Sounds & Fury

Too...Somethingorother To Let Pass

W e don't mean to continue beating up on an already much beaten dead horse, but this is just too...too...well, you fill in the adjective, to let pass without comment. The author's name and the source of the quote are here withheld as an act of charity.

I am happy (for them) and a little be terrified to learn that there are still people able to enjoy myths the way people could and did 150 years ago. As if Frazer, Levi-Bruhl, Levi-Strauss, Barthes and Girard had never existed. What Chereau perfectly knew is that it was impossible for cultivated men at the end of the seventies to take seriously wagnerian myths because those myths had been deconstructed by decades of ethnological and sociological researches. But Wagner is a genius and it would have been a pity to stop staging his operas only because one aspect of the dramatic language he used had fallen in the dustbins of History. Saying that the Ring must be staged only in universality and intemporality is condemning Wagner to tackyness and, ultimately, oblivion. The very concepts of intemporality and universality are meaningless for a modern mind – intemporality and universality are historical concepts and the products of a specific social and cultural environment. So Chereau had to get rid of all the mythological pararaphernalia that only philistines, whose intellectual environment resembles Alfred Rosenberg’s, seem today to regret. [Obvious sics omitted for readability's sake.]

One tries hard to imagine the above is nothing more than a spot-on caricature, even burlesque, of the postmodern mindset. Sadly, one comes quickly to the realization that it's nothing of the sort, but is instead an earnest, dead-serious expression of that mindset.

Is it any wonder that Eurotrash outrages such as the Chéreau centennial Ring, and the even more grotesque outrages that followed over the following more than three decades, are today gaining mainstream acceptance in major opera houses worldwide?

No, not a bit of it.

What's Wrong With This Picture?

What's wrong with this picture, not to even speak of one over-the-top rhetorical flourish the identification of which we leave as an exercise for the reader?

Think of the young Michael Jackson, an artist of sublime talent, whose working conditions in the Motown factory must have been just as hard to endure as those facing Haydn at the court of Prince Esterhazy.

The twisted sensibilities of our postmodern era, that's what.

(The above sentence extracted from this book review in The [London] Sunday Times.)

Featured Past Post #71 (Administrative Note)

Apropos the recent, um, vigorous dustup in the comments section of this S&F post concerning Patrice Chéreau's centennial production of Wagner's Ring mounted originally at the 1976 Bayreuther Festspiele, a new Featured Past Post ("Elegy”) is now up on the right sidebar. We featured this past post as recently as this past July, but the circumstance of this latest episode of, um, disagreement concerning this production and postmodern stagings of opera generally seems to warrant featuring it yet once again at this time.

Britten's Billy Budd

I'm listening this afternoon to the broadcast on WQXR (http://www.wqxr.com) of the Houston Grand Opera's production of Britten's Billy Budd, my very first hearing of this work. My listening today was just to get a feel for the work (I have a recording of the opera and also of Britten's Turn of the Screw in my library, but have not yet gotten around to even breaking the shrink-wrap on either), and the more I listen, the more I realize that Britten is one of the greatest composers of opera of all time. I mean, I intended to give the opera only a cursory listen this afternoon to, as I've said, just get a feel for it, but I've found that impossible. It keeps compelling my full attention even against my settled intent, and any opera that can do that is an opera that must be counted among the very first rank of the operatic canon.

I look forward now to sitting down with this opera to give it the serious, full-attention listen it so clearly requires and deserves.

Chéreau's Centennial Ring

[Note: This post has been updated (1) as of 7:22 PM Eastern on 29 Nov. See below.]

I n the comments section of a detailed post on Mostly Opera that praised the Chéreau Centennial Ring as,

Simply the finest Nibelungen Ring production in the Centenary history of the work. Even after more than 30 years the power and freshness of this staging is virtually undiminished. As directorial concept and execution it remains unsurpassed....

