800 Words: The Day After

And there they were, names on my cellphone and email and facebook which hadn’t appeared there in months. I’m sorry that I answered barely a single one of them, but even before I opened the messages, I knew exactly what was coming... ‘are you ok?’ ‘what happened?’ ‘why didn’t you tell me?!?’ ‘so that’s why you’ve been such a prick!’

I wanted to relax today. It’s one of those odd facts of depression that by the time everybody gets concerned, the worst is usually over. It’s like carpet beetles; light might not help and there’s no guarantee that light would cause them to go away, but if the beetles are already there, they’re almost guaranteed to thrive in the dark. Ridiculous as it is, it’s nevertheless tempting in the heat of delusion to point fingers at friends and wonder where they were when things were really bad. But where could they have been yesterday? I didn’t have use of a phone or a computer, and even if I wanted to find someone to talk to face to face, the first unbreakable wave of it happened when I was in the shower, from which I didn’t emerge well for over an hour. When things were truly terrible, I was at my parents’ house and had no use of any communication outlet except facebook. The only people who were available calm me down were my family, who are generally not well known for having a calming influence on me. But all the feuding and grudges become trivial when life gets dire enough. You’d think we’d all remember this when problems are not so urgent, but for reasons passing understanding, many people rarely do. But nearly three weeks after I wouldn't come to Pikesville at any point before 11 at night, there were Mom and Dad at my side, each of us on the phone with a different specialist, trying to recover my life’s last eight years.

It’s only recently that I understood that far-too-often repeated Nietzsche quote: “That for which we find words is something already dead in our hearts.” I’m no Nietzsche scholar, but I often feel like he’s a writer which you have to burrow through a hundred pages to find a single golden nugget - even the aphorisms can be pretty jumbled. But this phrase beautifully captures how impossible it is to convey the experience of depression to others. 99% of the time, the horror if it is so elusive that you’re no longer able to articulate that horror by the time you have the opportunity to express it. Few word combinations could ever convey the urgency or the immediacy of its emptiness. And if someone is around you to whom you feel comfortable enough around that you can precisely convey its emptiness, you’d no longer be nearly so depressed and any description of it would be a description of a memory. Furthermore, were you around someone who made you more depressed, it’s usually because this person is incapable of understanding what makes a person depressed. So regardless of how well you explained depression to this person who is tone-deaf to the experience, he would be incapable of understanding it - which would therefore make you more depressed. Just as the position of atoms are affected by light, the experience of depression is affected by the presence of human company. If you have people around you who lack empathy, they would not be able to understand why you feel bad, and that misunderstanding would be yet another reason to feel more depressed. But if you have empathetic people around with whom your emotional state could be understood, then you will almost always feel less lonely, less empty, less immaterial, and therefore, less depressed - and thus the need to explain depression becomes that much less urgent.

It’s just like a depressive to assume that all chalices are poisoned, but with the experience of trying to explain depression to friends, even sympathetic ones, comes all sorts of tradeoffs. Knowing that a friend or family member is depressed is as much a “Get out of jail free” card as having depression, and the card is far more useful to those people who don’t have depression, who can therefore use it to feel better about themselves. Ever since I’ve started posting about depression, I’ve experienced a number of moments when friends, sometimes not even particularly close ones, are remembering me feeling worse than I was about things which happened. One remembered when she accidentally came up with an insulting nickname for me when tripping up on her speech while we were on a long trip, which she claimed made me depressed, but she remembered wrongly: in fact I laughed uproariously at that nickname and wore it as a badge of honor for the trip’s duration. Another friend claimed that I was disappointed with the outcome of a party I threw a few months ago and felt depressed at the end of it (which was undeniably true). She claimed that not only was I clearly looking depressed, but that I was basically in tears. That’s total bull. I was certainly intoxicated, and far too melancholy at that point in the night to be a good party host, but tears? Are you joking? The last time I cried at a party was when I watched John Belushi pour a giant vat of mustard on his toga. Furthermore, I recently had an uncomfortable situation with a very good friend in which it would be all too easy for him (and for me) to blame the whole thing on the fact that I’m completely nuts. And true as that clearly is, to explain our fracas purely by that would absolve him (and me) of arriving at the truth about why things happened as they did.

Are they all remembering these moments wrongly because they’ve read me speak more openly about depression than I have in years? Am I remembering these moments wrongly because I unconsciously don’t want to acknowledge just how ruled I am by this malady? Or am I just so paranoid that every exchange is potentially colored by my worry that people will judge me differently for talking about this problem out loud? I admit, the last scenario seems the most likely. But even if people don’t view me differently once they learn this about me (which I doubt), the price for talking about depression aloud is sky high, and not one that ever should be trafficked  in unless a person is convinced that they have more to lose by staying silent. There have been years of my life, quite a few at this point, in which I’ve been extremely guarded about my experience with this illness. I have far too memories of being looked down upon for these experiences to talk about it unhesitantly. And there are many wolves who wear the clothing of snake-oil salesman (mixed-metaphor intentional) who would tell you all sorts of things about this illness that are plainly not true. Yet I also find myself unable to stop myself from keeping these feelings private - they’re simply too intense to handle alone, and I’m inevitably drawn toward talking about it like a bug drawn to light.

