Sounds & Fury

From Florence, A Report On An Interesting Staging

Blogger and musicologist Charles Downey of Ionarts reports from Florence, Italy on an interesting new staging of the first two music-dramas of Wagner's Der Ring des Nibelungen — Das Rheingold, and Die Walküre — the report on the latter complete with three informative videos.

We're not quite sure from either the written description or the rehearsal videos whether the machines that support the "flying" Valkyries in Act III of Die Walküre were visible in the actual performance or not, but either way, from what's been reported and on the evidence of the videos, we think this is a staging we ourselves would have liked to have seen live in the theater as it appears to have possibilities.

Our thanks to Dr. Downey for the report.

Q.E.D.

[Note: This post has been updated (1) as of 12:58 PM Eastern on 30 Jun. See below.]

It's not for nothing we've often declared academics, generally speaking, to be among the most useless and clueless creatures on the planet. Witnesseth:

For 40 years, since the Six-Day War of 1967, there has been one realistic possibility for peace: Israel's return to its pre-1967 borders, combined with viable economic conditions for a Palestinian state, including access to trade routes, water supplies and other essential needs. With small and mutually acceptable adjustments to those borders, these terms would enable peaceful co-existence of two states side by side....

Rejectionists on both sides repeatedly undermined efforts to realise that compromise. Starting in the early 1970s, religious Israeli settlers and hardline Israeli nationalists pushed Israel into a disastrous policy of creating and expanding settlements on Arab lands in the West Bank, in violation of common sense and international diplomacy. That policy blocked peace ever since, setting the stage for decades of bloodshed.

Nowhere in that article written for The Jordan Times by Jeffrey D. Sachs, professor of economics and director of the Earth Institute at Columbia University, is there considered or even so much as mentioned the cause of that 1967 Six-Day War, nor, for another single and singular instance, is there considered or even so much as mentioned the little matter of the murderous and barbaric Palestinian strategy of suicide bombing Israeli civilians — men, women, and children indiscriminately — being an obstacle to a "realistic possibility for peace."

Why are we not surprised.

(Thanks to 3 Quarks Daily for the link.)

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Update (12:58 PM Eastern on 30 Jun): CORRECTION. The above linked article was not written specifically for The Jordan Times as above indicated, but was chosen by that paper from a selection of articles syndicated by an outfit called Project Syndicate of which The Jordan Times is apparently a member.

It's The Music, Stupid!

The insidiously wrongheaded, '60s-populist prole-pandering advocated by some rather perversely muddleheaded, pop-culture-besotted souls within or connected with the classical music establishment in suggesting mass-culture-inspired ways to secure for classical music a new and younger audience may have reached some sort of milestone with this latest "concept."

"The difficulty with doing [the piece] in a church service is that you tend to do it for people who are there for a church service. Doing it in a secular theatre is important because it is a piece it's important should be heard by a theatre-going public. It has a relevance and profundity which really warrants that people should make an effort to experience it," says tenor Mark Padmore.

[...]

"The difficulty about classical music is that too often people go to a concert and they let it wash over them and think they've had a reasonably nice time, but somehow it hasn't stirred them," [says Mr. Padmore].

That stirring is to be achieved in collaboration with Katie Mitchell, one of Britain's most fiercely innovative stage directors, who admits that "everyone in theatre flirts with the idea of putting this great music on stage."

Instead of [the] two-and-a-half hour original ... she sets the [the piece] as a play within a play, split by a supper interval.

"What we are doing is very much a theatrical event," [says] Padmore, "partly because if you involve Katie Mitchell you're immediately going on that tack." [...] "I think Katie's idea of the staging is that there is a war-torn community.... It's a bit like Beslan, perhaps, where children have been killed, or a bomb has gone off in the school. Into this community come three traveling players, like an acting troupe, who are Jesus, the Evangelist and the soprano soloist, and they set up a performance, a story-telling of the Gospel narrative and then the arias and everything are reactions from the people of the community. So it's a fairly modern way of doing it — there's a certain remove from the original."

