Joseph Horowitz's Blog, page 5

The Bernstein Story Not Told in “Maestro” – Take Two

J. Edgar Hoover

When Jamie Bernstein told me about her father’s FBI file – and its disclosure of hate mail and picketers generated by the FBI in 1970, in the wake of the Bernsteins’ Black Panthers fundraiser — I was impressed but unsurprised. A year before, J. Edgar Hoover had called the Black Panther Party “the greatest threat to the internal security of the country.” The FBI responded with a covert counter-intelligrance program (COINTELPRO) of surveillance and infiltration.

I claim no expertise about the Black Panthers. But I did live through the sixties and seventies, including momentous years in Berkeley and Oakland. Before that, in 1970, I graduated from Swarthmore College, where my last two years were tumultuous. One day a gentleman in his thirties turned up and participated in a meeting at which he ludicrously suggested that our student demonstrations were insufficiently violent. Nobody paid any attention to him or thought twice about it. Some time later a nearby FBI office was raided in Media, Pennsylvania. Those files disclosed FBI agents infiltrating Swarthmore student meetings both on and off campus. We also learned that the campus switchboard operator was an FBI informant.

Someone should write a book about the relationship between the intelligence community and the American arts during the Cold War. At Tanglewood, an informant — another switchboard operator — fingered Aaron Copland with no idea who he was. The same was true of Joe McCarthy, when he interrogated Copland in 1953; his ignorance was risible.

My book on the cultural Cold War, The Propaganda of Freedom, is a study in mutual incomprehension. The White House, the CIA, and the State Department relied upon Nicolas Nabokov as their in-house expert on the state of the arts in Soviet Russia. As General Secretary of the Congress for Cultural Freedom, Nabokov enjoyed access to limitless funding, covertly furnished by the CIA. He also wrote widely about Soviet music. He was a minor composer of consequence, a cosmopolite, a charming and well intentioned raconteur. He was also a man disinherited by the Russian Revolution and traumatized by exile. He could only view the Soviet Union as a cultural and intellectual wasteland. He particularly demonized Dmitri Shostakovich, whom he considered a lesser composer than his friend Vittorio Rieti. And — notwithstanding the achievements of Shostakovich or Tarkovsky or Solzhenitsyn — this became the counter-factual American propaganda line: that absent “freedom,” creativity was inconceivable.  Any reasonably informed observer of Soviet music in those years (I even include myself) could have told the CIA that Nabokov’s Orwellian USSR was a fantasy. Soviet Russia was no North Korea.

Relying on Nicolas Nabokov for insight into Soviet culture was kindred to relying on Cuban exiles for advice on the Bay of Pigs invasion. Or thinking that the Bernsteins were a threat to American wellbeing.

The Bernstein Story Not Told in “Maestro” – His Prophetic Disenchantment with What America Had Become

Leonard Bernstein’s musical odyssey – in some ways, not unlike the marital odyssey dramatized in the film Maestro – was ignited by ecstatic expectations that proved unsustainable.

He eagerly anticipated a Great American Symphony, a new American species of musical theater, and a New World version of the New York Philharmonic. An iconic American journey, it yielded bitterness and disappointment, relieved by an unanticipated second musical home abroad: in Vienna. 

Bernstein’s alienation proved prophetic: he all too well perceived the unravelling of the America in which he had once placed enthralled hopes.  

“I don’t think anyone should doubt for a second the weight on Lennie’s soul,” comments  Thomas Hampson in my latest “More than Music” installment on NPR: The Bernstein Odyssey. Having sung with Bernstein more than any other baritone, Hampson bears witness that “when Lennie was in Vienna, the city stopped.” And he minces no words about what Bernstein increasingly encountered at home: “I think we are in dangerous times for people seeking enrichment to live. That may sound glorious and grand — but I’m a student of Leonard Bernstein. . . .  And I think to understand Lennie’s reaction in the sixties . . . would be terribly illuminating for people today.”

Bernstein’s elder daughter Jamie remembers her father’s response to the assassination of John F. Kennedy, whose White House he visited, then to the deaths of Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King. “My parents started to feel really pessimistic about the United States. And then we were in the Nixon Administration, and we had the Vietnam War. . . . My father got very discouraged about the state of the union – and that sense of despair did not leave him for the rest of his life.” 

A singular chapter in Bernstein’s American odyssey was a once very famous article by Tom Wolfe in New York Magazine. Coining the withering term “radical chic,” it savagely ridiculed the Bernsteins for hosting a fundraiser for the Black Panthers. Charlotte Curtis, the society editor of the New York Times, chimed in with a caustic piece of her own. Jamie Bernstein remembers:

“And then, after that, there was an editorial! In the New York Times! An editorial, lambasting Leonard Bernstein and his wife for hosting that event. And the subtext was that the Black Panthers were considered by Jewish people to be ‘anti-Zionist.’. . . Friends of my parents and relations of my family were furious at my mother . . . The blowback went on and on. The hate mail started to arrive. The Jewish Defense League was picketing outside our building. . . . And it was only decades later, in the 1980s, that through the Freedom of Information Act my father was able to view his own FBI file, which turned out to be 800 pages long. . . . It was in those pages that we discovered that all that hate mail had been generated by the FBI, and all those JDL protests outside our building were bristling with FBI plants. And this all came sstraight out of J. Edgar Hoover’s playbook – it was his dream come true to pit Jews against Blacks. . . . My mother and father were just sitting ducks.”

Another facet of Bernstein’s despair – which I don’t explore on the NPR show – was the fate of music, both popular and “serious.” He felt it had lost its way. This was the topic of his 1973 Norton Lectures, “The Unanswered Question,” the question being: Whither music in our time? When I first encountered these six talks I was impatient with Bernstein’s discomfort with non-tonal music; having been well indoctrinated in 12-tone compositional practice, my reaction was: Get over it. No longer. Bernstein was, again, prescient. His essential premise, I now realize, was that musical creativity – that any creativity – must not cancel the past, that to start wholly anew is a fool’s errand. He was equally skeptical of Stravinsky’s denial that music can express something other than itself. 

It took some nerve, in 1973, to confront Schoenberg and Stravinsky as Bernstein did. He also, in 1966, celebrated the birthday of Dmitri Shostakovich on a nationally televised Young People’s Concert, fearlessly commenting: “In these days of musical experimentation, with new fads chasing each other in and out of the concert halls, a composer like Shostakovich can be easily put down. After all he’s basically a traditional Russian composer, a true son of Tchaikovsky—and no matter how modern he ever gets, he never loses that tradition. So the music is always in some way old-fashioned—or at least what critics and musical intellectuals like to call old-fashioned. But they’re forgetting the most important thing—he’s a genius: a real authentic genius, and there aren’t too many of those around any more.”

Bernstein concluded his Norton lectures with an obligatory blast of optimism – not least because he believed his own compositional magnum opus lay ahead. “There is a general bubbling and rejoicing and brotherliness among composers that would have been unthinkable ten years go. It’s like the beginning of a new period of fresh air and fun.” It never happened. And Bernstein’s own 1983 opera A Quiet Place proved a dark place. The dialectical tension between present and past, long the mainspring for musical creativity, had long gone slack. In Stravinsky and Schoenberg, this conundrum, differently manifest, ran its fatal course. Today’s makeshift music — I am thinking of a variety of temporarily popular operas and concert works — is a further consequence.

To close my NPR program, I asked Thomas Hampson and Jamie Bernstein, and also the conductor JoAnn Falletta: “What is the significance, today, of the Bernstein odyssey?” 

“I feel for people of my time, he will always be a hero, there’s no one who will ever replace him,” said Falletta. “For younger people I’m less sure – and I feel badly about that. I mention Leonard Bernstein and I see a kind of blank look from teenagers. And that is such a pain to me, a pain in my heart.”

Jamie Bernstein has created “a dog and pony show” – an hour-long presentation, which she hosts, titled “Leonard Bernstein: Citizen Artist”: “And in this presentation I explain to young musicians why Leonard Bernstein still matters. And that it was because he used his musicmaking in every way he could think of to try to make the world a better place.”

For Hampson, forgetting who Leonard Bernstein was symptomizes a calamitous failure of American cultural memory. I can only agree. Sampling Bernstein’s 1959 televised concert from Moscow, I observe – referencing a story explored in my book The Propaganda of Freedom — that Bernstein’s New York Philharmonic tour to Soviet Russia became a turning point in American foreign policy.

