Sounds & Fury

The Spirit Of Bayreuth Past

This close of Wagner season finds even we at near the Wagner saturation point for the time being. But we can't resist posting this video with its wraith-like imagery of that incomparable conductor of Parsifal, Hans Knappertsbusch, conducting in his shirtsleeves in Bayreuth's "invisible" sunken pit the so-called "Transformation Music" in a 1959 Bayreuth production of the music-drama. Our thanks to Ms. Mostly Opera for the video which she posted along with several others in her interesting retrospective of the Bayreuther Festspiele covering the years from 1943 to the present.

Featured Past Post #67 (Administrative Note)

A new Featured Past Post ("Never Thought I'd See The Day”) is now up on the right sidebar.

Podcast: Beaux Arts Trio's Final American Concert

This PR release just received from American Public Media:

(St. Paul, Minn.) August 27, 2008—Capping a 53-year career, one of the world’s best-loved chamber ensembles, the renowned Beaux Arts Trio, played its final American concert on Thursday, August 21. American Public Media’s Performance Today is offering an exclusive podcast of this historic concert. Beginning on Wednesday, August 27, the concert at Massachusetts’ Tanglewood Music Festival will be available in its entirety, in two segments, by visiting www.performancetoday.org.

Led for more than half a century by pianist Menahem Pressler, the legendary Beaux Arts Trio will disband after a series of European concerts in September. With the concert at Tanglewood, the ensemble returned to its place of origin — it played its first concerts there in 1955. The occasion also marked a return to repertoire it made American audiences familiar with over the decades: Franz Schubert’s magisterial Opus 99 and Opus 100 piano trios. The group’s three encores will also be included in the podcast.

Fred Child, host of Performance Today, served as host for an exclusive live Webcast of the August 21 concert, and he’ll provide commentary, features and interviews with the members of the trio: pianist Menahem Pressler, violinist Daniel Hope and cellist Antonio Meneses.

For The Benefit Of Those Who Track S&F Via RSS

An important update has just been appended to this post.

An Explanation

[Note: This post has been updated (2) as of 2:37 PM Eastern on 3 Sep. See below.]

We've received several eMails concerning our somewhat provocatively titled post, "Devil's Spawn Make Bid For Bayreuth Festspiele", asking what we had against Nike Wagner and Gerard Mortier that prompted us to assign to them such parentage. The answer is that both are rabid promoters of Regietheater of the most Eurotrashy sort. The more grotesque the better. With Nike we have the additional objection that she's a longtime champion of opening the Festspiele to the production of works of other composers which is simply unthinkable and a gross and insupportable perversion of Richard Wagner's purpose for establishing the Festspiele, and a perversion of what the Festspiele is and must remain to ensure its future.

Our objection to those two certainly does NOT mean we have no objections to those other two: the frontrunners for the co-directorship of the Festspiele, Eva Wagner-Pasquier and Katharina Wagner. The latter is in every way objectionable, and has no place in the directorship of the Festspiele. Eva is the most sensible choice at this juncture (as some of you might know, the board of the Stiftung chose her for the directorship several years ago, but failed in their attempt to get papa Wolfgang to step aside at that time), but she too has a predilection for Eurotrash Regietheater, but it's a predilection tempered by common sense, and not nearly as extreme and ideologically mindless as Katharina's and those other two.

We trust that answers any similar lurking questions on this matter that haven't yet made their way into our inbox.

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Update (11:29 AM Eastern on 27 Aug): Even as we typed the sentence, "The answer is that both are rabid promoters of Regietheater of the most Eurotrashy sort," in our above, we said to ourself, "Don't do it, Douglas. Close the gates on the morons preemptively. Don't use that shorthand language even though you're entitled to use it given that Eurotrash Regietheater has been a veritable idée fixe on this blog since its inception over four years ago. Spell it out in detail yet once again to prevent the moronic charge that ossified 'traditionalists' such as you insist on pretending that the 20th and 21st centuries never happened, and are satisfied only when operas are staged as they were staged by their creators and have since been staged before the middle of the last century."

We should have taken our own advice. So far, some half-dozen variations of the above charge have infested our inbox in response to the shorthand language of that above quoted sentence.

Why is it that champions of Regietheater make the automatic assumption that all who speak against it speak against it because they're stuck-in-the-mud "traditionalists"?

