Sounds & Fury

Where We Were Wrong

No one is more pleased than we to report that, on the evidence of the streaming audio webcast of the first act, our initial fears that a "train wreck of Wagnerian proportions [was] in the making" for the Parsifal that is the opening production of the 2008 Bayreuther Festspiele were ill-founded musically. Musically, the performance by all, Italian conductor Daniele Gatti very much included, was just fine overall. Yes, we've a few complaints, but they all concern matters of more or less esoteric detail, and have mostly but not entirely to do with matters of tempi, and that, also mostly but not entirely, as it concerns the difficult — and decidedly esoteric — matter of internal metric pulse that's so critical to the proper reading of this most difficult and elusive of Wagner's scores. Our pleasure — and relief — that our initial expectations were in error musically preclude our proffering at this time a laundry list of our more or less niggling complaints as proffering such a list at this time would serve only to make us appear surly at best.

On to Act II!

For The Record

George Hunka of Superfluities Redux has posted a separate addendum to his post on new music on which original post we commented here, and Kyle Gann of PostClassic has posted a lengthy expansion of his previous thoughts on the same matter here.

All these posts addressed the problem of "difficult" or "difficult to understand" new music where audiences are concerned (Mr. Gann's piece focused on complexity in music the tacit assumption being that in music complexity and difficult to understand have always a hand in glove relationship each to the other which is not always the case by any means and rather blurs the argument). But to our way of thinking, that perceived problem is misidentified the misidentification due entirely a misunderstanding where music is concerned.

We responded to Mr. Hunka's addendum in a comment in that addendum's comments section which comment we'd like to make a part of the public record of Sounds & Fury. Accordingly, a reprint of that comment follows instanter.

It's almost oxymoronic to speak of "difficult" or "difficult to understand" music [where audiences are concerned] unless one is using the terms as euphemisms for the repulsive. The concept of difficult plays no part in the reception of genuine music by a listener. It's a fundamental characteristic of all genuine music — underline, all; there are no exceptions — that it resonates with or makes its impact on listeners, positive or negative, sans any participation by the intellect the determiner of difficult and not difficult, and the effect is immediate. Genuine music in fact bypasses intellect altogether by its very nature, and engaging the intellect to receive it actually requires an act of will. That's almost a definition of genuine music. Any music that doesn't act in that way has no right to the title. Since you mention Wagner (incorrectly in your stated context, BTW; that honor goes rather to Liszt from whom Wagner filched much if not most of his "atonality" [Mr. Hunka had written that atonality "began with Wagner and Debussy, not Schoenberg and the Viennese School"]), the huge majority of the first audiences for, say, Wagner's Tristan (as opposed to professionals with axes to grind) understood little or nothing about its "difficult" music, but that didn't prevent them being emotionally captivated and overwhelmed by it.

I could do a full-length treatise on this thesis, and as soon as I can locate someone willing to pay me cold, hard cash up-front for my trouble, I will.

ACD

Gird Your Loins

[Note: This post has been updated (1) as of 6:43 PM Eastern on 23 Jul. See below.]

Time to start girding your loins. The 2008 Bayreuther Festspiele opens this Friday, 25 July, with a new production of Parsifal with Konzept by Norwegian director Stefan Herheim, and with Italian conductor Daniele Gatti on the podium (he's currently music director of the Teatro Comunale di Bologna opera house as well as the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra).

From what little we've heard of the production (Eurotrash in spades, natch, one tipoff being that the staging requires the services of a professional stunt man — a Festspiele first — as a stand-in for Christopher Ventris, the Parsifal, to take a 20-foot leap off who-knows-what followed by a few-minutes prancing about going who-knows-where), a cast of singers the names of none of whom we've ever heard before (Gurnemanz: Kwangchul Youn; Parsifal: Christopher Ventris; Amfortas: Detlef Roth; Kundry: Mihoko Fujimura; Klingsor: Thomas Jesatko), and an Italian opera conductor on the podium, we suspect a train wreck of Wagnerian proportions is in the making. If, however, you'd like to hear a live streaming audio feed from the Festspielhaus, you can log onto Bayern 4 Klassik radio on the Web beginning at 9:55 AM, Eastern, by following this link:

• Windows Media Player

Or Bartók Radio (same time) by following this link:

• Real Player

If we're awake and up in time, we'll probably tune in for at least a quick listen, loins fully girded, of course. We won't, however, be setting our alarm clock.

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Update (6:43 PM Eastern on 23 Jul): Things may not be as catastrophic as they first appeared to us they might be. Two members of the CM&OF have responded to the above with these reassuring nuggets of information:

"Wagnertuba" writes:

I have heard of most of these singers, and they are experienced Wagnerians. Daniele Gatti is a talented conductor who has conducted all over with considerable success. I don't know how good he will be in Wagner, but the fact that he's Italian is not necessarily a bad thing when it comes to this composer. After all, Toscanini was closely associated with Wagner....

