Sounds & Fury

Prodigy

The following mordant commentary is from a retrospective piece appearing in the January 1940 number of the Saturday Evening Post:

After being a celebrity ... in Dublin and London, he had returned home [the following year] expecting to be a Broadway celebrity. But he got to the Algonquin without being mobbed. He discovered people in the lobby not talking about him. In Times Square he found large groups of people not mentioning him. A celebrity has a negative or an inverted sense of hearing: he can hear his name not being mentioned at forty paces. Everywhere he went, nonmention of his name drummed on his ear. He was bewildered. [...] By rights, [theater moguls] the Shuberts should have met him at the docks.

The celebrity in question was Orson Welles the first volume of whose wonderfully written and meticulously researched biography, Orson Welles: The Road To Xanadu, by Simon Callow I've just begun to read. I've gotten through only the first one-hundred-and-fifty pages, but already the life of the young Orson Welles has left me all but breathless so varied and broad in experience, and so rich in accomplishment it was.

The trip abroad referred to in the above quoted retrospective had taken Welles to Ireland where, traveling alone, and after myriad adventures in Galway and the country's West Coast, he'd set off for Dublin, and on arrival immediately presented himself to the directors of Dublin's famous Gate Theater to whom he announced he was available. His offer of services was duly accepted, and he was given the role of the middle-aged Duke Karl Alexander, the crucial second leading role in the play, Jew Süss, which had had a hit run in London's storied West End some four years previous.

Welles's performance was a triumph — a genuine phenomenon — eliciting delirious applause and cheering cum standing ovations from audiences, and unanimous raves in the theater critical press. "Interesting at every moment," said The Herald. "The young American actor received nothing short of a personal triumph," declared Dublin Opinion. "A touch of humanity and simplicity in [the Duke's] swinishness which in less expert hands might have been lost ... Orson Welles captured it magnificently," trumpeted The Independent. And this from J.J. Hayes, the New York Times's man in Dublin:

The Duke is played by a young American actor [Orson Welles] whose performance is astonishingly fine. [...] Dublin is eager to see him in other roles.... His coming will probably lead to the production of Coriolanus which was shelved ... because a suitable man could not be found for the title part ... 35 years since it was done in Ireland by Sir Frank Benson.

The last bit about Coriolanus was fed to Hayes by The Gate Theater Press Office, the presiding officer of which was ... Orson Welles.

All this took place in 1931. Orson Welles had just turned sixteen.

Bigot Alert!

[Note: This post has been updated (1) as of 4:58 PM Eastern on 30 Mar. See below.]

Sonofagun! How could we have missed it? Blogger Pliable of On an Overgrown Path is a bigot! A "soft bigot," to be sure, according to that ever vigilant sniffer-outer of bigots and bigotry, professional leftist Stirling Newberry of The Agonist, but a bigot nonetheless. After all, a bigot is a bigot is a bigot.

And what crime has that "soft bigot" Pliable perpetrated; a crime so heinous that we're exhorted to remove On An Overgrown Path from our blogrolls as due and proper punishment? Why, he — gasp! — had the unmitigated and egregious effrontery to link — actually link! — an article written by one of those "hard bigots" over at that bigot publication, The American Spectator; an article that spewed the vile sexist and racist notion that hiring quotas are counterproductive and out of place in elite organizations such as symphony orchestras where musical and technical excellence ought to be the central and foremost criterion in hiring decisions, and gender and/or race and/or ethnicity no criterion at all.

Heavens! Sound the alarm! Alert the authorities! It's the Nazis all over again!

Idiot.

(Our thanks to blogger Steve Hicken of Listen for the link to the post on The Agonist.)

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Update (4:58 PM Eastern on 30 Mar): The Rest Is Noise guest blogger, Justin Davidson, takes a second (and more rational) run at it (we commented on his first run here).

Featured Past Post #30 (Administrative Note)

A new Featured Past Post is up on the right sidebar.

They Ain't Growin' 'Em Like That Anymore

Since the appointment of Gérard Mortier as general-director-designate of the New York City Opera was confirmed, I've read an untold number of words from a bevy of classical music critics and reviewers commenting on that appointment and what it bodes for the New York City Opera in particular and opera in New York City in general. But none did it so neatly, so succinctly, or so perfectly as this from classical music critic Martin Bernheimer:

The New York City Opera – relatively poor and historically feisty – languishes forever in the shadow of the mighty Metropolitan. Now it finds itself contemplating a cultural crossroads.

The regime of Paul Kellogg, controversial general-director since 1996, lumbers to a somnolent close in June. His successor, who officially takes over in 2009, is none less than Gérard Mortier, the controversial iconoclast who has inspired blood, sweat and tears – also bravos – in Salzburg and Paris. Conservative New Yorkers may regard the Belgian impresario as a dangerous enfant terrible. Others may hail him as a deus ex machina.

Publicity machines are already grinding in high gear. The New York Times ran an editorial welcoming Mortier as a productive counterforce for Peter Gelb, the mastermind making waves next door at the Met. City Opera officials have blown up the editorial for display out front. A Mortier/Gelb rivalry could be stimulating, especially for aficionados of Schadenfreude.

Mortier has been a prime proponent of experiments that exalt in ignoring, if not contradicting, operatic scores. In Salzburg, for instance, he mustered an ugly and leaden Fledermaus predicated on cocaine nightmares and primitive politics. His admirers call the genre Regietheater. His detractors prefer "Eurotrash".

