Sounds & Fury

Heather Mac Donald Goes Baroque

When thinker and writer Heather Mac Donald feels moved to write a piece on opera classical music-lovers are sure to be richly rewarded by its reading even if, going in, one has no interest at all in whatever particular thing Ms. Mac Donald has chosen to write about (on coming out we assure you one's interest will be more than a little aroused whatever that particular thing may be).

This time, for the quarterly magazine City Journal, Ms. Mac Donald has chosen to write about two opera productions given in New York earlier this year: Telemann's Orpheus presented by New York City Opera, and a new original pasticcio opera titled Enchanted Island put together for the Metropolitan Opera by British playwright Jeremy Sams who also wrote the English libretto for the new work. Wrote Ms. Mac Donald about these two productions:

Few Baroque operas (and all by Handel) have clawed their way from oblivion to the margins of the standard repertoire, a source of chagrin to anyone who loves the period or simply hungers for broader musical experience. The Metropolitan Opera and New York City Opera offered radically different solutions to this lacuna earlier this year. NYCO revived an unknown opera by Georg Philipp Telemann in a beautiful and expertly performed production at El Museo del Barrio. The Metropolitan Opera crafted an entirely new work from music by eight Baroque composers, set to a new libretto in English.

The Met’s venture was the riskier proposition, bound to trigger grumbling among Baroque aficionados who resented the missed opportunity to stage an historical work. But while the revival of existing operas such as Telemann’s Orpheus at NYCO contributes more to our musical knowledge in the long run, the Met’s Enchanted Island must also be counted a resounding (and insufficiently appreciated) success.

Read the full text here.

The Wrong Man

If the accuracy of this report by Norman Lebrecht can be trusted (a not always safe assumption), The New York Times reassigned the wrong man.

We have been informed — not by the person concerned – that the [sic] New York Times has removed Allan Kozinn from his position as music critic and reassigned him to the newly-created, sidewalk-pounding post of general cultural reporter. He will report for new duties tomorrow. The move ... is rooted entirely in the poison of internal politics.

[...]

So why has the Times taken the extraordinary step of demoting a music critic?

The reasons are purely internal. Culture Editor Jon Landman knows he has a problem in the classical department. The chief critic Anthony Tommasini is thought to have failed to win the confidence of New York’s opinion formers. Moves are said to be afoot to hire Zachary Woolfe as Tommasini’s sidekick and, eventually, his successor. Landman has been heard to say that ‘Zach is the most important thing that has happened to classical music in a long time’ (sic). He needed to create a vacancy for Woolfe to be hired, so Kozinn had to go.

If creating a vacancy in the classical music department is the only way to do it, then creating that vacancy so that it can be filled by Zachary Woolfe is indeed the right way to go. But on critical/journalistic grounds alone it's clearly chief classical music critic Anthony Tommasini who should have been reassigned to some newly-created post elsewhere for the purpose, not Allan Kozinn. That, however, would have taken real balls; something corporate management, generally speaking, is not noted for possessing.

A Trenchant Commentary On Konzept Regietheater

Whoever posted this video to YouTube seems to have missed the point of this trenchant (and hilarious) Backa Teater (Gothenburg, Sweden) production of Carmen entirely.

Clearly, this production was done to skewer today's pervasive Konzept Regietheater (i.e., Eurotrash) opera productions, those who relish them, and all those responsible for conceiving, participating in, and producing them.

And a splendid job the Backa Teater theater company made of it, too.

An Apologia For Serious Critics And Criticism

If there exists a finer, more compelling argument for the need, necessity, and value of dedicated (i.e., professional), serious, deeply informed and literate critics and criticism in the arts and literature than the one written for The New Yorker titled "A Critic’s Manifesto" by Daniel Mendelsohn we've never encountered it.

An excerpt:

By dramatizing their own thinking on the page, by revealing the basis of their judgments and letting you glimpse the mechanisms by which they exercised their (individual, personal, quirky) taste, all these [professional] critics were, necessarily, implying that you could arrive at your own, quite different judgments—that a given work could operate on your own sensibility in a different way. What I was really learning from those critics each week was how to think. How to think (we use the term so often that we barely realize what we’re saying) critically — which is to say, how to think like a critic, how to judge things for myself. To think is to make judgments based on knowledge: period.

[...]

