Joseph Horowitz's Blog, page 8

Opera in South Africa: “You Get What You Deserve”

One of the most remarkable developments in classical music today is the profusion of gifted Black South African opera singers graduating from the University of Cape Town and winding up on major stages in Europe and the United States. Why and how is that happening? As I was recently in South Africa, I enjoyed an opportunity to try and find out. The outcome is the most recent of my “More than Music” documentaries on National Public Radio. You can hear it here.

South Africa is a “singing country.” In segregated Black townships, under apartheid, singing was inherent to church and school. And it became commonplace for Black high schoolers to sing selections from oratorios. With the end of apartheid in 1991, the cork was out of the bottle. By 2000, more than 90 per cent of the opera students in Cape Town were Black. 

As remarkable: casting in opera became color-blind virtually overnight. In the US, opera companies and audiences resisted seeing Black tenors sing opposite white sopranos. Today, the acrimony continues over who should sing what, and whether the entire enterprise is “colonialist.”

Here is the soprano Goitsemang Lehobye, whom you can hear singing Verdi and Gershwin on my “More than Music” show: “I want to sing [Puccini’s] Madame Butterfly one day. But am I not going to do it because I’m not Japanese, I’m not Asian? I come from a place where we don’t think like that. When you get onstage, you pretend to be what you’re supposed to be. And life goes on.”

And here is the tenor Sakhumzi Martins, whom I (surreptitiously) recorded – in Fish Hook, South Africa — in a rapturous rendition of “Maria,” from West Side Story: “It’s a shame what Black Americans are facing. In South Africa, for you to get cast, you have to be  hard worker. There’s no short way. The opportunities are quite slim, so you have to work and sweat. We have learned not to take things personally. It’s just business, you have to want it more than the next person. So it’s got nothing to do with color [who gets chosen]. We all know one another. In South Africa, you get what you deserve.”

And here is John McWhorter, quoted on my radio show: ”To a Black American, some Africans cam seem almost oddly secure and joyous – they don’t seem to have a basic sense of whiteness as an insult to them.”

To hear a related “More than Music” program on George Shirley and racial integration at the Metropolitan Opera, click here.

LISTENING GUIDE:

Part 1 (00:00): Sakhumzi Martins sings Bernstein; Jeremy Silver (who runs the University of Cape Town opera program) on what’s happening and why

Part 2 (12:00): Goitsemang Lehobye sings Verdi and Gershwin; Angelo Gobbato on the history of opera in South Africa; Mzilikazi Khumalo and the South African choral tradition (with commentary by Khumalo and music historian Thomas Pooley)

Part 3 (29:58): Khumalo’s epic Ushaka (commentary by orchestrator/conductor Robert Maxym); summing up: “In South Africa, you get what you deserve.”

The Best Performance of the Worst Masterpiece?

Gershwin’s Rhapsody performed by Alexander Tsfasman and Gennadi Rozhdestvensky

Now that the centenary of Rhapsody in Blue (last Monday) has come and gone – with fanfare and a degree of controversy and a sampling of many renditions of Gershwin’s “worst masterpiece” – I am left with a craving to revisit my favorite version: by Alexander Tsfasman and Gennadi Rozhdestvensky. That’s right: a 1960s Soviet studio recording with a Moscow orchestra. 

Rozhdestvensky was the leading Russian symphonic conductor of his generation. Tsfasman was the Russian pianist most associated with Rhapsody in Blue, having toured it throughout the Soviet Union during the interwar decades.

I would call this recording a supreme validation of Gershwin – from abroad (of course), where he was not patronized.

A product of the Moscow Conservatory, Tsfasman (though closely associated with jazz throughout his career) brings to Gershwin’s piano writing a Romantic keyboard arsenal – hair-trigger virtuosity; an heroic range of sonority and dynamics – rarely encountered in this much battered score. Initially denigrated by Lawrence Gilman in the New York Herald-Tribune for its “trite and feeble” tunes, the Rhapsody was later described by Leonard Bernstein as “not a composition at all.” Most recently, in the New York Times, it was pegged the “worst masterpiece,” “corny and naïve.”

