Worthwhile Reading For Your Holiday Weekend

We interrupt our unannounced seasonal blogging hiatus to call your attention to two splendid posts. The first is a glowing review of the new La Scala Chéreau/Barenboim production of Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde by compulsive operagoer Mostly Opera:

In brief: It a was a truly magical evening of the kind I´ll probably only experience a handful of times during my entire lifetime, if I´m lucky. The combination of Chéreau, Barenboim and Waltraud Meier was profoundly moving and even exceeding my wildest expectations.

And the second is this insightful, on-the-money examination of the structure and performance of the wild fugue from Beethoven’s “Hammerklavier” piano sonata (No. 29 in B-flat major, opus 106) by concert pianist and blogger Jeremy Denk of Think Denk:

I must admit this constant putting-Beethoven-in-order gets on my nerves. It makes me want to yell at the guy in Starbucks when there’s no blueberry crumbcake. Probably no other composer has been so obsessively mapped (Google-mapped, Google-streeted, even); his schemes have all been “found out;” he has been explored down to the last nanometer of contrapuntal unfolding in the deepest inner voice of the world. What should by rights be remote, a breathtaking Timbuktu of tones, is instead littered, when you arrive, with the droppings of musicologists, theorists, selling Schenkerian souvenirs and helpful pamphlets comparing legions of past performances. They tell you with one voice: we have already been here. (Oh, but, by the way, why are you modern performers playing so boringly, so predictably?)

[...]

[Listeners] have the right to be thrilled by this fugue, for example, and I could list others: the right to be dazzled, confused, whirled around, amused, stunned, bewildered, frenzied, the right to join in, to be caught up, to laugh wickedly with Beethoven and to feel out of breath, winded by stretti, by the endless chain of interruptive entrances, by dizzy leaping trills, and then to welcome the D major section, to bask in the one breath of the fugal dragon, its transcendent inhale before the fire resumes.

Both the above, worthwhile reading for your holiday weekend.