hard-fact argument against it — is the methodology that produced that conclusion, and upon which it ultimately depends: statistical reasoning. Let us, therefore, not take too much if any heart in Mr. Kozinn's thesis, and never forget Disraeli's (in)famous but sage dictum: "There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics."

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Update (4:53 PM Eastern on 1 Jun): More here.

!!#@@%$##!!!

It's 91 bloody Fahrenheit degrees out there today, and bloody summer is still almost a bloody month away. Can't the bloody weather gods bloody count!

Time to refresh the insulation and lock down all windows and doors, turn the air conditioning up to Full, and make arrangements for all necessities for living to be delivered to my front door for the duration so that I don't have to step so much as a foot outdoors for the next four months or so.

Oh!, that summer could be banished from the face of the earth forever!

A Brief Note On The New Deutsche Grammophon Parsifal

The broadcast premiere of the new recorded-live Deutsche Grammophon recording of Wagner's Parsifal aired today on WQXR (the New York Times-owned classical music station, in case you didn't already know), and what a sterling performance of that all but impossible to get right work it is. Christian Thielemann — an authentic possessor of what I've termed the "Wagner Gene" — is the conductor, and what more can one say other than the man's intuitive understanding and grasp of the Wagnerian language and Wagnerian rhetoric is simply flawless. Thielemann's Wagner readings recall those Wagner readings of the great Wagner Gene possessors of times past — Furtwängler, Knappertsbusch, Krauss, and Solti — with an added touch of that elegant sense of orchestral color and ensemble that was von Karajan's, and it's all in abundant evidence in this reading of this most difficult and fragile of Wagner's scores. The cast includes Plácido Domingo in the title role (whose typically execrable German diction and declamation is relatively well under control here), Waltraud Meier as Kundry, Franz-Joseph Selig as Gurnemanz, and Falk Struckmann as opera's biggest kvetch, Amfortas, all of whom turn in first-rate performances, Selig most particularly in what is this music-drama's toughest role (and one of the toughest roles in the Wagner canon) to bring off successfully (the role of Kundry a close contender for that title in this music-drama). The only relatively weak link in the cast was Wolfgang Bankl's somewhat limp-wristed and fairly harmless-sounding Klingsor, not at all good things for a depraved and evil sorcerer to be. First-rate as well were the Vienna State Opera Orchestra (a.k.a. the Wiener Philharmoniker) and the Vienna State Opera Chorus, both of which responded to Thielemann's direction as if they were a bespoke fit each for the other.

Though this reading of Parsifal falls somewhat short of the positively uncanny Knappertsbusch 1962 Bayreuth Parsifal — a reading so preternaturally right I'm convinced Knappertsbusch himself could not have replicated it were his very life at stake — that's saying nothing against it, and I, for one, will be adding this recording to my very select library.

"Live From Lincoln Center" Retrospective

Was anyone as appalled as I at the PBS "Live From Lincoln Center" 30-year retrospective, a tape of which I just finished watching? It was nothing other than a pop-culture, prole-pandering fraud. From what was included, anyone not familiar with the series would have guessed that over the past 30 years "Live From Lincoln Center" was a sort of serial vaudeville show with a mix of pop and pops concerts with but the merest smattering of genuine classical music concerts and ballet thrown in just to keep up appearances.

A bloody outrage.

Awesome

Here's an excerpt from a first-rate feature article for the magazine, Strings, by James Reel of KUAT-FM Blog on François Rabbath, a performer whose name was previously unknown to me:

“He’s recorded all the Bach cello suites,” reports composer, bassist, and sometimes recording engineer Frank Proto, “but they’re not released, because he hasn’t gotten around to approving the editing. He’s done this a few times over the years. In the 1980s, we were supposed to record the second suite. I went to Paris and we were supposed to do it in a church, but the church became unavailable and François had just hurt his back. So I said, ‘Let’s just hang out a few days and enjoy ourselves.’

“He said, ‘Let’s try it in my apartment’. So I set up my equipment, he started playing, he forgot about his back, everything was going well, and we finished the second suite. Then he said, ‘Keep the thing running.’ He played through, without stopping, all six suites.

