Sounds & Fury

What's Wrong With This Picture?

Ted Diadiun, ombudsman for Cleveland's The Plain Dealer, defends the decision by the newspaper's editor, Susan Goldberg, to remove classical music critic Donald Rosenberg from his 16-year post as the newspaper's principal classical music critic due Mr. Rosenberg's persistent criticism of Franz Welser-Möst, music director of the Cleveland Symphony Orchestra. Writes Mr. Diadiun:

Welser-Möst's contract extends to 2018. Rosenberg has made it clear, over and over, that he believes the conductor routinely fails to get the most out of the orchestra, a view he seems unlikely to change or mute. It is fair to wonder, then, whose interests would be served by 10 more years of unrelenting criticism on the same point. Just as we would not assign a book review to a critic who is already on the record as loathing a certain author's style or genre, is it reasonable to continue assigning a music critic to review performances by a conductor whose leadership he is unlikely ever to approve?

Critics are paid to criticize — and to praise when appropriate — the performance of the musicians, actors, cooks, authors, architects, linebackers and point guards they cover. Plain Dealer journalists have written critically about the Cleveland Clinic, the major sports teams, leaders in business and government, prosecutors and police chiefs and advertisers who annually spend millions of dollars with the newspaper. The objects of these critiques are not always pleased, and have often demanded that the writer be removed from the beat or fired.

Editor Goldberg, like Doug Clifton before her, always gives these people a hearing, as she should. Complaints about our coverage can and should cause editors to look more closely at what we're doing — but while such complaints are taken seriously, not one time did either of these editors ever take someone off a beat because of outside pressure.

Should we believe that, after standing up to angry industry leaders, county commissioners, advertisers and others on issues of journalistic principle, Goldberg would wither in front of some orchestra patrons?

I don't.

[italicized emphases ours]

You don't, do you?

We wonder if it's just possible that the reason that "not one time did either of [those] editors ever take someone off a beat because of outside pressure" in the cases cited had anything at all to do with the fact that had those editors dared to do so, they would never have gotten away with it with their general readership, not to even speak of earning the censure of their professional journalistic colleagues nationwide, once the word got out, but that firing a mere classical music critic from his post for expressing opinions unpopular with the powers that be at a prominent local arts institution is quite a different matter altogether.

Just wondering, is all.

RTWT here.

(For our earlier comments on Mr. Rosenberg's firing, see this post.)

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God Bless Sarah Palin!

Why? Here's why:

A few more like that and Ms. Palin will all but guarantee that the McCain-Palin ticket goes down in flames come November.

Rock on, Sarah!

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Another update (Update 2) has just been appended to this post.

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An important update has just been appended to this post.

Sounds Right To Us

[Note: This post has been updated (1) as of 1:08 PM Eastern on 23 Sep. See below.]

He may have just missed winning a well-deserved Pulitzer for his work, but the clearly more discerning MacArthur Foundation was not about to let him slip through its fingers.

[This year's] recipients [of the MacArthur Foundation's so-called "genius award"], who must be citizens or residents of the United States, join 756 who have been named fellows since 1981. Each gets $100,000 a year for five years, with no strings attached....

Most of the winners, who are singled out for their creativity and their potential for making important future contributions, are familiar primarily to experts in their own fields, although a few in the arts have reached larger audiences: for example, Alex Ross, 40, a music critic for The New Yorker and the author of a cultural history of 20th-century music, The Rest Is Noise....

Our warmest congratulations to Alex on his award of the fellowship.

RTWT here.

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Update (1:08 PM Eastern on 23 Sep): Alex Ross answers four questions vis-à-vis his award of the MacArthur Foundation fellowship.

(Our thanks to Mysteries Abysmal for the link.)

Beyond Outrageous

[Note: This post has been updated (4) as of 1:24 AM Eastern on 30 Sep. See below.]

This is outrageous. No, beyond outrageous — way beyond.

Don Rosenberg, music critic at the Cleveland Plain Dealer for 16 years, was told yesterday by the paper's editor that he will no longer be covering the famed Cleveland Orchestra. He has been given the option of reviewing other musical events in town, as well as dance. Another writer at the paper, Zack Lewis, was told he will now be orchestra's reviewer.

[...]

