I saw this too late to include in this week's miscellanea, but it is well worth a look:
Finding Hope At the Concert Hall: A recent recital at Lincoln Center was a victory over the tribalism of identity politics.
Sometimes an artistic experience can assume an elevated sense of urgency due to its context. After 9/11, the Berlin Philharmonic’s performance of Beethoven’s Fifth and Sixth Symphonies at Carnegie Hall felt like a triumphant assertion of a civilizational inheritance in the face of lethal attack. Last month, German baritone Christian Gerhaher’s recital of Mahler songs at Lincoln Center seemed no less momentous. While not as cataclysmic as 9/11, the current assault on the tradition that gave birth to those Mahler songs may prove more devastating over the long run. Gerhaher’s transcendent performance was a reminder of what is at stake.
A few markers of our present moment: every arts institution in the United States is under pressure to discard meritocratic standards in collections, programming, and personnel, in favor of race and gender preferences.
I really don't think that most people are aware of how destructive this is to the practice of art (not to mention science and just about everything else). I notice that the singer Christian Gerhaher is giving a lieder recital at the Salzburg Festival and I was planning on attending that one.
When Christian Gerhaher and his long-time accompanist, Gerard Huber, stepped onto the stage of Alice Tully Hall on October 29, in other words, they were entering what university precincts call a “contested” space. Their featured composer—Gustav Mahler—is a dead white male; Gerhaher and Huber are themselves white and male. And they were offering works that represent the pinnacle of a civilization routinely denounced in the academy and the political arena as the font of the world’s racism and sexism. Gerhaher and Huber demonstrated why the preservation of that inheritance is the most pressing imperative of our time.
Not just preservation of, but continuance of! I haven't previously thought of Heather MacDonald as being a music critic as she writes on many things, but she gets quite involved in the details of this recital and her aesthetic judgment seems sound.
This sublimation of the performer’s ego to the composer’s genius became a key feature of classical music in the nineteenth century. In a world dominated by identity-based narcissism, when individuals obsess over ever more arcane aspects of their allegedly victimized selves, to witness Gerhaher and Huber’s all-consuming commitment to a mind outside of themselves reaffirmed our common humanity and inducted the audience into a higher realm. Their recital was a triumph over the tribalism and hatreds of identity politics.
Let's listen to one of the songs from the recital:
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