About Last Night

“I shall not be sorry to be in town. I am rather tired of simple pleasures, bad reasoning, and worse cookery.”

Sydney Smith, letter to Sir George Philips (1839)

The autumn issue of Classic Record Collector, the only classical-music magazine I still read regularly (not that there’s a whole lot of competition out there), features on its cover Pierre Monteux, a great conductor who was by all accounts a perfectly delightful man. These two traits are rarely found in the same person, so their simultaneity in the case of Monteux is worthy of note.

Born in 1875, Monteux played for Brahms, conducted the first performance of The Rite of Spring for Serge Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, and lived long enough to conduct the 50th-anniversary performance of the same piece in 1963, with Igor Stravinsky present and cheering. As if that weren’t enough to put him in the history books, he also conducted the premieres of Stravinsky’s Petrushka and Ravel’s Daphnis et Chloë.

In short, Monteux was a very distinguished artist, which is all the more reason why I found these remarks he made in a 1959 interview to be worth mentioning:

I do have one big complaint about audiences in all countries, and that is their artificial restraint from applause between movements or a concerto or symphony. I don’t know where the habit started, but it certainly does not fit in with the composers’ intentions. Of course applause should be spontaneous, not dutiful, but often it is the most natural thing to applaud between movements.

It sure is, and yet I continue to see obviously excited concertgoers shamefacedly sitting on their hands at the very moment when they ought to be raising a ruckus. What’s more, the concert halls of New York are full of spine-starched prigs who delight in staring down any poor dope who makes the “mistake” of expressing his heartfelt enthusiasm for a great performance at a moment not to their liking. This never happens at the ballet–not only do dance audiences clap between movements, but they also applaud whenever anything especially cool happens on stage. Good for them, and down with the prigs.

Incidentally, my favorite Monteux anecdote (which didn’t make it into Classic Record Collector, alas) is to be found, logically enough, in one of my favorite musical memoirs, André Previn’s No Minor Chords: My Days in Hollywood, a book which has served as the source of two “About Last Night” almanac entries to date. Previn, who likes to tell stories of which he is the butt, studied conducting with Monteux:

He liked cloaking his advice with indirection and irony. A few years later he saw me conduct a concert with a provincial orchestra. He came backstage after the performance. He paid me some compliments and then asked, “In the last movement of the Haydn symphony, my dear, did you think the orchestra was playing well?” My mind whipped through the movement; had there been a mishap, had something gone wrong? Finally, and fearing the worst, I said that yes, I thought the orchestra had indeed played very well. Monteux leaned toward me conspiratorially and smiled. “So did I,” he said. “Next time, don’t interfere!” It was advice to be followed forever, germinal and important.

I wish somebody had told Leonard Bernstein that.

Charles Paul Freund makes interesting and provocative mention of my middlebrow posting from last week (see below, ad infinitum) in “Reading for NoBrows,” a piece written for Reason‘s Web site which you can read by clicking here:

The underlying conceit of the middlebrow phenomenon–that cultural choices should be understood as cultural duties–made gatekeepers more than useful; it made them necessary. Middlebrow adherents, in their attempts at achieving well-roundedness, often spread themselves notably thin, listening to, say, Third Stream Jazz, attending exhibits of Abstract Expressionism, watching enigmatic Bergman movies, sitting through eventless Beckett plays, etc. This entailed a lot of heavy lifting, intellectually speaking, and gatekeepers could greatly ease the trial by telling you not only what works were worth your while, but also what they meant. It was the age of the influential critic, to whom culture consumers often yielded power in exchange for guidance….

Good or bad, however, middlebrow’s eclipse is such that even its basic forms–such as greatest-ever lists–are now at the service of post-middlebrow values.

If I may mix my metaphors, Freund and I may not be quite on the same page, but we’re in the same ballpark.

The London Review of Books (October 9 issue) prints a head-turning letter from one of its own frequent contributors. He writes:

What is disappointing, even embarrassing about the poetry of Robert Lowell in retrospect is not so much the tin ear or heavy-handedness, not the posturing and self-dramatisation, not even the straining after the important subject, the insistence on being taken as major, when, in fact, with very few exceptions, the poetry isn’t really much good at all; what is, finally, so dreary about the oeuvre at this remove, the reason his enormous Collected Poems sinks like a breached tanker, are Lowell’s cultural assumptions, his notion of a cultural hierarchy and his pre-eminent position in that hierarchy so tirelessly cultivated throughout his career.

Even in the midst of the widespread reassessment that has followed the publication of Lowell’s Collected Poems last summer, I haven’t seen anything close to this emphatic a dissent from the consensus view of Lowell as a great twentieth-century poet. Is Kleinzahler’s view so exceptional, or are there like-minded poetry readers out there who have been biting their tongues?

For those of you visiting “About Last Night” for the first time, or who only tuned in recently, this is a two-headed blog.

Posts whose headlines begin with “TT” are by me. If you want to know more about who I am, visit the top box of the right-hand column.

In recent weeks, I’ve been sharing this space with a fetching young lady who prefers to be known as Our Girl in Chicago. (Posts whose headlines begin with “OGIC” are by her.) The original plan was for Our Girl to blog in my stead on Fridays, but when my hard drive exploded and I subsequently had to spend a good-sized chunk of October out of town, OGIC was kind enough to split the blogging burden with me, thus lengthening my life and saving my sanity.

If you want to know more about who Our Girl is, here’s how she described herself on the eve of her debut:

OGIC is a thirty-something dilettante (in the best sense of the word, she hopes) with experience as an editor, critic, graduate student, and teacher. Naturally drawn to the medium-hot centers of this world, she is a fierce advocate of her adopted Second City but still feels at home when she visits her one-time stomping grounds of Manhattan. A serious media addiction helps her keeps close tabs on the red-hot from her comfy but happening city by the lake. She worries she should shoulder more guilt about her guilty pleasures–which include pro hockey, cop and lawyer shows, Las Vegas, and the colorful adventures of Travis McGee–but they’re all just so damn pleasurable. More presentably, she’s into Romantic poetry, Henry James, landscape painting, modern dance (with and without shoes, if you know what she means), and Edward Gorey. But she’s not always sure she doesn’t have some of those items in the wrong column….

I hope that clears up any lurking confusion. We return you now to our regularly scheduled blog.

The finalists for the 2003 National Book Awards have just been posted on the National Book Foundation’s Web site. (I’m a judge for the nonfiction prize.)

To see lists of finalists in all categories, go here.

Yes, I’m back in New York City, finally and believe it or not (and I was starting to have my doubts as the plane approached LaGuardia, seeing as how the wind was up and we got bounced around pretty extensively).

Coming attractions include a quick nap, then The Boy from Oz, then a modest amount of additional sleep, then a wild sprint to a noon deadline for Friday’s Wall Street Journal, and then…I’ll be blogging again, with a vengeance. I can’t believe I missed all the action around here. I mean, Bookslut? Mark Steyn? Instapundit? Come on, now.

In the meantime, my heartfelt thanks to Our Girl in Chicago for keeping the joint jumping while I was out giving speeches and nibbling at my fear-of-flying problem. She isn’t going anywhere, but she does need a rest, so I’ll be doing most of the writing around here for the next few days, starting some time on Thursday.

As for School of Rock, I’ll see it the first free evening I have. I promise!

Still not sure whether you want to see the Coen Brothers’ Intolerable Cruelty? Cinetrix at Pullquote might not make your decision any easier–

This is a high-gloss enterprise; it’s not clear to me yet whether there’s any heart beating behind its Brian Grazer-buffed surface.

–but you’ll be glad you read her riff on the movie anyway.