I wrote in response:

Like all Konzept stagings of the Ring, the Chéreau Ring is a horror as a staging of WAGNER'S Ring. Chéreau's Konzept takes that universal, timeless, cosmic tragedy, and hugely diminishes it by fixing its meaning, and by fixing its action to particular times and places. By so doing, it robs Wagner's great tetralogy of precisely that which makes it the great cosmic drama that it is — or would be without the self-involved, self-indulgent, self-important corruptions of directors like Chéreau: it's universal, timeless, multiplicity of meanings and levels of understanding. And that's not to even speak of Boulez's absurdly passionless, chamber-music-transparent reading of the score which is one of the most perverse readings on record.

There really ought to be a law — literally! — prohibiting the perpetration of such monstrosities.

which brought the following comment in response:

Someone would have been very glad to live in Germany between 1933 and 1945.

In response to a comment further on down by a professional stage designer defending the Chéreau production, and which included the assertion that,

[Wagner] told the company after the run [of the first Ring] had closed that next time it would be all different--and he was the creator. He changed his mind about a lot of his stagings over the course of his life.

I wrote:

As I begin to get a whiff of the favorite straw man of defenders of Eurotrash ... let me put a stop to it right now.

First, as Wagner was the Ring's creator, he had the right to alter anything in any way he saw fit. Postmodern vandals such as Chéreau do not. An opera director has the obligation — the duty — to present onstage NOT his own concept of the work to hand, but the concept of the work's creator — which is to say, the composer — in the most effective and vivid manner possible. That does NOT mean the opera director must slavishly follow a composer's stage directions, most especially when those stage directions were written to accommodate audiences, a stage, and stage techniques that existed over a century ago. What it does mean is that in staging an opera, the director must stage the work so that it embodies as fully as possible the composer's concept as made manifest in an opera's text and music. In the case of the Ring, that means, first of all, that it must be staged in such a way that the staging is absent any indication of an identifiable time and place as that was Wagner's specific intent. It's no accident that Wagner chose a mythological subject and set it in "a cultural period that is remote from any experience or reference to an experience" as he put it in his instructions to his costume designer, Carl E. Doepler; instructions Doepler, to Wagner's extreme displeasure, flagrantly disregarded.

Wagner arranged matters so that everything in the Ring plays itself out on a world stage that can't be located in any identifiable era or in any identifiable location beyond being set in the deep prehistoric (literally pre-historic) past in the vicinity of the Rhine river. That was a purposeful creative act on Wagner's part; a creative act that's responsible for much of the timeless and universal resonate power of the Ring. Any staging of this work that sets it in a specific identifiable era — past, present, or future — or in a specific identifiable location is fundamentally faithless to Wagner's intention as made manifest in the dictates and requirements of the score (text and music). Further, an overarching force and pervading presence in the world-drama of the Ring is Nature itself; Nature in its most primal state, at its largest scale, and in its most profound depths; Nature in direct and affective contact with man. Any staging of the Ring that doesn't realize that in its staging -- either representationally, abstractly, or by unambiguous suggestion – is, again, fundamentally faithless to Wagner's intention as made manifest in the dictates and requirements of the score.

Chéreau's grotesque Konzept fails on all counts. His staging is instead an act of rank vandalism; a hijacking of Wagner's text and music to put onstage Chéreau's own postmodern "vision". In short, it's Eurotrash as I've already justly characterized it.

which brought the following response:

All that begins with: "Like all Konzept stagings of the Ring..." to the end, should have read: "crap, crap, crap, crap, crap".

All that begins with: "As I begin to get a whiff of the favorite straw man of defenders of Eurotrash..." to the end, should, of course, have read: more crap, more crap, more crap, more crap, more crap, obviously, annoyingly, fastidiously, bothering, definetively [sic] even more absolutely not worth reading crap.

Anyone here have any equally, um, impassioned comments to make on what I wrote? If so, make them below.

---

Update (7:22 PM Eastern on 29 Nov): More here (and it's a doozie).

Schmuck

We can think of no more appropriate word to characterize this postmodern twit/hypocrite and those who think as he does.

[Andre] Rieu insists that musical categorisation is meaningless; that there is no difference between classical and non-classical music, or high art and low art. [...] He depicts his critics as members of a stuffy musical elite with narrow aesthetic tastes, yet regularly demeans in interviews music that is not to his taste and classical musicians who choose not to perform in his manner.

