Sounds & Fury

His Last Bow

Wolfgang Wagner, 88-year-old director of the Bayreuther Festspiele, has, after 57 years, the first 15 of those years in partnership with his brother, Wieland, (finally) tendered his resignation as Festspiele director effective 31 August reports Bloomberg News:

Wolfgang Wagner, the 88-year-old director of the Richard Wagner Festival in Bayreuth and grandson of the composer, announced he is stepping down from his post after 57 years, ending an impasse over the festival leadership.

His successor hasn't yet been appointed and it is now up to the Wagner family* to agree on who should take over the 132-year- old festival, Thomas Goppel, the Bavarian minister for science, research and art, told reporters in Bayreuth.

[...]

"This wasn't an easy decision," said Stefan Mueller, Wolfgang Wagner's lawyer. "But once it was clear that his two daughters were willing to team up, he thought it was time to leave. Mr. Wagner is convinced that this would be the soundest solution and he thinks it will go through."

Wagner's resignation takes effect on Aug 31. The 13 family members* have until then to come to an agreement on who should take over, Goppel said.

Next up: And the successor(s) is...

Stay tuned.

* Actually, it's not up to the Wagner family, but the Richard Wagner Stiftung Bayreuth, the Festspiele's governing board, to choose Wolfgang's successor.

An Important Clarification

After a number of chiding eMails scolding us for our apparently treating the music of Elliott Carter so rudely in this post of ours, we see that a clarification is urgently required.

In that post we said nothing about Carter's music, with which music we're only glancingly familiar. Justin Davidson did. It seems our breezy (and we now see careless and ill-chosen) "Just so" response to Mr. Davidson's quoted remarks on Carter's music is the culprit here. Our "Just so" was NOT meant as a comment on Carter's music. It was meant to indicate that Mr. Davidson's closing remarks on Carter's music, though expressed differently, expressed exactly what we said in our above linked post's opening graf as it applied to, "much of the atonal music of our experience that we found so, well, unmusical — worse, found to be non-music," NOT to Carter's music specifically with which music, as we've above noted, we're only glancingly familiar and, further, from that glancing exposure concluded that what we heard was indeed genuine music and NOT gibberish.

The fault here is due entirely our careless writing, not our readers' reading, and for that, our shamefaced apologies.

On Music And Gibberish

[Note: This post has been updated (1) as of 5:24 PM Eastern on 26 Apr. See below.]

In the wake of yet another wave of outraged attacks by New Music's defenders, supporters, and champions against The New York Times's longtime classical music critic, Bernard Holland, one of this crowd's favorite MSM whipping boys, for his latest critique of atonal music, we started to think afresh concerning what it is about much of the atonal music of our experience that we found so, well, unmusical — worse, found to be non-music. It's not atonality per se — i.e., the music's lack of a triadic tonal center(s); a "home base," so to speak — nor is it the almost unrelenting, unresolved harmonic dissonance that's the hallmark of the atonal. It's something much more fundamental: the lack of a perceptible and coherent musical narrative from work's beginning to end, which is to say the lack of the work's saying comprehensibly something beyond and exclusive of commentary on its own processes and methods which are — or ought to have been and be — but mere tools used in its making.

In a February 2008 piece for New York Magazine on the music of venerable (and now celebrated) atonal composer Elliott Carter, Justin Davidson, the magazine's classical music critic, put the matter differently but most eloquently:

It’s often suggested that appreciating Carter requires a special kind of training — that some secret knowledge would make all those vinegary chords and dribbling rhythms suddenly make sense. Actually, the ideal listener would be one who had experienced total short-term memory loss. I could love all those little auroras, those dazzling bursts of iridescence, so much more if only I were relieved of the need to relate them to what came before or to wonder — the title of Carter’s only opera — "What next?" After the first minute or so of his mazelike music, I lose all sense of how deeply I have wandered in. Each passage blots out its own past, and at any given moment the possibilities for what the ensuing few bars might hold are virtually infinite. Carter creates no expectations, and so he cannot defy expectations, either. I will accept any dénouement, but I do so without investment in the outcome. A single blinding moment might be worth a standing ovation; a long chain of them gets only an irritated shrug.

Just so [4/26 – see Update below]. To put the matter more bluntly and much less eloquently, a composition absent a perceptible and coherent musical narrative from beginning to end is gibberish and not music.

Whenever we've expressed this idea within the hearing of those committed to the atonal, and even those committed to the noise-making of charlatans such as Cage and Stockhausen, we had hurled at us the charge that we'd surely have said the same about the mature music of Mozart and Beethoven at their most advanced had we lived in their times. While we suppose that's possible, we think it only remotely likely and bordering on the impossible. For however harmonically outrageous their mature works might have gratingly struck contemporary ears, no-one — except his rhetoric get the better of his common sense, or he be literally tone deaf — could have accused either composer of composing works absent a perceptible and coherent musical narrative as the requirements of the Classical forms employed by both all but guaranteed it. And that's the test — the touchstone — that determines whether a work as a whole is genuine music or gibberish. Flashes of musical brilliance — even a sustained series of such flashes from work's start to finish — simply won't do to make that work a work of genuine music unless those flashes conspire to produce a perceptible and coherent musical narrative.