“Some at the State Department were anxious about this initiative. And in fact, Bernstein proved wholly irrepressible, completely unpredictable. He also proved an exemplary cultural ambassador, extolling American and Russian music both. He shook the hand of Dmitri Shostakovich, the leading Soviet composer, who was at the time a target of CIA-sponsored defamation. He befriended invited Boris Pasternack, the eminent Soviet novelist, who was a target of Russian defamation. And, in an inimitable televised Moscow concert, he insisted that, through music, Russians and Americans could discover a common bond.

“In a matter of days, Bernstein superseded a decade of American cultural propaganda, funded by the CIA, demonizing the Soviet Union as a cultural backwater. Beginning with Bernstein, a new policy of cultural exchange with Soviet Russia, applying the arts as an instrument of mutual understanding, became an indispensable diplomatic tool. 

“If you think back to what Bernstein achieved in the Soviet Union in 1959, and ask yourself who could do something like that today – really no one comes to mind. We lack national spokespersons in the arts. We lack ‘citizen artists.’ We increasingly live in an arts vacuum.”

Challenged to end the show on a positive note, I add:

“All his life, Leonard Bernstein would ricochet between elation and distress. It’s in his music, it’s in his conducting. It’s in his letters, which document ecstasies of fulfillment in alternation with  ‘big, soggy depressions.’ It’s a Mahlerian duality. And here’s a Mahlerian remedy: Bernstein’s signature moment from his signature performance of his signature Mahler symphony — the symphony he led as a 29-year-old Wunderkind with the Boston Symphony, that he led on national television in response to President Kennedy’s assassination, that I heard him lead in April 1987 at Lincoln Center with the New York Philharmonic – a legendary performance of the Resurrection Symphony. 

“The moment in question is an apocalyptic fanfare, heralding a pageant of redemption. At Lincoln Center, in 1987, it was unforgettable. And unforgettably slow. So slow as to demand maximum emotional investment – from Bernstein, from the orchestra, from the audience. 

“You really had to be there.”

That 1987 Mahler/Bernstein fanfare ensues. It still sounds apocalyptic. 

LISTENING GUIDE:

To hear “The Bernstein Odyssey,” click here.

00:00 — JH shamelessly imitates Leonard Bernstein

3:50 — Thomas Hampson sings a Mahler song and recalls learning it with LB

8:30 — JoAnn Falletta remembers LB teaching at Juilliard

14:20 — Hampson sings “Lonely Town” and explains why it’s “very Lenny”

17::00 — Bernstein in Moscow

21:00 — Bernstein attempts to Americanize the New York Philharmonic

23:45 — Hampson on Bernstein in Vienna: “The city stopped.”

27:00 — Hampson sings and discusses Bernstein’s Yiddish wedding song

29:55 — Bernstein and Mahler’s Ninth

36:00 — Jamie Bernstein on her father’s estrangement from the US

38:30 — JoAnn Falletta, Jamie Bernstein, and Thomas Hampson on the significance of Bernstein today

42::00 — To end on a high note: the signature moment from Bernstein’s signature performance of Mahler 2

For more on the Bernstein odyssey, click here.

For a “More than Music” broadcast remembering Bernstein the cultural diplomat, click here.

For an archive of “More than Music” programs, click here.

“Mahlerei” — As Inspired by Zero Mostel

For a period of three decades, I have made music with the renegade bass trombonist David Taylor. These sessions began with sight-reading Beethoven cello sonatas in my living room. They accelerated with our mutual discovery that certain Schubert songs – especially Doppelganger — potently inflamed Taylor’s instrument. A few years ago, I threw caution to winds and turned the Scherzo of Mahler’s Fourth Symphony — a whirling waltz/scherzo — into a sui generis concertino for bass trombone and chamber ensemble: Mahlerei.

Mahlerei was premiered at the Kennedy Center and praised in the Washington Post. I subsequently invited Daniel Schnyder to revise the accompanying parts. The resulting final version (the video above) was brilliantly realized at last May’s Colorado Mahlerfest, with a conductor (Kenneth Woods) and instrumentalists steeped in Mahler style. 

My initial inspiration was an insane performance in my head of Zero Mostel singing Mahler’s scherzo in Yiddish. What I wound up with, I would say, is more “Jewish” than the original, and also funnier. But it purports to additionally capture the radiance and pathos of its source.  

In a nutshell: I have stitched together the various tunes Mahler distributes among his players and fashioned a relentless trombone excursion. Mahler’s movement tracks an unusual trajectory. A bustling perpetual-motion waltz in C minor somehow yields a celestial D major vision. In Mahlerei, the bass trombone is an irritant whose intrusions are magically subdued by D major angels. I have fashioned the solo part accordingly – including a choreographed exit near the end.

In a New York Sun review of Mahler conducting the New York Philharmonic, W. J. Henderson – one of the great names in American musical journalism – memorably wrote: ”We used to think that Beethoven’s scoring was tolerably simple and that most of it was purely harmonic. . . . But we are rapidly learning that it is quite as contrapuntal as Bach’s and that what we foolishly supposed were mere thirds or sixths in chord formations are in reality individual melodic voices which must be brought out by exploring conductors.” 

And so it is in Mahler’s scherzo. Fashioning my concertino, I became acutely aware that Mahler foregrounds a concatenation of individual voices – including differentiated first and second violin parts that had never before registered in my ear. Using single strings accentuates this barnyard dimension – especially when realized by instrumentalists and a conductor who understand Mahler’s intent.

David Taylor and I are currently preparing a version of Schubert’s Winterreise. You can sample our Schubert here. And for trombonists or conductors interested in Mahlerei, I possess scores and parts at hand. Have at it.

David and I gratefully acknowledge Ken Woods’ exemplary advocacy, and his Colorado Mahlerfest band:

Caroline Eva Chin and Sophia Ann Szokolay, violins

Lauren Spaulding, viola

Parry Karp, cello

Michael Geib, bass

Hannah Porter Occena, flute

Jordan Pyle, oboe

Gleyton Pinto, clarinet

Sarah Fish, bassoon

Lydia Van Dreel, horn

Jack Barry, Matthew Dupree, Adam Vera, percussion

Brian du Fresne, harmonium

Michael Karcher-Young, piano

Mahler, New York, and Cultural Memory

“It is always instructive to read European newspapers on American affairs. It gives us the much needed opportunity to see ourselves as others see us – with their eyes shut. . .  Do we not all reek with malodorous lucre? Are we not a nation of tradesmen?”?

Thus W. J. Henderson, in the New York Sun (March 8, 1908), on the arrival of Gustav Mahler in New York to conduct at the Metropolitan Opera. Henderson – for half a century, a great name in music journalism — was commenting on exaggerated Viennese accounts of Mahler’s financial terms of engagement at the Met. He added:

“The coming of the new interpreter of German operas was awaited with interest and received with pleasure, but there was no public excitement. The stock market was not affected.”

Henderson was merely correct. New York critics knew far more about musical Vienna than Vienna – including Mahler himself – knew of musical New York. When Mahler reported “absolute incompetence” at the Met, he did not realize that Heinrich Conried, the impresario who hired him, was a clownish successor to the Met regimes of Anton Seidl and Maurice Grau, during which New York boasted ensembles of German and Italian vocal artists that no European house could match. And when Mahler called his New York Philharmonic “a real American orchestra – talented and phlegmatic,” he had no idea what he was talking about. The premiere American orchestra was the Boston Symphony, whose conductors had already included Arthur Nikisch. Mahler’s Philharmonic was a shaky aggregation, a pathetic sequel to the concert orchestra Seidl had led.

My novel The Marriage: The Mahlers in New York (also published in German as Die Mahlers in New York) attempts to set the record straight. The most recent (full-page) German review, in the Frankfurter Rundschau, calls it “an important addition to the European Mahler literature. In contrast to Mahler, Joseph Horowitz paints an extremely positive picture of the American musical scene.”

In fact, I would not be at all surprised if my revisionist take on Mahler in America more impacts abroad, where cultural history doubtless retains some degree of vigor. In the US, the institutional history of classical music in America has never excited much interest among scholars. Even our orchestras and opera companies – including the Met, the New York Philharmonic, and the Boston Symphony – show little awareness of their own past achievements.

I am reminded that the current Sesquicentenary of Charles Ives is, at this moment, more celebrated in Europe than in the US. Fifty years ago, when Ives turned 100, Leonard Bernstein and Michael Tilson Thomas were prominent celebrants, and a major Ives Centenary conference was mounted by H. Wiley Hitchcock and Vivian Perlis. Nothing like that is transpiring in 2024 – excepting four Ives festivals initiated via the NEH Music Unwound consortium which I am fortunate to direct. 