And so the fact is that (to invoke the popular saying) everyone is not a critic. This, in the end, may be the crux of the problem, and may help explain the unusual degree of violence in the reaction to the stridently negative reviews that appeared in the Times Book Review earlier this summer, triggering the heated debate about critics. In an essay about phony memoirs that I wrote a few years ago, I argued that great anger expressed against authors and publishers when traditionally published memoirs turn out to be phony was a kind of cultural displacement: what has made us all anxious about truth and accuracy in personal narrative is not so much the published memoirs that turn out to be false or exaggerated, which has often been the case, historically, but rather the unprecedented explosion of personal writing (and inaccuracy and falsehood) online, in Web sites and blogs and anonymous commentary—forums where there are no editors and fact-checkers and publishers to point an accusing finger at.

Similarly, I wonder whether the recent storm of discussion about criticism, the flurry of anxiety and debate about the proper place of positive and negative reviewing in the literary world, isn’t a by-product of the fact that criticism, in a way unimaginable even twenty years ago, has been taken out of the hands of the people who should be practicing it: true critics, people who, on the whole, know precisely how to wield a deadly zinger, and to what uses it is properly put. When, after hearing about them, I first read the reviews of Peck’s and Ohlin’s works, I had to laugh. Even the worst of the disparagements wielded by the reviewers in question paled in comparison to the groundless vituperation and ad hominem abuse you regularly encounter in Amazon.com reviews or the “comments” sections of literary publications. Yes, we’re all a bit sensitive to negative reviewing these days; but if you’re going to sit in judgment on anyone, it shouldn’t be the critics.

RTWT here.

The Met's New La Traviata As Seen On PBS

It was one of those need-to-watch-TV-cause-we're-bored-silly nights. Problem was, there was nothing on TV worth watching. And so, faute de mieux, we turned to New Jersey's PBS HD channel which was airing the Met's HD film of La Traviata in the staging by Willy Decker and vowed to watch the whole thing through no matter what, except in the case the voices were not more than merely competent in which case we would be done with it and watch the news on CNN instead.

The voices were indeed more than merely competent for the most part, the standouts being that white-haired Russian guy whose singing was spectacular and that French person who, after a somewhat rocky start, did honor to her role as principal protagonist. And it didn't hurt matters that this opera is the sort of opera that's mother's milk to conductor Fabio Luisi who did a splendid job in the pit.

And then there was the staging.

To put this in perspective, one must first ask oneself what Traviata is at bottom. And the most honest answer to that question is that Traviata is, at bottom, nothing more than a soap opera in the typical Italian-opera mold. Its music, Italian-opera-lovely as some of it is, and its text declare it so and no staging can transform it into something greater which, we suspect, is what Herr Decker attempted (unsuccessfully) to do with his staging which staging, we hasten to add, while decidedly Regietheater is NOT Konzept Regietheater (i.e., Eurotrash). The staging maintains throughout the concept of the opera's creator and does not attempt to substitute its own Konzept in place of it. It merely reimagines the realization of the opera creator's concept which is, of course, what makes it a Regietheater staging.

We found that elegant but starkly bare staging to be hockey-puck devoid of anything that could be called evocative or resonant, and found the sledgehammer-symbolism of that ever-present clock thing and the equally ever-present silent figure that's supposed to represent Death (yeah, yeah, we get it, Willy; her time is running out) embarrassingly hokey as was that sparse IKEA (or was it Walmart) furniture not to speak of all that singing while lying down or crawling about the floor.

Mr. Gelb, we suggest, should do lots more along the lines of vetting these stagings before committing the Met to live with them beyond their initial presentation. We wonder just how many seasons this vapid entry will have to run in order to amortize its cost.

Early Warning

We've always been contra Republicans generally (that party has more loony tunes and idiots per congressional district than does Byberry state mental hospital and a positively delusional fairytale economic ideology that's resulted ultimately in catastrophe of one sort or another wherever and whenever it's been freely implemented), but here's a more current specific reason to be contra Republicans this presidential election year.

From a leaked transcript of an upcoming cover story in Fortune magazine by Andy Serwer in New York and David Whitford in Boston, Politico reports the following gem from the lips of presumed Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney:

“[F]irst there are programs I would eliminate [on becoming president]. Obamacare being one of them but also various subsidy programs — the Amtrak subsidy, the PBS subsidy, the subsidy for the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities. Some of these things, like those endowment efforts and PBS I very much appreciate and like what they do in many cases, but I just think they have to stand on their own rather than receiving money borrowed from other countries, as our government does on their behalf. [emphasis ours]

So, not only delusional loony tunes and idiots, but woodenheaded philistines as well (does Mr. Romney actually imagine a meaningful savings of money would result from such cuts?).

