800 Words: Evan and Hauptmann Rinderherz Discuss the Berlin Philharmonic (part 2)

Hauptmann Rinderherz: Zo, who do you think are the world’s great conductors?

Evan: It depends on how you define greatness.

Hauptmann Rinderherz: Nein, there is only one way can we define greatness. Nur performance.

Evan: That’s not true at all. Greatness is how much they give to music, rather than how much music gives them. When conductors collect thirty thousand dollars for a one-week engagement during which they perform a piece both the conductor and the orchestra barely need to rehearse before they perform to an audience which knows no more about the wonders of this piece of music by the end of the performance than they did at the beginning, that’s not greatness. I don’t care how effective or affecting the performance is, that’s cultural evil.

Hauptmann Rinderherz: OK. Ich habe nicht the energy fur this fight. What conductors you think give the best performance?

Evan: Well… Let’s see… The ones whom I think have totally mastered the art of performance?

Hauptmann Rinderherz: Ja. Who gives the best performance?

Evan: Of what composer?

Hauptmann Rinderherz: Any.

Evan: You can’t do that.

Hauptmann Rinderherz: Warum nicht?

Evan: Because lots of conductors give great performances of some composers and are terrible in others.

Hauptmann Rinderherz: That is not true! I find that many conductors who are good in one composer are good in them all.

Evan: That’s because you only like five composers.

Hauptmann Rinderherz: Untrue! I like sixteen!

Evan: But some of them you don't love passionately, like Mendelssohn, Mahler, Handel, Gluck...basically the one's who aren't German enough to be loved.

Hauptmann Rinderherz: Ja! But I still like them!

Evan: The only composers I'm convinced you love are Bach, Weber, Wagner, Schumann, and Richard Strauss. And sometimes I even have my doubts about Schumann and Strauss. 

Evan: Alright, enough from me. So who’s consistent over a huge number of composers…well, I have to include Riccardo Chailly,…

Hauptmann Rinderherz (interrupting): Schrecklich!

Evan: Vladimir Jurowski,…

Hauptmann Rinderherz: Scheisse!

Evan: Gennadi Rozhdestvensky,...

Hauptmann Rinderherz: O weh!

Evan: maybe Manfred Honeck and Daniel Harding,…

Hauptmann Rinderherz: O Gott!

Evan: and perhaps Ivan Fischer and Paavo Jarvi,…

Hauptmann Rinderherz: Ach Gott!

Evan: and I suppose I could include Semyon Bychkov and Andris Nelsons and Kirill Petrenko and David Zinman and Herbert Blomstedt…

Hauptmann Rinderherz: Mein Gott!

Evan: Oh! Don’t forget Franz Welser-Most and especially Neeme Jarvi.

Hauptmann Rinderherz: Um Gottes willen! You are an enemy of music!

Evan: I’m sorry you feel that way.

Hauptmann Rinderherz: Und I’m sorry you feel this way. Warum do you?

Evan: Because I like my music fast and Russian.

Hauptmann Rinderherz: How do you sleep at night?

Evan: I don’t. I’m too wired from the fast Russian music.

Hauptmann Rinderherz: Aber you listen to Schubert and Otis Redding late at night!

Evan: OK, you got me. I think these conductors make orchestras really responsive to what they feel the music wants, they inspire the orchestras they stand in front of to consistently give viscerally exciting performances, they never neglect any of the most crucial musical elements, they can be extremely expressive without compromising the music's formal elements, and most importantly, they don’t bore me. But except for Nelsons and maybe Jurowski, none of them are serious candidates for the Berlin Philharmonic.

Hauptmann Rinderherz: Und you’re sure of that?

Evan: Riccardo Chailly is a star in Leipzig and he’ll be 65 when Rattle retires. Daniel Harding is a protégé of both Rattle and Abbado, and that will disqualify him even though he’s a completely different sort of conductor than either. Paavo Jarvi will be knee-deep in Frankfurt and Paris and god knows where else by the time Berlin opens up. Welser-Most will still be in Vienna and possibly in Cleveland too, and even so, half the world already thinks he’s a mediocre conductor. Ivan Fischer will be 67 and is already the director of the Berlin Konzerthaus Orchester. Bychkov will be 66, and he could be a stopgap, but in five years he may well be the director of any major orchestra who offers him. In 2018, Zinman will be 82 and Blomstedt will be 90. The others are just too small time.

Hauptmann Rinderherz: What about Daniel Barenboim?

Evan: Daniel Barenboim is awesome when he realizes that he’s a Jewish kid from Argentina who loves to perform and not trying to be the most profound German musician who ever lived.

Hauptmann Rinderherz: Zo you do not like even his Beethoven?

Evan: Oh no, I think a lot of his Beethoven’s wonderful. I just don’t like it when he performs every slow movements at half Beethoven’s speed. But I think his Lisztand Bruckner are magnificent and he almost makes me love Wagner.

Hauptmann Rinderherz: But you think faster than the metronome like Harding and Jarvi is alright?

Evan: At least I’m not bored…

Hauptmann Rinderherz: Disgusting!

Evan: Whatever works for you…

Hauptmann Rinderherz: What about Riccardo Muti? He does the faster.

Evan: Another conductor who thinks seriousness is the same thing as intelligence. He’s a much, much better conductor during those few moments a decade when a major key score lightens him up and stops him from flopping his hair.

Hauptmann Rinderherz: And even Mariss Jansons you don't like?

Evan: I used to like Jansons a lot more when he was a younger man, but he’s been spoiled. Too much success made him kind of bland. He still has the same intensity, which I love, but it’s just intensity without any character.  But what are we talking about these guys for, they’ll all be over 75 by the time Rattle leaves. What about real candidates?

Hauptmann Rinderherz: Barenboim is real.

Evan: If Barenboim becomes the next director, the Berlin Philharmonic will be a joke – no different then any other orchestra which throws its future away with a high prestige name who has no future with them.

Hauptmann Rinderherz: But he should be the music director now!

Evan: I’m sorry to say that you’re probably right. They should have made him director after Karajan, but imagine appointing Herbert von Karajan as the director in 1984 if Karajan were the director of La Scala and the Philharmonic's crosstown rival. That's how dumb a Barenboim appointment would be. 

Hauptmann Rinderherz: Still better than Abbado…

Evan: Oh really?

Hauptmann Rinderherz: Abbado stopped being great when he got to Berlin. He destroyed the Philharmoniker!

Evan: Actually, you’re probably right about the first part of that, but it’s not because Abbado destroyed the orchestra. The orchestra was a shadow of a great orchestra under Karajan, turning music into a luxury item while other orchestras did the important work of introducing new music and finding new ways to perform old music. If anything, Abbado improved things quite measurably. But Claudio Abbado was always a delegator, and he got increasingly bored as his career went along. There was some point when he stopped caring about rehearsal or conveying any serious wishes to his musicians, but at every point in his career, he was lucky enough to face the world’s greatest orchestral musicians and in recent years they've all loved the fact that he makes no real demands. Sometimes I wonder if he isn’t just the luckiest conductor to ever step onto the podium, yet sometimes he snaps back into focus and pull an amazing performance out of his pocket.

Hauptmann Rinderherz: Ja, then so you hate Haitink too?

Evan: I don’t hate Haitink, but I do often find him astonishingly dull. I don’t hate Abbado either. But I do think they’re both amazingly overrated in comparison to a number of contemporaries who are demonstrably better. Not just Blomstedt and Rozhdestvensky but others like Mackerrasand Dohnanyi and Colin Davis, all three of of whom can be extremely dry but also can turn on the excitement far more often than either Haitink or Abbado.

Hauptmann Rinderherz: What about a junger conductor like Vasily Petrenko?

Evan: A one-trick horse who doesn’t seem to conduct anything but Russian music, which he performs extraordinarily well in that virtuoso way which tells you he’d be not much good in anything else.  He’ll probably end up inheriting the St. Petersburg Philharmonic after Yuri Temirkanov collapses off the podium dead drunk after his third bottle of vodka.