My next NPR “More than Music” feature, scheduled for August 22, will exlore the musical odyssey (rather than the marital travails) of Leonard Bernstein. Even Bernstein is little remembered; young American musicians don’t know his name. And Bernstein himself was increasingly alienated by what had become of the America in which he had once placed enthralled hopes. The baritone Thomas Hampson, who sang with Bernstein as much as anyone did, comments on my upcoming broadcast:

 “I think we [in the US] are in this phase, we are in this time, when things of worth and value that we treasure are easily forgotten, and not learned from. There seems to be this maniacal preoccupation with forward and future, and in the business world steady growth and steady profit. And you kind of have to wonder where the common good sits, and where the collective good sits. And the arts – they’re about the pursuit of happiness in our beautiful Declaration of Independence, they’re about the contented life, about the realization of being human. I think we are in dangerous times for people seeking enrichment to live. That may sound glorious and grand — but I’m a student of Leonard Bernstein. I don’t think anyone should doubt for a second the weight on Lennie’s soul. And I think to understand Lennie’s reaction in the sixties to all of that would be terribly illuminating for people today.”

When Charles Ives Wrote a Song as Magnificent as Brahms’s

In the remarkable absence of any suitable acknowledgement of the Charles Ives Sesquicentenary by our nation’s slumbering orchestras, it has fallen to the National Endowment for the Humanities to celebrate the 150th birthday of America’s greatest creative genius in the realm of classical music.

In its latest embodiment, the NEH Music Unwound consortium, which I have directed for a dozen years, is mainly dedicated to four Ives festivals. The first of these has just transpired at the Brevard Music Festival. Music Unwound contextualizes topics in American classical music. (My NPR “More than Music” programs, which do the same, are also NEH-funded via Music Unwound.) The video clip posted above samples “Charles Ives: A Life in Music,” which uses Ives’s songs to tell his story.  

This little theater piece, which I created a decade ago, features a supreme Ives interpreter: the baritone William Sharp. The excerpt here posted, from the July 15 Brevard performance (with pianist Deloise Lima and actress Allison Pohl), juxtaposes two settings of Hermann Allmers’ poem “Feldeinsamkeit” – the famous one by Brahms (1882) and another by the 23-year-old Yale composition student Charles Ives that, incredibly, is just as good.

This exercise deserves to banish the notion – once pervasive — of Ives the gifted dilettante or “primitive.” As Ives himself noted (a reminiscence quoted by Bill prior to singing the two songs), his setting is quite different from Brahms’. The “active tranquility” of Nature, here evoked, became a signature Ives trope. Ives’s Schumanesque piano accompaniment incorporates active particles of harmonic grit not to be found in Schumann. 

Ives pertinently wrote: “To think hard and deeply and to say what is thought, regardless of consequences, may produce a first impression . . . of great muddiness . . . The mud may be a form of sincerity.” He endorsed the “mud and scum” Ralph Waldo Emerson extolled in his poem “Music”: “There alway, alway something sings.” “Feldeinsamkeit,” “Remembrance,” “The Housatonic at Stockbridge,” “Thoreau,” and other outdoor reveries are in Ives invariably discordant, however faintly. The water, the ether are never wholly limpid; harmonic and textural impurities abound. Ives’ visions of river and meadow, woods and mountain-top are layered with Emersonian mud and scum: active particles of sound; actives particles of memory. It speaks volumes that Ives’ favorite painter was J. M. W. Turner, whose obscurely layered landscapes resist clarity.

The poetic text for “Feldeinsamkeit,” in English, reads: 

I rest at peace in tall green grass
And gaze steadily aloft,
Surrounded by unceasing crickets,
Wondrously interwoven with blue sky.

The lovely white clouds go drifting by
Through the deep blue, like lovely silent dreams;
I feel as if I have long been dead,
Drifting happily with them through eternal space.

The Brevard festival also included a contextualized performance of Ives’ Concord Piano Sonata (magnificently played by Michael Chertock) and of the transcendent finale of his Second String Quartet. And there was an orchestral concert (led by Delta David Gier) featuring Ives’s Second Symphony prefaced by some of the songs, familiar and not, he adapts. My terrific partner in these presentations was J. Peter Burkholder, our pre-eminent Ives scholar. 

Upcoming are Music Unwound Ives festivals via Indiana University/Bloomington (September 30 – August 8), Bard College’s The Orchestra Now/Carnegie Hall (November 9, 16-17, 21), and the Chicago Sinfonietta/Illinois State University (March 19-22, 2025). 

The first of these – including the premiere of a “visual presentation” of Ives’ Three Places in New England created by Peter Bogdanoff – will be the most ambitious Music Unwound festival ever mounted, with some three dozen events; for complete IU program information, click here.

In addition, The American Scholar will be creating an online Ives Sequicentenary program companion. And I’ll be dedicating my November NPR “More than Music” show to Charles Ives, born 150 years ago this October. 

Stravinsky in Exile — A New View

The current issue of the New School’s quarterly journal “Social Research” is dedicated to the topic “Exile.” I’m pleased to have contributed something on Igor Stravinsky – suggesting that his Symphony in Three Movements, composed in Los Angeles in response (sort of) to World War II, “complexly monograms its composer’s layer upon layer of identity,” disclosing “a condition of exile equally challenged and resourceful.”

I add: “Had Stravinsky less cause for resilience—had there been no Bolshevik Revolution, no world upheaval—he might have left a musical legacy less intriguingly textured with self-denial and reinvention, less mediated by rationalization, more sustained in the elemental energies powering his initial creative surge [i.e., The Firebird, Petrushka, The Rite of Spring, Les noces.]”

You can access the full article here. You can access the full issue (I recommend Jacques Rupnik on “Milan Kundera’s Liberating Exile” in Paris) here. What follows is a sizable chunk of my article (which I wrote as a sequel to my book “The Propaganda of Freedom: JFK, Shostakovich, Stravinsky, and the Cultural Cold War”) if you’d like an overview:

In the decades after World War I, Stravinsky was considered by many the supreme contemporary composer, transcending nationalism, articulating or adapting to changing aesthetic fashions. But the waning of modernism invites new perspectives on Stravinsky, on the effects of exile. . . .

In his polemics, Stravinsky in exile insisted on the liberating autonomy of the creative act. But the tangled history of the Symphony in Three Movements suggests a composition process that was less than fluent. The [New York] Philharmonic’s “victory symphony” commission . . . proved surprisingly (if secretly) inspirational. . . .

It would not be a stretch to treat Ingolf Dahl’s program note for the Symphony in Three Movements as one in a series of “assisted” Stravinsky writings, alongside the autobiography, the Poetics, and the conversations with [Robert] Craft. The combative, defensive tone is all too familiar. A pregnant example is Dahl’s insistence that it will “one day be universally recognized” that Stravinsky’s Hollywood home, “regarded by some as an ivory tower,” was “close to the core of a world at war.” And yet if the Symphony in Three Movements is partly to be regarded as an engaged response to World War II, its ivory-tower impersonality becomes an incongruously defining trait. The wartime output of others—think of Prokofiev’s Seventh Piano Sonata (1942), Schoenberg’s Ode to Napoleon (1942), Arthur Honegger’s Third Symphony (1946)—is enraged, mournful, consoling. Stravinsky’s militancy, however stirring, is merely descriptive.

Shostakovich is the obvious antipode. He directly experienced the horror of the siege of Leningrad. His musical response, in the Seventh Symphony, was exigent, driven, tidal—and fundamentally interior. . . . Shostakovich himself insisted—pace Stravinsky—upon the moral properties of music.

This reading of Shostakovich as a moral beacon was little heard in the West during the ensuing Cold War decades, when Russia again became the enemy. The Cold War cultural mantra emanating from the White House and the State Department—what I have termed the “propaganda of freedom”—was that only “free artists” in “free societies” could produce lasting artistic achievements. Shostakovich, accordingly, was dismissed as a Soviet stooge, a shackled musical anachronism. Stravinsky, concomitantly, became a free-world icon. . . .

In 1954 Shostakovich was afforded a rare opportunity to share his own view of artistic “freedom” with the New York Times. As he was speaking directly to Harrison Salisbury, the Times’s Moscow bureau chief, the words were his—as “passed by Soviet censors.” He said: “The artist in Russia has more ‘freedom’ than the artist in the West.” The reason? He enjoys, Salisbury paraphrased, “what might be described as a ‘principled’ relationship to society and to the party,” versus a “haphazard” relationship to society, as in Western nations. He is accorded “status” and “a defined role.” . . . 