If you care to sample Tsfasman’s Gershwin bear-hug, start with the solo at 8:30 and go to the “love theme,” magnificently prepared and sung, and thence to the end.

Another validation, again from abroad, is last Monday’s 45-minute feature on BBC 3: a tenacious inquiry, by Olivia Giovetti and Nick Taylor, into the American “melting pot”: what it was – and was not — for Gershwin; whether something like it can be captured in music today. The participants are mainly American composers, who volunteer a range of considered responses, including some misgivings.   

I contribute my own two cents — and now find I have this to add: Gershwin’s pot included Black American music, Cuban music, Jewish music, classical music. He loved it all and didn’t worry about disrespecting anyone. In today’s terms, he was a heedless appropriator. But his curiosity was so great, and his gift so facile, that he could absorb these influences without skimming.

Today the range of influences is much greater — for a start: Asian and African music (as Steve Reich mentions on the BBC show). This may be viewed as an enrichment, but it’s also a risky complication. We have one master practitioner of East/West fusion who’s deeply versed in a wide-ranging multiplicity of styles — that’s Lou Harrison. A lot of what’s produced by American composers today, reflecting on the American experience, seems to me in comparison “makeshift music”: a shortcut. Will any of it last? 

Gershwin, as he rapidly matured, became a student of musical form — in some respects, the hallmark of Western classical music: organizing time. For instance: considering that Porgy and Bess was Gershwin’s first attempt at something like grand opera, the scene of Robbins’ funeral is a magnificently knit narrative sequence (which cannot be said of the opera as a whole — Gershwin was still learning). What American composers are today aspiring toward a comparable mastery of long-range musical argument? I worry about this sort of thing. And even more (of course) about the state of the American “melting pot” generally.

The question overhanging BBC-3’s splendid tribute to Rhapsody in Blue is: Where are we now? 

Indeed.

 

Happy Birthday to the “Worst Masterpiece”

February 12 marks the 100th birthday of Rhapsody in Blue. Via NPR, the daily newsmagazine “1A” is re-airing my “Gershwin Moment” documentary from last February; it highlights my favorite Rhapsody in Blue recording, by Alexander Tsfasman and Gennadi Rozhdestvensky (Moscow, 1960). And I’m taking part in additional Gershwin radio features on NPR and BBC-3. As the pianist Benjamin Pasternack once had occasion to remark to me: “It’s the most beloved piece in the American concert repertoire.” 

But, historically, it may also be the most reviled. When I wrote Classical Music in America: A History of Its Rise and Fall (2005), among my most startling discoveries was “the Gershwin Threat.” In the classical music community, prominent musicians who spoke up for Gershwin were invariably foreign-born – a long list including Schoenberg, Klemperer, Rachmaninoff, and Ravel. American-born classical musicians typically disparaged Gershwin as a dilettante interloper. The larger picture here is the Jazz Threat – an antipathy to jazz being one of the defining features of interwar American classical music. In fact, the Gershwin Threat is an inexhaustible topic – and it apparently remains itself inexhaustible.

A much noticed Jan. 26 article in the New York Times, by the estimable jazz pianist Ethan Iverson, was headlined: “The Worst Masterpiece: ’Rhapsody in Blue’ at 100.” Iverson calls Gershwin’s Rhapsody “naïve and corny.” His grievance is that the “promise” of Rhapsody in Blue “hasn’t been honored.” Gershwin’s “bold and obvious proposal” was that America’s vital Black vernacular be merged with classical genres. And it never really happened.

He’s correct about that – our concert composers have mainly squandered the Black musical motherlode – but Gershwin (of all people) is not to blame. He was the great hope, not the great obstacle. Iverson cites the “reception history” of Rhapsody in Blue – but that history is obviously unknown to him. What’s salient here isn’t that Rhapsody “clogged the arteries” of American symphonic practice; what’s salient is that it was shunned. Just check out the subscription-concert repertoire for the major American orchestras all the way to the turn of the 21t century – with the exception of the New York Philharmonic, they all ghettoized Gershwin as a marginal “pops” composer. A typical example: the Boston Symphony first performed Rhapsody in Blue on subscription in 1997. 

