Unanswered Question: April 2010 Archives

When people worry about the impact of the recession on the performing arts, they worry about money: waning ticket sales, waning foundation support, waning gifts, waning fees. They should also worry about newspapers - about the draconian impact on arts journalism as papers cut back or go under.

The arts cannot flourish in a media vacuum. I know there are new media. But cultural conversation on the web is diffuse. Whatever purposes it may best serve, serving performing arts institutions - one function, however incidental, of mainstream print reviews and commentary - is not among them.

These thoughts are triggered by Bill Keller's review of Alan Brinkley's new biography of Henry Luce in today's New York Times Book Review. Keller is the executive editor of the Times. He writes: "It would be a mistake to sentimentalize the previous century's version of journalistic authority. But it is probably affair to say that the cacophony of today's media - in which rumor and invective often outpace truth-testing, in which shouting heads drown out sober reflection, in which it is possible for people to feel fully informed without ever encountering an opinion that contradicts their prejudices - plays some role in the polarizing of our politics, the dysfunction of our political system and the increased cynicism of the American electorate."

How I wish that this plausible judgment were commonly applied to the splintering of arts discourse. Five years ago, when I was invited to reflect on the state of arts journalism for Syracuse University's Goldring Program in Arts Journalism, I began by citing Harold Clurman's The Fervent Years. This classic 1941 history of the Group Theatre is many things - one of which is a case study on the life and death of a cutting-edge arts institution, offered as a lesson in futility. The failure of the Group Theatre, Clurman writes, was partly a failure of the press: New York's drama critics, he says, were not notably invested in standards they were prepared to articulate and defend. OK, probably not - but that they at least enjoyed a central pulpit, and the capacity to make a difference, looks pretty good today.

The same was true, of course, of Henry Luce's Time and Life - and of Look Magazine and countless other publications and TV shows I knew growing up. The performing arts coverage left a lot to be desired. And yet it mattered. Important players were right at hand: Ingmar Bergman, Pablo Casals, Tennessee Williams, Igor Stravinsky, Rodgers and Hammerstein actually registered as icons. Dwight MacDonald's classic putdown of "midcult" was unarguably just. As with the Ed Sullivan Show, or the Bell Telephone Hour, classical music as surveyed by a Luce or William Paley or David Sarnoff was all too Eurocentric and venerable, insufficiently tuned to America and to the contemporary moment. But the makings of significant public conversation were in place.

Does anyone care about the fate of arts journalism today? Few accounts of the demise of the daily paper seem to take notice of it. Foundations ignore it. The main exception of which I am aware is the National Endowment for the Arts, which under Dana Gioia undertook annual institutes for critics in music, theater, and dance. I am fortunate of have been the artistic director of the NEA Music Critics Institute since its inception in 2004. In seven years we have witnessed the disappearance of the fulltime music critic as a likely newspaper staff-member. The bloggers who have taken their place as institute participants are in many instances brighter and fresher than their precursors - but the platforms they occupy are smaller, less stable, less prominent. For the moment, I hold out more hope for the local radio station that takes responsibility for showcasing and buttressing the cultural life of a community. For a performing arts organization, the eager attention of a WFMT/Chicago (of which, alas, there is only one) can make a life-or-death difference.

Clurman wrote: "The Group could not sustain itself as such because it was isolated. The Group Theatre was a failure because, as no individual can exist alone, no group can exist alone. For a group to live a healthy life and mature to a full consummation of its potentiality, it must be sustained by other groups - not only of moneyed men or civic support, but by equally conscious groups in the press, in the audience, and generally in large and comparatively stable segments of society. When their this fails to happen, . . . it will wither just as an organ that is not nourished by the blood's circulation through the body."

Theodore Thomas, the Gilded Age father of American symphonic culture, preached: "A symphony orchestra shows the culture of the community." In cities big and small, it did. Today, our children avidly specialize in vicarious forms of electronic interpersonal diversion. Our laptops and televisions ensnare us in a surrogate world that shuns all but facile passions. We are greatly challenged to identify, nurture, and sustain anything like a community of culture infused with arts and learning.

