Friday Miscellanea

I have been a fan of opera ever since I saw my first European production which was Schoenberg's Moses und Aron in Madrid in 2016. This was designed by Romeo Castelluci and I was simply blown away by the production. Follow the link for a photo and some details. In the New York Times yesterday there was a review of another Castelluci production: A Model for Modern ‘Ring’ Operas Is Unfolding in Brussels.

He trusts the libretto to tell the story, and he trusts it to be timely on its own. After all, the “Ring” has always been relevant; that is the nature of mythic storytelling. And he isn’t misguided in having the operas stand alone. They are distinct — “Siegfried,” for example, an interjection of opera buffa, and “Das Rheingold” a seamless, proto-cinematic vision for the art form’s future. In the first two installments, Castellucci has presented an extended, visual essay on the essence of each work, his staging behaving like Wagner’s score in constantly commenting on and illuminating the action. The results have novelistic sweep and ambiguity, and are both persuasive and breathtakingly theatrical.

The world of “Das Rheingold,” in Castellucci’s production, is one of tribalism and violent hierarchy. Valhalla, the recently completed home of the gods, is a fortress built on loot. Wotan and Fricka, its rulers, enter by navigating — maybe even trampling — the bodies, made to look nude, of countless people laid out across the stage. Surrounding them are statues and reliefs based on the Elgin Marbles, the Greek friezes that have long been housed at the British Museum.

 I will be in Salzburg for the festival this summer and have requested a ticket to a new production of Don Giovanni on July 28 designed by Castelluci and conducted by Teodor Currenzis. This may not be the Golden Age of opera composition, but it is certainly one of opera production.

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One of the reasons I am devoting a lot of time to the study of Ludwig Wittgenstein these days is that he is unquestionably someone who was not out to establish his brand as a philosophical guru or "influencer." There are fewer and fewer like him these days: Everyone’s a sellout now.

The internet has made it so that no matter who you are or what you do — from nine-to-five middle managers to astronauts to house cleaners — you cannot escape the tyranny of the personal brand. For some, it looks like updating your LinkedIn connections whenever you get promoted; for others, it’s asking customers to give you five stars on Google Reviews; for still more, it’s crafting an engaging-but-authentic persona on Instagram. And for people who hope to publish a bestseller or release a hit record, it’s “building a platform” so that execs can use your existing audience to justify the costs of signing a new artist.

There is a rather depressing example in the recent career trend of Jordan Peterson, someone who, a few years ago, I would have cited as an example of someone with the highest standards. But since he has started buying expensive suits and hysterically alerting us to a new crisis every day on YouTube, I tend to steer clear of him. The pre-success Peterson can be seen in this clip. Grubby t-shirt, long pauses for thought and a genuinely spontaneous examination of some important ideas.

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Here's an interesting memoir of opera-lover Dana Gioia: The Imaginary Operagoer: A Memoir

There was something shameful about loving opera. Especially for a boy. Opera was pretentious, boring, effete, and effeminate. By the time I was ten, I understood the unsavory reputation of the art. Opera represented everything that my childhood in postwar America asked me not to be.

I had never been to the opera. I had never even seen an opera house, except in old movies. I knew from the Marx Brothers’ A Night at the Opera that rich people went there, but they didn’t much enjoy it. Only Groucho had any fun. The patrons were old and overweight—bejeweled matrons and potbellied bankers stuffed into tuxedos. There was also something sinister about opera’s orgy of opulence. In Lon Chaney’s The Phantom of the Opera, the opera house was built over the city sewers. A mad composer emerged from this mephitic underworld to kidnap and kill. He wore elegant clothes, including an opera cape, but without his stylish mask, he was a monster. Opera was somehow both tedious and malevolent.

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I think we are developing a theme today: opera! I said above that I became an opera lover in 2016. This was shockingly late in life. Actually I had had a certain amount of exposure to opera before, a bit of listening in university music courses and even more directly, I played the guitar parts in a number of operas by Rossini and others and even the mandolin part in Don Giovanni which I learned specifically for the occasion (and I haven't played the mandolin since!). I've even been to a few opera productions in both Canada and Mexico. But I didn't experience what opera is really about until I started going to European productions. There might be some good ones in New York and possibly Toronto or other urban centers in North America, but I haven't seen them. Europe however is teeming with spectacular opera productions. It really is an absurd art form, opera, because it is obviously out-of-date and ridiculously expensive. For one thing you have to build a large expensive building that can be used for little else. But there really is nothing like a great opera in a great production. And no, a video is not the same. All you can get is a faint hint of the real experience.

The history of opera is a long and interesting one. Have a look at A History of Opera: The Last Four Hundred Years by Carolyn Abbate and Roger Parker. There was one opera I became very fond of early on and that was the first opera that has found a niche in the repertoire: L'Orfeo by Claudio Monteverdi. Here is a recent production by Les Arts Florissants:

The New York Times asks the musical question: Schubert’s Operas Were Failures. Is Their Music Worth Saving?

It’s surprising that opera eluded Schubert, who by most counts started about 20 stage works, completed fewer than a dozen and saw the premieres of just two. After all, he wrote some of the most beautiful vocal music in the repertoire: the song cycles “Die Schöne Müllerin” and “Winterreise,” and hundreds of beloved lieder like “Gretchen am Spinnrade” and “Ave Maria.” 

And yet the operas remain curiosities better heard than seen, often composed to clumsy librettos and denied the revisions that could have accompanied rehearsals.

Another great composer that could not solve the mystery of opera was Joseph Haydn.

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Israel Daramola on the challenges facing music journalism

Can you talk about the state of music journalism now and how it compares to the past?

There’s kind of nothing left, really. I mean, there’s a couple of big brands that still remain, like Rolling Stone and Billboard, and even Spin is still around, but a lot of them have become content farms, especially online, and very few of them are still publishing anything in print. So a lot of it is just hanging by a thread. We’re almost seeing, especially in music, the dawning of another kind of blog era, where there’s a lot of boutique blogs and a lot of local localized music blogs. But as far as a thing that’s covering music, period, it’s probably like one writer at all the major newspapers and outlets and then a handful of music publications that still exist.

I suppose what is amusing about this is that, as far as I can see, music journalism as discussed here is really just pop music journalism and that turned into lifestyle journalism a long time ago--along with simple pieces promoting the latest.

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Let's have a non-opera envoi today as we have already had so much opera. Here, from Cathedral Brixen in South Tyrol (the most Austrian part of Italy) is the Missa in angustiis No. 11 in D minor (nicknamed the Nelson Mass) one of six Joseph Haydn wrote towards the end of his life. Some have argued that this is Haydn's greatest single composition.