October 2007 Archives

At a concert by the Theatre of Voices Friday night, I loved a Berio piece, A-Ronne. Twitters, muttering, all kinds of entertaining vocal sounds, and also some compelling singing, all structured in a way that captivated me.

But when I said I liked the piece, at intermission, two composers (one quite well known) objected. To them the piece felt suffocating. I knew why, of course. They'd studied composition in the 1970s, when modernism ruled in academia, and when -- as I know from my own composition studies then -- you had to like and write atonal music, and in fact acknowledge it as the only serious idiom a composer could write in. You couldn't like Britten or Shostakovich. Those composers were quietly forbidden: too tonal.

After the concert, someone else asked me how Berio could have been so terrifying -- and still could be -- since A-Ronne (and many other works by him) are fun, are full of sounds that aren't atonal, and by now sound (at least to people who didn't study composition in the '70s) quite charmingly dated.

The answer is simple. There was an implicit list, all but codified in writing, of acceptable composers. Berio ranked high on it. And so for anyone who found this compositional aesthetic -- this enforced ideology -- suffocating, Berio loomed (and apparently still looms) as yet another strangler. Forget that he taught Steve Reich, who surely didn't find him so. This wasn't about Berio, as he might have been in person. It was about the crowd he ran with, and the uses that his music could be put to.

Somehow that never bothered me. I thought Berio was fun, and also a master of composing; I still do. Maybe I escaped the suffocation because I simply started writing freer music, no doubt to faculty consternation at the music school I went to. Yet still I did it.

But I sympathize with the composers who hated A-Ronne. (A-Ronne -- didn't he play for the Yankees? Sorry, couldn't help it.) One of these composers stiffened noticeably when I said I liked the piece. His objection was visceral, and genuine.

So in his defense I'll note that Berio was formidably intellectual, that his form of intellectuality (shared also by Boulez and Babbitt, not to mention others) loomed as yet another strangulation, and that the program note he wrote for A-Ronne -- an anti-masterpiece of Mandarin impossibility -- was enough to give any composition student from the '70s a fit of nightmares. If you thought you had to swallow that to love the music (and I'm not sure we weren't taught we had to), then of course many people couldn't go there.

And in Berio's modernism, delightful as it now sounds to me -- and not just delightful; irreverent, too -- you run into a brick wall of limitation. Berio can twitter and burp all he likes, but the connections that he thinks he's making to the world outside classical music are all to highbrow theorizing, cultural, linguistic, and literary. You'd never catch him echoing a snatched memory of popular culture (unless you count folk songs, which I don't, because they're theorized, in Berio's world, as authentic, while pop culture, supposedly, is commercial and corrupt).

So that's the boundary. He can giggle all he wants, and also cough and hum and murmur, putting sounds in free association with each other. But if I'd written a piece like this, and my free association took me to a fragment of Led Zeppelin, eyebrows would have been raised. Likewise, when Elliott Carter says that he's inspired (as, for instance, in his piano piece Night Fantasies) by the slither of unconscious thoughts in Joyce's writing, what he'll never do, as thoughts skitter in his music, is let them skitter toward popular culture (by, for instance, echoing a popular song), as Joyce does on just about every page.

That's an odd, restrictive limit, typical of modernist music, but not of other modernist art. And it helps explains why modernist music has never had the appeal of modernist literature or painting.

We Americans can theorize all we like, but there's something most of us don't have -- the ghastly experience of living under a totalitarian regime. James Zhu, who had that experience, posted the following as a comment to my North Korea posts. He fully supports the Philharmonic's visit, and wrote what follows as a response to my fellow blogger Terry Teachout's piece in the Wall Street Journal. Terry opposed the Philharmonic's visit, which of course he has every right to do.

I thought I'd promote James Zhu's thoughts from a comment to a full blog post. I feel humbled before what he says. Thanks, James.

Following is a post in response to Terry Treachout article on WSJ 10/27.

Since part of Treachout article, which strongly against the visit, is a refute to you view, I repost here.

I was a bit unsettled by your article on New YorK Philharmonic visit to North Korea, 10/27/2007, on WSJ. You never lived in such a society("Darkness at Noon", nothing less) and culture, how do you evaluate the impact of classic music to people "not familiar with Western composers"? I was first exposed to Mozart at a time when one of my school teachers was beaten to death on the street like a wild dog. I didn't quite understand what was going on, but through his Serenade I said to myself, "there are got to be a better world". I was timely punished and sent away to a camp for scavenging these Columbia 33 1/2 records and listening to them.

After Philadelphia Philharmonic came to China(the audience was highly controlled and not telecasted), nobody over there thought it was a support to Mao, knowing you wouldn't be raided on anymore if you listen to Duke Ellington, and knowing the more good stuff were coming. I surmise the viewpoints like yours must be more belligerent before Philadelphia Orch. did China. Alas, look at what happened.

There's been a small explosion over Richard Taruskin's long piece in the New Republic, about, yes, the future of classical music. Or, more precisely, about three books that try to make classical music's case. Taruskin, as anyone who's read him might expect, goes after these books with savage virtuosity, or maybe it's virtuoso savagery. I loved every word, and agreed. This is a very long piece, but ought to be required reading.

(If you follow the link, don't try to read the piece on the page you'll go to. You'll find it broken into innumerable tiny parts. Instead, click on "print," and read the essay in a single chunk.)

Sample excerpts:

I had a grim laugh when I read an interview in The New York Times this past July with George Benjamin, a forty-seven-year-old British composer, in town for the American premiere of a chamber opera that he had written. He was pulling the usual long face about the fact that music "is not valued in contemporary society." He challenged the reporter interviewing him to "name a single politician who shows interest in the music of our time." This was only days after the Times had published an interview with John Edwards in which the candidate spoke enthusiastically about U2, Bruce Springsteen, and Dave Matthews.

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{T]he present collapse looks more dramatic than it really is, if that is any consolation. It follows a period of enthusiastic but unsustainable growth that coincided, ironically enough, precisely with the inauspicious changes in consumption patterns just surveyed [he means the rise of popular culture]--a testimony to the triumph of romanticism over realism in our musical culture....

As long as this gravy train lasted, the attrition of the audience could be overlooked. The result of living for three decades in a fool's paradise was a vast overpopulation of classical musicians as many more were trained, and briefly employed, than a market economy could bear. The cutbacks that seemed to imply the sudden cruel rejection of classical music were really more in the nature of a market correction, reflecting the present scarcity of patronage and a long-deferred confrontation with the changed realities of demand.

*

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 (the "dumbing down" that everybody except management deplores)....Orchestras have accommodated by modifying their programming in a fashion that favors the Itzies and Pinkies and little divas. 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.

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, for the academy is the one area of musical life that can still effectively insulate its transient denizens (students) and luckier permanent residents (faculty) from the vagaries of the market. Inevitably, all three authors are professors. In its strongest and most "uncompromising" form, the heritage of German romanticism is the ideology of modernism, and it is again no surprise to learn that two of the authors are composers who write in academically protected styles....Despite their obvious self-interest, they claim to be offering disinterested commentary and propounding universal values.

And so on. I could quote endlessly. This is important stuff, and of course parallels many things I've said.