Last night was rock bottom in a sense definitive beyond perhaps any I’ve ever experienced in my life. If emotions have a state of absolute zero/black, it was last night. But fortunately, it was over in about two hours, and I can’t help thinking that I was far too shocked to experience anything like the true extent of the awfulness that was about to descend over me. Had this problem been solved after an entire 24 hours, how much exponentially worse would I have felt when it was over? I can’t help thinking of Henry Fonda’s wife in The Wrong Man, who goes into a permanent state of depressive delusion when her husband is wrongfully suspected of murder and does not come out on the other side when his name is cleared.

For the most part, today has been rather relaxing. A full day in Pikesville with family, a sleeping pill to bring me down off the oddity of last night, and a choral rehearsal in which my 50% self could put its focus on music - the one true inevitable in my life when I need reviving. It was a decent day - a truly amazing one compared to yesterday. Yet there was one thing, really only one, which disturbed its idyll - a brief facebook update from an acquaintance which seemed like it was riffing off one of the more ridiculous things I said in yesterday’s post. No doubt there’s plenty in that post which was ridiculous, but purely the paranoia and worry that some people might be having a private laugh at all this (which someone probably is, even if it’s not him) was enough to rob me of more than an hour’s worth of relaxation.

The road ahead remains as long and turbulent as ever before. Last night was as close as I ever want to get to an absolute black, but life resumes now with its infinite greynesses. After I got the major things fixed last night, the first thing I said was ‘Well... now I go back to my normal depression.’ Depression sneaks up on those who possess its capacity without warning or mercy, and no matter how good I feel on any given day, there is always that chance that it will all come crashing down more quickly than I can ever know. I still believe, perhaps against all evidence, that a vigilant watchfulness over my emotional state can only benefit me. I have no idea if constant circumspection will lead to greater understanding of this illness, or even if greater understanding will lead to any lessening of its impact on my life. But one day, the world will either be a better place, in which case there will be a cure for depression because sufferers like me were able to give their own small but informed speculations into precisely what this nebulous illness is, or the world will descend into another dark age, in which case there will be bigger things to worry about than depression.

...Only a depressive would make that analogy.

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800 Words: The Second Anniversary

It was earlier today that I realized that for the last two months, I've been experiencing the worst depression I’d experienced since I began this project two years ago. I was biking in one of my regular public parks. I adore public parks - I don’t know how any urbanite can stay sane without them, and I’d happily spend a few hours in one every day. If London is my favorite city, it’s in no small part because 40% of the city is parks. Baltimore has a number of beautiful ones that are only dangerous after dark. And as I biked around the lake of this particular park at about seven-o’clock, I was doing my best to shut my brain off. There was simply far too much emotional stress in the preceding two weeks, and if I want my brain to function like something resembling a normal adult, I need those rides to calm down. After three laps around the lake, I saw the exit to the connecting main road, and slowed down so that my split-second decision as to whether to take a fourth lap could become a five second one. Within those five seconds, a hyper-athletic biker careened right next to me at at least four times my speed. I didn’t see him coming, I only heard him screaming in the second before impact as I turned toward the main road. By some miracle, he dodged me with what must of been only a tenth-of-a-second to spare. He kept biking, I shouted “Are you OK” to him, and he gave me his index and middle fingers as though to make a peace sign.

The other biker didn’t seem too shaken up. He looked quite macho, and had probably been in many close calls before, and maybe a few real crashes too. Perhaps he took this near-accident as a badge of honor, or at least a nice adrenalin rush. This was hardly my first close call either. I’d nearly been hit by a Jeep on the one day I’d forgotten my helmet, he screeched to a halt and barely brushed against my calf. A few months ago I reached for my water bottle during a downhill ride and broke too suddenly, my upper half careened in front of my bike and the bike landed between my legs. I gave myself a bruise the length of my entire inner thigh which didn’t heal for a month.

But it was only on this particular close call that I felt discouraged enough to entertain the thought of quitting biking. I’d long since realized that when riding a bike, my daydreamer self is a moving target for cars. Why try to live when every attempt ends up feeling like living death? This was just another in a series of rather pretty terrifying disappointments. For the last two weeks, I’d barely spoken to family because of another in a long series of rows, and thus have no work to do during the day. In the last week, I’d had ample reason to feel unappreciated by friends and harried at my regular musical job. For reasons passing my understanding, my phone had stopped working since Saturday, my laptop no longer had a working chord and had two minutes of battery. My apartment remains an unconquerable mess, the tics which periodically make me look like a freak are asserting their control of my face, and my hands and arms tremble for no reason. I have daily pain in my chest area which two cardiologists over the last five years have assured me is not heart pain, but even if it isn’t, my heart constantly races at the slightest exertion, I have low blood pressure which results in vertigo-like symptoms, and I have a constant shortness of breath which is either caused by a light social smoking habit or the massive amounts of food I find myself unable to stop ingesting due to it being the most reliable pleasure in my life. By this evening, any sense I’d developed that there are consolations in life which balance out the daily disappointments had nearly vanished.   