We are not a defender, supporter or champion of tonal over atonal music. We are a defender, supporter, and champion of genuine music over gibberish. We don't give a rat's ass about the processes and methods a composer uses to create his works. We insist only that those works be music and not gibberish which is to say we insist on each having a perceptible and coherent musical narrative from beginning to end. That's genuine music's sine qua non — even its very definition — and we will accept nothing less.

---

Update (5:24 PM Eastern on 26 Apr): For an important clarification of our above remarks, see this post.

Oh Dear

Oh dear. An insightful and informative review by Bernard Holland for The New York Times of a two-CD retrospective of the music of atonal composer George Perle on the Bridge label brought predictable howls of wounded outrage from several of the usual blogospheric suspects. Writes one of these:

Yes, Mr. Holland, as a professional music critic, you should feel guilty about your intellectual laziness. I don't mind the fact that you dislike serial and atonal music. I mind a great deal that you don't have the honesty to recuse yourself from writing about music you're incapable of writing about in a fair manner. And whoever continues to assign you to review music for which you happily demonstrate your contempt should feel ashamed of himself.

And in response to Mr. Holland writing,

[Perle] speaks a language he and his contemporaries made up. I can speak only the languages I was born to. Sometimes I feel guilty. Maybe I should work harder at his grammar and vocabulary.

another outraged blogger carps:

What, you write professional criticism of a medium you admit you can’t be bothered to engage with? Why would you feel guilty about that?

And in response to Mr. Holland's perfectly reasonable lede graf which read:

George Perle, who turns 93 next month, is a rare survivor of a disappearing movement. The general public will barely notice its departure, given that not many people know it ever existed.

yet another outraged blogger sputters:

I…you…crap. Tons and tons of people know this music (serial, atonal, and/or 12-tone) existed (exists! Hello! Present tense, please.). It has been widely studied, commented upon, cherished, and in some cases, derided (by, for example, Mr. Holland). Even people who do not like, say, Schoenberg, know he existed.

I could quote more excerpts from these and other outraged responses to this fine review, but they're even sillier and more hysterical than the above three, and so I'll refrain as it would serve no useful purpose. More useful, it seems to me, would be to quote directly from Mr. Holland's perceptive, admiring, and respectful review of this retrospective recording of this 93-year-old composer's music. Writes Mr. Holland:

Mr. Perle belongs to a second generation of explorers. I doubt there will be a third. It is not a question of quality. His atonal compositions ... are like well-cut jewelry: small enough to hold in the hand, diamond hard yet smooth to the touch, and shining with reflecting light.

[...]

How did all this atonality business start? A number of 20th-century composers said that it was the necessary next step, that old ways of listening had worn themselves out. It sounds reasonable to say that Anton Webern’s Piano Variations take up where Brahms left off. I admire the Webern; I even like it for its strangely satisfying space-age spirituality. I don’t think it has anything remotely to do with Brahms.

The Webern, and music that constitutes Mr. Perle’s immediate heritage, is altogether new. It is as if music history in the mid-1920s had stopped dead in its tracks and started again from scratch. Composers of the Second Viennese School — Arnold Schoenberg, Webern and, to a degree, Alban Berg — were like mutineers against the divine right of tonal music. Serialism was their Pitcairn Island. Freedom to reinvent was one result, inbreeding another.

Until the 20th century musicians obeyed natural laws of physics. Pick up a rock, drop it, and it falls to the ground. Music was the same. Send a piece of music up in the air, doctor and twist it, make it major, minor or modal; in the end it wants to come down to where it started. You can call the process tonality or music’s law of gravity.

The Nine Bagatelles for piano (played in the CD set by Horacio Gutiérrez), from 1999, and the Serenade No. 3 for piano and chamber orchestra (with Richard Goode and Gerard Schwarz conducting the Music Today Ensemble), from 1983, both have Mr. Perle’s trademark love for brief, elegant, highly energized phrases separated by marked pauses. Cleanliness and light are present: Art Deco streamlining replaces Edwardian overdecoration. If Mr. Perle is a jeweler, he is also an architect, and you can think of these pieces as buildings. We admire them for clear thinking and precision. Still, not many people want to live in them.

[...]

I recently came across a television program about [centenarian atonal composer Elliott] Carter, who, at the end, hoped that an increasingly complicated world would breed a public smart and alert enough to appreciate his music. That is a dangerous presumption, one that offers soap to an unwashed public as yet unworthy of his greatness.

Afterward I went back to George Perle on Bridge. The air seemed just as rarefied as before but somehow healthier to breathe.

RTW illuminating T here.

Strauss And Mahler Mark Passover With A Reenactment...Of Sorts

Kudos to Matthew Guerrieri of Soho The Dog for the latest in his ongoing series of Strauss-Mahler Favorite Movie Moments. This time it's the season-appropriate, The Ten Commandments.

About Time

It's about time. The redoubtable Molly Sheridan of NewMusicBox and "Friday Informer" fame (she's managing editor of the former, and writer of the latter) now has a blog of her own: Mind The Gap.

Time for classical music bloggers everywhere to update their blogrolls.