But there's an outcry, very seriously raised in Marc Geelhoed's blog. Marc (who's often posted comments here) doesn't like Taruskin's tone:

Taruskin's lusty bravado and the rude, put-down-laden qualities of some of his writing has always rubbed me the wrong way, since it's more appropriate for a tabloid-writer or some paper you could pick up for free in a sidewalk kiosk. (It's entertaining, but so is a cockfight.) The gloating, the I've-forgotten-more-than-you'll-ever-know arrogance, the snide assertions, none of it is the finest way to discuss either the music, its practitioners or the words written about it. I've argued  in the past that classical music shouldn't be treated with kid gloves, or as if it's not part of contemporary culture, but Taruskin's intellectual thuggishness ultimately detracts from his arguments.

But mainly Marc thinks that the central thrust of Taruskin's argument is wrong:

[W]e've now progressed from The Crisis of Classical Music, to The Saving of Classical Music, to Criticism of The Saving of Classical Music. No other genre of music takes its future livelihood so seriously, its obsolescence at some as-yet-undetermined date as a fact, or feels the need to raise an army to defend itself, as does classical music. It doesn't matter to those arguing these positions that 2,400 people showed up to hear the Chicago Symphony play Mozart and a Mark-Anthony Turnage premiere last night. It doesn't matter that Angela Gheorghiu can get on the front page of the Chicago Sun-Times by being fired by the Lyric Opera, or that one small contemporary music ensemble (the International Contemporary Ensemble) can find upwards of 200 people to fill each of eleven venues in seven days, or that another (eighth blackbird) can entice 800 to an enormous amphitheater. (Yes, there were large of amounts of freebies given away. That's not unheard of in popular environs, however.)...

The accommodation [Taruskin's] talking about isn't a black/white, either/or scenario, given the number of performers and institutions out there. The best will win out in every style. Yet Taruskin devotes his mental energy not to this phenomena, but decrying the efforts of three writers with extraordinarily small readerships.

The best will win out in classical music, too, just as it does in popular music. I keep wishing that we could just drop The Death of Classical Music, a hyperbolic idea which appears to be deathless itself....Can't we just play the music, let the marketers attract them any way they can, let the critics write about their enthusiasms, and move on? The defense of classical music will persuade no one, because you can't argue in favor of art.

"Why can't we all just get along?"

I'm quoting that sympathetically, and I'm sympathetic to Marc's points, even though I disagree,\, becase I think the classical music mainstream is in more trouble than Marc thinks it is. And -- most crucially -- that the people trying to save it (I mean arts advocates, and people who run major arts institutions) often believe the arguments that Taruskin's targets make, without having to read the books in question. In fact, they make those arguments themselves. They'll say that classical music is superior, that to understand it you need to understand its formal procedures, and that the audience is declining only because people in our culture haven't been properly educated.

And thus they

(a) maintain a crippling sense of entitlement

(b) waste their energy on demands for music education, and on education-based attempts to convert a prospective audience, which then

(c) leaves them without any workable plan to make things better.

Not enough of them, I fear, understand something that Taruskin says very well:

What draws listeners to music--not just to classical music, but to any music- - is what cannot be paraphrased: the stuff that sets your voice a-humming, your toes a-tapping, your mind's ear ringing, your ear's mind reeling. And that is not the kind of response anyone's books [or any education program] can instill.

If we need more people to hear classical music, we need to have classical performances that people want to go to -- which doesn't mean dumbing down, but means (my points here, not necessarily Taruskin's) tearing down the walls of blankness and formality, playing with edge-of-the-seat excitement (or at least some audible and visible sign of interest), and greeting the audience as active and intelligent co-participants.

I was privately asked two very good questions, and thought I'd share the answers.

Can the New York Philharmonic have any contact with the North Korean people?

Not likely. Attendance at the Philharmonic's concerts will be carefully controlled. And of course any concert in Pyongyang can't possibly reach the North Korean people, because only the elite, for the most part, are allowed into Pyongyang.

North Korea, as far as I know, doesn't have the kind of artistic life that other countries have. Even in most repressive countries, there will be concerts and other public events that people attend more or less on their own, buying tickets just because they feel like being there. But not in North Korea. From everything I've read, public events are only staged to glorify the regime, and attendance may either be compulsory, or else not allowed.

But I wouldn't minimize the effect a concert might have on the North Korean elite, or on North Korean musicians. Any North Koreans who attend may well be thrilled. They have almost no contact with the outside world, and a Western orchestra playing its heart out -- as I'm sure the Philharmonic will -- might well be a revelation. I'm sure there's underground uneasiness about the state of things, and some desire, of course never expressed in public, to make a change. If even a few North Koreans can see for themselves what the west is like, and if they can meet some Americans, there's no telling how deep the effect might be.

What could life be like, for high-ranking North Koreans? Some of them might be as sick of Kim Jong-il as the rest of the world is, or maybe even more so. So lighting a spark in their imaginations might lead to something big -- or not. It's hard to know, but I'm sure it's worth a shot.

Would the Philharmonic's visit to North Korea be anything like two pioneering orchestral trips to Communist countries in the past? The Philadelphia Orchestra toured Communist China in 1973, and the Philharmonic visited Soviet Russia in 1976.

In one way, there's a relationship. All these visits were gestures of peace, and of communication, trying to reach across political barriers to countries we hadn't been friendly with. Maybe there's a greater resemblance to the Philadelphia trip to China, because China, in those days -- Mao Zedong was still alive -- was unknown territory to most Americans, and the US was unknown territory to most Chinese.

But in other ways, the trips are very different, because North Korea is far more forbidding than China or Russia ever were. China, for instance, had internal politics that the whole world could see. The government's policy changed from time to time. There would be relative freedom, and then repression. Huge campaigns were launched, turning the country upside down. And then those campaigns would be stopped. Beyond that, China still had a lot of its pre-Communist culture still intact, as well as a lot of western-influenced culture, including people playing and studying classical music. North Korea has none of this. It's as if the rulers wanted to wipe the slate clean.

And while surely the country has internal politics, only hints of that show up in public. On the surface, it seems almost as if the government's policy has never changed. In recent years, according to Bradley Martin's book (see my last post), there have been hints of an economic relaxation, with more North Koreans engaging in trade (and smuggling), and more of them showing at least a little individual initiative. But it's not as if the country has formally announced any new direction. This means that the Philharmonic would be entering a situation nobody knows very much about -- or at least far less than people knew about China and Russia in the 1970s.

And Soviet Russia, back then, was much more like our own society than China was at that time, and North Korea is now. The most ghastly Communist rule came during Stalin's time. But by 1976, when the Philharmonic visited, Stalin had been dead for more than 20 years, and the Soviet government had in many ways repudiated him. The labor camps (the dreaded Gulag) had been closed, and people who opposed the regime were no longer arrested and shot. Leaders could be removed from office, and sent into retirement (as Nikita Khrushchev was), rather than put on trial. In no way was there freedom of the kind we have, but there also wasn't the brutal repression typical of Stalin's time.

The Soviet Union also had a vital classical music life, in many ways more vital than our own. This had existed before the Russian revolution, and continued under the Communists. There were many public concerts, all over the country. When Van Cliburn won the Tchaikovsky Competition in the 1950s (after Stalin's death), there was a genuine outpouring of warmth for him. Many, many people in Soviet Russia loved music, cared about who won the competition, loved Cliburn's playing, and thought it was a hopeful sign that an American had won.

The same thing happened when western artists performed in Russia -- when the Philharmonic visited, or, earlier, when George London sang the title role in the most quintessential of Russian operas, Boris Godunov, at the Bolshoi. Russian music-lovers got excited. There was a real public for these events.