Salisbury was impressed by Shostakovich’s “honesty and sincerity.” It was too much for his editors, who published a “contrasting view” alongside Salisbury’s “Visit with Dmitri Shostakovich.” This was “Music in a Cage” by one Julie Whitney, who proposed as a “very serious question” whether Soviet composers “might not use their talent more successfully if they were out of the ‘gilded’ cage in which Shostakovich declares they are so content.” Doubtless there were many occasions when Shostakovich found “too much attention” being paid to his music. And there were times when it was not “played all over Russia.” Conversely, “too little attention” is plainly something Stravinsky sometimes experienced in the United States. If he had no one telling him what to do, and why, he was susceptible to feeling ignored, unappreciated, misunderstood. In truth, whether or not an “ivory tower,” his fastidiously self-contained Los Angeles study at times conferred “too much freedom”—a freedom not to matter. . . .

Of the prominent Russian artists who wound up in the United States, two who “became Americans” were the conductor Serge Koussevitzky, who established Tanglewood as an indispensable laboratory for American music, and the choreographer George Balanchine, who Americanized Russian classical ballet. At the opposite extreme was the pianist and composer Sergey Rachmaninoff, who (notwithstanding an affinity for the jazz genius Art Tatum) remained incorrigibly Russian in his habits and musical predilections. More than Koussevitzky or Balanchine, more than Rachmaninoff, more than was readily apparent, Stravinsky was at all times pulled in multiple directions. Responding to an invitation from the New York Philharmonic—an invitation irresistible yet confounding, even obtuse—he first culled musical pages from a drawer. Then—as he would eventually disclose with tortured caveats—he resorted for inspiration to newsreels of World War II. The resulting “symphony,” not really a symphony, proved both exhilarating and curious, evasive and emphatic, elusive and visceral. It complexly monograms its composer’s layer upon layer of identity. It discloses a condition of exile equally challenged and resourceful.

Had Stravinsky less cause for resilience—had there been no Bolshevik Revolution, no world upheaval—he might have left a musical legacy less intriguingly textured with self-denial and reinvention, less mediated by rationalization, more sustained in the elemental energies powering his initial creative surge.

“A Validation Overwhelming and Unprecedented” — Babayan and Trifonov Perform Rachmaninoff

Today’s on-line “The American Scholar” includes something of mine on a magnificent new recording of Sergei Rachmaninoff’s “Symphonic Dances” – and why it matters. You can read the whole thing here.. An extract follows: 

Rachmaninoff left two versions of the Symphonic Dances: one for orchestra, the other for two pianos. He premiered the latter, privately, with Vladimir Horowitz. What that sounded like we can only guess. But he also inadvertently left a third version – which eventually became the biggest classical music find of recent decades. And now we have another find: a seminal new DG recording, by Sergei Babayan and Danill Trifonov, that realizes in full the magnitude of Rachmaninoff’s musical leave-taking.

Because Rachmaninoff refused to permit broadcasting or recording of his live performances, we only have his RCA recordings: studio jobs. But on December 21, 1940, the conductor Eugene Ormandy privately recorded Rachmaninoff playing through the Symphonic Dances in preparation for the Philadelphia Orchestra’s premiere performance the following month. This “third version” was released in 2018 as part of a three-CD Marston Records set titled “Rachmaninoff Plays Symphonic Dances.” As I wrote in a review for The Wall Street Journal: “The result is one of the most searing listening experiences in the history of recorded sound. . . As privately imparted to Ormandy, Rachmaninoff’s impromptu solo-piano rendering . . . documents roaring cataracts of sound, massive chording, and pounding accents powered by a demonic thrust the likes of which no studio environment has ever fostered.” It equally registers a trembling undertow of memories faraway and yet omnipresent.

This unprepared, off-the-cuff 26-minute rendition of a 35-minute composition is also necessarily hit and miss, and full of gaps. It sets a towering bar; it documents a lost world. But it is incomplete. The new Babayan/Trifonov recording is in no way a replica. . . . Authentically rendered by Babayan and Trifonov, however, are Rachmaninoff’s magisterial fluidity of tempo and pulse, the heroic range of dynamics, the convulsive ebb and flow, seething and poignant, of an epic confessional. It is a validation overwhelming and unprecedented.

I also write:

In 1952, the Central Intelligence Agency covertly supported an unprecedented international arts festival lavish in cost and purpose: “Masterpieces of the Twentieth Century.” It took place in Paris over the course of a full month. The mastermind was Nicolas Nabokov, Secretary General of the Congress for Cultural Freedom, then the major instrument of American Cold War cultural propaganda. 

Nabokov’s premise was that the United States had displaced Europe and Russia as the reigning home for the Western arts. And the twentieth century’s presiding genius, for Nabokov, was his friend Igor Stravinsky, resident in Los Angeles (and like Nabokov living in self-imposed exile from his Russian homeland). Stravinsky dominated the repertoire for Nabokov’s myriad Paris festival performances. Nabokov’s concept was to celebrate “free artists” – cosmopolites liberated from parochial national schools and from the oppressive Soviet yoke. His larger claim – that only “free societies” produce great art, was the fundamental cultural premise of the CIA, State Department, and White House. (In my book The Propaganda of Freedom: JFK, Shostakovich, Stravinsky and the Cultural Cold War, I dub this counter-factual Cold War doctrine the “propaganda of freedom.”)

Nabokov’s favorite case in point was Dmitri Shostakovich. As a widely acknowledged expert on Soviet culture, he influentially denigrated Shostakovich as a Soviet stooge (and named Vittorio Rieti and William Schuman composers of greater consequence). Of the hundreds of compositions programed in Paris in 1952 (by the leading opera companies of Vienna and London, by the New York City Ballet, and by orchestras from Boston, West Berlin, Paris, Geneva, and Rome), Shostakovich was represented by a single piece: a suite from his opera Lady Macbeth.  Nabokov chose it because this, notoriously, was the subversive “muddle” that enraged Stalin and provoked a musical crackdown. Wholly unnoticed was that another Russian composer of consequence, like Stravinsky living in the US, was not played at all. This, of course, was the late Sergei Rachmaninoff, written off as a hopeless anachronism.

Today, Nabokov is the anachronism. 

To read my “American Scholar” review of a recent Rachmaninoff biography, click here.

To read my “American Scholar” essay on “ripeness” in musical performance, click here. 

To read my previous blogs about Sergei Babayan, click here and here. 

Native America and American Music on NPR: “A Battleground”

This Hamms Beer commercial, which I vividly remember from childhood and our brand-new black-and-white TV, signals “Indian music” with a steady tom-tom beat. The tune (and its tom-tom) adapts the Dagger Dance in Victor Herbert’s opera Natoma. The words – “From the Land of Sky Blue Waters” – reference a once popular concert song by Charles Wakefield Cadman. Both Herbert’s opera and Cadman’s song belong to the “Indianist” movement in American music – the topic of my latest NPR “More than Music” installment: “Native American Inspirations.”

“This tale in its totality,” as I remark at the top of the show, “is a battleground. It actually holds up a mirror to the discontinuity and mistrust that plague the American experience today. But it also incorporates some pretty remarkable music – some of which, you might say, is more or less ‘cancelled’ by present-day sensitivities.” 

Unpacking it all, I confer with Timothy Long, who heads the opera program at the Eastman School of Music. Both his father, who was Muskogee Creek, and his mother, who was Choctaw, spoke English as a second language. His mother had been raised in an Indian orphanage in Oklahoma, after which she was moved to an Indian sanatorium. She was so bored there that she began to listen to Beethoven sonata recordings played by Wilhelm Kempff and Alfred Brendel – the music with which Long grew up. So Tim Long lives two musical lives. He also prefers not to listen to the Indianist composers. His reasoning, which he eloquently expounds, has nothing to do with “appropriation” or “permission.” Rather, he says: “We still don’t get recognition – we’re not in the history books, people know nothing about us. This really makes it very difficult to me to listen to the Indianists. We were being occupied, and the occupiers were celebrating us with our music.”

And yet I have long made the music of Arthur Farwell – the most sophisticated of the Indianists — a cause. He seems to me the closest thing to an American Bela Bartok. And he spearheaded a thirty-year chapter in American music that – make of it what you will — is a significant component of our nation’s cultural history.

As it happens, the pianist who has most recorded the Indianist compositions of Farwell is herself Native: Lisa Cheryl Thomas, whose ancestry is Cherokee. She uses word like “authentic” and “informed” when she discusses Farwell. She also says: “I feel we owe a great gratitude to the [non-Native] ethnographers and to the Indianists, especially Farwell. . . . And it’s my goal to keep promoting this with my concerts so that Native American music has a lasting legacy in the fine arts.” 