“It was awesome and I just let the tape run."

So, big deal. What’s so awesome about that? François Rabbath is a bassist, that's what.

RTWT here.

Encouraging Sign?

[Note: This post has been updated (1) as of 11:58 AM Eastern on 8 Jun. See below.]

Finally, after seven or so benighted online years, the New York Times online Music section appears, for the most part at least, to be going back to identifying classical music concert reviews with the simple and proper identifying words, "Music Review" as in the more enlightened times of print-edition yore, whilst reviews of "concerts" of other genres of music are each identified by their appropriate identifying qualifiers (jazz, pop, rock, hip-hop, etc.).

A purposeful move in the right direction, or merely an accident of the moment?

Only time will tell.

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Update (11:58 AM Eastern on 8 Jun): And time says, Not an encouraging sign after all. Merely an accident of the moment.

Too bad, but hardly surprising.

Bayreuth Festival 2006

[Note: This post has been updated (1) as of 2:07 PM Eastern on 19 Jul. See below.]

We've added to the top of our right-hand sidebar the schedule for the opening performances of the 2006 Bayreuth Festival. As is the custom, these opening performances will all be webcast live, and as that fine website Operacast makes available the sources for those webcasts, each entry in the list will be linked accordingly.

This year's Festival looks to be a genuinely exciting one as it will for the first time mount a new staging of the Ring by director Tankred Dorst (we're keeping fingers crossed here that it will not be yet another Eurotrash outrage), and perhaps even more exciting, the cycle is to be conducted by that most gifted of present-day Wagner conductors, Christian Thielemann.

Stay tuned.

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Update (2:07 PM Eastern on 19 Jul): The links to the listings of live webcasts have now been added to our Bayreuth 2006 listing on the right-hand sidebar.

Lovely

The lovely Sarah Noble of Prima la musica, poi le parole, opera-lover extraordinaire, nails perfectly and beautifully what is the quintessential Wagner experience:

The thing is that I almost feel like Wagner is beyond the scope of this blog, because the experience is so different from all my other opera listening, and because I doubt the ability of words — my words especially — to articulate it. Which is not to say I don't find equally ecstatic experiences in other music — but they're differently ecstatic. The darkened room and the headphones and the high volume probably help of course. But then, during last year's [Met] broadcast season, I listened to quite a few that way and nothing else transported me the way the Wagner did. And I don't just mean transports of delight; I mean a near physical sense of having been transported elsewhere for the duration. In other broadcasts I may sometimes have felt I'd been taken to the world of the theatre, of the performance. Here though it's the world of the opera — wherever that is — that I've ended up in, and no amount of Met quizzes, roundtables or interjections from Margaret "brought to you today by the letter R" Juntwait can really interfere with that trip.

There's much more. RTW lovely T here.

An Off-topic Musing

In the seemingly endless attacks on Freud and Freudian psychoanalytic theory, I just love reading stuff like this which is absolutely typical:

In a career that has spanned four decades, Dr. McGlashan, now 64 and a professor of psychiatry at Yale, has with grim delight extinguished some of psychiatry's grandest notions, none more ruthlessly than his own. He strived for years to master [Freudian] psychoanalysis, only to reject it outright after demonstrating, in a landmark 1984 study, that the treatment did not help much at all in people ... with schizophrenia.

See? Freud was wrong — yet again.

Well, Dr. McGlashan could have saved himself the trouble of making a study, "landmark" or otherwise, by simply taking Freud at his word; viz., psychoanalysis has no therapeutic application to the psychoses notwithstanding early attempts by Switzerland's Carl Jung and Eugen Bleuler to show that it does. Beyond a brief theoretical conjecture as to the actual mental dynamics at work in the psychoses, Freud resisted and rejected all attempts to apply psychoanalysis in the therapeutic treatment of psychotics as the necessary condition for its success was the very thing absent in all psychotics; was in fact the very thing the absence of which defined a psychotic: an intact ego.

But none of that dissuades the Freud- and psychoanalysis-bashers.

