Some More Random "Maxims and Arrows"
This is getting to be a habit. It’s great fun to make outlandish statements without any need to back them up. My sincere advice: If you write in objecting to any of these observations, I want you always to keep in mind that the maxims you are objecting to are not the only ones that need to be objected to; the other ones are equally foolish. The solution? Pack a picnic lunch and make a day of it.
Here Goes:
1. All the Transylvanian folk songs in the world aren’t worth one whisker on the chin of Bluebeard’s Castle. Bartok wasted his time with “ethnomusicology”.
2. Modern concert pianists are too perfect. Perfection is boring. Hear that, messieurs Pollini and Perahia? Make some wrong notes. Wrong notes are like shaking some pepper on your scrambled eggs. They improve the dish.
3. Can Korngold be that good? If hearing is believing, he is.
4. Forget the academy, please. Webern is a nature composer. He is closer to Mahler than to anyone else. And I ain’t talking about In Sommerwind.
5. French grand opera is a treasure. Why don’t we hear more of it? Money, money, money. And send me over some of those ballet dancers. You know, for later.
6. You want Russian neo-classicism? Forget Stravinsky. Your man is Tchaikovsky. Take an evening and give Queen of Spades a whirl. You’ll be glad you did.
7. Darius Milhaud. ‘nuff said.
8. But keep your Ned Rorems. Art songs or artsy-fartsy songs? You can keep Sam Barber too. (except of course, for Vanessa. Everyone knows that that’s a super dooper doo-dilly-doozer of a masterpiece. No wonder it’s played constantly!
9. Haydn’s piano sonatas. Somebody help me, pleeeeze! Masterpieces or bores?
10. Why is Prokofiev’s worst piano concerto (the third) the one that always gets played? And why is his worst opera (Love for Three Oranges) the one that always gets played? Did you know that in some jurisdictions, simply whistling the march tune from that opera is a misdemeanor? I kid you not.
Postscript to "If You Can't Beat 'em, Should You Join 'em?"
It occurs to me that in my defense of intractability, etc. I have made myself vulnerable to Richard Taruskin’s charge of irrelevantly clinging to the dying idealogy of German romanticism. And my case wouldn’t be appreciably helped if I substituted intractable works by say, Gesualdo or Scriabin for the works I did invoke by Bach, Beethoven, Schubert and Berg. Oh, well, let it stand. When somebody believes in something, it is only too easy to find reasoning that seemingly makes one’s own point of view appear to be the best point of view. To borrow a rhetorical tool from Nietzsche, here are some “maxims and arrows” related to the subject at hand:
- A composer creates his own audience.
- Yes, he creates it, and then like as not abandons it.
- What is the difference between some run-of-the-mill divertimento in D Major by a Classical composer, and some piece for three amplified percussionists, called “Resonances” by a Darmstadter?
- In every way, John Cage is more old-fashioned than Rachmaninov.
- Yes, and Philip Glass is more old-fashioned than Puccini. Compare “Satyagraha” and “Boheme”.
- But Schoenberg, despite vociferous hype to the contrary, is not old-fashioned. You can’t be old-fashioned before you’ve been digested (and being an icon for a generation of university composers is not digestion).
- Mozart wrote approximately three times as much music as Beethoven. They have roughly the same number of masterpieces. Does this make Beethoven better?
- No. He just has a better batting average.
- Taruskin’s words, “accommodation” and “German romanticism” are new words for that old stand-by of Schiller’s, the “Naive and the Sentimental”.
- Re Taruskin: Beethoven is sentimental in this dichotomy, agreed, but is Shostakovich “naive”?
- Polemics are like junk food; they taste great at first, but anything more than a few bites leaves you feeling a little nauseous; one wants fresh air.
- Popular and “high brow” music aren’t the same subject and shouldn’t be compared; they serve different functions; but sometimes they overlap.
- The composer is closer to the poet, never the scientist. Beauty can’t be “proved”.
In “A Shostakovich Casebook”, Taruskin wrote movingly of an experience he had listening to a Shostakovich symphony with sophisticated musicians, in the Soviet Union. He relates that he looked around to see if there were expressions of condescension on the part of his Soviet colleagues, and was taken aback to see how deeply involved with and moved by the music they were, and it appears he had a sort of epiphany, or awakening, which led him to question the biases in our higher musical education system. Could this be the beginning of the train of thinking that led to his article, “The Musical Mystique”?