Although Rieu's thinking in this case may be just a tendentious matter of good business much in the same way that it may be just a matter of business when a Mafia don orders a hit on a longtime faithful friend, it's thinking sadly emblematic of our postmodern era.

O tempora! O mores!

RTWT here.

(Our thanks to ArtsJournal for the link.)

Uh-Oh

We previously opined that the description of the staging of the new Met production of Berlioz's Damnation de Faust by director Robert Lepage was Curiously Encouraging News.

Maybe not.

It seems the press isn't prepared to say it, but I will: the new Robert Lepage production of Berlioz's Damnation of Faust is boring. Soporific, empty -- and, least forgivably, literal.

[...]

One cannot just pass the buck to Berlioz himself. Yes, he wrote not an opera but a series of scenes connected (if at all) by dream logic, but within each bit his idiosyncratic musical dramaturgy holds as characters emerge seriatim from the illogic into song. But here drama is entirely suppressed by a production overlay that flattens the human element twice over....

RTWT here.

And there's this by Martin Bernheimer:

The result [of the Robert Lepage staging] is often picturesque, occasionally distracting, sometimes naively literal. When the nostalgic Marguerite sings “D’amour l’ardente flame”, she is dwarfed by a massive replication of her own face while hungry flames lick multiple screens. Before the final curtain, the heroine ascends a seemingly dangerous ladder to heaven, flanked by Christmas-card angels. The production, a variation on multimedia extravaganzas at the Saito Kinen Festival in Japan and the Paris Opéra, reminds us that Lepage has worked similar service for Cirque du Soleil in, yes, Las Vegas

[...]

And so we brace ourselves for the revelations of a revolutionary Ring in 2010. Now Berlioz, next Wagner. Time to turn another Lepage.

RTWT here.

God Bless America!

This sort of imbecility could prevail only in sharia-governed Muslim countries and in America the only difference being that in the former you get your tongue cut out; in the latter, merely a slap on the wrist.

Over the years, Joe Scarborough’s penchant for speaking his mind has won him a seat in the House of Representatives and a hosting job on MSNBC; now it has also earned him a seven-second delay for his early-hours talk show, “Morning Joe.” The move by MSNBC was made after an incident on Mr. Scarborough’s live broadcast on Monday, during which he uttered an obscenity [the F word] while trying to draw a contrast between Representative Rahm Emanuel, Senator Barack Obama’s selection for his White House chief of staff, and other aides to Mr. Obama....

MSNBC later issued the following statement:

Joe made a mistake this morning and apologized to his viewers immediately. As he noted, the language he used was completely inappropriate.

No, it was perfectly appropriate. What it was (and is) was (and is) not permitted.

Video here.

Sources for the above quotes, here and here, respectively.

Gift

[Note: This post has been edited as of 11:56 AM Eastern on 11 Nov to correct a number of small errors and infelicities of expression.]

As I grow older, I find myself reading less and less fiction preferring instead to spend my book-reading time with non-fiction works in the fields of music, theoretical physics, and cosmology, the latter two in works written for laypersons. In fact, since my early thirties, I think the number of works of serious fiction I've read could be counted on the fingers of two hands, and, aside from the Harry Potter books, of genre fiction, none at all (an exception to this last is noted in passing below).

That said, although I've spent much of the past two decades off The Street, so to speak, I've not been living in a cave entirely, and so was aware of the huge publishing success of Dan Brown's 2003 mega-bestseller mystery novel, The Da Vinci Code. Unlike with the mega-bestseller Harry Potter books, however, I wasn't curious or provoked enough to read the thing just to see what all the fuss was about, nor did I bother to see the 2006 Ron Howard movie made from the book.

This past week, TNT telecast the movie, and so I took the opportunity to give it a look-see just to get an idea of what the book was all about. The plot premise was intriguing if a bit farfetched, but the movie, a crashing bore its Hollywood car chases notwithstanding, and that was enough to provoke me into getting hold of the book itself to see just what it was that made it a runaway bestseller, for if the movie was any indication of the book, there was nothing there (as I later discovered, the movie in fact missed or merely brushed past just about everything that made the book even marginally worth reading).

