Sounds & Fury

Soul-Satisfying

Few things in music are as soul-satisfying as Renaissance choral polyphony sung supremely well, especially at Eastertime.

(Our thanks to The Rest Is Noise for the link.)

An Introduction To Opera

On a heavily populated online opera forum, a member asked:

I am curious about people's first recordings of opera (I mean the first two or three, not the first thirty). What were they? At what age did you first listen to them? Were they a gift, bought, borrowed, or stolen (OK, you don't have to answer the last one)? What impact did they have on you? How have they held up over the years, as you have heard and learned more?

That provoked a (predictable) deluge of responses. Here' ours:

My proper introduction to opera, per se, occurred quite late (viz., when I was in my early 30s) and quite by accident (a double entendre as will presently be made clear).

I grew up within a musical milieu peopled by serious-minded musicians, instrumentalists all, who regarded, as did I, the whole domain of opera to be nothing other than fodder fit only for the delectation of musical groundlings and the proper butt of uncharitable jokes. In my younger years I'd occasionally tune into the Texaco Saturday Met opera radio broadcasts (which almost invariably turned out to be something from the Italian or French rep) and despite Milton Cross's enticing intros never managed to last beyond the first half-hour or so of the first act so trashy if superficially pretty and appealing did it all sound to me.

Fast-forward to 1970. I've been laid up for the better part of a year courtesy of a near-death-dealing motorcycle accident. Bad business that, but it's not all terrible. I've plenty of time on my hands, and I'm taking full advantage of it by reading like mad and listening to dozens of LPs I'd bought one fevered afternoon of record buying at a Sam Goody 50%-off sale some few years previous but still haven't gotten around to auditioning. (Not as ridiculous as it sounds. I bought over 250 LPs that out-of-control afternoon.)

One of the albums I'd plucked from Goody's shelves was the then-new Solti-Decca release of the first _Ring_ opera, _Das Rheingold_, an opera of which I never before heard so much as a measure and a recording I bought not because I had any intention of listening to the opera itself (what an idea!) but because that then-new recording had quickly gained a reputation among audio freaks, of which I was one, as being a kick-ass test of one's speaker system.

So one afternoon of my enforced confinement I pull the still un-played _Rheingold_ album from its place of storage, think to myself, "Forgot about this. Time I gave it a whirl to see just how great these speakers of mine really are," remove its still-intact shrink-wrap, and start the first LP going on the turntable.

With hobbling gait I almost make it back to my comfy armchair when the soles of my feet more than my ears become aware of that solitary, 16', four-measure opening E-flat pedal, and my first thought is that something's gone badly awry with my stereo system. I mean, no opera can possibly begin like that. After assuring myself that my stereo system is operating just fine, I start the LP going again, this time no longer intending to test my speakers but intending instead to find out just what sort of opera it is that can begin in such an un-opera-like manner.

One-hundred-and-thirty-six measures later (i.e., the full length of the _Rheingold_ prelude) such is my astonishment that I'm struck virtually dumb. I simply can't believe what I've just heard. No composer — not the divine Wolfgang, not even great Bach himself — should be able to do that much with such a paucity of harmonic and melodic material stretched over 136 measures; essentially not much more than a single arpeggiated major triad repeated over and over.

Hobbling back to the turntable as quickly as I'm able, I start the LP going again at the beginning, and again listen, more carefully this time. I end up replaying those opening 136 measures some dozen times before I let the first of the three Rheintöchter finish the opening phrase of her song. And when she does, further astonishment. She and her two sisters are bantering among themselves in dramatic real time, their banter sounding as natural as the dialogue of a spoken stage play, but they're all...singing! And the singing is lovely. Not bel canto lovely, but a different kind of sung lovely I've no name for because I've never heard anything like it before. Then a nasty-sounding baritone comes on the scene and interrupts their playful banter with some rather less playful banter of his own, also sung, and his singing, like the singing of the Rheintöchter, is in dramatic real time and as natural as spoken dialogue in a stage play and, in its own jarring way, electrifying. Inseparably intertwined with all this rather than merely accompanying it as it would in any respectable opera is a huge orchestra making rich continuous comment on all the goings-on in the manner of the chorus in a classical Greek drama, enriching and deepening immeasurably both drama and meaning, the gestalt effect positively riveting.