I had already determined that I was the most depressed I'd been in two years when I arrived at my parents’ house around ten o’clock to check email, only to discover that in the intervening day, my email account stopped accepting my password and my blog had apparently been deleted. Furthermore, since my phone wasn’t working, I couldn’t access my verification code. Eight years of writing is stored on that email account with nary a backup - blogposts, potential blogposts, notes for books and novels I’d be lucky to ever finish, tens of thousands of of personal correspondence documents, deeply personal letters to and from me which I’ll always value, deeply meaningful emails and recorded g-chats which I’ll remember to the day I die.

And I wanted to die tonight. I wanted to more than merely die. I wanted to blot out any trace of my existence. I wanted no one to remember the most important drama of our time: The Humiliation of Evan Tucker - The Brilliant Moron, a comedy laughed at uproariously by everyone but him in which he has the intelligence to move in circles where he can watch nearly everyone he knows seem blessed with all the joys of work, love, and family, but be utterly incapable of any of that himself. If the blog had disappeared, nearly every trace to the world that I’d done something meaningful with my adult life would disappear with it. If my emails had disappeared, nearly every trace to me that I’d done something meaningful with my adult life would disappear with it. I would have definitive proof that any and all striving I do to create a meaningful life will inevitably come to nothing. The world is what it is.

I doubt it could ever be any great tragedy to anyone but me if this page vanished without a trace. I’m a good writer, and there’s no sense in pretending I couldn’t do what many famous writers do, and maybe I could do it a little better. But I’m not a great writer, and I doubt I’ll ever be one. A great writer has a humanity which I lack. It’s there somewhere in me, but that humanity seems too poisoned by anger to surface often enough to make it to the page in a meaningful way. My life has made me too narcissistic, too cynical, too despairing, to have much which is hopeful to say, or to like human beings enough to think that they deserve hope.

When I read real masters: masters like Chekhov, or Turgenev, or Chaucer, or Shakespeare, or Willa Cather, or Philip Roth, or Saul Bellow, or Kafka, or Wordsworth, or Tennyson, or Frost, or Montaigne, or Stefan Zweig, or Eric Hoffer, or Isaiah Berlin, or many more I haven’t read yet, I see exactly what I lack, as all competent writers would. I see it because reading true masters like them gives me hope that I’d otherwise never have - hope that someone, somewhere, understands what it’s like to be me. There are a number of things which give me the strength to keep writing, but there must be a reason that writing’s become my definitive activity rather than something else - there must be an example powerful enough to move me to write every day.

When I began this ‘800 Words’ project two years ago, I was utterly despondent. Like a bourgeois 19th century convalescent for whom the ‘vapours’ simply weren’t enough, I was living on the side of a lake (actually a salt-pond). Until that summer, I was living ‘at home’ with my parents, and driving down to Washington DC a few times every week to party. I was working in Pikesville with my father and brother to start up an investment and real estate business. The three of us lived under the same roof with my mother, and we fought, as always, like cats and dogs. And in an irony worthy of Ionesco, the heavy plaster ceiling of our central living room which divided the part of the house where I lived from the part where the rest of my family lived was caving in. We had to move to a second house my parents had recently bought in Bethany Beach, Delaware.

At that point, I didn’t really care where I lived, and I suppose I was relieved to get away from my typical reality. There was certainly an initial shock which began to depress me two years ago (and isn’t it always the same shock...), but depression takes on a life of its own very quickly, and does so completely without warning. Depression is a second person warring for control of you, and as in any war, the stakes are two narratives which vie for posterity. One narrative is that of a sunny, well-reasoned pollyanna, who like most emotionally healthy people, goes through life giving himself the benefit of the doubt, and putting the most charitable possible interpretation on his actions. We all do it, and we couldn’t get through many days without it. The other narrative is that of the unconscious cassandra, who seeps into your life unawares, and gathers together a dossier of all those discarded thoughts of guilt and shame brought upon you humiliation-by-humiliation. Inevitably, the humiliation is your fault, not theirs. And what’s worst about this war is that all those emotionally healthy people, unwittingly putting a charitable spin upon their actions, would probably agree with you that it was in large part your own fault if your humiliations involved them.

But in retrospect, I wonder if that summer was not the greatest summer of my life. Not a single friend visited me there, but I was more at peace than I’d been in years, and probably much more at peace than I realized. Fearing a double-dip recession, my father divested himself of all his holdings, and we had very little to do from day to day in the most peaceful surroundings I’ve ever known. From day to day, I saw them all very little in this obscenely large townhouse. I was free to listen to music, to read, to watch movies, to take walks, and to bike everywhere within 15 miles of where we lived. Every day we’d have eggs for breakfast, salad for lunch, and fish for dinner. By the end of the summer, I was lighter, fitter, sun-kissed, and ready to move into Baltimore - the city of my youth, but a city I knew not at all.  

It was while I was down in Bethany that I decided to begin a project that I’d long thought about but never truly went about fulfilling. I’ve kept this blog for nearly five years, but until that summer in Bethany I never used it for more than the occasional long post. I used this blog most often as a storehouse for youtube videos I liked. When I conducted Voices of Washington, I kept a different kind of blog which was closer in spirit to this one, but still far away.