We have.

Featured Past Post #61 (Administrative Note)

A new Featured Past Post ("Not Today, Not Ever”) is now up on the right sidebar.

Glass As Composer For Film

So I was in the middle of watching the "Frozen Seas" episode of The Blue Planet, the beautifully photographed and poetically choreographed eight-part BBC documentary surveying undersea life in the world's oceans, when I remembered that the Met was broadcasting the Saturday afternoon matinee performance of Philip Glass's Satyagraha. Although the subject of the opera is of little interest to me, and the ethos being celebrated both irritating and tiresome (most especially so when co-opted in the Western world by the ethos of the Sixties), I did want to give the music with its incomprehensible Sanskrit text another listen. So I turned off the sound on the TV, and turned on the radio in time to catch the third act as it was opening.

It was bloody perfect. As soundtrack for The Blue Planet, I mean. And when I say perfect, I mean it was as if the music were written explicitly for the film right down to, for instance, the waddling step of the penguins who waddled on land in perfect time to the music, or the balletic, slow-motion swimming of whales to which swimming the music seemed a direct response. And then the next episode of the series — "Coral Seas" — came on, and the music fit that film, with its capturing of the evocative swaying movements of tropical undersea fauna looking more like lush flora than fauna, and the elegant gliding movements of myriad species of fish, even more perfectly.

I don't know what that says for Glass as an opera composer, but I can say I've never enjoyed The Blue Planet — or Satyagraha — more.

Gould's Secret Revealed

I've on a number of occasions over the course of Sounds & Fury waxed both poetic and technical on Glenn Gould's readings of Bach's keyboard works (that is, poetic to the extent possible by a non-poet, and performance-technical to the extent possible by one lacking any formal training on a keyboard instrument) in an attempt to express just what it is that makes a Gould reading of these works the sui generis thing it plainly is even to untrained ears, and also in an attempt to get at just what it is that makes these readings sui generis (and I do not speak here about those Bach readings by Gould which find him operating in wiseass, épater les bourgeois, look-what-I-can-do mode (infrequent), but about those Bach readings which make up the bulk of his readings of these nonpareil keyboard works), and can't help but conclude I've in large part failed in my attempt at the latter.

Lately, I've taken to playing various selections from Gould's recordings of both books of the Well-Tempered Clavier while lying in bed just before going off to sleep for the night; not to lull me asleep, but because I find it puts me in a state of mind in which my listening becomes largely unmoderated by critical or analytic thought which state I find pleasurable if mildly unnatural, and a most satisfyingly relaxing way to end a day. And strange to tell, it was during one of these listening sessions that I think I discovered the secret to what it is that's at the technical (as opposed to interpretive) heart of what makes a Gould Bach reading the sui generis thing that it is.

It's almost immediately apparent to any close listener that Gould's Bach readings are remarkable for their almost uncanny delineation of the works' horizontal (melodic) contrapuntal lines while the proper vertical (harmonic) interlacing of those lines is fully maintained. What's not immediately apparent is just what it is about that delineation that strikes one as uncanny and so unlike that of any other pianist — at least any other pianist of my experience.

It's an almost second-nature mental device of mine — one I've employed hundreds, maybe thousands, of times in my life when listening to any musical work — to isolate for attention a single horizontal musical line of the score whether it be the principal melodic line or a line of the surrounding counterpoint, and follow that line through whole paragraphs of the composition before shifting attention back to the full musical fabric of the piece or to another single horizontal line. (A single horizontal musical line is the maximum that can be singled out for attention in that way by humans. Imagining one can simultaneously single out more than a single horizontal musical line for that sort of attention is a mere illusion produced by one's unconscious rapid-fire shifting of attention from one line to another.)

As it's a natural, so to speak, it should then come as no surprise I've done that an uncountable number of times over the years while listening to Gould's Bach readings. This time, however, something struck me about Gould's performance of these works that had previously escaped my conscious perception. And that is that no matter what interior horizontal line I chose to isolate for attention in that way at any point in the performance, and no matter how dense or complex the surrounding counterpoint, that line was not only articulated perfectly and at the proper dynamic, but played with such perfect effortlessness it was as if it were being played by a pianist who had nothing else to do with his fingers but play that single line alone.

But this is impossible technically, isn't it? Yet there it is. With any other pianist of my experience performing these works, if one isolates any single interior horizontal line for attention in that way, one is always aware the pianist's fingers have things to do other than to play that single line. Some sense of effort is always apparent and affecting the articulation of that line no matter how subtly. With Gould, however, that sense of effort is simply absent, and the perfect articulation of that line unmarred and unimpeded. And it's no trick accomplished by recording engineers as it's immediately apparent in the isolation of any single interior horizontal line at almost any point one chooses to isolate it for that sort of attention.

No wonder, then, that listening in the normal way to Gould's readings of these works one feels that the delineation of the works' contrapuntal lines with their proper harmonic interlacing fully maintained has something of the uncanny about it. It's a direct result of Gould's keen awareness of the importance of each of those lines in both the contrapuntal and harmonic fabric of the work, and of that impossible technical mastery of his instrument which allowed him to realize both to their fullest; a technical keyboard capacity which, it seems, Gould and Gould alone possessed — in these works at least.