Don's musical background is as good as it gets, his evaluations reasoned and sensitive. He has covered the Cleveland Orchestra for nearly three decades (including a stint with another area paper), and he's the author of the definitive book about that orchestra. So what did he do wrong? He has questioned, more than once, the sanctity of the Cleveland Orchestra's music director, Franz Welser-Möst, who started in 2002 and has had his contract renewed a couple times, the last extension taking him all the way to 2018. Don has judged that Welser-Möst is lacking in certain abilities in certain repertoire, that he doesn't necessarily get the best out of music or the eminent ensemble.

[...]

[A]pparently, some Cleveland Orchestra boosters can't accept any negative words about the music director. I imagine they dismiss as irrelevant the fact that the orchestra, while on tour, has been known to generate reviews by other critics expressing reservations about Welser-Möst. Of course, there's nothing that can be done about out-of-town naysayers, but there's always good old-fashioned lobbying that can be tried at home. That, it seems, has now been successful. The Plain Dealer has clearly caved into pressure from a faction representing the orchestra and the man on its podium.

If all true, both the publisher and the editor of the Plain Dealer, "Ohio's largest newspaper", ought to be tarred and feathered and run out of town on a rail. That sort of craven, editorial kowtowing to influential interests ought to be absolute anathema to any news publication, large or small, with any pretense to quality, integrity, and authority.

Bloody pimps!

RTWT here.

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Update (1:56 AM Eastern on 24 Sep): We qualified our above closing comment by prefacing it with, "If all true...." Well, it now appears it's decidedly all true.

When the [Cleveland] orchestra announced in June that it had contracted the Austrian conductor [Welser-Möst] through the year 2018 — giving him 16 years on the Cleveland podium — The New York Times commented that the news might “surprise” some observers who feel that the conductor “has not lived up to his potential.”

Actually, the news surprised quite a few observers.... Rosenberg, too, was surprised, but he was told by his bosses that he could not express an opinion or write a column on the appointment; he could only report the facts.[!!]

Susan Goldberg, the newspaper’s editor since June of 2007, would not comment on her decision to reassign Rosenberg, calling it “an internal personnel move…we never talk about this kind of thing.” She also would neither confirm nor deny that she had been pressured by the orchestra to make the move; the newspaper’s current and immediate past publishers — Terrance E.Z. Egger and Alex Machaskee — both serve on the orchestra’s board of directors.

RTW squalid T here.

Update 2 (5:17 PM Eastern on 24 Sep): This gets more outrageous, seemingly with each passing day.

Rosenberg says the editor [Susan Goldberg, editor of Cleveland's The Plain Dealer since June of 2007] told him the "credibility of the paper is being compromised by [your] views," that he was being "unfair" to the orchestra, that he was "attacking them," and that it was an "untenable situation for the newspaper."

RTWT here.

Update 3 (1:44 PM Eastern on 25 Sep): Here's more on the matter, but nothing really new.

Update 4 (1:24 AM Eastern on 30 Sep): For a defense of this action by the ombudsman for The Plain Dealer and our response to same, see this post.

Off-Message But Of Deepest Significance

Regular readers of S&F know of our abiding interest in and fascination with all matters cosmological. Well, we've just read an intriguing article in Scientific American that proposes that the big bang theory of the creation of the universe really ought to be thought of as the big bounce rather than the big bang. To wit:

Einstein’s general theory of relativity says that the universe began with the big bang singularity, a moment when all the matter we see was concentrated at a single point of infinite density. But the theory does not capture the fine, quantum structure of spacetime, which limits how tightly matter can be concentrated and how strong gravity can become. To figure out what really happened, physicists need a quantum theory of gravity.

According to one candidate for such a theory, loop quantum gravity, space is subdivided into “atoms” of volume and has a finite capacity to store matter and energy, thereby preventing true singularities from existing.

If so, time may have extended before the bang. The prebang universe may have undergone a catastrophic implosion that reached a point of maximum density and then reversed. In short, a big crunch may have led to a big bounce and then to the big bang.

We don't know how that new theory makes you feel, but it makes us feel hugely comforted as it does away with the almost impossible to fathom and maddening to contemplate notion that the big bang singularity came into being ex nihilo.

RTWT here.

(Our thanks to 3 Quarks Daily for the link.)

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A Lesson From Hamlet And Macbeth

Blogger Molly Sheridan of Mind The Gap in a post a few days ago posed the question: "[P]utting aside the inter-movement consumptives for a moment, ambient concert noise: welcome sign of life in the hall or performance death knell?", in answer to which we replied in the post's comments section with just a smidge of snark:

Depends on what's being performed. If it's Cage or Stockhausen or stuff written by their acolytes, it could be a welcome sign of life in the hall. If, however, it's genuine music being performed, say Bach or Mozart, or...well, you know the list, then it's most decidedly a performance death knell.