I wanted to make a habit of writing. In a life with so many unfinished projects, a life that had so few constants, I wanted to keep at one thing, do it well, do it diligently, and master it before I quit. Over the years I’ve quit studying six instruments, six languages, and four college majors. I’ve quit on starting a theater troupe in college, and quit on forming a well-sustained chorus in Washington DC. I’ve quit applying to graduate school in conducting and composition, I’ve quit applying for writing jobs at magazines and newspapers both major and minor, and I’ve quit a year into graduate study in political science. I’ve quit on trying to make many relationships happen, I’ve quit on trying to make many friendships work, and occasionally I’ve even tried to quit on family. And then there are the jobs... we won’t get into that right now....

I don’t know if keeping on any of those pursuits might have saved me from an entire youth’s worth of heartache. But what I do know is that by starting this blog when I did, the blog saved me. The world is what it is, but it is a very large place, and there’s far too much of it to be curious about to always feel bad about it. I think anybody who spends fifteen minutes in my company knows that depression is an acquired quality of mine, not an inherent one. I am, allegedly, not a manic depressive, but except for when I can't, I can enjoy life as well as anybody in the world. I, of course, eat and drink with gusto, I'm excellent company if I do say so, and I'm a writer who converses basically as he writes - torrentially and openly. Depression is not the malady of those who hate life, depression is the malady of those who love it, and my love of life can only increase by the writing which you'll find here. There is always something new to write about, and there are dozens of posts still not yet completed, hundreds of ideas for posts which I’ve never yet started work, and thousands which I may yet think of. This blog has been the first thing I think of when I get up in the morning, and the last when I go to bed. The best of me is here (and, sadly, much of the worst too...), and if I ever need evidence that my life has any purpose or meaning, it’s all here. Tonight was, without a doubt, the very worst I’ve felt since I started this blog. I anticipate that the shocks of tonight will contain many aftershocks. The acid test of whether this blog was truly worth saving tonight is whether it can now save me again.

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800 Words: A Bi-Yearly Diatribe on Wagner...

As long as mankind shall continue to bestow more liberal applause on their destroyers than on their benefactors, the thirst of military glory will ever be the vice of the most exalted characters - Edward Gibbon

Wagner is the very music of sociopathy, expertly moulding our emotions like clay into whatever he wills us to feel with no regard for how we feel after it’s all over. Bach is music’s angel, promising us full consolation for whatever suffering we’ve undergone. Wagner is music’s devil, exciting us with rancor and disturbance but with no guarantee of any stability. He’s every drug which addicts can’t help taking on the infinitesimal chance that the next hit will be as amazing as the first. He’s every girlfriend who sets fire to your living room right before and after amazing sex. He’s every boyfriend who looks dreamy in the leather jacket he took off to give you a black eye. No matter how much the man repels you, no matter how often the music bores you, you can’t stay away.

And that’s because Wagner is the door of perception which opens to the new world of music which we still don’t understand - and may never. Like Loge, he offers resources, wonders, and mischief beyond what any other composer can offer. Like Wotan, the chaos of a far-away journey is something we cannot resist. But only as Wagner can, he conjures a hidden dream world of a primitive man which we unconsciously worry may be far, far more sophisticated than any world in which we live.

Wagner was born in 1813. During his youth, Beethoven still bestrode the earth, while Mozart and Haydn were still talked about as living presences. It was the moment at which music seemed literally capable of expressing anything, and Wagner’s contemporaries - Berlioz, Mendelssohn, Schumann, Chopin, Liszt, and Verdi among them, were centers in the most important intellectual debate of their generation - what is music capable of expressing? Every master had his own answer, but Wagner believed that in the 9th symphony, Beethoven ‘proved’ that music was so powerful an expressive language that it had become too grand to merely be confined to the realm of instruments, and Wagner was determined to show just how far the expressive power of ‘world-spirit’ which Beethoven demonstrated could be carried still much, much further. Beethoven, still alive until Wagner was 14, proved for all time that music was no mere artisan craft - it could express the entire world. And Wagner was determined to express that entire world to a purpose.

In Berlioz and Liszt, Wagner had a musical ‘big brothers’ or ‘cousins’, who regarded absolute music as a dangerously antiquated concept. But even Berlioz’s aims as a composer were so far removed from Wagner as to render Wagner sui generis. Berlioz, nearly as gifted a man of letters as he was a musician, and through the expressive potential which Beethoven unlocked, Berlioz aimed to create music that was as articulate of situational imagery as the great literary works. Liszt’s aim was closer. For most of his career, Liszt was a composing pianist who aimed to create music which would excite his public to a state which resembled worship. But Wagner’s aim was far more ambitious than either; he remained, to the end of his days, a lousy poet who happened to create great music to accompany his poetry. Nor was he ever a matinee idol or a skillful instrumentalist. Wagner required something more, Wagner wanted his music to express something far beyond great literature or even a cult of personality (hard as that may be to believe).

For Wagner, music was a means to an end, and the end was to provoke a particular response to the listener. His truest forerunners were romantic poets like Byron and Blake, themselves descended from his ultimate progenitor - Milton. And Wagner’s truest follower was Brecht. His art was not made to be appreciated as an end in itself, his art was made to provoke reactions in his listeners. It is hard not to believe he would have disagreed with Brecht’s famous quote: “Art is not a mirror held up to reality but a hammer with which to shape it.”

