About Last Night

“Boredom is one of the flattest, most self-evident, most self-justifying of all esthetic judgments. There is no appeal from boredom. Even when you tell yourself you like boredom, there the verdict is.”

Clement Greenberg, Homemade Esthetics

Film noir is the porn of pessimists, who like nothing more than to watch stylishly photographed movies in which the Robert Mitchums of the world make the mistake of going to bed with the Jane Greers of the world, for which they pay with their lives. In LaBrava, Elmore Leonard dreamed up the perfect title for a nonexistent film noir: “Obituary.” That’s a movie somebody needs to make.

Alas, I’m just as hopeless a case–I’m one of those pathetic cinephiles who can’t settle on the best place to hang his framed On Dangerous Ground lobby card–and in the interests of spreading my addiction more widely, I want to pass the word that Nicholas Ray’s In a Lonely Place is now available on DVD. In a Lonely Place is well known to serious film buffs and Humphrey Bogart fanatics, but if you don’t fall into either of those two categories, you probably haven’t seen it. Do so. Bogart plays Dixon Steele, an almost-washed-up screenwriter who gets tagged with a brutal murder at the precise moment that he falls hard for Laurel Gray, a blonde with a past-and-a-half. Gloria Grahame, the ultimate film-noir babe, is eerily perfect as Laurel, and as all cinephiles know, she was simultaneously (1) married to Nicholas Ray and (2) having an affair with Ray’s teenage son while the movie was in production. Yikes!

As for Bogart, he never made a better movie, and I do mean Casablanca. David Thomson nails it: “This last [film] penetrates the toughness that Bogart so often assumed and reaches an intractable malevolence that is more frightening than any of his gangsters.”

This, by the way, is the film in which Bogart rasps out the line of a lifetime: “I was born when she kissed me. I died when she left me. I lived a few weeks while she loved me.” If that doesn’t make you go ooooh, film noir is not for you.

“If we have to choose, it is always better to read Chaucer again than to read a new criticism of him.”

C.S. Lewis, An Experiment in Criticism

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.