At this point it becomes abundantly clear to me that, in terms of opera, I'm not on solid ground anymore but hopelessly adrift in waters wonderful strange and considerably over my head. This is a new and gripping musico-dramatic experience; one which bears but the most superficial resemblance to opera as I understand it. No recitative, no arias, no duets, trios, quartets, or choruses. Nothing from and among the singers but a single continuous stream of back-and-forth natural-as-speech sung dialogue, the whole interwovenly fleshed out and deepened by the huge orchestra acting as the work's principal "voice". As I've said, astonishing. And as I continue listening almost each succeeding new measure brings with it something new to astonish and by opera's end I'm utterly floored by the evocative and eloquent magic of it all.

That initial encounter with Wagner and his _Ring_ tetralogy set the stage, so to speak, for my subsequent Wagner attachment, and the deeper I immersed myself in the _Rheingold_, and over the ensuing weeks, months, and years in the entire _Ring_ tetralogy and then deeper still in _Tristan_ and _Parsifal_, that which initially captivated the Wagner-naïve musical snob continued, as it continues still, to captivate the seasoned and informed devotee I became. While in strictly musical terms Bach and Mozart are still my ne plus ultra composers, transcendent geniuses both, in musico-dramatic terms I now know there has never been, nor is there ever again likely to be, a genius as all-encompassing prodigious and transcendent as Richard Wagner who today still bestrides the domain of opera like a colossus, and whose music-dramas have since shaped or influenced the course not only of opera, but of all Western music.

Grin And Bear It

As it had no choice but to do, the Met is reviving its production of the Robert Lepage staging of Wagner's Der Ring des Nibelungen beginning 6 April 2013 with Das Rheingold and continuing in three complete cycles ending 11 May 2013 with Götterdämmerung. Grin and bear it. After this mandatory revival perhaps we'll be rid of the thing forever.

A member of a venerable online opera forum asked:

The new [Met] Ring, I loved it, in the Met and in HD. The sets were fantastic, and elastic. The singing was very good as well. So why exactly are so many against it?

To which we replied:

Because it ended up being a Robert Lepage spectacular (actually, a spectacular that failed as a spectacular; but that's quite beside the point) with Wagner's music serving as sound track and Wagner's drama given only lip service. Mr. Lepage's focus seemed to be on what he could get Le Machine to do that would result in some visually arresting effect for its own sake at any particular moment rather than on how the capabilities of the contraption could best be exploited to support, express, or frame the drama moment by moment from work's beginning to end. It's a tail-wagging-the-dog approach that's all but guaranteed to result in shallow (at least attempted) coups de théâtre pretty much every time, precisely as it did in this production.

After a repeat viewing of the Met's HD film of the tetralogy (via our HD DVR recordings of the HD PBS telecasts), we saw nothing to alter that opinion. For our comments on each of the music-dramas as telecast, you might want to consult the following S&F entries:

Das Rheingold
Die Walküre
Siegfried
The Lepage Staging Of The Ring: A Brief Summing-Up (Götterdämmerung)

On another online opera forum, a member remarked to us that we ought to be grateful and accept the Lepage staging of the Ring as the lesser of two evils. After all, at least the Lepage staging was not a Eurotrash (i.e., Konzept) Regietheater staging, to which we replied:

While I take your point (and it's a reasonable one), saying we ought to accept the lesser of two evils with some measure of gratitude is hardly an answer to the problem. The Lepage staging of the Ring is in every way unacceptable, especially for a company with the prestige and stature of the Met. And what makes it unacceptable is NOT fixable except by doing away with it altogether as it's flawed conceptually. The Lepage staging centrally features Le Machine as the looming, hulking, impotently conspicuous star of the show as it could not otherwise be, and that's utterly and fundamentally perverse.

And when I say the staging must be done away with altogether, I mean doing away with both Lepage and his humongous, dead-weight, ill-conceived, Frankenstein contraption to which contraption he's devoted entirely. The ONLY way such a contraption could justify itself is if it were capable of becoming THE ENTIRE STAGE ITSELF, perfectly plastic and malleable, and by so doing become invisible or transparent as a contraption. That's nowhere in the cards with Le Machine, either technically or practically; ergo, it has to go, along with its creator who cares infinitely more for it than for Wagner's great work which work both he and it were supposed to serve.