Well, perhaps some are. We, however, as we've demonstrated repeatedly and made abundantly clear on this blog, are most decidedly not to be counted among them. Our objection is NOT to Regietheater per se. Our objection is to Regietheater become Eurotrash; Regietheater in which the Regie hijacks a universally acknowledged masterpiece of another to express his own personal "vision" and promote his own personal agenda in the process of which the vision of the work's original creator is distorted beyond all recognition, and the work itself invariably diminished by being robbed of its manifold layers of meaning and response that are at the very heart of what's responsible for the work being the universally acknowledged masterpiece history has declared it to be.

So, those of you tempted to heap abuse upon our head by the moronic charge that we're a "traditionalist" would do well to save yourselves the trouble as your virtual crayon-scrawled missives will be consigned instantly to the cyber bit bucket unremarked and unanswered.

That is all.

As you were.

Update 2 (2:37 PM Eastern on 3 Sep): For a qualification of our above comment on Katharina Wagner, see this post.

Off-Message But Quotable Nevertheless

In the process of fashioning a more female-friendly world, we have created a culture that is hostile towards males, contemptuous of masculinity and cynical about the delightful differences that make men irresistible, especially when something goes bump in the night.

[...]

The exemplar of the modern male is the hairless, metrosexualised man and decorator boys who turn heterosexual slobs into perfumed ponies. All of which is fine as long as we can dwell happily in the Kingdom of Starbucks, munching our biscotti and debating whether nature or nurture determines gender identity. But in the dangerous world in which we really live, it might be nice to have a few guys around who aren’t trying to juggle pedicures and highlights.

What's that? Who's the embittered male who wrote that Neanderthal screed? That would be columnist Kathleen Parker, and the above is an excerpt from her new book, Save the Males: Why Men Matter, Why Women Should Care.

Read the full excerpt here.

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

Devil's Spawn Make Bid For Bayreuth Festspiele

[Note: This post has been updated (3) as of 12:08 PM Eastern on 1 Sep. See below.]

Is the Bayreuther Festspiele doomed? Might be if the Richard Wagner Stiftung Bayreuth loses its collective mind, and lets these two get their feet through the door.

Nike Wagner, the great-granddaughter of the composer Richard Wagner, has joined forces with Paris Opera chief Gerard Mortier to challenge her cousins Katharina and Eva for the leadership of the Bayreuth opera festival.

RTWT here.

---

Update (1:31 PM Eastern on 25 Aug): We should make clear just for the record that we don't seriously think the Stiftung will go with the Nike/Mortier ticket or even consider it seriously. Our guess is that the unspoken intent of the Stiftung is to install the Eva/Katharina team to meet the backroom "handshake agreement" with Wolfgang for his stepping aside, but with the very real expectation that after a year or two or three, Eva (with the Stiftung's sanction) will force Katharina out altogether (a good thing), and leave Eva in sole charge. We're not entirely happy with that state of affairs, either, but we think it's something we can live with.

Update 2 (2:32 PM Eastern on 26 Aug): For more on this, see this post.

Update 3 (12:08 PM Eastern on 1 Sep): It's official! Details here.

Quest

Since it went into production several years ago, we've heard surprisingly little about director-actor Kenneth Branagh's film adaptation of Mozart's The Magic Flute. That it was an "updating" that put the story and action in a World War I setting, and that conductor James Conlon was doing the musical honors along with stellar bass-baritone René Pape is pretty much all we knew about it.

Then, yesterday, we read Sunday's piece on the film by Los Angeles Times classical music critic Mark Swed that explained, sort of, why we'd heard so little about it. Writes Mr. Swed:

[The film] was made in 2006 as part of an extensive international celebration of Mozart's 250th birthday. That spring, just as the Salzburg Festival was gearing up to stage every one of Mozart's 22 operas and when no civilized city with an opera house was without Mozart, Branagh's film was shown at Cannes, out of competition but with hopes of attracting distribution. It didn't succeed.

Shown at the Toronto and Venice film festivals four months later, Branagh's Flute was not disliked, but it failed to generate much enthusiasm. Since then the film has had limited release in parts of Europe, Asia and South America and has been moderately well received. French and British DVD versions have been released. But the film has never been shown in the United States, and there is no word about a domestic DVD.

Mr. Swed did manage to finally get his hands on a DVD of the film in Amsterdam, and found it to be "a joy."