And so the beat goes on.

Birthday Wishes

Born 193 years ago today, Richard Wagner is not known for his sense of humor, much less a self-deprecatory sense of humor. As if to give lie to that impression, here's Herr Wagner himself late in life musing on that momentous event 193 years ago:

In der schönen Monat Mai
Kroch Richard Wagner aus dem Ei.
Es wünschten viele die ihn lieben
Er wäre besser d'rin geblieben.


(In the beautiful month of May
Crept Richard Wagner from the egg.
It's the [birthday] wishes of many who love him
That it were better had he remained within.)

Clearly, the man was a veritable Groucho Marx.

The Cultural Reactionary

[Note: This post has been updated (1) as of 4:48 PM Eastern on 20 May. See below.]

Referring to this post of ours, Patrick J. Smith of The Penitent Wagnerite writes in this post (whose title, "Signifying nothing, it seems", plays a riff on our blog title and tagline):

Everyone's favorite cultural reactionary, A.C. Douglas has seemingly been taken with the vapors over a new, (gasp!) pseudo-feminist production of Der Ring des Nibelungen. Were I nearer, I would have sent — gratis — Mr. Douglas a draught of brandy to revive him.

So, Mr. Smith considers me a "cultural reactionary," does he.

Gee, what a surprise.

Not.

In labeling me a "cultural reactionary," Mr. Smith — a good and loyal supporter of and apologist for Regietheater (a.k.a. Eurotrash) opera productions (he's, for example, crazy for the Boulez-Chéreau Bayreuth Ring) — is merely invoking the expected and invariable knee-jerk standard "argument" against all who have nothing but well-deserved contempt for such self-indulgent, self-involved, self-serving atrocities. And as is also standard for supporters of such atrocities, Mr. Smith provides what he imagines is good and sufficient justification for the departures taken by Eurotrash directors from Wagner's own vision of Der Ring des Nibelungen; in this case, in the above referenced "feminist" Ring by its director, Kasper Bech Holten:

You can read the production synopsis [of the "feminist" Ring as given in our above linked post], as I did, and I think that you'll find it interesting, as I did. Der Ring des Nibelungen is — like it or not — an extended meditation on power. The 20th Century has been a series of experiments in power. From the fall of the old-line European principalities in the aftermath of World War II, to the rise of totalitarian states like Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, to the democratization and collectivization of Europe, the story of the 20th Century has been one of power in all its forms. If Herr Holten wishes to explore that in the context of Wagner's Ring, then he is fulfilling the subtext of the music-dramas better than any silly, half-witted minimalist approach....

There's so much wrong in that apologia one hardly knows where to begin ripping it apart. As good a place as any to start is, I suppose, to disabuse Mr. Smith of his curious (but, alas, not uncommon) notion that the Ring is "an extended meditation on power." It's, of course, nothing of the sort. Using the terms of Mr. Smith's own argument, the Ring is not a "mediation on power," but a "meditation" on the world-encompassing and -destroying evil that ineluctably ensues when love is usurped and replaced as a life principle by the will to human-created power.

That's not at all the same thing, is it.

Of course it isn't.

As to the socio-political rubbish of the rest of Mr. Smith's above quoted text, none of those events is of any import or moment whatsoever. It's all nothing but a laundry list of the tiniest of insignificantly tiny transitory blips on the ground of cosmic history, which history is the underlying and overarching context of Der Ring des Nibelungen, and that which makes the work the resonantly timeless and universal thing that it is; fundamental characteristics destroyed utterly by Eurotrash directors "explor[ing] ... in the context of [the] Ring" their own petty, tendentious, "relevant," earth-bound "vision" instead of illuminating the cosmic and timeless vision that was Wagner's; a vision not in any way obscured or altered by the "minimalist approach" which, not at all surprisingly, Mr. Smith, as do others of his benighted ilk, finds to be "silly [and] half-witted."