The City Opera does not enjoy vast subsidies. The chief administrator must assume fundraising duties in addition to aesthetic pursuits. The company concentrates on modest productions employing little-known singers, with a scrappy orchestra and ragged chorus. The State Theater, capacity 2,755, is an ungainly barn designed for ballet. The sound, thanks to Kellogg, is distorted by microphones. Kellogg wanted new quarters; Mortier agreed to stay put. In any case, he stands to inherit and inhabit a brave new world.

Was the above excerpt taken from an article Bernheimer wrote on the matter? No, it was not. The above five grafs were merely a yummy and pitch-perfect-pertinent lead-in not to an article on the Mortier succession, but rather to a review written for the Financial Times of the NYCO's theatrically less than inspired production of Rossini's La Donna del Lago.

Sad to observe, the daily mainstream media ain't growin' classical music critics like that anymore. Face it and weep.

O tempora! O mores!

Just For The Record

An intellectual blogger with a perverse taste and seemingly insatiable appetite for the low in culture whom I refuse to name and whose blog I've just removed from our Culture Blogs listing and refuse to here link, yesterday posted the following:

I just wrote a note to the National Trust for Historical Preservation. Somebody's gotta take the hard-reactionary stance, darn it.

Dear All --

I'd been under the impression that the preservation movement came about in large part as a protest against what modernism has done to our environment. An anti-modernist stance is certainly why I at least am interested in supporting the preservation movement.

So imagine my dismay in recent years as the National Trust has taken it more and more on themselves to speak up for and agitate for preservation of modernist buildings. I notice in your Jan/Feb issue two major articles cryin' the blues about supposed modernist masterpieces, for example. (One of them is here.)

I'm very sorry to see that you've fallen for the architecture world's argument that modernism now deserves to be seen not as a disastrous episode in architecture history, but as a worthy-of-preservation moment.

The argument the architecture establishment is making is yet another in a series of their endless attempts to legitimize and perpetuate modernism. "It wasn't so bad ... It was well-intended ... After all, some of the buildings were great ... It deserves love and care too ... Why not embrace it?"

No no no. The current architecture establishment is the direct descendant of the original modernists, and they're doing what they can to entice preservationists into supporting their awful line of descent. They're doing what they can to co-opt their enemies.

Don't fall for it. Insist on the facts: Modernism stank, and was a destructive and totalitarian disaster.

We should be fighting these attempts to redeem modernism, not falling for them. Let's be clear: Modernism was a terrible disaster, the worst thing to happen in all of architectural history. The scale of its damage to our shared environment is on a par with what happens when wars devastate cities and countrysides.

Well, I guess you already have fallen for the let's-preserve-modernism line, darn it.

Would you mind directing me to a truly anti-modernist, pro-preservation-of-traditional-architecture organization?

Best,

[name withheld]

I wonder if they'll print it. Any bets?

I replied thusly to the above in the comments section of the post in question:

If you can find anyone to take the "Will" side, I'll take the other side, and give 1000-1 odds into the bargain.

Why should they print your letter? It's thoroughly uninformed, and reads like something written by a zealot from the lunatic fringe with an ax to grind. It's one thing to skewer Modernist architecture for its real failures and absurd moral cast. It's quite another to blanket-condemn the architecture of an entire architectural movement that was one of the most inventive and, at its best, one of the most aesthetically satisfying in all architectural history.

ACD

My above comment was summarily deleted by the post's author almost as soon as it was posted, and I reprint it here just for the record.

Wagner: The Movie

[Note: This post has been updated (1) as of 1:46 AM Eastern on 26 Mar. See below.]

Wagner-hater, Ms. Opera Chic, has some choice words about the four-hour cut version of the 1982, nine-hour, made-for-TV epic, Wagner, starring Richard Burton in the title role, and with a slew of first-rank actors such as Vanessa Redgrave, Sir Ralph Richardson, Sir John Gielgud, and Sir Larry Himself in supporting roles, and some even choicer if largely disproportionate and at times misguided words about Wagner himself.

When I purchased a VHS copy of this Tony Palmer-directed, nine-hour mini-series I watched it in its entirety. It was my first experience of this, um, epic, and what a colossal drag it was; a wanton squandering of time, money, and talent. Worse than a mere drag, actually. An aggravating bore, if I may be permitted the almost oxymoron.

From the film's look its budget must have been huge. It was visually gorgeous throughout, and the production values were of the same caliber as a theatrical film. The actors, too, all did a first-rate job — that is, given the positively dreadful — and I do mean dreadful — script they had to work with. Beyond that, there's nothing good to say about this film. Palmer's repeated cutting in of visually effective but totally irrelevant "moments" was more than merely annoying. It was damaging in the extreme. Ditto the mostly irrelevant music track, all of it taken from Wagner's own works which was damaging not only in its irrelevance to what was happening on-screen, but damaging due the unavoidable and at-odds associations one could not help but make with what the music means or has to do with in the works from which it was taken.

My sense of the thing is that intelligent editing (Palmer was the film's editor as well) could have done much to save the film from being the bloated, boring, impossibly confusing and disjointed thing that it is. But even given intelligent editing, nothing could have saved this film from its arrantly vapid script. Apart from its amateurishness, it missed just about all there was to miss of central importance to a reasonable understanding of Wagner the transcendent genius and, to a lesser degree, of Wagner the man.

Bloody shame.

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Update (1:46 AM Eastern on 26 Mar): Just for the record...

I'm not quite sure what possessed me, but I just watched the tape of Wagner again — all nine grueling hours of it — and it's even more dreadful than I remembered it from the first — and last — time I watched it.