Make certain y'all vote this coming November to ensure that not only are Republicans kept out of the White House, but that the Congress is cleansed of as many Republicans as possible.

A Failure Of Arts Criticism

It began late yesterday innocently enough as these things go: a naïve inquiry on an online opera forum by someone who wondered whether Regietheater stagings of opera are "really drawing people to go to opera live? Or buy it on DVD, etc.? Or is it driving people away?"

As we don't really know the answers to those questions in hard-facts terms we felt fairly certain we could easily avoid becoming involved in any back-and-forth arguments that ensued on one side or the other — that is, until we read this from a steadfast cheerleader for and champion of Regietheater of even the most extreme sort (i.e., Eurotrash):

For most of us [Americans], our experience with Regietheater is at [a distance]: we read a review or two consisting of a sort of laundry list of "shocking" effects: nudity, urination, bloody violence, depictions of drug use — or even something as minimally titillating as setting the action of "Il trovatore" in a hotel suite. This type of review represents a failure of arts criticism because there is no attempt [by the arts critic] to put these elements in context, or, more to the point, to try to grasp the drift of the director's take on the work.

Say what? "A failure of arts criticism because there is no attempt [by the arts critic] to ... try to grasp the drift of the director's take on the work"(!)? That's a bit like saying that it's a journalistic failure because in merely describing the brutal murders perpetrated by a particularly sadistic serial killer the journalist made no attempt to try to grasp the killer's view of the matter.

That was just one perverse, purblind step too far for us, and so we shot back:

"The director's take on the work"(!)? Why should anyone be concerned with an opera director's take on the work? It's of no importance whatsoever. It's not — or, rather, ought not to be — part of an opera director's job to have a "take on the work". His job — his sole job — is to realize onstage, in the most vivid and compelling manner possible, the opera creator's take on the work; i.e., to realize onstage the concept and vision of the opera's creator as made manifest in the score (music, text, and stage directions). Period. Full stop. Any opera director who goes beyond that in his staging of an opera is involving himself in areas he has no business being much less meddling in. And to preempt the favorite straw man of Regietheater cheerleaders and champions, that does NOT mean or even imply that opera stagings should be of the "Tosca with bonnet, shepherd's crook and Empire waist, [or] Valkyries with horns, or humped Rigolettos wearing funny hats" sort, as one [forum member] here put it. It means that honest and conscientious opera directors must find evocative and resonant new ways to stage an opera for contemporary audiences without tossing aside or ignoring in any meaningful way the full spirit and sense of the opera creator's concept and vision as made manifest in the score.

Any hack opera director can be outrageous and provocative in his stagings of opera. It takes an opera director of genuine gift to be able to stage an opera in conformance with the inviolable (or, rather, ought to be inviolable) principle above set forth.

We await a coherent, reasoned rebuttal.

Stay tuned.

The 12 Commandments

We've just come across a posting by theater critic, playwright, and author George Hunka on his blog Superfluities Redux titled "The Complete Critic’s Qualifications" wherein he reiterates theater and drama critic Harold Clurman’s 1964 list of the so-called "12 commandments" for theatre and drama critics and comments on same. It struck us that those 12 commandments are equally valid for classical music critics (classical music including opera of course) and so herewith reprint that list below, mutatis mutandis.

Besides having cultivated taste, feeling and a talent for clear observation of all classical musics:

1. The critic should know the greater part of historical and contemporary classical music as written and performed. Added to this, he must be conversant with general literature: novels, poetry, essays of wide scope.
2. He should know the history of classical music from its origins to the present.
3. He should have a long and broad concert- and opera-going experience — of native and foreign ensembles.
4. He should possess an interest in and a familiarity with the arts: painting, theater, architecture and the dance.
5. He should have worked in classical music organizations in some capacity (apart from criticism).
6. He should know the history of his country and world history: the social thinking of past and present.
7. He should have something like a philosophy, an attitude toward life.
8. He should write lucidly, and, if possible, gracefully.
9. He should respect his readers by upholding high standards and encourage his readers to cultivate the same.
10. He should be aware of his prejudices and blind spots.
11. He should err on the side of generosity rather than an opposite zeal.
12. He should seek to enlighten rather than carp or puff.