And so it goes.

On The Appropriate Camera Shot Syntax For Filmed Staged Opera

Now that (digitally) filmed staged opera performances have become a regular and popular inhabitant of our cultural landscape, it's time the one responsible for determining what appears or doesn't appear in a shot — viz., the film's director — recognizes the special requirements of the camera shot syntax peculiar to the successful presentation of filmed staged opera and cease assuming, as filmed staged opera film directors almost always do today, that the camera shot syntax appropriate for works created originally and specifically for film is equally appropriate for the presentation of filmed staged opera. It most decidedly is not. Filmed staged opera requires its own camera shot syntax, and it's one that couldn't be more simple or straightforward.

One of film's most powerful expressive tools, a tool unique to cinema, is the close-up in its various forms — from the extreme close-up that focuses on some minute detail, to the "head(or face)-shot", to the "head-and-shoulders-shot", to the "one-shot" (i.e., half-to-full-length one-person close-up most often referred to as a "medium close-up"), to the "two-shot" (i.e., half-to-full-length two-person close-up, also most often referred to as a "medium close-up"), etc. — and so, quite naturally, the close-up is used with great frequency in works created originally and specifically for film. It might even be called film's workhorse shot.

In the filming of staged opera, however, the close-up should never be used with anywhere near that sort of frequency and in fact ought to be used only with the utmost discretion. Anna Netrebko and Jonas Kaufmann notwithstanding, opera singers, generally speaking, are not meant to be seen up close when working but are most favorably and advantageously viewed when seen at a discreet distance. Ditto certain parts of a production's set or costumes (certain sets and costumes in Julie Taymor's Zauberflöte for the Met spring instantly to mind). Therefore, in filmed staged opera, and barring any special circumstances, the workhorse shot should always be the so-called "medium-shot", unexciting in itself as it may be: a shot that includes all those onstage who are part of the central action at any point in time, or are a dramatically meaningful part of the reaction to that action, close-ups being interjected only when dramatically clarifying or revealing, or interjected only occasionally and fleetingly as visual spice. Further, and contrary to the standard shot-hierarchy of film where the "long-shot" (i.e., the so-called "establishing-shot" that shows the entire overall setting of the action) is used only rarely, typically only at scene's opening, in a filmed staged opera the long-shot should be used fairly often so that the film audience is regularly provided a satisfying overall orientating view; a view available at will at all times for an audience in the opera house.

And excepting special effects, that's pretty much it. That would seem to give short shrift to those benefits film is able to provide an audience; benefits not available to them live in the opera house. But that's not the way filmed staged opera is experienced in practice when done properly where the shot "palette", so to speak, and shot tempo are used with intelligence and real dramatic understanding. Rather, filmed staged opera done in that way is almost invariably experienced as a satisfying simulacrum of the Real Deal. While there no doubt will be those who care little for or are indifferent to opera as genuine dramma per musica and who will object bitterly to being deprived of constant, up-close-and-personal views of their favorite songbirds, there's nothing for it. About such fans one can say only: let 'em eat cake.

Backstage At The Royal Opera House

The Royal Opera House streamed live today a ten-hour video of the backstage goings-on at the theater that was truly fascinating. The day closed with a prerecorded simultaneous look onstage and backstage at an actual performance of the full Act III of Die Walküre (the current Keith Warner production for the ROH that, if this act is representative of the whole, is a mildly Eurotrashy one more wrongheaded or just plain stupid than outrageous for the most part) and it was a real eye-opener to see the almost impossible coordination, mechanical and human, required among the 100-plus stage personnel to make it all come off onstage seamlessly and, as far as the audience was concerned, seemingly effortlessly (pay special attention to the Deputy Stage Manager (DSM): the amazing Sarah who calls out all the cues).

For those of you who missed today's webcast this part of it can be seen in full here. We think you'll find the viewing well worth the time spent.

The Glyndebourne Tristan: An Object Lesson In Doing Things Right

[NOTE: This entry has been edited as of 3:47 PM Eastern on 27 Dec to restore a one-word but important qualifying parenthetical and to clean up some overblown language.]