Any argument that Wagner did not mean to disturb his listeners for a fully disturbing reason is willfully naive. In terms of techniques utilized, he has no equal and not even anything resembling a peer. He occupies that ground in music which Milton occupies in literature and Kubrick occupies in cinema - accorded a level of influence and control over his ability to practice his art which no other artist in his artform ever occupied or ever will again. To find an artistic predecessor, one must look outside of music to Blake or Byron or Shelley. To find an artistic successor, one must again look outside of music to Brecht or Chaplin or Ibsen or Zola, but you won't find one in music.  Wagner was not simply an artist or a thinker, he was a man of action who wrote operas as a means to hammer his society to better fit his vision of it. But the irony of his vision was that it was of a purely spiritual world of myth and legend. His vision was of a race of people who transcend the stupid, crass, messy material world of ours into a realm where all things are possible - in other words, a world only possible in myths. But in order to create that new world, he had to perpetuate the most dangerous myth of all - the old world has to be obliterated to make way for the new. Senta must prove her love by sacrificing herself so that the Dutchman can leave Earth. Tristan and Isolde’s love can only be consummated through death. Kundry must be kept alive and Amfortas wounded until a perfect fool arrives with no knowledge of our terrible world and all its misery. In the Ring Cycle, the entire corrupt world of the gods, giants, and dwarves, must be destroyed so that heroic men like Siegfried may try again and do better. It is the same myth perpetuated by every dictator, that if only we rid ourselves of the festering corruption of those other humans who prevent us from realizing our full potential, we would emerge cured as a pristine society.

And meanwhile, Wagner has music which fully equals the implicit cult-of-death of his dramaturgy. Many people like to defend Wagner by saying that music can’t show fascist sympathies. It most certainly can. What other word than the F-word is there for a five-hour opera in which harmonic resolution is denied until the very last moment when the titular characters achieve a blissful union through death? What word but the F-word is there for a fifteen-hour cycle of operas which plunges us into every possible contortion of tonal harmony to illustrate every shade of evil, only to achieve a blissful state of serenity at the end, after the opera’s entire world has been destroyed.

Wagner was a musician of genius - perhaps of a higher creative genius than the world has ever yet seen from an artist of any form. But music was never enough for Wagner. He was firstly an activist, secondly an intellectual, and only thirdly a musician.

Wagner wrote Tristan und Isolde, the ultimate opera about love, immediately before he wrote Die Meistersinger, the ultimate opera about renouncing love. It was as though he wanted to prove that he was more than merely a creator of human considerations. Indeed, for five hours, Die Meistersinger is the most humane of all operas, creating a world of human beings with extremely human problems and joys done so uncannily that we can’t possibly mistaken this vision of life for anything but a world which teems with compassion for our fellow humans. But after five hours of pure humanity, there stands Hans Sachs, the great, benevolent hero of all Wagner, exhorting us to honor our German masters and protect the land from foreign invaders. After five hours of disguise, there lie the same warcries as ever before, all the more effective for being dressed up with so much Mozartian delight intermingling with heartbreak. Die Meistersinger is a perfect opera, with enough delight to make up for all the agonized moments in his operas and then some. It is therfore the greatest disgrace to our common humanity which Wagner ever created, and by far the most amenable of all the Wagner operas to propagandistic purposes.  

Wagner’s drama perhaps feels ‘real’ in the way that it’s entirely consistent with itself. There is rarely ever division between dialogue and song, and there are rarely ensemble numbers. There are merely a lot of singers standing in place and singing, with orchestral harmonies and effects swirling around them as though to explore every possible crevice of consciousness from these beings, a consciousness we can never understand because these beings clearly exist in another dimension from ours. If Verdi’s drama feels artificial, it’s also because he is so spontaneous and clearly ‘of our world.’ The musical development of Verdi is truly that of an organic composer (and anybody who thinks Verdi could not handle development in a symphonic sense is invited to deeply examine any opera of from Rigoletto onward). We recognize the emotions of Verdi’s characters, because they are our own emotions, even if those emotions are heightened and sometimes contained by ridiculous plots. But the development in Wagner’s music is not organic, it’s eugenic. It exists in a manner which is too controlled to convincingly portray the human. Wagner understood psychology, and he certainly understood human beings well enough to manipulate them, but he didn’t want to express anything which smacked of humanity. He wanted to portray humans through a mirror in which they were judged principally by how they measured up to his heroic standards. Within the Wagnerian universe, there is no good and evil in any traditional sense, there is only strength and weakness. And those who are too strong for our world as its currently constituted are exhorted to kill or be killed on the path to creating a better world. No, Wagner was not Hitler, and he shouldn’t be viewed as such. But it’s difficult to believe that he’d have looked at the cult of death out of which Hitler created Nazism from his operas with anything but delight.

II.

No wonder Daniel Barenboim is so fascinated by his music, and no wonder hardly any other conductor conducts his music with such deep perception.