How fortunate for us Gould lived at a time when the permanent capturing of such miracles on tape or other medium was possible and so was preserved to be heard by any and all even in the remotest future and at the remotest reaches of the globe.

Would the same had been true for certain other legendary music prodigies of the past.

No Country For Old Men: Two Colossal Logical Blunders

[Note: This post has been edited extensively as of 11:26 AM Eastern on 18 Apr to correct a slew of small errors, add an extended parenthetical, and revise some infelicitous language.]

Late to the party as is usual with us with these sorts of things, we've just viewed the 2008 Academy Award Best Picture winner, No Country For Old Men, courtesy of Netflix. As with all Coen brothers' movies there's much here that's engaging. But unlike other Coen brothers' movies this one contained two colossal logical blunders (among a number of minor ones) which all but totally short-circuited our enjoyment; blunders colossal because the progress of the plot depended and turned on each.

Colossal Logical Blunder No. 1:

Moss returns to the scene of the slaughter of the Mexican drug runners upon which he had earlier stumbled after he's already returned home safely and undetected with the satchel containing the drug money he found some fair distance away from the scene. The movie has Moss returning to the scene of the slaughter to bring a jug of water to the one Mexican drug runner who was left only half-dead after the slaughter and who was in need of water when Moss left him, but for whose plight Moss had shown a callous disregard when he first discovered him.

It would have been one thing to have Moss return to the scene of the slaughter not to bring a jug of water to the half-dead Mexican, but to make sure the half-dead Mexican was either already full-dead or, if not, to himself ensure that condition for the Mexican as he was the only one to have seen Moss's face even though he couldn't have seen Moss take the satchel containing the money.

But there's no hint that was Moss's intention in returning to the scene (he's bringing a jug of water for the guy, fer chrissake!), and in fact, hunter of animals that Moss is notwithstanding, Moss just ain't the kind of guy who could knock off a human being in cold blood; even some already half-dead Mexican drug-runner-type human being.

Had Moss not returned to the scene of the slaughter he would have been home free with the stolen money forever as there would have been no way for anyone to have known he was the one who took it. Of course, there then could have been no movie — or, rather, no movie as we have it — and so Moss has to return to the scene for whatever reason in order to be discovered and identified by those really bad people. As it's handled here, however, Moss's return to the scene is a wildly improbable deus ex machina employed not to save the day for the hero, but to save the movie for its creators.

(We understand the Coens' reasoning in having Moss decide to return to the scene with the jug of water. But the logical blunder aside, and contrary to their intent, Moss's return to the scene doesn't work to show the deep streak of humanity in him as much as it works to mark Moss as a moron with a death wish.)

Colossal Logical Blunder No. 2:

Moss very early on knows just how much money is in the stolen satchel ($2M). We know he knows not only because it would have strained credibility beyond the breaking point to believe Moss never counted it (what human being on Earth wouldn't have in the circumstance?), but because Moss tells us how much money is in the satchel (we overhear him telling his wife).

So, having counted the money, how come Moss missed discovering the electronic tracking gizmo stashed in one of the banded stack of bills near the top; a red-light-blinking electronic gizmo that's almost the thickness and size of a pack of regular-size cigarettes(!)?

Answer: Moss couldn't have missed discovering it. But the plot depends on him not discovering it so early on. That the moviemakers have him not discovering it almost immediately is nothing other than a colossal logical blunder on their part; a logical blunder made necessary because the plot doesn't work if the gizmo is discovered almost right away. And so another deus ex machina is employed; a negative one this time, so to speak.

The Coens should at least have contrived to have the gizmo stashed in a hidden compartment in the satchel itself even though real drug distributors as experienced and sharp as these movie drug distributors apparently are would never have made such a mistake. Or contrived to have the gizmo be as thin as a note or two of currency and absent any blinking red lights so that it actually could have been hidden reasonably successfully in a banded stack of bills. But, then, that would have been beyond the technology of the time (1980 or so), and therefore anachronistic.

We sympathize with the Coens being presented with this gizmo problem, but we nevertheless would have expected them to have solved it in a believable way.

Perhaps we shouldn't have been as enjoyment-robbing bothered as we were by these two logical blunders (they didn't seem to bother anyone else if they were noticed at all). But as Emperor Joseph II was wont to say, "There it is."

"Ars Gratia Artis." Ewww! How 19th Century!

In our technology- and rationality-besotted postmodern era, nothing that lacks proven utility — utility backed up by hard, quantifiable data — has any real value. Aesthetics? Don't be absurd. "Beauty is truth, truth beauty"? Have you lost your mind? Beauty (capital B) and Truth (capital T) are abstract, squishy-soft, unquantifiable concepts, and therefore inadmissible in considerations of value. And what about that most abstract, squishy-soft, and unquantifiable entity of all: music? In itself, it's a non-starter according to the UK government-sponsored Music Manifesto says writer Frank Furedi in an article for the online magazine, Spiked:

[T]he UK government-sponsored Music Manifesto pays lip service to the idea that "music is important in itself" but only as a prelude to treating music as a means to an end. So, after praising its alleged educational and therapeutic benefits, the authors of the Music Manifesto assert that "we believe that music is important for the social and cultural values it represents and promotes, and for the communities it can help to build and to unite". Apparently music is also good for business and economic wellbeing - as the Music Manifesto declares: "We also recognise music for the important contribution it makes to the economy." The manifesto has little interest in music as such; instead its energy is devoted towards promoting the political, social and economic merits of music.