Review of Taruskin's Article, Pt. 2: If You Can't Beat 'em, Should You Join 'em?
reviews:
Who Needs
Classical Music?
Julian Johnson
Classical Music,
Why Bother?
Joshua Fineberg
Why Classical Music
Still Matters
Lawrence Kramer
I just spent the morning listening intently to Paul Hindemith’s 1938 operatic masterpiece, Mathis der Maler. This work is ultimately an apologia for the so-called, “ivory tower”. It’s also an apologia for Hindemith’s personal artistic and political credos, formed in the crucible of Nazi Germany, but that’s another story. In short, the artist determines that art is, if not above, at least not predicated or necessarily determined by politics, and the artist has a free hand to determine his own relationship to society, and is not to be bullied either by the tyrant or the (probably justified) revolutionary. The work is a blockbuster, a profound work of (it sadly seems) eternal relevence. Why this magnificent work is not a staple of the repertory, I cannot say…actually, I can, but the explanation depresses me.
Which of course, brings us to Taruskin’s exasperating article. Taruskin claims: “There are two ways of dealing with the new pressure that classical music go out and earn its living. One is accommodation, which can entail painful losses and suffer from its own excesses …Composers have accommodated by adopting more “accessible” styles. Love it or hate it, such accommodation is a normal part of the evolutionary history of any art.” I don’t know where to begin with this seeming advocacy of cowardice and cynicism. The fact that we have the St. Matthew Passion, the Grosse Fuge, Winterreise, and Wozzeck, among other works, already constitutes a persuasive rationale for the “unreasonableness”, the “intractability”, the “lack of accommodation” of the artist. Accommodation is a prescription for pap. And, by the way, I think that the works listed above have “earned their living”. You could say, they’ve “made their living”; blunt as this sounds, they have forced their way into the consciousness of true music lovers, and the desires of casual music-lovers, to whom Taruskin appears to cater, is something else, something to which Bach, Beethoven, Schubert, and Berg, at their generally acknowledged, “best”, appear not to particularly care about…rest assured, lesser figures will care about this public, and the most fortunate of them will get rich doing it.
There are indeed, especially in academia, where so-called “artists” are protected from the judgement of the marketplace, composers who appear to produce sterile works for the approbation of their similiarly inclined colleagues rather than for the living consumption of real music lovers. This is a pathology, but this pathology obtains even more in popular genres, where imitation and formulae for commercial puposes rival the ubiquitous imitation and formulae extant in the Ivory Tower.
Taruskin: “The other way is to hole up in such sanctuary as still exists and hurl imprecations and exhortations. That is the path of resistance to change and defense of the status quo, and it is the path chosen by the authors of the books under review here. The status quo in question, by now a veritable mummy, is the German romanticism that still reigns in many academic precincts…” So Taruskin is overtly saying, “If you don’t like it, Lump it!” An artist can’t protest? And historians, by the way, tell us that vital aspects of Western Civilization was preserved by so-called sanctuaries (monasteries, for instance) in the Dark Ages. No, I am not suggesting that current academia serves anywhere near so vital or admirable a function; on the contrary, I tend to agree with Taruskin’s contempt for the self important navel gazing of so many of his colleagues. Quixotically, Taruskin’s suggestion appears to be similar to that of Hans Sachs’ (I’m fresh off hearing a broadcast of the notorious Katerina Wagner production of Die Meistersinger on Saturday) maxim of “let the people decide”…The people always decide, in the long run, Professor Taruskin, but they don’t need you to congratulate “them” (and I ain’t sure who “them” really is) on their immediate, unreflective judgement; especially when, as is usual, that judgment is a product of ever changeable current tastes and fads. And of course there are commercial, and even occasionally, academic, manipulation by professors and blog-writers, inter alia, who seek to influence them in their judgment.
Taruskin on the "Defense of Classical Music" Pt. 1
Who Needs
Classical Music?
Julian Johnson
Classical Music,
Why Bother?
