Unanswered Question: November 2011 Archives

The current Times Literary Supplement (UK) includes my review of Fabio Luisi conducting SIegfried and Don Giovanni at the Met, as follows:

Notwithstanding its importance as a showplace for rich boxholders -- Mrs. Caroline Astor, who regularly came late and left early, was called a "walking chandelier" -- the early Metropolitan Opera was a conductor's house. During its "German seasons" (1884-1891), the dominant composer was Wagner and the dominant performer was Wagner's protégé Anton Seidl, presiding in the pit. Not so long after, Mahler and Toscanini dominated the Met's artistic identity. After World War I, the Italian wing was entrusted to Tullio Serafin and then Ettore Panizza, the German wing to Artur Bodanzky. Panizza and Bodanzky are largely forgotten today. How I wish the Met's radio broadcasts would feature their broadcast recordings. Panizza's Verdi, Bodanzky's Wagner were incendiary, and the orchestra was a powderkeg -- more explosive than any such ensemble to be heard today. (Just listen to Panizza's 1938 "Otello" with Martinelli, Tibbett, and Rethberg, or Bodanzky's 1937 "Siegfried" with Melchior, Schorr, and Flagstad -- two of the supreme examples of operatic art ever documented in sound.)

Much later, in the final phase of Rudolf Bing's regime after the 1966 move to Lincoln Center, the Met was a house without great conductors. The orchestra was variable, the chorus worse. This was the setting for James Levin's appointment as music director in 1975. Levine swiftly turned the orchestra into a reliably impressive instrument. The chorus improved beyond recognition. The repertoire was refreshed. In 2009, Levine concurrently took over the Boston Symphony. But a physical decline set in -- his Met performances (never light-footed) turned massive and slack. Last September, the Met announced that Levine was bowing out of the fall's new productions of "Don Giovanni" and "Siegfried" because of emergency surgery for a damaged vertebra. He would be replaced by Fabio Luisi -- who was in the same instant named Principal Conductor. As of this writing, Levine is scheduled to return to duty in the spring -- but no one knows if he really can. And so five seasons into Peter Gelb's eventful tenure as General Manager, the company is negotiating a transition in musical authority.

Though Luisi first appeared at the Met in 2005, he remains little known in the US. He was music director of the Dresden Staatskapelle from 2007 to 2010. He takes over the Zurich Opera in 2012-13. The Met is about glamour; Luisi is not glamorous. He defers to the orchestra when he takes his bows. He doesn't smile at the audience. But he has won over the musicians. The best thing about the new "Don Giovanni and "Siegfried" productions is Luisi's way of conducting the latter, and the orchestra's way of playing it. He is the first conductor other than Levine to lead "Siegfried" at the Met since 1981. Before that, there was Erich Leinsdorf. To my ears, Luisi is a superior Wagnerian to either Levine or Leinsdorf. He achieves a striking refinement of style and sonority. His command is complete but never throttling. The balances between stage and pit are at all times impeccable. In the new "Siegfried," the most memorable moments occur during the act one exchange between Mime and the Wanderer. Luisi seals the Wanderer's music with a seamless majesty. Preparing Bryn Terfel's descriptions of the gods and of the Volsungs, he achieves an unforgettable poetic hush.

But the talk in the lobby is about Robert Lepage's production. This is the third installment of the Lepage "Ring," with its high tech projections and mobile metallic slabs. His virtual-reality special effects include running water, floating leaves, slimy worms, scampering rodents, and a Forest Bird that sits in Siegfried's lap. The production works best where it is least intrusive: act one. In act two, the shallow playing space vitiates the expansiveness of Wagner's forest; the dragon, if impressively large and animated, is neither frightening nor poignant. In act three, the magic fire frames Siegfried's entire scene with Brȕnnhilde. Wagner asks that it disappear after Siegfried penetrates the flames for a reason: the mountaintop he attains trembles with a preternatural stillness, a preamble to apocalyptic events. This is but one example of Lepage's failure to listen. Directing his singers in this final scene -- the most psychologically complex duet in all opera -- he is clueless. The steep rake of Brȕnnhilde's "rock" doesn't help. Only Gerhard Siegel, a terrific Mime, is consistently effective in keeping the opera's trajectory moving.

For "Don Giovanni" to succeed in a 4,000-seat house, it requires either an ensemble of larger-than-life vocal personalities, or an interpretation with a sharp edge. Mahler's revelatory Met "Don Giovanni" of 1908, with a cast including Scotti, Chaliapin, Bonci, Eames, Gadski, and Sembrich, doubtless had both. The Met's new "Don Giovanni," directed by Michael Grandage, has neither. Remarkably, the strongest performance comes from the weakest character. Though Don Ottavio is a milquetoast, Ramon Vargas's portrayal is so exquisite, vocally, that he steals the show. Both his great arias are delivered with exemplary diction, with pianissimo tones sustained on the breath, with elongated phrasings guided by Luisi in the pit. Grandage, a redoubtable director of plays, shows no signs of high operatic competence. Physically, the production is monotonous. The dancing at Zerlina's wedding and Don Giovanni's feast is over-choreographed. Inexplicably, the staging of the Don's descent into hell is given away by the preceding statue scene: the only surprise is the duration of the conflagration.

