Sounds & Fury

Here Be Dragons

I’ve just returned from a voyage of discovery within Deutsche Gramaphon’s newly opened DG Web Shop wherein I sampled a number of tracks from some few dozen albums without downloading any. The site is state-of-the-art from top to bottom and back to front; loaded with goodies from the sterling DG catalog, all available in glorious 320 kbps MP3 format (and it is indeed glorious; for most practical purposes, almost the equivalent of CD quality) and all reasonably priced; and, in my sampling, not so much as a single incidence of a movement of, say, a sonata or symphony referred to as a “song”.

In short, the DG Web Shop is everything a site devoted to the sale of recordings of classical music should be (I’m of course assuming that the download function operates flawlessly as whatever else DG might have screwed up in their setup, their screwing up on that function is an unimaginable stupidity making, as it would, the entire site little more than a bad and very expensive joke).

Given all the above, I’ve just added to my browser a new bookmark folder named, Here Be Dragons, into which I’ve placed the permanent bookmark for the DG Web Shop, the folder’s sole occupant. Downloading is too quick and easy — a bit like the danger of playing with chips instead of cash in a high-stakes poker game; my bank account too meager; and my willpower too frail.

I need the reminder — and the caution.

Uh-Oh

The plot of the soap opera that is the Wagner family and the succession of the directorship of the Bayreuther Festspiele takes another jarring — and completely unexpected — turn:

Gudrun Wagner, wife of Bayreuth Opera Festival director Wolfgang Wagner and a key partner in helping him stage the annual event, died Wednesday, officials said. She was 63.

She died Wednesday morning at a Bayreuth hospital. No cause of death was immediately given, said Peter Emmerich, a spokesman for the festival.

"It is with deep emotion and with silent grief that I must convey that this morning my loving wife and close co-worker Gudrun Wagner died fully unexpectedly," Wolfgang Wagner said in a statement.

We suspect this event will force the board of the Festspiele to quickly make some tough decisions it was hoping it might be able to put off till a more opportune time presented itself.

RTWT here.

ACD's Genuine, Unbelievably Super-terrific Philadelphia Cheesesteak

Want a naughty break from your regular, healthy, gourmet-quality food fare (your regular food fare is always healthy and gourmet-quality, right?)? I did last night, and rustled up this naughty, non-gourmet-delicious hot sandwich.

(CAUTION: If you're a "healthy food" freak, diet freak, physical fitness freak, or — Lord preserve us! — a vegetarian, this is not for you, and I don't want to hear any whining complaints or hysterical, paranoid predictions of cardiac doom from any of you. Just don't make or eat this sandwich, but let those who choose to do so enjoy themselves guiltlessly.)

What You Need (NO substitutes permitted)

(1) freshly baked, good quality “torpedo” roll
(135 grams) well-marbled, choice quality top round London broil sliced across the grain into thin "leaves" (best if you cut this yourself from a very well-chilled piece of meat using a razor-sharp chef's knife)
(2) squares of single-slice-pack WHITE American cheese (Kraft or Bordens is good)
(1/2) fairly large Spanish onion
(1) HOT cherry pepper (Cento is good)
Lea & Perrins Worcestershire Sauce
McCormick powdered sage
McCormick powdered garlic
McCormick dried oregano
salt
freshly-ground black pepper
extra-virgin olive oil
Heinz ketchup

Preparation

Preheat oven to 250F.

Double-julienne the leaves of meat into strips about 3/4" X 1/4". Add to taste: sage, garlic, oregano, salt, and pepper. Toss well. Add generous amount of the Lea & Perrins. Toss until all the strips are well-coated. Add small amount of olive oil. Toss until all the strips are well-coated. Set aside to marinate while you go on with the rest of this. (Note: Do not add the oil before the Lea & Perrins as if you do, the L&P will not saturate the meat properly.)

With the flat side down on the cutting board, slice the hemisphere of onion into thin half-moon slices. Separate all the strands and set aside. Cut the hot cherry pepper into small strips (after removing the stem and seeds), and set aside. Cut cheese squares in half and set aside.

Over a medium-low fire, heat a few ounces of olive oil in a large, heavy skillet and add onion. Salt and pepper to taste, then toss onion to coat with oil. Cook until translucent. Do not let the onion take on any color (caramelization) as you want it to end up soft and full-limp with no hint of crunch.