Mr. Hunka remarks of the original list that "of contemporary critics, and judging only by what they publish under the guise of criticism, I can count the number of both online and print reviewers who meet [these] qualifications on the fingers of one hand."

Word!, re, the above list.

Would That It Were Actionable At Law

A sometimes heated skirmish erupted on a venerable online opera forum during the past two weeks concerning the seemingly evergreen subject of "traditional" opera stagings versus Regietheater stagings the skirmish involving all the usual forum suspects on each side of the argument; a skirmish that began with this (relatively) innocent comment by Yours Truly in response to a post by another forum member:

Your list of production failures during Gelb's tenure may all have been ill-conceived or inept productions, and most (but not all) might be legitimately classified as Regietheater, but NONE of those productions could legitimately be classified as Eurotrash (Regietheater and Eurotrash are NOT synonymous terms; all Eurotrash is Regietheater, but not all Regietheater is Eurotrash). One of the remarkable things about Gelb's tenure is that Met audiences have been spared and saved harmless from the contemptible grotesqueries of Eurotrash, a pervasive malignancy that today infects opera stages worldwide. For that, at least, U.S. opera fans and Met operagoers ought to be grateful.

My repeated use of the term "Eurotrash" in this and in my following posts in the skirmish and my contempt for such stagings provoked one forum member to label me a "narrow minded [person] who live[s] in the past" and another to declare me "a psychotic bigot". You know. All the par-for-the-course stuff as these skirmishes go and to be expected.

As a participant in the skirmish, I at one point wrote the following concerning the distinction between Regietheater and Eurotrash:

Any staging where the director in some way or ways reimagines the original creator's vision and concept by, say for simple instance, moving the location and/or time of the action to a different place or period, is, by definition, Regietheater. The director has altered the original creator's instructions regarding those elements and substituted his own for whatever reason; good, bad, or indifferent. Only when the director substitutes his own VISION AND CONCEPT in place of that of the original creator's as made manifest in the score (music, text, and stage directions) does Regietheater descend into the malignancy that we today label Eurotrash, the very worst examples of the type being those where the director's vision and concept are, at bottom, a deconstruction of or critical commentary on the work to hand, a la, say (to use the current Bayreuth examples with which I'm most familiar), the Bayreuth _Parsifal_ of director Stefan Herheim, or the Bayreuth _Meistersinger_ of Katharina Wagner, or the Bayreuth _Lohengrin_ of Hans Neuenfels. These are all out-and-out Eurotrash and Eurotrash of the most malignant sort.

I'd seen detailed written physical descriptions and voluminous production photos of the staging of the Parsifal and had seen the full productions of both the Meistersinger and the Lohengrin as both were streamed live on the Web by the Bayreuther Festspiele and so felt fully confident classifying them all as out-and-out Eurotrash although I confess that confidence was momentarily shaken (but only momentarily) in the case of the Neuenfels Lohengrin when I read with utter dismay and something approaching utter disbelief The New Yorker's Alex Ross declare that staging "an austere, elegant, darkly enchanting piece of theatre" and a "great Wagner performance" that "made a particularly deep impression" on him.

Needless to say, that Eurotrash classification of mine didn't sit well with the Regietheater champions on this forum the chief of these even taking the trouble to give his take on Neuenfels's Konzept for the staging of Lohengrin. The take was quite intelligent, actually, but in making it this champion for Regietheater seemed totally oblivious to the fact that he was making not his case as a champion for Regietheater, but the case for Eurotrash Regietheater's most intransigent enemies among which I number myself. For whatever Neuenfels's staging of Lohengrin may be, there is one thing it most decidedly by any stretch is not: a staging of WAGNER'S Lohengrin. This Lohengrin is not Richard Wagner's Lohengrin but Hans Neuenfels's Lohengrin hijacking Richard Wagner's music and text for its own purpose, and that's a very definition of what it means to be Eurotrash. It also, at very least, makes the promoter and presenter of this production, the Bayreuther Festspiele, guilty of fraud.

Would that it were a class of fraud actionable at law.

Colossally Stupid

[NOTE: This entry has been updated (2) as of 4:46 PM Eastern on 22 May. See below.]