None of this happens in North Korea. There isn't any concert scene, independent of the government. There don't seem to be many -- if any -- classical music performances. People study classical instruments, and learn how to compose, but their talents are put to use in concerts of music specially written and (in the case of folk songs) rewritten to glorify the regime. (Bradley Martin's book has a fascinating interview with a North Korean cultural official, who explains how folk songs had to be given new content, in order to serve the government.) Traditional Korean music, in its original form, was simply wiped out, though some of it survives, altered to fit into the new kind of regime-glorifying work.

A comparison with Stalin's Russia ought to show what the differences were. Just about everyone involved with classical music knows how Shostakovich suffered under Stalin. He was forced to withdraw one of his operas, voluntarily withdrew his fourth symphony, and made sure that his fifth symphony was written in approved Communist ways. He was terrified that he'd hear the dreaded knock on his door in the middle of the night, and for a while slept fully dressed, so he'd be ready to go with the secret police if they came to arrest him.

All this sounds horrible to us, and it really is horrible. But at least Shostakovich was allowed to compose! At least there was a fully developed musical world, in which his works could be performed. And while the Communist party interfered now and then, and more or less forced him to write a few pieces that were pure Communist propaganda, he still could write many works that didn't get involved in politics at all, like his string quartets. And, for that matter, many of his symphonies. Even the fifth symphony had a secret, anti-Communist meaning, which (if you believe some memoirs from the period, quite apart from the disputed Shostakovich memoirs so famously published in the book Testimony) was clear to the many artists and intellectuals who attended the premiere.

Compare the fate of North Korean composers. They apparently exist; they work on huge government-glorifying musical spectacles. But we don't learn their names, and as far as anyone knows, they don't write anything that isn't specifically for the government. There simply doesn't seem to be any independent concert scene, of the kind Shostakovich was part of. So Shostakovich had a kind of freedom no one in North Korea even can dream of, at least under present conditions. He had to be careful; the Communists could descend on him at any time. But he was free to compose anything that wasn't specifically forbidden, as opposed to North Korean composers, who (at least as far as we know) only compose music that the government commands them to write.

I was queasy when I first heard that the New York Philharmonic might go to North Korea. This is the sickest country on earth, the place with the most repressive, most deranged, and most cynical government. If you offend the regime, and get sent to a labor camp, they'll send your entire family, including little kids. There's brutality in these camps, of course, and not enough food. And in the midst of all that, the kids are forced to go to schools -- or, rather, sick parodies of schools -- where they do nothing but recite praise of the country's "dear leader," Kim Jong-il.

Sick. But I know a leading expert on North Korea, and, to ease my mind, I asked for his opinion. He thinks the Philharmonic should go, because -- no matter how sick the regime might be -- any contact with the outside world can be helpful. That reassured me. I hope the Philharmonic's trip happens, and that it does some good.

But still it's best to be cautious. I wish, for instance, that the Philharmonic's director of communications, Eric Latzky, hadn't been quoted in a New York Times article, saying this about North Korea's capitol:

We went to Pyongyang and discovered a city that was clean and orderly and not without beauty, and had a kind of high level of culture and intelligence.

I'm friendly with Eric, and I like him. Maybe he was misquoted, or only partially quoted. But I think there's no reason to flatter this regime. Of course Pyongyang is nice. It's maintained as a showcase, and also as a home for the North Korean elite, while the rest of the country often starves. In no sense is it a normal city, the kind of bustling metropolis -- with an independent life of its own -- that Beijing was even in the worst days of Mao's rule, or as Moscow was under Stalin.

By all accounts, it's an artificial place. No one can live or travel there without official permission. I don't know what the Philharmonic delegation saw, but visitors often report that the streets are almost empty. Certainly the view from Google Earth shows wide boulevards with almost no traffic:

Some experts think that the subway in Pyongyang doesn't really run, that just a single train shuttles back and forth, to deceive visitors.

As for culture, everything I've read suggests that there isn't any, except what the regime fosters, always in praise of itself.

And the sickest thing about North Korea is the cult of its leaders -- Kim Jong-il, the "dear leader," and his late father, Kim Il-sung, the "great leader," founder of the country. Note that they might as well be monarchs, with the son succeeding the father. The cult goes beyond the cult of personality that surrounded Stalin and Mao. This is a cult of divinity. Foreign visitors are, by many accounts, asked to visit shrines to the leaders, and are asked to bow to their images. North Koreans emerge from these shrines weeping.

In a striking documentary I've seen on PBS, North Korean citizens were treated by a visiting French eye surgeon. (An amazing exception to the usual practice of not allowing foreigners to take any significant part in the life of the country.) These people had been blind for years, and the surgeon restored their sight. When their bandages were taken off, they fell on the floor before portraits of the two Kims, weeping and giving thanks, as if the leaders themselves had cured them, which, most likely, is quite literally what they believed.

Kim and his family, meanwhile, live like Eurotrash, enjoying all the vices the West can provide. Surrounding them is an inner Communist elite, who most likely are cynical. There's a documentary available on DVD, called A State of Mind, which shows young North Korean girls taking part in the "mass games," gigantic ceremonies in which dancers and gymnasts give praise to the leaders. At one point we see high-ranking officials in the audience, obviously bored, checking their watches, as if to see how much more of this nonsense they'll have to endure.

Surrounding the inner party (to use Orwell's terminology from 1984), is an "outer party" of elites who don't get inside information. These people appear to be utter believers. Some of them are in A State of Mind, looking normal enough in their Pyongyang apartment, with state radio broadcasts always in the background (they can be turned down, but can't be turned off). But, normal as they seem, they're also brainwashed. They're asked what would happen if the U.S. and North Korea fought a war, and with perfect crazy confidence they explain why North Korea would win.

Then there's the rest of the country, the mass of North Koreans, who often starve. I'm sure my portrait here is too simple -- surely North Korea has some kind of social and political life, apart from the rule of the Kims -- but as a broad outline, I think it's accurate.

For more information:

A State of Mind, the documentary film about preparations for the mass games.

 Under the Loving Care of the Fatherly Leader: North Korea and the Kim Dynasty, by Bradley K. Martin. A thorough, lively history, which also gives a clear picture of how things are now.

The Aquariums of Pyongyang: Ten Years in the North Korean Gulag, by Kang Chol-Hwan and Pierre Rigoulot. A sober, important memoir by a labor camp survivor who managed to flee the country.

Pyongyang: A Journey in North Korea, by Guy Delisle. The non-fiction equivalent of a graphic novel, very funny and sad, by a Frenchman who produced animated films in North Korea. Shows, with great empathy, how regimented North Korean life can be.

I've raved recently -- here and here -- about the cabalettas in 19th century Italian operas, the rousing pieces that bring each scene to a crashing close. I talked especially (in the second link above) about the cabaletta from a duet in Donizetti's Lucrezia Borgia, where the music just sweeps along, mostly ignoring the drama playing out on stage.

So now I've put this cabaletta online. Listen, and see what you think. Doesn't physical verve trump everything else? And if it does -- and if these pieces crop up over and over again in every opera from this period -- what does that say about what these operas mean, and how they should be performed? Shouldn't we go for broke, and make them more than a little wild?