Then, to Ms. Sheridan's follow-up question: "What's the most ridiculous concert noise you've had to endure?", we, with something more than a smidge of snark and with the intent of hammering home our point, replied (here spruced up just a smidge):

Well, it wasn't in a hall but at an outdoor concert at Philadelphia's Robin Hood Dell some time ago (1962) with the Philadelphia Orchestra with none other than Leopold Stokowski on the podium (famously its conductor for some 26 years, he hadn't conducted the orchestra since 1939 or so and was making a guest visit to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of his assumption of the orchestra’s leadership in 1912). Right in the middle of La Mer, if I remember correctly, a low-flying military helicopter began making its slow way over the Dell. Stokowsky stopped the performance in mid-paragraph, waited until all was silent, then began again — from the top. He had to do that three times during that performance.

And he was right, of course. Helicopters and Debussy just don't work together. Helicopters and Stockhausen, on the other hand....

Looking back on what we'd written, we retired from the comments thread feeling quite pleased with ourself for doing our small bit in making the case for music as distinct from noise — ambient and random, or created by design.

But then our thoughts turned to Slonimsky's Lexicon of Musical Invective and the language so often used by those disparaging the New Music of the time which music came to be viewed as great music by later times, and where one of the most frequently voiced charges was that that New Music was "noise, not music," and then thought of the often remarked phenomenon that everything written on the Internet is forever, which set us to wondering if perhaps that should give us pause to be so unequivocal in our judgments concerning certain New Music and of the works of certain icons of the New Music world.

Well, perhaps it ought to give us pause. But, then, as Hamlet remarked of conscience, such thinking doth make cowards of us all, and while we may fairly be accused of several less than stellar human traits, cowardice is not among them. And so we've determined to continue our incautious way in our judgments until either unexpectedly enlightened, proven wrong, or vindicated. For like Macbeth, we can do no better than to do all that becomes a man, secure in the knowledge that he who does more — or less — is none.

Extracts From A Schimpflexikon: One Of A Series

Turn your eyes to any one composition that bears the name of Liszt, if you are unlucky enough to have such a thing on your pianoforte, and answer frankly if it contains one bar of genuine music. Composition indeed! Decomposition is the proper word for such hateful fungi, which choke up and poison the fertile plains of harmony, threatening the world with drought.

—Musical World, London, 30 June 1855

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

A Bit Of Public, Self-Congratulatory Back-Patting

No. We're not the least embarrassed to confess we're not at all above that sort of thing when well deserved; most particularly when it involves matters musical.

In a May 2006 S&F post in which we made some brief remarks on the live-performance Christian Thielemann Parsifal recorded by Deutsche Grammophon, we had this to say about Thielemann's reading:

Christian Thielemann — an authentic possessor of what I've termed the "Wagner Gene" — is the conductor, and what more can one say other than that the man's intuitive understanding and grasp of the Wagnerian language and Wagnerian rhetoric is simply flawless. Thielemann's Wagner readings recall those Wagner readings of the great Wagner Gene possessors of times past — Furtwängler, Knappertsbusch, Krauss, and Solti — with an added touch of that elegant sense of orchestral color and ensemble that was von Karajan's, and it's all in abundant evidence in this reading of this most difficult and fragile of Wagner's scores.

We made that assessment of Thielemann's reading based solely on our single hearing of that recording.

Over the past weekend, from one of the newspaper pieces done in connection with the change in directorship of the Bayreuther Festspiele, we, for the very first time, learned that Thielemann got his conducting start and much of his early training at the hands of none other than Herbert von Karajan. That we heard that training at work in Thielemann's reading of this 2006 Parsifal absent any prior knowledge of that training gives us, we think, justifiable cause for a well-deserved, self-congratulatory, public pat on the back.

Damn!, She's Good

[Note: This post has been updated (1) as of 1:32 PM Eastern on 7 Sep. See below.]

We're not at all familiar with any of the operas cited in this first-rate piece by Washington Post chief classical music critic Anne Midgette, so have no idea how to assess her expressed opinions concerning each. But whether those opinions are spot-on or off-target vis-à-vis those particular operas, her analysis of opera and what's required to make it work or is for it the kiss of death as an artform is very much spot-on. To wit:

The problem — for many if not most composers [today] — is that dramatic expression is scary, and not at all hip.