How anyone as PR-savvy as Metropolitan Opera general manager Peter Gelb could openly have had a provoking hand in such a colossally stupid bit of business is simply beyond our comprehension. And what bit of business might that have been? Daniel J. Wakin of The New York Times explains:

Opera News, 76 years old and one of the leading classical music magazines in the country, said on Monday that it would stop reviewing the Metropolitan Opera, a policy prompted by the Met’s dissatisfaction over negative critiques.

The decision by the magazine, which is published by a Met fund-raising affiliate, the Metropolitan Opera Guild, and which freely reviews companies around the world, troubles some opera experts. It is also the latest sign of sensitivity from the Met under its general manager, Peter Gelb, in the face of criticism over its productions. The move came after a review in April took aim at the Met’s new production of Wagner’s Ring cycle — a hallmark of Mr. Gelb’s tenure that has led to a firestorm — and after a top Opera News editor criticized the Met’s direction in a scathing essay in the May issue.

Mr. Gelb said in an interview on Monday that the decision was made “in collaboration with the guild” but that he never liked the idea that an organization created to support the Met had a publication passing judgment on its productions. Worse yet, he said, is a publication that “continuously rips into” an institution that its parent is supposed to help.

Whether one agrees with Mr. Gelb's reasoning or not (and we actually do; to our way of thinking, Opera News should, from Day One, have recused itself from critical coverage of the Met's productions), his open intervention was a damaging bit of business in PR terms, both for the Met and for himself.

How damaging a bit of business was it?

Stay tuned.

---

Update (3:54 PM Eastern on 22 May): To answer our above closing question: pretty damn damaging. Mr. Gelb's act of censorship has been commented on voluminously and condemned (both the act and Mr. Gelb) everywhere it's been commented on. For salient example, this from Washington Post chief classical music critic Anne Midgette:

Peter Gelb has gone on the rampage again. The New York Times has reported (on Page One) that he’s set his sights on Opera News, the leading opera magazine in America and a publication of the Metropolitan Opera Guild, and is forcing them to stop writing reviews of the Met. You could say that this is still a story about arts journalism, and/or the way people respond to criticism; but the takeaway now seems to me to be that Gelb is losing his mind.

RTWT here.

Update 2 (4:46 PM Eastern on 22 May): Peter Gelb reverses his position! Text of the Met Press release follows.

In view of the outpouring of reaction from opera fans about the recent decision to discontinue Met performance reviews in Opera News, the Met has decided to reverse this new editorial policy. From their postings on the internet, it is abundantly clear that opera fans would miss reading reviews about the Met in Opera News. Ultimately, the Met is here to serve the opera-loving public and has changed its decision because of the passionate response of the fans.

The Met and the Met Opera Guild, the publisher of Opera News, have been in discussions about the role of the Guild and how its programs and activities can best fulfill its mission of supporting the Metropolitan Opera. These discussions have included the role of reviews in Opera News, and whether they served that mission. While the Met believed it did not make sense for a house organ that is published by the Guild and financed by the Met to continue to review Met productions, it has become clear that the reviews generate tremendous excitement and interest and will continue to have a place in Opera News.

Too late.

(Our thanks to The Baltimore Sun's Tim Smith for the text and the heads-up.)

Ave Atque Vale, Dietrich

The great, near-legendary German baritone Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau died today at his home in Bavaria at age 86. Celebrated worldwide as the foremost lieder singer of his generation and a world-class opera performer and first-rate musician, he was also an influential teacher and one of the 20th century's most prolific recording artists. We knew his work mostly through his recorded roles in the operas of Wagner and Mozart and through his recorded performances of Schubert's lieder and quickly came to appreciate his great artistry as both actor and singer. He was one of those rare performers who, over time, one comes to think of as living perpetually, the thought of his death at some point almost a thing beyond consideration. He immeasurably enriched the world of music and we should all be thankful that he lived at a time when his artistry could be faithfully preserved for us all and for unnumbered future generations to relish.

The New York Times obituary can be read here and a lovely tribute by tenor Ian Bostridge can be read here.

Atque in perpetuum, Dietrich, ave atque vale.

Wrong Target

In a 1 May piece for The New York Times titled, "'Ring' Criticism, Rescinded", music journalist Daniel J. Wakin revealed that

[New York Public Radio radio station] WQXR pulled a blog posting critical of the Metropolitan Opera’s new Ring cycle last month after the Met’s general manager, Peter Gelb, personally complained to the radio station’s top executive.

Since then, we've read indignant and outraged responses to that action across the classical music blogosphere and on online opera forums on the Web almost all of which responses condemned Mr. Gelb as being at fault and implying (or outright saying) he was guilty of censorship(!).