In the comments section of the above linked post on Opera Chic, I remarked in contradiction to the comment of another commenter that it was my recollection there was little representation of Wagner's anti-Semitism in the film. I was a bit off. There was no representation of Wagner's anti-Semitism in the film beyond three or four en passant, one-word remarks by Wagner such as could have come from any German of the time, and, at the end of the film, a good-natured(!), joking(!!) reference to Wagner's wanting the great conductor Hermann Levi, a practicing Jew and the son of a rabbi, to undergo baptism before conducting Parsifal.

So much for the accuracy of this ostensible TV biopic which had a number of other inaccuracies as well, and a few flat-out inventions throughout its length.

Master Class

I watched last night's installment of the PBS Great Performances series which opened with Daniel Barenboim performing five Beethoven sonatas, and closed with a 2005 Barenboim-led Beethoven master class wherein he showed the four participants (i.e., they performed, and Barenboim stopped them and interjected his remarks, criticisms, and demonstrations when necessary) — gifted young concert pianists Lang Lang, Jonathan Biss, Shai Wosner, and David Kadouch — just how it's done. Or, rather, how it ought to be done.

Barenboim and I are of the same generation, and watching that master class felt a bit like old home week to me. I don't know how master classes are carried on today in general, but Barenboim followed the method that prevailed when I attended school, and witnessing that master class had me feeling all warm and fuzzy right from the get-go (snicker at that last at your peril).

One of the participants, the twenty-year-old Frenchman, David Kadouch, began playing a movement from one of the sonatas, and played forte a measure or two that apparently was marked piano in the score. Barenboim stopped him instantly. Why was he playing forte when the score called for piano, Barenboim asked. "Because," replied Kadouch, barely controlled defiance in his voice, "I like it that way."

For an instant, I misbelieved my ears. No participant in a master class in my time, not even the bravest or most gifted — or the most reckless — would have dared offer such a justification for disregarding so clear a notation in a Beethoven score. Not to a master of Barenboim's stature, at any rate.

In an interval of less than a split second, a dozen witheringly savage responses to that imbecile justification and Kadouch's unmitigated chutzpah flashed through my mind.

I held my breath.

Barenboim didn't miss a beat. "Not good enough," he shot back with equanimity, sounding more bemused than annoyed or angered. "Had you said because there's a diminished ninth that needs to be heard at that point, I would have thought you wrong and told you so, but at least your reason would have had some real thought behind it. Now, let's see what happens when you play it as Beethoven wrote it, and let's examine it from there."*

The right response, and the right way to handle the thing, of course. Savaging Kadouch for his imbecile remark and for his unmitigated chutzpah would have accomplished nothing except perhaps to increase his defiance, and he would have learned nothing of value except that in a master class the master is the master, and against the master one cannot win in the short term.

Needless to say, after about another two minutes of Barenboim nudging his thinking, Kadouch saw his error, and it's a pretty sure bet he'd never again play that measure forte in disregard of the score's notation of piano. And it's almost, but not quite, a pretty sure bet he'd never again treat in so cavalier a fashion any notation of Beethoven's.

Master class indeed.

* I have neither a verbatim transcript nor a tape of the master class, and so I'm largely paraphrasing Barenboim's remarks from memory throughout this piece.

David Hurwitz To Roger Norrington: "Stuff It!"

We've in typical blog fashion ranted a number of times on this blog previously against doctrinaire HIP performances, and most particularly against those by HIP zealot and general menace to music Roger Norrington. But classical music critic David Hurwitz does HIP and Norrington proper in a 115-page PDF screed the link to which we posted almost a week ago, but apparently forgot to switch our TypePad editor from "Draft" to "Publish" when saving.

There is a fraud being foisted on the music-loving public today by certain members of the “historically informed performance practice” lunatic fringe (let us call them the HIPPLF for short). This consists of the notion that the modern orchestral “continuous vibrato,” a misnomer for reasons to be considered shortly, was a post-War invention that composers of the late Romantic period would have found alien, and in fact did not call for in their scores. Proponents of this theory would have us believe that prior to World War II, vibrato in orchestral string sections was a scarce commodity, and then all of a sudden, the same players, conductors, and composers who lived in vibrato-less bliss decided to apply the technique with a trowel.

Stated this way, the foolishness of this point of view ought to be self-evident, if only because of its utter lack of grounding in the reality of how people behave and the pace at which historical change logically occurs. It has arisen out of the fact that certain early music specialist conductors have broken into the mainstream, and now lead conventional symphony orchestras. Some simply loathe vibrato, but lack the personal courage to come out and say, “I like it this way.” Instead, they seek historical justification for their peculiar prejudices, and such is the state of affairs in the world of the performing arts today that it is in the interests of players, managers, and audiences to indulge these fantasies.

One result of this lamentable trend has been the creation of HIPPLF member Roger Norrington’s “Stuttgart sound.” His hypothesis, succinctly articulated in the notes to his recording of Mahler’s First Symphony, states categorically that, “Brahms, Wagner, Tchaikovsky, Bruckner, Mahler, and Berg never heard an orchestra with vibrato; it simply wasn’t a part of their experience.” Needless to say, this assertion is purely rhetorical, designed to shock rather than to enlighten. Norrington is a fundamentalist. Accordingly, his position is a matter of blind faith, and not one of reason supported by actual evidence. I am not suggesting that Norrington isn’t aware of the historical record; but his use of it, and that of the HIPPLF generally, is selective, biased, lacking in context, and opportunistic.

RTWT here (Adobe Reader required).

PSA

I've ordered mine. Have you ordered yours?

