I might have seemed to take a hard line in my post on Dr. Atomic, in which I said the subject of the piece has been pondered endlessly elsewhere, for decades, and that therefore this work doesn’t do much to establish opera as an art form we might look to for illumination of our current lives.
But I stand by that, and I’ll even go further.Nixon in China (the first opera John Adams created with Peter Sellars, along with librettist Alice Hoffman) didn’t do much for the art form, either. I went to the New York premiere, two decades or so ago, and the comments I heard were notable. Music people were entranced. Someone I’ll call X, who ran what’s still a notable classical record label, and also someone I’ll call Y, who if anything is more eminent as a classical music scholar now than he was back then, both said: “This is wonderful! An opera that’s about something!”
Which, when you think of it, is damning the piece with very faint praise. Can we imagine anyone saying such a thing about a novel, or an August Wilson play, or a film? The comment also opens the piece to the remark Samuel Johnson (I think) so famously made about the possibility of a talking dog. After the surprise wears off, we begin to ask what the dog has to say. And precisely in that vein, people from other arts who were at the Nixon premiere weren’t so impressed. Someone I’ll call Q, who’s still an important theater critic, and someone else, R, an impressive dance critic, both said to me, “This is awful. What it says about Nixon is ridiculous.”
They went, in other words, straight for the content of the piece. They didn’t feel they had to make allowances for the terrific music, for the surprise of an opera that (God save the mark) actually had any content, or for the mere fact of a new opera, which people in then classical music business tend to support in principle, whether or not the piece is any good.
But let’s look at the content of classical music. Normally we say this isn’t any problem. It’s the presentation that causes problems, or the need to introduce the music to a larger audience, or (related to that, of course) the need to devise new ways of giving concerts, so more people can hear the music.
But I think that it’s precisely the content of what we do that’s our biggest problem. I’m not saying that the music, taken by itself, is anything to worry about. Who could say that there’s anything wrong with Beethoven, taken by himself? Of course he’s an important historical figure, who—if we still read novels from his time, and look at paintings that were created then—still might have a lot to say to us.
But we never encounter music “taken by itself.” We encounter performances—works of music played by particular people, on concert programs that are performed at some particular time and place. And these performances presumably have content, except that, far too often, we don’t know what that content is. Let’s say there’s a concert of Brahms chamber music, at Alice Tully Hall in New York. What’s that concert about? What do the musicians want to say to us? What do we get by going to it?
Most of the answers we might get to these questions aren’t even remotely adequate. Brahms is a great composer. The works are masterpieces. They exhibit the development of Brahms’s sense of structure. They influenced composers who came after him. The first two sentences, taken as reasons to listen to Brahms, are empty hype. What makes him great? What makes these pieces masterworks? And the second two sentences are far too scholarly. I won’t deny that somebody might care about what they say; I might, myself. But that’s because I already care about the music. For somebody who doesn’t yet care, what on earth could Brahms’s sense of structure mean? (Important clarification. It might mean something if we could explain it terms that anyone could understand, because structure, if it really matters, has easily audible effects. But in the ways it’s usually discussed in, for instance, concert program notes, it won’t mean a thing.)
And what does any of this mean to the musicians who play this concert? Why do they care enough to study their instruments for years, practice endlessly, rehearse for many hours just to play this concert, and then put themselves on the line on the Alice Tully stage? What are they saying to themselves about why they do all this? (Even if they never speak the words aloud; surely they have some inner sense of why they play the music.) And what do we say to ourselves about being in the audience?
I think that, far too often, a Brahms chamber concert registers as, generically, a classical music event, and, within that framework, a chamber music event. That it’s Brahms is incidental, except for those with special feelings about Brahms, either pro or con. For most people, it’s what the chamber group is playing that night. You go because you like chamber music.
But what about people who haven’t yet established any taste for chamber concerts? Why should they go? What are we telling them?
I fear we’re losing out—and have lost out for generations now—to other art forms, other media. That’s true even for a classical music freak like me. I realized, over the past few years, that film has in many ways made a deeper impression on me than music. Twenty years ago I wrote an essay for Opera News about the marvelous E major trio in the first act of Cosi fan tutte. I thought that I’d unearthed exactly what makes the piece so powerful, what makes it (and the entire opera) such a reservoir of buried passion.
I’m proud of this analysis. I think it’s right. But I also realize that I had to make the analysis to see the opera this way. I was never spontaneously stricken by the buried passion in it, or by any understanding that this is what the piece is all about, not even when I sang Gulgliemo in a production of it when I was in college. I came to Mozart because I loved music. Then I formed my impressions of his pieces within the shelter of that love.
Compare how I react to films. In high school, I was ravaged by Antonioni’s L’avventura, which also speaks of buried passion. But this was passion I could feel. I was just about struck dumb with feeling. In college, I saw the film a second time, and (I think) a third, along with every other film that Antonioni made. They all got to me that way. I bought the L’avventura DVD a year or so ago, and was stricken once again.
Same thing with Alan Rudolph’s Choose Me, and, just a month or so ago, Wang Karwai’s Fallen Angels. All these films show me buried passion, in people who don’t know what to do with it. This speaks to me, more than any opera I’ve ever seen (except maybe Lulu). At the same time, I have an unending love of opera, especially Verdi and Bellini, but that, again, seems to work its power deep inside a hidden box. It doesn’t much hit me as I go about my life in the world we all live in.
The films I mentioned do hit me in the world we share. They’re part of what I might (without going too deeply yet into the issues all this raises) call my real life. Please note that I’m not putting down anyone who gets real-life meaning from anything in classical music; I know this happens. It even happens to me. (And, in fact, I’m very interested in learning more about how classical music speaks to other people. I’d love to hear from anyone who wants to talk about this.) I’m just saying that I get more meaning from these films.
And I think the fault , in many ways, s classical music’s, not mine. Classical music just isn’t very good at speaking of (and in, and to) the present day. And thus, I think, it won’t be healthy until most of the pieces we hear at classical concerts are by living composers. And have some connection (as much new music never has) to the world we live in.
My thoughts about Cosi, L’avventura, Choose Me, and Fallen Angels will show up in the book I’m planning, at the start of the final chapter, which of course will be about where we go from here, how we solve the problems classical music has. My thoughts about the film are meant to set the stage for this discussion. Why doesn’t classical music make more impression on the world? What has to change before it does?