Say what? Last time we checked, Mr. Gelb was not a member of the editorial staff of New York Public Radio or WQXR. How he could have been at fault, and guilty of censorship no less, in the pulling of that blog post is beyond our capacity to understand. The only guilty parties in this craven incident would be the editorial staff of WQXR and Laura Walker, the president and chief executive of WQXR’s parent NYPR, who backed the editorial staff's decision. It's those two entities alone at which one's indignation and outrage should be aimed. All Peter Gelb could be guilty of in this matter is having a too-thin skin and an outsized sense of his own importance and influence in domains outside the Met.

Peter Gelb, Take Note

[NOTE: This entry has been edited as of 10:49 AM Eastern on 21 Apr to reinstate in the opening graf a critical conditional clause mysteriously gone missing.]

In our long-running and continuing war against Eurotrash Regietheater, we've often remarked, both here and elsewhere, that at the root of the problem when the staging goes bad in those rare cases where the Regie is actually making an honest effort to reimagine the concept of the opera's creator rather than blatantly foisting his or her own pea-brained Konzept on an innocent public while hijacking the opera creator's music and text to his or her own purpose is that the Regie is taking his cues from the opera's text rather than its music, and that such a process is a lethal error on the Regie's part. It was therefore gratifying to read the following from stellar singer-actor and intelligent musician Jonas Kaufmann in a piece today for The New York Times by classical music critic, book author, and opera scholar Peter G. Davis:

Too many directors arrive at the opera house these days knowing little or nothing about music. Most come from the spoken theater, focus only on the text and don’t understand how to give the music its space [we would have said, "give the music its due"]. It may seem obvious to you and me, but a brilliant theater director does not automatically translate into a brilliant opera director. If I am a crack racecar driver, that doesn’t qualify me to be an ace pilot as well.

I sometimes feel that directors devise all these elaborate concepts because they don’t trust the power of the music and are terrified of boring the audience. Opera is a truly magical art, but the magic originates primarily in the music that we singers [we would have added, "and the conductor and orchestra"] work so hard to communicate.

Yes indeed.

Peter Gelb, take note.

Cutting Peter Gelb Some Slack

In a piece for The New York Times this past Tuesday, Times chief classical music critic Anthony Tommasini reported on an interview he had with Peter Gelb, General Manager of the Metropolitan Opera, the interview carried out at Mr. Gelb's invitation. In that interview, Mr. Gelb yet once again defended the Robert Lepage staging of Wagner's Der Ring des Nibelungen:

Peter Gelb has both raised expectations and invited criticism by calling Robert Lepage’s $16 million production of Wagner’s Ring cycle for the Metropolitan Opera revolutionary. He used the word again in a recent interview at his office, as he spoke of the “trials and tribulations” of executing Mr. Lepage’s “superhuman,” technically daunting concept in a repertory theater “against amazing odds.”

[...]

Despite the technical problems and the stinging barbs the production has received from many critics, Mr. Gelb sees the Lepage Ring as emblematic of his mission to bring the latest theatrical thinking and technology to the Met. “Over all for me, on balance, I think it’s a remarkable experience,” he said. Yet even he is a little worried: “I reserve final assessment until I see how it all works out technically, when presented complete in the space of a week.”

To be fair to Mr. Gelb in the matter of his defenses of the Lepage Ring, he at present finds himself in a seriously difficult position: he has to defend his original decision on this staging against the reality of now having on his hands a clear white elephant — a multi-million-dollar white elephant; by far the most costly production in Met history.

Back at the planning stages of the project, the Lepage staging must have looked like it would be THE perfect solution for the Met: a staging that used spectacular — yes, even "revolutionary" — new technology to present Wagner's Ring the way Wagner himself conceived it. In one fell swoop, Mr. Gelb must have thought, it would satisfy both "progressives" and "traditionalists" and the Met would be the beneficiary in terms of critical accolades and ticket sales. Unhappily, things didn't work out that way. Neither "progressives" nor "traditionalists" were satisfied, and the critical response from all quarters — both print and digital, professional and amateur — was largely anything but enthusiastic.