What happens on stage: Lucrezia Borgia has a problem. Her husband just poisoned her son, but his son doesn't know it. (He also doesn't know he's her son, but let that go for now.) So now she has to tell him. "Unhappy man!" she sings. "You just drank poison!" And then we're off to the races. The soprano sings the tune, the tenor sings the tune, there's a noisy interlude, both singers sing the tune together, and then there's a noisy coda. Somewhere in there, Lucrezia gives her son an antidote, but you can't tell when. The music just doesn't bother with such trivial details.

One note: in my earlier post, I said this cabaletta has horror movie chords, but they don't stick out as much as they did in the 19th century. To find them, listen to the way the melody rises to a high note. It does this twice. The first time, the chords underneath are nothing special. But the second time, they're pure melodrama.

The performance: Montserrat Caballé is Lucrezia, Alfredo Kraus is Gennaro, her son, and Jonel Perlea conducts.

Well, I'm joking a little. I mean reactions to my "shocking proposal," which really wasn't so shocking. The real shock may come in something else I'll post today or tomorrow. There's a bad moon rising about tax deductions for donors to the arts -- a lot of people, some quite distinguished, are starting to believe that these tax deductions aren't warranted. What would that do to classical music?

But more on this later. My shocking proposal was that classical music institutions be written about, in newspapers, the way real journalists write about everything else - that, for instance, newspapers should demand that orchestras reveal their ticket sales, so that we'd all know how well or badly they were doing.

Now, the most devastating comments thoughts about this come at the end of this post.

But Gene Carr -- who runs Patron Technology, an e-marketing firm -- points out that we need regional and national benchmarks before we can understand those sales figures. And of course he's right. As he wrote to me (and of course I'm quoting him with his permission), "When Dell's sales go down 5% and the industry goes down 10% they celebrate. So what if your orchestra is down 5% if the rest of your colleagues are down 15%?"

So we need benchmarks. But where are we going to get them? Music journalists should demand -- in the loudest voices possible -- some solid data. Or else, they could say, they'd deride orchestras (and opera companies, and even poor little chamber music groups) as spin machines. OK, I'm pushing this a little far, but really! Anyone covering Dell or any other business firm has all the information needed to interpret any new development. While in classical music, the great, immortal art form, no such thing is possible right now.

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Then Brian Bell, with some praise of me for past writings, e-mailed this (quoted with permission, as always):

Finally, I fear what you have written could be wildly misinterpreted. Yes, Boston is learning that Levine likes to challenge the listener with new compositions. [Brian was comparing the Boston Symphony under Seiji Ozawa and under James Levine.]

Letters to the editor abound. People are suddenly talking about the orchestra again, debating the merits/demerits of Ameriques. But the benefit here is not that there has been "negative" coverage. Far from it. There has been more light than heat.

Elsewhere, trashing individual players/conductors won't help matters as much as WHY the concert wasn't the success it could've been. WHY was the concert boring? Too often in the past I've read critics who roast a concert, but don't adequately explain why. Mindlessly generating controversy isn't the answer. Grappling with how the composer wasn't served well, will.

I'd mildly say that I'm not interested in trashing anyone, but in helping communities understand how good (or not so good) their orchestra actually is. But Brian raises an important point, which is that the overall artistic profile of the orchestra (or a local opera company, or chamber music series, or new music series) needs to be talked about. And, to get back on my hob by horse, compared to similar profiles elsewhere. An organization afraid of doing new music should -- just for instance -- be told about similar organizations elsewhere that thrive on it. Or rather the community that supports the organization should be told.

Maybe if critics had a stronger idea of what's going on nationally, the New York Philharmonic wouldn't be so ritually abused. I'm not saying that the Philharmonic couldn't be more creative. It has miles -- light-years -- to go in that regard. But it's also not as bad as people like to think. Yes, we can do the kneejerk comparison to Los Angeles or San Francisco -- so ritually famous for their creative programming -- but so what? Maybe the Philharmonic has something to learn, but maybe, on a national scale, it's not as uncreative (compared to all large orchestras) as people think. I've always thought it got a bad rap, though, damn, in New York City , of all places, there ought to be very little limit on what it might try.

*

And now we come to the devastating comments I promised. Three people have posted comments on the blog (here and here, though you'll have to do some scrolling to find them), in which they say that their local critics aren't any good. These people -- those posting comments, not the critics -- work with major orchestras, at least one as a musician. Sample excerpt:

In my city the music critic has rarely written a word I agree with and not just about us. He is an informed person but his ignorance, at least in my opinion, has made me laugh out loud frequently. Coincidentally, he has started in with the personal attacks with players he doesn't seem to admire. So whose opinion should go down in print? Sometimes we behave like a critic's column is like a box score, as though it is an accurate record of what transpired on stage. As a player in a full time orchestra I feel we are the real experts.

I wasn't surprised to read this, because I've heard similar things from orchestra people, and other classical music professionals. And I know it can be true. So I was naïve -- talking about what critics (or classical music journalists generally, whether they're critics or not) should do, without stopping to ask whether they're fully competent to do it.

Which raises a serious question. I said that classical music journalists should look at orchestras (and of course other classical music organizations) far more sharply -- and thoroughly -- than they currently do. But who's going to look at critics and journalists? Think about it -- they're the only ones in the classical music food chain who aren't going to be rated in public, the only ones immune from criticism (unless you count letters to the editor, which don't carry much force). Someone's sure to say that musicians don't like critics because they don't like reading bad reviews, but I haven't found this to be true. In fact, I've seen musicians either laughing or aghast at critics because a performance had been terrible, and the critic liked it.

So how could musicians in any town sit in public judgment on their critic? I'd suggest a standardized test, which ideally would be developed nationally, and would consist of musical excerpts to listen to, and questions to answer, both about music and about how the music business works. The excerpts would include common faults in performance, sloppy rhythm and bad intonation, for a start, things musicians are normally unanimous in hearing. But the rhythm shouldn't be too sloppy, or the intonation too unpleasant. Let's see who hears subtleties. Critics would be asked to take the test, which remember would be given all over the country. And their scores would be announced.

Musicians could be asked to take it, too, just to see how they'd do. And at last -- though I'm sure my scheme is way too optimistic -- we'd maybe have some objective recourse, when a musician wants to tell the world a critic doesn't know what he or she is hearing.

And yes: I'd volunteer to take the test.

My quiz question has been answered, and I'm delighted to welcome La Cierca, the divine creatrix of the Parterre Box queer opera zine to my humble blog. She knew the answer, as of course she would.

But first!

Parterre Box has reported the most delicious scandal. A top conductor -- a name known, I'm sure, to almost everyone who reads this blog -- was conducting in Beijing just now, and arranged a little tryst. "I WANT TO FIND YOU NAKED when I arrive," he e-mailed to his paramourlette, adding instructions for retrieving the key to his hotel room.

And then he sent the message to his entire contact list.

It then spread onto the web, of course. And you can read it on La Ceica's site. And the relevance for this blog? (Not that we don't love gossip as much as the next girl.) If classical music was in the gossip columns, that would help it draw a larger audience. I know that purists (who would never read Parterre Box, but do read me from time to time) think that all attention should be on the music, but life doesn't work like that, and never did. Exclude the human element, and you have an art that nobody will care about. Nobody, at any rate, with blood flowing.

Or let me put it upside down. If we had a vibrant classical music scene that our whole culture cared about, then of course classical music would be in the gossip columns. I'm going to e-mail this story to a columnist at the New York Daily News, and see what happens.