Meanwhile, place “torpedo” roll in oven, and heat until crust is slightly crisp. Remove from oven and let cool a bit, then slice in half lengthwise but not all the way through so as to leave a “hinge” along one side. With roll “closed” (so the inside stays warm), set aside.

Lower fire under skillet a bit, push the onion strands to the edge of the skillet, then add the marinated steak strips to the freed-up space. Separate strips and let cook long enough to turn the strips a light brown on the skillet side but with a generous hint of red still on the top side (about a minute or two; if you cook longer at this point the meat will go rubbery when it's finished). Turn strips, lay cheese slices on top, and let the steak strips cook until the other side goes a light brown (about a minute or so).

(Note: By cooking the marinated steak strips in the same pan as the onion, the juices from the onion will effectively cause the steak strips to be steamed rather than sautéed. This is exactly what you want as, given well-marbled, choice quality meat, the combination of the short marinade and the steaming will make the steak strips go wonderfully tender.)

Immediately the steak strips go light brown on the second side, remove the skillet from the fire completely and start tossing the strips with the cheese. When the cheese just begins to go liquid (underline, just begins; the cheese should go fully liquid only after the steak and cheese mixture is in the roll), open the “torpedo” roll, scoop out with a large, slotted serving spoon (slotted so that you don't pick up excess oil and juice from the pan) what is now a steak and cheese mixture and heap evenly into the opened roll. Scoop out the onion and heap evenly on top of the steak and cheese mixture. Add the hot cherry pepper strips, and top off the whole thing with ketchup to taste. Close roll, cut in half across the width, and plate.

You are now the proud possessor of a genuine, unbelievably super-terrific, ACD Philadelphia cheesesteak.

Serve with your beer of choice (mine is Guinness Stout). Be sure to supply yourself with a damp paper towel and a fork. You'll almost certainly need both as I've never met the person who can eat this thing cleanly and neatly.

Yum!

Sounds Promising

Not the DRM-free thing (our mind is still not made up on that matter), but the 320 kbps thing, and the fact that 600 of the albums are otherwise out of print.

Apparently Universal Music Group – which has been dipping its toes into DRM-free waters this year – is none too worried about music pirates getting into classical music. Deutsche Grammophon, a German classical music company founded in 1898 and owned by Universal, will be launching on Wednesday an online store for MP3s called DG Web Shop.

The store will offer 24,000 albums and box sets [that number is almost certainly a typo for 2,400] encoded in a delectable 320 kbps (over the more standard 128-192 kbps). Six hundred of these albums are no longer available on CDs.

Albums will cost between $/€11-12 and tracks will be priced at $/€1.29 each, making purchases peculiarly cheaper for Americans. The site will be available in 42 countries and offer other things like album booklets, promotional videos, and tour information.

It may be worth noting that classical music receives less legal protection than contemporary music because only its recorded performances, not its compositions, are still under copyright.

The last graf of that news story as regards copyright is not by any means always the case.

We'll post here the link to the DG Web Shop as soon as it goes online. (Update 23:04 EST: The DG Web Shop is now online and the preceding link is now active.)

(The above news item taken from TechCrunch.)

Unmitigated Chutzpah

The unmitigated chutzpah of this avant-garde, Eurotrash charlatan is simply beyond belief.

In a recent interview in the German edition of Vanity Fair, the director-cum-artist Christoph Schlingensief has expressed an interest in heading the prestigious Richard Wagner Festival in Bayreuth. But as the Frankfurter Rundschau reports, the controversial Schlingensief does not want to take the position alone. "Why shouldn't Bayreuth be taken over by a team of artists?" Schlingensief asked. "Why shouldn't I apply [for the position as festival director] with Matthew Barney or Paul McCarthy or Doug Aitken?"

For Schlingensief, Barney, McCarthy, and Aitken are the dominant American media and performance artists. Schlingensief — who directed Wagner's Parsifal at the festival in 2004 to mixed audience reactions — is critical of the fact that only members of the Wagner family have applied to take over from outgoing director Wolfgang Wagner. "I link Wagner with life," Schlingensief said. "Bayreuth needs contact with life, that's all. And life is not always commensurable with the Wagners."

Nor with the Schlingensiefs of this world.

Presumptuous, contemptible little cretin.

(The above news item taken from Artforum International Magazine.)

Featured Past Post #51 (Administrative Note)

A new Featured Past Post ("It's That Damned Dissonance") is now up on the right sidebar.