Get with the program!

Be There Or Be Square!

For those of you who don't know of its existence, this is one great idea, and too long coming.

Be there or be square!

Needs To Be Noted

We've often on this blog justifiably slammed New York Times chief music critic Anthony Tommasini for any number of justifiable reasons, and so when justifiable praise is warranted we feel constrained to post it here.

We've never heard even so much as a measure of Strauss's Die Ägyptische Helena, nor have we attended the Met's new production of the opera with the stellar soprano Deborah Voigt in the title role (this production was apparently created for Ms. Voigt), and so know nothing about either. We do, however, know an informed, well-written review when we read one no matter whether we might agree or disagree with the opinions expressed had we knowledge of the work and the production, and Mr. Tommasini's review of this production is just such a review.

RTWT here, to see whether or not you agree.

A Response To, Wagner’s Ring: Tension and Delight

Jens F. Laurson privately calls our attention to, Wagner’s Ring: Tension and Delight, a piece he wrote for the blog maintained by Washington's Classical WETA 90.9 FM, in which piece he comments in general terms on the staging of Wagner's great tetralogy, Der Ring des Nibelungen, in connection with the upcoming March 24th premier of Die Walküre, the second music-drama of the cycle that's being staged by director Francesca Zambello for Washington National Opera's production of the tetralogy, which staging she refers to as an "American Ring". At bottom, however, Mr. Laurson's piece comes across as a lukewarm apologia of sorts for Ms. Zambello's Regietheater approach to the staging of the Ring which apologia is, of course, perfectly understandable on civic boosterism grounds, but is otherwise largely indefensible.

Mr. Laurson first attempts to sort things out a bit by defining and distinguishing such terms as "Wagnerianism", Wagnerian, traditionalist, "originalist", Modernist, conservative, etc. His definitions and distinctions are at times fairly muddled but we don't wish to here quibble with any of them but instead go right to the heart of Mr. Laurson's argument in which he writes:

An opera that has a message that goes beyond the literal story it tells (and all great operas do), needs to be allowed to get that message across. And whatever means conveyed that message three-, two-, or one-hundred years ago are not likely the means that convey it nowadays. Points of reference change, symbols and conventions change. Scenery depicting a depraved society in 1850 looked different than such scenery would look in 1980 or 2007. An audience today would merely see costumes and conclude: “pretty” – but hardly register a social critique.

It is any good director’s job to identify the message(s) of the opera at hand, and then find a way to translate this into a language that is understandable to the audience. To merely re-create a version of the past, making sure not to introduce any new idea and add new fancy trims is the traditionalist’s choice; insufficient to anyone who wishes opera to be more than merely a museum of former art. [...] To treat Wagner this way would be highly inappropriate and unfortunate. Similarly it wouldn’t do to force alien or scantly related elements into the structure, although that’s very tempting, apparently.

The difficultly for a director who wishes neither to embalm the opera, nor to impose him- or herself on it, lies in translating the core elements of the opera into a modern language without making the latter dominate the meaning. Different interpretations of an opera’s core and meaning meet different attempts to interpret them and various different nuances and accentuations that give it a particular flavor. These legions of possibilities are exactly what make opera so attractive and exciting, even if only a few of them actually work well. This challenge is only more attractive (and perilous) in the most demanding and complex of operas, the Ring.

Francesca Zambello sets out to meet this challenge with her “American Ring” in a particularly daring and reasonably novel way. Instead of trimming localisms away in order to hone in on the message, alone, she aims at presenting the Ring’s truths in a new, familiar localism, a quintessentially American vernacular. This should be less daring than it may seem at first, given that the Ring is much less quintessential German than it is universal, even if the Rhein flows prominently through it, everywhere.

References to "messages" aside (the Ring contains no "messages" even though when writing the initial prose draft of the drama that was to become the Ring Wagner, the then political revolutionary, may himself have thought in such simpleminded, propagandistic terms), the above, when stated in this general way, all sounds perfectly harmless, even reasonable and right-thinking. The problems begin when an actual director takes the Ring in hand to "translat[e] the core elements of the opera into a modern language without making the latter dominate the meaning" — most especially a director who imagines herself Wagner's equal or superior as a dramatist, dramaturge, and philosopher.

As we wrote on this blog in January of last year concerning Ms. Zambello's proposed but not yet fully revealed "translation" of the Ring:

While a new production of the Ring is always cause for notice and remark, what makes this particular new production [i.e., the then not yet produced WNO production] worthy of notice and remark is that it's to be what its director, Francesca Zambello, calls "an American Ring."

Say what?

Well, you know, American. As in, Native American, perhaps. As in, Red-Indian American. As in, the magic gold residing in the depths of the Mississippi or Colorado, perhaps (Das Mississippigold just doesn't cut it, does it). As in, perhaps, Wotan as Kitcki Manitou, the Algonquin Great Spirit or Supreme Being, father of all. As in, perhaps, Erda as Atira, the Pawnee Earth goddess. As in, perhaps, Donner as Hino, the Iroquois god of thunder. As in, perhaps, Loge as Michabo, the Algonquin trickster god. As in, perhaps, Alberich as a proto-black slaver (there were such, you know), and the Nibelungs his stable of slaves.

Mind-boggling. Absurd.

