Sounds & Fury

Beczala's "Black List"

Today, on a venerable online opera forum, a member linked this interview (in German) wherein the well-known Polish tenor Piotr Beczala declared his refusal in advance to be part of any opera production by certain Regietheater Regies (which, for obvious professional reasons, he declined to name) with a reputation for staging Eurotrash (i.e., Konzept) Regietheater productions of the established operatic repertoire — his "Black List", as he called it.

This brave declaration was hailed roundly by an overwhelmingly large percentage of the responding membership of the forum but was just as roundly pooh-poohed by the usual suspects, one of whom is a member of the certified classical music "smart set", a set identified in this recent S&F entry. Wrote this usual suspect:

But Leontyne Price says never sing on principal, only on interest. So difficult to keep up with all these pearls of wisdom from great thinkers whose qualification to theorize on the nature of art consists mostly of the ability to make a pretty noise in the throat.

To which we responded:

You mean as opposed to all those pearls of wisdom from great thinkers whose qualification to theorize on the nature of art consists mostly of their desperate, urgent need to justify and make acceptable their parasitic hijacking of the original works of others, or the theorizing of those great thinkers whose qualification to theorize on the nature of an artform consists of a view of that artform that's long been jaded by their having been obsessive-compulsively addicted to that artform for reasons other than art? I of course dismiss the theorizing of academic types as their theorizing on an artform is provoked and corrupted by things external to art and is therefore ipso facto worthless.

Usual Suspect's immediately following sally attempted the less snarky, more sober approach, managing only to dig himself into an even deeper hole:

I see nothing particularly brave in what Beczala said. Essentially he states he will refuse to work with "crazy" directors who try to "reinvent" the opera without bothering to define what constitutes either craziness or reinvention.... I would call it brave, for example, if Beczala had named names, said, "I worked with Fritz Krank in Graz on a terrible 'Traviata' in which I had to sing my cabaletta nude in a children's swimming pool filled with Jello." But he offers neither names nor concrete examples of what he considers "crazy." (What he says about a crocodile in "Lohengrin" is hypothetical and therefore pointless....)

To which we responded:

Since when does being hypothetical equate with being pointless? And in the case of Lohengrin, Beczala's hypothetical crocodile is perfectly on point given the recent infamous Bayreuth Eurotrash Lohengrin — the so-called "Rat" Lohengrin — with its army of rat-costumed Brabantians complete with tails.

In any case, the man is setting forth a principle and his stated rejection of any staging of Lohengrin — actual or hypothetical — in which a crocodile takes the place of the swan illustrates that principle in a way perfectly comprehensible to all — to all, that is, other than cheerleaders for and staunch fans and defenders of that malignancy known as Eurotrash (i.e., Konzept) Regietheater.

We await (but do not expect) any further argument.

Stay tuned.

Letter From Bayreuth

At the 1960 Bayreuther Festspiele, mezzo soprano Frances Martin made her operatic debut as Ortlinde (one of Brünnhilde's eight Valkyrie sisters) in the Wolfgang Wagner production of Die Walküre. We suspect most of you will not have heard of Ms. Martin before (we hadn't, but, then, that's as per usual for us where singers are concerned as regular readers of S&F well know) but, as explains baritone Donald Collup, this occasion was the result of an invitation by Friedelind Wagner to attend master classes at Bayreuth in the summer of 1959 where Ms. Martin was the only student that summer offered a contract to sing at the Festspiele the following summer.

As can be imagined, this was a stellar event in the career of the young (34-year-old) mezzo, no matter how small the part, and she chronicled the experience in a long letter home to her parents in Atlanta, Georgia which letter Mr. Collup has used as the basis of a delightful and informative YouTube video he produced, the soundtrack of which has the now 86-year-old Ms. Martin reading that letter she wrote some 52 years ago. The video follows instanter and we trust you'll find it as entertaining as we did.

From Brahms To Bach: An Improvisation

(Our thanks to Slipped Disc for the link.)

Confessions Of An Apparent Reactionary Middle-Brow Bourgeois

[NOTE: This entry has been edited as of 8:10 PM Eastern on 15 Dec to restore a missing parenthetical in the last graf.]