This season, Luisi also conducts "Manon" and "La traviata." The Met is a company in need of strong artistic leadership. Luisi exerts authority quietly and inconspicuously. The possible parameters of his institutional vision are as yet unknowable. Will he be a fit? One hopes so.

The most vivid writings about composers' lives, I find, are the ones they produce themselves: letters, articles, books. A case in point is Gustav Mahler -- a copious and gifted correspondent. I have yet to find a Mahler biography that as vividly or poignantly limns the man as Gustav Mahler: Letters of his Wife, as edited by Henry-Louis de La Grange and Gunther Weiss in collaboration with Knud Martner.

In fact, this decade-long series of exchanges between Gustav and Alma, cannily interspersed with Alma's diary entries, reads like a play.

For the Pacific Symphony's performances of Mahler's Ninth Symphony a week ago, I had the opportunity to turn the Gustav/Alma correspondence into a half-hour pre-concert playlet, with two gifted actors: Nick Ullett and Jennie O'Hara. The audience responded volubly -- and, in the case of Gustav's marriage demands, incredulously.

Mahler, on Dec. 1901, 1902, composes 2,000 words setting forth such conditions as:

"From now on you have only one profession: to make me happy! Do you understand, Alma? I do realize that if you are to make me happy, you yourself must be happy. But in this drama, which could develop equally well into a comedy or a tragedy, the roles must be correctly cast. The role of the 'composer,' the 'bread-winner,' is mine; yours is that of the loving partner, the sympathetic comrade. Are you satisfied with it? I am asking much of you, very much - but I can and must do so, because I also know what I have to offer (and shall offer) in return. Almschi, I beg you, read this letter carefully. Before we speak again, we must have clarified everything, you must know what I demand and expect of you, and what I can give in return - what you must be for me. . . . I bless you, my dearest love, no matter how you react - I shall not write tomorrow, but wait instead for your letter on Saturday. A servant will be sent round and kept waiting in readiness. Many tender kisses, my Alma. And I beg you: Be truthful! Your Gustav."

"This letter!" Alma responds. "My heart missed a beat - give up my music - abandon what until now has been my life. My first reaction was - to pass him up. I had to weep - for then I realized that I loved him. Mama and I talked it over till late at night. She had read the letter. I find his behavior so ill-considered, so inept. It might have come all of its own, quite gently. But likely this will leave an indelible scar."

Then the tables turn: Alma falls in love with Walter Gropius. Mahler rescinds his demands. He now writes:

"My darling, I am possessed by dark spirits; they have cast me to the ground. Come and dispel them. Abide by me, my rod and staff. Come soon today, that I may rise up. Here I lie prostrate and await you; and silently I ask whether I may still hope for salvation, or whether I am to be damned. . . . Almschli, if you had left me, I would simply have been snuffed out, like a candle starved of air. When will you be arriving, dear heart? As you know, I am a schoolboy at heart, but a trace of the husband, or whatever you prefer to call it, still remains, and that part of me wishes for news of my dearest! But I'm longing for you! Longing! Longing!"

In fact, the Pacific Symphony's "Music Unwound" presentations of Mahler's Ninth included two prefatory segments -- the second of which, at concert-time, was a mini-lecture by conductor Carl St. Clair combined with three Ruckert Songs (memorably sung by Chris Nomura) and a tape-recorded reminiscence of her father by Anna Mahler, from the 1960s.

As notable as what all this incorporated was what it did without: the orchestra was not onstage until 8:50. That is: no excerpts from Mahler's Ninth were performed. Rather, the entire exercise was one of contextualization: creating conditions for maximum emotional and intellectual engagement. The vast majority of the listeners had never before encountered this long and challenging work. A propitious ambience was secured. And the impact of 100 musicians purveying Mahler was reserved for the performance itself.

St. Clair pursued a similar strategy contextualizing Bruckner's Ninth last season -- a "Music Unwound" concert I wrote about at the time. What this conductor -- a ripe and impassioned advocate of music of the spirit -- has achieved is a listening sanctum the more remarkable (and necessary) given the Pacific Symphony's locale: California's Orange County. He has successfully negated the freeway experience preceding the symphonic experience. He has found a way to slow the speedy, fractured pace of daily lives, to ease his audience into fresh and unexpected realms of personal adventure.

The rapt silence accorded Mahler's symphony -- 90 minutes long in St. Clair's fraught rendering -- registered discovery. Many stayed post-concert, nearly until midnight, to share their discoveries in intimate detail. A community of listeners was created and sustained.

