Sounds & Fury

Chéreau's Centennial Ring

In 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 on stage 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 way 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 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 expressed 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 placed 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 things 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 places it in a specific identifiable era — past, present, or future — or in a specific identifiable location is fundamentally faithless to Wagner's intention and to the dictates and requirements of the score (text and music). Further, the central player in the world-drama of the Ring is Nature itself; Nature in its most primal state and at its largest scale and in its most profound depths; Nature in direct contact with man. Any staging of the Ring that doesn't realize that in its staging -- either representationally, abstractly, or by suggestion – is, again, fundamentally faithless to Wagner's intention and to 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 on stage Chéreau's own, postmodern "vision". In short, it's a horror, as I've already termed 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.

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.

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.

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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.

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.

Bless You!, Martin Bernheimer

The venerable and almost always right Martin Bernheimer on Bernstein's Mass:

On Friday, Marin Alsop led a cast of hundreds in a noble, possibly futile, attempt at aesthetic resuscitation. The object of her loving labour was Bernstein’s Mass. Profoundly showbizzy, pompously pious and pretentiously trendy, it was a mess when it inaugurated the Kennedy Center in 1971, and it still is a mess.

Word!

RTWT here.

The Straw Man Cometh — Yet Once Again

Depending on one's mood at the moment, it's either annoying or comical to encounter one or both of the current favorite straw men set up by certain champions of pop culture in the so-called "Culture Wars" as it concerns so-called high and pop culture in the arts generally, and music in particular.

The first of these is the Graying Audience For Classical Music straw man (for a neat trashing of this straw man, see here); the second, the straw man of the flawed and ill-considered attempts by out-of-touch, old-fogey, snobbish high-culture types to "convert" younger people to their way of thinking about music. As one of the usual suspects, an indefatigable champion of pop culture, lately put this last:

Younger people (which by now means people 40 or younger...) don't make distinctions between high and popular culture, or at least not distinctions of value. That includes what used to be thought of as high culture values, like being thoughtful, noncommercial, deep, or (more simply) serious.

People in the older culture can ignore this, or try to fight it, but that's dangerous for them. They simply cut themselves off, not just from contemporary life, but from a lot of thoughtful, noncommercial, deep, and serious art. And if they're trying to make converts for high culture, than they lose bigtime, because their case won't seem plausible to the people they're trying to reach. It's a very bad strategy — obviously! — to go to smart, educated people, and say, "Listen to our music, because yours is trash."

The very notion that "people in the older culture" give so much as a rat's ass about "mak[ing] converts for high culture" among the "40 or younger" crowd (the "smart," "educated" young crowd referred to above, not the primary- and secondary-school young) is nothing short of risible. Other than misguided champions of pop culture, the only people who concern themselves with attempts at such purblind, circle-squaring exercises are well-paid marketing suits and the commercial and managerial high-culture interests who pay them to find ways to put more butts in seats.

Misguided champions of pop culture have the curious notion that it's somehow a bad thing to "make distinctions between high and popular culture" even though it's blazingly clear that not only are there clear distinctions between the two, but a vast gulf that, in one direction — from pop to high — is all but unbridgeable for the overwhelming majority of those who've not been specially schooled when very young to prepare them to be able to understand and appreciate the complexities of things high cultural, music in particular; complexities almost by definition all but totally absent from things inhabiting the pop cultural domain, again, music in particular.

One is sorely tempted to assign or speculate on the tendentious motives behind that perverse sort of thinking on the part of these misguided champions of pop culture. But identifying those motives would, ultimately, serve no useful purpose. It's more than sufficient to simply recognize the perversity and wrongheadedness of that thinking, and accordingly dismiss it from consideration entirely.

Heads-Up

In conjunction with the release of the paperback edition of his award-winning book, The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century, New Yorker music critic Alex Ross has announced a new expansion of the book's companion blog, The Rest Is Noise, to include a newly compiled audio-illustrated Glossary and a newly expanded Audio Guide to help sharpen readers' appreciation of what's discussed in the text.

Neato supplements to a neato book.

Oh Dear

[Note: This post has been updated (2) as of 11:23 AM Eastern on 21 Oct. See below.]

This is not encouraging:

The composer's [Richard Wagner's] great-granddaughter, 30-year-old Katharina Wagner, has a lot on her plate. She has just taken over the Bayreuth opera festival, together with her half-sister Eva Wagner-Pasquier, winning a drawn-out power struggle with her cousin [Nike Wagner]. At the premiere of her uninspiring "Rienzi" in Bremen on Oct. 11, it was easy to imagine that all this had distracted her.

Set in 14th-century Rome, "Rienzi" is an epic seven-hour drama describing the rise and fall of a populist leader whose power goes to his head. He promises peace and delivers bloodshed, until finally the people turn against him. Later in life, the composer himself was a little embarrassed about the work which made him famous overnight (he was 29 when he conducted the premiere in Dresden in 1842.) Katharina has thankfully given us a four-hour version. It still feels long.

She has also turned it from drama to farce, especially the first two acts. Megalomania becomes vanity, violence becomes impudence in her interpretation. Rienzi is a preening, prancing, buffoonish showman, a media politician with a penchant for kitsch and an out-of-control ego. Part Liberace, part Silvio Berlusconi.

But, then, we hardly expected anything more — or different — of Katharina.

RTWT here.

---

Update (9:16 PM Eastern on 13 Oct): Different voice; same assessment.

Update 2 (11:23 AM Eastern on 21 Oct): And yet another voice, but essentially the same assessment if more kindly put.

More On The Plain Dealer-Rosenberg Affair

Joshua Kosman, classical music critic of the San Francisco Chronicle, adds his voice to the virtual flood of critical commentary on the squalid Plain Dealer-Rosenberg affair, and it's the most trenchant commentary yet. Begins Mr. Kosman:

Newspaper writers know a lot of ways to lose our jobs. We can cut ethical corners by taking money or gifts from people we write about. We can plagiarize, invent sources, file stories from places we haven't been — the list goes on.

A couple of weeks ago Donald Rosenberg, the longtime and deeply respected classical music critic for the Cleveland Plain Dealer, found a new one. He attended concerts by the Cleveland Orchestra and wrote what he thought about them.

Now, you might suppose that that was more or less the job description, but you'd be wrong. Rosenberg's task, as his editors conceived it, was to attend concerts by the Cleveland Orchestra and write complimentary things about them — and particularly about the orchestra's music director, Franz Welser-Möst.

RTWT here.

(Our previous posts on this matter can be read here and here.)

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.)

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.

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.

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.

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.)