RTWT here.

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

From The We Wish We'd Said That Dept

The following are the closing grafs of a review for the Financial Times by veteran classical music critic Martin Bernheimer — that master of saying maximally what needs to be said in the minimal space allotted — of the Met's new production of the Philip Glass opera, Satyagraha.

The music works hard, very hard, to be hypnotic. If a phrase is worth singing once, Glass apparently reasons, it must be worth singing 50 times in a row. Certain structures ensnare the brain by dint of repetition. There is, for instance, doodledy-doodledy-doodledy-doodledy, which, reduced to its essence, becomes doodle-doodle-doodle-doodle. Precious? Profound? Psychedelic? Who knows?

Ultimately, this sort of thing is great if you like this sort of thing. Did I like it? Minimally.

Featured Past Post #60 (Administrative Note)

A new Featured Past Post ("Critical Writing On Classical Music”) is now up on the right sidebar.

Memory's Way With Youthful Missteps And Their Consequences

Double bassist, classical music reviewer, and blogger Chantal of Mahler Owes Me Ten Bucks gives an unusually candid account of stepping in for the absent principal of her section (she doesn't say of which orchestra) at the dress rehearsal for an upcoming concert. I read that account with utmost sympathy not because I've been in a similar situation, but because it called to mind a better-forgotten orchestral experience of mine during my student years at conservatory.

I occupied at that time the middle regions of the rather fair-sized first fiddle section of the conservatory orchestra, and there are three things you need to know about that before I can proceed further.

The first is that I almost never practiced my instrument — or, rather, practiced as little as possible, my practice sessions being confined mostly to a frantic two- or three-hours worth just prior to a fiddle lesson (this with one of the most brilliant and revered fiddle teachers in the country at the time who put up with my outrageous dereliction because he loved me as a human being, believe it or not). The second is that I never practiced orchestral music, pretty much sight-reading my part at first rehearsal. And the third is, I was perhaps the world's worst sight reader. I took this cavalier attitude toward my instrument not only because I'm essentially lazy about such things, but because I was at conservatory to study conducting, not fiddle, the fiddle being for me merely the fulfilling of my instrument entrance requirement.

With that information in place, we can now proceed with the story.

One day there was a rehearsal of a standard-repertoire orchestral work (Brahms No. 3), but one the orchestra had not done during my time there. This rehearsal was special for the orchestra not only on that account, but because the rehearsal was to be conducted by none other than the great Charles Munch, then music director of the Boston Symphony Orchestra.

Did this provoke me to alter my no-practice ways for the nonce as it would have any sensible and sane fiddle player (that is, sensible and sane as fiddle players go)? It did not, and I walked into that rehearsal as unprepared as always.

Things went pretty much OK for me for the first ten or fifteen minutes or so, and then, as was bound to happen sooner or later, I botched an entrance, coming in almost an eighth too late. A few measures or so thereafter, Munch stopped the orchestra, issued some instruction or other, and asked for a start again at four or so measures previous to my botched entrance, and I again botched the very same entrance. This time, Munch stopped the orchestra almost immediately, looked directly at me, and said — sneered would perhaps be a better word here — "You're late again! Can't you count? And you want to be a conductor!"

Oh, the humiliation! But an instant before that overwhelming emotion kicked in, two thoughts flashed across my mind: what a sharp ear the man had! I mean, it wasn't as if I were second flute in a three-flute flute section. I was a fiddle player in the middle of a 14-member fiddle section. And I came in late, not early, which would have been a different matter altogether.

The second thought that flashed across my mind was Munch's, "And you want to be a conductor!" How, by all that's holy, did he know that? We'd never met before, and he couldn't have known me from Adam, as the saying goes. An instant later, the humiliation kicked in and pushed everything else into the background. I stammered an apology (a lame, "Sorry"), and somehow managed to get through the rest of rehearsal without further embarrassing incident.

About a week later, under considerably more congenial circumstances, I learned from Munch himself how he'd known me from Adam. He'd been at the rear of the auditorium during a conducting master class in which I was a participant, and, impressed, had made note of me and my name. But even the memory of being singled out by him in that supremely gratifying way has never managed to mitigate in memory his singling out of me in that other way, and to this very day I can still remember the humiliation, the cause of which was my fault and mine alone, as vividly as if it occurred just yesterday. And lo these many decades later it's lost none of its power to make me cringe in the remembering.

Such is the way with the memory of our youthful missteps and, more to the point, of their immediate consequences.

A good thing, perhaps.

Or perhaps not.

Parents and teachers, take note.

The Soap Opera Takes A New Turn

Here's a development few expected would, without third-party arm-twisting or intervention, ever come about. Reports Top News:

Wolfgang Wagner, 88, the chief for life of Germany's Wagnerian opera festival in Bayreuth, has offered to step down if his two formerly feuding daughters take over the job, a spokesman said Friday.