"Music Unwound" -- creative contextualization -- feels necessary: something many orchestras should attempt. In Orange County, it's supported by the NEH and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Orchestras elsewhere lack comparable subsidies. But maybe all they need is a push. "Music Unwound" doesn't require expensive soloists. More often than not, there is less music to rehearse. One can't generalize that it's more expensive than business as usual.

Meanwhile, I'm going to expand my playlet into a full evening, with interpolated music by Gustav and Alma both.

The central premise of Post-Classical Ensemble's three-day "Ives Project" at the Strathmore Music Center last week was that Charles Ives the composer was not a curmudgeonly modernist, but a wholesome and uplifting product of fin-de-siecle America.

The central presentation, "Charles Ives: A Life in Music," applied letters and other writings to an array of Ives songs (peerlessly enacted by William Sharp) and chamber-orchestra works, plus "The Alcotts" from the Concord Piano Sonata (an exalted performance by Jeremy Denk).

The central document was the "Dear Daddy" letter Edie Ives gave her father on his sixty-eighth birthday, reading in part:

"You have fire and imagination that is truly a divine spark, but to me the great thing is that never once have you tried to turn your gift to your own ends. Instead you have continually given to humanity right from your heart, asking nothing in return; -- and all too often getting nothing. The thing that makes me happiest about your recognition today is to see the bread you have so generously cast upon most ungrateful waters, finally beginning to return to you. All that great love is flowing back to you at last. Don't refuse it because it comes so late, Daddy."

When the evening was done, an audience member asked how our presentation could be reconciled with popular imagery of Ives the man: irascible, cranky, difficult.

That Ives' music cannot be fully appreciated outside the context of 19th century gentility, and the genteel notion that art is morally empowering, has long seemed obvious to me. Moral fire is what Ives found and cherished in Emerson -- and also in Beethoven, whom he considered "in the history of this youthful world the best product that human beings can boast of." But I hadn't sufficiently appreciated the implications for Ives the man.

When Ives was belatedly discovered in the thirties, forties, and fifties, modernists seized on the bravery of Ives the composer - his experiments with tonality, rhythm, and sound. Concomitantly, they seized on his tirades against "pansies" and "sissies" to paint Ives the man. That Ives was confrontational suited the modernist template for genius.

But in what others had to say about him, I can find no evidence of Ives being remotely cruel or selfish. In fact, it seems he was singularly benign. At the Ives & Myrick insurance office, he may have been considered eccentric, but he was beloved.

Many are the stories memorably limning Ives the man. One of my favorites was told by Charles Buesing, an Ives & Myrick employee. Buesing remembered Ives as "a very shy, retiring man." He was "very kindly," never harsh or angry. He "would talk to anyone." He "made everyone feel important." The first time Buesing entered Ives's office - which was "out of sight," "around a corner" -- he thought Ives asleep. His eyes were shut, his feet rested on a desk drawer, his desk was a mass of papers. "Come in and sit down," Ives said, his eyes still closed. He asked Buesing about his family, his work, his future plans. He encouraged him to stick with the life insurance business.

One day, an Ives & Myrick salesman named Charlie came to Buesing with tears in his eyes. Charlie had gone months without a sale: he had no income. Ives had just paid him a visit. "Charlie," Ives had said, "will you take out your wallet?" Charlie did. "Now, you open it," said Ives. The wallet was empty. "I thought so," said Ives. "No one can ever make a sale of anything with an empty wallet. Now, I want you to take this as a business loan. I know you'll have so much confidence with what I am going to put in that wallet that you will pay me back, and I don't want an I.O.U. or anything else." And Ives put fifty dollars in Charlie's wallet. As Ives left the office, Charlie said to Buesing, "There is a great man." Politically, Ives was an extreme populist who advocated direct democracy. He believed in people.

In Beethoven, writes Ives in Essays before a Sonata, "the moral and the intellectual" are one. "It is told, and the story is so well known that we hesitate to repeat it here, that [Beethoven and Goethe] were standing in the street one day when the Emperor drove by - Goethe, like the rest of the crowd, bowed and uncovered - but Beethoven stood bolt upright, and refused even to salute, saying; : "Let him bow to us, for ours is a nobler empire." Goethe's mind knew this was true, but his moral courage was not instinctive."

Like Ives, like Emerson, Beethoven embodies ideals of uplift and equality - and yet will not pander. His language grows arcane. Ives knows this paradox and solves it: Beethoven writes symphonies "to the people," not "for the people"; he composes "for the human-soul," not for the "human-ear." In fact, with their Beethoven encomiums, the Concord Sonata and Ives' accompanying Essays Before a Sonata mutually testify that Ives saw himself striding alongside Emerson and Beethoven in a common high endeavor -- that the human, morally empowered, might become divine.