The Guardian has posted until 6 January 2013 videos of the 2007 revival of Glyndebourne's 2003 Nikolaus Lehnhoff über-minimalist staging of Wagner's Tristan und Isolde (Act I, Act II, Act III), a staging that's an object lesson in just how powerful a Wagner music-drama can be when the opera director stays out of Wagner's way by doing — and doing only — what he ought to be doing: viz., discovering, to the utmost capacity of his gift, the most vivid and compelling way to realize onstage the full sense and spirit of the opera creator's concept and vision as made manifest in the score (music, text, and stage directions), as we've put it previously. This holds true even when the resulting staging turns out first-rate but is imperfectly realized and dotted here and there with (mostly) small but outright conceptual blunders as it is in this case. Of course, it doesn't hurt matters in this case that the cast is also first-rate, both as singers and as actors, and that the performance of one of that cast, Nina Stemme as Isolde, is the equal of every iconic performance known to us of that impossible role. On the other hand, it doesn't help much (and most especially in this music-drama) that the conductor, Jiří Bĕlohlávek, turns in a less than profound reading of the score; competent, conscientious, and lively as it may be. Negatives notwithstanding, all in all a thoroughly worthwhile and rewarding expenditure of some five hours of our time. We suspect it might prove to be for you as well.

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.)

A Great Idea Gone Horribly Wrong From The Get-Go

Herman Melville's Moby-Dick is arguably the very incarnation of that mythical entity, The Great American Novel. Someone had the splendid idea of having the novel read aloud serially on the Web a chapter at a time in downloadable segments. Here's the result so far.

What's wrong with this picture (apart from the misspelling of the novel's title we mean)?

Carl Orff’s Meretricious Claptrap

Following a few brief, general introductory remarks, venerable classical music critic Martin Bernheimer began his Financial Times review of this past Wednesday's opening concert of the Carnegie Hall 2012-2013 season featuring the splendid Chicago Symphony Orchestra under the baton of its music director Riccardo Muti thusly:

Riccardo Muti, whose aesthetic preferences are sometimes surprising, chose to inaugurate [the orchestra's] vaunted Manhattan visit with the meretricious claptrap of Carl Orff’s Carmina Burana. So much for intellectual and/or emotional challenge.

On reading this we simultaneously smiled and winced (a neat trick, that), for while we could not help but agree with Mr. Bernheimer's bitingly laconic assessment of the work, we nevertheless harbor "an ongoing, undiminished, and fairly mindless fascination with it," as we've previously remarked here on S&F. As we went on to say:

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. And it's weird. Very weird. The text, I mean, its weirdness sharpened by being written and of course sung mostly in Latin.

But as Mr. Bernheimer neatly put it concerning other music on the CSO's program for the following night's concert, "one didn’t have to love the music on this occasion to admire the music-making," so it is with a particularly brilliant reading of Carmina recorded and released on vinyl LP in 1958 by Capitol Records featuring (of all groups!) the Houston Choral, Houston Youth Symphony Boys' Choir, and Houston Symphony Orchestra with the great and inimitable Leopold Stokowski on the podium which recording was subsequently remastered and transferred to CD by EMI. (It's paired on this recording with a reading of Stravinsky's Firebird Suite about which reading the less said the better.) As we wrote about this recorded performance of Carmina:

Lord knows I'm no Stoki fan generally which in my day was enough to get one run out of Philadelphia on a rail were one reckless enough to admit to it in public. But of all the recorded readings of this work of my experience Stoki is the only one to get everything right sans any minuses. He draws from the at that time less than world-class Houston forces performances that the best of the era would have been proud to have produced, and draws from the soloists — Virginia Babikian, Clyde Hager, and Guy Gardner — performances to match. A truly sterling reading. [Our full and more detailed commentary on Carmina and this recorded performance can be read here.]

This EMI remastering is a tough-to-impossible CD to find new, but one well worth the search.

An Apologia For Serious Critics And Criticism

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

An excerpt:

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

[...]

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

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

RTWT here.