[...]

Peter Emmerich, Bayreuth Festival spokesman, confirmed Friday to Deutsche Presse-Agentur dpa that the elder Wagner had hinted he might retire and that the two daughters could jointly step into his place.

Emmerich said Katharina Wagner and Eva Wagner-Pasquier had realised they could work together if the circumstances were right.

The Bayreuth Festival's trust board, which runs the government-subsidized event and formally employs Wagner, is to meet April 29 and the sisters are expected to outline their succession plan then.

And PR Inside adds:

Wolfgang Wagner wrote in a personal letter to donors dated April 8 that he was prepared to support his daughters Katharina Wagner and Eva Wagner-Pasquier as part of a group to succeed him, Germany's 3sat television reported, citing unidentified sources from the foundation that oversees the festival.

It was the first time Wagner had indicated he would support Wagner-Pasquier, 62 — an experienced manager of artistic and musical events who enjoys the support of the foundation — as part of the leadership. The team could also include non-family professionals such as star German conductor Christian Thielemann and cultural manager Peter Ruzicka, Wagner suggested, according to the report.

As ever, the soap opera continues.

Stay tuned.

More Point, Counterpoint

Joshua Kosman, classical music critic of the San Francisco Chronicle, replies to this post of ours in a post on his blog here. In that post, Mr. Kosman declares that our characterizing as courageous classical music critic Alan Rich's attack on would-be classical music critics Adam Baer and Chris Pasles is "self-refuting." Writes Mr. Kosman:

The fact that Baer and Pasles cast such comparatively small shadows upon the musical-critical landscape is precisely what makes the act of going after them — and doing it in such a bloodthirsty fashion — so small, and so unworthy.

Either Mr. Kosman is being willfully dense here, or he has a cognitive deficit that's in need of urgent attention.

The entire point of Mr. Rich's attack was not that those two "small shadows upon the musical-critical landscape" are incompetent, but that their incompetent work saw print not in some free-distribution community weekly or the like, but in the Los Angeles Times. Does Mr. Kosman imagine that Mr. Rich would have spent so much as an instant of his time, or wasted so much as a column millimeter of space, flaying such unworthies had not their uninformed work seen daylight in the Times, "the city’s one and only culturally responsive newspaper," as Mr. Rich put it?

Mr. Kosman further declares that,

The inability to distinguish between those two kinds of aggressiveness [directed against worthy targets and against unworthy ones] has always been a flaw in Rich's writing, and it's a flaw that ACD's chest-beating paeans to "courage" and "hair-mussing" and "offensiveness" shares [sic] in spades.

We suggest that in this case it wasn't Mr. Rich's inability to distinguish between those two kinds of aggressiveness (nor ours in characterizing Mr. Rich's aggressiveness as courageous), but rather Mr. Kosman's seeming inability to comprehend the nature of that against which Mr. Rich's aggressiveness was directed.

Thinking on the instant case a bit more, not entirely surprising, actually, Mr. Kosman's inability to comprehend. It's difficult to see things clearly when one's knee has jerked so high that it obstructs one's vision.

Point, Counterpoint

[Note: This post has been updated (1) as of 10:36 PM Eastern on 10 Apr. See below.]

Joshua Kosman, classical music critic of the San Francisco Chronicle, comments on his blog, On A Pacific Aisle, concerning the recent firing by the LA Weekly (or, rather, by its corporate owner, Village Voice Media) of its longtime, near iconic classical music critic, Alan Rich. Mr. Kosman writes,

It was reading his reviews in New York [magazine] throughout the 1970s that first made me want to get into this game. Imagine what an eye-opener those articles were — the smart, pugnacious prose style, the insatiable curiosity, the breadth of knowledge, and best of all, the passion for music (it's a fortunate critic who loves and hates as keenly as Alan does). They opened up whole new worlds, and continue to do so, week after week.

Mr. Kosman then links to and singles out for censure our post announcing that firing (another MSM classical music critic and blogger, honorably wanting to acknowledge the precedence of that announcement, for delicacy's sake refused to link to the post itself, linking to the main page of Sounds & Fury instead):

In a post from Bizarro World, ACD singles out for praise Alan's most regrettable recent episode, his shameful tirade against fellow critics Adam Baer and Chris Pasles. True Richophiles would prefer to blot out the memory of that one; it was, in the memorable words of Tibor Fischer on Martin Amis' Yellow Dog, "not-knowing-where-to-look bad...like your favourite uncle being caught in a school playground, masturbating."

It should have been crystal clear from the explicit context of our post that we didn't "singl[e] out for praise Alan's most regrettable recent episode," as Mr. Kosman put it, willy-nilly, faute de mieux, or because we're a "Bizarro World" insensitive clod. We singled out Mr. Rich's "tirade against fellow critics Adam Baer and Chris Pasles" (whoever they might be) because it neatly made our point concerning the courage of erudite Old School classical music critics to say in print what needed to be said no matter how offensive their readers may find it to be; the courage to "dirty [their] hands" and "muss [the] hair and distur[b] [the] digestion" of their readers, as we put it in this post.