Haputmann Rinderherz: Then what about Yannick Nezet-Seguin?

Evan: Oy. Leonard Bernstein sans le talent.

Hauptmann Rinderherz: How can you say that?

Evan: He’s like a kid up there with a permanent sugar rush, but that’s when he isn’t trying to do the super-profound us to sleep in Bruckner. But he has no sense of the long-range structure or how to keep an orchestra together. But he’ll have a great career as the new ‘great conductor’ in this part of America. He arrived at just the right time to be the knight on the white horse who ‘saves’ the Philadelphia Orchestra and he’ll probably have the same lucky timing when or if he becomes director of the Metropolitan Opera. But I don’t understand how he got there or how people think he’s a great conductor.

Hauptmann Rinderherz: But you like the fast tempos!

Evan: I like fast tempos when they make musical sense and the conductor gets the musicians to play in them well!

Hauptmann Rinderherz: Then you must hate der Gergiev.

Evan: Sometimes I love Valery Gergiev. When his orchestras catch up to him, his performances can be amazing. But they can also suck, and sometimes his performances are both in the same piece. Like Furtwangler.

Hauptmann Rinderherz: I give up, you are ein musicalisches schweinegrippe! But how about der Dudamel? He too is fast.

Evan: Well in most ways he’s just like Gergiev. An amazing conductor at inspiring the orchestra and getting a rich sound, he’s also musically smarter than Gergiev and much more curious about music. But even if he stays this inspirational, he’s gonna be erratic as hell and he could still be just another Zubin Mehta and completely check out musically by the time he’s 40.

Hauptmann Rinderherz: Zubin Mehta is better than people say.

Evan: I agree with you, but that’s a pretty low bar to clear. In any event, La Scala clearly wants Dudamel to replace Barenboim, and if he takes it, he will have as terrible a time managing that house as every other director they’ve ever had.

Hauptmann Rinderherz: But then why should he not go to Berlin?

Evan: Because he will and should demand they play all sorts of music which they hated to play under Rattle. As a conductor, Dudamel’s like Gergiev, but as a music director he would be Rattle redux.

Hauptmann Rinderherz: But he venerates our traditions!

Evan: Well good for you that you think you found someone who does!

Hauptmann Rinderherz: You’re hopeless.

Evan: I’m not hopeless. I just think the traditions you love are unbelievably stuffy and reactionary.

Hauptmann Rinderherz: You’re hopeless because you hate music!

Evan: I don’t hate music. I love it more than anything short of herring in wine sauce and a pastrami sandwich.

Hauptmann Rinderherz: These traditions are what made the music you love. If you do not honor them, the music will disappear along with it. And everything in kultur you love except herring and pastrami will be gone.  

Evan: The age in which these compositions were produced will soon be completely dead and gone. We currently live in the most revolutionary era since the dawn of Romanticism. And the true test of whether or not these works are true classics in the sense which Homer and Sophocles are is if they still demand to be heard when the tradition of how they’re meant to be heard is entirely broken and a new one begins with no knowledge of how it was once presented. Will people still want to hear Bach, Mozart, and Beethoven’s music if they can only be heard live in an arrangement for Rock Band; or a synthetic orchestra, because in 150 years, or perhaps much sooner, that may be the only way people can hear the music we love.

Hauptmann Rinderherz: Such an age approaches too quickly for me.

Evan: Well, we may all live to see that day.

Hauptmann Rinderherz: For music to die before me is a death from which I want nothing.

Evan: So long as our minds stay open, music will never die.

Hauptmann Rinderherz: What mind is there in this other music?

Evan: This is gonna take a while…

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800 Words: What Influences the Music and Books I Don't Write (Part 1 of ...)

In the last two days, I’ve gotten variations on the exact same question: what influences your music-making? On Sunday I was at a rehearsal of Peabody musicians. The composer, the cellist, and I were hanging out after rehearsal, and they asked me what sort of music I write. It was rather painful to admit that aside from some time-consuming arrangements of Jewish songs for my chorus of Jewish singers, I have not finished an original piece or even worked hard on an original piece worthy of the name in roughly a year-and-a-half. And I haven’t been truly impressed with anything I’ve written in nearly five years.

The next day I was hanging out at the break during the open-mike Jazz night at which I often play. Our regular keyboardist asked me what jazz violinists inspire me. I couldn’t name a single one except Stephane Grappelli, whose music making I adore as much as any classical violinist. I can’t remember a single piece Jean-Luc Ponty played or even that the Mahavishnu Orchestra had a violinist. Instead I named some extremely cliché old school jazz musicians – Duke Ellington, Art Tatum, John Coltrane,  early Miles. Basically, my vision of jazz is as the American twin to classical music. I have little knowledge of modern jazz, and unfortunately, it’s usually because I have even less patience for it. The keyboardist looked visibly disappointed, and I don’t blame him. He then asked me if I play classical pieces for my practice routine… “What practice routine?” I answered. Fortunately, he laughed. But I think I deserve a little credit here… if I practiced regularly I’d be a much, much better violinist than I am now.

Perhaps I’m exactly as delusional as I seem, but I honestly believe that some pretty good music or novels exist somewhere in the dark recesses of my brain. But I have no idea how to drudge them out. I’ve probably listened to too much music and read (OK…started) too many books to stop other people’s examples from flooding my head. My brain is a 24/7 radio of other people’s music, and on those rare moments when the music stops, I can quote dialogue from plays and movies, whole passages of books, almost word-for-word. My car has probably died a dozen times in the last year from my forgetting to turn the headlights off, but I can vividly recall music I haven’t heard in twenty-five years.  

But there’s another reason that I can’t write down what I know is in my head, and that is lack of confidence. Not lack of confidence in the way which most people mean it, though I suppose that’s possible, I mean lack of confidence that anybody but me would find anything I have to say interesting. I think everybody who’s friends with me knows that I find myself to be an endlessly fascinating subject… but my life-experiences are so different, so outside the mainstream of most people’s lives, what audience is there for most of what I want to produce when I find so much of what they produce to be so pedestrian.

To give but one obvious example: I love what most people call classical music; truly, madly, deeply. It is a life-endowing spiritual quest at whose destination I hope I never arrive, and a mad obsession whose passion has rarely been shared by anyone else in my life. I also hate, loathe, boil with disgust for the over-refined, genteel, embalmed culture of luxury and perfection which goes with its contemporary incarnation – a tradition only 100-years-old which maintains a rod-of-iron omerta on anything which might remotely be construed as playing to the gallery. I hate the anonymous perfection to be found in most of its performers, I hate the holier-than-thou distrust of anything which gives the slightest whiff of frivolity, and I hate the idea that great music cannot be made in a different way than classical musicians make it – even if, more often than not, it isn’t.

I could name hundreds of other examples like this: the lowest-common-denominator populism of most Hollywood movies vs. the vapid pretension of the independent film industry, the anonymous insipidity of Top-40 hits vs. the simple-minded distrust of complexity in most independent label ‘scene’ music, the narrowness of genre fiction vs. the naval gazing of high modern literature, the hallmark-card placidity of the art in most people’s homes vs. the decadent stupidity of modern art. Where is the ambition in any of this? Where is the desire to capture the entire world? Where is the belief that what we do is valuable to everybody - even if it isn't true? Where is the conviction that the masses should not abandoned? Where is the desire to unite the world in greater understanding? Where is the desire for people of different viewpoints to view each other with something other than enmity? Because such desires almost completely absent from contemporary life in virtually any place I’ve ever visited as an adult. I can name plenty of contemporary exceptions, and no doubt you can too, but I can name many more from other epochs. Some of them came from times that truly divided people or united them in suffering, but most hailed from eras which viewed humanity with far more hope than most people have for ourselves today. We are, in so many ways, better off than in virtually any era of human history. And yet the more progress we make, the bifurcated our society grows between those privileged enough to benefit from that progress and those who are not.