Uh-huh. Pretty much par for the course for Mr. Swed, we thought, who seems to have a penchant for finding many of the grotesque outrages of Regietheater to be "a joy."

Ho-hum. BAU.

Then, further down, we read these intriguing grafs:

Branagh's Flute fascinatingly re-imagines Mozart's opera. All the music is intact and excellently conducted by James Conlon, music director of Los Angeles Opera. The English actor and humorist Stephen Fry translated the German libretto into colloquial English and supplied pertinent new dialogue. The cast is attractive. Young characters are played by young singers. Good teeth must have been a priority of the filmmaker.

Branagh's vision of the Great War is awful and magical at the same time, which is very strange and surely British. The film opens with bright sun, lush fields and bouncy soldiers in the trenches. This is cinema with a smile as big as [Ingmar] Bergman's, but the sweetness doesn't last. During the overture's development, soldiers charge, shells blast, bodies fly. No composer dealt with darkness and light quite like Mozart, and Branagh is on continual lookout for every mood flick.

Branagh has a deft touch with Mozartean contrasts between magic and realism. Half fairy tale, half war drama, the film also goes its own way. Sometimes Branagh supplies reason where Mozart relied on fantasy, and other times he takes the opposite route. The dragon becomes threatening poison gas. Papageno is the birdman whose pigeons test the air underground. Actual flutes, though, fly. The Queen of the Night arrives atop a tank and later darts through the sky like a kinky Tinkerbell. Surreal lips fly in space. So do Mary Poppins umbrellas.

Uh, OK. Now you've got our attention.

Off we go to Netflix posthaste.

Nothing.

Amazon.

Nothing.

Out of sheer desperation, we head over to that rich mine of the weird and wonderful, YouTube, to see whether anyone has pirated a clip or ten from the film.

Pay dirt!

Here's the film's opening sequence with music by Mozart (the overture to the opera) and images by Branagh.

And here's the scene of Papageno's meeting with Monostatos.

OK. Just those two did it for us (there are more excerpts on YouTube).

WE WANT TO SEE THIS FILM (or a DVD of same)!

NOW!

We're going on a hunting expedition.

Stay tuned.

Midgette On Muhly

Anne Midgette, The Washington Post's recently appointed chief classical music critic, has up an article on the road show promoting "Mothertongue", the newest album of the music of "hot," 27-year-old composer Nico Muhly, "the [media's current] flavor of the month," as Ms. Midgette put it.

Muhly, 27, is difficult to write about. Certainly he has already caused a lot of ink to be spilled, including a long profile in the New Yorker in February, at an age when many composers are still in graduate school. It is easy to see why the press likes him. He is smart, verbal, ingenuous, direct. Talking faster than the kinetic rhythms of some of his music, he embeds pointed observations in an agar of "likes" and "you knows," not unlike the sweet fragments of sound that rise out of the many layers of his likable, involved, yet wholesome music.

But he is difficult to write about because in describing what he does, you come up against the traditional division between "classical" and "pop." (In June, the Sunday Times of London named "Mothertongue" its pop CD of the week.) And this distinction is, to Muhly, irrelevant. Explaining it, therefore, is already taking a step away from the spirit of his work and back toward the Dark Ages when musical choices and tastes were linked, implicitly or not, to ideologies. For many, of course, they still are. But those "many" are more than 27 years old.

We're afraid we number ourself among those "many," and from what little we know of Mr. Muhly's work (provided to us by Mr. Muhly himself subsequent to a brief eMail exchange last year) it's of the sort that's, shall we say, not to our tastes. Had we been asked to write a review of it, however, we confess we wouldn't quite know what to say as from our brief correspondence Mr. Muhly appeared to us to be so open, intelligent, ingenuous, non-doctrinaire, and so thoroughly unpretentious and gentlemanly we'd be loath to say anything negative about it. Ms. Midgette, on the other hand, handles the whole business about as adroitly as we can imagine it being handled.

An article well worth your time reading.

Maazel On Regietheater

Reported in an interview done for an Italian newspaper which interview is, unhappily (for those who can read Italian), not online. Opera Chic has an English translation of a couple of the more juicy quotes, however, which can be read here.

Good on Maestro Maazel for speaking out publicly on the matter.