And the piece that "it's important should be heard by a theatre-going public" the fully staged performance of which is "a certain remove from the original"? Bach's Matthäus-Passion (St. Matthew Passion).

O tempora! O mores!

RTW perverse T here.

Gioia Tells It Straight And In Your Face

Chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts, Dana Gioia, may not be a celebrity or otherwise famous, nor any great shakes as a poet, but as a university commencement speaker and pitchman for high culture and the arts he rocks.

[Today,] almost everything in our national culture, even the news, has been reduced to entertainment or altogether eliminated. The loss of recognition for artists, thinkers, and scientists has impoverished our culture in innumerable ways, but let me mention one. When virtually all of a culture's celebrated figures are in sports or entertainment, how few possible role models we offer the young. There are so many other ways to lead a successful and meaningful life that are not denominated by money or fame. Adult life begins in a child's imagination, and we've relinquished that imagination to the marketplace.

[...]

Everything now is entertainment. And the purpose of this omnipresent commercial entertainment is to sell us something. American culture has mostly become one vast infomercial.

I have a recurring nightmare. I am in Rome visiting the Sistine Chapel. I look up at Michelangelo's incomparable fresco of the "Creation of Man." I see God stretching out his arm to touch the reclining Adam's finger. And then I notice in the other hand Adam is holding a Diet Pepsi.

[...]

Don't get me wrong. I love entertainment, and I love the free market. I have a Stanford MBA and spent fifteen years in the food industry. I adore my big-screen TV. The productivity and efficiency of the free market is beyond dispute. It has created a society of unprecedented prosperity.

But we must remember that the marketplace does only one thing — it puts a price on everything.

RTWT here.

(Our thanks to ArtsJournal for the link.)

A Most Distressful Ambivalence

In the astonishingly productive year of 1888 before his precipitous descent into madness during the first few days of January 1889, Friedrich Nietzsche was able finally to cast loose of the spell long before worked on him by the music of Richard Wagner, and cemented during his years-long intimate attachment to Wagner himself; a spell that had persisted inexorably despite Nietzsche's heroic efforts to free himself of it even after he'd broken openly with Wagner some twelve years previous. That productive year saw the writing of Die Götzen-Dämmerung (Twilight of the Idols), Der Antichrist, Ecce Homo, and two savage polemics attacking Wagner: Der Fall Wagner (The Case of Wagner), and Nietzsche contra Wagner, both of which works seem to me suffused with a miasmic aura of self-loathing every bit as savage as his polemic attacks. Just how difficult — and ambivalent — was the casting off of that spell may be judged by these two passages (English translations by Walter Kaufmann) written only months apart which I here quote knowing full well how parlous an enterprise it is to quote Nietzsche out of the quote's surrounding context, both immediate and oeuvre-wide.

First, this from Der Fall Wagner:

I place this perspective at the outset: Wagner's art is sick. The problems he presents on the stage — all of them problems of hysterics — the convulsive nature of his affects, his overexcited sensibility, his taste that required ever stronger spices, his instability which he dressed up as principles, not least of all the choice of his heroes and heroines — consider them as physiological types (a pathological gallery!) — all of this taken together represents a profile of sickness that permits no further doubt. Wagner est une névrose (Wagner is a neurosis).

[...]

Wagner represents a great corruption of music. He has guessed that it is a means to excite weary nerves — and with that he has made music sick. His inventiveness is not inconsiderable in the art of goading again those who are weariest, calling back into life those who are half dead. He is a master of hypnotic tricks, he manages to throw down the strongest like bulls.

And this from Ecce Homo:

From the moment when there was a piano score of Tristan ... I was a Wagnerian ... older works I deemed beneath myself — still too vulgar, too "German".