Joshua Fineberg
Why Classical Music
Still Matters
Lawrence Kramer
Richard Taruskin begins his essay, “The Musical Mystique” by rightly deriding a pseudo-meaningful, pretentiously artsy-fartsy “experiment” perpetrated by violinist Joshua Bell at the behest of A WashingtonTimes reporter in which Bell posted himself in the most annoying and least appropriate place in the subway system and played Bach on his priceless fiddle, in order to record the supposedly a-cultural apathy of the average commuter. This sophomoric experiment hardly needed to be made. You could go into a doctor’s office where the piped in Muzak might be a movement from, let’s say, a Mozart piano concerto, and record the apathy of the patients. In fact, its arguable that authentic lovers of so-called “Classical” music are exactly the sort of persons who object to the trivialization and degradation of music represented by its infliction on a defenseless commuter or patient population that is given no chance to decide what it wants to hear, or if it wants to hear anything at all.
If I have to hear music in a dentist’s office, restaurant, or subway, I vastly prefer that it be bad music. Not only because bad music is less distracting, but because I like to hear great music as a deliberate choice, with a relatively formal listening posture. Real music lovers don’t want music all the time, and are disinclined toward the use of background music. This includes real music lovers who prefer popular genres, as well.
So far so good, Taruskin’s point is agreed. But then he comments, “In one respect, though, the caper was instructive. It offered answers to those who wonder why classical music now finds itself friendless in its moment of self perceived crisis-a long moment that has given rise in recent years to a whole literature of elegy and jeremiad.” Why are sideshows like the Bell experiment presumed to prove anything about classical music generally? Aren’t commuters, etc. smart enough to recognise that silly stunts don’t sully Bach, or prove anything at all about the viability of classical music? And is classical music friendless? Here in Chicago we recently had a magnificent performance of Mahler’s 6th symphony. I’ve been discussing it all week with my friends and students. Aren’t we friends of classical music? Or is it a numbers game? There aren’t enough friends, perhaps. But why would I care that 99 per cent of the American population at large doesn’t give a hoot about Mahler? What sort of “obligation” does anyone have to any kind of music? I think Taruskin rightly considers that no one has any sort of obligation. Again, this point is agreed. We would indeed have a problem if the Chicago Symphony orchestra went away. We would have a problem if less visible local orchestras went away, as well. But this doesn’t seem to be happening. Millions of people sort of liking something a little bit means less than hundreds of people deeply committed to something, provided the threshold of at least minimal commercial viability is passed.
Why all the insecurity? It couldn’t possibly matter to me what Taruskin thinks about Schoenberg; he doesn’t love it, and therefore doesn’t understand it. It means a great deal to me what Pierre Boulez thinks about Schoenberg, however. But it doesn’t matter to me what Pierre Boulez thinks about Shostakovich. He doesn’t love it, and therefore doesn’t understand it. But it matters a great deal to me what Richard Taruskin thinks about Shostakovich. I personally dislike almost all popular music with which I’m acquainted. So what. It’s not because I’m an elitist Teutonic racist, either. Ironically, Taruskin, who loves classical music and has given his life to the subject, doesn’t appear to acknowledge the perfectly possible sincerity with which one can abhor popular music and be exclusively inclined to the classical repertory, with no other guiding principle than personal taste. The 99 percent of the population that prefers various articles from popular genres neither intimidates me, nor is in a position to force their taste on me.
Taruskin takes plenty of shots at hoity-toity classical music lovers, with occasional justification. But he could as well take some shots at the sort of idiot who likes certain pop styles, who expresses ludicrous sentiments such as “Why don’t you forget about those out-dated European guys, and listen to music that normal people like.” I’ve heard plenty of nonsense like this in my time. It’s a kind of reverse snobbery. I’m tempted to respond in such situations, “If you’ll carfully listen to Die Frau Ohne Schatten, I’ll carfully listen to Doggy-bone Snoop’s latest album. Two can play at that game, mister!
Arguments are Won by the Best Arguer, not Necessarily by the Best Argument: Richard Taruskin's Polemic in The New Republic
Who Needs
Classical Music?
Julian Johnson
Classical Music,
Why Bother?