Did Rhapsody in Blue exert a baneful influence on American composers? No – it exerted virtually no influence at all. They denigrated it as amateur hackwork. The most notable exception, if it can be called that, was Aaron Copland’s Piano Concerto of 192 , conceived as a modernist “improvement” on Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue and Concerto in F. And that’s how Paul Rosenfeld influentially extolled it — for fixing Gershwin’s “hash derivative” efforts. Roy Harris, in comparison, urged Copland to ignore jazz altogether. You have to look abroad – to, e.g., Ravel’s divine Piano Concerto in G – to find a major composer for whom Gershwin was a catalyst for memorably assimilating the jazz influence. In the US, the exception that proves the rule was Gershwin’s own Porgy and Bess – itself a work still threatening and misunderstood in the US (but not abroad).

Gershwin’s followers, Iverson complains, had “terrible rhythm” (he singles out Oscar Levant). But Gershwin was himself a master stride pianist. He was intimate with Harlem. He hung out with James P. Johnson and Luckey Roberts.

The Gershwin Threat was many things. It stigmatized Black America as declasse. It symptomatized New World provincialism, an exaggerated quest for pedigree. It never wholly died.

***

I write about the Gershwin Threat at length in “On My Way” – the Forgotten Story of Rouben Mamoulian, George Gershwin, and “Porgy and Bess’’ and Dvorak’s Prophecy and the Vexed Fate of Black Classical Music. 

And here’s a Listening Guide for The Gershwin Moment on 1A:

00:00 Rhapsody in Blue, as recorded in Soviet Russia in 1960

4:12 — John McWhorter on resituating Gershwin in the story of American music

8:55 — Ruby Elzy sings “My Man’s Gone Now” for the departed composer

13:40 –Kirill Gerstein plays “I Got Rhythm”

14:30 — Gerstein performs and discusses his improvised cadenza in the Gershwin Piano Concerto in F

23:33 — Traci Lombre on Gershwin and Black America

26:20 — Gershwin plays “I Got Rhythm”

27:40 — Nina Simone sings “I Love You Porgy”

29:50 — “Music by Gershwin” on the radio (1934)

35:10 — Mark Clague on An American in Paris — taxi horns and sonata structure (with the University of Michigan Orchestra conducted by Kenneth Kiesler)

40:40 — What if Gershwin had lived as long as Copland (with comments by Mark Clague)

The Boston Symphony In Trouble

[Above: Boston’s Symphony Hall, built by Henry Higginson and opened in 1900.]

Last week I heard the Boston Symphony perform Shostakovich’s Lady Macbeth at Carnegie Hall. The conductor was their music director since 2014: Andris Nelsons. I had planned to write a blog but instead emailed my impressions to a dozen friends in the music business. The emails that came back – some from people long familiar with the BSO or Nelsons or both – more than suggested that this is an orchestra in trouble. So I’ve decided to turn my private email into a public blog. I’m willing to risk seeming presumptuous and gratuitous. I have a constructive agenda.

My wife Agnes and I left at intermission. We were climbing the walls.

We were seated opposite the first violins, about 15 rows back. I would not even call this section a section. It was an eclectic group of violinists, disengaged to varying degrees. At the rear were two ladies who liked to chat. They did so in between scenes. At times they barely moved their bows. At the end of the first half, when the orchestra rose to bow, it took them a long time to leave their seats and they did so chatting.

The conductor is a mystery to me. When he asked his violins for a big response, the reaction was sluggish. I see that he conducts in Leipzig, Vienna, Berlin, that his Shostakovich CDs win awards. I encountered him once before, leading Tchaikovsky’s Pique Dame at the Met. I was with a distinguished pianist; we both found it slack. 

My first experience of Lady Macbeth was at the City Opera back when it performed at City Center. I was in high school. The conductor was Julius Rudel. The orchestral interludes raised the roof. The show was hot and fierce.

A year ago, I participated in a memorable Shostakovich 7 in South Dakota – I write about it often. Some time afterward, I spot-checked a few recorded performances of the soul-stirring ending of that symphony. The Nelsons/BSO version compared unfavorably, I thought, with Delta David Gier/South Dakota Symphony. In fact, the same South Dakota performance included, on the first half, one of those Lady Macbeth interludes – wittier than Nelsons’ BSO rendition.