I sat myself down a few days ago to give myself a good talking to. "With each passing day, ACD, you're beginning to appear more and more like a reactionary middle-brow bourgeois where it concerns the domain of classical music," I admonished myself. "More and more you come down on the side polarly opposite the certified smart set in classical music — i.e., the professional practitioners and print-published classical music critics — and, to be perfectly blunt about it, you're beginning to piss me off. Wake up and smell the proverbial coffee! Get a grip! You're fast beginning to appear a champion of the flat-earthers where classical music is concerned!"

I confess I had to agree with my Admonishing Self. But things are even more dire than my Admonishing Self imagined. I daily find myself more and more beginning to feel resentment against and contempt for the certified classical music smart set; to feel they're doing the domain of classical music not only a disservice but real harm in their appreciation and championing of postmodern idiocies such as the idiocies of the avant-garde that include the embracing of Cagean and Stockhausen-esque and Minimalist (uppercase M) aesthetics; idiocies such as the falsifications and absurdities of Eurotrash (i.e., Konzept) Regietheater (Regieoper); idiocies such as the denial of and the declaring null and void the by-their-very-nature-generated boundary line between classical and pop musics; idiocies such as the idea of effectively transforming the classical music concert hall into a quasi-mosh pit on the grounds that it will free the audience to experience and enjoy the music more fully and will, in addition, bring into the concert hall a new and younger audience; etc., etc., etc.

Well, it seems there's no help for me. That all the above makes me appear a reactionary middle-brow bourgeois where the domain of classical music is concerned is undeniable and I must accept that as there's nothing for it until such time — if ever such time arrives, as improbable as that may be — as I can honestly appreciate and champion what the current certified classical music smart set now appreciates and champions. Until that time what I must earnestly strive to do is find an honorable and honest way to not feel resentment against and contempt for the current certified classical music smart set. After all, I've no reason to suspect that smart set of being dishonorable or dishonest in their enthusiasms (other than, perhaps, a subconscious falling victim to a persistent if subterranean fear of appearing in a 22nd-century edition of Slonimsky) and they have as much right to hold them as I have to reject them (the enthusiasms, that is). A new year will presently be upon us, the traditional time for the making of resolutions. Let that be my very first.

Trash Into Music: The Landfill Harmonic

Reversing the typical Modern and Postmodern progression in classical music, this group is astonishing, encouraging, and thoroughly heartwarming. Meet The Landfill Harmonic.

As we've said: astonishing, encouraging, and thoroughly heartwarming.

Ave Atque Vale, Charles

The world of classical music suffered a great loss this past Sunday, 9 December 2012. Charles Rosen — concert pianist, musicologist, teacher, critic, brilliant polymath, and author of several hugely enlightening books in the domain of classical music, one of which, The Classical Style, has become a bona fide classic — died of cancer in Manhattan at age 85. We considered (and consider) Mr. Rosen a latter day Sir Donald Francis Tovey and his absence will be deeply felt both by the classical music world generally and by us personally as we owe him much. For more details on Mr. Rosen's life and work than we can provide, the New York Times obituary can be read here, and the Guardian obituary, here.

Atque in perpetuum, Charles, ave atque vale.

Paragon

We've just finished watching — uncut, unedited, and uninterrupted by commercials, all courtesy of that invaluable cable channel TCM — the 1973 Oscar-winning movie The Sting written by David S. Ward and directed by George Roy Hill starring Paul Newman and Robert Redford, and even after six or seven previous viewings over the years it remains fresh and a source of unalloyed pleasure. From its intricate, suspenseful, twisty plot, to its brilliantly realized characterizations, to its casting, to its soundtrack (Scott Joplin rags adapted and arranged by the late Marvin Hamlisch), to its costumes, to its cinematography, to its minute attention to detail throughout, it is positively lapidary; a very paragon of the well-made Hollywood movie; an exemplar of the breed.

Since the mid-70s we've visited a movie theater only rarely (only three times, to be more precise) and so ask the question: Does Hollywood make such movies anymore, or have 21st-century movie audiences become too sophisticated and/or lost their taste for such intelligent if unserious fare? We honestly don't know, but judging from what eventually makes it to the TV screen from current-day Hollywood we would guess such movies are today considerably out of fashion and would fail to be appreciated.

If so, too bad. In a world and era fraught with difficulty and danger, such supremely well-made intelligent if unserious fare is just the ticket if only to provide but a few hours of soul-satisfying escape and relief from the prevailing Zeitgeist.