Inevitably, I’ll be construed as a snob for believing all this by the few people patient enough to get through it all. Even if I think I sometimes convince myself that I’m virtually the only (pseudo) intellectual who hasn’t abandoned the larger population, I’m resigned to the fact that most of what I believe would be construed as snobbery by the vast majority of the people who listen. But if believing what I believe means I’m a snob, then no one in the world would be prouder to be one; because to me, this ‘snobbery’ isn’t just a reaction to a precipitous historical drop in aesthetic standards. I wonder every day if our contemporary climate is indicative of a culture that has lost its intellectual dynamism, and as a result, I fear, teeters once again upon the brink of multiple cataclysms. The best lack all conviction while the worst are full of passionate intensity. It often, though not always, seems as though the only cultural phenomena which exhibit enough health or dynamism to be attractive on a mass scale is stuff which is watered down to the point of being absolutely vanilla. The large mass of people are encouraged every day to go through life without using their brains, and the only result is that they can only develop stupider beliefs, and still more desire to enforce them on those privileged enough to be smart. It would seem that the philosophy which increasingly prevails in modern times is that if it can be consumed by everybody, it can be made by anybody. And if it can’t be consumed by everybody, then it should only appeal to people who think exactly like the person who made it. I look around me, and nearly wherever I look, I can’t help it that I see an irreparably broken contemporary culture. Intelligence and popular taste must go together, or else the content of both is almost worthless. Perhaps we stand on the brink of an age in which this becomes a passing trend; but as of this moment, I hate the culture of what I love, and love the culture of what I hate.

I don’t make such sweeping declarations to analyze why culture is this way or even to give examples. In this particular conundrum, I don’t need to show proof. I only need to say that perhaps this is the main reason (this and sheer laziness) why I can’t produce what I long to produce. How can I possibly create something for such a culture when there is so little demand for what I not only like, but believe any society which makes life worth living would like?

Hopefully, over the next while or so, I’ll start to detail the kind of work which I think is indicative of a healthy culture which captures the world. Or, more importantly (if only to you…), captures my world. 

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800 Words: Evan and Hauptmann Rinderherz discuss the Berlin Philharmonic (Part 1)

(Evan gets home around 8:30 in the evening Thursday night to find that Hauptmann Rinderherz is still in his underwear. Hauptmann Rinderherz is the 53-year-old, crew-cutted, 6’6, 350 lbs, German man who’s been crashing on Evan’s couch since September. They met one day at bar trivia in East Baltimore, and quickly came to learn that this was a kindred spirit with a seemingly bottomless knowledge of classical music, and who’d been evicted from his apartment a week earlier. In a moment he’d come to regret endlessly, Evan invited Hauptmann Rinderherz to crash on his couch for the night. Since then, Hauptmann Rinderherz has never so much as left the couch except to go to the bathroom. Evan would later find out from HaWestbrook that there was, in fact, no apartment, and he’d been moving from couch to couch until his host tires enough of him to call the police. On Evan’s coffeetable is Hauptmann Rinderherz’s 400-CD collection of Carlos Kleiber and Sergiu Celibidache bootlegs, which the good Herr Hauptmann has not bothered organizing or even listening to because they can all be found now on his youtube channel, the views of which he seems to check as often as possible.

From the little information Evan can coax out of him, Hauptmann Rinderherz would appear to have been a rising star in the East Berlin police who specialized in interrogations (only violent criminals, not political prisoners), but his career was tragically derailed by the fall of the Berlin Wall. Because he refused under oath to falsely acknowledge that he was ever a member of the Stasi, he was not allowed to continue his police work. He then decided to pursue the music career he abandoned at the behest of his mother who told him daily that her fondest wish for her son was to die for Germany. Hauptmann Rinderherz was apparently a childhood musical prodigy, and even claims that as a teenager he studied piano at the Moscow Conservatory under Emil Gilels, but Evan has yet to see Hauptmann Rinderherz approach a piano or even hear him speak a word of Russian. For the first few years after the wall fell, Herr Hauptmann made his living operating a floor-buffer in the lobby of the Philharmonie. But when Simon Rattle was elected the next leader of the Berlin Philharmonic in 1999, Hauptmann Rinderherz was so disgusted that he elected to leave for America.

Hauptmann Rinderherz lived for the next few years as a loafer, jumping coal train to coal train for the next few years through all the various American cities until he happened to catch an episode of The Wire through the window of a Radio Shack in Toledo. He immediately realized that of all American cities, Baltimore alone had the gritty dinginess to remind him of the good old days of the Honecker dictatorship when everybody was banded together in the communal solidarity of mutual misery.)

Evan: Hello Herr Hauptmann! How was your day?

Hauptmann Rinderherz: Ach. This latest post of yours is insufferably pompous - presenting your own personal opinions as though it’s a new theory. You never were much of an intellectual.

Evan: I’m not an intellectual. I just play one on the internet. And I never said it was anywhere near complete or anything more than attempt to gather my thoughts.

Hauptmann Rinderherz: We must work on your thought gathering ja? It is something you have very little ability for. 

Evan: Maybe I should have called it a self-interview.

Hauptmann Rinderherz: Ah! Now I understand you. Like Witold Gombrowicz?

Evan: …Why not….

Hauptmann Rinderherz: Ach, such a magnificent novelist, the Poles never had another. Have you ever read Ferdydurke?

Evan: I tried, I didn’t like it.

Hauptmann Rinderherz: You wouldn’t.

Evan: What does that mean?

Hauptmann Rinderherz: It’s the same reason you won’t read Hermann Broch. You are intimidated by the thought that intelligences are greater than yourselves.

Evan:  I’ve just come around to the point of view that if you’re insecure enough to have to show off what you know, you’re probably insecure about the fact that you don’t know that much. (pauses to contemplate the various ironies of that last sentence…)

Hauptmann Rinderherz: (mutters) Typical anti-intellectual Americanische…

Evan: Most Americans I know would probably disagree.

Hauptmann Rinderherz: What do these idioten know? Spoiled and weak from comforts and thinking a year of unemployment is the world-end. In 1945 my mother lived on a single herring for a month!

Evan: She was dehoused by Allied bombing?

Hauptmann Rinderherz: Nein. Just anorexic.

Evan: Ah. I’m sorry.

Hauptmann Rinderherz: Bitte nicht, don’t apologize. She was my size and diabetic by the time I was five.

Evan: How do Northern Europeans always age so quickly?

Hauptmann Rinderherz: It’s in our blood. The new generation needs breathing room!

Evan: Are you at all aware of how you sound to other people?

Hauptmann Rinderherz: Yes. But your demand for a sense of irony is an easily surmountable obstacle.

Evan: Y’know…I’m still trying to figure out if you’re charming or a genuinely offensive stereotype. And can I please use my own computer?

Hauptmann Rinderherz: Here.

(Herr Hauptmann gives Evan the computer and picks up his copy of On Nature by Anaximander. Evan checks mail, looks at facebook, and checks his blog for pageviews. When he goes to twitter, he sees an extremely newsworthy development for classical music fans.)

Evan: Herr Hauptmann! Look at this! Apparently Simon Rattle is leaving the Berlin Philharmonic.

Hauptmann Rinderherz: Mr. Tucker thank you very much for your hospitality. I shall leave right now.

Evan: Really?

Hauptmann Rinderherz: Now that Simon Rattle is leaving the Philharmoniker, it is safe to go back to Berlin.

Evan: Well, far be it for me to stop you, but he's not leaving for another five years. And who knows, he might still change his mind and make peace with the orchestra.

Hauptmann Rinderherz: Nevertheless, this is the greatest victory for Rattlehaters in our long, illustrious history. I must go join the cheering throngs who are dancing in the streets.

Evan: I highly doubt there are any cheering throngs to celebrate Simon Rattle's departure. And why do you hate Simon Rattle so much?

Hauptmann Rinderherz: Ach! So viele grunde! He is the Barack Obama of music! A celebrity leichtgewichtler who put your hintere in the seat so he can feed you Scheissemusik! More rock singer than conductor!