And now for La Cieca's answer to my question. I'd asked which singer gets the most new music, when the frequent cut in the second-act Lucia finale is dispensed with, and we hear the piece complete. La Cieca wrote:

You are talking about the section that we over at parterre.com have dubbed "Alisa's aria?" (My own suspicion is that Alisa's line here was originally written for Lucia but was traded off during rehearsals for the first production in order to spare the soprano who created the role, Fanny Tacchinardi-Persiani. She was relatively young (only 22) and reportedly not a very large voice.)

Which is correct. The singer who benefits is the mezzo who sings Alisa, Lucia's confidante, who otherwise is only audible in the second scene of Act 1, when she prompts Lucia's aria and cabaletta with her questions and her worries. In the second act stretta she gets some cries -- or maybe screeches -- on repeated high As, which can make a great, if momentary, splash if sung securely. (As did happen at the Met.)

Alisa also sings in the sextet, but she's buried in the harmony, and sometimes doesn't do much more than double one of the chorus parts. Nobody will notice her.

La Cieca's speculation is interesting. I wonder what Donizetti's manuscript would show, if it survives. Probably some musicologist has written about this, if La Cieca's right.

I've gotten some very vivid e-mail encouragement for what I proposed in my last post, my shocking proposal that newspapers (and of course other media outlets) cover classical music the way they'd cover anything else, with probing questions and all the factual data they can get. I'm even encouraged to think that some people who write about classical music are going to do at least some of what I suggested.

So I want to append a little how-to guide, about things to look out for when you ask orchestras (or of course other classical music institutions) for data on ticket sales. The data isn't always as straightforward as all of us might think.

*

First suggestion: if you want to know how an institution has been doing lately, ask for more than just two or three years' worth of data. That's because the data you get needs a context. If a business writer is writing about Ford or GM, he or she is going to have reams of numbers, covering the companies' performance for decades. Thus anything happening now can be put into context.

That's not going to be true of orchestra data. If you discover that your local orchestra has lost ticket sales over the past three years, or gained them, what exactly does this mean? How large is the gain compared to long-term performance, or how large is the drop? Maybe the drop turns out just to be the normal year to year churning of these numbers. Or maybe ticket sales in fact had been increasing for years, and the recent drop rather strongly reverses this trend. There's no way to know what current numbers mean without a much longer context.

So I'd urge everyone to ask, not just for two or three or four years' of data, but 10 or even 20 years. Don't be shy. Here we're in a very different position from sports or business reporters, who already have that information. We're starting very nearly from scratch. So ask for the long-term context. Your local orchestra or opera company can -- if they're doing their job right -- give you data for 20 years as easily as three years. It's all on their computers. Or it ought to be.

*

Second suggestion: Be sure to distinguish between ticket sales and attendance. The League of American Orchestras (formerly the American Symphony Orchestra League) collects and reports data on attendance. This isn't the same as ticket sales! It includes attendance at huge free Fourth of July parks concerts, for instance, and free concerts for bussed-in schoolchildren. Ticket sales are a much more sensitive measure of an orchestra's performance, so always get ticket sales data. Attendance data is valuable, too, but make sure you have figures for ticket sales. (Attendance figures also allow institutions to inflate their numbers by papering their houses, giving away many free tickets. I've known this to happen at one of New York's big institutions, and I wouldn't rule out the possibility that it happens elsewhere.)

And make sure you know which concerts are included in the sales figures. Aggregate sales numbers might include pops concerts, if the orchestra does them, and also the annual holiday gala, which perhaps is always packed. I'd always ask for a breakdown, so that I'd know the sales data for each kind of event. But here the most sensitive data would be sales for the orchestra's core classical concerts. These, after all, are the orchestra's main mission, and sales figures specifically for these concerts will give you one very clear measure of how successful that mission has lately been.

*

Third suggestion: Be very careful with subscription data. An orchestra might report, for instance, that subscriptions have risen 14%. But what does this mean? There are actually four separate statistical measures of success with subscriptions (or lack of success), and you need to get all of them.

The first measure is simple enough. It's the number of subscribers an orchestra has, the figure that tells you how many people bought subscription packages. So an orchestra reporting a gain in subscriptions might be referring to this number. More people are buying subscription packages. Good news!

But is it? Another measure of subscription success is how many subscription tickets were sold, a number that's to some degree independent of the number of subscribers. Suppose, for instance, that a large opera company increases the number of subscribers it has by shortening the length of subscription packages. It's now, maybe, more tempting for people to buy subscriptions, because they cost less, and commit people to fewer performances. (A big issue in today's subscription market.) But if this happens, it's entirely possible that the opera company will sell fewer subscription tickets than it used to, even while the number of subscribers goes up! You need to get both numbers.

And you also want to ask about the revenue from subscription sales. Is this up or down? Suppose an orchestra announces a 14% increase in subscriptions. Maybe they've shortened the subscription packages, and also sold them at a steep discount. Now they have more subscribers, but they're taking in less money from subscription sales! Or maybe they have more subscribers, and are also selling more subscription tickets, but subscription revenue is flat.

I'm not saying that classical music institutions are behaving badly or making strategic mistakes if any of these things should be true. Maybe they've got a strategic plan that makes sense, for instance a plan to attract more people at an initial lower price, in hopes of getting new people through the door, and then retaining them at the normal price in the future. The St. Paul Chamber Orchestra was very successful with a plan like this. But if you're gathering these stats, you have to know what you're dealing with. So get all three of these measures -- total number of subscribers, total number of subscription sales, and total revenue from subscription sales -- as well as a fourth figure, which in some ways is the most important of all.

The fourth figure is the percent of total ticket sales that are sold by subscription. This number is very important because -- for orchestras, at least -- it's been falling for at least the past two decades. According to an article in the latest Symphony magazine by David Snead, the marketing director of the New York Philharmonic, the drop in this percentage is considerable: from 95% in 1984-85 to 76% for the 2004-2005 season. (These numbers are for the 25 largest orchestras.) This makes a huge difference. Subscription sales are cheaper to market than single-ticket sales. Your marketing effort nets you many sales with each transaction, instead of one sale at a time. So the drop in subscription percentage has created a more difficult sales climate, and also made marketing more expensive.

That's why you need this number. If you want to know how well an orchestra is doing with subscriptions, this percentage is the bottom line. For any given orchestra, you'd want to know how their percentage compares with the industry average, and also whether it's rising or falling. An orchestra that increases subscription sales but still has a subscription percentage below the industry average may have scored a brilliant success, compared to its past performance.

But then you have to ask why sales had fallen below the industry average, and also how high the orchestra thinks they can rise. If the orchestra thinks they can continue to rise until they're higher than the industry average, you have every right to be cautious, and to ask why the institution thinks the percentage can keep going up. And if the percentage is falling, before blaming the orchestra for doing its job badly, you have to know if the decline falls within industry norms.

Bur the subscription sales percentage is the key to understanding subscription success. If, over a period of years, it keeps falling, even within industry norms, that's a problem. (It's a problem for the whole industry.) And if there are gains in the other three subscription numbers, that's good news for the orchestra, but still these gains -- in the larger context -- may only be a holding action, a success that in the longer run only lessens the immediate effect of the long-term decline.

Thus my suggestions for sharper coverage of classical music ticket sales. I hope they're not too elementary, and my apologies to readers who already know these things. But I sense, from seeing classical music coverage in the media, that these details might not be as widely known as they should be.

*

One last footnote. David Snead's article in the current issue of Symphony is very, very important (and also brilliantly written). Snead tackles the subscription issue head-on, explaining why the older model (as set forth in Danny Newman's famous book, Subscribe Now!) doesn't work any more, but how subscription sales can be made to work in different ways. And since the Philharmonic's sales have been up...