To this day I am still looking for a work of equally dangerous fascination, of an equally gruesome and sweet infinity as Tristan — and look in all the arts in vain. All the strangenesses of Leonardo da Vinci emerge from their spell at the first note of Tristan. ... The world is poor for anyone who has never been sick enough for this "voluptuousness of hell"; it is permitted, it is almost imperative, to employ a formula of the mystics at this point.

I think I know better than anyone else of what tremendous things Wagner is capable — the fifty worlds of alien ecstasies for which no one besides him had wings; and given the way I am, strong enough to turn even what is most questionable and dangerous to my advantage and thus to become stronger, I call Wagner the great benefactor of my life.

A Brief Cinematic Comment

I comment very little here on movies even though I used to be a cinema freak, and even contributed a couple papers to the literature of what we pompously called cinematic aesthetics. I comment very little on movies simply because I pretty much stopped going to the movies after the mid-'70s or so, the last straw for me being the critical reception (almost entirely favorable, and even some raves, from those who ought to have known better) of that risible cartoon of a movie, Star Wars, which signaled for me the beginning of the end of an era of cinematic seriousness that began with great promise in the late '50s, and continued through the '60s and early '70s.

The above is prelude to my voicing my, shall we say, astonishment on viewing a tape of Wednesday's CBS airing of the American Film Institute's 10th anniversary edition of its listing of America's 100 Greatest Movies. What, for egregious instance, is Casablanca, Singin' In The Rain, Vertigo, and The Wizard Of Oz doing listed in the Top 10 of those 100 movies, and listed there ahead of such also listed films as, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Chinatown, Dr. Strangelove, and a dozen other films I could name? And what is a clear masterpiece such as The French Connection — the very apotheosis of the American cop movie genre, and a brilliant film in its own right — doing listed way down there at position 93(!)? And why are clear masterpieces such as Rosemary's Baby, The Exorcist, and The Omen — stellar examples of the venerable American horror movie genre, and, again, brilliant films in their own right — missing from the list altogether? Just who are those responsible for selecting and ordering the entries for this list? Backward-baseball-cap Gen X and Gen Y airheads (a redundancy, I know)?

Stupid question that last.

O tempora! O mores!

Particularly Apposite

Apropos the just concluded online, blog-form symposium, Engaging Art — A Public Conversation, held by ArtsJournal in conjunction with the American Symphony Orchestra League, the Curb Center at Vanderbilt University, and the conference, Every City, Music City held in Nashville, Tennessee and also just concluded, three past posts on S&F seem to us to be particularly apposite: "An Audience For Classical Music" from July 2004, "The Classical Music Concert" from August 2004, and "More On Classical Music Concert Audience Etiquette" from January 2005.

As a teaser, here's the lede graf of the first:

During the past decade or so, one has read often of attempts made by various classical (or "serious", or "art") music entities — symphony orchestras, chamber groups, recital organizers, even opera companies — to gain a larger audience for their "product", and it's nothing short of depressing to observe that, virtually without exception, they've all, to greater or lesser degree, pursued a model that's not merely wrongheaded, but positively suicidal. That model, in keeping with the rabidly populist and promiscuously equalitarian Zeitgeist of our era, and using promotional techniques employed in the world of mass entertainment, has at its core the concept of reaching out to The People; or using less euphemistic and less generous terminology, prole pandering. While such a concept is perfectly appropriate and spot-on in the world of mass entertainment, it's an ultimate kiss of death in the world of classical music for the simple and should-be (but astonishingly, largely isn't) obvious reason that, much as one wishes it were not the case, classical music is not, nor has it ever been, nor will it ever even marginally be, an object of mass or even widespread appeal no matter how vigorously and assiduously it may be promoted. Classical music is, by its very nature, a fundamentally elite enterprise, and should never be viewed or promoted as anything other.

