Archives for 2003

I started writing about music a quarter-century ago, and one thing I’ve learned since then (the only thing, some of you may already be muttering) is that the quickest way to start a fight is to say something nasty about the operas of Richard Wagner. Most of his admirers are reasonable, but some are fanatical, and the fanatics are all compulsive correspondents. Since I find Wagner a near-unendurable bore…O.K., O.K., enough already. Let’s just say that staged performances of Wagner’s operas usually fill me with unenthusiastic respect, and drop it. Or, as H. L. Mencken put it in his inimitable manner:

In the concert-hall Wagner’s music is still immensely effective; none other, new or old, can match its brilliance at its high points, which may be isolated there very conveniently and effectively. But in the opera-house it has to carry a heavy burden of puerile folk-lore, brummagem patriotism, and bilge-water Christianity, and another and even heavier burden of choppy and gargling singing. No wonder it begins to stagger.

For some (though not all) of these reasons, I occasionally enjoy listening to excerpts from Wagner’s operas in the privacy of my own home, and I definitely have a depraved taste for the super-sensuous Wagner performances of Leopold Stokowski and the Philadelphia Orchestra. Stokowski may have been a bit of a fraud, with that phony Slavic accent and those pretty-pretty hands, but he knew how to make an orchestra play its heart out, and his Wagner recordings, which I once described as being as hot as an atomic pile, are the antithesis of dull.

Hence it was with unexpected delight that I learned that Andante has released a five-CD set of the complete Wagner recordings made by Stokowski and the Philadelphians between 1926 and 1940, exquisitely remastered from the original 78s by Ward Marston. I shelled out good cash money for this set, and considering the way I feel about Wagner, I’d say that’s a pretty strong recommendation. Maybe Stokowski’s Wagner is for people who don’t really like Wagner, but I have a feeling it’s for everybody, especially his 35-minute-long “symphonic synthesis” of Tristan und Isolde, which consists of all the good parts lined up in single file with nothing in between.

One last slapshot at the Bryan of Bayreuth. This is what I wrote in the New York Daily News a few years ago about Robert Wilson’s Metropolitan Opera staging of Lohengrin:

“Though Wagnerites are a famously conservative lot, I confess to being puzzled by the displeasure of the opening-night crowd. Wilson was born to stage Wagner, and his ‘Lohengrin’—epic in scale and often deeply poetic in effect, but also inhumanely symbolic and portentous to the point of self-parody—is as precise a translation into contemporary terms of Wagner’s windy German romanticism as could possibly be imagined.”

Heh, heh, heh.

“The mentality of conductors is a dark, abysmal chapter that still awaits a historian. Conducting tends to spoil the character. When all is said and done, it is the only musical activity in which a dash of charlatanism is not only harmless, but positively necessary.”

Carl Flesch, Memoirs

Jesse Green recently wrote a smart piece in the New York Times Magazine about Adam Guettel, the composer of the off-Broadway musical Floyd Collins (it’s about the guy who got stuck in the cave) and the pop-song cycle Myths and Hymns. I’ve been interested in Guettel for some time now–I think he’s the most gifted and significant of the post-Sondheim musical-theater composers–and I’m very much looking forward to seeing his latest show, The Light in the Piazza, once it finally makes its way to New York. (It just had its premiere at Seattle’s Intiman Theatre.)

Having said all this, I’m puzzled by one thing. Green, who obviously admires Guettel as much as I do, described The Light in the Piazza as a “serious chamber musical” and emphasizes its musical complexity:

Anyone can whistle a happy tune. But take a look at the score of ”Piazza.” To create its highly chromatic, yearning atmosphere (Guettel calls it faux-Lisztian), the harpist is kept so busy changing pedals that she’s basically doing a clog dance. The other instruments–piano, violin, cello, bass–aren’t spared, either. The vocal lines are compulsively notated down to the last crotchet, specifying the kinds of inflections and back-phrasings that other composers would leave to the singers’ sense of style. It’s not pedantry; it’s how Guettel hears, and in some sense tries to stabilize, his damaged world. Is ”Love to Me”–the romantic climax of the score–less heart-melting because it is set mostly in the compound time signature of 5/8 + 4/8? No, it is more so, thanks to that strangely limping extra eighth-note, which seems to argue that imperfection can be another kind of beauty. But just try learning it without Guettel’s longtime music director, Ted Sperling, hammering out the beats.

What few can learn, few can love. ”I can’t help that,” Guettel says. ”We can finally admit, confidentially, that being a prominent theater composer is like being a prominent manuscript illuminator. So let’s not ask people to think more of this art form than they want to.” Which seems a shame because, with enough tinkering, ”Piazza” could be a classic….

Well, duh, it sounds to me like it wouldn’t take any tinkering whatsoever for Piazza to be…an opera. So why not call it that, and invite an opera company to produce it? I am fascinated by, and have written more than once about, the continuing resistance of “new music theater” composers like Guettel to thinking of their work in operatic terms. Stephen Sondheim is the same way. It’s as though “opera” were the dirtiest world in the language.