Extensive Live Bayreuth Coverage

Extensive live coverage of the Bayreuther Festspiele and Bayreuth itself, including loads of neat photos, can be found right here at Mostly Opera whose author is at this year's Festspiele.

Worth your while to click over and browse.

Oh Dear. Here We Go Again.

Oh dear. Here we go again. It seems each time we proffer our opinion that, with several notable exceptions (most notably, Verdi's Don Carlo(s), Otello, and Falstaff), most Italian opera and all bel canto opera are, at bottom, little more than pretext and platform for showcasing songbirds, a deeply offended TOF or ten feels compelled to express his outrage in terms somewhat less than temperate. While we freely confess we consider outraging TOFs to be one of life's small pleasures, it can get to be rather a tiresome enterprise after a time.

Case in point: no sooner had we put up on our right-hand sidebar the link to our latest Featured Past Post, "TOFs And Wagner", in which is expressed that opinion concerning most Italian opera, than we received the following aggrieved eMail; one that eerily echoed several objections to that opinion which opinion we expressed in a recent blog comments thread in which, just to increase the outrage factor, we further proclaimed "the mawkish operas of Puccini [to be] the very worst non-bel-canto offenders," for expressing all of which we were declared by one charming commenter to be "[the] biggest idiot on the Internet or [perhaps] merely in the opera blogosphere."

The eMail in question read:

Are you deaf and ignorant, merely an idiot, or all three? Anyone familiar with the correspondence between Verdi and Puccini with their librettists discussing the *dramatic* matters in their operas could never offer the moronic opinion that "the typical Italian opera is about the singers, the 'songs,' and the singing almost exclusively, everything else being at bottom mere pretext and platform."

Wake up and smell the coffee!!! And unstuff your ears while your [sic] at it!

Yes.

Oh well.

That it makes not a whit of difference what's included in that correspondence between those Italian opera composers and their librettists concerning the dramatic aspects of their operas seems never to have occurred to these outraged objectors. What counts — the ONLY thing that counts — is what the finished operas ended up actually being, not what their creators started out wanting or imagining them to be.

In answer to those who insist on relying on that correspondence rather than the evidence of the operas themselves to prove their point that those operas are not at bottom merely pretext and platform for showcasing songbirds, I offer the following exchange from Mel Brooks's script for the film, The Producers. In place of MAX BIALYSTOCK, put a serious-minded librettist, and in place of ROGER DE BRIS, put any one of numerous Italian opera composers, Puccini included, and adjust the rest mutatis mutandis.

BIALYSTOCK
I think this would be a marvelous
opportunity for you, Roger. Up to
now, you've always been associated
with Broadway musicals, and...

DE BRIS
Yes. Dopey show-girls in gooey
gowns. Two-three-kick-turn! Turn-
turn-kick-turn! It's enough to
make you throw up! At last a
chance to do real drama! To
deal with conflict, with inner
truth. Roger De Bris presents
history. Of course, I think we
should add a little music. That
whole third act has got to go.
They're losing the war. It's too
depressing. We'll have to put
something in there.
(gripped by his vision)
Aaahghhh! I see it! A line of
beautiful girls, dressed as Storm
Troopers, black patent leather
boots, all marching together...
Two-three-kick-turn! Turn-turn-
kick-turn!

And so it went — most of the time.

Featured Past Post #66 (Administrative Note)

To close out the annual Wagner Season, so to speak (the annual Bayreuther Festspiele ends on the 28th of this month with the sixth performance of its new production of Parsifal), another Wagner-related Featured Past Post ("TOFs And Wagner”) is now up on the right sidebar.

Karaoke Conductor Put To The Test

How hard can it be?" asks music journalist Neil Fisher in a recent piece for the London Times concerning his trial as a conductor contestant in the BBC's latest reality show, Maestro, in which "a motley crew of celebrities, including the actress Jane Asher, the DJ Goldie, comedienne Sue Perkins and former Blur bassist Alex James compete to become the best conductor in time for a public vote next month," where the winner will get a 15-minute stint with the BBC Concert Orchestra at a Proms in the Park concert.

For Mr. Fisher, pretty damn hard, apparently.

A 70-piece ensemble is waiting expectantly for my downbeat for the first movement of Beethoven's Fifth. What kind of a maestro should I be? The conductor is, after all, not the karaoke conduit I have been play-acting for years. He is mentor, scholar, motivator, interpreter, leader, follower, idol. He is all of those and none, a cryptic figurehead who can mean everything or nothing depending on what he brings to the performance.