And of the second:

As someone trained as a classical musician who was virtually raised in a concert hall (Philadelphia's Academy of Music), and for whom live orchestral and chamber music concerts were the mother's milk of his youth, I find just the prospect of the diminishment or, worse, the eventual demise of the classical music concert to be a thing unthinkable. Or rather, a thing I'd rather not have to think about. As matters seem to stand today, however, there's nothing for it for someone such as myself but to think long and hard about it. Classical music concerts (the unadulterated sort), nationwide, are, so we are assured by any number of doomsayers in the print media, slowly dying out for want of enough audience to adequately support them except in our largest metropolitan centers. And even there, we're further told, the going today is fairly rough, and bound to get insupportably rougher unless a viable solution can be found for the apparent growing problem.

Did I say problem? Why a problem? I mean, if it's all true, and the marketplace really can't support the classical music concert, perhaps the thing has outlived its pertinence and importance for our cultural life, and ought to be permitted to go gently into that good night spared the always humiliating if heroic last-ditch efforts to provide it synthetic life-support.

And here's the thesis-introductory graf of the third:

Champions and promoters of [a] more relaxed code [of concert hall etiquette] are forever citing the more free, even rowdy, concert audience etiquette of the 18th and 19th centuries as justification for, and proof of the validity of, a call for a return to that earlier practice. A more relaxed code is not some new, postmodern idea, they say, but was the norm and expected (with the tendentious implication that it was also sanctioned) by the very composers who wrote most of the classical music that today constitutes the by far largest proportion of the repertoire of classical music concerts. Like most such justifications and "proofs," however, those justifications and proofs are made up of many half-truths and carefully selected facts, typically put forward out of context.

We think these three S&F posts will make for especially interesting and pertinent reading when considered within the context of ArtsJournal's just concluded online symposium the posts of which, along with their attached comments, can be read at the above provided link.

Featured Past Post #36 (Administrative Note)

A new Featured Past Post ("Engaging Wagner") is up on the right sidebar.
 

Off-Message, But So Imbecile It's Irresistible

And here we thought America's Office Of The Surgeon General had a virtual monopoly on this particular flavor of utterly mindless twit.

[A]s if this show of [British] impotence [in dealing with Iran in the face of the capture by Iran of fifteen British sailors last March] were not humiliating enough, the British were unable even to mobilize any [so-called] "soft power." [...] The most the [United Nations] Security Council could bring itself to do was to express "grave concern." Meanwhile, a member of the British cabinet was going the Security Council one better. While registering no objection to propaganda pictures of the one woman hostage, who had been forced to shed her uniform and dress for the cameras in Muslim clothing, [British] Health Secretary Patricia Hewitt pronounced it "deplorable" that [the woman hostage] should have permitted herself to be photographed with a cigarette in her mouth. "This," said Hewitt, "sends completely the wrong message to our young people."

—Norman Podhoretz, excerpted from, "The Case for Bombing Iran"

We're not making this up, you know.

How To Write A Music Analysis

We link below a piece by concert pianist and blogger Jeremy Denk of Think Denk sans any excerpt or any comment whatsoever except to say it's beyond brilliant both in form and substance.

The piece is unassumingly but provocatively titled, "Dude!", and can be read here.

Il Trittico on PBS

[Note: This post has been updated (2) as of 3:06 PM Eastern on 19 Jun. See below.]

Regular readers of this blog are aware in what low esteem I hold Italian opera generally, and bel canto opera in particular, and are aware as well of my principal reason for that low opinion; viz., Italian opera as genuine dramma per musica is, by and large, a joke. I have, however, a special problem with the operas of Giacomo Puccini on quite different grounds: I simply cannot abide their sheer mawkishness, both musically and dramatically.

That notwithstanding, I taped the airing last Thursday (on New York's WNET) of PBS's Great Performances At The Met series which presented the Met's new production of Puccini's Il Trittico, a trio of unconnected one-act operas — Il Tabarro (The Cloak), Suor Angelica (Sister Angelica), and Gianni Schicchi — all of which were totally unfamiliar to me; ergo, my taping.