The Time Has Come

This today from The New York Times:

Khaled Meshal, the political leader of Hamas, gave a defiant speech on Saturday, vowing to build an Islamic Palestinian state on all the land of Israel, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.

Speaking [in Gaza] before tens of thousands of supporters on the 25th anniversary of the founding of Hamas, Mr. Meshal said the Jewish state would be wiped away through “resistance,” or military action. “The state will come from resistance, not negotiation,” he said. “Liberation first, then statehood.”

His voice rising to a shout, Mr. Meshal said: “Palestine is ours from the river to the sea and from the south to the north. There will be no concession on any inch of the land.” He vowed that all Palestinian refugees and their descendants would one day return to their original homes in what is now Israel.

“We will never recognize the legitimacy of the Israeli occupation, and therefore there is no legitimacy for Israel, no matter how long it will take,” he said. “We will free Jerusalem inch by inch, stone by stone. Israel has no right to be in Jerusalem.”

The time has come to implement as a response to this what's outlined in this recent S&F post.

New Entry On Off-Message Rants & Screeds (Administrative Note)

The link to a just-posted new entry ("The Plan") on S&F's Off-Message Rants & Screeds blog is now up on our sidebar under the Most Recent On Rants & Screeds section.

Pull-quote:

So, two states — Colorado and Washington state — have made (or are about to make in the case of Colorado) recreational use of marijuana perfectly legal for adults effectively putting Mary Jane in the same class of dope as that good ol' dope of the masses, alcohol.

Sounds like a good idea to us and also offers the possibility of eventual legalization for adults of all so-called "hard drugs": coke, heroin, ecstasy, methamphetamines, opium, and whathaveyou. That sounds like a good idea to us as well.

Kaufmann On Regietheater

This video of a Jonas Kaufmann interview (don't be dissuaded by the French title; the interview is conducted in English) wherein Kaufmann expresses his thoughts on Regietheater is a most intelligent discussion of the subject (with due allowance made concerning Kaufmann's careful laudatory comments about the current Hans Neuenfels Eurotrash staging of Lohengrin at Bayreuth — the so-called "Rat" Lohengrin — in which Kaufmann sang the eponymous role). And we don't say that merely because Kaufmann's thoughts on Regietheater closely parallel our own; in particular as expressed in our July 2010 S&F entry titled "It's The Music, Stupid!".

Well, on second thought, maybe we do.

Featured Past Post #114 (Administrative Note)

For the hundredth or so time, we spent a few hours today listening to Glenn Gould's extraordinary reading of Book I of Bach's Well-Tempered Clavier and for the hundredth or so time marveled at Gould's astonishing performance which is, in our estimation, nonpareil in the entire recorded legacy of performance of this work, Landowska's included. And, immodestly, we think we've uncovered the secret behind that nonpareil performance which secret we spelled out in an S&F entry of April 2008 titled "Gould's Secret Revealed" the link to which entry is now up on our sidebar as our new Featured Past Post.

2nd New Entry On Off-Message Rants & Screeds (Administrative Note)

The link to a just-posted 2nd new entry ("More On The Current Palestinian-Israeli Conflict") on S&F's Off-Message Rants & Screeds blog is now up on our sidebar under the Most Recent On Rants & Screeds section.

Pull-quote:

With each passing year of the more than half-century-old "conflict" between the Israelis and Palestinians the real bottom-line nature of that conflict, as well as why the conflict has been so resistant to any lasting solution, becomes more and more clear. That is, more and more clear to me. To those in positions of power worldwide, even some in positions of power within the governments of the combatants themselves, the bottom-line nature of the conflict seems to have become more and more clouded and fraught with myriad and impenetrable subtleties and difficulties that defy even clear definition; hence the perennial putting forward of doomed-to-failure "peace plans," and the earnest engagement in impossible and equally doomed-to-failure Pollyanna "peace processes."

New Entry On Off-Message Rants & Screeds (Administrative Note)

The link to a just-posted new entry ("Sympathy For The Palestinians?") on S&F's Off-Message Rants & Screeds blog is now up on our sidebar under the Most Recent On Rants & Screeds section.

Pull-quote:

We suppose one should feel at least some measure of sympathy for the Palestinian citizenry of Gaza, but except for the very young children whose suffering breaks our heart, we feel none. This current battle is yet another outcome of the Palestinians's own making; an ineluctable consequence of their never-wavering determination, public window-dressing to the contrary notwithstanding, to never live in peace alongside the Israelis but rather work to achieve Israel's destruction as a sovereign Jewish State....