Evan: What’s wrong with being a rock star? Wouldn’t it be great to have classical musicians who got the kind of publicity rock stars do?

Hauptmann Rinderherz: It is a pollution of music’s natural purity! The kultur industry now dictates how we must appreciate the classics! First they gave us a jazz conductor mit Leonard Bernstein, now we have this rock star Simon Rattle.

Evan: Was that any reason to leave Germany?

Hauptmann Rinderherz: Ach nein! I came to America to meet der Johnny Cash!

Evan: So you actually like American popular music?

Hauptmann Rinderherz: He sang Der Ring!

Evan: Herr Hauptmann… I don’t think that the same Ring.

Hauptmann Rinderherz: I know that! But he is the noble savage! The animal vox populi which must be kept in complete kulturkampf from Heilige Deutsche Kunst! I came to America to resist rock music. I came to America to look der Johnny Cash in the eye and tell him that he shall not triumph!

Evan: Why must the two cultures be kept separate? Don’t you think classical musicians might learn something from Johnny Cash? Who, by the way, has been dead for nearly ten years.

Hauptmann Rinderherz: Nein! So long as art is polluted by his energy we shall never free ourselves from the shakles of animal man to achieve our true worldspiritpotential!

Evan: I think that’s a little unfair. There is plenty of animal energy in classical music. And even if what you’re saying may have a very small grain of truth, why blame Simon Rattle for it?

Hauptmann Rinderherz: Because musicians like Rattle are the reason that all that is good in art shall never triumph. And his performances are terrible!

Evan: No they’re not!

Hauptmann Rinderherz: So you truly believe that Simon Rattle is the Maestro from all the Maestros?

Evan: He’s one of them, certainly. He has his problems as a conductor, but he’s no lightweight. He’s a fantastic musician who came to Berlin for all the best reasons. The musicians of the Berlin Philharmonic knew that if they wanted to maintain their reputation as the world’s greatest orchestra, they had to modernize themselves very quickly. But they didn’t let Rattle finish the job, so now they’ll be just another fine German orchestra which specializes in Brahms and Bruckner – no different than the Staatskapelles Dresden or Berlin, but not quite as good as either. 

Hauptmann Rinderherz: So honestly you think the Philharmoniker lost its position as the world’s greatest orchestra by chasing Rattle from the baton?

Evan: The Berlin Philharmonic probably never was the greatest orchestra in the world, and it especially wasn’t the greatest under Karajan.  At least the Vienna Philharmonic was probably the world’s greatest orchestra in the 1870’s and 80’s, and it’s lived in that era ever since. But the supremacy of the Berlin Philharmonic was always a myth.

Hauptmann Rinderherz: I can’t believe what I’m hearing! Listen to how much better they sounded from the Karajan and Furtwangler years. Listen to the final years of Abbado!

Evan: Berlin never got Simon Rattle at his best because the more traditional members of the orchestra weren’t willing to give him their best. They resented the fact that he was their director at all, and that limited how willing they were to commit to his performances. And perhaps now that they know Rattle is leaving, they’ll perform better for him in the same way their performances for Abbado improved once they realized he was leaving too.

Hauptmann Rinderherz: They resented him because he wasn’t a conductor good enough!

Evan: Well it’s true that he’s not the greatest conductor in the world performance-wise. He has a kind of interpretive attention deficit disorder which makes him too reckless. Conductors like Bernstein and Barenboim have a level of genius that allows them make up their interpretations on the spot and still make musical sense, Rattle doesn’t but thinks he does. But even so, it’s amazing how many risks he gets away with, and I’ll take Rattle’s fearlessness over the kind of overprotective carefulness you get from most conductors any day of the week.

Hauptmann Rinderherz: But if he’s not performance-wise the greatest conductor in the world, he’s not the greatest conductor in the world. Only performances matter.

Evan: The performance is just one part of a conductor’s responsibility. Rattle is a great conductor because he brings music to others who would never hear it otherwise. He made sure the Berlin Philharmonic musicians were all well-paid before he even signed his contract. He’s involved inner-city children in concerts, he brought in great multimedia artists for interdisciplinary performances, he established an education department for the Berlin Philharmonic, he is absolutely undogmatic in terms of the repertoire he performs, and he’s always rethinking his interpretations of what he performs. To me, that is indicative of the fact that he is one of the very greatest conductors who ever lived.

Hauptmann Rinderherz: Well I just think he is lucky. A wunderkind who was not talented yet had every advantage other musicians never have.

Evan: Well it can’t be denied that luck certainly played its role in Rattle’s career. But Rattle should be measured by what he’s done with his luck. And very few musicians have used luck to do more good.

Hauptmann Rinderherz: Ach. Do good, what does good and evil have to do with music?

Evan: What is the point of Beethoven’s message if people aren’t there to hear it?

Hauptmann Rinderherz: People will hear it!

Evan: How?

Hauptmann Rinderherz: By force!

Evan: What??

Hauptmann Rinderherz: If they do not hear the message of die neunte symphonie, they must be made to listen and appreciate its importance.

Evan: Is this what you really believe?

Hauptmann Rinderherz: 300%.

Evan: So… then I’m just going to take a guess that you would like to see Christian Thielemann replace Rattle.

Hauptmann Rinderherz: Ja ja. Er ist Der Meister. The greatest since Furtwangler!

Evan: High praise indeed. Though you do realize that he’s branching out now and making a real effort to conduct Russian and French music, right?

Hauptmann Rinderherz: Ja. But he doesn’t look like he likes it.

Evan: Well, you’re in luck, because Thielemann will probably be the next director. 

Hauptmann Rinderherz: Wirklich? I thought he would be too committed to his work in Dresden and Bayreuth.

Evan: Furtwangler and Nikisch both conducted the Berlin Philharmonic and the Leipzig Gewandhaus simultaneously. Karajan held jobs with the Vienna Opera, the Vienna Symphony, the Salzburg Festival, and L’Orchestre de Paris at the same time that he headed the Berlin Philharmonic. I don’t think it’s good for music, but conductors hold multiple jobs all the time and put in too few hours with every one of them.

Hauptmann Rinderherz: Do not give me false hope! A Thielemann Philharmoniker would be a golden age for music!

Evan: Well, Thielemann is a very talented conductor, but he conducts a limited repertoire. And even in his specialties, he has many of the same problems as an interpreter that Simon Rattle has.

Hauptmann Rinderherz: Do not you dare to compare der meister to that Beatlesschwindler!

Evan: Think about it. They both have amazing ears for orchestral color, they both relish the big tunes, and they can both go to ridiculous interpretive extremes.

Hauptmann Rinderherz: It is not ridiculous when Thielemann does it! He lives and suffers for his holy art!

Evan: Well, I think he goes to a lot of excesses that don’t come off particularly well. But if you don’t want a heart attack from too much excitement, why don’t we discuss some of the other alternatives. How do you feel about Daniele Gatti?When it wasn’t certain Rattle would extend his contract past 2012, the musicians conducted a poll for whom they wanted to be the next conductor and Gatti was the winner.

Hauptmann Rinderherz: Ein grosser Maestro. The greatest of the Italians except for Il Giulini.

Evan: Wow. No other Italians earn your approbation?

Hauptmann Rinderherz: Toscanini was a kappellmeister, no imagination or gemutlichkeit. De Sabata has no innigkeit, Muti too much loves the Italian music, Chailly is an annihilator of all German, and Abbado used to be better before he went to Berlin.

Evan: But Gatti clearly loves Verdi.

Hauptmann RInderherz: Nobody’s perfect.

Evan: Well, I don’t much care for Gatti and I don’t see the big deal about him. Technically, his performances are often disasters, and that would be alright if he sounded like he inspires orchestras. But he doesn’t, and instead he just has a lot of interpretive quirks that his technique isn’t good enough to make the orchestras play.

Hauptmann Rinderherz: But there is so much innigkeit in his performances!

Evan: I’m still not sure what this innigkeit thing is… but I’ll let it go. And in any event, he keeps getting invited back to the greatest orchestras, so clearly orchestral musicians see something in him I don’t.