In singling out for censure our post announcing the firing of Mr. Rich — not to speak of his censure of Mr. Rich's original "tirade" — Mr. Kosman has unwittingly made our other point for us; viz., that the "PC-contaminated, ultra-'civilized' crowd which today constitutes much of the mainstream classical music critical fraternity," also as we put it, are unworthy successors of their Old School progenitors.

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Update (10:36 PM Eastern on 10 Apr): More Point, Counterpoint.

Kin Beneath The Skin?

You'd never so much as even suspect it, we'd guess, but Samuel Beckett and Richard Wagner really were, in some respects at least, aesthetic kin beneath the skin. Or so playwright, Guardian theater columnist, and blogger George Hunka of Superfluities Redux posits.

On the face of it, there couldn't be two more different theatre artists than Richard Wagner and Samuel Beckett – the first the egomaniacal, nineteenth-century composer and theorist who had giants and gods banging about the stage in forests and faux-Olympias like Valhalla to thundering orchestral music in five-hour-long operas; the second the spare, self-effacing master of essences who, towards the end of his career, turned out plays – often quiet, approaching silence – that rarely exceeded twenty minutes.

Beckett himself cared very little for Wagner.... But the production of Tristan und Isolde by Dieter Dorn which was recently restaged at New York's Metropolitan Opera with Deborah Voigt and Ben Heppner suggests there may be more to the comparison than meets the eye. After the Ring cycle of operas and Die Meistersinger, this opera and Parsifal expressed essences of suffering, desire and renunciation – the same essences that provided the matter for Beckett's own last plays. And, apart from the extraordinary opportunities and challenges that these works provide for their performers ... there's just as much, if not more, to say about the theatre practice that these works represent.

Wagner was always a man of the theatre first. "Everything he did was determined by his need to create theatre," said the editors of an anthology of Wagner's prose work, and by the time Bayreuth was built, Wagner, like Beckett, found it necessary to direct his own music-dramas. But there was more. Both Beckett and Wagner recognized Arthur Schopenhauer's contribution to aesthetic philosophy and exemplified this same philosophy in their stage work.

Mr. Hunka has lots more to say on this, and while we're not familiar with Beckett's full oeuvre, we are familiar with Godot, and although we confess we never saw any parallels between that extraordinary play and Tristan, a work with which we're intimately familiar, Mr. Hunka has persuaded us that, in some respects at least, they do indeed exist.

We suggest you read this excellent piece and judge for yourselves.

More On That Endangered Species — The Arts Critic

Apropos our closing comments in this recent post of ours, longtime LA Weekly classical music critic Alan Rich, a card-carrying member of the Old School of classical music critics (he's now about 84 years of age and worked previously as classical music critic for periodicals such as The New York Times, the New York Herald Tribune, New York magazine, Newsweek, and the Los Angeles Herald-Examiner), had this to say at the close of a review for the Weekly of 6 September 2006 (all square bracketed remarks are Rich's):

In last Thursday’s Times, I learned from the words of one Adam Baer that Martin Chalifour “remained keenly aware of how to perform as a team player” and shared “rhythmic landings [!] with Zhang while drawing rich-sounding [nonexistent] arpeggios from his instrument.” The slow movement, our man in Box 830 seems to have noticed, was “sung lyrically, with a touch of speed [huh?],” which sounds to me like some kind of disagreement in tempo. No, it sounds like somebody using words for no real reason.

Look around, as many do nowadays, at the news of classical music’s sad decline in popularity, at the box office and at the now-disappearing record store; sooner or later, some of the blame descends upon the pall of ignorance that envelops the consuming public. Who’s around these days to write to the 12,000 people who heard Chalifour’s moving and beautiful version of the Brahms Concerto and the Prokofiev ballet music on a balmy night — or to the nearly 7,000 who heard this marvelous young Argentine pianist (“ending long phrases not with a bang but with a Mozartean rounding-off”) and our own superb young conductor doing great Beethoven and Shostakovich — and come back in the city’s one and only culturally responsive newspaper to help them put a value on what they heard and why? The jilted listeners find, instead, the gibberish of an Adam Baer or a Chris Pasles, or a couple of other preening dilettantes of comparable brainpower who throw a lot of artsy words around at the cultural life of this growing community, and nobody cares about stuffing a rag into their word processors.

I am a member of an endangered species. Encountering dangerous members of the species makes me frightened or sick, especially at 82. I happen to think that I am better than a lot of them, on the strength of having studied with superior teachers and stayed awake in their classrooms. (The best of them, Joseph Kerman, wrote a book whose title I stole for this article. I also dedicated my own recent book to him.) The best of the active critics are Mark Swed, Alex Ross and, I guess, myself. All three of us have four-letter names. But so does Adam Baer, so this proves nothing.

As of yesterday, Alan Rich was let go by the LA Weekly as their classical music critic.

(Thanks to constant reader George M. Wallace of A Fool In The Forest for the heads-up concerning Mr. Rich's termination.)

No Surprise Here

[Note: This post has been updated (1) as of 6:18 PM Eastern on 9 Apr. See below.]