Starting with Louis Ballard (1931-2007) ,whose music I also sample, a growing number of Native American composers have taken up the challenge of marrying Native American sources with the Western concert tradition. On my NPR show, we hear a tribute to Crazy Horse by Jerod Impichchaachaaha’ Tate. It’s performed by Delta David Gier and the South Dakota Symphony, whose “Lakota Music Project”, now more than a decade old, has fostered musical collaborations with Lakota musicians.

I conclude: “Would that a coming to terms with Native America – with the cultural vigor and desolate ordeal of this country’s first inhabitants – could enrich a more harmonious America to come. In truth, that day still seems far distant. But we have at least put far behind us the tom-tom beat of that Hamms Beer commercial with which I grew up.”

LISTENING GUIDE:

2:06: Victor Herbert’s “Dagger Dance” (1911)

5:30: The Scherzo from Dvorak’s New World Symphony (1893), inspired by the Dance of Pau-Puk Keewis in Longfellow’s The Song of Hiawatha

7:00: Arthur Farwell’s Pawnee Horses (1904), performed by pianist Benjamin Pasternack

8:25: Farwell’s choral Pawnee Horses (1937), performed by the University of Texas Chamber Singers led by James Morrow

12:00: An Omaha song recorded in 1895

16:05: Art historian Adam Harris on George Catlin’s controversial paintings of Indian life 

19:25: Lisa Cheryl Thomas on Arthur Farwell

20:45: Farwell’s Navajo War Dance No. 2 (1905), performed by Benjamin Pasternack

25:30: Timothy Long on the Indianists movement

29:05: Charles Wakefield Cadman’s “From the Land of the Sky Blue Waters” (1909)

30:30: Louis Ballard’s Devil’s Promenade (1973), performed by the Fort Smith Symphony conducted by John Jeter

32:15: Jerod Tate on Louis Ballard

33:40: Tate’s Crazy Horse tribute from his Victory Songs (2013), performed by Stephen Bryant and the South Dakota Symphony led by Delta David Gier

37:45: Raven Chacon’s Nilchi’ Shada’ji Nalaghali (Winds that turn on the side from Sun) (2008), performed by Emanuele Arciuli

41:00: Jeffrey Paul’s Wind on Clear Lake, performed by Lakota flutist Bryan Akipa and the South Dakota Symphony led by Gier

The “Worst Ever” Carmen — Take Two: A Way Forward

Kelli O’Hara, Renee Fleming, and Joyce DiDonato in “The Hours” [Photo: Evan Zimmerman/Met Opera]

In response to my two-day-old blog about the Met’s “worst ever” Carmen, a prominent European artists’ manager wrote (in an email): “If you would have been forced – as I was from professional duty – to attend productions as Tosca at the Aix-en-Provence Festival (staged Christoph Honoré) or Les Troyens at the Bayerische Staatsoper (staged by the same Christoph Honore) or Aida, again at the Bayerische Staatsoper (staged by Damiano Michieletto), you would understand that opera as we knew it, and as we used to love it, is a dead artistic form. It was poisoned little by little by stage directors who did not like opera and used it for their own purposes. We just have to acknowledge this fact and keep going.”

The conductor Paul Polivnick wrote (on facebook): “We don’t take the Mona Lisa and put her in a psychiatrist’s office so she can have her enigmatic smile analyzed.” Another conductor wrote (via email): “Both this article and your recent articles on [Klaus] Makela brought out what is so wrong in today’s opera and music world. .  . . I have spent decades conducting in Germany and experienced the gamut from wonderful stagings in the [Walter] Felsenstein tradition to the most horrible Regietheater in which the stagings are total perversion and distortions.” (The sentiment of helplessness – from conductors — seems notable to me.)

Conrad L. Osborne, whose opera blog is mandatory reading, most recently observes: “Of all the productions I have written about over the seven years of this series, to say nothing of (I scour the memory bank in vain) those of several earlier decades, this [Carmen] has come the closest to complete separation of eye and ear: its stage world cannot conceivably have generated this music, and Bizet’s music cannot have evoked this stage world. And it is unrelievedly ugly to look at. With Carmen, the Met has hit what we must hope is rock bottom.”

What next? Do we really need to haplessly “acknowledge . . . and keep going”? What am I to make of the many thousands of readers I have suddenly and uncharacteristically acquired via  my recent blogs about the startling resignation of Esa-Pekka Salonen in San Francisco, and the implausible appointment of Klaus Makela in Chicago, and the troubles afflicting the Boston Symphony? Rubber-necking? Or might there be a groundswell of discontent out of which something constructive could emerge?

Here’s an analogy to the degeneration of Regietheater that cripples opera today:

Europe experienced a couple of seismic upheavals during the first half of the twentieth century. The “sweetness and light” of the arts, especially the Germanic arts, seemed discredited. For this and other reasons, a drastic reorientation seemed required. In music, Arnold Schoenberg came up with a new method of composition – with 12-tone rows – that he believed would rescue German music from obsolescence. I know a thing or two about 12-tone composition, having studied it religiously at Swarthmore under a true believer: Claudio Spies. And I became a true believer, too. No longer. It was a wrong turn. And the wrongest turn came in the US, where the historic conditions that produced serial music did not exist. I could name a few 12-tone compositions that deserve to endure – Berg’s Violin Concerto is certainly one, Schoenberg’s Ode to Napoleon (which I have frequently presented in concert to overwhelming effect) is another. But I cannot think of a single American 12-tone piece of lasting consequence. (Can you?)

And so it is with Regietheater. It was a European product. It never made sense to import it lock, stock, and barrel to the New World. And it remains less embedded in the US – and potentially more possible to ameliorate.

What direction to take? First of all, it seems to me: stagings of opera, whatever else they may be, should be musically literate. I mean: stage directors of opera should be able to read music. They should be able to offer guidance to singers – how to inflect a word or phrase. Just as theater directors do. And ideally they should also work in concert with the conductor at hand. Currently, these conditions seem to me infrequently met at the Met.

When I think back to the 1977 Bayreuth productions I have so often described, one manifest aspect is that Götz Friedrich and Harry Kupfer were stage directors profoundly conversant with the operas – Tannhäuser and The Flying Dutchman – at hand. As for Patrice Chereau’s Ring – he shifted the musical and dramatic aesthetic toward modernism. The stage pictures of Richard Peduzzi and the conducting of Pierre Boulez followed suit – the result was an integrated whole. When Chereau’s Siegfried was indisposed, he acted the role himself (with a singer offstage). He had absorbed and memorized every detail, every gesture. 

Commensurately: the director of an opera should make a close study of the work at hand. Self-evidently, this cannot be assumed. With its high tech projections and mobile metallic slabs, the Robert Lepage Ring, at the Met, furnished a notorious example. Reviewing Lepage’s Siegfried for the Times Literary Supplement in 2019, I reported:

“Lepage’s virtual-reality special effects include running water, floating leaves, slimy worms, scampering rodents, and a Forest Bird that sits in Siegfried’s lap. The production works best where it is least intrusive: act one. In act two, the shallow playing space vitiates the expansiveness of Wagner’s forest; the dragon, if impressively large and animated, is neither frightening nor poignant. In act three, the magic fire frames Siegfried’s entire scene with Brȕnnhilde. Wagner asks that it disappear after Siegfried penetrates the flames for a reason: the mountaintop he attains trembles with a preternatural stillness, a preamble to apocalyptic events. This is but one example of Lepage’s failure to listen. Directing his singers in this final scene — the most psychologically complex duet in all opera — he is clueless. [That is: Siegfried and Brunnhilde simply stand and sing.]” 

No less than the Lepage Ring, Carrie Cracknell’s Met Carmen fails every criterion at hand. She not only cancels Bizet’s score. Her “feminist” take – with Carmen a victim of sexist societal norms – is a banal misreading. What’s Carmen about? Here again is Conrad L. Osborne:

“Dramatically, it introduces an agonizing twist on the [generic operatic] narrative: the couple’s bond holds the seed of its own destruction, and tragedy ensues not when one or both partners die in the struggle against antagonist forces, but when one partner kills the other. Musically, it brings an unprecedented depth and darkness to a tone that is predominantly one of brilliant, crowd-pleasing entertainment, and once past the dashed expectations of its first audience, has found no contradiction there. And there is one more layer. While the history of opera is studded with works derived from mythical sources and which take place either in a mythical world or else one wherein mythical figures and disputes govern and/or intrude into the “real” one (opera began that way, after all), there are only a few wherein a central character assumes a legendary status that itself verges on the mythical, and wherein mythical law, subliminally but quite clearly, guides the ‘real world’ action.”