Finally, as to Mr. Smith's,

As to feminism, I can say only this: ... Das Rheingold shows what happens when men make bargains, shutting out their female peers. Die Walküre shows that only women provide salvation from the corruption of the bourgeois men - through disobedience (i.e., self-empowerment). Sieglinde disobeys Hunding and "natural law" and Brünnhilde disobeys her father, or the traditional patriarchal power dichotomy. Siegfried makes it clear that a man can only be a man, i.e., know fear and overcome it, through the other — the female (as opposed to the effeminate, represented by Mime). Whether Götterdämmerung ends in an Immolation Scene or a birthing scene, it is a catharsis brought about by a woman. [...] On one level, Wagner's Ring shows both what happens when women are disempowered and how empowered women can solve the problem.

Yes, well, I can only suggest to Mr. Smith that, 1) He reread Wagner's scores with clear rather than postmodern-clouded eyes, and, 2) proffer his above, um, odd postmodern bill of goods to the so-called "Women's Studies" departments of today's academy where it's certain to be a sure sell, and desist attempting to peddle it in saner, more well-informed, less agenda-driven quarters where it's just as certain to be the source of and provoke derisive laughter, and a myriad of good-natured if slightly off-color misogynistic jokes.

Just a well-meaning suggestion or two.

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Update (4:48 PM Eastern on 20 May): Patrick J. Smith responds. Mr. Smith has clearly missed the point and thrust of my argument against his mischaracterization of the Ring as "a meditation on power," which argument pointed out to him that the Ring is nothing of the sort, but, and in terms of Mr. Smith's own argument, rather, as I wrote, "a 'meditation' on the world-encompassing and -destroying evil that ineluctably ensues when love is usurped and replaced as a life principle by the will to human-created power." I didn't at all imagine that the distinction between what Mr. Smith argued and my counter to it was of esoteric or arcane subtlety, but apparently it is so far as Mr. Smith is concerned as the distinction seems to have gone well over his head, and so was missed by him entirely.

I would further point out to Mr. Smith that his new notion that "[t]he story arc of the Ring is ... based on love," is quite wrong — entirely wrong, as a matter of fact — and I would suggest gently to him that he regroup and reconsider this new notion of his in the light of a clear-eyed rereading of Wagner's scores. I can assure Mr. Smith that there exist no "secret scores" consulted by me as he conjectured there might be. There's but a single Wagner score for each Wagner opera, and the ones he consulted previously are the very same ones consulted by me. The difference between our readings of those scores rests on the circumstance that Mr. Smith viewed them through a postmodern glass darkly, while my view of them was unencumbered by such pernicious impediments.

Update to the Update: Mr. Smith responds here.

Shoulda Known

As is my habit, I was working at the computer with the radio tuned to WQXR going in the background when I became half-conscious of what sounded like the opening measures of the Tannhäuser overture. About thirty seconds or so passed when something told me to give over my full attention to it. That something was its absolute, unmitigated wrongness; a wrongness on just about every level possible except for the notes, which notes were all correct and all there.

When I say wrongness, I mean the kind of wrongness of, say, a Beethoven piano sonata played as if it had been composed by, say, Fats Domino. That's how grotesque the wrongness of this reading. And as the overture progressed, the more wrong the reading seemed to become; so wrong that for the life of me I couldn't even begin to guess who the butcher on the podium might be. A non-Westerner conducting a technically competent non-Western orchestra, surely, I thought. A provincial Chinese conductor, perhaps, who had never heard any Western music before, or at very least had never heard any music of Wagner's before, and was simply conducting this work by the numbers, so to speak.

Mercifully, it was the Dresden version of the overture that was being played, and so I didn't have long to wait to find out just who the culprit was, and when his identity was revealed it all became perfectly clear, and it all made perfect sense.

The conductor was (surprise!) ... Pierre Boulez.

Shoulda known.

Speaking Of Critics II

Here's an extract from a review by Financial Times critic Alastair Macaulay of the Met's current production of Wagner's Parsifal:

Wagner called Parsifal a "stage-consecrating festival play", and most companies these days apply modern sensibilities to the complex narrative. Some adapt abstraction, others impose stylisation. Some focus on symbolism, others invoke sociological, even political commentary. There can be more here than meets the ear.