Joshua Fineberg
Why Classical Music
Still Matters
Lawrence Kramer
Arnold Bax described a genius as someone who has, among other things, superior reserves of energy. Joseph Joachim, violinist friend of Brahms, described genius as “doing with ease what mere talent cannot do at all.” We can all probably agree that genius requires exceptional intelligence yoked with creativity. For my money, idiot savants are a sentimental myth.
By these criteria, Richard Taruskin is a genius. Probably by most rational criteria. Can you say “indefatigable?” And his writing is scintillating.
But Taruskin’s awesomely scathing and intemperate assault in The New Republic on musico-sociological tomes by Julian Johnson, Joshua Fineberg, and Lawrence Kramer does him little credit. His vitriol, entertaining as it is, tells us more about Taruskin than it does about his maimed and bleeding victims. And I say this as someone who has little use for Johnson et. al, and who admires Taruskin no end. In fact, I buy and read Taruskin’s books, and it would never occur to me to buy the books he lambasts. But the viciousness and one-sidedness of his attack-piece may make me reconsider. Taruskin quotes from “The Sopranos”, but after reading his latest, I want to quote from “Mash”. There is a scene in a “Mash” episode where the fatuously moronic Frank Burns is “more sinned against than sinning”. Hawkeye defends Frank. He is asked, “Since when do you give two hoots about Frank Burns?” He replies, “Just now, and it’s only one hoot.” Well put. That’s just how I feel in this instance.
I plan on making more posts about this article, examining Taruskin’s point(s) of view in detail (he’s all over the place). The gist of the argument is that the three maligned writers are elitist, ignorant, out of touch idiots who want to preserve obsolete Teutonic-oriented prerogatives of taste-making and arrogant cultural monopolies of limited perspective, and impose these on some public; the general public? (is there such a thing?) The “musically inclined public”? They have allies in the “academic” “public”, I know… probably the widest public Taruskin can mean is the public that shops at Borders and Amazon. But even this isn’t certain. Taruskin actually questions Johnson, if not the others, in a moral sense. I also think Taruskin questions the sincerity of music lovers who admire certain styles (Arnold Schoenberg’s style, for instance). This is infuriating. I am as moved by “Moses und Aron” as he is by Musorgsky or Shostakovich, and genius though he may be, he has no right to dispute this. He can’t know.
Schoenberg once made a blistering and unfair critique of Stravinsky’s Oedipus Rex, and ironicallyacknowledged in the very critique that his intemperance spoke against himself and in favor of the work. Taruskin doesn’t have to retract his objections to these highly questionable books, just as Schoenberg didn’t retract his criticism, but a review like this does the books a favor.
I should add that without Taruskin’s inspired, and if I can put it this way, intoxicatingly sober advocacy for Shostakovich, my understanding for that very great composer would be much the poorer. But “That was then, and this is now.”
Four Cellists, ONE Cello
Stringfever is a British band that combines string playing, humor and performance art. This hilariously impressive performance has been making the YouTube rounds lately. Yes, all four guys are playing “Bolero” (in four parts) on a single cello. Initially it was sent to me by Jacque.
Last Night's Mahler Sixth: a Real Review
Some Guy irately complained about my irrelevant, sophomoric, and esoteric “non-review” of last night’s performance of Mahler 6, and requested — nay, demanded — that I write a “real” review. To this reproach I can only say “Touche.” So, here is my Official Review, translated into Standard Written Criticalese
Some Guy irately complained about my irrelevant, sophomoric, and esoteric “non-review” of last night’s performance of Mahler 6, and requested — nay, demanded — that I write a “real” review. To this reproach I can only say “Touche.” So, here is my Official Review, translated into Standard Written Criticalese:
MAESTRO Haitink led a LUCIDLY INFORMED READING of the Mahler Sixth Symphony last night at Symphony Center. IT WAS WORTH THE WAIT, as the ERSTWHILE Concertgebouew leader AMPLY DEMONSTRATED. Classical RESTRAINT was combined with romantic ELAN in a performance that combined URGENCY with METICULOUS PRECISION. KUDOS to the fine playing of Concertmaster Chen, principal horn Clevenger and especially to that finest of trombonists, Jay Friedman. But if I take my hat off to them, I put it back on again when I consider the antics of that percussionist who kept walking on and off the stage. We go to the concerts to see the music as well as hear it, you know!