A crucial detail, derived from the Prosper Merimee novella Bizet adapted: Don Jose is himself a renegade outsider. In fact, he’s killed a man and is well capable of doing so again. The mythic tragedy that Jose and Carmen enact, and which Bizet adapts, cannot be reduced to a lesson in victimization without shrinking the characters and miniaturizing their story. 

                                    ***

What is the tone of today’s Metropolitan Opera? I fear that it’s summarized by the success of Kevin Puts’s The Hours. The new Met audience, insofar as it can be glimpsed, seems enraptured by this operatic adaptation of the Michael Cunningham novel and its cinematic sequel (with Nicole Kidman as Virginia Woolf).

In Understanding Toscanini (1987), I wrote: “In his landmark 1960 essay ‘Masscult and Midcult,’ Dwight Macdonald, stigmatizing both, wrote of midcult that it has ‘the essential qualities of masscult [but] decently covers them with a cultural figleaf,’ and that it ‘pretends to respect the standards of high culture while in fact it waters them down and vulgarizes them.’ . . . Midcult’s ambiguity, Macdonald argued, makes it the most insidious cultural stratum: ostensibly raising mass culture, it corrupts – packages and petrifies – high culture. It ‘threatens to absorb both its parents. It may become stabilized as the norm of our culture.’ . . To ponder the health of contemporary operatic and symphonic culture is to ponder the diverse ramifications of a vast, democratized audience headquartered here in the United States.” 

To suggest that The Hours exemplifies midcult may sound gratuitous. It may sound supercilious. This is not a makeshift effort, like Terrence Blanchard’s Champion and The Fire Shut Up in My Bones. It is an opera skilled and clever in many ways. Greg Pierce’s libretto is ingenious. The vocal writing sings, and so does the orchestra. But aspirations outstrip means. Puts’s idiom is fundamentally saccharine. It craves fulfillment in cliché. Does a sung enactment of a three-woman drama pondering Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway have to end with a vocal trio remembering Der Rosenkavalier?

Invoking Virginia Woolf is false. However unwittingly, it’s opportunistic. The art of Virginia Woolf is nothing like the artifice of Kevin Puts. Read Mrs. Dalloway. Its pronounced musicality – the lyric  free verse of its language – is original. The narrative, though seamlessly bound, bristles with unlikely insights into character and behavior. And Woolf is heedlessly, ruthlessly unsentimental. She abhors cliché.

Is mine an extreme reading of a popular new work? Am I ricocheting off the wall? I recognize my own response in the reviews of Alex Ross in The New Yorker and Oussama Zahr in the New York Times. Self-evidently, they both tried hard to like The Hours more than they could. So did I.

Is The Hours what we want today’s Met to be? Could it be something else? Among the peak frustrations of recent seasons was a new Lohengrin directed by Francois Girard: another dark, dystopic re-imagining of an opera flooded with air and light. It was nevertheless possible to enjoy Piotr Beczala, in the title role, as an “in spite of” accomplishment. Wagner’s poetic ending — the reappearance of the swan – proved magically indestructible; the audience came to life. Thomas Mann somewhere describes Lohengrin as “blue” – a memorable evocation. Black it is not.

Thirty years ago, I encountered a Lohengrin in Seattle directed by Stephen Wadsworth. Ben Heppner sang Lohengrin. The swan, for once, was wholly life-like. Its reappearance at the close consummated a moment purely Wagnerian. To paraphrase my viral  Tannhäuser blog: as with the cataclysmic climax of the Venusberg orgy in the Met’s Schenk/Schneider-Siemssen Tannhäuser (its sudden transformation to a green valley and piping Shepherd Boy), a credulous rendering, abetted by Wagner’s musical imagination, proved as breathtaking today as in times past. 

Lohengrin (Ben Heppner) and the swan [photo: Chris Bennion]

It was Speight Jenkins, the Seattle Opera’s general manager from 1983 to 2014, who engaged Wadsworth and (I have no doubt) requested a credible swan. But Jenkins’ real find was the Swiss director Francois Rochaix. Rochaix’s Seattle Ring of the Nibelung, lucidly designed by Robert Israel, was the most memorable of my experience. He also staged Parsifal and Die Meistersinger in Seattle. His version of Regietheater was musical, assiduous, and original, scrupulous and creative in equal measure. 

Jenkins went his own way. An impassioned, informed Wagnerite, he built on the Seattle Wagner festivals of his predecessor, Glynn Ross. He made the Seattle Opera the Wagner capital of the Western hemisphere. Beholden to no one, defying fashion, he set parameters. He refused to denigrate the operas with imputations of anti-Semitism or sexism. He shrunk the house and enhanced its acoustics. He was omnipresent in the lobbies, in the community. In Wagner Nights: An American History (1994), I summarized: “Rochaix’s response [to Wagner] is not esoteric but fresh, not complex but sincere. And the same can be said for the Seattle Wagner enterprise as a whole. Jenkins has aimed for a balanced Wagner ensemble. He has not courted celebrity performers, pedigreed by Deutsche Grammophon, Salzburg, and Columbia Artists Management. Rather, he has stressed world-class Ring lectures, four-hour Ring symposia, and a serious bookstore. His English supertitles, an innovation so far shunned by the Met, transformed the ambience of the house. . . . Something special has been rekindled: a company whose mission transcends self-promulgation.” 

It can be done.

EXTRA CREDIT: Two memories of Francois Rochaix’s Seattle Wagner productions:

— The Rochaix “Ring” showed how a bold exercise in Regietheater can at the same time remain keenly attuned to Wagner’s synthesis of the arts. I write in “The Post-Classical Predicament” (1995 — reprising a long article “On Staging Wagner’s ‘Ring’” in “Opus” Magazine, April 1987):

To underline Siegfried’s coming of age, Rochaix inserts a touching pantomime . . . just after Siegfried penetrates the Magic Fire: he envisions his father’s murder, his mother’s death in childbirth, Fafner’s warning, and the Forest Bird’s summons. Fortified by new self-knowledge, he tentatively kisses Brunnhilde. Rochaix’s handling of this long final scene is so honest that for once Siegfried’s astonished exclamation ‘Das is kein Mann!’ is astonishing, not comic. Disregarding Wagner, Rochaix has Siegfried flee his awakened bride; when Brunnhilde sings ‘Wer ist der Held, der mich erweckt?’ [‘Who is the hero who has awakened me?’], he stands, terrified, well outside her field of vision. Brunnhilde’s gradual transformation from goddess to woman, Siegfried’s coming to terms with adult feelings, their growing proximity, mutual awareness, and commitment — Rochaix’s detailed understanding of all of this, his use of blocking and gestural detail to bind the momentous, compressed emotional scenario, is a triumph of creative empathy.

Many at Seattle found Siegfried’s interpolated pantomime/vision intrusive. The problem is partly Wagner’s; his layoff partway through act 2 of Siegfried created discontinuities in the Ring. In particular, Siegfried and Brunnhilde became somewhat different personalities. Rochaix’s masque intelligently attempts to explain the new Siegfried, whom Brunnhilde eventually praises for his loyalty and valor.

—For more than a decade I regularly reviewed music books and New York operatic performances for the Times Literary Supplement (UK). This was before the internet – to my knowledge, these articles have not been digitized. Here’s my review, from August 2003, of Francois Rochaix’s Seattle Opera “Parsifal” production:

For most of the twentieth century, opera in the United States was synonymous with the New York’s Metropolitan Opera. Nowhere else was anything like a fulltime opera season sustained for decades without interruption. Only in Chicago and San Francisco was a local tradition of opera-giving substantially implanted. But beginning in the 1960s regional companies began to grow dramatically in number, size, and achievement. In 1987 the Met abandoned its annual national tour. Concurrently, English-language supertitles everywhere won converts to opera as theater. Today, America’s leading regional opera companies have acquired unprecedented individuality and sophistication – and nowhere more than in Seattle, which now boasts North America’s leading Wagner house.