Hauptmann Rinderherz: Ja ja. And certainly would he be preferable to Paavo Jarvi.

Evan: Really? I love Paavo Jarvi, I just wish he would stop trying to conduct 5 orchestras at a time.

Hauptmann Rinderherz: Jarvi is terrible. Such awful Beethoven.

Evan: I love Jarvi’s Beethoven. Hell, I’m not sure I’ve ever heard a performance by Jarvi which I didn’t think was great. But I don’t think you have to worry too much. He’s clearly beloved in Frankfurt and he’ll probably be the director of four more orchestras by the time the Berlin Philharmonic begins to consider who their next director might be.

Hauptmann Rinderherz: Well if not Thielemann, the next director should be Andris Nelsons. Ein grosser Wagnerleiter.

Evan: Well I agree that he’d be a very good choice, maybe even the prudent one. He’ll be only 40 when Rattle leaves, he’s a very fine conductor of all sorts of music, including many composers you don’t like, and he always has interesting ideas. But if you expect another Furtwangler, you won’t get it in Nelsons.  

Hauptmann Rinderherz: Why not?

Evan: He’s far too catholic in his tastes to limit himself to German music. And his basic tempos are far, far quicker than Furtwangler’s. He’s more like Mengelberg than Furtwangler.

Hauptmann Rinderherz: To even have a Mengelberg today…

Evan: Well, you’re a Celibidache fan. What do you think of Semyon Bychkov?

Hauptmann Rinderherz: He’s no Celibidache! How can you make that comparison even?

Evan: They’re both uncompromising masters of the craft who hate the wear and tear of being a music director, they’ve whittled their repertoire down to the pieces they really love, they both started their careers at the top of the profession and then had periods of working in obscurity so they could get the results they wanted. 

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800 Words: A Five Year Old Attempt to Make a Theory of Music

This is something I just found which I think I began around five years ago. I never finished or published it in any form. Much of it doesn't necessarily reflect my current feelings, and I'm not even sure it accurately reflected my feelings at the time I wrote it. It is also quite fragmented and incomplete, but with a few changes to flesh out the ideas I was expressing, I suppose what's here is still publishable and worth reading to those curious enough.

The key to music is not emotion, but expression:

In a sense, Stravinsky is right.  Music is incapable of expressing anything specific but its symbols, but deaf is the person who thinks music is incapable of expressing anything but itself.  The greatest property of music is its capability to expressing something unique to each listener, upon each listen, within each performance.  Music can be an abstraction, and far more than art, abstraction (rather than representation) is its natural home. But just as visual art can easily take the form of abstraction, music can easily take the form of representation. Great songs and word painting would be impossible without music’s capability to represent ideas, images and people. Furthermore, music grants each person the ability to hear themselves within its contents: for some people the beginning of the Eroica Symphony can be Allegro con brio, for some it can be Napoleon, and for some it can be their own grandfather.  None of them are right any more than they are wrong.  But a Rorschach test is an unchanging abstract blot on a page that doesn't move.    But from it we supposedly see something more about ourselves, and we emerge (hopefully) a little wiser and more experienced than we were before.

The absoluteness of music is a dangerous concept:

Nothing has damaged classical music more than discouraging personal reaction to it.   Hear in music whatever you like.   That is all.

Opera is still the greatest artform the world has yet created. 

It's still the only total art work in existence.  Its production involves collecting gifted people from all available facets of endeavor, and then undergoing a preciously delicate fusion of all their talents in a manner that depends upon each of them giving of their best to one another.  Film also involves every facet of talent, but by definition the result can't communicate as spontaneously, and all raw human emotion must be processed through the hundred filters of the camera, the editing room, and the priorities of each behind-the-scenes artist. Filming depends almost purely on the kind of control and organization that until 100 years ago was a military prerogative.  It communicates to us only through the kind of precision that's planned and approved by overseers to the last detail, and then executed by underlings.  Film is a miracle of organization, but the organization can never be democratic, and that lack of free exchange can impede on what film is capable of expressing.  Film works by implication - we can read emotions into a person’s facial expressions, but direct emotional expression almost always comes across as stupid and awkward because there is no context to which the other elements of the production can respond in real time.  Film can imply the recesses of the human condition, and suggests those recesses better than any other medium, leaving our imagination to fill in where film stops.  But by its very nature, film is nearly incapable of make audiences feel along with the characters.  Nothing on a screen can equal the experience of watching subversive feelings and ideas communicated directly by people whose flesh and blood is directly in front of their audience.  Opera depends upon such spontaneity.   A specific phrasing by an oboeist may vary from night to night, and that might effect how the singer sings a different phrase, which might in turn affect how the entire ensemble phrases another section.  Great opera requires at least as much planning as great film, musical greatness requires decades of training and, usually, decades more of rejection.  But nearly the entire effort of great opera is put to the service of allowing audiences to feel precisely as the characters feel.  Music is by its nature democratic, and speaks a universal language accessible to anyone capable of hearing it.  It appeals directly to the heart. Theater is by its nature aristocratic, counting upon the audience to be schooled in language, conventions, and the suspension of disbelief.  It ultimately appeals to a people's brain.  Opera appeals to senses that are both more basic than music, and loftier than theater.  It pleas for empathy, and appeals to common humanity.  It asks us to view music not as a means to perceive our own emotions, but instead as a means to perceive the emotions of others and to understand the consciousness of another human being at a far more basic level than we could without opera.  It is an experience the makes the world at once a more enobled and more dangerous place than the world than the world would be without opera.  Opera makes the world more interesting.

Above all contemporary operas, there are Stephen Sondheim's:

For me, Sondheim is perhaps the giant among American artists of any form or any period - a natural transition figure between the exhausted old world of literature and acoustic music and the brave new world of cinema and electronically produced music. Obviously he achieved such a state by being the American lyricist par excellence.  He's totally without the sugary sentimentalism of most musical lyricists, or the metaphysical pretensions of even the best rock lyricists like Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen.  Sondheim's lyrics, for all their technical accomplishment, are about the genuine issues of real people, and his shows have that ability perhaps only shared among musicians only by Mozart to imply even more emotional depth than his songs express directly.  What we call in America the "Musical" has no peer among its creators at any point in its history, and opera has very few.  If Sondheim ultimately takes a back seat to Mozart, it's because great music is more powerful and universal than great lyrics.  Mozart's best librettos (the Da Ponte operas) are wonderful, but they're still functional.  And music - an art at which Sondheim is very skilled but without genius - is more expressive than lyrics can ever be.


Classicism for its own sake is necessary, but can kill originality:

There is a striking irony at the heart of the idea of referring to the music of previous eras which is so good that it must still be performed 'classical music.' There are few eras in human history which valued music less than the Classical Era. And there are a number of highly explicable reasons that of all the composers of all the thousands of composers working during the entire second half of the 18th century, most music lovers only remember the names of Haydn, Gluck, and Mozart. And it is because of the rules of composition so rigid that no one could break out of them.

Ascribing rules to proper composition is unfortunately necessary, but adherence to them still damages individuality in the extreme and the temptation to follow an anonymous template is something that most composers throughout history found themselves unable to resist. As a result, the classical era music was considered an 'inferior' artform, akin to the design of furniture and ceramics in its ability express artistic truth. As such, it was only those people who were able to swim against seemingly unswimmable tides and find ways to subvert the rigidity of these rules who succeeded in creating great music.

Likewise, in American Musical History, a series of mini-’classical’ periods helped us to create what we now know as the ‘song’ the ‘album’ and the ‘musical.’  Song writers of the 10's, jazz musicians of the 30's, rock and roll musicians in the 50’s, disco musicians of the 70's, and independent musicians of the 90's, found a way to create faultlessly crafted songs that are pleasing to the ear.  But beyond their ability to please us, they are almost uniformly of little value because they are interchangeable.  Any competent person can learn the rules of crafting music, but it takes an artist of real individuality and taste to create music of greater qualities than merely pleasing.  