Does it matter whether you call a show like The Light in the Piazza or Sweeney Todd a musical or an opera? I think so. As I wrote in the Times a couple of years ago apropos the failed Broadway run of Marie Christine, whose composer, Michael John LaChiusa, similarly insisted on calling it a musical:

“The key word here is ‘elitist.’ Mr. LaChiusa, who admits to having had to pawn his piano after writing ‘Marie Christine,’ clearly longs to be popular. Alas, he longs in vain. Broadway today is about ‘Beauty and the Beast’ and ‘Footloose,’ not complex scores that demand your full attention at all times. To call ‘Marie Christine’ a musical is implicitly to claim that it has more in common with these simple-minded shows than ‘Carmen.’ Not only is this untrue, it’s bad marketing, the equivalent of a bait-and-switch scam. Labels are unfashionable these days, even politically incorrect, but sometimes they still matter. Had ‘Marie Christine’ been billed as ‘a new opera’ and produced by, say, Glimmerglass Opera, it would have drawn a different, more adventurous kind of audience, one better prepared to grapple with its challenging blend of pop-flavored rhythms and prickly harmonies.”

Judging by Jesse Green’s piece, I’d say Adam Guettel, for whatever reason, is making the same mistake—and I don’t think it will serve him well in the long run.

But don’t get me wrong—I love Broadway….

Our Girl in Chicago writes:

Is there a woman out there who doesn’t carry around the invisible scars of her teenage social life? If so, I don’t know her. For everyone else, though, I recommend Special, Bella Bathurst’s psychologically acute, emotionally charged first novel. Why it hasn’t been more widely reviewed is a mystery to me. The perfect title captures one aspect of the angst that makes girls of 13 treat each other so cruelly, even at the height of their own psychic tenderness. How do you square the idea, carried over from childhood, of your own inalienable specialness with the beginning of an adult social life and the regard for others it entails? How can everyone be special? In the adolescent social algebra that Bathurst renders with heartbreaking verisimilitude, to remain special implacably requires that someone else be chaff–to put it politely.

Bathurst tells the story of a school trip that brings eight girls to a shopworn English countryside. Removed from their usual setting, the girls quickly shake off the flickering authority of their two chaperones and hammer out their own pitiless social contract. Early on, one character looks out over the Severn River: “Something about the water seemed misleading to Hen. Over there in the distance the river looked harmless. Only when she looked down through the railings of the bridge could she see how fast it was going. You’d never know until you were dead that it might kill you, she thought.” It’s a powerful metaphor, both for the feelings churning inside the girls and for their shifting alliances with one another. Throw in boys and sex, distracted absent parents, and everyday insecurities, and you have plenty of lit matches to go with this powderkeg.

No doubt you’ve thought by now of Lord of the Flies, a point of reference duly noted in the book’s jacket copy. But it isn’t power that’s at issue here so much as the struggle to shape an acceptable self to present to the world. When the audience is narrowed to seven others involved in the same endeavor, beset by the same vulnerabilities, things get dangerous–like the Severn. The girls’ little world smolders, rather than explodes, but the conclusion is every bit as devastating.

This book dredged up uncomfortable memories of junior high school, but gave me new sympathy with my tormentors of old–something I wouldn’t have thought possible. Maybe it’s because I’m a woman that I find Bathurst’s girls even more fascinating than William Golding’s boys, and her novel at least as penetrating as his. But I think it’s because Special is simply that good.

I’ve been reading Edward Brooks’ The Young Louis Armstrong on Records: A Critical Survey of the Early Recordings, 1923-1928, a record-by-record study of Armstrong’s early work written by a Brit with a Ph.D. in musicology. Most of what he says is astute and well-informed, but I have to confess that I get the giggles whenever he writes about one of the many recordings in which Armstrong can be heard backing up such classic blues singers as Bessie Smith. Each of these latter entries begins with a wonderfully starchy summary of the lyrics of the song in question. To wit:

“The words describe a life of emotional imprudence, but without chronological plot; they are more a series of sorrowful, impressionistic comments about a wasted life caused by a wild temperament.” (Reckless Blues)

“A melancholy but resigned complaint about an uncaring, ill-treating, improvident, impecunious man, sung by a voice well acquainted with grief; it ends with a resolve to find another.” (Cold in Hand Blues)

“A demand for emotional status, the words contain a grain or two of oblique humor.” (I Ain’t Goin’ to Play No Second Fiddle)

I suspect–I hope–that Brooks is pulling our legs, but either way, his decorous little summaries somehow remind me of George Bernard Shaw’s parody of over-technical classical-music program notes:

I will now, ladies and gentlemen, give you my celebrated “analysis” of Hamlet’s soliloquy on suicide, in the same scientific style. “Shakespear, dispensing with the customary exordium, announces his subject at once in the infinitive, in which mood it is presently repeated after a short connecting passage in which, brief as it is, we recognize the alternative and negative forms on which so much of the significance of repetition depends. Here we reach a colon; and a pointed pository phrase, in which the accent falls decisively on the relative pronoun, brings us to the first full stop

I’m not exactly a Shaw fan, to put it mildly, but I forgive him a lot for having written that.