Staging Wagner: From Wagner To The Birth Of Eurotrash

We used the occasion of our Sandy-enforced from-the-world-isolated downtime (we were without electric power from Monday a week ago to Monday last; it's sobering to be confronted so directly by just how utterly dependent on electricity is modern everyday life) to read a book we purchased some four years ago but never got around to reading titled Wagner and the Art of the Theatre by Patrick Carnegy (Yale University Press, 2006) and a most informative read it proved to be. The book surveys the high points of the history of Wagner stagings, mostly in Germany with a side trip to Russia, from the Romantic naturalism of Wagner's own staging to the Brechtian "critical" realism of the so-called Bayreuth "Centennial Ring" of Patrice Chéreau of 1976 and as such traces the history of the emergence of what we today refer to as Regietheater; a development which was the product of pressures social, political, and aesthetic.

What we found especially interesting was the huge influence upon this slow but sea-change shift in the staging of Wagner's works of the theoretical writings of the then mostly obscure Swiss "theatrical visionary" Adolphe Appia at the turn of the century; an influence that can be observed in all manner of opera stagings of even the present day. Appia was a devout Wagnerian and it was Wagner's works that provoked and impelled the formation of his theories of mise en scène. He was convinced that Wagner's devotion to 19th-century realism (or rather illusion of the real) in his stagings of his own works was not only misplaced but effectively worked to sabotage and betray those works.

Appia was right and Wagner should have realized his misstep himself for after Tristan he no longer referred to his music-dramas as examples of Gesamtkunstwerk but as "deeds of music made visible," a belated recognition by him of the primacy of the art of music in music-drama which, contrary to his original theoretical formulation of Gesamtkunstwerk, Wagner finally realized can never be on an equal footing with the other arts but will always reign supreme among them. It was precisely this that Appia seized upon. His solution to the problem of mise en scène in the staging of Wagner's works is complex but is grounded in the conviction that the music, not the text, should always be the controlling factor in determining the mise en scène and that that mise en scène should always be suggestive rather than literal and formed to great extent by light modeling and shaping solid structures and the space defined by them as well as the living bodies (i.e., the singer-actors) that interact with those structures and move about within that space. On Appia's stage, scene painting on drops and flats and the like was, for the most part, consigned permanently to the dust bin of theatrical history. (As we read about Appia's theories we could not help but experience a delicious stab of self-satisfied pleasure when we saw how similar was our own modest thinking in the matter of staging Wagner's music-dramas as set forth in our 2005 S&F entry titled "Staging Wagner's Music-Dramas" which can be read in full here.)

What we also found especially interesting was how honest and essentially Werktreue were the early Regietheater stagings of Wagner's works in the sense that none, it seems, attempted to supplant the spirit and sense of Wagner's original theatrical concept by the imposition of the director's own but instead worked to achieve a heightened and more revelatory realization of the drama embodied by the music through the spirit and sense of that original theatrical concept using the music itself as the controlling guide.

The first of these Wagner stagings in a major theater to break, at least in part, with the traditional way of staging Wagner's works as established at Bayreuth by Wagner himself and after him by his wife Cosima who ruled Bayreuth for some 23 years after Wagner's death is generally acknowledged to be the Gustav Mahler/Alfred Roller Tristan of 1903 at the Vienna Court Opera where Mahler had reigned as the theater's conductor and general director since 1897. It proved a great success but didn't manage to extend its influence beyond productions mounted at the Court Opera. The next steps were taken by the Russian director Vsevolod Myerhold with his 1909 Tristan for the Mariinsky Theater in St. Petersburg, Fyodor Komissarzhevsky with his 1918 Lohengrin for the Theater of the Council of Working Deputies (the former Zimin Theater), I. Prostorov's Rienzi of 1923 for the same theater, and, much later, the legendary Sergei Eisenstein with his 1940 Walküre for the Bolshoi.