Recently I heard that the culture editor of a newspaper somewhere in the US had been told about me, as someone who could give him ideas about improving newspaper coverage of classical music. I don't know if this person will ever contact me, but I started thinking of what I'd say, if he ever did. And here's what I came up with. Everyone talks about covering classical music in a livelier, more accessible way. But while I think that's certainly a good thing to do, I don't think it's the main problem. I think the main problem is that -- from any serious journalistic point of view -- classical music isn't covered at all.

Here's what I mean. Suppose this person were the culture editor of the San Diego paper. (He's not; I picked that city because I don't know anyone at the newspaper there, or in the music scene, except that I've met Jahja Ling, the music director of the orchestra, a couple of times.) I'd start by asking if he knew how the San Diego Padres are doing. Probably he'd say yes (especially today, when they've got a one-game playoff for the National League wildcard). If he's any kind of baseball fan, he'd know where they were in their division, and at least approximately what their won and lost record is. Very likely he'd also know how they stack up against the league at each position, what their manager is like, how their general manager is doing, and what kind of ownership they have. If he didn't know these things, more serious fans certainly would. They'd all be written about on the newspaper's sports pages.

Then I'd ask if he -- or anyone at the paper -- knew equivalent things about the San Diego Symphony. Here the answer almost certainly would be no, in large part because these things aren't covered in the paper. But I think they should be. The orchestra, just like the baseball team, is an important civic resource. Plus it gets taxpayer money, and is out in the public arena every day of the year, raising money. The public, therefore, has a right to know what kind of organization it is, and whether it's as good as it should be.

How would a newspaper determine that? The key, pretty clearly, is to compare the orchestra to others of its size. How does it stack up? I'll admit that there's nothing tangible to talk about, nothing like the won-lost record any sports team has. But orchestra professionals can rank the orchestra for you. They might not always agree, but you'll get at least a general idea. Go around the country and ask musicians and orchestra managers how the San Diego Symphony rates. Also send your critic around to hear comparable orchestras, and see what the critic reports.

But there's more. I said that baseball fans in San Diego know how the Padres rate at each position, how their second baseman, for example, rates against all the other second basemen in the league. The orchestra, too, can be examined that way. How's its oboe section? How are its trombones? How well do the violas play? Again you can ask musicians. Find an oboist in some other city to talk to. Find several oboists. An objective picture will emerge. Orchestra professionals are very definite about such things. And this is a serious discussion, with real consequences. If the principal trumpet isn't good enough, shouldn't all of San Diego know it, and shouldn't something be done?

Now classical music coverage begins to get interesting. Something's at stake -- civic pride, professionalism, human interest. There's a story here, maybe several stories. I know one major orchestra where for quite a while the principal clarinet just wasn't cutting it. Any musician could hear that. Was that ever written about, in that orchestra's city? I don't know. But when the New York Philharmonic's first violin section wasn't as good as it should have been, and Kurt Masur was taking very strong measures behind the scenes to get the weak violinists to quit, I don't think that was ever mentioned in the New York press. It should have been. It was an important story, one of the main things going on in the orchestra.

And then what about the front office, as we'd say in baseball? What about the orchestra's management, its president or executive director, and its board? How well do they do the job? Again, people in other orchestras will give you a good idea, if you can get their confidence (off the record, of course). So will people in other San Diego arts organizations. If the board is weak, what's being done? I've heard several times from well-connected people in the arts in New York that the New York Philharmonic can't attract A-list board members, or at least not many of them. The best people, or so I've been told, want to go to the Met Opera, the Met Museum, or MOMA. Is this true? It's a devastating and important story, if it is. I've never seen it covered anywhere. (I'm not vouching for it, by the way. I'm only reporting what I've been told.) The Cleveland Orchestra, conversely, has long said it has the best board the business, the board that's most qualified, works hardest, and best understands its role within the institution. Is this true? Certainly it's important news if an institution thinks this. Certainly they're letting their view be known among prospective board members, in order to set the requirements for board membership very high. So shouldn't the public know whether the institution's view of itself is really true? (From what I've seen in the past, Cleveland's view of its board has very likely been right.)

Finally, there are tangible stats. How are the orchestra's ticket sales? Over a ten-year period, what's their trend, if there is one? Up or down? And how sharply up or down? Likewise for their fundraising, and for the size of their endowment (which depends, at least in part, on how well the endowment funds are managed). Why shouldn't the public know how orchestras are doing by these measures? I think newspapers should demand to see these numbers. Why don't they? Aren't these numbers especially important to know, at a time when it's the conventional wisdom that orchestras, as institutions, are doing poorly?

I'm sure some people in the business, some who might even be my friends, will be shocked to see me saying all of this. Orchestras need the best press they can get, I may be told. They don't need anyone prying into their private business. What will donors think, if the press reports there's trouble? Well, what will donors think if the press doesn't report this, but the trouble is real, and the orchestra doesn't talk about it? I don't see why orchestras shouldn't have the press keeping them honest, just as government and business does. Not to mention sports teams. If they don't have anything to hide, why should they mind the scrutiny.

I'll end with two major New York stories that the press, as far as I know, isn't covering. One is the notable success the Philharmonic has had in the past two years, selling tickets. The numbers, from what I hear, are really good. Why shouldn't the public know this? Especially, as I've said, when it's assumed that orchestras are doing badly. And what's the reason for the solid sales? Are they likely to continue? Are they the result of anything that other orchestras can emulate? Aren't these questions that would routinely be asked about a business that lately had been doing well?

The other story is about the Metropolitan Opera, which I've heard is running major deficits, despite all of Peter Gelb's success. I'm not saying that these deficits are disastrous. In fact, I think they're surely necessary. Peter, unlike many people who run large classical music institutions, isn't afraid to invest money in the institution's future, as a private business would do, if it had been in trouble, and needed to improve. But at the same time, the deficits raise a question, which I'm sure Peter would be the first person to acknowledge. What's the Met's financial model for its future? What does it need to put itself in balance financially, to get income and expenses in a ratio that's sustainable? I think this all is very reasonable -- and surely important -- for the press to cover. And I can't believe that it would put the Met in danger. Since the Met is clearly making progress toward the kind of public presence other classical music institutions would kill to have, and since it's selling more tickets, wouldn't responsible coverage of its financial situation actually make people sympathetic? "Look how forceful and how daring this institution is! We should support it."

One more footnote. I've head of places where the board of a classical music institution complains to a newspaper about what they think is unfavorable coverage, and the newspaper, to its shame, crumples under these complaints. The offending coverage -- which in one case I know about was very sober, thoughtful criticism, the kind any institution should consider itself lucky to get -- was suppressed. This, to me, is just about despicable, though I've run into things like it many times. Long ago I was asked to be on the advisory board of a magazine that would cover new classical music. I suggested that the magazine write about the controversies that then existed in the field. (This was the late 1970s, so that would have been angry disputes between "uptown" and "downtown" composers.) Oh, no, I was told. We can't do that. We have to present a united front. Wrong! If you don't -- and this goes double or triple for mainstream newspapers -- report a human-seeming world when you write about classical music, a world where people have the same human failings they have everywhere else, no one will believe what you write. Or, if they don't react strongly enough to disbelieve it, they just won't care.