The tempi were SPACIOUS, but not OVER-BROAD, while the articulations ADMIRABLY combined FINESSE and a sense of stylistic APPOSITENESS with a POWER that NEVER SEEMED FORCED. VELVETY LEGATO GAVE WAY WHEN NECESSARY TO BRUTAL FORCE, and the extreme emotional states evoked by this TRAGIC LANDMARK [Actually this is only too true. -JG] CONFRONTED the listener WITH A SENSE OF HIS OWN MORTALITY. [True, again. -JG]
Anyway, this is the way criticism oughtta be written, pal. And to my irate interlocutor, may I pose the immortal question first posed by the eminent critic Carl Showalter from the movie Fargo: “Happy now, A———?”
Here are some favorite Mahler 6 recordings.
Mahler's Popularity? He's the Antidote for Medieval (and Modern) Anonymity: the Sixth at Symphony Center
by obsessing about himself, about Gustav Mahler, personally —and for 80 glorious minutes at a time as Haitink was in no hurry — Mahler gives us, by proxy, some of our dignity back.
Originally, my plan was to review the October 19, 2007 performance by Haitink and the Chicagos of the Mahler Sixth Symphony for these pages. But I decided (to borrow a phrase from one of the psychopathic hillbillies in Deliverance), “That river don’t go to Aintree.” My reviews of particular performances tend to end up like this:
Of course it was great. It was Mahler’s Sixth. It was Haitink and Chicago.
Others are welcome to recount how Haitink’s expansively paced tempi allowed for stentorian (yet plush) sounds from the brass, and other ephemera that you really had to be there to appreciate.
So, let’s talk about something else. How about, “What does Mahler mean for the intellectual and emotional life of a human being in 2007?”
Mahler said, “My time will come.” If he meant that lots of smart people who love music will come to venerate him, he was right on the money. If he meant that his music was ahead of its time or a vision of the future, he was mistaken. We have yet to realize Mahler’s vision of the future: the “Long 19th Century” may have ended with the First World War, but the twentieth century is still, sadly, with us. America is still in “Viet Nam”, the Russians (Soviets) still have a “Czar”, genocide still reigns in too many places, Nuclear weapons are still all the rage, etc.
In a sense, the Twentieth Century is a Medieval epoch. In Medieval times people were largely anonymous, like the characters in Die Frau ohne Schatten: the dyer, the dyer’s wife, the lame brother, the one-eyed brother, etc. All but the wealthy and powerful were so much at the mercy of nature that they, rightly, feared such things as being eaten by wolves.
The twentieth century has alarming similarities. People have names, but technology has made them anonymous (when it isn’t taking away their privacy). Even our “celebrities” have achieved a strange kind of anonymity due to their ubiquity. They’ve become an undifferentiated set of cute nicknames, completely interchangeable. (Was it Britney or Lindsay that got arrested last week?) Some don’t even merit a cute nickname of their own, but must share with a (statistically temporary) partner, a la TomKat, Brangelina, or Bennifer (one Ben, two successive Jennifers). They might as well be The Anorexic Supermodel, The Globe-trotting Humanitarian Actress, or The Former Bodyguard Baby-Daddy. Anonymous, anonymous, anonymous.
Fear of wolves has been replaced by fear of dirty bombs and climate change, but we’re still at the mercy of nature (science), because most people don’t understand it, and too many of those that do only want to deny it, abuse it or exploit it. And have you compared the virulent strains of faith propounded both by some American politicos and their unspeakable “fundamentalist” adversaries with their Dark Age counterparts lately? This is a Medieval epoch. There are Torquemadas, Savonarolas, and Sultans all over the place.
Well, by obsessing about himself, about Gustav Mahler, personally — and for 80 glorious minutes at a time as Haitink was in no hurry — Mahler gives us, by proxy, some of our dignity back. And he gives us the Nineteenth Century back, all over again. Hammer blows of fate doom the victim! The universe cares about us, even if its attitude is malevolent! And the unutterable hearbreak of Alpine beauty in the third movement! Nature is there to awe and move us, and furthermore, to co-operate with our emotional states. Our feelings matter! The third movement is so fabulously, extravagantly, jaw-droppingly beautiful that it verges on the unlistenable.