My first — and last — attempt at writing a novel-length work of mystery fiction (the S&F posts recounting the 13-years-ago genesis of which experiment and the recounting of my subsequent years-later experiment at self-publishing are collected here) taught me two things subsequent to the passing away of my first delusional flush of triumph wherein I was convinced I'd written a niche-market hit: 1) writing a work of genre fiction requires an intimate knowledge of and "feel" for the genre in which one is writing which knowledge and feel I foolishly, not to say arrogantly, wrongly imagined I could gain by reading some ten-gazillion novels of the genre within the space of a few months just to get the "formula"; and 2) that I've zero gift for the writing of fiction. In fact, the work I'd written was not so much written as manufactured to formula; the formula I'd wrongly imagined I learned from the reading of those ten-gazillion mystery novels. Excluding a mere handful of exceptions, those ten-gazillion mystery novels also shared one other thing in common beyond their adherence to the conventions of the genre (i.e., the "formula"): their prose writing was, shall we say, less than stellar. And so when I began reading The Da Vinci Code, I was prepared for less than stellar prose writing notwithstanding that the novel was a runaway bestseller. Nothing, however, could have prepared me for what I found.

There's hardly a page of The Da Vinci Code that does not induce multiple cringes at the execrable prose writing; writing so execrable it's almost beyond tolerance. Excluding from consideration the efforts of my own good self, I don't believe I've ever read a work of fiction, even mystery fiction, that could equal or surpass it in badness. And yet — and this, for me, is the real mystery — I kept on turning the pages!

Why? The characters are two-dimensional jokes; the incidents, contrived; and the plot, while inherently intriguing, is not much more so than the plots of a number of mystery novels I'd read previously in my above noted several-months mystery novel reading marathon. True, the expansion and embellishment of the quasi- or pseudo-historical basis of the inherently intriguing plot of The Da Vinci Code gave that plot a certain frisson not otherwise attainable. But still....

So, what's the answer; the explanation of the mystery of what it was that made me continue to turn the pages of this execrably written work of mystery fiction? I confess, I'm not really sure. What I'm certain of, however, is that no matter how deficient a writer of prose Dan Brown may be (or, rather, clearly is), he possesses a gift — i.e., that which cannot be acquired, but must be inborn — for the plotting and spinning out of a mystery narrative absent which gift even the best of fiction prose stylists would be helpless to write an effective novel of the genre. Further proof, if any were still needed, that writers and artists of all sorts, like idiots, are born, not made.

Students (and instructors) engaged in so-called "creative writing" courses, take note.

Memo To The Fat Police: Stuff it!

The almost trillion-dollar fat-free industry, promoters of fat paranoia on a scale exceeded only by the extreme paranoia promoted by the crusading zealots — political, professional, and civilian — devoted to the secondhand smoke myth, needs to be exposed before it succeeds in robbing us totally of yet one more of life's greatest pleasures.

[We have been] told that fat [is] out of fashion and that eating fat made you fat. The food industry backed this claim with new products: reduced-fat, no-fat, fat-free. Everything fat-free came with a license to eat more and we did. And got fatter. By now we have been so long bombarded with fat-phobic fear mongering that much of it is considered accepted wisdom.

[...]

Fat, the fat we cook with and eat, is good for you.... Our bodies need fat. That's right — fat supports cellular growth, the immune system, the brain, and our hormone-producing endocrine system. We'd struggle to function without it. The low- and no-fat era of the last half century made us heavier, not healthier, and in the process has taken a lot of the pleasure from eating.

[...]

Fat in its natural state is not the enemy. You need it, and you love it. It makes all food taste better and even feel better. You crave it. The key is to use it well and to eat well.

Word!

RTWT here.

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

Even Catastrophic Economic Upheavals Can Have a Silver Lining

It would seem even catastrophic economic upheavals can have a silver lining.

The New York City Opera’s bold effort at reinvention ended in fiasco on Friday when the company announced that its designated leader, the provocative impresario Gerard Mortier, was pulling out amid the company’s financial difficulties.