Do we want politics, sports, and business covered in the normal style of the American press, while classical music is covered as if we lived in North Korea? OK, I'm exaggerating, but I don't see how it does anybody any good for the press not to try to find out the truth.

Final footnote. I know the coverage I'm advocating would be hard to do. Nobody's prepared for it, because it's never been done. Critics, for the most part, aren't equipped to do it. Generally they aren't hardnosed reporters. But just because it's hard, is that a reason not to try it? It's a newspaper's job, for God's sake.

Let me quickly -- well, maybe not; I tend to write long -- summarize my thoughts about the Met Opera season opening. Old news by now, maybe. But...

Conducting/orchestra

I read reviews full of comments on James Levine's energy, his thoughtful, savvy approach to a score he hadn't conducted before, in a style he doesn't like.

It would be fascinating to get a recording of the performance, and go over it with some of the people who wrote those reviews. As I said earlier, I heard an orchestra that for most of the first two acts seemed to be sleepwalking. In dotted rhythms, for instance

I often couldn't hear two distinct notes, articulated at close enough to the same moment, by everyone playing them, so that they sounded distinct. That's a sure sign that an orchestra isn't paying attention. And since these rhythms jump out forcefully at dramatic moments, it wasn't just the music that suffered; it was the performance's dramatic force.

I heard other signs of sloppiness. I didn't think, for instance, that short, very loud, dramatic chords (a big feature of Italian opera) were played in tune. It's amazing how much difference this makes, though when the chords aren't in tune, the out of tuneness may not register as such. Instead, the chords just don't sound very focused.

Quick passages often weren't precisely together. And I'd swear I heard something truly sloppy, in the instrumental introduction to the second-act Lucia-Enrico duet, "Soffriva nel piano." The horns play the melody, in this introduction, and the first violins double the last two notes of the first two phrases. This is a very simple rhythm, just a quarter note followed by an eighth, but I'd swear the violins weren't together with the horns. This is so elementary, though, that I might be wrong. Maybe it was some acoustical peculiarity, affecting the seat I happened to be in.

As I said in my last post, things picked up at the very end of the second act, and suddenly the music was alive and exciting.

Levine did three things I didn't understand. These were definite choices on his part. One was to take the cabaletta of the Lucia-Edgardo duet -- "Verrano a te" -- very slowly. To me, this was a mistake because the singers seemed strained by the slow tempo. There's also no justification I can find either in the score or the performance practice of Donizetti's time for such slowness, though I'll readily grant that conductors are free to reinterpret, if they make it work. But, for whatever it's worth, I don't think that a performance in Donizetti's time could have achieved so slow a tempo, because they didn't really have conductors (Donizetti would have led the first three performances from the keyboard, and after that the principal violinist would have been in charge). They also didn't have much rehearsal, and finally it would have been hard to enforce anything the singers didn't want to do. Any extreme effect, like this slow tempo, would probably have been unachievable, and so I doubt Donizetti would have asked for it. (He suffered enough when he asked the soprano in Lucrezia Borgia to make her first entrance wearing a mask. She hated that. "How will anyone know it is moi?" Not an actual quote; I'm imagining how someone now might have stated her objection.)

In the score, "Veranno a te" is marked Moderato assai. I'd have to study a lot of Donizetti scores before I could say I was sure what that means. Literally, it translates as "rather moderately." Why "rather"? Does that mean, "I don't want this to go slowly, but take it only moderately fast"? Or does it mean, "I'd like "
this to move along at a moderate speed, but don't go too quickly"? Is it, in other words, a caution against going too slowly, or against going too fast? But one thing it certainly doesn't mean is to take the piece very slowly. That's ruled out.

Second peculiarity. The cabaletta of the Lucia-Enrico duet, "Se tradirmi," seemed to start way too fast. The singers and orchestra weren't together. I couldn't even make out exactly where the downbeats in each measure were supposed to be. After a few bars, it all settled down (at a tempo a bit slower than the initial one, if I remember correctly). But this happened three times, each time the melody comes in! That is, it happened when Enrico sang the melody, then when Lucia sang it, and then, in the cabaletta repeat, when they share it. One messup like this seems like normal human error. But three of them?

Of course, this -- and some of the other problems I've mentioned -- might settle down in future performances. (Though I don't remember the Butterfly at the start of last season being so sloppy.) But the final peculiarity I want to cite is, like the tempo in "Veranno a te," definitely something Levine did on purpose. He started both statements of the final, repeated section of the sextet -- the one the baritone leads, singing "Ah, é mio sangue, l'ho tradita!" ("She's my family, I've betrayed her!") -- in a pianissimo hush, even forcing the baritone to stay quiet on a phrase that arches through a high F. This sounded unnatural to me, and the phrase didn't make any effect.

The baritone at this point has the melody, doubled by the first violins in octaves, along with the first flute flute, and, when the high F comes in, by the first oboe. One would have thought, first, that Donizetti would have wanted the baritone's line to come out more strongly, and also that he wouldn't have written anything that goes so high in the baritone's voice without expecting it to be sung with at least a little emphasis. Besides, the added oboe doubling in the higher part of the phrase would seem to indicate some strengthening of the sound.

And then the phrase isn't marked pianissimo, but only piano. The opening of the sextet, interestingly, is marked pianissimo, something I'd never noticed before. This would mean then, that -- however soft you take the beginning -- that the baritone's phrase should be louder. But how soft should the beginning be? I can imagine a conductor reading the score, seeing the pianissimo, and thinking, perhaps understandably, that Donizetti wanted the kind of true pianissimo hush that Mahler, let's say, would have wanted when he wrote pp. I don't think that's right for Donizetti, though.

First there's the circumstance that I noted before, that nothing in the performance conditions of the time would probably allow such an effect. Yes, maybe, with a lot of insistence from the composer, you might get a true pianissimo in a short passage, when something really notable is happening onstage. (You can read accounts of the rehearsals for the premiere of Verdi's Macbeth to see how hard he had to work to get things like that.) And second is something that happened to Toscanini, when he played in the cello section at the premiere of Verdi's Otello. Toscanini was one of the four solo cellists in the passage that starts the love duet at the end of the first act. This music is marked to be played very softly. I don't have my score with me just now, but I think the marking might be ppp, not an uncommon marking in Verdi's later scores. So Toscanini played what he saw in the score, and Verdi corrected him. "Second cello, you're playing too softly!" "But, maestro, you marked the music triple piano!" (Or whatever it is.) "Yes, but it always must be played with a singing tone."

So the extremely soft marking isn't quite to be taken literally. It means "yes, I really mean this to be soft," but it doesn't mean, "play this extremely softly." The singing tone is more important, and this would be lost if the music were played in a true hush. Toscanini never forgot this, and if you compare his Verdi performances with a score, you'll see that he doesn't take piano or pianissimo passages as softly as you'd expect. I think the same applies to the Lucia sextet. It's marked pianissimo, and later piano, but if you interpret this too literally, you lose the flow of the vocal melody. At that, I think, is what happened in Levine's performance.

Some musical things that worked wonderfully. The glass harmonica in the mad scene, which Donizetti had wanted to use, but hadn't been able to. One caveat: the instrument is very quiet for such a big house, and more might have been done, with both the staging and the playing, to underline the hush that inevitably fell over everything when the glass harmonica played.

Also the Mad Scene cadenza, shorn of the flute. Very touching. A brilliant decision.