And now he is a prize ass. I step up to the podium exuding what I think is a fatherly authority; I leave a chastened schoolboy, the kindly giggles of a viola player ringing in my ears (violas are the bullied pond scum of the orchestra, so this is doubly humiliating). My beat is feeble, my body language weaker yet. If the iconic opening bars of Beethoven's Fifth are supposed to depict “fate knocking at the gate”, then my paltry wrist action makes it sound as if the gate has just managed to punch fate in the face. Eventually it all falls apart completely: when I fall slightly behind, I make the elementary error of galloping ahead and manage to turn a smudgy mess into a sonic catastrophe.

Beethoven's Fifth crackles along with just one beat per bar. I did spend 15 minutes with the series consultant, Peter Stark, in which I was taught the rudimentary gestures and told how to adapt to match the time signature and rhythm. But it means setting a distinct, vigorous and regular pace from the start that doesn't flatten one of the most dramatically charged pieces in the history of classical music. I just haven't got the pulse of it at all.

RTWT here.

How Stupid Is That?

Enough of all this serious talk about culture. It's bloody August, and everyone's out to lunch on the beach or in the mountains or wherever anyway, so it's the perfect time for an episode of...

How Stupid Is That?

About 10 years ago, I went shopping for a living room armchair and was appalled by the prices. I had fixed in my mind a gorgeous leather armchair with matching ottoman I'd bought many years before (around 1963 or so), and for which I'd laid out some $500 which in terms of that year's money was a huge sum. The approximate same thing 10 years ago had a price tag of some $2800!

Screw this, I thought. I'm going to buy me one a them tacky La-Z-Boy recliner thingies instead; you know, the ones that have that built-in footrest that pops up when you sit back hard against the recliner's back.

So I set off shopping and I'm stunned. Those tacky things cost some $500 at cheapest! Not for me. Not in this life. I simply refuse to lay out that kind of money for something that tacky. I'm about ready to go home when I see an armchair on sale at the back of the store. A really cheesy-looking, no-name, non-La-Z-Boy-type regular stuffed armchair upholstered in yucky beige corduroy fabric. Price: $125.

Sold!

And that's the armchair I've been living with for the past 10 years, and each time I sit in it I expect it to start falling apart so cheesy is it. But it hasn't done so yet even though it's made threatening noises suggesting it was about to do so a couple times. And whenever I settle in to listen to music, or read, or watch a movie, I have to drag a table chair from the kitchen to use as a footrest. It's a royal pain in the ass to have to do that, and it doesn't feel right when I put my feet up on it because the seat is a bit too high for a footrest, but what can I do but make do.

Last night, I wanted to watch a DVD, but the air conditioner is making such a whooshing racket I can't hear the TV sound very well, so I figure I'll just drag the armchair closer to the TV for the nonce, and set up there. I try to manhandle the thing by grasping it by its back, but it's damned heavy, and I have to drag it on a wood floor and then over a rug, and it's giving me all sorts of grief, so I switch tactics. Instead of grasping it by its back, I go round to the front of the armchair, grasp it under the upholstered front panel that runs from the seat to the floor, lift the armchair onto its back feet, and start pulling.

Uh-oh. I'm in trouble now. The damn front panel starts breaking away from the armchair, and I immediately let go of it so that the front of the armchair drops back down onto its front feet again. I try to assess the damage, but can't see under the armchair to see just how extensive the damage might be. Then I think, "Oh, the hell with it! If the panel breaks off, it breaks off. It's time for another armchair anyway. And this time, tacky as it is, I'll spring for a La-Z-Boy recliner so I'll at least have a proper footrest."

So I grasp the armchair under the upholstered front panel again, lift, and start pulling. Sure enough, the panel again starts breaking away from the armchair, but I keep on pulling; keep on pulling until the panel breaks away from the armchair completely, revealing itself not broken but the top portion of a built-in La-Z-Boy-recliner-type footrest — a two-position footrest, the first for an almost upright sitting position, the second for an almost fully reclining position, that pops up when one sits back hard against the armchair's back — that's been there all along for these past 10 years, but which I never knew existed.

Now I ask you, How stupid is that?

It's The Text, Stupid!