And "Daland" has this to say:

From Italy, here some details on Daniele Gatti: He’s no more in Bologna, where he worked close to Thielemann (and this can explain why he’s been called to Bayreuth). In January this year he conducted a most appreciated concert-performance of Parsifal in Rome, with the prestigious Accademia di Santa Cecilia orchestra (whose director is today Antonio Pappano, a long time Bayreuth guest). [...] He’s very much acquainted with Wagner and the German romantic and post-romantic musical school.

Sounds encouraging.

Our thanks to these two most generous informants. We now feel somewhat more sanguine about this opening.

Inferiority Or Outrage?

[Note: This post has been updated (1) as of 7:17 PM Eastern on 24 Jul. See below.]

Playwright, critic, and blogger George Hunka of Superfluities Redux adds his voice to the growing chorus censuring The Guardian's Joe Queenan for what he had to say about "modern" or new music, and for how he went about saying it.

Once all [the] poor rhetorical flourishes are chipped away, one is left with a sense that what drives all this is the emergence of an inferiority complex — that Queenan just doesn't "get it." Setting aside for the moment the assumption that art is something that one has to "get," whatever that means, one doesn't need to get past more than an introductory course in Freud to recognise that Queenan's attack on this music is an act of aggression towards that which makes him feel inferior.

Hmmm.

Well, even though we're in sympathy with much of what Mr. Queenan had to say in his piece, we must concede he unquestionably painted with a brush broad enough to paint Fifth Avenue without ever once having to lift the bristles from the pavement.

But is Mr. Queenan's attack really "an act of aggression towards that which makes him feel inferior," or is it rather an expression of his sense of outrage at our postmodern art-is-whatever-the-artist-says-is-art Zeitgeist wherein snake oil pimped by charlatans is being bought wholesale and with enthusiasm by those best equipped by native intelligence and refined education and sensibilities to know better — most especially by those best equipped by native intelligence and refined education and sensibilities to know better?

We suspect the latter is more the case than the former.

But, then, perhaps that's just us.

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Update (7:17 PM Eastern on 24 Jul): For more on this, see this post.

The Arts Critic In A Non-Elitist World

There's lately been a remarkable amount of breast-beating going around the MSM critical community provoked by the recent rash of forced "retiring" of MSM arts critics nationwide from the MSM print pubs they served for many years — a few, for several decades. Their letting go was justified almost invariably by the suits at these pubs as having largely to do with the present and growing hard economic pressures threatening ink-on-paper publications, most particularly in the face of what is seen as a rapidly growing trend for ordinary folk to get their daily dose of critical arts commentary on the Web via writings to be found on an uncountable number of blogs by non-elitist bloggers writing non-elitist reviews in non-elitist language and in non-elitist terms ("A solid two thumbs up!") that a non-elitist public can (you should pardon the expression) relate to.

Well, it's a non-elitist culture we inhabit today, and we suppose the development of such a trend was only to be expected. It's now a prole's world out there, after all, and in a prole's world the first casualty is always and inevitably the arts. Not that the arts have ever been a high-priority item in America at any time in its history, and perhaps a thumbs-up (or -down) judgment is all The People need to satisfy their requirements. But while a count of thumbs judgment is perfectly adequate, even precisely what's called for, when reviewing the performance of, say, different brands of air conditioners, it tells us very little — almost nothing, really — about anything in the world of the arts. Are bloggers up to providing much more than that?

Why the hell not? Bloggers simply write in a different medium, and, pace Dr. McLuhan, the medium ain't necessarily the message. Problem is, very few if any bloggers are well enough informed and richly enough gifted to write like this:

When Mozart placed a loud, dark, bone-chilling chord of D minor in the first bars of Don Giovanni, he set a new precedent for operatic curtain-raisers: instead of charming his listeners into paying attention, he would stun them into submission, with intimations of the awakening of the dead and the opening of the gates of Hell. Modern scholarship suggests that Mozart may have derived aspects of his famous gesture from none other than Antonio Salieri, that most unfairly abused of composers, whose opera La Grotta di Trofonio, premièred two years before Don Giovanni, contains some strikingly similar demonic noises. Ever since, composers have tried to outdo each other with carefully engineered hammer blows of fate. Verdi’s Otello begins with a rumbling six-note dissonance; Strauss’s Elektra with a souped-up D-minor detonation; Alban Berg’s Lulu with a sharply stabbing figure that foreshadows the heroine’s fate.

Bernd Alois Zimmermann’s 1965 opera Die Soldaten, the story of a woman’s degradation at the hands of a series of heartless soldiers, has a prelude of such stupefying intensity that it stands for the moment as the ne plus ultra. The full orchestra sustains an enormous dissonance spread out over many octaves. Beneath it, the timpani pound out, "in iron rhythm," the note D — perhaps a nod backward to Don Giovanni. The onslaught returns several times as the prelude unfolds, though it periodically gives way to a frenzy of competing voices: the trumpets tangle in independent rhythms, violins buzz around maniacally in their upper registers, the timpani repeatedly fall out of synch with the principal one-two pulse. The music is at once hyper-organized and deranged, a death machine that leaves chaos in its wake.*

So what?, you'll say. Suppose critical writing like that disappeared from the face of the Earth forever and was replaced by a multitude of thumbs-upers and -downers? The wisdom of crowds, and all that, you know. Would the world come to an end?