But not so fast, please. Unlike the prima facie absurd Konzept of, say, the Chéreau, Kupfer, or Flimm Rings, the Konz..., er, concept of an American Red-Indian Ring cannot be dismissed out of hand as prima facie absurd. It in fact has possibilities. Genuine mythic possibilities; mythic possibilities in which Nature and the cosmic are both overarching context and underlying ground just as in the Scandinavian-Germanic-derived world of the Ring as envisioned and realized by its original creator. [...] [F]or this production one must withhold judgment until it's a fait accompli as its success or failure depends entirely on how Ms. Zambello and her team handle the new material, especially as it concerns that material's correspondence with Wagner's text, and most especially with Wagner's music; correspondences which the above mentioned Eurotrash productions failed grotesquely and abjectly to achieve, if such correspondences were even considered by the productions' respective directors as of any importance at all. If this "American Ring" satisfies those correspondences faithfully, imaginatively, and resonantly; remains unwaveringly and resolutely mythically grounded through and through; and the music forces involved are all first-rate, Washington National Opera might just find itself with a bona fide, world-class, true-to-the-Wagnerian-vision Ring on its hands.

Unhappily, on the evidence of her production of the Ring's first music-drama, Das Rheingold, produced last year at the WNO, Ms. Zambello's "translation" of the Ring is nothing of the sort. Instead, Ms. Zambello has "translated" Wagner's great cosmic drama into a squalid, confused, politically correct, quasi-Marxist, postmodern morality play much as did her apparent model, Patrice Chéreau, in his "translation" of the Ring for his 1976 Bayreuth Festival "Centennial Ring" production, and by so doing, as did Chéreau in 1976, trivialized beyond redemption that music-drama and the great tetralogy to which it's prelude, and, more disastrously, made absolute nonsense of Wagner's music and text and their inviolable organic unity.

It was not for nothing that Wagner set the Ring in a literally pre-historic and unidentifiable time and place, notwithstanding that the costumes created for the Ring's premier at the first Bayreuth Festival where the production was directed by Wagner himself — the only production of the Ring Wagner ever witnessed or had a hand in producing — were, to Wagner's great displeasure, in total violation of Wagner's direct instructions to the costume designer to create costumes that would be "a vivid and characteristic portrayal [of the characters] which will present us with appropriate liveliness, personal incidents from a cultural period that is remote from any experience or reference to an experience," and instead, by their design, made the Ring seem to be set very identifiably in 5th-century Germany or thereabouts. Wagner, great dramatist that he was, knew that by his setting the Ring in an indeterminate time and place the work — the drama — would thereby gain immeasurably in its timelessness, universality, and universal symbolism, which qualities — qualities that are among those principally responsible for the Ring's astonishing resonant power — are destroyed utterly by the willful, intrusive meddling of postmodern directors and their Regietheater approach whereby the director's "today-relevant" Konzept or "translation" disregards and supplants the timeless, universal, cosmic Konzept that was Wagner's own.

There is nothing — nothing — that can excuse or justify that sort of perfidious vandalism. As we've elsewhere noted, faithfully serving the vision — the Konzept — of the opera's creator as embodied in the opera's score (text, music, and nominal stage directions) is the opera director's Prime Directive, and any opera director who doesn't in his very bones understand that should never be permitted access to an opera house stage.

It's, sadly, too late for the WNO, but other opera houses would do well to take note.

Die Meistersinger Discovered

Of all Wagner's mature operas, I'm least familiar with Die Meistersinger. It's the only Wagner opera post-Lohengrin the score of which I've neither owned nor studied. Truth be told, while I on very first hearing recognized instantly the masterwork that from first note to last Meistersinger indisputably is, the opera is simply too diatonically sunny for my, shall we say, darker sensibilities, and I could never quite curl myself around it, nor enter into its depths as I have with Wagner's other mature operas. That notwithstanding, along with tens (hundreds?) of thousands of others, I enjoyed immensely the live radio broadcast of the Met's presentation of Die Meistersinger this past Saturday. It was, by and large, a top drawer performance, and one would be hard-pressed to find serious fault with it.

And yet....

And yet what? Perhaps the best way I can express what I mean by that and yet is to say that Saturday's Met performance was a top drawer re-creation of a top drawer Meistersinger as opposed to its being the real thing, so to speak.

And what might the real thing be? I confess I wasn't quite sure before yesterday (Sunday) afternoon when I heard through for the first time the Wieland Wagner-Hans Knappertsbusch 1952 Bayreuth Die Meistersinger. With due allowance made for the Bayreuth's '50s mono audio, and leaving aside comparisons between individual singers in the two readings (such as, for instance, the Met's Johan Botha and Bayreuth's Hans Hopf in the role of Walther von Stolzing; Botha turned in a fine Walther Saturday, but his fundamentally Italianate dramatic tenor pales by comparison with the rich, seemingly effortless baritonal heldentenor of Hopf), what struck me almost immediately about the Kna reading was its almost preternatural naturalness musically and dramatically. Nothing the slightest bit forced. Nothing the slightest bit strained. Not the slightest whiff of "the smell of opera" about it anywhere in the pit or on-stage.

Whomever might have directed the Met's Meistersinger, I suspect he's no match for Wieland Wagner in that capacity, and much as I admire and am impressed with the Wagner conductor James Levine has lately become, he's no match for Knappertsbusch in that capacity — few conductors are — and Kna makes this score in its musical and dramatic totality come alive in such a way that the experiencing of it was for me almost Damascene — so much so that I'm now for the first time contemplating purchasing the full score of Meistersinger, and immersing myself in it as completely as I have with the other mature Wagner operas. Should I actually act on that impulse, I prophesy that after a few months study of the work this blog will fast become glutted with disquisitions on Meistersinger that suggest I imagine I'm the very first to have discovered the work and understood it.

Stay tuned.