On Musical Masterpieces

So you, a musically well-educated musician, hear a piece of music new to you, are gobsmacked by it and passionately declare it a masterpiece. Your companion, an equally musically well-educated musician, disagrees. He says it's merely a pleasing, well-made piece of music. Do you imagine you could successfully defend your assessment of the piece as a masterpiece?

If you answered Yes, we suggest you think again and reflect on what the legendary teacher of composition Nadia Boulanger (and we here use the word "legendary" most advisedly) had to say on the matter:

I can distinguish music that is well-made and music that isn't. Yet, what distinguishes well-made music and a masterpiece, that I cannot tell. I won't say that [an objective criterion to distinguish the two] doesn't exist, but I don't know what it is. It all comes down to faith. As I accept God, I accept beauty, I accept emotion. I also accept masterpieces. There are conditions without which masterpieces cannot be achieved, but what defines a masterpiece cannot be pinned down.

Just so.

(The above quote was transcribed from a lovely film on Mademoiselle Boulanger by Bruno Monsaingeon which can be viewed here.)

The Herheim Bayreuther Festspiele Parsifal

[NOTE: This entry has been updated (1) as of 5:35 PM Eastern on 16 Aug. See below.]

[NOTE: This entry has been edited as of 2:40 PM Eastern on 14 Aug to clarify certain points rhetorically made.]

Just finished watching the HD (720p) videos of the live transmission from the Bayreuther Festspiele of Stefan Herheim's Eurotrash (i.e., Konzept) staging of Parsifal and it's just about as we expected, generally speaking, although we must say the staging was unexpectedly beautiful and beautifully executed, never mind that it has nothing whatsoever to do with Wagner's Parsifal beyond its being a deconstruction of and commentary on Wagner's music-drama; a deconstruction and commentary that hijacks the music and text of Wagner's Parsifal to serve its own purposes resulting in what is effectively a new opera.

What makes this Eurotrash staging remarkable is that it was, from the beginning (2008), lauded to the sky by audiences and critics alike, the latter presumably to avoid the risk of being looked upon as reactionary dinosaurs by pointing out its almost utter disregard of the concept of Wagner's music-drama — not a good thing for critics to be looked upon as — and the former, for who knows what reasons other than that Mr. Herheim's Konzept takes as its central idea the historical progress of Germany and the Bayreuther Festspiele itself from the last quarter of the 19th century forward, and makes Parsifal (the character) a stand-in for...that's right, you guessed it: Richard Wagner himself. A bit scandalous that last as one scene in Act I of this staging has Parsifal schtupping Herzeleide, his own mother (never mind that we know, or rather are expected to know, it's the shape-shifting Kundry).

Seriously. We kid you not.

But don't take our word for any of this. Judge for yourselves here (Act I), here (Act II), and here (Act III).

And why do we interrupt our blogging hiatus to report this at this time? Because we don't know how long the the above linked HD videos will remain online. So for those interested, view them while the viewing is still good.

That is all. As you were.

---

Update (5:35 PM Eastern on 16 Aug): If our eMail is any indicator, we seem to have given the impression we object to this Konzept staging simply because it's a Konzept staging. That's not the case at all. We object to this Konzept staging for two reasons: first, because it's a fraud insofar as it's billed and promoted as a staging of Wagner's Parsifal which it most decidedly is not, and second, because it was presented at the Bayreuther Festspiele which is the very last place on Earth almost any Konzept staging of a Wagner opera or music-drama should be permitted. Had this otherwise excellent staging been billed and promoted honestly as what it actually is — viz., Stefan Herheim's Parsifal which is a deconstruction of and commentary on the music-drama of the same name by Richard Wagner and using Wagner's music and text for its own purposes — and presented at any opera venue in the world other than at the Bayreuther Festspiele, we would have had no objection to it at all, and in fact would have had many good things to say about it.

The above, just for the record.

Bach, Gould, Dope, And Another Dose

Mark Edmundson, a university professor of English at the University of Virginia, had published in The Chronicle of Higher Education last week an interesting article titled "Can Music Save Your Life?" wherein he concluded:

My wonderful former teacher, Geoffrey Hartman, said that most reading was vague and lazy, like girl watching. Feminists gave him the bastinado for that, but he was right. Something similar is true about listening to music. Usually it's about getting your emotions packaged for you, quieting the static inside, fabricating an exciting identity ... to counteract one's commitment to a life of secure banality.