Notes on Notes From The Kelp

At the composer’s request, we were recently sent a review copy by Innova Recordings, the recording arm of the American Composers Forum, of a just released CD titled, Notes from the Kelp, an album devoted to eight chamber works by the contemporary American composer Alex Shapiro.

As regular readers of Sounds & Fury are aware, we as a rule don’t do CD reviews here, and our interest in and enthusiasm for contemporary classical music is just about nil. But the contemporary classical music works on this CD immediately compelled our attention because of their utter lack of doctrinaire adherence to any of the manifold modern and postmodern isms today floating about in the world of classical music, and gave evidence of not so much as a trace of the obsession with process and sound that so malignantly infects so much contemporary classical music today. It’s not that we imagine the 45-year-old Ms. Shapiro is unaware or ignorant of any of these tendencies, but rather that we sense that her fundamental and overarching concern is with musical ideas and their spinning out to create a coherent musical narrative rather than with musical and quasi-musical effects, which is not to say she’s above using either or both when she determines they’ll serve her musical ideas advantageously and well.

As a happy consequence, there’s nothing in this collection of well-made chamber works — all of it very much of the 21st and late 20th century — that one could call or mistake for avant-garde innovative. All these works are, to use a ubiquitous buzzword in music criticism today, accessible, and absent any of the extreme complicatedness masquerading as complexity that’s part of the working kit of avant-garde charlatans such as Babbitt, Boulez, and Stockhausen and their ilk. If one was forced to chose one adjective to characterize all these chamber works, that adjective would be, beautiful. Even the opening comic piece, “Slipping” — scored for violin, harpsichord, and percussion — is no exception having as it does its own zany sort of beauty. It’s a madcap, half-demented romp through a potpourri of styles ranging from early-‘50s rock-and-roll, to Italian street song; from ‘40s jazz to Japanese koto music in all of which the harpsichord is called upon to impersonate every imaginable plectrum instrument — except the Baroque harpsichord. A thoroughly delightful frolic, expertly and with relish performed by Robin Lorentz, violin (who commissioned the work as a gift for her recital partner, Kathleen McIntosh); Kathleen McIntosh, harpsichord; and Dan Morris, percussion. Perhaps it’s just our mildly weird sense of humor, but we couldn’t help thinking that an integral bookending of this mélange by a single po-faced fragment on both ends in the style of a Bach trio sonata (sans percussion, of course) would have given sharper point to the work’s musical idea, and made the comic wackiness in-between that much more piquant.

Far from comic or wacky is “Bioplasm”, the next cut on the CD. It’s an eerie and curiously haunting tone poem written for flute quartet — 2 C flutes, 2 alto flutes, 2 bass flutes, and 1 piccolo — that incorporates some uncommon flute techniques such as percussive pitched key clicks and pitch bending (the latter sounding just as the words suggest, and both new to this writer) as well as vocalizations by the players while they’re playing (no, we have no idea how that’s done, but we’re assured that no overdubbing was employed, and that none of the four flutists were harmed in the making of the recording), that requires more than one listening to appreciate fully in all its details.

The centerpiece of Notes from the Kelp (for us, at any rate) is “Current Events”, three thematically and musically related essays on the sea written for string quintet (2 violins, 2 violas, and 1 cello). Moving quickly past the cutesy double entendre title which ill serves the sense and depth of the work, the three named movements are “Surge”, “Ebb”, and “Rip”, all referring to ocean tidal currents (“Current Events”, get it?). The musical language shared by all three is richly dissonant and dark-textured; a dense polytonal chromaticism that’s gorgeously and unabashedly romantic and deeply affecting. If there’s but one work on this CD that all will love, this is it, and were it the only work on the CD, it alone would justify the purchase price.

“For My Father” is the fourth movement of Ms. Shapiro’s 1996 five-movement Piano Suite No. 1: The Resonance of Childhood, and the sixth track on this twelve-track CD. It’s an elegy on the inexorable descent of Ms. Shapiro’s father into dementia — an anguished, extended questioning of fate ending in quiet resignation the totality of the movement seeming to echo the sense of the words if not the original meaning of Beethoven’s famous written question and answer on the beginning and ending pages, respectively, of the last movement of his last quartet: “Muss es sein? Es muss sein. [Must it be? It must be.]”