Mr. Mortier’s departure came to light 21 months after City Opera had proclaimed him as its savior, saying he would take on the job as general manager and artistic director in the 2009-10 season. It agreed to his plans to scrap old-fashioned traditions, mount challenging 20th-century works, bring opera to the people in their neighborhoods and extensively renovate the company’s home, the New York State Theater, rather than try to find a new building.

[...]

Speaking from his apartment in Ghent, Belgium, Mr. Mortier said he decided to resign when it became clear that the board would not give him the money needed to produce a meaningful slate of opera productions. He said that from the start he had been promised a budget of $60 million, a number even mentioned in his contract. But the board was prepared to approve only $36 million, he said, not much more than the basic fixed costs of running the company, leaving him little room for innovative productions.

Beverly, wherever her soul might now be residing, must be breathing a huge sigh of relief, so to speak.

But we don't mean to be entirely negative about Mr. Mortier here. To the extent that he would have focused his attentions on presenting a "meaningful slate of opera productions" of new or little- or never-heard late-20th- and 21st-century works, Mr. Mortier's bowing out is a loss for both the NYCO in particular, and for the world of opera generally. But to the extent he would have turned his attentions to commissioning postmodern (read, Eurotrash) productions of the 18th-, 19th-, and pre-war-20th-century rep — a notorious, career-long Mortier trademark — Mr. Mortier's departure is a blessing for all concerned.

RTWT here.

Curiously Encouraging News

[Note: This post has been updated (1) as of 11:17 PM Eastern on 15 Nov. See below.]

In an era where postmodern (read, Eurotrash) stagings of the standard operatic rep are, or are fast becoming, the de facto norm at major opera houses worldwide, we find the following to be curiously encouraging news.

A watery reflection ripples beneath a boat gliding along the stage. Soldiers march over a field of grass. The blades rustle. Fire flutters above the face of a soprano singing of the burning flame of love.

Water, fire and field are all illusion, created by computers, infrared cameras, digital projectors and scrims. These uncanny scenes play out in a production of Berlioz’s Damnation de Faust, which opens Friday night at the Metropolitan Opera and introduces an unprecedented level of technological stagecraft to the house.

While video and projection entered the opera staging manual years ago, this Faust is the Met’s first interactive opera. The technology allows the singers’ motion and voices, as well as the sounds of the orchestra, to trigger and even shape video projections flashed onto the set.

[...]

The stakes here are higher than this one production. The Met has also engaged Mr. Lepage [director, Robert Lepage] to mount its first new Ring cycle since the late 1980s rendition by Otto Schenk, starting in the 2010-11 season. Both the Met and Mr. Lepage said the Faust serves as a test run for some of the techniques.

RTWT here.

---

Update (11:17 PM Eastern on 15 Nov): Maybe not.

A New Tragic Opera

A new tragic three-act opera the synopsis of which can be read hot from the Conservative librettist's trembling hands: L’Obama, ossia L’Avvento del Messia — Opera in Tre Atti.

The Sixties Wasn't All Bad

Since the 1962 appearance of the first entry in the now 21-movie series (soon to be 22) that constitutes the James Bond movie franchise, the focus, style, and content of the entries have slowly but inexorably degenerated from the nicely detailed, winkingly humorous, cleverly plotted and peopled fantasy scenarios, and polished and debonair MCP-macho sophistication of the series's first three entries, all based loosely on the original Ian Fleming novels of the same names — Dr. No (1962), From Russia With Love (1963), and Goldfinger (1964) — into little more than bubblegum action flicks replete with wall-to-wall special effects; a non-stop array of unsmiling and in dead earnest car/boat chases, fisticuffs, shootouts, and things blowing up, the movies' flimsy, largely contrived, po-faced plots mere excuses for the non-stop array of unsmiling and in dead earnest car/boat chases, fisticuffs, shootouts, and things blowing up. In short, high-production-value Steven Seagal-Chuck Norris-type fare fit only for kiddies and morons, and all but unwatchable by anyone with an IQ larger than his belt size.

This was all brought home to us with special force by our viewing yesterday of the 44-year-old Goldfinger, the apotheosis of the early, classic Bond movie aesthetic and a movie we haven't seen in some 25 years or so, after viewing for the first time three of the newer Bond flicks back-to-back, courtesy of USA Network: Golden Eye (1995), Tomorrow Never Dies (1997), and The World Is Not Enough (1999).