We suppose not. But, then, at that point we wouldn't much care one way or the other.

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* From, "Infernal Opera: Zimmermann’s Die Soldaten at the Park Avenue Armory", Alex Ross, The New Yorker, issue dated 21 July 2008. RTWT here.

Rush To Judgment

[Note: This post has been updated (2) as of 11:58 AM Eastern on 7 Jul. See below.]

In a piece for the Financial Times titled, "Critics In A Hostile World", veteran Pulitzer Prize winning classical music critic, Martin Bernheimer, bemoans what looks to him like the imminent extinction of the professional arts critic.

These are hard times for journalism in America. Newspapers are at best shrinking, at worst folding. Fewer than 10 cities still support more than a single daily. Writers face buy-outs, lay-offs or firing. The papers that survive are making do with fewer employees, fewer pages, fewer articles and fewer opinion pieces. Critics are looking more and more like dodos.

And the proximate cause of this distressing trend?

A primary cause of our imminent extinction must be the Internet. An impatient generation is succumbing to the free and easy lure of computer enlightenment. Sure, not all those who cover the arts in old-fashioned print are paragons — still, most do have sufficient education and/or experience to justify their views. On the Web, anyone can impersonate an expert. Anyone can blog. Credentials don’t count. All views are equal. Some sort of criticism may survive the American media revolution, but professional criticism may not.

Essentially, our civilisation is tilting towards anti-authoritarian contests. Audiences, not judges, select winners. Call it the American Idolisation of culture. On TV, contestants get voted off without explanation. Quality is measured by thumbs, up or down. Scholarly analyses have turned into irrelevant extravagances for snobs.

As constant readers of Sounds & Fury are aware, Mr. Bernheimer is one of a handful of professional classical music critics whose writings we regularly single out for praise, and we find ourself in full agreement with much of what he has to say above. But his intemperate assessment that, "On the Web, anyone can impersonate an expert. Anyone can blog. Credentials don’t count. All views are equal," is overblown even as rhetoric.

There can be no argument with Mr. Bernheimer's assertion that anyone can blog. Indeed, anyone can. Almost no one, however, can "impersonate an expert" successfully in the arts blogosphere for very long without in some measure actually being one, the blogger's lack of "credentials" notwithstanding. In fact, the imposture will be sniffed out far more quickly, and punished far more decisively in the blogosphere than in the print world.

So much for "All views are equal."

We share Mr. Bernheimer's concern with and his dismay at the seemingly unstoppable rise of the rabid equalitarianism and populism that today so malignantly infects our American cultural life. It's manifest everywhere, and most perniciously in the high arts, a domain in which classical music arguably occupies the highest station. Mr. Bernheimer, however, has misidentified the culprit. The cause of that seemingly unstoppable and alarming rise lies elsewhere and deeper than blogs, bloggers, and the Internet which are merely the most widespread and visible instances of its expression. Where and what that elsewhere may be we, as a non-expert, are incompetent to identify adequately, and so leave its full exposure and suggestions for a means to defeat it to those best qualified to accomplish those urgent tasks.

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Update (5:24 PM Eastern on 5 Jul): Lisa Hirsch of Iron Tongue of Midnight has a response of her own to Mr. Bernheimer's article.

Update 2 (11:58 AM Eastern on 7 Jul): James Reel, professional arts journalist and critic for Arizona Public Media, adds his thoughts on the matter on his blog, Cue Sheet.

Refreshing News

In a post of 10 May of this year, we had, in part, this to say concerning the work of classical music reviewer and journalist, Anne Midgette:

We've often in the past come down fairly hard on classical music reviewer and journalist Anne Midgette (most famously — or as famously as anything written on this blog can be considered famous — here), but since her move from The New York Times to The Washington Post in January of this year to take the place of the Post's on-leave Pulitzer Prize winning chief classical music critic, Tim Page, and where her official designation is, "interim chief classical music critic," Miss Midgette has been turning out reviews and commentary that are of consistently high quality and well worth one's time reading.

Apparently, The Washington Post agrees.

Amid the current trend to the contrary among newspapers, The Washington Post last week hired a permanent staff music critic to succeed Tim Page. Anne Midgette, who has been in the job on an interim basis since January, when Page took a leave of absence, has been hired officially as the Post’s classical music critic.

“In light of all the lay-offs around the country, they’re really bucking the trend in committing to serious arts journalism,” said a delighted Midgette in a brief telephone conversation.

The newspaper recently completed a round of voluntary buy-outs (of which Page availed himself, to start an arts journalism program on the west coast), offering early-retirement packages to some 200 employees; half of them accepted, having been asked to make their decision by May 15. That same day, the staff classical music critic job was posted.

“It’s fantastic that, after a round of buyouts, the music critic was one of the first people they hired,” said Midgette.

RTWT here.

Extracts From A Schimpflexikon: Special Wagner Edition

The more we see and hear of Richard Wagner, the more are we convinced that music is not his special birthright, is not for him an articulate language. ... Either Richard Wagner is a desperate charlatan endowed with worldly skill and vigorous purpose enough to persuade a gaping crowd that the nauseous compound he manufactures has some previous inner virtue; or else he is a self-deceived enthusiast ... too utterly destitute of any perception of musical beauty to recognize the worthlessness of his credentials.