Most music listening, like most reading, is passive. It's about girl watching rather than woman wooing, which is a tougher game. Schopenhauer says that most reading is letting other people think your thoughts for you. I'd add that most music listening is about letting other people feel your feelings for you.

While I take Dr. Edmundson's point, I think he's rather missed the mark. Music listening can go far deeper than that.

A personal experience:

I've been on serious dope for a period of time but once in my life: during a one-year recovery from a particularly nasty and should-have-been-fatal motorcycle accident in the early '70s. That experience with dope was an eye-opening and consciousness-raising one which to this day remains unforgettable. The dope was administered intravenously by medical personnel for the first month or so and self-administered orally thereafter for a period of another few months. That first warm rush and the immediately ensuing feeling of transcendent wellbeing after each dose simply has no equal in ordinary life — at least not in my ordinary life.

Needless to say, I became hooked on that feeling and slipped into the habit of checking my watch repeatedly to see whether it was permissible to administer another dose without exceeding the safe limit. One day I caught myself actually doing that and it scared me straight. On the spot and cold turkey I ceased taking the stuff and depended thereafter on aspirin alone for whatever pain relief it could offer.

While it's not quite the same thing, I today, in the closing years of my life (I've passed the biblically allotted three-score-and-ten and so figure I'm now living on borrowed time), experience much that same feeling of transcendent wellbeing and when the music's over the need for "another dose" every time I listen to a Glenn Gould performance of a Bach keyboard work; the Partitas, the Goldberg, and Book I of the Well-Tempered Clavier most especially. Once the CD gets going in the player with the repeat set to ALL, it requires a substantial effort of will on my part to stop it going so that I can get on with other things no matter how long it's been going which at times could be an entire day without break.

I've of course attempted many times to analyze and explain this phenomenon to myself, a phenomenon I experience with no other music and performer, and of course always come up with an answer. But in the end, that answer, no matter how well-thought-out and detailed, always turns out to be woefully inadequate and no explanation at all. I know the phenomenon has something to do with Gould's unique and uncanny ability to delineate each voice in the music's dense polyphonic texture with perfect clarity as if he had a separate hand devoted to each yet maintain at all times a perfect horizontal (melodic) and vertical (harmonic) contrapuntal coherence in the gestalt and in so doing seems to be inhabiting and giving voice to the very mind of Bach himself which, in turn, seems, in this one respect, the very mind of God. No other so-called "absolute" music and no other keyboardist of my experience comes even close to being able to accomplish that in my case. But, by itself, that's no real explanation either.

Am I merely "getting [my] emotions packaged for [me], quieting the static inside [me], fabricating an exciting identity [for myself] ... to counteract [my] commitment to a life of secure banality" by "letting other people feel [my] feelings for [me]" as Dr. Edmundson suggests?

I seriously doubt it. But, then, there's always the possibility, no matter how disquieting, that I might be doing just that. If so, I'm content to let it be so — that is, as long as I can always get another dose.

And Speaking Of Wagner

It's an irony of sorts that the works of the rabidly anti-Semitic Wagner have, over the centuries, often been best understood and performed by Jews, from the hugely gifted Hermann Levi, a Jew and the son of a rabbi, who conducted the Bayreuth world premiere of Wagner's deeply Christian-themed Parsifal to the notable Jewish Wagner conductors of our own era such as Fritz Reiner, Daniel Barenboim, and the great Georg Solti. Here is yet another who speaks with deeply-felt passion about Wagner and his music-dramas and operas: Iván Fischer.

(Our thanks to The Wagnerian for the link.)

NPR's "Goldberg Week": Joining The Party

This week, NPR has been celebrating the birthday of the incomparably great Johann Sebastian Bach (born, 21 March 1685) with a series of posts on its blog Deceptive Cadence devoted to commentary on Bach's so-called Goldberg Variations, an astonishing set of 30 variations for the keyboard on the ground bass of a meltingly beautiful 32-measure sarabande (Aria) which set of variations is what we've conservatively called the "without-equal crown jewel of the entire Baroque keyboard repertoire." That commentary will be capped off tomorrow, 23 March, at 12:00 PM EDT, by a live "online listening party" featuring pianist Glenn Gould's seminal 1955 recording of the Goldberg with special guests Tim page and Anne Midgette, former and present Washington Post chief classical music critics, respectively, commenting. We herewith join the party in spirit, if somewhat prematurely, by way of reprinting below our 2004 S&F entry "Gould's Goldberg: Earlier or Later?", a commentary on Gould's two historic recordings of this great work: those of 1955 and 1981. The text follows instanter and without further comment.