"One of things that's been forgotten in music for a long time is the ability to be nakedly emotional," the composer David Lang said to me after he won the Pulitzer Prize earlier this year for The Little Match Girl Passion, an oratorio that was so nakedly emotional I mistook it for deliberate kitsch when I first heard it. Opera takes the emotional exposure one step further, saying serious things on a very big scale that positively invites parody (which is why everyone makes fun of opera singers). As a composer, you have to know what you're doing onstage, in theatrical terms, if you're going to make it work.

[...]

Stylistic melange alone is now taken as investing some measure of contemporaneity. What a few decades ago was slammed as lowbrow pastiche is today heralded as a visionary merging of disparate traditions (think Osvaldo Golijov). This kind of polyglot approach is certainly cited as a reason for praise by the many adherents of Douglas J. Cuomo's Arjuna's Dilemma....

[...]

It's easy on the ear, and very beguiling. I'm just not sure it's opera. Based on the Bhagavad-Gita, the piece depicts the hero Arjuna about to join battle against an army that includes family and friends; he turns to Krishna for guidance, and learns the secrets of the universe. This is thought-provoking, but not necessarily the stuff of theatrical drama; and while I enjoyed listening to it, particularly as the voices and styles wove together in the work's culmination, I wanted more emotional depth beyond the prettiness.

RTWT here.

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Update (1:32 PM Eastern on 7 Sep): The above brought a curious response from a member of the Opera-L eMail list which response we reprint below as it's a neat example of selective misreading:

Anne Midgette is a knowledgeable critic in that her writing displays a strong background in literature, theatre and music. But she often lets her understanding of these raw materials of opera suffice to inform her opinions of opera performances and their value without becoming involved with the synthesis of these basic qualities of opera.

[...]

For example, she states that a composer whom she is reviewing has involved himself on a "formless wallow of feelings (and) is trying to shape (opera) through musical means alone". She then states that "you need more". Of course, at the outset, this statement is obviously true and needs not be restated, but the fact is that, regardless of the importance of the text and the story line, the music is the primary dramatic element in opera and all else falls into a less than important consideration. In short, it is the composer's music that 'carries the day' and that requires that the music is an organic outgrowth of the story and, consequently, the text of the opera. Any critical analysis of the opera must begin from the musical presentation and how it relates to the rest of the performance.

To which misreading we responded:

You've not quoted Ms. Midgette correctly. What she actually wrote was,

"I don't like everything [director Peter] Sellars has done myself, but I think his expertise has helped [composer John] Adams take his work a step beyond the formless wallow of feelings that [composer Michael] Nyman, in [his opera] 'Love Counts', is trying to shape through musical means alone. You need more."

Clearly, Ms. Midgette did NOT write what you paraphrased her as writing; viz., that Nyman was trying to "shape (opera) through musical means alone." What she wrote was that Nyman was "trying to shape through musical means alone" the "formless wallow of feelings" in his opera, "Love Counts".

That's not at all the same thing, is it. And if in fact Nyman was attempting to do just that, Ms. Midgette is correct. His attempt was exactly the wrong way to go about it.

To use the metaphor I've often used to describe the overall structure of opera as genuine _dramma per musica_, the core and substance of the drama resides within the music, the libretto and actions of the actors being the armature about which the drama is ordered. What Ms. Midgette is saying in her above is that the armature of Nyman's opera is faulty, and he's attempting to correct it by musical means alone, which is exactly the wrong way to go about it, and doomed to failure. To switch metaphors, that's like a physician attempting to fix broken bones in his patient's skeleton via the agency of the patient's vital organs. In taking that approach, what the physician will end up with is either a dead or permanently crippled patient.

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New Audience For Classical Music Redux

[Note: This post has been updated (1) as of 1:07 AM Eastern on 5 Sep. See below.]

Musician and blogger David Preiser of Through These Ears tries his hand at addressing the now well-worn issue of attracting new audiences for classical music. Writes Mr. Preiser:

The language of the Standard Repertoire (I don't intend that as a pejorative, I swear) tends to be that of the European harmonies and structures of the late 18th Century through to the middle of the 20th. Yes, this is a gross generalization, but bear with me. When I say "harmonies and structures", I mean the shapes and colors and emotions of the language. These affect different people in different ways, depending on many personal things. In the end it's a personal perspective, and so much of life experience contributes to that.