The problem Mr. Gelb faced in the planning stage was that, because of the nature of the staging, it was difficult, if not entirely impossible, to make anything even approaching a trustworthy assessment of the staging until it was fully a fait accompli, and so, at the time, he had to rely almost exclusively on how the thing looked on paper, so to speak; a hugely risky gamble given the costs involved; a gamble that, as things turned out, Mr. Gelb lost — big time. But, as always in the arts, and particularly in the performing arts, no risks taken is a prescription for stagnation, and so perhaps we all — and that very much includes us — should cut Mr. Gelb just a modicum of slack when it concerns his desperate if impotent defenses of this failed staging. We all can afford to give him that much.

Smashingly Good Concept

Leave it to the Brits to come up with this smashingly good and perfectly apposite concept:

When Alex Ross started writing The Rest is Noise in 2000 he never expected that a book about 20th-century classical music would go on to sell 250,000 copies and win literary prizes around the world – including the Guardian First Book Award. Now the book's extraordinary success has scaled new heights with the announcement of a year-long festival at London's Southbank Centre which aims to bring it to life.

The Rest is Noise festival will take in almost 100 concerts, films and debates, starting on 19 January 2013 with a performance by the London Philharmonic. Conducted by Vladimir Jurowski, the orchestra will play a Richard Strauss programme including the final scene of Salome – the opera whose premiere in 1906 is the "year zero" moment of Ross's book

RTWT here.

Would that some NYC genius had come up with the concept first.

Our congratulations to Mr. Ross. An apropos and well-deserved tribute.

Our New Hero

[NOTE: This entry has been updated (1) as of 3:29 PM Eastern on 11 Jan. See below.]

If this report is true as related, New York Philharmonic music director Alan Gilbert is our new hero.

Tuesday night's New York Philharmonic performance of the Mahler Ninth was stopped dead by an unusual instrument — the iPhone.

[...]

"Mr. Gilbert was visibly annoyed by the persistent ring-tone, so much that he quietly cut the orchestra," the concertgoer reports. She related how the orchestra's music director turned on the podium towards the offender. The pause lasted a good "three or four minutes. It might have been two. It seemed long."

Mr. Gilbert asked the man, sitting [in the audience] in front of the concertmaster: "Are you finished?"

RTWT here.

---

Update (3:29 PM Eastern on 11 Jan): More from The New York Times.

Ethically Compromised Funding

British blogger Bob Shingleton of On An Overgrown Path has been running a series of posts that addresses what he calls the "ethically compromised funding" of classical music by which he means funding provided by "ethically compromised" companies such as cigarette manufacturers and greedy mega-financial institutions whose moneymaking practices are, in part, legally and ethically questionable. Despite his claim that it's his intention "to inform rather than condemn" and bring "transparency" to the practice, which claim, we feel bound to say, has about it more than a whiff of the disingenuous, it's clear this sort of funding is something of which Mr. Shingleton deeply disapproves.

We find Mr. Shingleton's position puzzling. Why disapprove? In our view, there's nothing of which to disapprove in such funding. We would go even further and say, if somewhat rhetorically, that, apart from funding by outright criminal agencies such as, for instance, the mafia, there is no such thing as "ethically compromised funding" in the sense that Mr. Shingleton uses the label. So what that tobacco companies such as British American Tobacco and Japan Tobacco International, "manufacturer[s] of the leading cause of preventable death," as Mr. Shingleton has it, support classical music organizations such as the Royal Opera House Covent Garden and the London Philharmonic? Even if one accepts Mr. Shingleton's characterization of these tobacco companies (which we do not), is their money thereby tainted and ought therefore to be refused, or is it more meet and does it make more sense to look upon the donation of that money to these classical music organizations as an effort on the part of the companies to partially compensate for the "evils" of the products they manufacture? Clearly, we favor the latter view.

Or put another way, there is no such thing as "dirty money" unless it be money earned through outright criminal activity. Any other view of the matter is the product of individual moral judgment on how the money was earned by the funder, and, by and large, moral judgments of this sort are notoriously and infamously arbitrary, not to mention tendentious.

Or put yet another way: stop whinging and take the money and run!

The Conductor's Prime Directive

New York magazine's classical music critic Justin Davidson tries his hand(s) out on the podium as a conductor and writes about it in an article for New York titled, What Does a Conductor Do?. In that article Mr. Davidson quotes trenchant advice to conductors from world-renowned Dutch conductor Bernard Haitink; advice that, laconic as it is, should be taken by every conductor as his(her) Prime Directive when standing in front of an orchestra in either rehearsal or performance. It says that conductors should always remember when waving their arms and hands about on the podium that "the musicians are very busy with playing. You should not distract them."