On my first try at watching, I made it through the first twenty minutes or so of Il Tabarro, and had to switch it off. Impossible. Pure Italian soap opera of the very worst sort — which is to say, the very worst sort there is.

Then I sat myself down, and had a little talk with myself.

"Look, Douglas," I said to myself somewhat severely. "You're not being entirely fair about this. I mean, Italian opera composer though he was, Puccini was a devoted Wagnerian. He must have learned something about opera as dramma per musica from the music-dramas of his German hero. Give him another shot, and try giving him the benefit of the doubt at every turn instead of switching the thing off. There must be something there worth your attention."

And so, back to the tape I went, this time making it through both Il Tabarro and Suor Angelica in their entirety (I'll get to Gianni Schicchi tomorrow or the next day; I'm Italian-opera saturated for the nonce). And there was something there. For single but not sole instance, some of the singers were just splendid vocally; most notably Stephanie Blythe as Frugola in Il Tabarro and the Princess in Suor Angelica, and Barbara Frittoli as Angelica in Suor Angelica.

So, something. Not all that much, but enough to keep one from switching off or walking out of the opera house — if it weren't for the positively wretched acting and stage direction, that is. Had both those operas been up to spoken theater theatrical standards (as opposed to opera theatrical standards) I would have found the experience of watching those two operas entertaining enough to not be an altogether terrible way to spend a couple hours.

But there they were. Those bloody singers doing their bloody stock Italian opera cartoon gestures which opera singers, TOFs, and other lovers of Italian opera imagine are genuinely expressive dramatic devices, the very worst offender being the bloody Italian tenor (Salvatore Licitra as Luigi in Il Tabarro), natch. And there were all those people moving — always moving — about the stage doing...who knows what. And again there were those bloody singers whose characters were variously engaged in intimate or dramatic tête-à-tête with other characters but who were singing with their faces turned toward...the bloody audience(!). And there was the bloody director, Jack O'Brien, making all but insignificant the significance of the cloak in an opera with the title Il Tabarro which one might have expected would have given him some small clue.

As I've said, positively wretched.

If anything makes the case for Peter Gelb's declaration that opera needs to pay more — lots more — attention to the theatrical side of opera, this production is it. Although a new production, it was inherited largely from the Met's previous general manager, Joseph Volpe, and it shows. For the future, Mr. Gelb has his work cut out for him, I'm afraid.

If I might make one small, constructive suggestion to Mr. Gelb it is that he ought to institute a new policy for all singers, institute it immediately, and make it mandatory. And that is that for all rehearsals the singers — especially the Italian singers — be compelled to sing and act out their parts with their hands tied behind their backs — literally. Ultimately, it will work marvels dramatically.

Trust me.

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Update (4:15 PM Eastern on 17 Jun): In the spring of 1822, through the intervention of writer, editor, and poet Giuseppe Carpani, the then 30-year-old Gioacchino Rossini, at his special plea, was granted an interview with Beethoven in the latter's Vienna quarters. After greeting Rossini with, "Ah! Rossini! The composer of Il Barbière di Siviglia? I congratulate you. It is an excellent opera buffa. I read it with pleasure, and it delights me. It will be played as long as Italian opera exists," Beethoven continued,

Never try to do anything but opera buffa. In opera buffa, nobody would have the wit to match you Italians. Your language and your vivacity of temperament destine you for it. Never attempt opera seria. It's not in the Italian nature. You don't have enough musical science to deal with true drama, so confine yourself to what best suits you. Wanting to succeed in opera seria would be trying to force your destiny. So do only opera buffa, and leave opera seria to those qualified to deal with it.

I've just finished watching the tape of the third one-act opera of the Il Trittico triptych, the comedy, Gianni Schicchi, and unlike the first two operas, found it thoroughly delightful even if entirely predictable.

Beethoven was right.

Update 2 (3:06 PM Eastern on 19 Jun): I thought I'd pretty much answered these questions in the lede graf of this post, but apparently not to the satisfaction of several readers of this blog whose eMail essentially asks me the questions, "What do you have against the operas that make up Il Trittico," and "What do you have against Puccini?"