It is entirely possible that posterity will regard the entire late-20th century as a similar sort of musical mausoleum during which music was considered a minor, subsidiary art for the purposes of housing other purposes - lyrics, dancing, perhaps even improvisation. Music to be listened for its own sake is almost an unheard of concept in our day. And therefore very, very few musicians of our day are able to craft music for its own sake that is listenable for the sake of critically distant appreciation. 

It is entirely possible that the greatest music of our historical period has yet to be written. Just as the template of the classical period enabled Romantics to build musical greatness out of the classical models of sonata form, symphonies, and reformed opera - perhaps the hit single, the LP-length album will provide the template for a musical era less encumbered by extra-musical limitations.

I adore High Romanticism, I have contempt for Decadence:

Music does not exist to take us out of ourselves, it exists to remind us of whom we already are.  It is THE expressive artform, and Romantics like Beethoven, Schubert, Schumann, Chopin and Verdi (and their descendents) wrote music that still compels because what they've written taps into our primal need for music to reveal emotions within us that we'd forgotten were there.  I believe that attempts to create music that attempts other goals almost inevitably ends in boredom.  The list of famous musicians who attempted to use music for something other than expression is unfortunately endless.

I adore Verdi, I have contempt for Wagner:

Verdi is the consumate example of an artist whose methods should fail, yet rarely do.  Wagner is just as consumate an example of an artist whose methods should succeed, yet rarely do.  Verdi is opera at its most irrational and spontaneous, Wagner is opera at its most rational and planned.  Verdi uses irrational means to depict the way people think and feel, Wagner uses rational means to depict people on their most irrational levels.  Like Mozart, Verdi is interested in depicting people as they are.   Wagner is interested only in depicting people as they should be.   His music appeals to the untamed id, and while we shouldn’t deny it’s occasional appeal, his music does not inspire love, it inspires infatuation.

I love Musical Nationalism:

Nationalism was as beneficial to music as it was noxious to politics. From approximately 1848-1917, musicians of every major European center attempted to recapture their own identities. The qualities which made the root music of their milleus unique.  The best of them created music that both belonged to their people, yet to only themselves.  Each of these great figures crafted a completely personal solution to the question "How do we make music our own?"  Between Offenbach, Franck, Bruckner, Smetana, the Strauss family, Brahms, Ponchielli, Borodin, Bizet, Mussorgsky, Tchaikovsky, Dvorak, Massenet, Arthur Sullivan, Faure, Rimsky-Korsakov, Duparc, Chausson, Leoncavallo, Puccini, Janacek, Elgar, Mahler, Hugo Wolf, Debussy, Delius, Mascagni, Richard Strauss, Glazunov, Sibelius, Nielsen, Dukas, Scott Joplin, Pfitzner, Lehar, Vaughan Williams, Holst, De Falla, Rachmaninov, Ives, Erno Dohnanyi, Ravel, Scriabin, Schoenberg, Respighi, Bloch, Bartok, Szymanowski, Stravinsky, Kodaly, Berg, Leo Weiner, George Butterworth, Heitor Villa-Lobos and dozens of others, a new, and personalized musical language (different in every case) was created that empowered whole new groups of people to be touched by music's greatness for the first time - people for whom hearing that some Germans named Mozart and Beethoven wrote good music simply wasn't enough and who never thought that the seamless interaction between melody, harmony, rhythm, and form would be enough to sustain interest.

I am indifferent to Modernism:

I believe in Direct Communication between musician and audience.  Classical music is a partnership of three equals: the composer, the performer, and the listener.  A satisfying relationship between them depends upon the continual good will of each party to the other.  It is perfectly acceptable for an immaculately performed work to be met with incomprehension from the audience.  What is not acceptable is for the incomprehension to be deliberately sought.  A listener must always be challenged but never ignored.  Our audiences pay our salaries, and they must never be made to feel that their investment in us reaps an unworthy dividend intentionally.  Similarly, I do not for a moment believe that Modernism is the reason for classical music's decline.  I do, however, believe that Modernism unwittingly facilitated a (not THE) musical decline by allowing composers to hide from direct communication behind esoterica.  History is packed with fine composers who used a difficult language to communicate difficult sentiments.  But these seemingly esoteric means were used for communication just as direct as any that came before.  For every overrated mediocrity who rose to prominence due to the 'difficult' label, there is a difficult composer who is entirely deserving of his approbation. For every Webern there was a Berg, for every Boulez a Messiaen, for every Stockhausen a Ligeti.  

I am not particularly fascinated by 'early music' movements:

Lazy man that I am, what interests me is the summit, not the process.  I do not doubt that there are countless masterpieces in the centuries Western Music History before Bach, and I've heard quite a few of them.  But I'm unwilling to sit for hours upon end listening to forgettable period pieces in order to find another gem for my personal collection.  I enjoy Italian music from the period of Monteverdi and Gesualdo just fine, and I like the Elizabethan composers even better.  But life is too short to let anyone who is not a paid researcher dig the island up for buried treasure.  I look forward to hearing anything worthwhile from what they find.

I feel very little affinity with any contemporary musical genre, including what we now call 'classical music':

I have no doubt that there are contemporaries with which I would feel more affinity, but there's a lifetime's worth of music to listen simply for the potential of finding them.  In nearly each genre, there are plenty of artists whose work I find myself admiring, and yet when I try to hear their complete output I find myself out of sympathy. The number of living creative musicians from the American Popular Tradition whose music I find great without reservation is a miniscule number: Sondheim and Randy Newman are the only two whose greatness I feel no need to question - and I value even these two geniuses more for their lyrics and diversity of expressive moods than for any musical sophistication.


I have complex feelings generally on American Music:

The history of American Music is not yet written.  We still haven't decided what constitutes musical quality, most European nations had another 700 years on us to decide that.  The greats of our era may have languored in obscurity for their entire careers, or they may as yet be young unknowns. Nevertheless, The History of American Music as it currently stands is a story full of unrealized talent, burned out talent, bad talent celebrated for bad reasons, synthetic talent, misdirected talent, and good talent overrated because nobody could figure out what greatness was.  I believe that any list of the greatest talents this country has ever known has to include could go on for days.  And yet they shine so greatly because they're like gold coins in an endlessly plowed field of shit.

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800 Words: The Survival of Les Miserables Part 4 (Part 1)

(The apocalyptic first two acts of Berlioz’s Les Troyens, about nothing less than the destruction of a civilization.)

I spent five-and-half hour at the movies on Saturday so that I could see the Metropolitan Opera’s live HD broadcast of Les Troyens around the world. The effort was made so that I might wrap my head around Berlioz’s crowning achievement, his five-act grand opera based on the Aeneid, a Roman epic so boring that Dante saw fit to abandon its author in Purgatory forever.

In a way I have never felt about many other operatic epics (hello Wagner!…), I left this opera absolutely convinced that Les Troyens is one of the greatest operas ever written. Even if for all its greatness, it still doesn’t reach that final level of humanity present in the two very greatest masters of the genre (only by my estimation) – Mozart and Janacek, it must surely take its place with the greatest work of other great ‘operatists’ like Verdi and Britten as being very nearly on the most sublime level of artistic achievement.

Les Troyens is an opera about nothing less than the sacrifices one must make for the constant vigilance of maintaining a civilization. The civilizations on display in Les Troyens may be distant from our own chronologically, yet they are all too similar to civilizations we know quite well. In Berlioz’s hands, it’s possible to see within the Troy of the Aeneid a thinly disguised vision of mid-19^th century France, still reeling from the shocks of the French Revolution, the First French Republic, the rise of Robespierre and Napoleon, the First French Empire and the Napoleonic Wars, the Bourbon Restoration and the Hundred Days, the Four Ordinances and the July Revolution,  the Charter of 1830 and the failed 1832 Revolution, the 1848 Revolution and the Second Republic, the Coup of 1851 and the Second Empire. Berlioz’s France was a land exhausted by war, intrigue, and bloodshed; all too willing to believe prematurely that an era of peace was at hand and all too willing to welcome any new development because of the colossal failures of the old paradigms. It is the France in which Les Miserables is set, rendered far more powerfully than a Cameron Mackintosh production ever could. And yet, we needn’t be too hard on poor Mackintosh (who’s worth $1.1 billion). In his hands, perhaps the Paris of Victor Hugo’s Les Miserables is no longer 1832 Paris. Perhaps it is the London of Margaret Thatcher.