Three reflections on the present state of our species and its relation to our planet are the substance of “At The Abyss”; a work scored for piano, marimba, vibraphone, and percussion. The three named, complexly contrapuntal movements are, “Observe”, “Reflect”, and “Act”. The first is mad as hell, and the second and third, determined not to take it any more. Note the ethereal upper-partial harmonics in “Reflect”. They’re produced not by a glass harmonica as first thought by this writer, but by bowed rather than struck crotales; small (3”-4” diameter), tuned, cymbal-like percussion instruments that can be had in a chromatically-tuned-octave set.

“Phos Hilaron” (Gracious Light) is the second movement of Ms. Shapiro’s 1999 six-movement Evensong Suite, and is scored for flute, clarinet, bassoon, and piano. This lovely Anglican liturgical piece celebrates, within its liturgical Evensong service context, “the last vesper light of a setting sun,” as Ms. Shapiro puts it. But as with all the works on this CD, its putative meaning is malleable, and outside of its liturgical setting one should feel perfectly free to assign to it anything whatsoever it might call to mind.

As preparation for the next cut on this CD, first think of two really big instruments, and then mentally pair them in a lyrical duet.

Bet you didn’t think of a piano and a tuba. But Ms. Shapiro did, then imaginatively named the resulting duet, “Music for Two Big Instruments”. And a more surprising lyrical pairing would be hard to imagine except it be the music of Ponchielli’s “Dance of The Hours” and Walt Disney’s impossibly graceful hippo ballerinas.

Say what? A lyrical tuba?

Betcherass — and beautifully, too.

“Deep” is the last cut on this CD, and the only work to utilize a prepared (by the composer) electronic track over which musically lavish electronic track a solo contrabassoon does its solo turn. It’s a deeply and darkly mysterious work that will make the hair stand up on the back of your neck, we promise you. This is electronics put to proper use in the making of music, and if we hear so much as a whisper of the phrase “movie music” from any of you we’ll write you off as a woodenheaded, hopelessly music-deaf philistine, and have nothing further to do with you.

All the musicians taking part in the making of Notes from the Kelp — and there were some 22 of them if my count is not in error — performed splendidly, and splendid as well were the audio engineers responsible for capturing those performances, laying them down on digital tape, and transferring them flawlessly to CD. Innova Recordings and everyone involved in the making of this CD have much of which to be proud. The CD may be purchased directly from the composer, or individual tracks downloaded, here as can supplementary materials (such as the scores) be downloaded and much information found on the music and the making of Notes from the Kelp. The CD is available as well from Amazon here.

One final word about Notes from the Kelp.

Do not be fooled by the fact that Ms. Shapiro is a regular babe (that girl on the album cover is not a model, but the composer herself), nor by Ms. Shapiro’s CD liner notes and her comments on the CD’s web page which might lead one to conclude she’s little more than a utopian, tree-hugging, Left Coast flower child; a relic of the post-Woodstock ‘70s and all that implies. Listen to the music, not the words. The music says it all. The rest is silence.

Thanksgiving Gone AWOL

It’s the fourth Thursday in November here in the wilds of New Jersey. There’s no snow on the ground, and the temperature is predicted to go to 70 degrees Fahrenheit at midday. Thanksgiving has passed us by this year. We look forward to its return in years to come.

The Day Of The Digital Book

Read this January 2006 blog post. Then peruse this product page for the details of this just announced device (see Amazon's front page for the actual announcement), and view all the embedded videos. Except for special editions and books of the coffee table sort, The Day Of The Digital Book and the beginning of the death of the paper-and-ink book has arrived — almost. All that’s needed now is a small physical refinement (the device needs a retractable or fold-back cover), and a price tag of $39.00 instead of the current $399.00. Not that far off as soon as Amazon and their partner publishers — which include at the very start every major publisher in the US and some small presses as well — finally understand they’re in the book-selling business, not the electronic hardware business. If they’re really smart about this, they’ll even sell the device at a loss if they have to. Think Gillette and the safety razor.

About Those Rituals

One would have thought this issue would have long been a dead-because-wrongheaded one by now, but no such luck. On his blog, On The Record, Henry Fogel writes:

I've written before about the sense of formality in today's classical music concert world — a formality that sometimes borders on rigidity. No applause between movements is one of my favorite symbols for this problem, though the white tie and tails of orchestra musicians runs a close second. This ritual-like atmosphere, which to some degree can enhance a concert experience, can also, if overdone, make it a less-than-welcoming experience for those new to the music. That is especially true, I think, of younger people who have grown up in a society that has moved away from some of these rituals...