In his collection of essays on criticism and art, The Sacred Wood (1920), T.S. Eliot wrote in the essay titled, "Tradition and the Individual Talent", "[T]he more perfect the artist, the more completely separate in him will be the man who suffers and the mind which creates." We suspect author P.D. Smith, writing for the blog, 3 Quarks Daily, would agree.

There is something about Kafka’s writing that gets under your skin. Perhaps that’s because he was always so uneasy in his own skin. Kafka described it as “a garment but also a straitjacket and fate”, suggesting that he saw skin as both clothing, something you choose to wear for a day before shedding, but also as a tightly bound involucre, restricting and suffocating the self — a biological fait accompli and a life sentence. Only Kafka could react so ambivalently and with such psychological acuity towards something most people take for granted and indeed scarcely think about.

[...]

Reading Kafka is the literary equivalent of an earthquake: as you read, you can feel the walls of reality begin to tremble and shake until eventually they come tumbling down around your ears. At the end, you find yourself wandering in an unfamiliar wasteland. All around are scattered the jumbled fragments of what you once recognised as normal life. Now you, the reader, have to begin putting Humpty-Dumpty back together again.

[...]

Unlike Leonardo da Vinci and Newton who used mirror writing or coded language in their notebooks to obscure their words, Kafka wanted to tell us something important. He didn’t set out to create a series of coded autobiographical puzzles in order to keep future literary historians in a job. The Germanist Martin Swales argues convincingly that the obsession with Kafka’s private life does not help us to understand Kafka’s writing: “an unremitting interest in the personality behind the utterance suggests that the utterance has in some way broken down”.

In a recent article, Zadie Smith has suggested that Kafka is “a writer sullied by our attempts to define him”. Novelist James Hawes, author of a new book called Excavating Kafka (or in the US, Why You Should Read Kafka Before You Waste Your Life), seems to agree: “The myth of Kafka's life so overshadows what he wrote that millions who have never read a word of his know, or think they know, something about the middle-European Nostradamus, almost unknown in his own lifetime, trapped in a dead-end job, whose mysterious, endlessly interpretable works somehow foresaw the Holocaust (and so on).”

[...]

Biographical interpretations are an excuse for lazy reading. Using an author’s life to crack the code of his texts is just too easy. There are no shortcuts to interpretation.

And, we might add, not only "just too easy," but too easily misleading.

RTWT here.

And So It Goes

The successful pseudo-intellectual types that flourished in profusion from the Quattrocento through the mid-20th-century have today fallen on hard times. They've lost their clout and their ability to strike fear and a deep sense of inferiority into the hearts of pseudo-intellectual wannabes and hopelessly ignorant proles because they've not kept pace with the times.

[T]here have been three epochs of intellectual affectation. The first, lasting from approximately 1400 to 1965, was the great age of snobbery. Cultural artifacts existed in a hierarchy, with opera and fine art at the top, and stripping at the bottom. The social climbing pseud merely had to familiarize himself with the forms at the top of the hierarchy and febrile acolytes would perch at his feet.

[...]

This code died sometime in the late 1960s and was replaced by the code of the Higher Eclectica. The old hierarchy of the arts was dismissed as hopelessly reactionary. Instead, any cultural artifact produced by a member of a colonially oppressed out-group was deemed artistically and intellectually superior.

During this period, status rewards went to the ostentatious cultural omnivores — those who could publicly savor an infinite range of historically hegemonized cultural products. It was necessary to have a record collection that contained “a little bit of everything” (except heavy metal): bluegrass, rap, world music, salsa and Gregorian chant. It was useful to decorate one’s living room with African or Thai religious totems — any religion so long as it was one you could not conceivably believe in.

But on or about June 29, 2007, human character changed. That, of course, was the release date of the first iPhone.

On that date, media displaced culture. ... [T]he means of transmission replaced the content of culture as the center of historical excitement and as the marker of social status.

RTW sad T here.

A Brief Thought On This Norrington Vibrato Thing

[Note: This post has been updated (1) as of 7:54 AM Eastern on 8 Aug. See below.]