Classical Music Critics Beware!

Beware!, all you classical music critics. In our absurdly litigious, grotesquely equalitarian, populist-centric culture, you too are at risk.

[A] review, published last month in The Philadelphia Inquirer, was three sentences long. It praised the crab cake at Chops restaurant in Bala Cynwyd, Pa., but said the meal there over all “was expensive and disappointing, from the soggy and sour chopped salad to a miserably tough and fatty strip steak.”

The resulting libel lawsuit was 16 pages long.

[...]

"People who conceive of themselves as artists, which most people dealing with culinary things do, consider anything said about them that is critical at all very wounding,” Mr. Bostwick [a lawyer] said. “If they happen to be combative people, they are at the end of their rope by the time they walk in my front door. They have begun to doubt themselves. The only way they could solve this cognitive dissonance was to fight back.”

RTWT here.

Would That It Were A Parody

We at first-read thought the following a scathing parody of the pop-culture-besotted and destructively wrongheaded rubbish regularly spewed by Greg Sandow on his blog, in his writings, and in his courses taught at otherwise respectable college-level music schools vis-à-vis what he, sans irony, calls "the future of classical music."

But, no, it's nothing of the sort. It's an excerpt from a final paper written in dead earnest by one of Mr. Sandow's students by the name of Erika Lange, and proudly posted by Mr. Sandow on his blog as an exemplar of right-thinking. Its call for the programming of more new music at classical music concerts alone excepted, it's instead an epitome of everything that's wrong with Mr. Sandow's pop-culture-corrupted notions concerning the future of classical music, and so outrageously perverse and grotesquely wrongheaded, that we break our longstanding inviolable policy on this blog of never posting full reprints of the blog posts of others, and post Ms. Lange's thoughts verbatim and in extenso below, and without further comment.

As a performer of classical music, one would think that I would feel completely at home in a classical concert, but this is not always the case. At times even I feel uncomfortable in the stuffy atmosphere of the concert hall and sometimes I wish I could just go to a concert in jeans and a sweatshirt instead of feeling like I need to dress up for the event. I think it would be fantastic if some orchestras experimented with talking to the audience, having question and answer time and even ask the audience to respond during the piece when they hear something they like. Less formal attire for musicians would not only make us more comfortable when we’re playing, but I think it would also let the audience feel more relaxed. Throw in some pop /rock lighting experiments and I think we might be talking about real entertainment.

I went to a recital performed by my teacher John Marcellus and the trumpet professor Jim Thompson earlier this week. During the recital they interacted with the audience, allowed themselves to show their strange but hilarious personalities and got the audience involved in their performance. Suddenly their ‘serious’ classical music was not so serious anymore. We laughed, we were entertained and most importantly, we talked about it to our friends the next day. When was the last time a faculty recital caused such hype?

Changing the general setup of a classical concert would also be a step in the right direction in terms of audience involvement. I was involved in the performance of an improvisatory piece by Globakov recently, which was to be performed in a circle. At points, we were supposed to turn towards the audience and give loud interjections. Being a trombone player, I knew that it would be appropriate for my loud interjection to be performed on my instrument instead of vocally. I turned toward the audience and played one extremely loud note and not surprisingly, a woman in the front of the hall jumped about two feet out of her chair. How often can typical classical music concerts affect an audience member so directly? Whether or not I gave her a heart condition, you can bet that she’ll never forget her experience that night!

New music needs to take a bigger role in classical music concerts. All of the classical music that we play over and over again today was at one point new and vogue, whether it was accepted or not. When was the last time a new ballet caused a riot as in the first performance of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring? The composers of new music should also take a greater hand in how they want music to be performed. It is always amazing to have the composer of a work present at the rehearsal giving specifications for staging and performance. What if the composer also specified that the woodwinds should stand and the lighting should be blue during the second movement? Spotlighting on soloists is also a direction that might be interesting in concerts especially for children who are just learning the instruments. Along the same lines, composers could even denote attire for the soloists. I would love to see the trombone soloist in Mahler’s Third Symphony wearing a bright pink shirt. These are just some of my ideas and they might be impossible to reproduce, but classical music needs to change somehow so why not add some spice.

(A note for Ms. Lange should she read this post. We've reprinted your above without your express permission, and are therefore technically, legally, and ethically in violation of your copyright. Should you object, we will immediately remove it, and instead furnish a link to Mr. Sandow's post wherein he's with your permission reprinted the above excerpt from your final paper.)

A Madman's Prophecy Comes Home To Roost

In, "The Intellectual in the Infosphere",¹ an article written for the Chronicle Review, Peter J.M. Nicholson, president and chief executive officer of the Council of Canadian Academies, writes in part:

What qualifies as intellectual authority today is changing fundamentally. People are much less prepared to defer to the acknowledged experts in various fields. At the same time, however, we are being swamped with data and information — a glut that cries out for analysis and summary.

[...]

As president of the Council of Canadian Academies ... I am in the business of brokering intellectual authority. I believe that intellectual authority should have a close correlation with expertise as conventionally recognized. It should flow from the tried and true, although never infallible, processes of peer review and other forms of elite consensus building.

[...]

But I also recognize that the values that have created my worldview are being eclipsed by a new paradigm shaped by technology, globalization, and postindustrial affluence. Those factors have spawned a culture that, to an unprecedented extent, celebrates and empowers the individual. And a significant symptom of that pervasive shift is the decline of deference to virtually all forms of traditional authority — the church, the schoolteacher, the family doctor, the business executive, the union leader, the politician, and, not least, the intellectual.