To assess the legacy of a conductor, the first place to look is repertoire. Leonard Bernstein's too-brief decade as Music Director of the New York Philharmonic was remarkable in many ways, but the surest criterion of Bernstein's success is the music he successfully championed. He made Mahler, Ives, and Nielsen matter as they had not mattered before.

Every orchestra, every conductor, should aspire to impact on repertoire - whether locally, nationally, or internationally. As a producer of concerts, and as Artistic Director of DC's Post-Classical Ensemble (which I co-founded with the conductor Angel Gil-Ordonez seven years ago), I hunger for opportunities to celebrate important music that remains little-known.

The composer we most program in DC is the Mexican Silvestre Revueltas (1899-1940). Angel and I feel confident that his time will come. We believe that Revueltas's score for Redes (1935) is as stirring as Prokofiev's for Alexander Nevsky. We think that few composers this side of the Atlantic have created a symphonic palette as individual or vital.

We've also championed (and recorded) Aaron Copland's The City (1939) as his highest achievement as a film composer - the most important Copland score that remains little-heard. We gave the American premiere of Kurt Weill's Walt Whitman songs in the version with orchestra in the conviction that this heartfelt response to Pearl Harbor is one Weill's finest American works (cf. my blog of Feb. 21).

Last night at BAM, Angel conducted the Orchestra of St Luke's in the American stage premiere of Manuel de Falla's El Corregidor y la Molinera (The Magistrate and the Miller's Wife) in a new production that Post-Classical Ensemble repeats in DC this Friday night. A 45-minute dance/pantomime with chamber orchestra, Corregidor has a tangled history. It premiered in Madrid in 1917. Diaghilev wanted it. But he also wanted many changes. He had Falla recast it with a full orchestra, less pantomime, and many new numbers, including a fresh finale. Massine choreographed and danced the Miller. Picasso did sets and costumes. The result was The Three-Cornered Hat - whose triumph doomed Corregidor to obscurity.

According to the listing in the New Grove Dictionary of Music, Three-Cornered Hat is a "revised and expanded" version of Corregidor. Not really. The story is the same, and two of the famous Three-Cornered Hat dances - the fandango and seguidilla - originate in Corregidor (in deliciously fragrant scorings for a 17-member pit band). But Corregidor is longer than Three-Cornered Hat, not shorter. And about half the music is different.

In a post-concert discussion at BAM, Angel called Corregidor "cartoon music." And so it is. The score prickles with detailed gesture and incident aligned with precise musical description. There are also facetious allusions to Beethoven's First and Fifth Symphonies, and (a reference not mentioned in any Falla book I know) to the Rhinemaidens in Gotterdammerung (water music, for the Corregidor's hapless plunge into the local river en route to seduce the Miller's Wife).

The changes Diaghilev wanted were both practical and shrewd. Corregidor was far too intimate for his Ballet Russes. Its ending is problematically abrupt. And Falla - a compulsive eccentric; he was known to brush his teeth for 30 minutes -- got carried away with his cartoonsmanship (what is derided in film-music circles as "Mickey-Mousing"). As he was an inveterate reviser, intent on perfection, he would certainly have polished Corregidor had Three-Cornered Hat not intervened.

In short, El Corregidor y la Molinera is an orphaned work craving reconsideration. A literal staging, with every cartoon detail in place, would today risk seeming impossibly anachronistic. And so Angel and I commissioned a new production from Barcelona's Ramon Oller - an original choreographic talent, whose well-traveled adaptation of Carmen (with the same splendid principal dancers -- Sandrine Rouet and Javier Garcia - as Corregidor) ranges far afield from Bizet. The density of pantomime in Falla's Corregidor is in Oller's Corregidor replaced with a density of dance. It is a fascinating exercise. Will it travel? Can it rescue Corregidor? We will see.

One thing is certain: had there been no Diaghilev, and no Three-Cornered Hat, El Corregidor y la Molinera would today be beloved for its fandango, seguidilla, and countless other aromatic signatures of Falla's genius.