I would never advocate a return to the "good old days" of the 19th-century concert. But a good look at that era shows us how huge the distance is between then and now, and I wonder if at least some degree of the more relaxed atmosphere of the past might not be a good [sic] thing.

On one hand, it’s encouraging to learn from the above that Mr. Fogel rejects the imbecile, postmodern equalitarian, pop-culture besotted notion of a return to the vulgar concert-hall etiquette of the first three-quarters of the 19th century (and I gather, by extension, also the even more vulgar concert-hall etiquette of the middle-to-late 18th). On the other, it’s discouraging to learn that, like most writers on this subject, Mr. Fogel — a man who should know better — still has yet to get it.

Get what?, you might ask, and well you might. The answer is, get a grasp on the understanding that the largely tacit “rituals” of concert-hall etiquette that have prevailed for the last 100 years or so have evolved in fair measure precisely as a response to the attendance at classical music concerts of new and/or classical-music-ignorant concertgoers. Were concert hall audiences guaranteed to be made up strictly of informed classical music concertgoers, such “rituals” would be entirely unnecessary as everyone would know, for instance, when applause was appropriate between movements — say, after a particularly excellent reading of, say, the first movement of, say, the Tchaikovsky Violin Concerto — and when it was manifestly inappropriate — say, after the second movement of, say, the Beethoven Symphony No. 3. And no-one would need the orchestra players dressed in white tie and tails to intimate to him semiotically that a well-executed concert of great classical music is a special event that promises to lift him above and beyond the quotidian cares and concerns of his ordinary existence but requires his full and focused attention in order to fulfill that promise. A musically informed concertgoer would know all that as a matter of course, and need no semiotic reminder.

As long as we have the possibility of attendance at classical music concerts of a fair number of the classical music ignorant, so long will those largely tacit “rituals” of concert hall etiquette need to remain in force, and be enforced by any means required, very much including, but certainly not limited to, the often- and unjustly-maligned shush.

Featured Past Post #50 (Administrative Note)

It's that time of year again, and so our annual, period-appropriate Featured Past Post ("The Annual Bird Post") is now up on the right sidebar.

Why We Love Swedish Women

From Sweden’s The Local: Sweden’s News In English:

They're "just breasts"! This is the rallying cry of a network of women who have launched a campaign for the right to bathe topless at Sweden's swimming pools.

A new wave of feminists have been angered by an incident in September in which two bare-breasted young women were called ashore by a lifeguard at a swimming pool in Uppsala. When they refused to cover up, they were asked to leave the premises.

RTWT here.

(Our thanks to the always indispensable Arts & Letters Daily for the link.)

Head-Scratcher

A 4 November piece written for The New York Times by Times classical music critic Bernard Holland seems to have set a number of people’s teeth on edge. It begins and ends innocently enough with Mr. Holland discussing how, as a professional critic, he prepares for the premiere of a new work:

I read about the people and the circumstances, where the piece came from and what the composer eats for breakfast. If I have a score, I look at the orchestration. It’s nice to know how many crayons are in the composer’s coloring box. I don’t listen to anything. Surprise me.

A perfectly sensible way to go about the thing, actually (remember, as a professional critic Mr. Holland has to write not only about the new work, but about the work within its total context which might very well have to take note of “what the composer eats for breakfast”), and certainly no cause for setting anyone’s teeth on edge. Unless, of course, one disregards the context of what Mr. Holland wrote, and, as absurd as the conclusion is, concludes from his words, as it seems did at least one blogger, that Mr. Holland makes his judgment on the new work without listening to it or to any other work the new work’s composer has written previously when it was perfectly clear that what Mr. Holland meant was simply that he doesn’t listen to the new work via any source before hearing it at its premiere.

In that same piece, however, Mr. Holland also addressed the matter of who owes whom what in the understanding and acceptance of a new work: the composer the audience, or the audience the composer?

[P]reparation signals a critic’s work ethic, an obligation to reach out (or up) to a composer, to speak his or her language, to enter someone else’s territory and ask for directions.

The more I follow this line of thought, the more irritated I get, for haven’t we got things backward? Shouldn’t composers be preparing for me rather than me for them? By “me,” I mean not me the critic but me the audience member in general.

[...]