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Lovely Weekend Guest, a first-rate pianist and knowledgeable lover of Bach's keyboard works (she often refers to them by BWV number, for instance) spent part of her last weekend evening here in a friendly but, um, animated discussion with me of Glenn Gould's 1955 and 1981 recordings of Bach's Goldberg Variations (or BWV 988 as LWG calls it just to piss me off). On the whole, I rather prefer the earlier reading, she the later. The readings, both of them, are, of course, marvels, and display in equal measure Gould's trademark, irreproducible, and nonpareil Bach performance technique — the preternatural (horizontal) delineation of multiple contrapuntal lines while maintaining fully their interlaced (vertical) harmonic coherence; the uncanny rhythmic sense, perfectly precise but infinitely plastic; and the equally precise and plastic articulation which commentators and critics insist on referring to as détaché but which is rather a near-perfect pianistic analogue of the highly prized and near-impossible harpsichord legato — but are otherwise world's apart in spirit.

Rambunctious, LWG calls the earlier reading. Staid, I call the later, but only half mean it, using the term largely for reasons of symmetry with her rambunctious. About the only interpretive point on which we agree is that both Gould readings of this without-equal crown jewel of the entire Baroque keyboard repertoire blow away all other readings, truly excellent though some are.

I've had the recordings of both readings in my library almost since the day of their releases (both of which recordings survived the catastrophe that consumed most of the rest of my libraries several years ago), and though I listen to them often, I never really made the effort to nail down exactly why I preferred the one reading over the other. Better late than never, I decide, and so use the weekend's discussion with LWG as a spur.

Leaving aside the Aria (the ground bass of which is the unifying theme upon which the variations are built) which opens and closes the set of variations (and which I here leave aside mostly because I suspect I'm missing something important concerning it in the later reading as I simply cannot conceive a reasonable musical, aesthetic, or emotional justification for the funereal, almost structure-destroying tempo taken for it by Gould in that reading), I always vaguely imagined it was the generally slower — at times significantly slower — tempi of the later reading (i.e., slower as compared with the earlier reading) that provoked my antipathy for, even annoyance with, that reading. But I now see that's not it. Something else. And that something else is, I think, most clearly exemplified in Gould's two readings of Variation 25, dubbed "The Black Pearl" by the great harpsichordist and Bach scholar Wanda Landowska; an astonishing piece of music that enters the set of variations like some alien presence and at its departure leaves one slack-jawed with amazement and wonder.

With its frequent, expectation-subverting harmonic modulations, actual and implied, Variation 25's chromaticism is so extreme it makes the music of Tristan and Parsifal seem positively diatonic by comparison. Gould, in his liner notes for the 1955 release, refers to this variation in his typically provocative way as a "Chopinesque mood-piece," and elsewhere as a "Romantic effusion." It's neither of these, of course, but thoroughly and essentially Bachian throughout. It's simply that it seems to not belong to this set of variations, but seemingly magically still remains one with it while at the same time seeming to inhabit another world altogether.

In his earlier reading, Gould captures this another-world quality perfectly, largely by his circumspect and strategic use of rubato, an expressive device more identified with the Classical period and with Chopin and the Romantics than with Bach, but here used to brilliant effect. This variation is one of the few where the tempo of the earlier reading is taken slightly slower overall than the later (but only marginally so; 6'28" vs. 6'03"; a 6% difference in timings). The confluence of the marginally slower overall tempo and the strategic use of rubati in this earlier reading, however, make the progress of the melodic line and the movement of the astonishing harmonic shifts seem to play out on a scale cosmically slow the variation's internal pulse seemingly proceeding as do the slow wheeling of galaxies through the infinite eons of boundless space, the harmony's expectation-subverting modulations given point by the rubati and suggesting tonalities mystically strange and vastly remote.