In my last blog, I extolled a 1935 Met La Traviata broadcast as an antidote to the Verdi performances of today, and invited readers to listen to Ettore Panizza conduct the preludes, and to Lawrence Tibbett deliver the goods in "Di Provenza."

My friend Ettore Volontieri, who trained as a baritone before becoming an inimitable artists' manager, wrote to remind me that the same January 5 broadcast features an equally memorable act two exchange between Germont and Violetta, with Tibbett and Rosa Ponselle. I refreshed by memory on youtube - and so it does.

But it irks me indescribably that neither the youtube posting nor any of the many posted comments see fit to mention Panizza or his orchestra. This duet would be a far lesser achievement without them. And their contributions seem doubly pertinent in the wake of Leonard Slatkin's withdrawal from the current Met Traviata.

Reports that Slatkin failed to "support" his singers (I wasn't there) skirt the heart of the matter. Panizza doesn't merely support Tibbett and Ponselle - he instructs, he challenges, he ignites them. Obviously, one listens to this astounding performance gripped by Germont and Violetta, by Tibbett and Ponselle. Which is as it should be. But listen again and pay attention to what's happening in the pit.

As I remarked last week, the 1935 Met possessed a great Italian orchestra. Researching my Classical Music in America, amazed by Panizza's broadcasts, I visited the Met Archives and discovered that no fewer than 53 of 85 instrumentalists on the permanent 1934-35 roster had incontestably Italian names: Mario, Luigi, Ettore, Arturo, etc. And this Italian orchestra sounds Italian: the taut filaments of tone, the keen timbres, the velocity and precision of the playing make the Met orchestra an eager and knowing participant in the drama onstage. Honed and maintained by a master house conductor, it offers a kind of "support" little known at today's Met: a binding style.

Among the electrifying attributes of this style, as embodied by a Panizza or Toscanini, is clipped, attenuated phrasings. These players drive to a cadence, or clinch a taut lyric continuum, with a burst of acceleration. Like the string portamentos we also no longer hear, it's something in their blood.

In the Traviata duet in question, this quality of abruption transforms Violetta's "non sapete" - her urgent plea for understanding. Panizza drives the orchestra's stabbing interjections at a faster clip than Ponselle's song. Where her desperation peaks, he summons an accelerating whirlwind she must ride. Only a soprano made of stone could fail to respond to this musical-dramatic vortex. (Yes, I know the ensemble is imperfect - forget about perfection.)

Who was Panizza? He was born in Buenos Aires and trained in Milan. From 1921 to 1931 he conducted at La Scala, where Toscanini esteemed him (as did Richard Strauss, who arranged for him to conduct Elektra in Vienna). His Met years were 1934 to 1943. Given his extensive European career, which also included Covent Garden, it bears emphasis that he considered the Met's "as fine at theater orchestra as I have seen in the world." During the war he returned to Buenos Aires, where he later had occasion to coach and conduct Leonard Warren in Simon Boccanegra and other roles new to him.

At the Met, it was Panizza and his orchestra that stylistically bound the polyglot casts. Tibbett was a sheriff's son from Bakersfield, California, who discovered music in the local Methodist church. Frederick Jagel, Tibbett's Alfredo, was Brooklyn-born. Ponselle grew up in Connecticut among Italian immigrants.

Reading contemporaneous reviews of Met performances such as Panizza's Traviata is a humbling experience. That they upheld the house standard is simply taken for granted. Similarly, to listen to the Met audience respond to the various numbers is to glean an opera public that is appreciative and discerning in equal measure, and that applies the highest expectations. These expectations become a performance factor: listeners influence singers. (Never has the Met audience seemed as clueless as today. But I notice no decline in critical understanding among demonstrative Rangers fans at Madison Square Garden.)

My own Met opera-going dates back to a 1962 Masked Ball led by Nello Santi. I cannot count the number of Verdi conductors I have since encountered in New York (a list unfortunately not including Carlos Kleiber). I have never encountered anything like Ettore Panizza.