“As soon as I detest something I ask myself why I like it.”

Hans Keller, Essays on Music

I went to The Producers last Friday to see the new leads, Lewis J. Stadlen and Don Stephenson. I’ll leave their performances for my drama column in this Friday’s Wall Street Journal, but what struck me most forcibly about the show is how old-fashioned, even quaint it seemed, from the slam-bam-zowie overture to the billion-decibel acting to–above all–the corny rim-shot jokes.

It stands to reason that The Producers should be old-fashioned, Mel Brooks having been born in 1926, but it occurred to me that what I was seeing on stage at the St. James Theatre was not so much a hit musical as the last gasp of a dying comic language. Strip away the four-letter words and self-consciously outrageous production numbers and The Producers is nothing more (or less) than a virtuoso homage to the lapel-grabbing, absolutely-anything-for-a-laugh schtickery on which so much of the stand-up comedy of my childhood was based. That kind of comedy was for the most part explicitly Jewish, as is The Producers itself, in which Yiddish slang is forever popping up, even in Brooks’ lyrics (which, if I heard right, go so far as to rhyme “caressing you” with “fressing you,” a couplet that would have made Lenny Bruce giggle).

It is this aspect of The Producers that I found…well, poignant. Back when I was a small-town Missouri boy, Jewish humor still had the crisp tang of the unfamiliar, which was part of why it was so funny. But Jewish comics assimilated a long time ago, as was proved beyond doubt by the colossal success of Seinfeld, that least overtly Jewish of Jewish sitcoms. Jerry and his friends shed their parents’ accents and became cool and ironic and put the past behind them–and now it’s gone, never to return.

To see The Producers is to be immersed one final time in that older style of pressure-cooker comedy, and for those of us who were born before 1960 or so, the experience is as sweetly nostalgic as a trip to the state fair, which I rather doubt is what Mel Brooks had in mind. My guess is that he still thinks it’s titillating, even shocking, to put swishy Nazis on stage. It’s no accident that he hasn’t made a movie for years and years: Broadway is the last place in America where he could possibly draw a crowd with that kind of humor, and it’s not an especially young crowd, either.

“It is a great danger for everyone when what is shocking changes,” says a character in Graham Greene’s Our Man in Havana. It can also be sad–and even touching.

A reader writes, apropos of last week’s postings about Giorgio Morandi:

Morandi looks a bit like our local Sacramento Wayne Thiebaud–rather creamy unfocused objects.

Ask yourself–is this really beautiful? Exquisite? As good as Leo Da Vinci’s Madonna of the Rocks (London version)?

I submit it is not. If it is not as beautiful, why should I care about it? Why is it worth my time or eyesight?

I only care about the Good, the True, the Beautiful. Not the sort of good etc. So why should anyone care about the sort of?

I never know quite what to say to people like this, other than what Stephen Maturin says in Treason’s Harbour to a slickster who tries to sell him on the idea that Napoleon was actually a great guy: “Sure, it is a point of view.” But I’ll give it another try.

To begin with, I don’t think Morandi is “sort of” good. I think he’s great, as do many other people who take art seriously and know far more about it than I, among them Karen Wilkin, the author of the eloquent monograph about Morandi I cited in my original posting. Yes, we could all be wrong, just like those 50 million Frenchmen, but as a college teacher of mine once gently informed me in response to my declaration that I didn’t think much of the music of Robert Schumann, “That may say more about you than it does about Schumann.”

I like “Leo Da Vinci,” too, but I also like lots of other painters, many of whom were alive in the 20th century and some of whom are at work right now, whereas there are more than a few people out there–including, I fear, my correspondent–who don’t like any modern art, and are proud not to. Such a lack of receptivity makes no sense to me, if only because there is a vast amount of modern art which is both deeply rooted in tradition and completely accessible to the open-minded traditionalist. Nobody’s asking you to fall in love with green women with two noses, or listen to symphonies with no tunes. If you like (say) Chardin, Brahms, Trollope, and Swan Lake, I can’t think of any earthly reason why you shouldn’t like (say) Morandi, Vaughan Williams, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and George Balanchine.

And if you don’t? Well, you don’t. De gustibus and all that. But what sort of person doesn’t even want to try to engage with the art of his own day, much less the comparatively recent past? That’s like a six-year-old who refuses to taste anything he doesn’t already like. I spend a lot of time–most of my time, really–engaging with art of all kinds, and I’m here to tell you that there are people out there right now who are busy creating “really beautiful” works of art that will make sense to even the most conservative viewer, reader, or listener, so long as he has sufficient curiosity to give them a try. Once again, I’m not talking about bisected pigs and dried bull dung–I mean this. Or this.

If neither of these things strikes you as “really beautiful,” all I can say is that you may have come to the wrong blog. Fair enough?