Archives for July 2007

My posting about the death of Jerry Hadley made a lot of people angry, as did the unsentimental obituary I wrote for The Wall Street Journal when Arthur Miller died. One of Hadley’s fans went so far as to call me “disgusting” twice in the same e-mail, which I believe is a personal record. In both cases, the reason for much of the anger can be summed up by a Latin tag: De mortuis nil nisi bonum. The wise man is slow to quarrel with proverbs, but I’m afraid I must trump that one with a snippet of Shakespeare. He that dies pays all debts–including the debt of discretion that is owed to him, insofar as it’s ever owed to a public figure who voluntarily chooses his status.

My own view of the matter is to be found in the published sayings of Nero Wolfe:

“Marko was himself headstrong, gullible, oversanguine, and naïve. He had–”

“For shame! He’s dead, and you insult–”

“That will do!” he roared. It stopped her. He went down a few decibels. “You share the common fallacy, but I don’t. I do not insult Marko. I pay him the tribute of speaking of him and feeling about him precisely as I did when he lived; the insult would be to smear his corpse with the honey excreted by my fear of death.”

If anyone should see fit to write anything about me after I die, I hope they’ll keep that in mind.

As for the people who’ve been writing to say that I can’t possibly know anything about depression…well, what I know about it is nobody’s business. But I’ll say this much: Hadley was a talented, once-successful artist whose career had collapsed and who was on the verge of bankruptcy when he shot himself in the head. I’m sorry he did it–I wish he hadn’t–but somehow I doubt that psychotherapy would have stopped him from doing so, much less the kindness of strangers. The world is a hard place, and the opera business is, or can be, one of its toughest neighborhoods. Those who think otherwise know nothing about it. Those who pretend otherwise are kidding themselves.

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For additional thoughts on the subject of obituary writing, go here.

CultureGrrl seems to think that critics (presumably meaning, among others, me) were partly responsible for Hadley’s suicide. She may well have a larger point, but in this particular case I can assure her that the critics who wrote of his vocal difficulties in 1999 were only reporting well after the fact what was common knowledge in the opera world. The damage had already been done, and I’m sure he knew it.

This is the most interesting reaction I’ve seen to what I wrote.

• The most incongruous day of my cultural life took place in 1999, when Time sent me to Milwaukee, a city I’d never before visited, to see Florentine Opera give the American premiere of Lowell Liebermann’s operatic verison of The Picture of Dorian Gray.

Milwaukee isn’t far from Chicago, so I persuaded Our Girl to meet me there. I flew out at midday and spent the afternoon walking around the Milwaukee Art Museum, then met OGIC at the train station and took her to the theater. After the opera–which was a knockout and a wow–we went back to our hotel and turned on the TV to look for a chaser with which to clear our spinning heads. There’s Something About Mary was playing on the pay-per-view channel. I hadn’t yet seen it, but OGIC assured me that it was drop-dead funny, so we proceeded to watch it, and I laughed so hard at the first scene that I came close to throwing up.

I recently quoted Greg Sandow in this space:

The [fine] arts–as an enterprise separate from our wider culture, and somehow standing above it–are over….any attempt to revive them (this includes classical music, of course) will have to mean that they engage popular culture, and everything else going on in the outside world.

Somehow I doubt that was quite what Greg had in mind. But maybe not!

• One of my closest friends regularly sends me handwritten letters and postcards, to which I generally respond via e-mail. It’s not that she’s a technophobe. In fact, she’s a blogger of long standing. But as she once explained to me:

Isn’t it nice to open letters, too? In a funny way, I think all the email/blogging returns an almost romantic, Victorian specialness to pen & paper correspondence.

I know exactly what my friend means, and I’ve tried to reciprocate. Yet I still find it all but impossible to sit down and write a full-length letter by hand, in part because I’m left-handed and so have always found penmanship (as they used to call it once upon a time) awkward and ungratifying. I started using a typewriter at the age of ten and learned how to touch-type six years later, and since then I’ve mostly restricted my handwritten communication with the outside world to postcards and very brief notes. Despite my advancing age and old-fashioned inclinations, e-mail and blogging somehow seem to suit me better. I guess I’m just a post-postmodern man in a hurry, juggling too many balls for my own good.

I wish it were otherwise. I love the letters I get from my friend. I love the way her handwriting reflects her quirky, slightly fey personality. Would that I could give as good as I get.

Mr. Artblog, who visited the Teachout Museum the other day, is himself an artist of no mean accomplishment. To my amazement and delight, he brought me a present, a lovely little ink-on-paper sketch called “Reading on the Subway.” I’ll hang it with pride as soon as I get back to New York.
If you’d like to see it, go here.