To be sure, Panizza and his Italians were not a band for all seasons. Panizza's 1939 Boris Godunov broadcast (with Ezio Pinza) contains no revelations. How did the same Italian orchestra fare in Wagner? Its bright timbres still sound Italian. Fortunately, the house conductor for the German wing - Artur Bodanzky - was a febrile Wagnerian, poles apart from a Furtwangler or Knappertsbusch. Bodanzky is my favorite Siegfried conductor. In fact, the Met Siegfried broadcast of January 30, 1937 -- with Lauritz Melchior, Kirsten Flagstad, and Friedrich Schorr - is the only viable Siegfried I know (who since Melchior can be said to have owned this opera's treacherous and implausible title role?). To listen to those Italians sing their way toward Brunnhilde's awakening, then light their powderkeg, is to relearn the expressive possibilities of this epochal symphonic passage. It's on my website.

That Bodanzky's successor was Erich Leinsdorf encapsulates in a sentence the decline of Wagner conducting at the Met in the decades to follow - another story for another time.

In the opinion of an eminent European conductor of my acquaintance, it was last possible to adequately cast the big Verdi operas in the 1970s.

Nothing in my experience sporadically attending Verdi at the Met contradicts that view. Sampling yesterday's live broadcast of Aida, I listened to the tenor struggle through "Celeste Aida" and the soprano skim "Ritorna vincitor." It was enough.

A welcome innovation of Peter Gelb's Met has been bringing Met broadcast performances of yesteryear into general circulation via Sirius radio. But the broadcasts I encounter there are typically of quite recent vintage. The Verdi broadcasts we need to hear are from the 1930s and 1940s. They put today's situation into perspective.

To begin with, the Met in those decades possessed a great Italian orchestra. What I mean by "Italian" is that the musicians (check their names, as preserved in the Met Archives) were nearly all Italians, and that the sounds they produced were lean, fleet, and bright. Trumpets and drums were a piercing presence. The strings spun keen filaments of sound. The entire ensemble was a powderkeg.

The house conductor for Verdi was Ettore Panizza, today not even a name. Verdi conductors don't come any better. To listen to Panizza conduct the La Traviata Preludes in 1935 is to encounter something like Toscanini -- the tensile line, the high temperament, the impeccable precision -- with a freer command of pulse.

As for the singing, the house baritone for Verdi was Lawrence Tibbett, who unlike famous American Verdi baritones to come (Merrill, Warren, MacNeil, Milnes) was a demonic singing actor. In Rigoletto, partnered by Panizza, his wrenching act two scene with the courtiers trumps Tito Gobbi and Tullio Serafin in the most famous of all studio recordings of this opera. Or listen to Tibbett deliver "Di Provenza il mar," from La Traviata, on youtube. That's live from the Met, with Panizza conducting.

The most gripping performance of any Verdi opera I've ever encountered is a Feb. 12, 1938, Met Otello, with Tibbett, Giovanni Martinelli, and Elisabeth Rethberg. Panizza's shaping of the first act love duet, supporting Martinelli's signature long lines, is supreme; he makes other conductors sound choppy. Where the score explodes, the split-second spontaneity and precision of orchestra and conductor are clairvoyant (a function of shared tradition). Martinelli's studio recordings in this role are famous, but only in live performance does the veracity of his portrayal (including the death rattle at the close) fully register. This incendiary live recording used to be commercially available in the US on Naxos, but (thanks to EMI's meddlesome litigation) no longer. You can hear chunks of it (and also Rosa Ponselle and Panizza in Traviata) among the historic recordings on my website. There are some excerpts on youtube, too.

I'm sure that if I frequented the Met I would discover the great Verdi singers of today -- but they would be a small minority. In time and culture, we are distant from the conditions that created these operas. And -- with Toscanini, Serafin, and Panizza long gone -- the Met can no longer connect with its venerable Italian tradition.

The most complete operatic performances nowadays, in my experience, are of Russian operas performed by Valery Gergiev and his Maarinsky soloists, chorus, and orchestra. Thanks to the Soviet time warp, pertinent Russian traditions survive (for the moment). This company continues to produce big singers. Its forays into non-Russian repertoire, predictably unidiomatic, are unpredictable in affect. Still, I don't doubt that Gergiev and the Maarinsky could manage a potent Aida.