The personal music experiences of today's younger generations tend to include far more that is over-amplified and distorted or strange-sounding, violent or ugly, or harsh and dissonant than in previous generations. The sounds that some Classical audiences reject are much more readily accepted by people who listen to other kinds of music.

[...]

How many times have we heard that "Classical Music" is boring? Or, "That's too pretty, it's putting me to sleep", or other casual dismissals of 1000 years of music? As often as not, it's because they are only exposed to one of the "prettier" languages, and their own personal experience simply hasn't prepared them to understand it. That should be a familiar argument to anyone who cares about New Music.

Someone who is very into the grungier, more experimental sounds in rock or electronica will find many appealing sounds in contemporary works. But the same person who enjoys the purely electronic sounds coming out of IRCAM can just as easily run screaming from the room at the sound of a harpsichord. The language of one is familiar and enjoyable, the other is Lurch from The Addams Family.

What this means is that there are many more people for whom the language(s) of New Music won't be so alien after all. It's time to reach out to that audience.

Concludes Mr. Preiser:

It's time to give up for good the idea that the old school composers [i.e., composers of the standard concert rep] will lead the way to new school audiences. That doesn't mean that music isn't great, or that it should die out because new audiences dont care for it. Instead, it means that the path to the enjoyment of the Standard Rep. starts with the enjoyment of the New Rep.

We respectfully but adamantly disagree. Gaining a new and younger audience for classical music is NOT a matter of programming music more appealing to younger audiences. It's entirely a matter of being bluntly honest about the nature of classical music vis-à-vis other musics, and of cultivating a way of listening to music that's thoroughly alien to today's younger audiences; a way of listening that involves focused and close listening to complex music over relatively extended time spans (i.e., complex and extended compared with the relatively simplistic music and minutes-long time spans today's younger audiences are used to and comfortable with); a way of listening that, generally speaking, can be instilled only in the very young, and can be instilled only very rarely later in life.

As we wrote in 2004 in one of Sounds & Fury's inaugural posts, "An Audience For Classical Music":

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

[...]

The alpha and omega of it is that a hardcore audience for classical music can, in huge part, be created only by targeting the very young. If you fail to get 'em very young, you mostly don't get 'em at all.

And that targeting must begin with the pre-kindergarten young, and continue at least through early adolescence. Schools, both public and private, cannot do the job by themselves although they have their place in the campaign. Neither, strange to tell, can parents although they, too, have their place. In today's world, the single most important — overwhelmingly important — entity in the promotion of classical music is none other than the commercial media, cable and broadcast TV most especially, via its content, not via commercials, public service or paid-for. If classical music is not sold there, it will remain largely unsold no matter what else is done. Classical music must be made a part of the very air children breathe, and only the commercial media can accomplish that.

So, the answer is to give up the ineluctably doomed attempt to "convert" those young but already grown-up persons who presently have little or no understanding of and little or no interest in classical music, and concentrate all efforts on (you should pardon the term) "growing" a new audience for classical music by targeting the very young, and making classical music "part of the very air [they] breathe." As we concluded in our above linked 2004 post,

[It's] a long, hard road to travel, but an on-the-right-track — the only right track — beginning. Without a long-term commitment to the education of the very young, the classical music concert as we know it today (that is, neither adjusted, watered- nor dumbed-down in either content or presentation to accommodate the ignorant) will be doomed to the trash bin of history.

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Update (1:07 AM Eastern on 5 Sep): Mr. Preiser responds in an update to his above linked post.

While we share Mr. Preiser's desire for a quick-fix solution to the problem of building a new and younger audience for classical music, we've never been able to come up with or discover one, and we cannot agree that Mr. Preiser's proposal constitutes such a solution either as a quick-fix or for the long term. Neither can we agree with Mr. Preiser's notion that for today's younger audiences, "the path to the enjoyment of the Standard Rep starts with the enjoyment of the New Rep." The enjoyment of the new rep with its "grungier, more experimental sounds" that echo the "over-amplified and distorted ... violent or ugly ... harsh and dissonant" sounds of the "personal experience" of that younger audience will almost never lead to an enjoyment of the music of, say, Monteverdi, or Purcell, or Bach, or Mozart, or Beethoven, or Brahms, or Prokofiev, but will, at very best, lead only to a desire to hear more of the same for no reason other than that it's an extension of the already familiar, "grungier" sounds of "their own personal experience." And that, we suggest, is no way to build an audience for classical music, quick-fix or long term.