And finally the long harp solo at the start of the second scene of the first act. This isn't written in the score, but traditionally harp players are allowed to play an unmarked solo. (Interesting, in performances when the singers aren't given or don't want to take equivalent freedom, which they certainly would have had in Donizetti's time.) This solo was a wonderful one, and wonderfully played. I wanted to applaud, and I wish the audience had somehow been signaled that applause was welcome. In Donizetti's time, there weren't any orchestra pits. The orchestra simply sat on the floor in front of the stage. So the harpist would have been visible, and very likely would have been applaused.

The staging

I said that, according to gossip, the director hadn't done much with the singers. And I also said that the scenes that depended only on the soloists seemed incoherent on stage. Here's an example. The Wolfscrag scene, at the start of the third act, is a ferocious confrontation between two mortal enemies, Edgardo and Enrico. To me, it looked as if the singers had staged the scene by themselves, with no director to refine and shape what they came up with. The evidence for this, for me, was that three times they got directly in each other's faces. On stage, this is a powerful thing, and shouldn't be overused. In this performance, it happened way too much in this scene, and therefore lost its force.

But it also fell flat because it never had any force in the first place. You can't just, as an actor, stick your face in somebody else's face. The moment has to read, in every way, like the powerful confrontation it is. The tension has to be shown in body language, and also in the way you get into the confrontation, and then in the way you get out of it. Nothing like that happened here. Take the final clinch (if I can use that expression, metaphorically). It happened right at the end of the scene. And it ended with Enrico calmly putting his hat on, and walking out the door. (The opera was updated to the high Victorian era, and everyone was costumed appropriately.)

I won't deny that such a thing could happen, someone breaking a tense confrontation by walking away. But the tension has to be visible. Enrico might have covered his fury with an affected icy calm, so that when he puts his hat on, he's showing the utmost defiance. Or he might slam his hat on his head, unable to hide his fury. Or something else might happen -- but something has to register. You can't just say, in effect, "Well, it's time for my exit, so I'll put my hat on and walk out."

One other moment worth noting: the wedding photograph that took place during the sextet. The execution here was perfect; obviously, the director's strength is in the kind of formally avant-darde theater we'd normally see at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, where over longish stretches of time, wonderful movements can evolve. This was like that. While the singers sang the sextet, a photographer motioned for everyone on stage (except Edgardo, of course) to pose for a photograph, which he finally took just as the music ended. This was striking., and beautifully executed.

But unfortunately it made no sense! First, imagine that you're at a large, politically important wedding, and suddenly the family's worst enemy shows up, the man the bride really loves. Do you think anyone would elaborately set up a photo at just that moment? No way. Then, afterward, as the opera is written, Edgardo won't believe that Lucia is marrying someone else, until he's shown the marriage contract. But this now seemed silly, because he's already seen Lucia posed for the photo, holding hands with her intended, with her family and all the wedding guests gathered round. Why, after that, would Edgardo be so shocked to see the contract?

Maybe if the whole thing had taken place in some kind of dream, this would have worked. But it didn't seem to. The staging of the photo was utterly realistic, as was the staging of the rest of the scene. (Including a terrific moment -- great credit to the director here -- where in the stretta the men in the chorus surround Edgardo and use prominent phrases in their music to threaten him. Except then I had to wonder why, since he'd pulled his sword, they didn't grab him from behind and disarm him.) So we apparently were supposed to believe that the photo was taking place in real time, which, as I've said, made no sense at all.

***

For anyone who cares, and who's stayed with me this long, here's a listing of the cuts taken in this performance. Cuts are always an issue in bel canto opera. A few weeks ago I found myself at a party with a conductor who'd soon be leading a production of Donizetti's Anna Bolena in Europe. That's a lengthy, sprawling opera, and she and I had a delightful time discussing what the cuts should be. But these decisions are rarely, if ever, critiqued in public after a production premieres. So let me try it. I'm doing this from memory, and of course wasn't sitting at the performance reading the score, so I might be mistaken here and there. Still, here are the cuts I remember noticing:

In the baritone's cabaletta in scene one, they used the really drastic cut familiar from 1950s recordings. The cabaletta has, as written, an initial statement of the melody, a noisy interlude, a repeat of the melody, a long, interestingly ruminative coda, and then a very noisy conclusion. At the Met, they jumped from the first statement of the melody right to the noisy conclusion.

Scene two: In the coda of Lucia's cabaletta, there's a wildly florid passage that begins with C major arpeggios, and is repeated. Dessay sang only one statement of it, and very interestingly rewrote the music (or had it rewritten for her), to make it easier to sing. I don't mind that at all; it's what any 19th century singer might have done, if she felt the original version wasn't suited to her voice.

Then, after the repeat of "Veranno a te," they cut one of my favorite moments in the score, a crazy cadenza that starts with the soprano on high C, and the tenor on a hard-to-believe high E flat. On records, I've heard this done with the voices reversed, the soprano on E flat and the tenor on C. I'll grant that this is a lot for the singers to dare to try live, but it makes a stupendous effect, at least on records; it's like a sonic starburst. I wish, instead of cutting it, that they'd try to replace it with something similar, if not so difficult.

Act two, scene one: they included the scene for Raimondo and Lucia, which is often cut entirely, but only did the first statement of Raimondo's cabaletta. Quite reasonable, in my view. I don't even see much point in doing the scene at all.

Act three: in the Wolfscrag scene (also sometimes cut entirely), they did only one statement of the cabaletta. Again, that's perfectly reasonable. Though I notice, in the score, that Donizetti has something notable happen during the repeat. The entire scene is supposed to take place during a storm. In fact, the orchestral introduction is called "Uragono" (hurricane). So midway through the cabaletta repeat, Donizetti says in the score, "the storm reaches its height." It might be exciting to see a performance where stormy excitement built all through the cabaletta, though that would raise the question of how to show that. The orchestration for the repeat is exactly the same as it is in the first statement. Do you show the storm building with lightning, and with thunder conveyed as a sound effect? If I were conducting, I might be tempted to add a bass drum to the timpani part in the repeat, to convey the extra power of the storm (though this might not be enough).

And, finally, the short recitative after the Mad Scene was cut, as it always is. I can understand why. Surely it was written only to cover a scene change, and surely it's going to come as a tremendous anticlimax. Still, it's not entirely dispensable. For one thing, Donizetti scores it very carefully, at one point toward the end putting the cellos higher than the violas, apparently to make a chord progression in the strings more poignant. He didn't treat this recitative, in other words, as simply a throwaway.

And something fascinating happens in the drama. Raimondo, who'd most decisively persuaded Lucia to go through with her fatal marriage, now blames the whole thing on Normanno, the head of the family's little group of armed men, who'd initially discovered that Lucia was secretly seeing the family's enemy, Edgardo. But Normanno, surely, was only doing his job. This little moment, in which Raimondo expresses himself with notable force. "You, evil one, are the cause of all this bloodshed! This blood accuses you to heaven, and now the Supreme Hand inscribes your sentence. Go now, and tremble!" Which is stunningly hypocritical, since Raimondo is a thousand times more guilty.

Of all these cuts, the one I most regret, though, is the one in the baritone's cabaletta. It robs the piece of all its dignity. Couldn't we at least reinstate the ruminative coda?

I'll end -- again assuming anyone has read this far -- with a quiz question. The stretta of the second act finale was performed complete, which I like very much. It's a surprising piece, with a development section in place of the usual repeat. But here's the question. When the old-fashioned cut is opened, and we hear every note of the stretta, which singer gains the most notable music?