Arnold Schoenberg was right, as usual, when he flatly stated “Gustav Mahler was a saint.” But let’s not kid ourselves, he is our past, not our present. We can only hope that his vision will become our future.
Is Bruckner a Niche Composer?
Here are a couple examples of a certain personality type:
1. The person who (thinks he) aspires to be a writer, and sets out his pens, paper, erasers, etc. in meticulous array, but somehow never gets around to writing anything. He might rearrange his materials, however, and thus have reason to think he’s begun work.
2. A manager at a company who believes in the efficacy of meetings, and actually schedules and conducts meetings. Nothing was ever accomplished at a meeting. But the willingness to be bored is at least a gesture of good will.
My third example is all too personal:
3. The husband who is told he better darn well participate in the house work if he wants a clean house, and who responds by ostentatiously dragging the vacuum cleaner into the middle of the living room, abandones it there to brood forlornly over the dust, and then drinks a beer while complaining of how unfairly he is over-taxed with the housework.
This sounds like me, but does it sound like Bruckner?
Attempts at humor aside, I think that many critics of Bruckner consider that Bruckner got out his Wagnerian harmonies and Beethoven Ninth themes and arranged them on his worktable, then busily fussed with them, neither adding nor subtracting to the material’s intrinsic worth, and then abandoned the chaotic shambles in the middle of the concert hall, and went to drink some (probably sacramental) wine, all the while congratulating himself on having undergone the rigors imposed on a symphonist. An example from such critics? consider the following, by Aldous Huxley concerning a performance by Albert Coates of the 4th symphony, but which passage could be levelled at Bruckner generally:
“One of these minor works of art, which forty years ago appeared to possess a considerable significance, [Huxley was writing in 1922] was dragged, some few nights ago, out of a reposeful obscurity that should have been eternal, and galvanized by Mr. Coates’ exuberant vitality into a semblance of life. There must have been many who, like myself, went to the London Symphony Orchestra’s concert last Monday for the sole purpose of hearing what Bruckner’s Fourth Symphony would sound like on revival. Most of them, I venture to believe, must have agreed with me that the poor thing was better dead, must even have budgeted it its allotted hour of re-existence; have wished long before the end, to see it safely under the tombstone once again.
At a time when it was complimentary in the highest possible degree to be compared with Wagner, Bruckner was called “the Wagner of the Symphony.” People listened to his music with all the seriousness and good-will which he himself brought to the making of it. We who listen with forty years more experience in our ears than they, perceive that the Wagner of the Symphony was a man who wrote for the Wagnerian orchestra pieces of music which he believed to be in the form of Beethoven’s symphonies. We perceive that his thematic invention was of a vulgar and commonplace character. (All his learning and ingenuity are lavished on themes that would not do any very great credit to a Gilbert and Sullivan opera.) We see that he has fallen heavily between his Wagnerian and classical stools; that he takes noise and climaxes from Wagner and cramping limitations from the classics, and that he makes of the two something that is at once curiously childish and pretentious.
Listening to this work, I found myself wondering which of our own esteemed composers will be regarded, a generation hence, as we regard Bruckner. Will they wonder why on earth we made all this fuss about Stravinsky, or how we were not disgusted by the emotionalism of Scriabin…”
This is unfair, as became evident in yesterday’s class, which was devoted to a consideration of Bruckner’s Eighth Symphony, edition Haas. The 8th does indeed feature a principal theme which is derived from the rhythm employed by Beethoven for the definitive statement of the first subject of the first movement of the Ninth symphony (and the harmonies, particularly in the slow movement, would be right at home in the love duet from Tristan und Isolde, the “magic fire” music from Die Walkurere, and the redemption business at the conclusion of Parsifal). But it is patent nonsense to suggest that Bruckner thought he was writing in Beethoven’s forms. Bruckner had an absolutely unique way with sonata form, which famously involves three differentiated thematic groups as opposed to Beethoven’s customary two, more or less completely eschews transitions, of which Beethoven was the greatest master, and keeps intentionally arresting tonal and rhythmic momentum, which is just about the opposite of Beethovenian method.