One would not have guessed that on Friday at the Metropolitan Opera, proudly regressive haven of pretty-postcard literalism. The production dates back to 1991, and it looked old- fashioned then. With quaintly innocent direction by Otto Schenk (reproduced by Zoe Pappas) and kitsch décors by Günther Schneider-Siemssen, the drama remains stubbornly though neatly decorative. Wagner's convoluted flights of mystical mumbo-jumbo, his painful pieties and lovely longueurs are recreated on face value, for better or worse. Probably worse.

[...]

In the best of all possible operatic worlds, [the excellent cast of singers] would work with an inventive director, one who actually entertained some ideas about Wagner, the Holy Grail and Parsifal.

I confess I didn't have a clue who Alastair Macaulay might be, and on reading his above, my first thought was, Who's this idiot, and just what qualifications does The Financial Times insist on these days in the hiring of its music critics?

"Inventive director"? Doesn't this bozo realize that the Met is perhaps the last major opera house in the world where Wagner's mature-period operas are mounted with the respectful attention due the sense and spirit of Wagner's original vision* rather than the "vision" of some "inventive director"? I mean, this is opera, not some bloody play where, today at least, it's considered absolutely de rigueur for a theater director to mess with the playwright's text and ideas in order to realize the director's "concept". Today, a theater director without a concept is quite simply considered no theater director at all.**

But as I've already noted, this is opera we're talking about here, not The Theater. What could this music critic have been thinking in trashing the Met's successful and oft-lauded realization of Wagner's own vision of Parsifal, and calling instead for a concept from an "inventive director" who "entertained some ideas about Wagner, the Holy Grail and Parsifal"?

Turns out, this music critic is actually no music critic at all. A Google search reveals that Alastair Macaulay is a bloody theater critic primarily; a theater critic who, in this case at least, applied his theater-critic prejudices and sensibilities to an art form in which they've little or no place, and an art form of which he clearly has a limited understanding.

Which serves to answer my second rhetorical question; the one concerning what qualifications The Financial Times insists on these days in the hiring of its music critics. The answer, it would appear, is: marginal.

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* N.B., I wrote, "...mounted with the respectful attention due the sense and spirit of Wagner's original vision," not, "...mounted in accordance with Wagner's original stage directions." The two statements are not even remotely equivalent.

** I readily admit that in certain quarters — in Germany in particular — such has become the case for opera directors as well, but that's beside my point vis-à-vis music critics.

Updated Post (Administrative Note)

Another update to our much-linked-to post, Here We Go Again, and it's a doozie (see Update 3).

Antidote

We offer the following extracts and link as an antidote to the wrongheaded and perverse notions held by classical music marketing types and pop-culture besotted writers on classical music who, in a misguided attempt to make classical music more "accessible" and "relevant," advocate turning the classical music concert into either a sort of vaudeville show that mixes classical music with pop fare and performers on the same program, or into a circus act à la the so-called rock "concert" — complete with light shows and other visuals, and mosh-pit-like audience informality and "participation" — in an attempt to put butts into concert hall seats — any ol' butts whatsoever as long as they're young butts (both these types seem congenitally incapable of distinguishing the difference — and the importance of the difference — between any ol' young butts and informed and devoted young butts).

The extracts are from the published text of a speech delivered at the Royal Philharmonic Society Awards by the British writer and broadcaster Armando Iannucci, about whom we know absolutely nothing beyond the published text of this speech, the extracts from which now follow instanter, and sans further comment by us.

I can trace my love of classical music from the moment, aged 11, I attended my first musical appreciation lesson and the needle of a badly battered record player dropped with a loud thump onto a scratchy recording of Holst's The Planets. Then I heard sounds that excited me in a way that somehow the recordings of Deep Purple and King Crimson my brothers played never did.

[...]