The BSO’s Lady Macbeth was sung in Russian by a non-Russian cast — my wife, fluent in Russian, was unimpressed. They next record it for DG.

The house was practically full and everyone seemed prepared to enjoy the second half.

The BSO has a new executive director: Chad Smith, coming over from LA. He will make a difference. Already, he’s announced the creation of a humanities arm – something the LA Phil has, something every major American orchestra needs. And he’s increased the presence of his music director at Tanglewood – in principle, the right move. 

I imagine that he will rethink the programing. What will happen with the humanities component remains to be seen. In LA, so far as I can tell, it emphasizes the contemporary arts. Nothing wrong with that. But it bears reckoning that Boston is not LA – no other American musical institution had nearly so impressive a beginning. The orchestra’s inventor, owner, and operator, in 1881, was Henry Higginson, a visionary genius insufficiently recalled and not least by the BSO itself. The conductors of those early seasons included Arthur Nikisch – later the pre-eminent symphonic conductor in Germany. Nikisch’s 400 BSO concerts are today wholly unremembered. At the time, their impact was cataclysmic. This is a story that bears retelling. 

The orchestra’s most impactful music director was Serge Koussevitzky (1924–1949); it is he who created the Tanglewood Festival as an American music laboratory. Koussevitzky was a man who thought nothing of telling Bela Bartok, terminally ill in a New York hospital bed, that we was to compose a major work for the Boston Symphony. The result was the Concerto for Orchestra, which Koussevitzky premiered in 1944. A few weeks later, he scheduled further performances of the same music so it could be nationally broadcast. That radio performance (Dec. 30, 1944) remains the most vivid, most virtuosic version I have ever heard (or will ever hear); the galvanizing string choir is a Koussevitzky signature.

Koussevitzky’s many causes included pieces by his countryman Igor Stravinsky then little played by others in the US. It was also in Boston that Stravinsky delivered his seminal Norton lectures at Harvard University. This is a story that the BSO and Harvard could remember together. 

We are today witnessing an ever riper crisis in the American symphonic community. Our orchestras, once civic bastions, need to figure out what they’re for. In my experience, the South Dakota Symphony is one orchestra ahead of the pack. Its example should be studied. (For my 7,000 word American Scholar manifesto on “Shostakovich and South Dakota,” click here.)

The larger crisis is an erasure of the arts from the American experience. The crucial loss is of cultural memory. We live in the present moment. Our attention spans are short. But the arts, historically, build on past achievement. History, lineage, tradition: ballast. 

I cannot think of an American cultural institution with a more glorious history than  the Boston Symphony Orchestra.

To hear a “More than Music” NPR feature on the South Dakota Symphony, with live excerpts from Lady Macbeth (at 29:56) and (at 00:10 and 8:45) Shostakovich’s Seventh, click here.

For a long look at Henry Higginson, see my Moral Fire: Musical Portraits from America’s Fin-de-Siecle (2012) [with a jacket blurb from former BSO CEO Mark Volpe].

For much more on Nikisch and Koussevitzky in Boston, see my Classical Music in America: A History of its Rise and Fall (2005)

Rachmaninoff in Exile: “Implacable Poise and Sovereign Humanity”

Reviewing Fiona Maddocks’ beautiful new book on Sergei Rachmaninoff in exile for The American Scholar, I write: 

“With the waning of modernism, Rachmaninoff’s stock began to rise; for the first time, he became an object of serious scholarly inquiry. Today, he ranks with Igor Stravinsky, Dmitri Shostakovich, and Serge Prokofiev as one of four great Russian composers populating the interwar period and after. . . .

“In this company, Rachmaninoff is the one who left Russia yet stayed Russian. At first, he seemed creatively stranded. . . . Then, miraculously, came two late masterpieces. The first, the Rhapsody on a Theme by Paganini, is concise and ingenious, witty and warm. It also somewhat feeds on the smart syncopations and wicked virtuosity of Harlem piano. The second is the Symphonic Dances . . . Summoning his waning energies, he fashioned a musical testament. . . .