Apropos and contrary to HIP zealot Sir Roger Norrington's loony campaign to do away with string vibrato in the performance of all music written prior to 1940 or so (see this S&F post for his latest foray), there's every reason to conclude that string vibrato has been in regular use forever and NOT merely as an ornament, and that it's been applied more or less sparingly by performing string players depending on their individual musical sensibilities and the violin "school" in which they were trained whenever the length of the note(s) was long enough to make its effect audible and the nature of the music's expressive requirements didn't clearly argue against its use (rare).*

Well, Wagner's music was written pre-1940. How about Wagner performed senza vibrato (if one can imagine such an absurdity)? Sir Roger has declared that Wagner, along with other composers of the Romantic era, "never heard an orchestra with vibrato; it simply wasn’t a part of their experience,” and it's been pointed out to us that in several of Wagner's scores Wagner actually notates vibrato for the strings in a number of places the inference being that senza vibrato was the norm, and therefore a point in Norrington's argument's favor.

That's a crock. The more reasonable inference is that orchestra string players of the time applied vibrato more or less sparingly according to their own individual musical sensibilities and training, and Wagner — perhaps the greatest conductor of his time, and a man intimately familiar with orchestral practices — wanted to ensure that at those points where he notates vibrato ALL the string players applied that device in full-blown form regardless of their own individual musical inclinations.

Sir Roger is simply off his trolley with this senza vibrato thing.

Way off.

---

* See this lengthy article by David Hurwitz for a detailed investigation of this (Adobe Reader required).

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Update (7:54 AM Eastern on 8 Aug): Conductor and blogger Kenneth Woods of A View From The Podium has some thoughts on this senza vibrato business as it applies to the music of Elgar.

David Robertson On The Live Classical Music Concert

We've addressed the importance of the live classical music concert previously on S&F, and why devices such as the ubiquitous iPod and MP3 media generally are among the very worst of substitutes (most notably, here and here). In an article written for The Australian, conductor David Robertson, music director of the Saint Louis Symphony Orchestra, has this to say on the matter of the live classical music concert:

All people are sensitive to music: it's one of the better things that unites humans across the globe. We sometimes call it a universal language because it's easier for us to begin to hear meaning in musical sounds than it is to hear meaning in languages we don't speak.

[...]

[Classical music] has maintained an attachment to its history while branching out into extraordinarily varied directions. When you listen to it, or perform it, you become part of a continuum that stretches back centuries. That amazing passage of musical ideas from one generation to the next is a form of communication that we can equate with an emotional language.

The fascinating thing about it is that this emotional language works with or without text. I could play three different pieces from very different periods of the classical repertoire and you would sense their meaning: Josquin des Pres's Nymphes des bois from the 15th century, Mozart's Requiem from the 18th and Gyorgy Kurtag's Stele, from 1994. The listener would hear, in each case, that these pieces are about loss; it doesn't necessarily need to be explained with verbal language.

This is what we talk about when we talk about music. [...] The idea that music exists as a product — that you can download or purchase — is a recent phenomenon. A seismic shift occurred in musical culture when music could be listened to on the gramophone, a radio, stereo system or MP3 player without the need to have musicians present.

This constant presence of recorded music has heightened the brain's shut-off valve: we have learned to ignore it. Although aural stimulus is still coming in, we may no longer be paying attention. Having the stimulus of music when we don't want it has dulled people to the magic of what music can be.

When radio came in, someone said to Arnold Schoenberg, "This is wonderful, people can listen to music any time they want to." Schoenberg said: "I'm not so sure it's a good thing. They can also listen to music any time they don't want to."

This exchange gets to the heart of why the concert experience is so important.

Something happens in the concert hall that doesn't happen anywhere else. You are let off the leash in a neutral, unscripted environment. That's essential for the health of the human spirit. You can choose to listen and become absorbed in that communication of meaning through sound in any way you like. You can even choose to not pay attention.

The things that you can get from that experience cannot be obtained in any other manner and that, in the end, is the final response to whether a classical music concert is relevant to us.

RTWT here.

Extracts From A Schimpflexikon: One Of A Series

The Pathétique Symphony [of Tchaikovsky] threads all the foul ditches and sewers of human despair; it is as unclean as music well can be. One might call the first movement Zola's Confession de Claude set to music! [...] The second movement, with its strabismal rhythm, is hardly less ignoble; the third, sheer billingsgate. In the finale, bleary-eyed paresis meets us face to face; and that solemn closing epitaph of the trombones might begin with: "Here continues to rot...."

—W. F. Apthorp, Boston Evening Transcript, 31 October 1898

(From Nicolas Slonimsky's, Lexicon of Musical Invective)