One looks in vain in these latter-day Bond flicks for a plot as wickedly humorous and as cleverly fantastic as Goldfinger's plan to make financially impotent the U.S. gold reserves stored in Fort Knox. Or a villain as slick, cool, and calculating as Auric Goldfinger (Bond, strapped to a table of gold, and about to be sliced in half lengthwise from crotch to crown by a slowly moving, steel-cutting laser beam set in motion by Goldfinger, inquires of him, his eyes locked on the threatening beam and nervous sweat forming on his brow, "Do you expect me to talk?", to which Goldfinger replies coolly in a mildly bemused voice absent so much as a hint of anger or malice, "No, Mr. Bond. I expect you to die."). Or a villain's sidekick as imperturbable, enigmatic, and all but indestructible as Oddjob with his neat little hat trick. Or a villain's associate as extravagantly and big-haired lovely and with a name as female redolent as Pussy Galore; a name which on first hearing Bond responds to with a comically disbelieving, "I must be dreaming."

No, there's none of this to be found in these risible, overblown latter-day Bond flicks. No winking good humor here. They all take themselves terribly seriously, and expect us to do so as well.

Futile expectation. As if we Bond movie connoisseurs, other considerations aside, could get past the ultimate absurdity of these movie actors playing at being James Bond. We all know the genuine article is Sean Connery, and these other clowns merely inadequate, playacting imposters unworthy to deliver Bond's signature response as to who he might be: "Bond. James Bond."

Go Figure

In a nation virtually drowning in the cesspool that is pop culture the fetid miasma of which has invaded every nook and cranny of our culture, that fons et origo and nursery of much of that noxious pestilence, Los Angeles, is planning a ten-week festival to be held 15 April through 30 June 2010 dedicated to — wait for it! — Richard Wagner.

In what could be the region's most ambitious, broadest-based artistic endeavor since the 1984 Olympic Arts Festival, Los Angeles Opera will join forces with more than 50 Southern California arts and educational institutions to stage a 10-week festival in spring 2010 inspired by the opera company's upcoming production of Richard Wagner's epic Ring cycle.

The launch of Ring Festival L.A., which will include a variety of performances, symposiums, concerts, special exhibitions and film screenings, will be formally announced this morning by L.A. Opera General Director Plácido Domingo. Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, county Supervisors Gloria Molina and Zev Yaroslavsky and philanthropist Eli Broad, whose $6-million foundation gift is underwriting the Ring, as well as a number of local arts representatives, are expected to attend.

Go figure.

RTWT here.

It's Time To Stand Up And Be Counted — Literally

I confess I've voted in a federal election exactly once in my life — in 1960 when I enthusiastically cast my vote for that other "too intelligent," "high-minded ... speechifier ... capable of thrilling the Scarlett Johansson set and feeling the fierce urgency of now" as New York Times Conservative columnist David Brooks, describing Barack Obama, put it some time ago: John Fitzgerald Kennedy. When he was murdered, my hope for America was murdered along with him, and no candidate since seemed capable of filling the void.

Until now, that is.

I further confess that, this year, even had the Democrats nominated Mickey Mouse as their candidate, I would go to the polls for the first time since 1960 come 4 November, and cast my vote for him. But as things stand now, and barring anything unimaginably untoward being revealed between now and then, I can go to the polls this 4 November and cast my vote for the Democrat candidate with a perfectly clean conscience and a new sense of hope for America.

It's not that I agree with everything Mr. Obama has to say. It's rather that it's become crystal clear to me that he has what it takes to be a genuine leader, even a great one: a charismatic, riveting podium presence; a sharp, intuitive, and practical political sense; and clear-eyed, imaginative intelligence to spare. Those are the three required, fundamental, and unacquirable gifts. Whatever Mr. Obama might lack in specific experience and expertise on the myriad urgent matters now facing this country can be rented or bought as needed whenever and wherever required.

So, cheer up!, America. Things are looking up. All you need do is to cast your vote for Mr. Obama come Tuesday. Do your part and stand up and be counted come this 4 November. It's time.