Listening to classical music is a journey, not a state; an activity, not a meditation. Music is not a background noise. It's something you bring into the foreground of your experience, by engaging with it, by doing some work. Only recently have I come to listen properly to Schumann, Haydn and, especially, Bach, and begun to get that sense of rich, deep satisfaction that I first encountered more immediately as an adolescent in Mahler. I'm aware that it's easy to fall back on quasi-mystical, pretentious language when trying to talk about one's experience of classical music, but that shouldn't stop us trying. We don't talk about music enough. As someone who's never felt he's had the technical language at his fingertips, I feel all I can do is talk about it in whatever English I have at my command. I want to emote about how I feel. After a concert, I want to grab people by the lapels and tell them how lucky we are as a species that, out of all the hundreds of billions of us who ever lived, one of us managed to come up with the Goldberg Variations. But I don't, because that's not the done thing. So instead I mention that the cafe downstairs does some fabulous chocolate éclairs.

[...]

There's no way anyone is ever going to fully 'know' music, but I do think there's now an obligation to allow as many people as possible to know as much about it as they can. That's not the same as saying that music could become more accessible through marketing gimmicks. That's' why I'm always suspicious of any concert that puts other things in the way of the music, fireworks, laser displays, as if scared that the music by itself will not be enough.

Nor does it mean the classical music industry has to start talking awkwardly in the language of the street, going on about how Beethoven was a crazy guy, and Wagner made 'action movies'. It's not that at all. But it's about developing a language that talks to the audience aware of their intelligence and appetite, but also recognising that they will have questions that need answering.

[...]

[O]utside the concert hall I feel there is a greater and greater appetite for verbal communication about music. As traditional music teaching in schools diminishes, the language is taken away, but the feeling is still there. People want to have proper grown-up conversations about why music matters, about why the arts matter.

That's why I think it's necessary to have an emotional debate about music as well as an intellectual one....

[...]

Just as I think any performer tries to perform music as if for the first time, with all that energy and excitement that comes from discovering a new piece - maybe trying to recreate the memory of falling in love with a piece when hearing it first as a child - and just as people regularly say of a brilliant conductor that they seem to conduct as if recreating the energy an audience must have felt when the piece was first played decades, even centuries, before, so too I think we need to communicate our knowledge with the passion we first encountered as children.

RTW lovely T here.

Here We Go Again

[Note: This post has been updated (3) as of 11:19 PM Eastern on 15 May. See below.]

And I think I'm beginning to understand just how Don Quixote must have felt on observing the response of those who witnessed him tilting at all his various windmills.

This time it's music theorist Scott Spiegelberg of Musical Perceptions, who writes in part in this post:

One reason why lay people are resistant to attending classical concerts is from fear of appearing uncultured. [...] I have been working on respecting these people's opinions, and in engaging in a dialogue about the music rather than a lecture.

I think it is okay to challenge the opinions of neophytes, but said challenges should not be based on the weight of authority, and always with the philosophy of chacun à son goût.

What could Dr. Spiegelberg possibly mean by saying such people "fear ... appearing uncultured." It's not a matter of "appearing." They are uncultured, and should be made to understand that — gently and pleasantly, of course, so long as they don't go about brandishing their ignorance as if it were a banner to be saluted — and their opinions granted no measure of "respec[t]" whatsoever beyond one's respecting their right to hold such opinions no matter how ignorant.

As to challenging those neophyte opinions, in the case of the established classical music canon what more apposite, concise, and easily understood challenge than a challenge based on authority. In the case of the established classical music canon there are centuries (or in the case of canonical 20th-century works, close to a century) of received expert opinion and the almost universal judgment of history informing such a challenge, which challenge should never be engaged in "always with the philosophy of chacun à son goût." The very idea is absurd. When one gets right down to it, neophytes are incompetent even to hold an opinion beyond saying they simply don't "get it," which in turn is the perfect opening for providing the uncultured, ignorant neophyte instructive and patient explanations, suggestions, and answers to questions should he appear the least genuinely interested in "getting it." Any "dialogue" between the well-informed and the ignorant can take place only on such terms.

The notion that the granting of respect to uncultured opinions and to ignorance, and the adoption of an attitude of chacun à son goût will somehow facilitate enlightenment, and help to gain and educate an audience for classical music is, not to put too fine a point on it, simply preposterous.