—Henry Smart in the London Sunday Times, quoted in Musical World, 12 May 1855

Look at Lohengrin. ... It is poison — rank poison. All we can make out is an incoherent mass of rubbish with no more real pretension to be called music than the jangling and clashing of gongs and other uneuphonious instruments with which the Chinamen, on the brow of a hill, fondly thought to scare away our English "blue-jackets."

—Musical World, London, 30 June 1855

Wagner] affirms that national melody is unhealthy and unreal, being simply the narrow-souled emanation from oppressed peoples.... The symmetry of form ... ignored, or else abandoned; the consistency of keys and their relations ... overthrown, contemned, demolished; the charm of rhythmic measure ... destroyed; the true basis of harmony, and the indispensable government of modulation, cast away, for a reckless, wild, extravagant and demagogic cacophony, the symbol of profligate libertinage! Are we then to have music in no definite key whatever? ... This man, this Wagner, this author of Tannhäuser, of Lohengrin, and so many other hideous things — and above all, the overture to Der Fliegende Holländer, the most hideous and detestable of the whole — this preacher of the "Future," was born to feed spiders with flies, not to make happy the heart of man with beautiful melody and harmony.

—Musical World, London, 30 June 1855

The second part of the program began with a prelude and introduction of an opera by Monsieur Wagner, entitled, Tristan and Isolde. On this text, the composer certainly has surpassed anything that one can imagine in confusion, disorder, and impotence. One might say it was a challenge to common sense and the most elementary requirements of the ear. Had I not heard this monstrous piling of discordant sounds three times, I would not believe it possible.

—P. Scudo, L'Année Musicale, Paris, 1861

Wagner is a man devoid of all talent. His melodies, where they are found at all, are in worse taste than Verdi and [Friedrich von] Flotow and more sour than the stalest Mendelssohn. All this is covered up with a thick layer of rot. His orchestra is decorative, but coarse. The violins squeal throughout on the highest notes and throw the listener into a state of extreme nervousness. I left without waiting for the concert to end, and I assure you that had I stayed longer, both I and my wife would have a fit of hysterics.

—Letter from César Cui to Rimsky-Korsakov, 9 March 1863

With the last chords of the Twilight of the Gods, I had a feeling of liberation from captivity. It may be that the Nibelungs' Ring [sic] is a very great work, but there never has been anything more tedious and more dragged-out than this rigmarole. The agglomeration of the most intricate and contrived harmonies, colorlessness of all that is sung on the stage, interminably long dialogues — all this fatigues the nerves to the utmost degree. So, what is the aim of Wagner's reform? In the past, music was supposed to delight people, and now we are tormented and exhausted by it.

—From a letter of Tchaikovsky's from Vienna, to his brother, Modest, 20 August 1876

I do not believe that a single composition of Wagner will survive him.

—From a letter by Moritz Hauptmann, 3 February 1849

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

What's Wrong With This Picture?

[Note: This post has been updated (2) as of 8:53 AM Eastern on 30 Jun. See below.]

The following are part of German-born director Elke Neidhardt's justification of her rewriting of the stage action and updating of the setting of Mozart's Don Giovanni in an Opera Australia production to be premiered at the Sydney Opera House on 5 July. All quotes have been taken from articles in Opera Australia, The Australian, and The Sydney Morning Herald.

• To create [opera] productions [today] that resonate with contemporary audiences, directors, perhaps more so than conductors, have to stay tuned to the spirit of the [contemporary] age. Audiences used to film and television will not, and should not, accept traditional [i.e., the composer's original] treatment of old material.

• [Today] it's virtually impossible to have that [viz., the coming to life of the Commendatore's statue in Don Giovanni] — you cannot portray that kind of miracle [today] unless you give a [today-acceptable] reason.

• [O]ffending a statue[!] is not good enough [reason for the downfall and demise of Giovanni]. That would be pretty hard to sell today.

• When watching Don Giovanni, audiences are required to believe in God and revenge and hell; in the notion that if we are not good boys and girls, we will be punished. Who buys into that today?

• In my treatment, [Giovanni is] a playboy who parties and beds women and takes drugs — these people exist more now than then

• Judged by the values of our own world, Giovanni is not that bad. He is thrilled by the conquest and he is not interested in forming relationships with women, but that is really all one can hold against him. Men who will not commit to relationships are common today — I don't think he deserves the demise he gets.

• You cannot do nodding, walking statues in the year 2008. You would be laughed off the stage anywhere else in the world except in Australia.

Oh? Is that a fact (may be applied to any or all the above).

Self-serving, self-involved, postmodern vandal!

(Our thanks to down-under blogger Sarah Noble of Prima la musica, poi le parole — who, in her excellent preceding linked post, displays more temperance on the subject than we're capable of mustering — for the links to the Australian press articles from which the above quotes were drawn.)

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Update (11:08 PM Eastern on 29 Jun): The above post brought the following aggrieved response posted to the Opera-L eMail list:

Oh please - enough of this prejudice. I mean prejudice in its etymological sense of pre-judging. This production has not even opened but is condemned.