So, herewith, a slightly more detailed statement from me.

Gianni Schicchi excepted (see the prior Update), the operas of Il Trittico are not operas I'd make it a point to see again. While it's true Puccini's orchestral writing is certainly way richer and way more articulating of the (melo)drama than anything in the Italian rep of my experience prior to Verdi's Otello, alas and ultimately Puccini is, after all, Puccini, and despite a few rare albeit impressive, even memorable, musico-dramatic moments, his music is mawkish beyond toleration for the most part, and he sets that music to libretti to match. In other words, Italian soap opera irredeemably. While I can tolerate that sort of thing fairly well if only infrequently and in small doses as in Il Trittico if everything else is first-rate, I can't imagine suffering such stuff other than infrequently and in small doses, a prolonged or frequent diet of such fare simply out of the question for me.

There. I trust that answers both questions definitively where I'm concerned.

16 June 1904

 

Who Knew?

Not us, certainly. Nor any informed musician we ever had contact with either in the flesh or via print. Seems all of us were just plain deaf and blind.

In truth, it would be hard to efface [Sir Edward] Elgar from our [British] musical life. Even if Land of Hope and Glory should fall into disuse, who could imagine a time when cellists could resist his lyrical concerto, when string orchestras would refrain from the earthy ecstasies of his Introduction and Allegro, or full orchestras from his monumental symphonies? It is true that these two works are not as widely heard outside this country as they should be. Nevertheless, they embody a notion of post[-]Wagnerian symphonic thought every bit as compelling as Mahler’s. Elgar is simply the greatest composer this country has produced — our musical Shakespeare, a protean and inescapable force.

We wonder where that places Purcell and Britten.

RTWT here.

A Delightful Read

Here's a lovely tribute to Milan and to the late, great conductor, Carlo Maria Giulini, by the lovely Opera Chic sans her trademark sprinkling of Valley girl texting-speak (or, txtspk) which, we confess, was beginning to grate a bit on our sensibilities.

A delightful — and poignant — read.

The Way We Are

While doing some research via Google on the business of the firings of Mainstream Media classical music critics and the retiring of their positions at various major MSM publications, I couldn't help muttering to myself that gone are the days when one could pick up the nation's "Newspaper of Record", turn to the Music pages of its Arts & Leisure section, and be both delighted and enlightened by eloquent, erudite critical writings on classical music and opera of the sort written by former Times critics such as the late Harold C. Schonberg, Edward Rothstein, and Alex Ross. Today, I muttered to myself, we're instead most often treated to the largely inane writings on classical music and opera of critical midgets such as the Times's present chief classical music critic, Anthony Tommasini, and staff music critic Anne Midgette whose name could not be more uncannily apposite.

As if in confirming answer to my snarky mutterings, one of the Google hits was for Mr. Tommasini's June 2003 review for the Times of a new production of Tristan und Isolde at the Vienna State Opera which production marked the debut of stellar soprano Deborah Voigt in the title role of Isolde which, I suspect, was the sole reason for Mr. Tommasini's coverage of the production.

Why was running across this review as if in confirming answer to my snarky mutterings? Here's one reason:

The only way the legend [of Tristan and Isolde as treated by Wagner] has psychological resonance [wrote Mr. Tommasini] is if you accept that the love potion is a kind of truth serum that unlocks their inner erotic yearnings. Such dangerous emotions, the opera suggests, are nothing but trouble.

Lord preserve us. The above is, of course, perfectly ignorant, reflecting the kind of understanding that would be expected of a TOF or an ordinary opera-goer. But this is the chief classical music critic of The New York Times; a classical music critic who doesn't seem to understand that the opera has no "psychological resonance" if one accepts that the potion drunk by the two lovers has any magical or pharmacological effect, either as a love potion or a "truth serum." The opera has psychological resonance only when one understands that the potion has no magical or pharmacological effect at all, but instead produces an effect because the two lovers are, in their minds, both convinced it's a powerful death potion (i.e., a poison), and are therefore both certain they'll be dead within a matter of minutes, and so for the first time feel completely free to confess fully to each other their long-secret and forbidden love, each for the other.