“We are drawing a new musical map. Looking back, the twentieth no longer seems the century of Stravinsky. Prokofiev once eclipsed Shostakovich – but no longer. And Sergei Rachmaninoff stands apart from the turmoil that enveloped him, a pillar of implacable poise and sovereign humanity.”

To read the review, click here.

For a related Rachmaninoff blog, clock here.

“Tannhäuser” — Take Four

Wilhelm Furtwängler

Conrad L. Osborne has now chimed in with a typically riveting review of the Met Tannhäuser, bristling with insights into the opera and its performance last December 12. Read it.

As a brief postscript to my three previous Tannhäuser blogs, and Conrad’s blog, would like to draw particular attention to his observations about the current condition of the Met orchestra, as revealed in the opening pages of the opera’s famous overture:

“The playing almost never sounded committed to the beauty and drama of the writing. It was generally obedient to the letter of its law, but never to its spirit. This was patently true of the strings, and—not to overlook the placidity of the lower-voiced viols—most patently of the violins. As important as the other choirs are in our mind’s-ear evocation of a Wagnerian texture, it is the strings, led on by the violins, that carry the writing forward the largest share of the time, as in most composition for a classical orchestra. So (staying with the first couple of minutes of the Overture, one of the all-time greatest) you have only to imagine the first string entrance, in the cellos, with the Burden of Sin theme (“Ach, schwer drückt mich der Sünden Last” is your textual reference); then the violins taking up the theme, but higher, with a seraphic tint that suggests that though sin still exerts its drag, a light gleams on high—both these brief, leaning-forward statements played calmly and prettily, without the slightest hint of a counterforce, of an inner struggle; and finally, over the fortissimo entrance of the brass and percussion with the Pilgrim’s Chorus, one of the score’s most famous effects, the overlay of descending violin triplets, utterly undone by a literal picking-apart of each triplet into evenly played duplets interrupted by rests, with no sense of attack or of playing through, as if the players just didn’t know how this is supposed to go.” 

To add my two cents: The mechanical rendering of the violin triplets during the first grand statement of the pilgrims’ theme produced the audio equivalent of blinding strobe lights flashing at regular intervals; it was bewilderingly odd. As for the entrances of the cellos and violins a little earlier on (as described by Conrad), just about any credentialed recording of this glorious passage will convey its gravitas and ardor. Try, for instance, Wilhelm Furtwängler and the Vienna Philharmonic in 1952. It would be a simple task to notate the many inflections of pulse, tempo, and dynamics, including a characteristic climactic allargando, here interpolated by the conductor and players. But it would be impossible to replicate this performance accordingly; the urgency of the pilgrims’ song must be felt. And unless this overture strives, it cannot possibly launch the opera.

Many years ago, when the Met orchestra regularly failed to make much of Valery Gergiev, I urged one of its members to attend a New York City concert by Gergiev and his own Mariinski Orchestra. He did – and discovered the  majestic soundworld that Gergiev was trying to instill in the Met pit. Though it will never happen, one thing that would improve matters in today’s Met pit would be a listening exercise. I am certain that some members of the current Met orchestra would be flabbergasted to discover to what it sounded like in the days of Artur Bodanzky and Ettore Panizza – beginning with the sheer energy of the playing. This was still an Italianate band, once led by Arturo Toscanini. It specialized in hair-trigger attacks and cantabile slides in the strings. It brought its own galvanizing style and powderkeg intensity to Wagner and Verdi, especially with Bodanzky and Panizza on the podium. Those broadcast recordings remain not only inspirational, but specifically instructive — moreso now than ever.

“Tannhäuser” — Take Three

The Ride of the Valkyries, from Francois Rochaix’s Seattle “Ring”

The emails continue to roll in, responding to my two Tannhäuser  blogs. Here’s one from a former member of the Met orchestra:

“Your two articles pretty much describe what I observed at the Met during my 40-plus years with the Met Orchestra. The best performances I had a chance to experience, and the privilege to be part of, were the ones presenting a complete art form. During these rare occurrences, the sum total created an unforgettable night, bigger than the components would suggest. In particular, then Carlos Kleiber conducted, the whole approach was: everything is organic, it all has to work together. Then you get to Lepage – who was not the only one who didn’t care, by the way.  There have been many of those for whom ‘theater’ meant placing the singers where you can’t really hear them.”