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Update (11:47 PM Eastern on 12 May): Scott Spiegelberg responds. I would only point out to Dr. Spiegelberg that the lack of a comments section on almost all posts on this blog is not due my not "car[ing] to engage in dialogue," as Dr. Spiegelberg put it, but rather my not caring to sponsor and provide the space for the opinions of others. Every time I write something here such as the above post, I do so always with the hope, even the expectation, that it in fact will encourage dialogue; blog-to-blog dialogue; the very sort represented by Dr. Spiegelberg's own posted response to this post on his blog, which posted response is linked above. That Dr. Spiegelberg's posted response dealt with my points merely by characterizing them as "dogmatic" and "close-minded" (Lordy!, how I do love that concise, all-purpose, '60s-vintage-Leftist retort to just about everything contra), and defended his points merely by saying he "want[s] to share [his] love of music with others, and to learn about other views of music," is quite another matter altogether.

Update 2 (5:59 PM Eastern on 13 May): The uncultured, classical-music-ignorant hordes give angry vent to their outrage at my remarks. Be certain to read all the attached comments as of the time of this update (more of the same will follow, I suspect). They're absolutely priceless.

Update 3 (11:19 PM Eastern on 15 May): And the beat goes on. The clueless arrogance of the culturally benighted displayed by the writer of this post is typical of our populist dominated, pop-culture contaminated era wherein culturally ignorant airheads have the unmitigated chutzpah to adopt an attitude that implies that by their agreeing (with conditions, no less!) to give a prove-it-to-me listen to proposed selections from the classical music repertory they're doing classical music and the knowledgeable classical music community a favor(!).

O tempora! O mores!

[Note: This post was posted originally on 11 May.]

The Self-indulgent, Self-involved Vandalism Continues

[Note: This post has been updated (1) as of 12:32 PM Eastern on 20 May. See below.]

How about a feminist Der Ring des Nibelungen? Thoroughly imbecile, you say? So do we, but the thoroughly imbecile never gave pause to the self-indulgent, self-involved cretins well-schooled in the nothing-too-imbecile Eurotrash tradition of vandalized opera production.

Following is a brief description of a new production of the Wagner tetralogy by German director Kasper Bech Holten for Copenhagen's Royal Danish Opera. The description is by Shirley Apthorp, excerpted from an article for Bloomberg News. We post it here without further comment as none is needed.

When Valhalla goes up in flames at the end of the Royal Danish Opera's new "Ring" cycle, Brunnhilde does not ride her horse onto the funeral pyre. She gives birth to Siegfried's babe. The Rhine floods its banks and a new era dawns with Brunnhilde and daughter in charge. Men have had their chance at running the world, and botched it. Now it's women's turn.

[...]

[This "Ring"] is narrated as an extended flashback with Brunnhilde poring over diaries and albums in Wotan's library, piecing together her family history in the moments after Siegfried's death.

The female perspective is evident from the start. The Rheingold itself [i.e., the Wagner-specified lump of gold in the first music-drama of the tetralogy, Das Rheingold, in this production set in the 1920's] is a naked amphibious man, kept as a pet in the Rhinemaiden's fish tank. He swims decoratively to and fro until Alberich fishes him out and chops out his heart with a pen knife. The water clouds with blood.

This Rheingold is organic matter, and the dwarf, a Frankenstein figure, forges it into a range of half-human body parts, a science-fiction helmet [i.e., for the Wagner-specified magic helmet, the Tarnhelm], and the ring itself [i.e., Alberich's ring of the tetralogy's title] becomes a bracelet formed like a double twist of DNA. Wotan hacks Alberich's arm off just above the elbow to get it for himself and keeps the hand as a souvenir.

In "Walkure" [set in the 1950s in this production] Hunding is a sinister militarist who breaks glasses and beats his wife [Sieglinde]. Sieglinde pulls the sword from the tree herself [i.e., instead of Siegmund, her brother and rescuer], and stays awake to hear Brunnhilde warn Siegmund of his forthcoming death. Atop the roof of Copenhagen's Glyptotek museum, the Valkyries sport evening gowns with blood- soaked hems beneath black angelic wings, and sort the mangled corpses of fallen soldiers into piles. Brunnhilde screams as Wotan tears her wings from her back.