I have been looking forward to listening to this Ring Cycle for months because Barenboim may well be the greatest Wagner conductor of the recorded era. Look at the alternatives to that title - Solti is decent; Wagner through the lens of Salome and Elektra. Solti was never quite as inflexible and martinet-like as critics alleged, and he certainly has a great sense of theater and the sensational, but Wagner requires still far more flexibility and moods than Solti’s ever willing to give. Karl Bohm is Wagner by way of Schubert’s Winterreise, he has the Bayreuth orchestra at a great standard, with nearly all of Solti’s singers singing better for him, and he follows and supports his singers all the way through like a great lieder accompanist. But even so, he seems extremely unwilling to make the music move on its own with the flexibility Wagner requires. Wagner’s messy “unending melody” is not the precise elegance of Schubert - Wagnerian melody is grounded in harmony, not rhythm, and the conductor has to stretch tempos well over barlines for the phrases to create a life of their own which cannot be found in the score. James Levine is surprisingly fine at points, but utterly wrongheaded. Too rhythmically foursquare when it should soar, too perky when it should be weighty, too weighty when it should be perky. Levine positively basks in the Wagner’s refulgence, with no sense that he ever feels the need to follow the drama to its fullest plumage. Levine, a surprisingly great Brahms conductor, seems to see Wagner through Brahms’s lense - lots of warmth, but not enough heat. And if Levine is a Brahmsian Wagner, then Furtwangler is Wagner by way of Bruckner, often extremely exciting and moving, but with amazingly dull spots in between because we can’t ever forget just how ‘deep’ Wagner’s music is - I can’t help thinking that Furtwangler possesses a conception of Wagner’s music which is far loftier even than Wagner’s own. Boulez’s Wagner is Wagner by way of Debussy’s Pelleas et Melisande. The singers aren’t quite as good as in earlier generations, but they almost don’t matter. He has an even better Bayreuth orchestra than Bohm’s, refined to the point of shine with every detail shimmering through an always beautiful sound - the singers sound like merely another line to clarify on the way to complete transparency. Clemens Krauss, easily the best of the old Bayreuth house conductors for my money, is like later Strauss, including in its underratedness (except among the most hard-core collectors). Here, at last among those mentioned, is a conductor able to articulate the full diversity of meaning in the Ring Cycle, but not quite able to summon the epic Wagnerian power within that framework. Maybe it’s the sound, but all that lightness and shade comes at a price. Joseph Keilberth is like a Brahms/Bruckner hybrid, warm, dependable, and still too heavy-going. And I still haven’t heard enough of Herbert von Karajan’s non-Meistersinger Wagner to make a judgement...

That leaves four major recorded conductors left who understand Wagner on his own terms. One of whom I haven’t listened to enough Wagner to make a judgement on his (Christian Thielemann). The other three are Hans Knappertsbusch, Reginald Goodall (Kna’s pupil), and Daniel Barenboim. I have no doubt that Wagner by way of Knappertsbusch and Goodall possesses a certain type of authenticity, but it’s no authenticity I want in my life - under Kna, Wagner becomes a static ritual, something to be worshipped rather than enjoyed. When I hear Knappertsbusch in Wagner, I hear Wagner as Wagner probably wanted to hear himself - an object for veneration rather than love. The dimension in which the characters of Wagner operas exist under Kna’s hands is so far removed from the human dimension that it seems to me a perfect representation of everything that’s noxious in Wagner.

For reasons I don’t quite understand, Barenboim is the only conductor of a major recorded Ring Cycle who seems to meet Wagner on his own terms. His tempos are both faster and slower than nearly any other conductor, and the sudden changes in tempo are so imperceptible that they seem like black magic. Barenboim doesn’t simply support his singers, he challenges them, he inspires them, he inflames them - and this clearly inferior generation of singers is inspired to a level of commitment unseen from far greater Wagnerian voices. For the first and only time among Ring recordings, Wagner’s cumulative impact is felt (just about) all the way through, every bar threatening to double the excitement and meaning of the last.

(A three hour Tristan, a three hour Tristan, a three hour Tristan)

As far as I’m concerned, there is only one more perceptive Wagner conductor than Barenboim, and it’s the infamous Artur Bodanzky. The sound of his 1930’s recordings is nearly unlistenable, but if you can get past the sound to hear the music, then Bodanzky’s Metropolitan Opera forces had probably the greatest Wagner singers the world will ever hear. And he inflamed those singers to the maximum possible commitment, whipped the orchestra into a constant frenzy of fast (but constantly shifting) tempos, and mercilessly cut out so many of the dull passages which cow the rest of us into avoiding Wagner when possible. Finally, here were performances in which Wagner is no longer a ritual for the believers, but a visceral composer for the theater, in which characters sing as though they have human motivations. For only in this time and place, the practical considerations of the listener’s attention span are engaged in Wagner. Wagner was not simply a religious ritual and pseudo-philosopher taken seriously, he was a theater composer to be practically engaged and enjoyed for pleasure as one would a Shakespeare play or a Dickens novel. Never has the approach to Wagner been more Jewish than it was at the 1930’s Met.