Much, though not all, of what one finds in Les Troyens can be found in Les Mis (though much of what’s missing is the greatness). Like Les Mis, Les Troyens is a work of unfathomable pomp. Berlioz is a (perhaps THE) true romantic, less in love with emotional expression than in the grandeur which such expression provides. But dearest Hector can afford to be so outsize in his expression only because he is so completely grounded in classicism. Even in Berlioz’s most grandiose passages, he is fundamentally dealing in those tried-and-true musical and operatic principles: diatonic harmony, four-bar phrases, and singing which always advances the story. For all its romantic trappings, there’s little if anything here that Haydn and Gluck wouldn’t recognize.

(The last movement of the Symphonie Fantastique: music that may seem at first glance to operate by no law of the past. And yet, listen to that fugue – it’s pure Bach, church music for the Devil.)

Yet why is it that many still regard Berlioz as the greatest revolutionary the music world has ever seen? Berlioz’s most visceral moments may thrill as few (any?) musicans before or since, but they thrill in part because they are often put next to some of the most shockingly elegant, classically balanced music ever written. Next to Wagner, Berlioz’s music is tradition itself.

It is because Berlioz was such a classicist that he was such a revolutionary. Berlioz was the first great composer of living memory to realize that it was not revolutionary simply to put an individual stamp on the laws of classicism – even Beethoven operated within them. Berlioz was the first to understand that he could create more effective music if he sometimes broke out of the classical style altogether. Before Berlioz, the greatness of the ‘classical canon’ was not established, and the great composers of the eighteenth century were forced to forge their voices in a damp sea of popular culture mediocrity in which the music commonly heard was sufficiently bad to prevent musicians from imagining a way of making music that was completely different. Much like the great musicians of the 20^th century, the best that could be done by the greats of the 18^th century was to invent their own spins on rules so constricting that they crushed the individuality of all but the most resilient musical voices.

(The Love Scene from Romeo and Juliet - Berlioz can write the most visceral, most eye-poppingly dissonant music imaginable, but he can also write the most elegant, breathtakingly beautiful, music. The spirit is completely romantic, the style is almost totally classical.)

To those strong enough to prevail, it was a staggering creative blessing which initiated a rain of musical beauty without precedent or equal in human history before or since. I am firmly convinced that the greatest music ever written is still the great music composed around Vienna in the years between 1780 and 1830. Bach wrote the music of the angels, Wagner wrote the music of the demons, but Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, and Schubert wrote the music of us humans on earth – music which allows all our messy complexities and emotional entanglements to be heard as though our evolving emotional states can be seen through a mirror.

(Four brass bands stationed around the concert hall and a dozen bass drums conjure a vision of the apocalypse in Berlioz’s Requiem)

But it was only with Berlioz that a musical genius felt so saturated with great music of a particular type that he felt the need to invent a completely new way of composing. Whereas his greatest predecessors looked toward humanity, only with Berlioz did composers feel privileged enough to cast their gaze not only above just as centuries of composers felt the need to afix, but also down below. Whereas Mozart wanted a brief apparition of Hell so he could rid the world of Don Giovanni, Berlioz wrote the Symphonie Fantastique as a means to stay down there forever. Whereas Beethoven wanted to expand the capacities of the orchestra, Berlioz wrote a manifesto which stated his desire to expand the orchestra to 956 musicians. If Haydn wanted to write a few oratorios based upon great literature (including a Paradise Lost oratorio for which he never got the libretto he wanted), Berlioz devoted his entire musical career to capturing literary greatness in music. As such, the grand gestures of Berlioz’s music makes him perhaps the most ‘fun’ composer to pick up a pen. Nothing in Stravinsky or James Brown or The Rolling Stones can equal the visceral thrill of Berlioz’s imagination in full flight. And yet, there is something limiting about Berlioz’s greatness – something which can only capture the human heart when at its most uninhibited. There’s something within Berlioz's makeup which is only curious about people when they are at their most dramatic, and couldn’t care less about the mundanities of everyday life. As such, he misses all too much of the flavor of human experience. In some ways, he was like a kid who plays with dangerous toys.

This is an aspect of his music brought home to me again and again through Les Troyens. There are moments in this great opera which discuss mundanities, and those scenes are uniformly dull and only served to dampen the greatness of everything else. The absolute operatic masters, Mozart and Janacek, found ways to make the dull stuff interesting. As always, you have the feeling that Berlioz is just marking time, setting up the next splendid theatrical pageant.

But that alone was not quite as troubling to me as certain scenes which make me wonder if Berlioz was not interested at all in the humanity of his characters. At the end of Act II, Berlioz invoked a truly horrific scene - a group of Trojan women debate whether to commit mass suicide so as to prevent themselves from rape and slavery at the hands of the Greeks (or perhaps slavery as a means to rape, as living memory has shown us in both Bosnia and Rwanda can exist on a mass scale). The scene is unbelievably exciting, how could a discussion of such life-or-death issues set to music of genius not be? And yet one has to ask: is Berlioz enobling the suffering of such women in wartime, or is he trivializing them? Is this a serious invocation of the women’s terror and suffering, or is it merely a grandly theatrical tableau? It’s a tribute to Berlioz that the scene can invoke both, and yet the setting is too sensational to avoid wondering if this is just another splendid piece of theater that regards mass suicide, rape, and slavery as nice fodder to excite the audience.

(the end of Act II)

Berlioz was music’s ultimate outsider – a literary man, barely proficient at his two instruments, the guitar and flute, and accepted for study quite begrudgingly by the Paris Conservatoire. In 1830, the music world was still reeling from Beethoven’s shadow, and only a true outsider could emerge from it. The only composer who could compete with Beethoven was a composer stupid enough to know more about the world than about music.

Around Berlioz was the same sea of mediocrity which surrounded every great composer since Gluck. But Berlioz lived in Paris, which during the mid-19^th century had a far more dynamic culture than Vienna – a city which remained a backwater during that era in all regards except music and geopolitics. And in Paris, the kind of grandeur one finds in Berlioz was what moved mountains in all the arts.

 The grand opera of the 1830’s and 40’s had to keep up with the spectacle of modern literature. Just as the grand cinema of Steven Spielberg and George Lucas killed modern theatergoer’s desire for intimacy and wit, the desire for the sparkle and elegance of Rossini or Bellini was ultimately killed not by Grand Opera, but by the sheer grandeur of the vast theatrical scenes readers could find in the novels of Balzac, Hugo, Dumas, and Stendahl (to say nothing of Walter Scott in translation). Imitating Goethe’s example, romantic poets around Europe wrote verse dramas for a ‘theater of the mind.’ Modern opera was as yet a mere imitation of what people experienced in these other genres, and at first gave lots of operas with lots of noise and expense, but little quality (sound familiar?).

With the social utility which newly bourgeois families demanded of their art, and the universal language which democratic revolutions demanded, music was the single most important artform at the turn of the 19^thcentury, and no one should have taken offense when I declared that those years between 1780 and 1830 were a rain of musical beauty unprecedented in human history, and as yet unequaled. And even so, the effect which all this great democratic music to inflame the masses and entertain the bourgeois produced upon the world was Romanticism itself. The anthems of an age of liberty must be written in music, for music evokes passion, and Romanticism was passion’s eruption. The poets and philosophers of the extremely unimperial and relatively free late-18^thcentury Germany – Goethe, Kant, Hegel, Herder, Schiller, Hamann, Lessing, Kleist, Klopstock, Hoffman, Fichte, - awakened the Romantic urge to express more than the two constricting polls of an artist’s goal: to inspire worship and to entertain, which was then given passion to the masses by Beethoven. Meanwhile, turn of the 19^thcentury English poets like Byron, Keats, Wordsworth, Shelley, Blake, and Coleridge read their German predecessors,  and so did painters from both countries like Turner and Friedrich, who then passed their influence to early 19^thcentury French painters like Delacroix and Gericault, who then passed their influence to French writers and poets like Balzac, Hugo, Dumas, and Stendahl; who then passed on their influence to poets like Alfred de Musset, Gerard de Nerval, Alphonse de Lamartine, and Theophile Gautier.  Beethoven may have captured the world-spirit of the age, the other arts lay in wait like sleeping giants, and when Romanticism hit Europe, they pounced back upon the cultural scene. All music could do was to catch up.  