This is such a common tendency on this list - judging productions on little evidence other than the written word. It seems to me there are so many self-appointed guardians of 'what Verdi/Wagner/ Mozart etc etc wanted'. Yet they were all theatrical and operatic progressives - concerned with meaning being conveyed to a contemporary audience.

Extending meaning to our time seems to be such a horror for some people. Any theatrical work only finds meaning in the minds of its audience.

Thankfully I live in a city where a 'conventional' production is greeted with the same outrage as avant-garde productions in the USA. We Europeans (not all of us I know - but opera often attracts a more conservative audience for all sorts of reasons) actively welcome re- interpretation. The houses are full on a diet of re-interpretation. Berlin audiences on the whole know their operas - but attract new audiences through radical re-interpretation.

Again and again on this list there is the same contempt evinced for 'Eurotrash' production - principally from the USA. I have asked this question before and never been answered - Are we all masochists in a city like Berlin?

Go to your conventional productions and enjoy them. We enjoy ours. You are not even seeing them but object often on the basis of a short clip on Youtube - do you want to dictate production styles for the world at large?

Cultural imperialism must have its limits.

Our posted response to those remarks (which we here reprint without further comment) read:

From Elke Neidhardt's own ignorant, even imbecile, remarks (those quoted in my S&F article), one is perfectly justified in prejudging her new production of _Don Giovanni_ to be yet another grotesque piece of Eurotrash, and yet another instance of the egregious, self-serving, _Regietheater_ vandalizing of yet another near-perfect opera masterpiece. Your perverse notion that these loathsome _Regietheater_ productions are simply efforts to "[e]xten[d] [the operas'] meaning to our time" is as ignorant and imbecile as anything Ms. Neidhardt had to say, for in every case -- no exceptions -- the "reinterpretations" produced by these pernicious _Regietheater_ vandals succeed only in trivializing and circumscribing meaning, never in expanding it, or in making it more "relevant". And that, at bottom, is the crux of the argument against these postmodern vandals and their _Regietheater_ travesties.

Update 2 (8:53 AM Eastern on 30 Jun): More from Opera-L in response to the above post.

I was going to change the Subject line to "When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth!" but decided to keep to the rules of the class. I will also hate myself the next day for wasting my time in such a useless effort, but.....

The idea that an opera, after it has been produced, cannot be interpreted by another artist in a different light is simply stunningly flaccid. Fact One. The composers did it themselves during their lifetimes: "You want a BALLET in my Tannhauser?!?!" (Gulp) "When do you need that by?" "My Lucia rewritten in French and changed?!?!" (Gulp) "And you need that when?" All composers (who had their operas performed) have the same history of easy compliance in making their operas audience friendly.

Second, artists were always adapting their image to the audience of the time (note to file: the baby Jesus was not actually born in Tuscany) but regarded the story itself as eternally relevant.

There is no intellectual argument that opera was meant, at the time it was composed, to be something to hang in the Louvre with guards around. It was not valid then and it is not valid now. Mozart, for example, by using Beaumarchais, was risking trouble because his plays were not just "pushing the envelope" but actually revolutionary. There were poor sods behind bars in the Chateau du Vincennes for much less! (In the newly refurbished donjon, you can see their graffiti still preserved.) If the regime had not been so tired and corrupt, it might have turned bad for our Salzburgian.

To which we responded (again, here reprinted without further comment):

My congratulations to you on invoking just about every lame straw man invoked by the "progressive" defenders and champions of Eurotrash to discredit both the person and the opinions of all those who take an opposite view of the matter.

Let me be as brief as possible in my response by saying that the creators of operas neither need nor require partners or collaborators once the work is finished. What the creators of operas need and require are gifted *servants* of which the director is one; servants who will faithfully and as free from distortion as possible *translate* the creator's work from its form on the printed page into its most effective and evocative concrete physical form onstage so that the work becomes apprehensible to an audience in a theater as its *creator* envisioned it, which vision is embodied fully in the score itself (music and text). When a director steps beyond the bounds of faithful translator he steps into territory in which he has no proper place nor any business being, and by so doing does a gross disservice to the opera, the opera's creator, and the audience alike. In short, a director is doing what he ought to be doing only when he and his work are perfectly transparent middlemen -- that is, transparent vis-a-vis the sense and spirit of the creator's original _Konzept_.

Does this mean or even imply that the opera director ought to be a slavish, unimaginative lackey? Not by a long shot. Perhaps the most effective and evocative staging ever of Wagner's impossible to stage _Ring_, for most pertinent example, was done in the early 1950s by Wieland Wagner, and that staging was the very antithesis of slavish and unimaginative.

To put the matter in the proverbial nutshell, all will be well if the opera director adheres rigorously and assiduously to what I've rather immodestly labeled The A.C. Douglas Opera Director's Prime Directive: Thou mayest do any bloody thing thou wilt in order to realize a dramatically and aesthetically effective and evocative translation of the score (music and text) into its concrete physical realization on the stage so long as what thou doest is consonant with the score at every point, and contradicts or diverges from it at none.

Oh Yeah? Sez You.