Virtually every other conductor who’d be willing to grab the bull by the (jew)horns never gave us a recording of anything more than small pieces of The Ring: Eugen Jochum, Dimitri Mitropoulos, Charles Munch, Victor de Sabata, Nikolai Golovanov, Willem Mengelberg, Albert Coates, Carlos Kleiber, the young Leonard Bernstein or John Barbirolli or Colin Davis.... Perhaps there’s yet hope to get a great Ring from younger conductors like Manfred Honeck and Andris Nelsons. Hell, maybe even Simon Rattle or Valery Gergiev still have a great Ring in them somewhere (not yet...), and, perish the thought, maybe a millionth of a possibility of a great Ring from Nikolaus Harnoncourt.

Perhaps it’s the congestion of the online sound, but something has changed definitively in Daniel Barenboim’s Ring Cycle conception, and not for the better. Life is not quite lived on the edge of safety anymore. People used to say that Barenboim’s Wagner was slavishly imitative of Furtwangler’s, but this past week’s Proms performance seems much closer to Furtwangler’s conception than his recording from twenty years ago. There is excitement to be had during those points where he keeps things flexible, and there fortunately are a number of moments when he does - but not quite enough anymore. Like last year’s Beethoven cycle which Barenboim conducted, I was put very much in mind of the older Bruno Walter. We have no way of knowing how the elderly Walter would conduct Wagner’s Ring, but I’d imagine it would be with great warmth and beauty of sound, and with the incendiary fire of his middle age dampened though not vanished. The musical depth which Barenboim used to imply is now self-conscious. This is no longer Wagner on his own terms, this is Wagner by way of a Schubert piano sonata or The Magic Flute. Amazingly beautiful, luminously so at times, but also a little sapped of intensity at times and not quite hanging together as a whole. It’s certainly great, but it’s not quite the Wagner which Barenboim made me love against my better judgement.

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DFD Sings Der Kreuzzug

One of life's great joys.

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800 Words: The American Lycee - A Syllabus - Grades 7-9 - American Stories

Submitted without comment or explanation.

Grade 7 - The Television Era: 1999-

The Sopranos

Freaks and Geeks

The West Wing
Late Night with Conan O'Brien
Malcolm in the Middle
Monk

Futurama

24

The Daily Show
Six Feet Under

Family Guy (second incarnation)

The Shield

South Park

The Wire

Arrested Development

Deadwood

The Office (British and American)

Lost
The Colbert Report

Friday Night Lights

How I Met Your Mother

Mad Men

Breaking Bad
True Blood
John Adams

Louie

Game of Thrones

Homeland

Girls

Additional Texts:

Movies:

Three Kings

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind

The Social Network

Elephant

The Dark Knight

WALL-E

United 93

Juno

Little Miss Sunshine

Thank You For Smoking

Up In The Air

There Will Be Blood

Brokeback Mountain

Gran Torino

Books (to be studied either complete or in excerpts):

Non-Fiction:

Consider the Lobster by David Foster Wallace

Freakonomics by Steven D Leavitt and Steven J Dubner & Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell

Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed by Jared Diamond

The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins

The Outsourced Self by Arlie Russell Hochschild 

Dreams of My Father by Barack Obama

Slavery by Another Name: The Re-enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II by Douglas A. Blackmon

“A Problem from Hell” America and the Age of Genocide by Samantha Power

War in a Time of Peace: Bush, Clinton and the Generals by David Halberstam

The Looming Tower: Al Qaeda and the Road to 9/11 by Lawrence Wright

The Assassin’s Gate: America in Iraq by George Packer & Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq by Thomas Ricks

Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan, and Bin Laden, from the Soviet Invasion to September 10th, 2001 by Steve Coll

The Virtue of Selfishness by Ayn Rand

The Closing of the American Mind by Alan Bloom

How Should We Then Live? The Rise and Decline of Western Thought and Culture by Francis Schaeffer

The Clash of Civilizations by Samuel Huntington

Terror and Liberalism by Paul Berman & The Future of Freedom by Fareed Zakaria

Post-American World by Fareed Zakaria

Nickel and Dimed by Barbara Ehrenreich

Too Big to Fail by Andrew Ross Sorkin

Journalism by Paul Krugman
The Two Income Trap by Elizabeth Warren

Republic, Lost: by Lawrence Lessig

American Theocracy: The Peril and Politics of Radical Religion, Oil, and Borrowed Money in the 21st Century by Kevin Phillips

Fiction:

The Koran

Atlas Shrugged & The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand

Interpreter of Maladies by Jhumpa Lahiri

The Brief Wonderous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz

Close Range: Wyoming Stories by Anne Proulx

The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen

A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan

Empire Falls by Richard Russo

The Road by Cormac McCarthy

The Orphan Master’s Son by Adam Johnson

Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides

The Pale King by David Foster Wallace

Freedom by Jonathan Franzen

Plays:

Doubt by John Patrick Shanley

August: Osage County by Tracy Letts

Avenue Q

In the Heights

Grade 8 - The TV Era: 1983-1999

Cheers
Frasier
Late Night with David Letterman
St. Elsewhere
The Golden Girls
Moonlighting
NYPD Blue
The Cosby Show
A Different World
Picket Fences LA Law
Law & Order
Star Trek The Next Generation
Family Ties
Murphy Brown
Saturday Night Live
Married With Children

The Simpsons

Seinfeld

Twin Peaks

The Larry Sanders Show

Homicide: Life on the Streets

The X-Files
3rd Rock from the Sun
Buffy the Vampire Slayer
Beavis and Butthead
King of the Hill

Animaniacs
Daria

The Drew Carey Show

Everybody Loves Raymond

Friends

Ellen
Will and Grace
Spin City
Ally McBeal

Sex and the City

Additional texts:

Movies

Jaws & Star Wars

Close Encounters of the Third Kind & ET

Blue Velvet & American Beauty

The Breakfast Club

Do The Right Thing

Hoop Dreams

Who Framed Roger Rabbit

Forrest Gump

Glengarry Glen Ross

Hotel Rwanda

Wag the Dog & Primary Colors

Dazed and Confused

Books:

Non-Fiction:

Speeches and Letters by Martin Luther King Jr.