The Seattle Opera began presenting summer cycles of the Ring of the Nibelung in 1975 under Glynn Ross, an entrepreneurial visionary who started from scratch. Ross’s successor as of 1983, Speight Jenkins, is also a zealous Wagnerite (he closes the office for Wagner’s birthday). Jenkins opted for a more ambitious Ring, one he could not afford to mount every summer, but more carefully cast, more strongly conducted, and more provocatively staged. The resulting 1986 cycle, directed by Francois Rochaix and designed by Robert Israel, was a landmark event. If the influence of Patrice Chéreau’s 1976 Bayreuth centenary Ring was discernible, in most respects Rochaix (best-known in his native Switzerland) and Israel (then keenly associated with Philip Glass’s Satyagraha) went their own way. Such signature images as the airborne carousel horses ridden by the Valkyries achieved an iconic intensity.

Meanwhile, back in New York, the Met entrusted its Ring and three other Wagner operas to Gunther Schneider-Siemssen and Otto Schenk. The goal was something like the naturalism Wagner himself prescribed, abetted by modern stage technology. The outcome fulfilled Wieland Wagner’s prediction that “a naturalistic set today would simply destroy an illusion, not create one.” Seeking authenticity, Schenk assumed that sin and redemption were concepts whose self-sufficient meanings could shock and inspire as Victorian audiences were shocked and inspired when the Ring and Parsifal were new.

Jenkins mounted fresh Seattle productions of The Flying Dutchman, Tannhäuser, Lohengrin, Die Meistersinger, and Tristan between 1984 and 1998. He also, in 2001, unveiled a new, hyper-realistic Ring conceived by Stephen Wadsworth – a production [which I reviewed for the TLS] both more beautiful than the Met’s and more meddlesome in its psychological portraiture. This summer, Seattle finally completed its traversal of the Wagner canon with a work never before given locally: Parsifal. As the production was assigned to Rochaix and Israel, and happened to coincide with the opening of a new home for the company, expectations ran high: as at Bayreuth in 1882, Wagner’s Bühnenweihfestspiel inaugurated the hall.

The former Seattle Opera House, a product of the 1962 World’s Fair, was merely functional. The Marion Oliver McCaw Hall, on the same site, is in every way an improvement. From stage and pit, the sound is more vivid than before. The voices project easily. The excellent orchestra – mainly members of the Seattle Symphony — has acquired new tonal richness and depth. Visually, the new building seems as airy and spacious as the old one felt ponderous and square. Though the seating capacity has been only slightly reduced – from 3,017 to 2,900 — the gain in intimacy is notable. The central downstairs seating space is narrower, flanked by more sharply raked seats themselves flanked by – the most arresting touch – “floating” boxes rising in a diagonal along the side walls.

“Parsifal” in Seattle (2003), designed by Robert Israel (photo: Chris Bennion)

The new Parsifal is a more qualified triumph. Jenkins wanted a production that did not underline the work’s decadence or loudly infer racism. He wished to afford his first-time Parsifal audience a positive experience of Wagner’s confusing final opus. At the same time, in engaging Rochaix, he was certain not to obtain a whitewash.

Rochaix dispenses with obvious effects and cheap thrills: the cup does not glow red; the spear is not caught in mid-air. A non-sectarian universality is stressed. The costumes are as often Eastern as Western. The flower maidens include an American flapper and an Arabian Scheherazade. What most stays in the mind’s eye, and teases the brain, is the treatment of the grail knights: a motley assemblage of robed Middle Eastern types, including some whose trance-like gestures and gyrations connote a religious fundamentalism much in the news today. These tableaus are executed with exceptional conviction and attention to detail. They achieve an authentic strangeness – and also insure that we are not to equate holiness with wholesomeness.

Israel’s sets are typically spare. The transformation scenes are chiefly achieved by moving a gigantic slab of stage into a vertical position. Klingsor’s wooden tower occupies the full height of the stage; its “destruction” entails a startling 47-foot descent into the bowels of the theater. A striking inspiration is the macabre coffin/crib in which Titurel sits erect, a severe presence counterposed with his wayward son. In place of scenery, the production mainly opts for color-saturated images produced and manipulated by digital projectors from a behind a screen forming the back of the set. To begin act two, before the prelude in the pit, the ruddy mountain range of act one is digitally rotated to reveal the parched landscape – the mountain’s other side — of Klingsor’s realm. The projectors offer a verdant Classical version of the magic garden – which blurs when Parsifal strives fruitlessly to remember “what I have forgotten” and cannot. Destroyed, the garden digitally decomposes.

A special strength of Rochaix’s Ring was his penchant for adding eloquent witnesses to the action – Wotan, vigilant in a side-stage chair, unforgettably followed the actions of his harried and beloved offspring during Die Walküre act one. Rochaix similarly situates Kundry in a peripheral space, where her act one presence is prolonged beyond the exit specified by Wagner. Amfortas appears, ghost-like, while Kundry administers her seductive act two kiss. When Parsifal returns to Monsalvat in act three, the squires, richly differentiated, gather excitedly to follow the benedictions bestowed by Gurnemanz and Kundry. Far from constraining the singers, these additions, subtly choreographed, create fresh opportunities for characterization while inviting empathy on stage and off.

Of the principal singers, Stephen Milling achieves greatness as Gurnemanz. Like Germany’s René Pape, this young Danish bass, whose Seattle Fasolt and Hunding two summers ago (his American debut) announced the arrival of a major singing actor, has everything: voice, presence, intellect. Not yet 40, he has mastered the long act one narratives: every word, every gesture tells. He credibly impersonates an old man in act three. During the Good Friday music, his large, full-featured face is as expressive an instrument as his huge voice. He next sings Gurnemanz at the Vienna Staatsoper in 2005.

The Parsifal of Britain’s Christopher Ventris is also a major achievement, magnificently acted and strongly sung. Greer Grimsley, the Amfortas (and a Seattle mainstay), was indisposed on August 16; his cover, Gary Simpson, was in every way impressive. Willa Cather, in an indelible 1916 commentary, called Kundry “a summary of the history of womankind,” and continued: “[Wagner] sees in her an instrument of temptation, of salvation, and of service; but always an instrument, a thing driven and employed. . . . She cannot possibly be at peace with herself.” Describing the Kundry of Olive Fremstad, the Met’s principal Wagner soprano from 1903 to 1914 and the Callas of her day, Cather wrote that she “preserves the integrity of the character through all its changes. In the last act, when Kundry washes Parsifal’s feet and dries them with her hair, she is the same driven creature, dragging her long past behind her, an instrument made for purposes eternally contradictory. . . . Who can say what memories of Klingsor’s garden are left on the renunciatory hands that wash Parsifal’s feet?” The tragic entrapment of this extraordinary Wagner creation eludes Linda Watson in the Seattle production. Having sung the role in Bayreuth, New York, and Berlin, she is a singer conscientious, sincere, and skilled. But she lacks the demonic. Rochaix does not help by replacing Kundry’s expiration at the opera’s close with an ecstatic tableau in which she lifts the sacred spear alongside Parsifal and the uplifted grail. Both Kundry and her fate are made to seem the more conventional.

Seattle’s conductor is an Israeli, Asher Fisch, who has led Parsifal in Vienna, Dresden, and Berlin. His authority is evident. Not the least satisfactory aspect of Wagner in Seattle is the audience. Jenkins provides a full menu of pre-performance lectures and post-performance discussions, two symposia, and a CD companion. His audience trusts him, and also Wagner. Once past the prelude, there is no coughing. When people applaud, they mean it.

Another manifestation of loyalty is the new hall itself: of its $127 million cost, more than $70 million comes from non-governmental sources. At a time when other American opera companies are reeling from the recession – Chicago Lyric, Los Angeles, and San Francisco have all cancelled major productions – Jenkins has balanced his budget 12 years in a row, a feat the more remarkable given the collapse of the local economy, with its dependence on .com companies and a Boeing plant greatly diminished in scope and personnel. The summer’s nine Parsifal performances were 85 per cent sold out. The paucity of non-North American visitors – about 1 per cent — was notable.

Wagnerites from outside the United States and Canada should know that the Wadsworth Ring will be repeated in summer 2005 under Robert Spano. Other Seattle Wagner productions will be reprised in the summers of 2004, 2006, and 2008.

Two postscripts complete this American Parsifal report. This past spring, for the first time since 1974, someone other than James Levine led Parsifal at the Met. The someone was Valery Gergiev, and he breathed new life into a tired and tedious production. Gergiev is always heard to best advantage in New York with his own Kirov company. On this occasion, something like the dark ceremonial majesty of a Kirov Boris or Khovantschina was frequently suggested. Also new to the Met Parsifal were René Pape’s Gurnemanz and Falk Struckmann’s Amfortas – unsurpassed characterizations.