Too Good To Be True, But True Nevertheless

[Note: This post has been updated (1) as of 6:13 PM Eastern on 4 Sep. See below.]

A couple weeks ago we received an eMail with subject, "Too Good To Be True?", from constant reader Thomas Smith informing us of an unbelievable offer: the complete prose works of Richard Wagner, translated into English by William Ashton Ellis, in eight (count em'!) hardback, library-bound volumes for the majestic sum of — wait for it! — $15. No, that's not a typo. That's fifteen U.S. dollars — total.

As we've said, an unbelievable offer. However, since it was Amazon.com making the offer we ordered the set immediately, but forbore to post anything about it here pending our getting the actual volumes in our hot little hands.

Well, the offer is unbelievable no longer. The set has just arrived, its eight volumes bound in a handsome black library binding. The printing on the pages inside is something less than handsome, but not bad; not bad at all given the price.

Want a set for yourself? Here's the link. Only four sets left at that price at last check, so hop to it, and good luck to you.

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Update (6:13 PM Eastern on 4 Sep): The $15 offer is sold out. It sold out within an hour or two after we posted the above notice. The set is now listed at its regular price of $560.

Provisional Retraction

In our post of 26 August titled, "An Explanation", we wrote:

Our objection to those two [Nike Wagner and Gerard Mortier) certainly does NOT mean we have no objections to those other two: the frontrunners for [now appointed to] 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.

We're now beginning to see that we may have been too hasty in our judgment.

First, over the past few days it's been made clear in the German press that Eva will be mainly responsible for all Festspiele artistic matters, while Katharina will mainly handle all matters administrative. This echoes the highly successful division of labor between Wieland and Wolfgang Wagner when in 1951 they took control of and reopened the Festspiele after the war.

That's comforting.

Comforting as well is Katharina's public declaration that she's committed to documenting fully and publicly all the ugliness of the Festspiele's and the Wagner family's past Nazi associations by opening up without reservation the Bayreuth archives to qualified historians thereby breaking the longstanding Wagner family tradition begun by Cosima Wagner, wife of Richard, of Geheimniskrämerei, secrecy for secrecy's sake, and Wolfgang's devotion to Verschwiegenheit, a word whose meaning hovers somewhere between secrecy and discretion, especially in this matter.

There are, in addition, other, less specific, signs that we find encouraging, and so, for the nonce, we've decided to retract our above quoted unequivocal objection to Katharina, and adopt instead a wait-and-see attitude; an attitude we confess we perhaps ought to have adopted from the get-go.

Stuff White People Like: Classical Music

Though white people do not actually listen to classical music, they like to believe that they are the type of people who would enjoy it. You can witness this first hand by going to any classical performance at your local symphony where you will see literally dozens of white couples who have paid upwards of $80 for the right to dress up and sit in a chair for hours reading every word in the program.

After leaving the concert hall, white people will immediately begin telling everyone they know about how much they loved the performance and how they plan to “go more often.” This is because white people see little to no value enjoying classical music without recognition from other white people. This can be seen first hand by looking at the plaques and bricks around all opera houses: they are covered in white person names.

If a white person starts talking to you about classical music, it’s essential that you tread very lightly. This is because white people are all petrified that they will be exposed as someone who has only a moderate understanding of classical music.

[...]

Therefore it is essential that even if you possess a massive amount of knowledge about classical music, do not share it with a white person regardless of how much they profess to love it. It’s a recipe for disaster and shame.

—From the blog, Stuff White People Like

RTWT here.

(Our thanks to Life's a Pitch for the link.)

It's Official

The Stiftungsrat (board) of the executive governing agency of the Bayreuther Festspiele, the Richard Wagner Stiftung Bayreuth, has, by a margin of 22 of the Stiftungsrat's 24 votes (the vote was 22-0 with two abstentions), chosen half-sisters Katharina Wagner and Eva Wagner-Pasquier to be the Festspiele's new co-directors to succeed their father and longtime Festspiele director, Wolfgang Wagner.

The Bayreuth Festival board on Monday named half-sisters Katharina Wagner and Eva Wagner-Pasquier to replace their father at the helm of the German festival dedicated to the music of composer Richard Wagner.

The women — the composer's great-great [sic] granddaughters — will replace their father, Wolfgang Wagner, who stepped down at the end of August after 57 years as director of the festival.

Surprise!

RTWT here, and more here, here, and here.