Autobiography of Malcolm X

News of a Kidnapping by Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Days of Obligation: An Argument with My Mexican Father by Richard Rodriguez

We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will be Killed Along With Our Families: by Philip Gourevitch

Lenin’s Tomb: The Last Days of the Soviet Empire by David Remnick

The End of History by Francis Fukuyama

The Age of Reagan 1974-2008: A History by Sean Wilentz 

The Starr Report by Kenneth Starr

Power and the Idealists by Paul Berman

What's The Matter With Kansas by Thomas Frank 

Capital by Karl Marx

Capitalism and Freedom by Milton Friedman

The Conscience of a Conservative by Barry Goldwater

The Conscience of a Liberal by Paul Krugman

Twilight of the Common Dream by Todd Gitlin

The Big Con by Jonathan Chait


The Price of Inequality by Joseph Stieglitz

America: The Book by Jon Stewart

Ashes to Ashes: America’s Cigarette War, The Public Health, and the Unabashed Triumph of Philip Morris by Richard Kluger

Fiction:

Fight Club by Chuck Palahniuk

Watchmen by Alan Moore

The Joy Luck Club by Amy Tan

A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain by Robert Olen Butler

The Bonfire of the Vanities by Tom Wolfe

Rabbit is Rich & Rabbit at Rest by John Updike

Lila: An Inquiry Into Morals by Robert M. Pirsig

Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace

The Human Stain by Philip Roth

Plays:

Angels in America by Tony Kushner

The Piano Lesson by August Wilson

Fences by August Wilson

Speed-the-plow by David Mamet

Into the Woods by Stephen Sondheim

Assassins by Stephen Sondheim

Grade 9 - 1962-1983: The Film Era

The Manchurian Candidate

Dr. Strangelove

Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf

The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

The Graduate

In the Heat of the Night

The Dirty Dozen

Bonnie and Clyde

The Producers  
Blazing Saddles

2001: A Space Odyssey

Easy Rider

Midnight Cowboy

M*A*S*H
Five Easy Pieces
A Clockwork Orange
Dirty Harry
Patton
Serpico

The Last Picture Show
McCabe & Mrs. Miller

Little Big Man

The French Connection

The Godfather Epic

Mean Streets

Badlands

The Conversation

Chinatown
The Long Goodbye

Nashville

One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest

Rocky 
Taxi Driver 
All the President's Men

Network

Annie Hall & Manhattan

The Deer Hunter & Apocalypse Now
The Shining
Blowout
Raging Bull

The Right Stuff

TV

The Andy Griffith Show

Bonanza

The Brady Bunch

Dragnet

Get Smart

Hogan's Heroes

Mission: Impossible

Star Trek

All in the Family

Mary Tyler Moore

Taxi

The Carrol Burnett Show

The Jeffersons

Good Times

Books:

The Affluent Society by John Kenneth Galbraith

Understanding Media by Marshall McLuhan

The Medium is the Massage by Marshall McLuhan

The Making of a President by Theodore H. White

The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test by Tom Wolfe

Hell’s Angels by Hunter S. Thompson

Ghandi’s Truth: On the Origins of Militant Non-Violence by Erik Ericksen

Armies of the Night: History as a Novel/The Novel as History by Norman Mailer

Unsafe at Any Speed by Ralph Nader

Anti-Intellectualism in American Life by Richard Hofstadter

So Human an Animal by Rene J. Dubos

The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat by Oliver Sacks

The Dragons of Eden by Carl Sagan

On Human Nature by E. O. Wilson

The Soul of a New Machine by Tracy Kidder

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert M. Pirsig

Nixonland by Rick Perlstein

The Imperial Presidency by Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr.

All the President’s Men by Carl Bernstein

Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas by Hunter S. Thompson

The Feminine Mystique by Betty Friedan

The Right Stuff by Tom Wolfe

The Joy of Sex by Alex Comfort

A Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawking

A Theory of Justice by John Rawls

Fiction:

Herzog by Saul Bellow

The Crying of Lot 49 by Thomas Pynchon

Portnoy’s Complaint by Philip Roth and Fear of Flying by Erica Jong

One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest by Ken Kesey

The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath

Mr. Sammler’s Planet by Saul Bellow and Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut

The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien

The Executioner’s Song by Norman Mailer

Theater:

Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf by Edward Albee

Company, Follies, A Little Night Music, Sweeney Todd, Sunday in the Park with George by Stephen Sondheim

How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying

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