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800 Words The Survival of Les Miserables - Part 3

 (Bombastic, insipid, yet amazingly fun. Everything in Les Mis that seems new to musical theater is owed to its composer’s obvious knowledge of a predecessor hardly anyone performed after 1930. Like Les Mis, Meyerbeer couched his operas with liberal, anti-monarchist pieties in the midst of the most decadently expensive and exotic spectacles his audiences would ever see. In the 1840’s, Giacomo Meyerbeer was thought of as the greatest opera composer in the world. A century later, he was a footnote to history.)

Les Miserables is not just opera, it is French Grand Opera, the dumbest variety of theater ever perpetrated on an allegedly intelligent public. It is pure musico/theatrical junk food: insipid melodies, bombastic orchestration, one-dimensional characters, exotic settings, decadently lavish sets, and non-stop opportunities for celebrity singers to showboat. French Grand Opera is so stupid as to render you dumber for having heard it. Like any junk food, it’s wonderful in small doses, and can warp your brain if you consume too much of it. Just as how the French musical theater at the time Les Miserables is set took a turn from the Italian lightness of Rossini, Donizetti, and Bellini to the grand German bombast of Auber and Meyerbeer, the English-speaking music theater took a similar turn from the light (Jewish?) touch of Richard Rodgers and Stephen Sondheim to the grand “European” bombast of Andrew Lloyd Webber and Claude Michel Schonberg. Of all the eminent modern musicals, the two which pay the most extensive tribute to its French forerunner are Les Miserables, and its almost exact contemporary - The Phantom of the Opera.

(The last three minutes of this clip must be heard to be believed. It’s from The Italian Girl in Algiers, light opera from Rossini, the greatest composer of the Opera Comique/Opera Buffa style which dominated opera in the early 19^th century. Rather than the expensive spectacle of Meyerbeer, this music depends on lightness and the dexterous virtuosity of its performers. It was sometimes so cheap to produce that it could be written and rehearsed in the span of three weeks.)

The term used for such productions is the ‘mega-musical,’ which reached utter domination of Broadway and London's West End with the release of these two musicals between 1986 and 1987. In large part, the ‘mega-musical’ is the result of economics. The costs of putting on a show have escalated enormously in recent decades and the mega-musical is a direct result of 1970’s inflation. Before the 70’s, a piece of theater piece could run for a year and recoup all its costs. But in order to compensate the amount of money invested to pay the escalating costs of both salaries and materials, every new piece of musical theater has to be staged with an eye towards running indefinitely because it takes at least a three-year run for costs to recoup. And since it’s impossible for most shows to run more than three years, every new piece of Broadway and West End musical theater has to be staged in a manner that can recoup all the costs of the failed musicals that came before them. The musicals of the postwar era, which many still feel to be the Golden Age of Broadway, were already larger in scale than those which came before them. Anyone who's ever seen the ballroom scene of My Fair Lady or the Siamese Palace in The King and I can figure out that costs were already escalating by the alleged 'Golden Age.' Nevertheless, the true transition from regular musical to megamusical began in the early 70's with Kander & Ebb musicals like Cabaret and Chicago, or with the Marvin Hamlisch/Edward Kleban musical – A Chorus Line, all three of which were simply larger in scale than anything by Rodgers and Hammerstein (Oaklahoma, South Pacific, Carousel, The King & I) or the Gershwin Brothers (Porgy and Bess, Funny Face, Of Thee I Sing, Strike Up The Band). And it continued through the Cameron Mackintosh-produced British megahits of Andrew Lloyd Webber & Tim Rice (Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, Jesus Christ Superstar, Evita, Phantom of the Opera) and the Mackintosh produced French megahits of Alan Boulblil and Claude-Michel Schonberg (Les Miserables, Miss Saigon, Martin Guerre).

(Rodgers and Hammerstein wrote memorably beautiful songs by any standard, but the general optimism of their shows and their veneration for ‘Ordinary Americans’ makes them absolutely out of touch with the contemporary American experience. And thus their musicals have gone out of fashion. They will return.)

The loss is ours. Mega-musicals are simply an inferior product. Like the ‘Golden Age’ musicals, the mega-musicals are relentlessly middlebrow, meaning that they do little if anything to challenge the tastes of their respectably middle-class audiences (with a few glorious exceptions). But the difference is that during the ‘Golden Age’, many members of the English-speaking middle class were better educated than their children and grandchildren eventually became. They may not have had as many college degrees, but they had far greater ambitions for self-improvement and read far more voraciously. The result was that the content of middlebrow culture (mid-cult) used to be far more intelligent than it became in the generations that followed, and the culture which all Americans shared was not the corrosive lowbrow ldiversions of voyeuristic reality shows and tabloid magazines. It was what we now think of as Classic Movies, Golden Age Musical Theater, Reader’s Digest books, Life Magazine photography, and educational television - all of which were consumed by a general public of 10-20 million people around 1950’s America.  And in spite of the Movies’ unremitting dominance over 20^th century America, each of these industries was able to flourish without being subsumed by the American taste for cinematic spectacle. Cinema was still learning its own language, and could only do so by absorbing examples from the older arts.

Between roughly the early 1920’s when American Musical Theater emerged from its roots in the European Operetta, and the early 1970’s, when Music Theater began to assimilate the spectacles of cinema, music theater was an entirely independent, and uniquely American, tradition. Opera singers would take time off from the stage of the Metropolitan Opera to sing on Broadway, and Hollywood viewed Broadway as at very least an equal partner. Movie musicals aspired to have all the properties of the stage shows which audiences loved – not the other way around. Today’s mega-musicals are created for a gullible American public which now requires cinematic spectacle even in their music. By the 1990’s, musical theater producers could barely afford to put on show that wasn’t based on a commodity that wasn’t as known as a previous hit movie (Beauty and the Beast, The Lion King, Big, Billy Elliot, Catch Me If You Can, Dirty Rotten Scoundrels, The Color Purple, Once, Newsies, Ghost, Sister Act, Spider Man, Mary Poppins, The Full Monty, Footloose, Flashdance, Fame, Elf, Aladdin, The Producers, Young Frankenstein, Blazing Saddles, Peggy Sue Got Married, Hairspray, The Goodbye Girl, Legally Blonde, the Little Mermaid, Little Miss Sunshine, My Favorite Year, The Opposite of Sex, Saturday Night Fever, Shrek, The Wedding Singer, Woman on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown, Sweet Smell of Success, Sunset Boulevard, Spamalot, Edward Scissorhands, Smile, Reefer Madness, Nosferatu, Love Story, Honeymoon in Vegas, Heathers, High School Musical, Carrie, Pinocchio, Evil Dead, and Debbie Does Dallas).

Music theater is yet another American industry grown so expensive to produce that it teeters on the verge of collapse. Yet there are signs of hope: not least of which is the partial decamping of Trey Parker and Matt Stone from South Park to Broadway so they could make The Book of Mormon – though while I haven’t seen it live, the Original Cast Album of that musical is a surprisingly touching and humane treatment of the subject, and as intellectually ambitious as anything performed on the Broadway stage since the retirement of Stephen Sondheim… yes, it’s uneven and musically not at all distinguished, but of course it also helps that the show’s goddamned hysterical.

(The best hope for Broadway in twenty years? The greatest Broadway song in more than twenty years?)

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