And as to the opera suggesting "[s]uch dangerous emotions...are nothing but trouble": yet more ignorance on the part of Mr. Tommasini. The opera in fact celebrates those "dangerous emotions." And if it "suggests" anything about Tristan's and Isolde's love (and it does more than merely suggest) it's that a love that profound can be consummated only when both lovers have become one with the universal World Soul (represented symbolically in the opera as the domain of Night), freed from the hated world of ordinary experience, delusion, and desire (represented symbolically as the domain of Day).

As if Mr. Tommasini's above quoted nonsense were by itself not enough, we have this as well:

In a telling turnaround of imagery, at the end of the opera, when Isolde confronts the dying Tristan, she stands again at the end of [the] metal table, this time facing not the armored shell of Morold [Isolde's former betrothed whom Tristan killed in battle] but the human shell of her beloved. To signal his death, she shuts his eyelids with her hand, blocking out the hated light of day; to signal her own death, she simply stands by him motionlessly and covers her own eyes. Mr. Krämer [the director] makes metaphorical staging seem humane and free of cliché.

I bypass the stage business of the metal table and the armored shell of Morold which are but conceits of this clearly Eurotrash production — one which Mr. Tommasini saw fit not to criticize severely as it surely deserved — and move on to his praising of the eyelid-shutting-and-covering, and Isolde's "death" at opera's end: the famous, and famously erroneously-called, Liebestod (Love-death).

By his ignorant praise for these rank bits of stage idiocy, Mr. Tommasini betrays a seeming unawareness of the fact that Wagner referred to the ending of his great music-drama not by the term Liebestod — a term he reserved to denominate the prelude to the first act of this three-act music-drama — but by the term Verklärung (Transfiguration). And for good reason, too. Wagner's stage directions state, and the text and music confirm, that Isolde "sinks as if transfigured" onto the dead Tristan's breast. No indication anywhere of her dying.* Not only that, but for a full ten minutes or so prior, Isolde, in a state of transcendent rapture, imagines Tristan alive and standing before her, beckoning to her. As far as Isolde is concerned, no longer are she and Tristan part of the ordinary world, the hated domain of Day. That, in fact, is the entire point of the Verklärung. The very last thing Isolde would be doing is closing Tristan's eyes or covering her own. She's after all in the throes of an ecstatic vision. But to read Mr. Tommasini's ignorant and clueless comments, one would have no idea just how idiot and counter to the sense and substance of both music and text that stage business actually was, or that anything about it was even amiss.

As disgraceful and disheartening as Mr. Tommasini's display of critical ignorance is in this review, the really disgraceful and disheartening thing is that that sort of ignorance is not an exception today when it comes to writings on classical music and opera in the MSM, but, with a few notable exceptions, rather the norm — even in the once justifiably vaunted Arts & Leisure Music pages of The New York Times. With the triumph of pop culture and the nature of the cultural marketplace that's developed as a consequence, almost all critical writing on classical music and opera in the MSM — again, barring a few notable exceptions — has been reduced to the point of thumbs-up-thumbs-down inanity, or, worse, to the point of being uninformed tripe. In either case, it's writing not worth the paper it's printed on or the phosphor with which it's displayed digitally.

O tempora! O mores!

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* For more on the matter of Isolde's "death," see this post.