As I said, music that leaves one slack-jawed with amazement and wonder — in the earlier reading, that is. In the later reading the rubati, while still present to some extent, are largely emasculated, the internal pulse and inflection of the melodic line and harmonic shifts spun out in deliberately and soberly considered fashion, the variation now seeming more at home with the set's other variations than in the earlier reading because more metrically and sensibly proportional to them. The expectation-subverting modulations are still there, of course, and still give this variation the feel of a vaguely alien presence within the set, but the another-world magic of the earlier reading has gone missing. Gould's deliberate and sober approach to the music bars such mysteries. One's amazement at the variation's harmonic inventiveness remains, of course, but the wonder has fled.

This stately, deliberate sobriety characterizes most (but not all) of Gould's later reading of the Goldberg; a sobriety achieved by various musical means, one of which is Gould's singling out of one of the contrapuntal voices (typically, the unifying element of the Aria's bass line) as if to say, "See? Here it is." In intent, the device is somewhat akin to that used in "Konzept" opera productions wherein the self-involved director insists on pushing his particular "vision" repeatedly in the audience's face lest they miss it. It's a device as annoying here as it is there.

The sheer audacity — the "rambunctious[ness]" — of Gould's earlier reading may be considered by some a mark against it, but for me it's that very audacity that gives revelatory life to that earlier reading, while the deliberately sober later reading largely (but, again, not entirely) eschews audacity as if to act as corrective of the implied youthful excesses of the earlier. While the later reading may achieve its end in that respect, it does so at a cost, and to my way of thinking (and hearing), the cost is simply too great.

Authentic Shakespeare?

Lord preserve us (and the Bard forgive us)! HIP has now invaded the world of the spoken theater: Shakespeare spoken as Shakespeare would have heard it spoken. Give a listen.

"Authentic" Shakespeare?

Let's hope not.

Earworm

We first saw this brilliant and marvelously surreal commercial for The Cosmopolitan of Las Vegas, a Las Vegas resort and casino, last night and the music — a number by Austrian composer Marcus Füreder aka Parov Stelar titled, "Booty Swing"— keeps on playing in our head and refuses to leave.

An MP3 of the full three-minute number can be downloaded from Amazon for $0.99 here.

The Lepage Staging Of Die Walküre: A Brief Rant

We just had our first extended look at the Robert Lepage staging of Wagner's Der Ring des Nibelungen for the Met via a YouTube video of the complete Met HD film of Die Walküre and it's even worse than we imagined it to be from the manifold verbal descriptions read and production photos viewed. This Die Walküre staging is, in short, perhaps the most wooden, most vapid, least evocative, and most utterly empty staging of a Wagner music-drama it's ever been our displeasure to witness, Le Machine accomplishing nothing but constrain the action of the singer-actors who, for the most part, moved to and fro seemingly willy-nilly along the thin strip of real estate provided them downstage doing vaguely appropriate things most, but by no means all, of the time, and make itself impotently conspicuous merely by its looming, hulking, contribute-nothing presence.

What a colossal and colossally expensive blunder on Peter Gelb's part. We can only hope Mr. Gelb has the courage and nerve to accept the blunder head-on, retire this entire Ring production from the Met's stage forever after this year's complete cycle is concluded, and not attempt to amortize the cost of Le Machine by mounting revivals of the production in future.

What an appalling squandering of time, talent, and money.

Say What? We Think Not.

Say what? A longtime musical partnership riven over a performer's choice of cadenza(!)? We think not. Even given that pianist Hélène Grimaud's decision to use a cadenza written by the most decidedly un-Mozartian Ferruccio Busoni (1866-1924) in her planned recording with conductor Claudio Abbado of Mozart's Piano Concerto No. 23 instead of using Mozart's own, written-out cadenza is nothing short of bewildering and in questionable taste, it is, after all, a cadenza — something that by its very nature is and has always been a performer's choice, especially so in Mozart's time. Yet, because of that choice, it's been reported, Maestro Abbado has called an end to his participation in the recording and to his longtime musical partnership with Ms. Grimaud as well.

As we've said, we think not. There's something else going on there and it's got nothing to do with cadenzas (no, we've no idea what that something else might be).

Damn shame.