No one can deny the oceans of irrelevance that have always resulted from giving the public what it wants. But any music intended for public consumption must ask on every page: “How can I make them respond? What common denominator between their sensibility and mine can I discover?” Otherwise it bears irrelevance of a different kind. Haydn and Mozart — purveyors of the most profound and original music ever written — asked these questions every day, or they would have had nothing to eat.

[...]

I hope it is not unreasonable to suggest that composers, not listeners, are the servants here, and that every new opera or orchestral piece they write should be brought in on a tray with hopes that it has something substantial to say that we can like.

Unlike Mr. Holland’s reasoning for his method of preparation for a new work as a professional critic, his reasoning here is more than a little problematic, or at least badly set forth. Is he really saying, as it seems he is, that composers ought to pander to the tastes of their audience in order for their work to be understood, accepted, and loved by them? Sounds unreasonable to us — wrongheaded, even — and Mr. Holland only loads the dice by putting forward the example of a transcendent genius such as Mozart who consciously and seemingly effortlessly wrote his music in such a way that, in part or in whole and at some level or other — from the most superficial to the most profound — it could be understood, accepted, and loved by any listener excepting those he (Mozart) called the “long ears” (i.e., asses). As a composer, Mozart could eat his cake and have it too. No other composer in history was (or is) capable of that.

Our respect for Mr. Holland as a critic is well-known to regular readers of Sounds & Fury. But this piece seems to us confused and poorly, even perversely, argued, and we confess to some not inconsiderable bafflement as to what point(s), exactly, Mr. Holland was attempting to get across by writing it.

Why We Love Rossini

What Else

But of course.

Featured Past Post #49 (Administrative Note)

A new Featured Past Post ("Infallible(?)") is now up on the right sidebar.

About That Getting-The-Facts-Right Competence Of MSM Journalists Thing

The following grafs, representing more than half of a news story written by one Tony Paterson for the Brit The Independent, are so loaded with half-truth and outright error (and in one graf, gratuitous and invidious innuendo) that it can only be the work either of a total incompetent, or of someone who was pulled from a news desk having nothing to do with classical music to cover the story, and who did his background “research” in a Facebook or MySpace chat room.

The grafs in question follow with the misinformation italicized by me. All Square-bracketed comments are mine.

• A bitter and invariably operatic feud that has divided the family of the German composer Richard Wagner for more than a decade neared its denouement yesterday when three female descendants of the maestro [great-granddaughters Katharina Wagner, Nike Wagner, and Eva Wagner-Pasquier] staked rival claims in a battle to become his artistic successor. [Those claims were staked months ago in the case of Katharina, and years ago in the case of Nike and Eva if the latter two can even be said to have “staked a claim”.]

• Wolfgang Wagner, Richard's 88-year-old grandson and director of the home of Wagner opera — Germany's famous Bayreuth music festival [sic!] — has claimed the role as the composer's rightful heir since he took over the post 40 years ago. [Wolfgang never made such a claim. The role passed to him on the death of his brother and co-director, Wieland, to both of whom the role was passed down from their grandmother, Cosima, wife of Richard, through their father Siegfried, Richard Wagner’s son, and mother Winifred.]

• Members of the powerful Richard Wagner Foundation [Der Richard Wagner Stiftung Bayreuth], which is partly run by the German government and controls the Bayreuth Festival, were holding a closed meeting in the Bavarian city yesterday to decide on the financially troubled event's future. [The Stiftung is NOT "partly run by the German government." Rather, the Stiftung board is mostly comprised of representatives of several local German governments, and the Bayreuth Festival is not now nor has it for the last almost half-century been “financially troubled.”]

• In advance of the meeting, Karl Gerhard Schmidt, the foundation's chairman, took the unprecedented step of calling for Wolfgang's resignation as soon as possible, saying that because of his deteriorating health, the festival was de facto "without a director". [Karl Gerhard Schmidt is the chairman of the Society of Bayreuth Friends, not chairman of the Stiftung.]

• Katharina, who likes wearing black and sports a suitably Teutonic blonde mane, has been groomed for the post by her parents for decades. This year, she made an important debut at the festival, directing Die Meistersinger von Nüremberg [sic], a classically German opera that was a favourite of the Wagner enthusiast Adolf Hitler. [As Katharina is only 29 it’s rather a bit much to say she’s been “groomed for the post by her parents for decades”; Die Meistersinger is hardly “a classically German opera”; and the fact that Katharina is blonde is neither “suitably Teutonic” nor pertinent. Ditto in spades that Die Meistersinger “was a favourite of the Wagner enthusiast Adolf Hitler.”]