Scorn Indeed

Here's an article by Adam Kirsch for The New York Sun concerning "newspapers around the country slashing their book coverage" titled, "The Scorn of the Literary Blog" which concluded with this choice bit of insightful wisdom:

[B]itesized [sic] commentary, which is all the blog form allows, is next to useless when it comes to talking about books. Literary criticism is only worth having if it at least strives to be literary in its own right, with a scope, complexity, and authority that no blogger I know even wants to achieve. The only useful part of most book blogs, in fact, are the links to long-form essays and articles by professional writers, usually from print journals.

and which then went on to declare, "[T]here's no chance that literary culture will thrive on the Internet until we recognize that the ethical and intellectual crotchets of the bloggers represent a dead end."

Charming, is it not?

I submitted a comment in the article's comments section (where all comments are subject to acceptance and editing by the newspaper's "moderators," natch) which comment read:

By what prodigious mechanism does someone who by his above remarks [i.e., the graf I above quoted] makes manifestly clear he's appallingly ignorant about blogs generally, and about literary blogs in particular, manage to crank up the degree of chutzpah necessary to even dare to write what you actually wrote? Needless to say, you're in error -- egregious error -- on both your above "points" as but a cursory and unbiased examination of the blogosphere's better lit blogs would attest. As a professional, you should be ashamed of your remarks, and of yourself for having had the unmitigated chutzpah to write them.

And, no, I'm no literary blogger, but a longtime blogger whose blog is concerned with the arts generally, and with classical music and opera in particular.

ACD

The "moderators" declined to make my comment public.

Why are we not surprised.

Featured Past Post #35 (Administrative Note)

A new Featured Past Post ("More On The Matter Of Eurotrash Wagner") is up on the right sidebar.

The Power Of Music

Music hath charms to soothe a savage breast, saith the poet — or to sexually excite a savage beast.

Great Pronouncements In Music History 1

On the threshold of what we now refer to as the Classical Style, celebrated music theoretician, and music dictionary and encyclopedia writer Jean-Jacques Rousseau wrote:

With regard to counterfugues, double fugues, inverted fugues, ground basses, and other difficult sillinesses that the ear cannot abide and which reason cannot justify, these are obviously remnants of barbarism and bad taste that only persist, like the portals of our Gothic cathedrals, to the shame of those who had the endurance to build them.

—Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Lettre sur la musique française, 1753

Caution! Long-Pent-Up, Political Mini-Rant Ahead

[Note: This post has been updated (1) as of 6:16 PM Eastern on 9 Jun. See below.]

This Republican Administration and its legislators and bureaucrats are, from top to bottom, from Federal down to the local levels, so egregiously, so criminally incompetent; so indigenously corrupt; so thoroughly infused with mindless, chillingly scary, neo-Conservative, Religious-Right ideological thinking that even if the Democrats were to put up as their next presidential candidate Mickey Mouse or Mortimer Snerd, and nominate as legislators persons of equal stature, I'd not only vote for them, but actively campaign for their election.

END Long-Pent-Up, Political Mini-Rant.

As you were.

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Update (6:16 PM Eastern on 9 Jun): I've to date received five poison-pen eMails concerning this post (a couple fairly lengthy, and all of them sent from public eMail accounts, natch) accusing me of being a "typical left-wing Bush hater," as one of them put it. How anyone who reads this blog could accuse me of being either is a mystery that's beyond my meager capacity to unravel.

Just for the record, I hold both Leftists and Right-wingers in equal contempt (which contempt is comprehensive) and would never align myself with either unsavory group. And as for our president, I harbor no personal ill-feelings toward Mr. Bush. He's perhaps a bit more simpleminded and dense than the typical holder of the office, but as I've remarked in the past, his heart's mostly in the right place — most of the time. It's just that, after initiating all the right moves after 9/11, both foreign and domestic — even if, in the case of Iraq, a critical year too late, and for all the wrong publicly stated (underline, publicly stated) reasons — he and his ideology-besotted, criminally incompetent neo-Conservative gang, from his vice-president and Cabinet members down to his appointed bureaucrats, got egregiously wrong — and are still getting wrong — just about everything it was possible to get wrong with everything — everything! — they put their indigenously corrupt hands to. Ergo, the above rant.