Let’s remember that the members of an opera orchestra – a competent one – are not just following the conductor. They’re listening to the singers. Many of them can also see the singers and observe the staging. When you hear those old broadcasts from the thirties and forties, the energy in the pit is nearly bewildering. It’s evident, I would say, that the players love the operas – they’re not just drawing inspiration from a baton. And of course the caliber of the singing was very high. 

To again reference Robert Lepage’s Met Ring: Wagner’s Siegfried ends with one of the most psychologically complex love duets in opera. It documents sexual awakening. Siegfried is naïve and immature. Brunnhilde is vulnerable and scared. Over the course of some 35 minutes, they wind up in the same place. Lepage did not even attempt to stage this sequence. The singers weren’t blocked – they stood and sang. At either side, electric squibbles signified the Magic Fire. But both music and libretto tell us that the Magic Fire through which Siegfried has passed is now wholly absent. Lepage’s indifference to music, and to the marriage of music and words, is here absolute.

The most memorable Ring in my experience was staged by Francois Rochaix in Seattle in 1986. I’ve written about it extensively – in The Post-Classical Predicament (1995) and Wagner Nights (1994). It shows 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 (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 Brunhilde eventually praises for his loyalty and valor.”

Rochaix had never before directed a Ring production. His preparations, documented in reams of notes and advisories he doubtless shared with the singers, were prodigious. Lepage’s preparations were self-evidently wasted on complexly intrusive stage machinery in service of a Ring made more “theatrical.” Re-reading my Opus essay of 36 years ago, I discover this, by Thomas Mann: “Wagner experienced modern culture, the culture of bourgeois society, through the medium and in the image of the operatic theater of his day. He saw art reduced to the level of an extravagant consumer product . . . he watched with fury while vast resources were squandered, not for the attainment of high artistic purpose, but for that which he despised above all else as an artist: the easy, cheap effect.”

“Tannhäuser” — Take Two

On the heels of my Tannhäuser blog, Conrad L. Osborne has posted yet another of his indispensable mega-essays – on the topic of cultivating American opera.

I wrote: “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 Otto Schenk’s 46-eyear-old staging – if relevance is to be measured in terms of sheer visceral impact.” 

Conrad writes of the Met’s sudden espousal of new works: “The company’s current management has undertaken a program of artificial insemination in place of what was once natural conception—hence the ethnocultural distribution [catering to Black and Latino audiences] . . . , to which we can add a sexual identity element, as well. This is not a program of audience integration . . . , but of audience fragmentation, in perfect synchronization with the oft-remarked silo-ing of group identities in our society as a whole.”

And Conrad contrasts the current crop of new operas mounted by the Met with the New York City Opera’s more informed attempt to curate American opera back in the 1950s. Of that crop, he writes: “Several of the sturdier American operas maintained a hold in the NYCO repertory through the 1960s, along with several more 20th-Century European works, and the company’s first season in its new home at Lincoln Center (Spring, 1966) consisted wholly of post-WW1 operas, though just three of the eleven were American. The pattern did not hold, of course.”

The composers Conrad mentions whose operas enjoyed an “occasional return” at City Opera are Gian Carlo Menotti, Kurt Weill, Carlisle Floyd, Douglas Moore, Marc Blitzstein, and Robert Ward. I would add that our pre-eminent American grand opera, Porgy and Bess (1935), was also given at NYCO. My two cents: in second place I would position Blitzstein’s Regina (1948), adapting Lillian Hellman’s Broadway triumph The Little Foxes. Too many of the new and newish American operas nowadays at the Met are makeshift efforts best assigned to much smaller spaces. Regina is the real deal; suitably cast with big voices and personalities, honestly produced without special pleadings, it would flood the big house with drama and song. It adroitly sets the English language. It powerfully critiques class and race.  As once with Porgy , unproduced at the Met for half a century, Regina remains — now more than ever – a beckoning, high-stakes Metropolitan Opera opportunity.