"Siegfried" is set in 1968 and features the hero as a rebellious teenager with guitar, sitar and Jimi Hendrix poster in his attic room. Fafner lives in a subterranean laboratory, issuing statements via microphone through overhead loudspeakers, leaking chemical waste into the forest. Siegfried kills Mime almost by accident, and regrets it immediately. Brunnhilde, awoken from her rooftop slumber by Siegfried's kiss, recovers from her initial shyness to straddle her rescuer.

The Gibichungs are decadent Balkan warlords in [the last music-drama of the tetralogy] "Gotterdammerung" [set at the end of the 20th century in this production] with a limitless supply of contraband whiskey, cocaine and fast cars. Hagen, a psychopathic cross between Goring and Goldfinger, kills hostages for fun and lets his henchmen rape their wives as a special treat. Siegfried is quickly corrupted.

And just to top things off (as if things needed any topping off), here's a newspaper squib that was posted on the Usenet Wagner newsgroup (source newspaper not identified)* wherein the director, Kasper Bech Holten, comments on his Konzept. As before, we post it here without further comment.

Copenhagen Opera Mounts New "Ring" as Modern Danish Family Saga

Feminist Staging

The artistic director of the Royal Danish Opera, Kasper Bech Holten's "Ring" cycle is reported to have "played a role in changing opera's image for the next generation."

Bech Holten has the "Ring" set in the 20th century and "seen from a feminist perspective."

"We chose to make it a portrait of the most fascinating, dynamic and terrible century in mankind's history," [says Bech Holten]. "'Das Rheingold' takes place in the 20s, when the big ideologies are taking shape. 'Die Walküre' is set in the 50s, in a Cold War climate. 'Siegfried' is in 1968, when the young hero comes and breaks his father's rules. And 'Götterdämmerung' is at the end of the century in the Balkans, when the ideologies come crashing down."

"At the end, Brunnhilde sets fire to Valhalla," [Bech Holten says]. "But we let her survive. It is time to put an end to the operatic tradition of slaughtering all these dangerous and interesting women...."

Idiot!

(We know, we know. We said we'd make no further comment. But it's all more than just a bit much, and we simply couldn't help ourself.)

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* Turns out, the "source newspaper" for this was none other than another article by Shirley Apthorp, also for Bloomberg News.

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Update (12:32 PM Eastern on 20 May): Patrick J. Smith of The Penitent Wagnerite comments. Our response to Mr. Smith's comment can be read here.

Lord Preserve Us!

We offer the following excerpt from this piece without further comment (you may, however, consider editorial exclamation points of head-shaking dismay and utter disgust inserted after each graf, most particularly the last).

The experience of the 1960s and '70s seemed to show that political [classical] music is caught in a dilemma. If it uses radical language to say radical things, it can't connect with real political and social life. If it says simple things in a simple way, it loses all emotional subtlety and turns into propaganda. If the choice is that stark, then it's a lost cause, and we shouldn't be sad about the disappearance of the ideological strain in new music.

But I am sad, because we seem so much poorer without it. The retreat to the purely aesthetic in the past 30 years has led to a depressing lowering of the emotional and intellectual temperature of new music. We hear so many safe, high-gloss pieces that seem to have no urgent reason for existing.

However, the good news is that the radical spirit hasn't gone. It's just that, as in pop music, you find it in people who might be old in years, but are marvelously young in spirit. One of them is the American composer Frederic Rzewski, who's in London this month for a retrospective of his music.

He declines the title of political composer, saying that, unlike [British radical composer Cornelius] Cardew, he is not a provocateur. But he also says he is not into abstractions: "I am interested in life and the relationship of music to life." He's written pieces about the Iraq war, about union-breaking in American cotton mills, about the Attica prison riot in New York state in 1971. His best-known piece is stirringly entitled "The People United Will Never Be Defeated."