Sage advice indeed.

More On The Regietheater vs. "Traditional" Front

It might be thought we devote an inordinate amount of space on S&F to the malignancy in opera known as Eurotrash Regietheater the subject being almost an idée fixe on this blog since its inception. In our estimation, however, the subject can never be addressed too often as, save only the financial concerns of opera production, it's today the single most pressing and fundamental production problem in the world of opera; one that it seems will be with us well into the foreseeable future.

Recently, on a venerable online opera forum, the battle between advocates of Regietheater opera stagings and what, for want of a better term, is called "traditional" stagings broke out anew. Wrote one forum member, an inveterate cheerleader for Regietheater opera stagings of even the most extreme sort:

I have nothing against the "romantically pictorial" [style of opera staging; i.e., "traditional" staging] or whatever you want to call it assuming that a) it's done in an interesting manner and b) it's not the only choice at the buffet. Taking a) first. My issue with a lot of example of this style of production is that it makes for very handsome still photographs but a very dull theater experience.

To which we responded:

More sophistry from the champion Regietheater cheerleader.

So, the "Romantic-pictorial" style of opera production tends to "mak[e] for very handsome still photographs but a very dull theater experience," does it? You mean as opposed to the Regietheater style of opera production that so often tends to make for Eurotrash — grotesque, wholly irrelevant distortions of the sense and spirit of the composer's concept of whatever opera it corrupts?

What you savage in the "Romantic-pictorial" style of opera production is IN NO WAY an inherent characteristic of that style any more than the Regietheater style of opera production is inherently Eurotrash. In the right hands, either style of production can make for vital, dramatically exciting and illuminating theater the only constraint on both being that the sense and spirit of the composer's concept — the *composer's* concept, NOT the director's — be kept inviolable throughout. That's relatively easy to accomplish with the "Romantic-pictorial" style of opera production, hugely more difficult with Regietheater which style of opera production requires a director possessing enormous insight and gift both musically and dramatically in order to carry off successfully. Is it any wonder, then, that Regietheater opera productions so often and so overwhelmingly end up degenerating into unmitigated Eurotrash?

Not a bit of it.

And so the beat goes on.

Betrayal

[NOTE: This entry has been updated (1) as of 11:43 PM Eastern on 15 Dec. See below.]

Norman Lebrecht of the blog Slipped Disc points to an article in the Neue Musikzeitung wherein Matthias Jena, the Bavarian trades union (DGB) chairman which union represents the workers at the Bayreuther Festspiele, accuses the current Festspiele management and board of directors of forgetting the history of the Festspiele and the ideals of its founder Richard Wagner by limiting the availability of tickets and pricing them out of the reach of the ordinary German working man. "Today's festival management and board of directors have buried the legacy of Richard Wagner on the Green Hill," said Herr Jena.

Indeed they have, and not just in the matter of tickets. They've betrayed the Festspiele's very raison d'être: to present model performances of its founder's stageworks as he conceived them.

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Update (11:43 PM Eastern on 15 Dec): We've had an interesting — and curious — response to our above entry from a member of one of the opera forums to which we posted a link to the entry. Wrote this member:

Not only has the Festival Management remembered its own history, to judge from the recent 'Parsifal' they are trying to come to terms with it. Whatever you might say about the current crop of productions, they are -- with the exception of the dreadfully dull and dreary 'Tristan' -- boldly innovative. If that is not in accordance with the ideals of the founder of the Festival, then I do not know what is.

To which our response was:

"Boldly innovative"(!)? Is that what you call the current _Parsifal_, _Tannhäuser_, and _Lohengrin_?

Well, I'll allow they may indeed be innovative, but they're not, by any stretch, *Wagner's* operas and music-dramas. What they are are Herheim's _Parsifal_, Baumgarten's _Tannhäuser_, and Neuenfels's _Lohengrin_, all using Wagner's hijacked music and text. From what we know of Wagner, do you imagine he would have sanctioned *any* of these using his name, never mind his music and text, were he able today to voice his feelings, not to even speak of considering them in accordance with his ideals?

Well, the question is, of course, moot. But from everything we know of Wagner and his ideals (which is considerable), far from sanctioning these grotesque Eurotrash outrages he'd be more than likely to reach for the most damaging weapon at his disposal, his pen, and give these self-involved, self-serving, self-indulgent vandals and hijackers the thrashing of their lives.