There's no gainsaying another's personal response to a work of art no matter how benighted one may feel it to be. One can simply shake one's head, shrug one's shoulders, and move on.

Or write a blog post about it.

Blogger and Orange County Register classical music critic Tim Mangan of The Arts Blog has this to say about Carl Orff's Carmina Burana.

If I could grab hold of a piece of music and give it a life-ending chuck, I’d choose Carmina Burana. Why? Because its music is longwinded and repetitive, its mood is maudlin and manipulative, its view of life is (overly) sentimental and tragic. The Nazis loved it, too.

Oh yeah? Sez you. We say (and say in more detail here):

[We] confess to having an ongoing, undiminished, and fairly mindless fascination with Orff's Carmina Burana. Its unrelenting ostinati; its primitive, propulsive rhythmic drive; its unsubtle tonic-dominant harmony sans any trace of chromatic coloring — in short, its very "dumbness" — is what seems to attract. It's a sort of invigorating mind-rester: primally engaging, and no thought required.

[...]

One critic would have it that Carmina is "toxic" music that will make Nazis of all who succumb to its primitive charms. A more idiot notion can hardly be imagined, and no more attention should be paid it than should be paid the notion that one who is not master of his domain, to borrow the Seinfeldian locution, will go blind as consequence. And so what if Orff himself was a Nazi as has been alleged. If true, that's Orff's reputation's problem, not [ours] or yours — or Carmina's.

We're tempted to say more, but, then, what more can one say in response to the opinion of a professional classical music critic who, in respect of his above quoted comments on Carmina, thinks Wagner's Tristan und Isolde shares some of those same qualities, but escapes the same censure because "the music is way better"?

Not much.

Of Interest To Classical Music Newbies

If you're a classical music newbie looking for a blog addressed specifically to your needs and concerns for introductory information on the field, then you should look in on The Horn, a newly opened blog written by former French horn player Robert Berger. Mr. Berger's passionate devotion to classical music, and to introducing classical music to those who've had limited or no experience of it, is evidenced in all his posts, and they make informative and engaging reading.

So, for all you classical music newbies out there, do stop over and give Mr. Berger's new blog a read.

There Oughta Be A Law

The peripatetic Danish opera blogger, Ms. Mostly Opera of Mostly Opera, has posted a detailed series of posts cum production photos on the Kasper Bech Holten Ring cycle done for the Royal Danish Opera in 2006 (dubbed by them, "The Copenhagen Ring") the DVD of which is to be released next month.

Needless to say, the production is yet one more entry in the Regietheater sweepstakes (as we feel atypically charitable today we'll refrain from employing our usual designation for such Konzept productions), and — judging from Ms. Mostly Opera's detailed descriptions and the numerous production photos as well as Mr. Bech Holten's own explanation of his Konzept — also needless to say, it's yet one more egregious postmodern trivialization of Wagner's timeless cosmic tragedy, this time the Ring as a kind of early to end of 20th-century Forsyte Saga with Brünnhilde, not Wotan, as a latter day Soames Forsyte.

Jesus!

When, Oh when will these vandalizing Regie-midgets get it through their pointy-headed, self-important, self-involved heads that one cannot improve on the original Konzept of the Ring's creator (N.B., his Konzept, NOT his mise en scène), but can only ineluctably diminish or make to look ridiculous this sublime work of transcendent genius by their mundane, "today-relevant" intrusions.

There oughta be a law.

Literally.

Rich Is Rare

A rare creature it is today within the professional classical music critical fraternity who can do well-informed snark with eloquence and style in a classical music or opera review, and possesses the courage to commit it to print.

Case in point:

MAGDA DOES JOAN: La Rondine is with us again, Puccini’s elegant snore, with Marta Domingo’s tinkerings in place to confuse what is already inadequate in the dramatic resolution and with Michael Scott’s Coney Island Merry-Go-Round of an Act-Two stage set to cheapen and vulgarize even further what is already wrong-headed and simply clumsy in Signora Domingo’s "conception and direction." Speculations, however cynical, as to why impresario Plácido tosses this directorial bone to his wife from time to time don’t work this time, since Plácido is also in town, conducting the last few performances of Tosca.

Marta’s most blatant tinkering is to allow her heroine — mere moments after her Ruggero, having discovered the seedy details of her past, throws a hissy fit of the sort that any exuberant loverboy might throw from time to time and recover from an hour later — to hook onto a passing tsunami and disappear, Joan Crawford style, into the billowing wave. The dramatic timing is completely wrong; a suicide scene in any other Puccini opera — Madama Butterfly for one — takes up a fair proportion of the act; this one goes wham-o, with music Marta has dug up from somewhere. Granted, the opera’s ending as composed (and laboriously revised) by Puccini is hardly thrilling: the heroine Magda bathed in melancholy resignation; at least the timing is right. Marta Domingo’s evasive justification for the suicide, as printed in the program, is so much baloney. And that placid expanse of ocean in Michael Scott’s set design looks as capable of churning up a tsunami as my backyard fishpond.

We rest our case.

RTWT here.