Also: thanks to andante.com, the complete Wagner recordings made by Leopold Stokowski for RCA between 1921 and 1940 are now readily available in a 5-CD box (AND1130). These performances document the Philadelphia Orchestra in its peak estate (of which Rachmaninoff said: “Philadelphia has the finest orchestra I have ever heard at any time or any place in my whole life. I don’t know that I would be exaggerating if I said that it is the finest orchestra the world has ever heard”). And they document the most anomalous of all the great Wagner conductors: a New World original, the ultimate sonic sybarite. Stokowski’s 40 minutes of Parsifal excerpts constitute the most beautiful Parsifal performance on records – even, I would say, the most beautifully sung (though there are no human voices). As surely as Karl Muck at Bayreuth keyed on the drama’s ascetic hero, Stokowski singularly inhabits Klingsor and his magic garden.

The Met’s “Worst Ever” Carmen and What To Do About It

“Les tringles des sistres tintaient” –Clémentine Margaine as Carmen in act two of Bizet’s “Carmen.” (The truck tires rotate.) Photo: Nina Wurtzel / Met Opera

Two veteran opera-goers of my acquaintance reacted identically to the Metropolitan Opera’s new production of Georges Bizet’s Carmen. One called it “the worst thing I’ve seen at the Met in thirty years.” The other declared it the “nadir” of the company’s 141-year history. I had to go.

A classic description of this opera, by Friedrich Nietzsche, extols it as the apex of “Mediterranean” genius, refuting the dark miasma of Germanic art. Nietzsche called it a “return to nature, health, cheerfulness, youth, virtue!” Its music “liberates the spirit.” It “gives wings to thought.” Bizet’s exoticized Spain is sublimely lucid, streaming with sunlight, hot with perfumed indolence. 

Carrie Cracknell’s Met Carmen inflicts black skies, barbed wire, and machine guns. The act one workplace is a guarded facility all of whose female employees wear pink uniforms. The soldiers outside are joined by vagrants (who however sing as if soldiers). The act two gypsy song is danced (sort of) within the confines of the cargo hold of a moving tractor trailer truck. Later in the same act, Carmen’s solo dance of seduction is positioned atop a gasoline pump, a perch so precarious she needs a helping hand from Jose (whom she is defying). The act three set (Bizet’s “wild spot in the mountains”) is the trailer truck overturned, rotating circularly on its side. Dirt and grime are omnipresent. 

According to the program book, Cracknell has transplanted Carmen to “a contemporary American industrial town.” Bizet’s Seville cigarette factory is now an “arms factory.” The outcome is a “contemporary American setting” where “the issues at stake seem powerfully relevant.” Carmen and her co-workers are oppressed in a man’s world.

In short, this is a revisionist reading reconstruing plot and characters. And yet Carmen is an opera, not a play. Whatever one makes of the logic of Cracknell’s strategy, it negates the poetry of the music at every turn.

Regietheater, now ubiquitous on world opera stages, was largely born in Germany after World War II – and no wonder. Heilige Kunst seemed, if not discredited, clouded with questions the loudest of which afflicted the operas of Richard Wagner. My own first exposure came at the Bayreuth festival of 1977 – about which I have written extensively (having been sent by the New York Times). Encountering Gotz Friedrich’s Tannhäuser  (new in 1972), Patrice Chereau’s Ring of the Nibelung (new in 1976), and Harry Kupfer’s The Flying Dutchman (of which I reviewed the premiere), I encountered a consistency of highly rehearsed operatic acting, wedded to a thoroughness of directorial engagement, wholly new to me. Friedrich’s Tannhäuser  was an anti-fascist polemic. Chereau’s method was to assume nothing. He found himself fascinated by the guile of Mime and Alberich, and disgusted by Wotan’s more complex opportunism; he gave him grasping gestures and a scowling face; he dressed him as Wagner.

Kupfer, too, knew what he was doing. I was stunned by his conceit that the main action of the opera was hallucinated by the deranged Senta. I found her character fortified — and also that of Erik, who understood his beloved all too well. The trade-off was a shallower Dutchman, reduced to an idealized figment of imagination. But what most lingered was Kupfer’s ingenious delineation of twin stage-worlds coincident with twin sound-worlds. As I previously wrote in this space: “Kupfer’s handing of musical content was an astounding coup. The opera’s riper, more chromatic stretches were linked to the vigorously depicted fantasy world of Senta’s mind; the squarer, more diatonic parts were framed by the dull walls of Daland’s house, which collapsed outward whenever Senta lost touch. In the big Senta-Dutchman duet, where Wagner’s stylistic lapses are particularly obvious, Kupfer achieved the same effect by alternating between Senta’s fantasy of the Dutchman and the stolid real-life suitor (not in Wagner’s libretto) that her father provided. Never before had I encountered an operatic staging in which the director’s musical literacy was as apparent or pertinent.” 

It was only a matter of time before something similar happened at the Met. The breakthrough moment came in 1979 with a re-imagining of The Flying Dutchman by Jean-Pierre Ponnelle. But the breakthrough was careless and superficial. By staging the opera as if dreamt not by the high-strung, headstrong Senta, but by the ancillary Steersman, Ponnelle gained nothing. And the dreamscape itself resembled a high school auditorium at Halloween. 

One may ask – one should ask – what purposes may be served transporting historically conditioned Germanic Regietheater to the US. I can think of two. The first, as at Bayreuth, is an exercise in taking a known opera and casting a different light upon it. But nowadays the majority of American operagoers are newcomers, or relatively so: this rationale is cancelled. The second is to discover new “relevance.” But, consulting my long and checkered operatic memory, I cannot think of a single production that by resituating time and place likely enhanced the engagement of audiences new to the work. 

Earlier this season, the Met revived the most literal, least revised Wagner staging in memory: the Otto Schenk/Gunther Schneider Siemssen Tannhäuser  of 1972. I wrote a series of four blogs opened by thousands of readers. The first read in part: 

“Many points of conjunction between what the ear hears and the eye sees are unforgettably clinched. The action begins with the erotic Venusberg. Wagner asks for ‘a wide grotto which, as it curves towards the right in the background, seems to be prolonged till the eye loses it in the distance. From an opening in the rocks, through which the daylight filters dimly, a greenish waterfall plunges down the whole height of the grotto, foaming wildly over the rocks; out of the basin that receives the water a brook flows to the further background; it there forms into a lake, in which Naiads are seen bathing, while Sirens recline on its banks.’ Schneider-Siemssen wisely doesn’t attempt all of this – but he poetically renders enough of it to get the job done. At the climax of the Venusberg orgy, Wagner makes everything suddenly and cataclysmically vanish, to be replaced by ‘a green valley. . . blue sky, bright sun. In the foreground is a shrine to the Virgin. A Shepherd Boy is blowing his pipe and singing.’ A credulous rendering of this transformation, abetted by Wagner’s musical imagination, proves as breathtaking today as half a century ago.

“At the opera’s close, Tannhäuser expires alongside Elisabeth’s bier, and young pilgrims arrive with a flowered staff betokening his foregiveness. Nowadays, this ending is variously revised. It is considered toxic or tired. But faithfully conjoined with the reprise of the Pilgrims’ Chorus, it remains overwhelming. . . . 

“The arts are today vanishing from the American experience. There is a crisis in cultural memory. How best keep Tannhäuser alive? Flooded with neophytes, the Metropolitan Opera audience is very different from audiences just a few decades ago. What I observed at the end of Tannhäuser was an ambushed audience thrilled and surprised. The Met is cultivating newcomers with new operas that aren’t very good. A more momentous longterm strategy, it seems to me, would be to present great operas staged in a manner that reinforces – rather than challenges or critiques or refreshes – the intended marriage of words and music. For newcomers to Wagner, an updated Tannhäuser would almost certainly possess less ‘relevance’ than Schenk’s 46-year-old staging – if relevance is to be measured in terms of sheer visceral impact.”

In short: there are lessons to be learned from the new Carmen. But it would take a brave artistic initiative, flaunting fashion, to apply them.

All this I pondered while enduring acts one and two last Wednesday night. After that, I discovered that Diego Matheuz’s gestures of hand and baton, in the pit, were more eloquent than anything to be seen onstage. In fact, the musical highlight of the performance was Matheuz’s shaping of Micaela’s aria, and the poetic virtuosity of the accompanying French horns. I am certain I would have enjoyed the Micaela and Don Jose – Ailyn Perez and Michael Fabiano – under other circumstances. 

The Metropolitan Opera’s 2023-24 Carmen deserves to be remembered, and answered, as a seminal lesson in waste – and this at a time when the American arts are starving.