No surprise, that is, that MSM critics in the arts are fast losing, or have already lost, their authority. And no surprise the principal reason, although in this piece for the Los Angeles Times, Patrick Goldstein, subsequent to an opening statement that sets the scene for the phenomenon, seems curiously diffuse and unsure on the matter. Writes Mr. Goldstein:

There was a time when critics were our arbiters of culture, the ultimate interpreters of intellectual discourse. When I was growing up, eager to write about the arts, it was just as important to read Pauline Kael, Frank Rich and Lester Bangs as it was to see a Robert Altman film, a David Mamet play or listen to the latest Elvis Costello album. Critics gave art its context, explained its meaning and guided us to new discoveries.

As a flood of stories in recent weeks has shown, those days are going, going, gone. Critics today are viewed as cultural dinosaurs on the verge of extinction.

[...]

Obviously the Internet has played a big role in this shift. It has promoted a democratization of opinion in which solo bloggers — most famously Matt Drudge — can outstrip mammoth news organizations. Whenever I spend time with young students, I see an even more intriguing concept at work. Although they are heavily influenced by peer group reaction to films or music, they do listen to critics, but largely as a group, not as individual brands. The age of the singular critical voice is ending — people prefer the wisdom of a community.

[...]

Of course, it's not only the Web that is putting nails in the coffin. When it comes to film, no one has done a better job of robbing critics of credibility than the movie studios themselves, whose blurb ads are a thoroughly corrupt and cynical invention that has done more to devalue critics than any incursion from the Internet.

[...]

To be fair, the media is also responsible for undermining its critics' authority. Scores of TV's film critics have become quote whores, willing to say anything ("Awesome!" Fox TV's Shawn Edwards enthused about the woeful "Drillbit Taylor") to get their names atop movie ads. The news weeklies often devalue their star critics by using them to deliver exclusive interviews with big-shot filmmakers, allowing the studios to create some much-needed aura-by-association for their summer blockbusters. At all too many newspapers, the emergence of various service-oriented sections has created a thumbs-up or -down mentality.

[...]

The flaws extend beyond film. In pop music, especially at top-of-the-food-chain publications like Rolling Stone, critics have a distressing tendency to pull their punches for leading artists. As Bill Wyman points out in a hilarious post at his Hitsville.com site, a long string of Rolling Stone critics has gotten twisted into pretzels to try to portray any new R.E.M. album as a throwback to the band's glory days, even though the albums now written off as disappointments were the ones originally labeled comebacks.

"In the music industry press, you are frequently discouraged from writing negative reviews," Wyman told me. "It's considered uncool to say that a lot of pop music is terrible. You're not supposed to tell readers things they don't want to hear."

From all this Mr. Goldstein concludes:

The Web isn't the enemy of critical thinking. The land of a million blogs is a medium brimming with opinion. What's different is the reader gets to decide whose opinion matters the most. It's a big adjustment, but maybe it's time critics, like many artists, realize they should pay more attention to their audience.

What's wrong with this picture?

What's wrong with it was laid out by us in this July 2003 piece (reprinted on this blog in July 2005) concerning classical music critics, wherein we wrote:

The generally debased, PC-contaminated, ultra-"civilized" crowd which today constitutes much of the mainstream classical music critical fraternity relishes nothing so much as engaging in discussion of classical music in ways more appropriate to genteel luncheon and dinner parties where it's considered the height of gauche to argue in any manner that might upset the digestion of those seated at table. Arguing in that "civilized," genteel way makes members of this critical crowd feel they've been winning, intellectually probing, stimulating, and "with it," when all they've managed to be is glib; nattering on about nothing of real substance or pertinence while at the same time keeping hands clean, hair un-mussed, and digestion undisturbed — theirs and their readers'.

And our answer to this?

Well, I've a bit of news for this critically "civilized" bunch: Your brother mainstream classical music critics of prior eras would have none of such "civilized," genteel pap, even in proper and oh-so-civilized Victorian England. When they discussed or wrote on matters musical they were not in the least afraid of dirtying hands, mussing hair, and disturbing digestion. They carried on their dialogues red in tooth and claw if need be as in those culturally more concerned eras we had in the mainstream media that healthy and vital mass of informed classical music critical ferment ... at the heart of which was a critical fraternity made up of courageous and erudite classical music critics who felt that anything in music or music related worth arguing about was worth getting bloodied for.

Goldstein's, "maybe it's time critics, like many artists, realize they should pay more attention to their audience" our ass. What it's time for is for critics to give their audiences no quarter at all. Skewer their ignorant opinions. Destroy utterly their uninformed prole assessments. Make sport of, mock and humiliate them ruthlessly with your erudite rapier wit.

But a critic can't even begin to employ — daren't even attempt — such tactics unless he first be informed and erudite beyond even the wildest self-important, self-delusional, Web-inspired conceits of his ignorant prole audience.

And therein lies the problem. Just how many arts critics exist today who could qualify and would be fully competent to administer this much needed and richly deserved lesson to an ignorant public and by so doing raise the consciousness of and enlighten that public?

Apart from the Old School crowd who are fast dying off — literally — pitifully few, we suspect.

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Update (6:18 PM Eastern on 9 Apr): Apropos our above closing remarks, see here.