Also, this Tannhäuser  afterthought: As it happens, not long after experiencing the Schenk Tannhäuser at the Met in 1977, I attended the Bayreuth premiere of Götz  Friedrich’s Tannhäuser  – a polemical anti-Fascist staging that became famous. My chief reaction, at the time, was that I’d never witnessed such terrific, painstakingly rehearsed acting, top to bottom, on an operatic stage. I also felt intellectually tantalized. But it is the Schenk Tannhäuser , re-encountered last Tuesday, that made me weep during the finales of acts two and three. In these days of synthetic groupthink outrage, weeping has perhaps become somewhat passé. And perhaps that’s pertinent to whatever makes Otto Schenk’s Tannhäuser seem “old-fashioned.”       

***

A torrent of emails suggests that my Tannhäuser blog has struck a responsive chord — and I feel impelled to say a little more about Wagner and Regietheater. Gotz Friedrich’s Bayreuth Tannhäuser, whatever one makes of it, was self-evidently a product of intensive engagement with music and text; where he departed from Wagner’s intended marriage of notes and words, he had his reasons, good or bad. The same Bayreuth summer, I encountered the premiere of another famous production: Harry Kupfer’s The Flying Dutchman. In fact, i reviewed it for the New York Times (if you look it up, the misspellings [“Terry Kupfer,” “Hans Knattersbusch,” etc.] and misconstrued words were a result of trans-Atlantic dictation via telephone in pre-email days). Kupfer, too, knew exactly 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 once wrote in this space: “Kupfer’s handling 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.”

What most disturbs me about Regietheater at the Met is the prevalence of directors who seem tone deaf, even musically illiterate; they steamroll the calibrated music-and-words alignment that is the lifeblood of opera, its very reason for being. Robert Lepage’s Ring is merely the most notorious example.

If you happen to listen to that 1936 Met Tannhäuser (extolled in my previous blog), begin with act three: Lawrence Tibbett (Wolfram) and Lauritz Melchior (Tannhäuser). It wil cost you an hour. Follow the libretto. I just re-experienced their interaction with my wife. She said when it was over: “Every word is emotionally articulate.” Precisely. And so is the orchestra. It is an exercise in empathy.

A Timely Old “Tannhäuser” at the Met

“Tannhauser,” act two, at the Metropolitan Opera

The Met’s current revival of Otto Schenk’s 1977 production of Wagner’s Tannhäuser is an event unthinkable in any European house – perhaps unthinkable in any other American house. Designed by Gunther Schneider-Siemssen, this was a rare attempt to faithfully render Wagner’s complex scenic intentions, albeit with access to instruments of stagecraft unavailable in Wagner’s time. The result was an unimpeachably Romantic staging of a Romantic grand opera – with no questions asked about hidden agendas or old-fashioned thinking. 

I well remember Andrew Porter’s ecstatic New Yorker review, which hailed a triumphant antidote to revisionist Regietheater. “A twentieth century landmark in the history of Wagner staging,” he called it. “As far as I know, it represents the first attempt any major company has made in more than a quarter of a century . . . to do a Wagner opera in the way Wagner asked for it to be done.” Porter urged the Met to undertake a Schenk/Schneider-Siemssen Ring. And the Met did precisely that – with disappointing results. The Ring is a music drama exploring archetypes, not a Romantic opera invoking thirteenth-century German history. But the Schenk Tannhäuser worked its magic. And it proves just as presentable — and arguably more necessary —  in 2023.

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. I attended Tuesday night’s performance with a devout Christian who objects that Wagner presents Tannhäuser’s redemption as a reward for repentance (“Christ died for our sins”). Another companion, at the same performance, objects that the opera’s discourse on duty and honor seems terribly Germanic in a musty way. Alternatively, Tannhäuser can be read and re-read as an argument against self-indulgence. I discover, for myself, that none of this really matters. I now mainly discover in Tannhäuser an emotional purgative or therapy – it powerfully exercises feelings of compassion. 

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. 