“Eulogy is nice, but one does not learn anything from it.”
Ellen Terry, Ellen Terry’s Memoirs

As if to prove my own point about the place of enthusiasm in criticism, today’s Wall Street Journal drama column consists of a pair of flat-out raves. On tap are City Center’s Gypsy and Westport Country Playhouse’s Relatively Speaking:

Patti LuPone, who was last seen on Broadway puffing on a tuba in “Sweeney Todd,” stopped the show cold at her first entrance in Monday’s performance of “Gypsy.” No sooner did she march up the aisle of City Center shouting “Sing out, Louise!” than the sold-out house popped its collective cork. That’s how excited playgoers are about her “Gypsy”–as well they should be. Not only will Ms. LuPone be remembered as the Mama Rose of her generation, but every other aspect of this production is as good as it can be. Point for point, it’s the best revival of a golden-age musical I’ve seen, in or out of New York. Staging, casting, design, even the orchestra: All are gloriously, exhilaratingly right.
Not counting the show itself, Ms. LuPone is the very best thing about “Gypsy,” but the director comes in a close second. Arthur Laurents, who turned 89 last week, wrote the book of “Gypsy” and also directed the show’s 1974 and 1989 Broadway revivals. Though he’s never been much of a playwright, Mr. Laurents was a kind of genius when it came to writing the books of musicals. “Gypsy,” like “West Side Story” before it, is a fat-free masterpiece of compression that cuts to the chase in every scene, discarding all superfluous detail and sticking unswervingly to the main dramatic line. Needless to say, Mr. Laurents knows it cold, and his staging, which I gather is a close but not slavish copy of the 1989 revival, zips along like lightning, unfussily nailing every laugh and jerking every tear….
If the recent Brits Off Broadway production of “Intimate Exchanges” made you long to see another Alan Ayckbourn comedy as soon as possible, I strongly suggest you catch the next train to Connecticut, where “Relatively Speaking,” the first of Mr. Ayckbourn’s 70-odd plays to hit the box-office bull’s-eye, is being performed with pizzazz at Westport Country Playhouse….

No free link, blah blah blah. Buy the paper already, or (better yet) go here to subscribe to the Online Journal, which will give you instant access to my column and all the rest of the Journal‘s extensive arts coverage. (If you’re already a subscriber, the column is here.)

My “Sightings” column in Saturday’s Wall Street Journal takes a look at three books, Toni Bentley’s Winter Season: A Dancer’s Journal, Michael Blakemore’s Arguments with England, and Glenn Kurtz’s newly published Practicing: A Musician’s Return to Music, that offer an insider’s perspective on the difficult life of the performing artist.
To find out what makes these books so memorable, pick up a copy of tomorrow’s Journal and turn to the “Pursuits” section.
UPDATE: Subscribers to the Online Journal can read my column by going here.

“For my part, I travel not to go anywhere, but to go. I travel for travel’s sake. The great affair is to move; to feel the needs and hitches of our life more nearly; to come down off this feather-bed of civilization, and find the globe granite underfoot and strewn with cutting flints.”
Robert Louis Stevenson, Travels With a Donkey in the Cevennes (courtesy of Kate’s Book Blog)

Jerry Hadley’s suicide has set the small town that is American opera to buzzing. It was a surprise–I can’t think of another well-known classical singer who has killed himself–but on further reflection I didn’t find it all that shocking. Hadley’s career had been in decline for a number of years, and he’d long since dropped off my scope. The last time I saw him on stage was in the 1999 Metropolitan Opera premiere of John Harbison’s operatic version of The Great Gatsby, which didn’t make much of an impression on me. The New York Sun‘s obituary quoted something nice I’d said about him in my 1988 High Fidelity review of his recording of Show Boat, and it took me a moment to remember that I’d written the piece.
To outlive your own fame is a terrible fate, and it is all the more poignant for a performer. As I wrote when Johnny Carson died:

I wonder what he thought of his life’s work? Or how he felt about having lived long enough to disappear into the memory hole? At least he had the dignity to vanish completely, retreating into private life instead of trying to hang on to celebrity by his fingernails. Perhaps he knew how little it means to have once been famous.

Alas, Hadley, unlike Carson, lost his fame comparatively early, and all too clearly longed in vain for its return. He was, of course, an operatic tenor, and as such the closest thing in music to an athlete, which suggests an appropriate epitaph: Now you will not swell the rout/Of lads that wore their honours out,/Runners whom renown outran/And the name died before the man.
UPDATE: I’d also forgotten that I reviewed the premiere of Gatsby for Time:

The score is strictly mainline modernist yard goods, while the libretto is a filet of Fitzgerald containing all of the action, most of the famous lines (“Her voice is full of money”) and none of the elegiac, bittersweet tone that is the novel’s essence. Gatsby is given a pair of clumsily confessional arias, a fatal mistake; the great mystery man of American fiction would never have revealed himself in that way, not even to himself. It doesn’t help that Jerry Hadley’s voice is frayed and throaty, or that he is stocky and unglamorous–hardly the gorgeous, gold-hatted charmer of Fitzgerald’s imagination….Harbison has turned Fitzgerald’s quicksilver masterpiece into a slow-moving opera that is stolidly competent and totally superfluous.

I wish my last memory of Hadley were a happier one.