My question is: Was Bruckner a niche composer? i.e., is it necessary to have a specific personal sympathy for his style in order to appreciate his work? Now please don’t get on my case and say that you need a special personal sympathy to appreciate Bach, or Mozart, or Beethoven, or anybody at all. Let’s be sane, if you please. Any educated music lover had better like them guys. One of the few ground rules I attempt to enforce for this forum is the inadmissability of questioning the greatness and primacy of the aforementioned composers-otherwise, nothing would ever get done, and we would be spinning around in a never-never land of relativistic lunacy, as for instance exhibited last year by Norman Lebrecht’s idiotic column in some Australian periodical decrying what he believes to be the childish fetishisation of that childish mediocrity called Mozart. Grown-ups shouldn’t have conversations that would be perfectly apropos to a late night bull session in a college dorm room.
But Bruckner is different; he has a capacity to bore or annoy perfectly intelligent people in a way that other composers are unable to do. Maybe it has to do with his rather too pronounced Catholicism; I’m not saying Catholicism is worse than any other faith, but when anybody expresses “personal” beliefs in too fervent a fashion, it tends to alienate those who don’t harbor like convictions. By the way, the French composer Olivier Messiaen is a much greater offender in this regard than Bruckner could ever be. For my money, Bruckner succeeds in achieving, if not universality, at least a type of expression that may be comfortably taken metaphorically. And here’s another thing, which I anticipate will bring the wrath of the Dementors down on my luckless person: Bruckner’s symphonies wear better than Mahler’s symphonies, just as Wagner wears better than Strauss, or Debussy wears better than Stravinsky. Mahler used to be my favorite composer, but nowadays I tend to take his symphonies one movement at a time, except for that most magnificent and perfect work, Das Lied von der Erde, which, given my expressed preference for sanity, must be accepted as the masterpiece with no superiors and precious few peers. Mahler is always writing about himself, and while it’s a good thing that he is indeed so interesting and worthy of being written about, sometimes enough is enough. A wag might say that Bruckner is always writing about God, which would indeed be problematical. But it’s not so, thank God. Bruckner is writing about the formal potential of the symphony, unlike Mahler, whose symphonies are sometimes a collection of fascinating, and ideed moving, tone poems. Some guy, not me, even suggested that Mahler’s 3rd, 4th, 5th, and 7th are “potpourris”. Let’s send the dementors to that guy.
The Levine 1997 Gotterdammerung -A "Holde-Review" -With a Few Comments Pertaining to Same
Many readers got a chuckle out of the Holde-Quiz and the Holde-Interview, so I plan on having those types of essays as occasionally recurring features. Sober and prudent readers should just skip ‘em, as they cause the risk of a specific birth defect. Also, those with certain types of kidney disease should probably give ‘em a pass as well, just to be on the safe side. Below is the first Holde-Review.
Wagner’s Gotterdammerung, conducted by James Levine at the 1997 Bayreuth Festival, with Deborah Polaski as Brunnhilde, Wolfgang Schmidt as Siegfried, Eric Halfarson as Hagen, and Hanna Schwartz as Waltraute. Staged by Alfred Kirchner, with sets and costume design by Rosalie. (what the heck is this one name pretentiousness all about? Perhaps it’s an incognito, as the sets were not a factor and the costumes were laughable). On DVD.
(The YouTube video above shows most of the Immolation Scene, and provides a taste of the “Costumes by Rosalie. The subtitles are in Spanish.)
Almost every review I read, in “Opera News”, “BBC Music Magazine”, NY Times, etc. is functionally at least somewhat useful, but deadly boring as literature. Some critics (Alex Ross, Charles Rosen, Michael Steinberg, the crew at Opera News) know music, and know how to write. Many do not. With occasional exceptions, you will learn nothing from customer reviews on Amazon, or from most newspapers, whose reviewers were apparently assigned to the Classical Music beat when they were deemed inadequate to cover seventh grade soccer scrimmages. Here in Chicago, we have a reasonably intelligent and affable critic who just guesses at what the performance was like. He has absolutely no clue, so he guesses, and is right every now and then, purely by accident. Still, he constitutes an improvement on the totally ignorant and vilely venomous Claudia Cassidy, who besmirched the reputation of critics everywhere, and who flaunted a total lack of integrity, and indeed, decency. You can’t put a trained musician with a professional point of view on the review page nowadays; he might be tempted to tell the truth. (which, actually, much of the time would mean that he is more laudatory then condemnatory; he would sympathise with the special difficulties horn players face, he would understand why singers can’t sing properly when the tempo is too slow, etc.)