• Yet here the complications also abound, for Eva and Nike have been at loggerheads with Wolfgang for over a decade. [They’ve “been at loggerheads” for almost four decades.]

• Katharina insists she is "very well qualified for the job". She took steps to strengthen her position by enlisting the support of prominent conductors and composers. [Katharina enlisted the help of but a single conductor — Thielemann — and no composers, “prominent” or otherwise, of which anyone’s publicly aware.]

• Of the three rivals for the post, only Nike has argued in favour of liberating the festival from the "dictatorship of the [Wagner] gene". But the foundation is obliged by its statutes to give the job to Wagner family members. [The Stiftung is under no such obligation. It’s obliged to offer the position to a Wagner family member only if it considers that family member to be the best choice for the position. It’s otherwise free to look elsewhere.]

So much for the getting-the-facts-right competence of MSM journalists over us loose-cannon bloggers. This grossly ill-informed piece would be a genuine embarrassment for even a local rag. How much more so for a national daily such as The Independent.

Push Is Fast Coming To Shove — Or So It Seems

If this report is accurate, Wolfgang Wagner’s days as head of the Bayreuther Festspiele are fast coming to an end whether he agrees to step down or not. All factions that make up the governing board of the Festspiele (Der Richard Wagner Stiftung Bayreuth) are pressuring the old boy (he’s 88) to voluntarily resign his lifetime appointment, and make way for new blood even if that new blood is not that of his chosen heir, Katharina Wagner, his 29-year-old daughter with his second wife, Gudrun.

Germany’s cultural power-brokers yesterday piled the pressure on the 88-year-old grandson of Richard Wagner in the hope of persuading him to step down from the helm of the Bayreuth Festival, one of the world’s greatest musical events.

The man at the centre of the storm is Wolfgang Wagner, who has run the festival since 1966. Since the death of the composer the festival, on the so-called “Green Hill” of Bayreuth, in Bavaria, has been managed by a member of the clan.

Mr. Wagner, frail and confused, refuses to surrender the post unless it goes to his 29-year-old daughter, Katharina. The politicians and businessmen who make up the majority of the Bayreuth Foundation, which supervises the festival, begged to differ at a crisis meeting yesterday. Mr. Wagner decided not to attend the meeting and let his lawyer fight his corner in an often passionate and irritable debate.

Although they kept the old man in place — the statutes give him the job for life unless it can be proved that he has lost his faculties — the board called on all contenders to prepare their concepts for the future of the festival. Clearly the intention is to hold a beauty contest and line up a successor whether Mr. Wagner approves or not.

RTWT here.

Free Lunch

My friendly, monopolistic TV cable pimps have happily screwed-up again — alas, only the second time in some nine years — and instead of serving me only the basic broadcast channels they’re required by the FCC to provide access to and for which I’m being charged the minimum fee of some $15 per month, they’re now serving me the entire analog cable spectrum ($50 per month, minus the extra-charge premium channels like HBO, of course).

Oh goody!, thought I. They’ll catch their error sooner or later and bump me back to being served only the basic service for which I’m paying, but in the meantime, thought I, I’ve an escape from the wasteland that is broadcast TV (PBS and House excepted, of course), and now, if only for the nonce, I have access to the rich vastness of the entire multi-channel analog cable spectrum.

Silly boy.

Turns out, that multi-channel vastness is merely the wasteland of broadcast TV writ large, and saturated with commercials of intolerable length and frequency. It wasn’t anywhere near this bad the last time they made this error nine years ago and gave me access to channels for which I wasn’t paying. Commercials aside, why do paying customers put up with this deluge of unmitigated crap?

Silly question.

Why We Love Bernard Holland

Following, is the lede graf of New York Times classical music critic Bernard Holland’s review of the Met’s now several-seasons-old production of Verdi’s La Traviata:

“La Traviata” returned to the Metropolitan Opera on Saturday afternoon. When a Franco Zeffirelli production is on the boards, competition is in the air. Who will win? Verdi’s beloved music, the people who sing it, or will both be swamped under the force of opera’s premier interior decorator?

Perfect! But then, on the other hand, better an extravagant interior decorator than a postmodern social and political polemicist, we always say.