[...]

In fact, the growing decline in deference to traditional sources of authority is a nearly universal feature of advanced societies. It transcends every specific, local instance. We are witnessing a sociocultural change whose roots run deep in the nature of economically advanced societies. But our understanding of that profound change remains rather shallow and limited largely to a description of the symptoms.

What are the deeper causes? The best analysis that I have read is a body of academic work led by the political scientists Ronald Inglehart at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor and Neil Nevitte at the University of Toronto. Their research draws on more than two decades of statistics from the World Values Survey, which tracks multicountry public-opinion data. Those data establish convincingly that "the new citizens are less likely than their predecessors to be satisfied with any form of authoritarianism. ... Citizens cut from the newer cloth are more attracted to formations that are bottom-up."

Thus societies formerly based on deference to authority, community loyalty, and the struggle for the material basics of life have given way to affluent societies that have engendered a generational shift toward the "postmaterialist" values of self-esteem, quality of life, and the search for personal fulfillment.... When those postmaterialist values are combined with the empowering tools of universal education, a rights-oriented political culture, and the Google search engine, we should not be surprised that more and more people today regard ex cathedra expert authority with skepticism, if not outright hostility.

Mr. Nicholson then goes on to put forward a sober and reasoned explanation for this lack of deference to, and reckless eschewal of, acknowledged expert authority; an explanation grounded in terms of the "information explosion" — the "information glut" — and our easy and instant unmediated access to that information, both of which have been made possible by ever more sophisticated information technologies, and both of which we're woeful ill-equipped and inept to harness, manage, and deal with with sophistication and discernment.

Mr. Nicholson's explanation for this reckless eschewal and lack of deference is no doubt sound as far as it goes, but in not going far enough it misses the Big Picture; misses that which underlies and overarches everything having to do with and touching on this phenomenon. That Big Picture was limned in chillingly vivid and prophetic prose some century and a quarter ago by one who seven years after it was written went hopelessly mad.

Have you not heard of that madman who lit a lantern in the bright morning hours, ran to the market place, and cried incessantly: "I seek God! I seek God!" As many of those who did not believe in God were standing around just then, he provoked much laughter. Why, did he get lost? said one. Did he lose his way like a child? said another. Or is he hiding? Is he afraid of us? Has he gone on a voyage? or emigrated? Thus they yelled and laughed. The madman jumped into their midst and pierced them with his glances.

"Whither is God" he cried. "I will tell you. We have killed him — you and I. All of us are his murderers. But how did we do this? How were we able to drink up the sea? Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the entire horizon? What did we do when we unchained this earth from its sun? Whither is it moving now? Whither are we moving now? Away from all suns? Are we not plunging continually? Backward, sideward, forward, in all directions? Is there any up or down left? Are we not straying as through an infinite nothing? Do we not feel the breath of empty space? Has it not become colder? Is not night and more night coming on all the while? Must not lanterns be lit in the morning? Do we not hear anything yet of the noise of the gravediggers who are burying God? Do we not smell anything yet of God's decomposition? Gods, too, decompose. God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. How shall we, the murderers of all murderers, comfort ourselves? What was holiest and most powerful of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives. Who will wipe this blood off us? What water is there for us to clean ourselves? What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we have to invent? Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us? Must not we ourselves become gods simply to seem worthy of it? There has never been a greater deed; and whoever will be born after us — for the sake of this deed he will be part of a higher history than all history hitherto."

Here the madman fell silent and looked again at his listeners; and they, too, were silent and stared at him in astonishment. At last he threw his lantern on the ground, and it broke and went out. "I have come too early," he said then; "my time is not come yet. This tremendous event is still on its way, still wandering — it has not yet reached the ears of man. Lightning and thunder require time, the light of the stars requires time, deeds require time even after they are done, before they can be seen and heard. This deed is still more distant from them than the most distant stars — and yet they have done it themselves.²

For those of you given to literalist readings, I would remind you (or point out to you, as the case may be) that the man who wrote that shattering prophetic parable was, by any conventional measure, a lifelong atheist, as am I.

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¹ Our thanks to ArtsJournal for the link.
² Friedrich Nietzsche, from, Die Fröhliche Wissenschaft (The Gay Science), 1882, trans., Walter Kaufmann.

The Groundlings' Argument

Terry Teachout takes a break from his seemingly ceaseless self-promotion on his blog, About Last Night, to quote the money grafs rather than a teaser from one of his Wall Street Journal articles:

Is it possible for a critic to know too much? Not a chance. The unhappy truth is that it’s far more common for us not to know nearly enough about the art forms we review. (If you doubt it, ask any artist.) But I’ve also discovered that the accumulation of knowledge can inhibit our ability to appreciate an artistic experience. I know middle-aged opera buffs who never seem to enjoy the performances they attend. Whenever they go to “La Traviata,” they always end up spending the whole intermission grousing about how the soprano wasn’t as good as some half-forgotten diva they heard in Milan 37 years ago. They’ve lost the knack of enjoying the performances they’re seeing — not to mention the piercing beauty of the music they’re hearing....

[T]he more you learn about an art form, the harder it becomes to enjoy it in a straightforward, uncomplicated way. The literary critic R.P. Blackmur had this phenomenon in mind when he observed that “knowledge itself is a fall from the paradise of undifferentiated sensation.” Go to “Swan Lake” for the first time and you’ll be blown away by the flood of gorgeous new sights and sounds that spills over you. Go 20 times and you’re more likely to notice that the orchestra played out of tune and the ballerina did 31 fouettés instead of 32.