Wuorinen On Brokeback

When it was announced a day or so ago that bad-boy postmodernist opera impresario Gérard Mortier had commissioned bad-boy serialist Charles Wuorinen to compose an opera for the New York City Opera based on brilliant writer Annie Proulx’s Brokeback Mountain, we first did a sharp intake of breath, and then — most curiously for us, all things considered — nodded our head in assent. It'll work, we decided.

Following are some thoughts on the matter by the commissioned composer himself in answer to questions put to him by Peter Dobrin, one of the classical music critics of The Philadelphia Inquirer.

Why did this project appeal to you?

Well, it has the potential to be a very dramatic thing — operatic doomed love and tragedy, the conflict between love and duty if you will. It’s just the basic material out of which many operas and tragedies can be made. It’s just that the circumstances are updated to our time.

Have you done any work on it yet?

We don’t yet know whether Annie Proulx will do the libretto, so I haven’t done anything directly. We have had a few preliminary discussions and I have a number of other works to get out of the way. I see starting in earnest beginning in 2009.

What will determine whether Proulx does the libretto?

It’s a question of time. We are all very busy. I don’t want to speak for her. I think she wants to, but there may be practical considerations that may get in the way.

What if she doesn’t do the libretto? Would you write it yourself?

We have some other ideas in mind. I doubt I would do it. It’s not a wise idea generally speaking.

What are the big challenges in this project, at least as you see them now?

Without knowing what form the libretto takes it’s difficult to be specific. I think that I would like to have a somewhat larger role for the wives of the two principal characters than in the current story. For questions of vocal balance and for theatrical aspects as well.

Have you thought about structure? Will it follow the film or the original story?

No, I think it will follow the story. The film has its own character, and I am not partial to referencing the film. One thing the film fails to do is to make quite clear the degree to which the landscape, the mountains, the effect it all has on the characters. It’s a very hard and unforgiving environment in which these people have to function and it does prevent them from taking the kind of escape routes they might otherwise have. I know that Annie Proulx is very much engaged by this question, not just in this story but in others that come from the same collection. I want to make sure that we have elements of menace in the landscape clearly delineated.

And that last is the key both to Proulx's story, and to why we decided a score by Wuorinen will work.

RTWT here.

Worldwide Compendium

We've just been made aware of what turns out to be a valuable online classical music resource. It's a new website called Classical DJ, and the name is most apt. Classical DJ is a worldwide compendium of online commercial (broadcast) classical music radio stations neatly organized and hyperlinked for your convenience. We've added Classical DJ to our exclusive listing of Culture Sites on our left-hand sidebar.

(Note to those contemplating eMailing us to announce the existence of a new website or blog and requesting a link on Sounds & Fury in exchange for a link to S&F on the new website or blog.

Although we're most gratified when linked to by others, we don't engage in link trading on S&F. We almost dumped the eMail that came to us announcing the above website as it suggested such a link exchange. If you have a new website or blog that you think would be of interest or use to S&F's readers, by all means let us know about it. If we think the website or blog worthy of a listing on S&F, we'll list it. If not, not, regardless of whether you post a link to S&F on your website or blog or not. We trust we make ourselves clear.)

Alan Rich's New Blog, So I've Heard, Is Now Online

The new blog of venerable classical music critic Alan Rich, So I've Heard, is now online and logging reports direct from the Ojai Festival. Time for everyone to update their blogrolls, then click over to So I've Heard to read what Mr. Rich has written, and to welcome him to the classical music blogosphere.

Heads, We Win; Tails, You Lose — Or: Pimps 1, Artists 0

When it was announced a couple weeks ago that Universal Music Group, owner of the top classical labels Decca and Deutsche Grammophon, was forming a new division called Universal Music Classical Artists Management and Production — a division designed to provide management services for prominent classical musicians, and produce recordings and live events for them, the division to be headed by classical superstar manager Jeffrey D. Vanderveen (Anna Netrebko is one of his clients), formerly of the eight-hundred-pound gorilla of artist management, IMG Artists — it sounded to us like a natural and a good deal all round for everyone.

How thoroughly silly — and purblind — of us. How we could have missed seeing this huge, devouring monster lurking beneath the surface of that cozy little arrangement is simply beyond our comprehension.

A manager has moved from one agency to another. So what? "It happens all the time," says Barrett Wissman, the chairman and owner of IMGA , and Mr. Vanderveen's former boss. "But here much more is at stake. The suit [instituted by IMGA against Mr. Vanderveen and the new Universal group] is about huge conflicts of interest. Who will protect the artist? No one is talking about that. And many of the artists don't even see what's coming."

Mr. Wissman conjures up scenarios of junior Artur Rubinsteins and Renata Tebaldis suckered into indentured servitude for the sake of a coveted recording contract with a major label. You want to sing Schubert in Salzburg? Too bad, this is business. It's show tunes at the Garden for you. For an analogy, think back to Hollywood in the days of the almighty studios, when the moguls owned stars virtually body and soul.

[...]

The Norwegian pianist Leif Ove Andsnes, wants an ally who answers only to him. "The recording company has to think commercially," he says. "That's the nature of their enterprise. As an artist, I need room to think completely differently, to think about which projects are artistically interesting and only that, and then to see if we can sell them."

