Terry Teachout's Blog, page 40

TT: Life-sized

Paul Moravec, my operatic collaborator, sent me this excerpt from Julian Barnes' Levels of Life , in which Barnes describes what happened to him after his wife died:

I fell into a love of opera. For most of my life it had seemed one of the least comprehensible art forms. I didn't really understand what was going on...but most of all, I couldn't make the necessary imaginative leap. Operas felt like deeply implausible and badly constructed plays, with characters yelling in one another's faces simultaneously...Now it seemed quite natural for people to stand onstage and sing at one another, because song was a more primal means of communication than the spoken word--both higher and deeper...an art in which violent, overwhelming, hysterical and destructive emotion was the norm; an art which seeks, more obviously than any other form, to break your heart. Here was my new social realism.

What fascinates me about this passage is that I find it utterly alien to my own experience--though not for the reason that you may suspect. The truth is that opera has always seemed real and natural to me. I'm not an emotionally extravagant person by any means, but even so, there was never a time in my life when I had a problem with the notion that people might sing to one another on stage, or that it's "realistic" to expect to have your heart broken by life.

No doubt this has something to do with the fact that I became a musician right around the time that I entered puberty, and that I'd been listening closely and attentively to pop music long before that. While I didn't hear my first opera, La Bohème, until I was in high school, I was already well prepared for its emotional content by my previous experience of pop music.

As Nick Hornby famously put it in High Fidelity:

What came first--the music or the misery? Did I listen to music because I was miserable? Or was I miserable because I listened to music?...The unhappiest people I know, romantically speaking, are the ones who like pop music the most; and I don't know whether pop music has caused this unhappiness, but I do know that they've been listening to the sad songs longer than they've been living the unhappy lives.

This is both clever and, up to a point, valid. On the other hand, I discovered as I grew older that both pop music and opera do in fact portray the pains and pleasures of love in a heightened but nonetheless recognizably real way. The key difference between the two art forms is that opera embeds this heightened mode of expression in a theatrical framework. Beyond that, though, I'm not so sure that there's much of a difference between what Frank Sinatra was doing when he sang "One for My Baby" and what Maria Callas was doing when she sang "Vissi d'arte."

Now that I'm in the business of helping to create new operas, I feel that an indispensable part of my job is figuring out how to get this point across to contemporary listeners who suffer from the mistaken notion that opera is somehow "irrelevant" to them. Unless you have no inner life at all--unless you have no notion of what it feels like to have your heart broken by love or loss or treachery--it couldn't be more relevant. All you have to do is open your eyes and ears and be fully present in the moment, and what you see and hear on stage will make the most powerful kind of sense imaginable, in exactly the same way that a Shakespeare play can make perfect sense to a viewer who doesn't fully understand the language that the actors are speaking.

How to persuade the stubborn skeptic that this is so? That's not a question to be answered in a sentence or two. But Julian Barnes points the way.

UPDATE: Paul found the Barnes quote in this essay , which is also worth reading.

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Frank Sinatra sings "One for My Baby," by Harold Arlen and Johnny Mercer:



Maria Callas and Tito Gobbi perform a scene from Giacomo Puccini's Tosca at Covent Garden in 1964:

TT: Lookback

From 2003:

I was a small-town second-grader on November 22, 1963. My teacher, Jackie Grant, told the class that the president had been shot and killed, and then we all went home. For me, home was a block away from the classroom door, but my mother still drove to the school to pick me up, and my family spent much of the rest of the long weekend watching television. That much I remember, but I have no direct recollections of any of the TV images, except for this: I went to the kitchen to get a glass of milk just before Oswald was shot, and returned to the living room to find chaos on the screen.

That's it. Not many memories, and no trauma at all. Which makes sense: I was born in 1956, the exact midway point of the baby boom, making me just too young to have been marked by the JFK assassination or to have served in Vietnam. In both of those respects, we younger baby boomers are more like Gen-Xers than our older brothers and sisters....

Read the whole thing here .

TT: Almanac

"There's nothing more, well, naked than writing a play. If you write a book and the critics pan it, you can comfort yourself by believing that you are a misunderstood genius, but when most of an audience walks out on you after the first act, it's your own fault, and it's one of the worst in the realm of human experience."

John P. Marquand, Women and Thomas Harrow

TT: See me, hear me (cont'd)

I'll be hitting the road on Wednesday morning for two more Duke -related out-of-town appearances:

• On Wednesday at 6:30 I'll be lecturing about Duke at the Kansas City Public Library's central library, which is at 14 W. 10th St. Admission is free.

For more information, go here .

• On Sunday at 1:30 I'll be joining three other authors for a panel discussion at Miami Book Fair International. My fellow panelists are Deborah Solomon (American Mirror: The Life and Art of Norman Rockwell), Brian Jay Jones (Jim Henson), and R. Clifton Spargo (Beautiful Fools: The Last Affair of Zelda and Scott Fitzgerald).

For more information, go here .

TT: All caught up

Given the recent frenzy of activity that I've been reporting in this space, I'm sure you weren't surprised to find that several weeks went by without my posting anything new in the right-hand column. Fortunately, things calmed down just a little bit over the weekend, thus allowing me to completely update the Top Five and "Out of the Past" modules with brand-new postings. Take a look!

Special note should be taken by Christmas shoppers who've already purchased copies of Duke: A Life of Duke Ellington for their nearest and dearest (and if not, why not?) but have additional unfilled slots on their gift lists. Click on the links and order with impunity.

TT: Just because

A 1964 commercial for Muriel Cigars, featuring Edie Adams and Stan Getz:



(This is the latest in a series of arts-related videos that appear in this space each Monday and Wednesday.)

TT: Almanac

"What is always overlooked is that although the poor want to be rich, it does not follow that they either like the rich or that they in any way want to emulate their characters which, in fact, they despise. Both the poor and the rich have always found precisely the same grounds on which to complain about each other. Each feels the other has no manners, is disloyal, corrupt, insensitive--and has never put in an honest day's work in its life."

Elaine Dundy, Elvis and Gladys

GRAPHIC NOVEL

Alison Bechdel, Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic . Given the (understandable) fuss that's being made over the new Lisa Kron-Jeanine Tesori musical version of Fun Home, it strikes me that those who haven't read this powerfully poignant 2006 comic-book memoir about the suicide of her homosexual father should do so at once and see what they've been missing. The dry, detached candor and jagged emotional edges of Bechdel's first-person narration are a big part of what made Fun Home so distinctive, and they're largely missing from the softer, sentimentalized stage version. The real Fun Home is a much tougher and far more impressive piece of work (TT).

GALLERY

John Marin: The Breakthrough Years (Meredith Ward Fine Art, 44 E. 74th St., up through Jan. 11). Subtitled "From Paris to the Armory Show," this exhibition of twenty-eight watercolors painted between 1904 and 1914 by the pioneering American modernist shows with breathtaking clarity how he broke free from received ideas about representation, assimilated the language of European cubism, and forged his own distinctively American style. Once again, a Manhattan gallery does what one of New York's art museums should have done--and gets it exactly right (TT).

BOOK

The Leonard Bernstein Letters (Yale, $38). A collection of 650 letters to and (mostly) from the conductor-composer. The list of correspondents is spectacularly wide-ranging--it includes everyone from Aaron Copland to Harpo Marx--and the contents shine an unsparingly bright light on Bernstein's ever-complex interior life. Indispensable reading for anyone interested in American music in the twentieth century (TT).