That’s not snobbishness. It’s connoisseurship, and it’s a good thing — unless it gets between you and the immediate experience of art. Gratuitous pickiness is a soul-killing trap against which the critic must always be on guard....

Yes, connoisseurship is indeed a good thing. The argument — if I may dignify it by so calling it — that those well-informed in matters of art know too much for their own good, and that displays of their well-informed-ness are a mark of their snobbishness or elitism, is an argument that's been mounted perennially and from time out of mind by groundlings and philistines everywhere to justify their own abject ignorance and paucity of understanding in matters of art. That the argument still holds weight today says more about our pop-culture-infested, grotesquely equalitarian culture than it does about those it attempts to denigrate.

Yes!

Writes Ben Schott in the New York Times Sunday Book Review:

While the ideas expressed in even the vilest of books are worthy of protection, I find it difficult to respect books as objects, and see no harm whatsoever in abusing them.

[...]

Indeed, the ability of books to survive abuse is one of the reasons they are such remarkable objects, elevated far beyond, say, Web sites.

[...]

I ... enthusiastically turn down the pages of books as I read them — so much so that I have developed a personal dog-earing code: folding a top corner marks a temporary page position, while folding a bottom corner marks a page that might be worth revisiting. In both cases, the tip of the fold points toward the relevant passage. Of course, this could be achieved with a ribbon or a bookmark; but so many books are bereft of ribbons, and I have always thought there is something ever so slightly shifty about those who always have a bookmark on hand.

My favorite act of abuse is writing in books — and, in this at least, I follow in illustrious footsteps. Mathematics would be considerably poorer were it not for the marginalia of Pierre de Fermat, who in 1637 jotted in his copy of the “Arithmetica” of Diophantus, “I have a truly marvelous proof of this proposition that this margin is too narrow to contain.” This casual act of vandalism kept mathematicians out of trouble for 358 years. (Andrew Wiles finally proved Fermat’s Last Theorem in 1995.)

[...]

It is notable that those who abuse their own books through manhandling or marginalia are often those who love books best. And surely the dystopia of “Fahrenheit 451” is more likely avoided through the loving abuse of books than through their sterile reverence.

We couldn't agree more.

RTWT here.

Not Bloody Likely

[Note: This post has been updated (1) as of 6:41 AM Eastern on 6 Mar. See below.]

Music critic for the Chicago Tribune, John von Rhein, in a commentary on the Hatto affair concerning the honesty of classical music recordings generally, wrote:

Back then [1950s], howls of outrage greeted the revelation that high Cs sung by Elisabeth Schwarzkopf had been spliced into Kirsten Flagstad's recording of the "Liebestod," from Wagner's "Tristan und Isolde."

Not bloody likely. Principally because there are no sung high Cs in the so-called "Liebestod" (in the Furtwängler complete recording of Tristan with Flagstad, the Schwarzkopf-inserted high Cs were in fact inserted into the minute or so of wild ecstasy at the beginning of Act II when the two lovers first greet each other).

That sort of error is one that a classical music duffer might make, and be forgiven. For a seasoned classical music critic of a major daily to make such an error is both appalling and unforgivable. I mean, didn't he mentally hear the "Liebestod" as he was writing that sentence, and realize instantly there couldn't possibly be sung high Cs in that Act III closing episode?

He should have.

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Update (6:41 AM Eastern on 6 Mar): In a squib in his "Links I found while not working" blog sidebar feature, Leon Dominguez of Sieglinde's Diaries links the above post, and comments:

critics, check your facts, or else acd will, and he'll give you more than a correction

I'd just like to point out to Leon that the gaffe that's the subject of the above post goes far beyond a mere failure to check facts, and in fact betrays a degree of ignorance on the part of the MSM classical music critic skewered that is, as I've above written, "both appalling and unforgivable" in such a professional writing for a major daily. Had this critic's gaffe been merely the result of a failure to check facts, it's more likely than not that I'd never have noted it publicly, and would, instead, have simply informed the critic of his error via eMail.

Divas Of the Non-Singer Sort

Legendary record producer John Culshaw relates, in his equally legendary account of the first-ever complete recording of Wagner's Der Ring des Nibelungen (the legendary Solti recording done for the Decca Record Company, Ltd.), Ring Resounding (now out of print), the following story concerning a certain unnamed "Viennese conductor" and a Decca colleague of Culshaw's by the name of Christopher Jennings:

Christopher had published an article about [a concert in London in the early '50s conducted by this "Viennese conductor"] — a splendid piece, full of love for the music and fervent in its praise for the conductor. Along with [the piece] appeared an "action" picture to which the conductor took exception, though it was hard to see why, for to most people it conveyed the intensity the conductor was putting into his work in order to achieve the brilliant results which Jennings described.

The conductor made it known to [Decca Artists' Department head, Harry] Sarton that Jennings should be kept out of his sight; he was disinclined even to visit the Decca offices unless he could be assured that Jennings was elsewhere. In vain, we tried to explain that Jennings had not been responsible for the photograph, but it made no difference.

[...]

A week or two after Christopher's death [from Polio at age 29], I had to visit the conductor in his London hotel [on Decca business], and as soon as I entered the room he started to bombard me with questions. Was Jennings still with Decca? Had he still not been fired? I told him Jennings was dead. His big eyes lit up. "God has punished him," he said, "and his family, for what he did to me."

Makes the demands and hissy fits of diva singers seem but gentle eccentricities, does it not?

What's that? The identity of the unnamed "Viennese conductor"?

No less than Josef Krips.

Incredible.