Meanwhile, back in Germany, the great conductor Otto Klemperer had become director of the Kroll Opera in Berlin in 1927 and there, with stage designer Ewald Dülberg, staged in 1929 a Fliegende Holländer that pretty much jettisoned Wagner's original theatrical concept for its own and jettisoned as well the principles of Appian mise en scène in favor of the principles of so-called "critical" staging as devised and promoted by Bertolt Brecht; principles that are the very antithesis of everything Wagnerian; principles producing stagings calculated to force an audience to think rather than feel during a performance; to adopt an actively critical attitude toward what's being performed onstage before their very eyes. This production set the keynote, as it were, for the post-war, Brecht-influenced German productions meant to counter the hugely successful and essentially Werktreue New Bayreuth productions of the Appia-influenced Wieland Wagner in the 1950s and '60s; Brecht-influenced productions such as the 1970 Ring of Ulrich Melchinger, the 1972 Tannhäuser of Götz Friedrich, and the 1973 Ring of Joachim Herz from which the 1976 Bayreuth "Centennial Ring" of the Frenchman Patrice Chéreau took its cue (something of which we were previously unaware).

Thus was born Eurotrash (i.e., Konzept) Regietheater; Regietheater that's today the norm rather than the avant-garde exception.

(We hasten to make clear that the immediately foregoing declaration is ours and NOT that of the book's author Patrick Carnegy who not only holds that Konzept Regietheater is a perfectly legitimate enterprise but actually applauds its practice.)

For those with a more than passing interest in the staging of Wagner's operas and music-dramas we warmly recommend Wagner and the Art of the Theatre for its informed historical survey of the high points of that staging's development from its beginnings up through 1976 and a small bit beyond. We think you'll find the time spent reading its 400 easy-reading pages time well spent.

Whither Classical Music?

John Simon, the often reviled but brilliant literary, theater, music, and film critic whose acerbic, barb-tongued, (too-)often just plain nasty commentary has appeared in such wide-ranging publications as The Hudson Review, The New Leader, The New Criterion, National Review, New York Magazine, Opera News, The Weekly Standard, and Bloomberg News and who now writes his own blog Uncensored John Simon has up on that blog a new article titled "Whither Art?" the "art" of the title referring to the fine arts generally but painting in particular.

As we read the article it struck us that were one to substitute classical music along with mutatis mutandis adjustments everywhere painting is referred to, pretty much everything Mr. Simon has to say would read just as on-point. (In fact Mr. Simon himself suggests just that in one brief sentence in one brief paragraph: "The problem for most arts is that so very much has already been done in them, propelling more recent practitioners into horrible distortions, obscure byways, or downright dead ends. This is true also in music, otherwise we would have been spared Stockhausen, Cage, Glass and their likes." See also our August 2004 S&F entry titled "Whither Genuine Art?".)

Writes Mr. Simon:

As I have often said and sometimes written, the history of art extends from Anonymous to Untitled, from when only the work mattered to where only the name in the signature does.

What reminds me of this is a reproduction in The New York Times (10/16/12) of an untitled painting by Franz Kline, which, at the forthcoming auction, “is expected to bring $20 million to $30 million” and make me sick to my stomach. I recall a time, long ago, when Kline yelled at me at a party, “You are full of shit!”, and I replied, “Maybe, but at least I don’t smear it on canvas and peddle it as art.”

Art today is the result of a tacit conspiracy among artists, art historians, art critics, art dealers, nabobs who don’t know what to do with their money, and all the people who don’t know anything about art. And why shouldn’t it fetch that much when the article about the Kline painting notes that one by Clyfford Still, resonantly entitled “1949-A-No. 1” went for $61.7 million? Even Clyfford with a Y should raise a cautionary eyebrow.

Read the full text here.

Things May Be Looking Up

Here are two news items from the worlds of opera and the spoken-word theater: here and here, respectively.

1: The heirs of Francis Poulenc are nun too pleased with Dmitri Tcherniakov's 2010 production of Dialogues des carmélites. They've taken the Bavarian State Opera to court, alleging the concept, in particular the final scene, misrepresents the 1957 opera.

2: Simon Stone, the resident director of Belvoir St. Theatre, an Australian company, jumped head first into a pail of boiling oil when he took it upon himself to rewrite [Arthur Miller's] Death of a Salesman. Not only did he cut the play's epilogue, but he altered the manner in which Willy Loman, Arthur Miller's protagonist, meets his death. In the original play, Willy dies in a car crash that may or may not have been intentional; in Mr. Stone's staging, he commits suicide by gassing himself. On top of that, Belvoir neglected to inform ICM Partners, the agency that represents Mr. Miller's estate and licenses his plays for production throughout the world, that Mr. Stone was altering the script. [...] No sooner did ICM get wind of the changes than Belvoir was informed that if the company didn't perform Death of a Salesman in its entirety — complete with epilogue — the production would be shut down....