The disagreements are never-ending, and recording executives are not the only ones who may think an artist's ideas too esoteric. Lately, Mr. Andsnes had to battle presenters in Paris who thought Debussy piano pieces too recherché for the French. How much harder it would have been had his manager — who is paid to represent his point of view — been a paid operative of his record label as well, working hand in glove with the impresario. Here we touch the crux of the matter: Under such circumstances, manager and impresario would be united in the common interest of maximizing profits for themselves rather than for the artist. And the artist's creative agenda would have no true defender at all.

During intermission at the Metropolitan Opera, a competitor of Mr. Wissman's explained some of the basics, on condition of anonymity. "Say I manage Diana Damrau," he said, referring to the diva of the evening. "As her manager, my interest is to maximize her fee, and thus my commission. But if I'm presenting her and selling tickets, my interest is to reduce her fee to zero or even to get her to pay me for the privilege of singing, and thus to maximize my take at the box office."

IOW, heads, we win; tails, you lose — or: Pimps 1, Artists 0.

RTWT here.

We Interrupt Our Forced Hiatus For A Short Rant

We've just finished watching our tape of last night's PBS telecast of the Met's "HD Live" film of its March 2008 staging of Wagner's Tristan und Isolde, and we just want to say that if we ever in real life meet up with Barbara Willis Sweete — the apparent escapee from film school responsible for directing this "HD Live" film with its relentless, illusion- and drama-destroying use of multiple split-screen and relentless, illusion-destroying use of closeups — we will, with our bare hands, rip her a new one from stem to stern.

And when we're done with her, we'll look for a way to meet up in real life with theater director Dieter Dorn to do the same for him for his starkly geometric, insistently symmetrical, one-set-fits-all 1999 Konzept which by its stultifying act-to-act sameness, its faux-Appia shifts of color notwithstanding, dulled — even subverted — the emotional, mystic, and dramatic core of the music-drama for all its three acts; and for his apparently forgetting that a director is supposed to direct his actors to act and move about in ways dramatically appropriate, not leave them mostly free to wander about doing any damn thing it enters their heads to do (or so it seemed), complete with risible, Italian opera cartoon hand and arm gestures and facial expressions which these singer-actors apparently imagined constituted, you know, actual acting.

Jesus!

That is all.

As you — and we — were.

And More Distressing News

[Note: This post has been updated (1) as of 11:07 AM Eastern on 23 May. See below.]

The appalling beat goes on. The latest to join the march is The Washington Post. Reports the Washingtonian:

The [Washington] Post collected six Pulitzer prizes for 2007, but it could lose as many as 12 Pulitzer Prize winners in the current round of buyouts.

[...]

Tim Page, who previously won for his classical-music criticism, is taking the deal and planning to teach.

Not altogether unexpected, but distressing nevertheless.

If true (no notice or confirmation from The Washington Post yet), Mr. Page's eloquent and authoritative voice will be sorely missed.

---

Update (11:07 AM Eastern on 23 May): It's now public officially.

A Little Depression Never Hurt Anyone

Here's something for y'all to think — and think hard — about.

North Carolina writer Eric Wilson thinks America's current addiction to happiness threatens the arts.

[...]

Wilson writes about it in his new book, Against Happiness ($20, Farrar, Straus & Giroux), which paints a disturbing portrait of what happens to art in a world filled with "happy types."

He predicts an America of vacant smiles and bland sameness. It's a place where poetry is a Hallmark card and where music is, well, Muzak.

"I fear we're creating a country where no one would aspire to write a novel like Moby-Dick again," said Wilson.... No one would even want to read it, because who needs Moby-Dick when you've got Dr. Phil?"

[...]

Dr. Thomas Svolos, an adjunct professor and the vice chairman of the department of psychiatry at the Creighton University School of Medicine, thinks Wilson may be on to something.

It's especially true because the psychiatric community has long known about the link between artistic genius and manic-depressive disorder. History is full of examples.

Composer Ludwig van Beethoven, painter Vincent van Gogh and writer Sylvia Plath all were famous depressives. And Springsteen was purportedly in a deep malaise when he entered a lonely room in Colts Neck, N.J., in 1981 to record "Nebraska."

"When you're melancholy, you tend to step back and examine your life," Svolos said. "That kind of questioning is essential for creativity."

But for happy types, life's deeper meaning may not be an active question. Wilson makes that point in his book, and Svolos thinks it points to an even broader cultural concern.

Before the 1950s, clinical depression was considered an extremely rare mental illness, affecting less than 5 percent of the population.

Now, Svolos said, depression is a catchall term.

"It applies to everything from a life-threatening mental illness to ordinary sadness or disappointment," he said. "It's all the same and often receives the same treatment."

And that treatment often involves the use of antidepressant drugs, which have been readily available since the 1990s.

[...]

"This overemphasis on drugs has become a knee-jerk reaction that's thrown our whole concept of happiness out of whack," Svolos said. "Happiness is now seen as a lack of suffering as opposed to accomplishing important societal goals, like creating art."

Sadly, all too true — except, that is, that last imbecile bit about the creation of art being an accomplishing of an "important societal goa[l]."

RTWT here.

(Our thanks to ArtsJournal for the link.)