My Solemn Vow: Never will you hear about “silky legato” or “pearly tones” here; I will attempt to write in English, not Newsparperese.
8 Comments on the disc:
1. The modestly “Regietheatre” orientation of the production neither adds nor detracts from the totality of the experience. There are no egregious violations of decency standards, but there are no original thoughts about the piece, either. Apparently Kirchner saw the effectiveness of lighting effects in Wieland Wagner’s productions and the (disputable) effectiveness of totemic symbolic props in Wolfgang Wagner’s productions, and designed a production in which the rich Bavarian beer of the Wagner brothers has been magically transformed into a can of O’Douls. Close your eyes, keep em’ open, dealer’s choice.
2. Levine’s conducting turns one of the richest, most complex and dramatic orchestrations in history into a work of absorbing tragedy, and beyond tragedy, of unnerving sadness. The sounds coming from the pit are acutely poignant. Levine’s knowledge of the score is stupendous; stuff like accent marks in a second clarinet are treated with the respect they deserve. There is absolutely no playing to the galleries, as some might accuse Solti of doing, so to speak, on his uncommonly dramatic recording, or of disengagement and superficiality, as some might accuse Boulez of purveying. And the orchestra plays at an inestimably higher level then on the great recordings of Furtwangler, Knappertsbusch, Krauss or Bohm.
3. Technically the DVD is great, both visually and aurally. And it’s a steal, retailing for 40 bucks, and easy to find even cheaper. Opera DVDs are incredible values; for less than the price of a single ticket, you can have the piece forever, in a reasonably reliable format.
4. Deborah Polaski underplays (but doesn’t undersing) Brunnhilde. A real woman, a grown up with her eyes open, caught in the inexorability of a tragedy she cannot control, this portrayal projects an inward awareness that is hugely moving.
5. Wolfgang Schmidt’s Siegfried is merely adequate. He certainly doesn’t mar the work like John Treleaven or Reiner Goldberg do, for instance. But he has neither the power of a Windgassen nor the eloquence of a Siegfried Jerusalem, and he doesn’t have the tonal beauty of a Rene Kollo, either. He is overhadowed by Brunnhilde, which actually makes considerable plot sense.
6. The Bayreuth Chorus? Do you have to even ask?
7. The star of the show is Eric Halferson. Dietrich Fisher-Dieskau famously called Gotterdammerung a “family tragedy”; whose family tragedy? Sieg. and Brunn’s, and by extension, Wotan’s, of course. Gunther and Gutrune’s? Yes, of course. But how about Alberich and Hagen? It is about time that “Schwarz-Alberich”, the anti-Wotan, and Hagen, the anti-Siegfried get their just due not as the villains of the piece, but as complementary heroes to Siegfried et al. Hagen’s watch is known to be dark, depressing, and frightening music, as well as beautiful music. But what kind of beautiful is it? Maybe its beauty has a noble, despairing, piquaint sadness. Halfvarson and Levine seem to think so. This passage was uncanny.
8. The greatest single feature of this performance is that while nothing was minimized or attenuated, The work’s tragic grandiosity was complemented by a desperately sad inwardness.
A brief comment on an unrelated topic: Many people have asked me why, as a pianist, none of these essays (so far) has been about piano music, and why there are so many essays on opera. Firstly, I anticipate that there will be many essays on the piano repertory, but for the most part I write about things that are new discoveries of mine, or about things which are topical for my classes. So for instance, despite learning and performing the large opus Davidsbundlertanze for my Romanticism course, I didn’t write about this magnificent score on these pages. The reason being that I have little to add to Charles Rosen’s magisterial comments in his The Romantic Generation, except technically. Rosen adequately discusses the structure, rhetoric, and rhythmical profiles of the work. Of course, I could recapitulate his ideas for these pages, or look in depth at the individual pieces, or compare the work to others. All of which would have been useful, but I didn’t feel like it. As for opera? Opera is like golf; those who like it at all are obsessed by it. Oh my, there will be more essays on opera.