Things may be looking up on the staging front — finally.

Urgent Open Memo To The Obama Campaign

We're aware this entry belongs more properly on S&F's Rants & Screeds adjunct blog but time is too short and the matter too important to not have it appear here on S&F's Main Page due the appalling and as recently as a few weeks ago utterly unexpected dead-heat dash to the finish line of the contest between the President and his Republican challenger Mitt Romney for the office of President of The United States. What's desperately needed now is an Obama champion to travel the closing circuit along with Mr. Obama; one who's even more persuasive, compelling, and electrifying than the justly vaunted Bill Clinton. We speak, of course, of that stellar, beloved, and legendary former president Josiah ("Jed") Bartlet (who bears a remarkable resemblance to that dashingly handsome and superbly skilled actor Martin Sheen) whose considerable gifts should be employed for the purpose of galvanizing the country on Mr. Obama's behalf, President Bartlet's speeches written, it should go without saying, by none other than the brilliant Aaron Sorkin.

Obama campaign managers take urgent note. The clock is ticking and time is fast running out.

Whatever Became Of The Breastplates?

The excellent Wagner-dedicated website The Wagnerian has up a chapter excerpt from author David Littlejohn's 1992 book The Ultimate Art: Essays Around and About Opera titled "Whatever Became of the Breastplates?" that comments in brief on stagings of Wagner's Der Ring des Nibelungen from Wagner's own staging at Bayreuth in 1876 down to the present day (or rather, the present day as of 1992). For Ring newcomers especially (but by no means exclusively) the chapter makes for most interesting reading and closes with the following thought, even more salient today than when it was written:

Chaos, as Wagner himself sometimes suggested, is likely to be the rule, rather than the exception, in our world (and in productions of Der Ring des Nibelungen that try to reflect or comment on that world) until another cruel divine order emerges to force things back into unity. Rings devoted to the evils and collapse of Eastern European communism are surely on the drafting boards already, now that Rings devoted to the evils and collapse of capitalism and fascism are becoming routine. Be grateful if you have the opportunity to see a contemporary Ring that is as compelling to look at as it is to listen to; thoughtfully (not narrowly or spitefully) of our time; on the whole generous to Wagner, rather than mean-minded and reductive; one that makes provocative sense, and still seems to grow out of the music, which is (fortunately) larger than all of these postmodern Konzepts put together.

Read the full text here.

James Levine To Resume Conducting

This press release from the Metropolitan Opera today:

James Levine, the Metropolitan Opera’s Music Director, will return to conducting on May 19, 2013 with the MET Orchestra at Carnegie Hall. He will then lead three operas in the Met’s 2013-14 season, including a new production of Verdi’s Falstaff and revivals of Mozart’s Così fan tutte and Berg’s Wozzeck. He will also conduct all three Carnegie Hall concerts that season.

Oh that it not prove a false (or over-optimistic) alert!

Read the full text here.

Viewing Sounds & Fury (Administrative Note)

Ever since we changed Sounds & Fury's page design last year to what's called a grayscale rendering we've had more than a few complaints about the readability of S&F's pages. In almost every case the problem could be traced to the reader's LED display — or rather, to the viewing angle of the reader's LED display which display type is hypersensitive to angle of view vis-à-vis the one viewing it. To address this problem we purposely set the overall main background (i.e., the background surrounding S&F's content columns) of all S&F's pages (with the exception of the "About Page") to pure black (for the technical-minded, color #000000) to act as a "calibrating element", so to speak. For the proper viewing of S&F's pages the three-step "calibration" of your LED display vis-à-vis your viewing angle works like this:

1: Sit in front of your laptop in your normal viewing position and load S&F.
2: Tilt the lid of the laptop (i.e., the LED display) toward you as far as it will go without closing it.
3: Then, slowly tilt the lid of the laptop (i.e., the LED display) backward (i.e., away from you) and keep tilting backward just until the overall main background of the S&F page first goes a pure black. When that point is reached it means you're at the proper viewing angle vis-à-vis your LED display and so the entire S&F page (or any HTML page on any website whatsoever for that matter) will display as it should.

Simple but effective.