About Tuesday’s performance: Reviving the Schenk Tannhäuser would be pointless without the forces to do Wagner some degree of justice. And standard repertoire at the Met, these days, is never a sure thing. The current cast offers nothing remotely comparable to Leonie Rysanek’s Elisabeth or James McCracken’s Tannhäuser of 1977 – to say nothing of such legendary Met Wagnerites as Lotte Lehmann and Lauritz Melchior. The first 45 minutes are a loss. The Venusberg ballet seems interminable. I could not detect a single word sung by Venus. Later on, the Wolfram is at best an acquired taste: Christian Gerhaher talks his way through the part. But the Met’s current Tannhäuser and Elisabeth – Andreas Schager and Elza van den Heever – rise sufficiently to the occasion. Neither is vocally resplendent – but both singing and acting are honest and informed, audible and visible. The conductor, Donald Runnicles, capably steers the big climaxes.  The chorus is terrific.

It is by now apparent that the current Met orchestra suffers from an odd defect: the violins are at all times overbalanced. Regardless of venue or seat location, they register with insufficient volume and energy. (I am by no means alone in this opinion.) Perpetuating cultural memory is a challenge for everyone – onstage, in the pit, in the house. I discern scant evidence that these youngish string players love the operas they perform. The Venusberg music, in particular, is a faded cartoon unless purveyed with sustained intensity. Just listen to Artur Bodanzky’s torrid Met orchestra of 1936 and you’ll hear what I am talking about: a harrowing vortex of feeling. In the pit, the Schwung and bite of the low strings, animating the Landgraf’s arid speeches, the urgency and precision of the reckless violin riffs, are feats no longer associated with the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra.  

But this 1936 Tannhäuser broadcast is Melchior’s show. If in his lifetime he was somewhat taken for granted, it was partly because his consistency of achievement (at least until Bodanzky died) was absolute. On this occasion, every encounter with Lawrence Tibbett’s Wolfram strikes sparks. The third act’s Mitleid moment – where Wolfram’s unexpected compassion ignites Tannhäuser’s tortured confessional narrative – is so believable that the incredulity of Tannhäuser’s gratitude seems wholly unrehearsed. Porter, in his New Yorker review, discovered authenticity in the Met’s Tannhäuser of 1977. But it is Melchior, in 1936, who realizes the Olympian expectations Wagner specified: that in act two Tannhäuser’s  “Erbarm dich mein” must become the drama’s titanic linchpin; that in act three Tannhäuser must exude a terminal weariness both physical and existential. 

Not so long ago, the 1936 Bodanzky Tannhäuser was only accessible to opera fanatics on rare LPs. These days, it’s an under-utilized tap on youtube. As a prized morsel of cultural memory, it remains indispensable. But an 87-year-old broadcast recording in faded sound, sans scenery and stage activity, can only retain pertinence if we possess the means — and also the mindset — to recreate a vital re-embodiment in our vexed twenty-first century.

Yet Again — The South Dakota Symphony

As readers of this blog now know by heart, I regard the South Dakota Symphony as a national exemplar. I’ve written about their Lakota Music Project, which connects the orchestra to Indian reservations throughout the state. I’ve extolled their ingeniously contextualized performances of Silvestre Revueltas’s Redes, of Shostakovich’s Leningrad Symphony, and – most recently – of Lou Harrison’s Piano Concerto. And I’ve reported Alex Ross’s enthusiasm for the South Dakota Symphony in The New Yorker. 

Now my friend Doug McLennan, founder/editor of the invaluable ArtsJournal, has chimed in with his own report on the Harrison concerto last October. Doug begins:

“That the piece hasn’t found a wider following is a shame. Horowitz considers it the best American piano concerto, and I might agree. From its grand bombastic opening and angular melodies, reflective pools and undulating rhythms, it is both original and evocatively American.” 

Doug continues:

“The South Dakota players are good musicians, but what is extraordinary about them is the way they listen to one another, build on one another’s phrases and the willingness of [Music Director David] Gier to give them room to do it. Italian pianist Emanuele Arciuli was the soloist, a specialist in American music. He tore into the propulsive second movement, using percussion as counterpoint he could play with like a cat with a toy. The longer, angular open-toned melodies he gave room to breathe – they evoke for me the great Western expanses and mountains – and made the gamelan-inflected oscillations of the score supple rather than strict. In every way, this was an idiomatic performance that let it find its own language.”

The Harrison concerto was flanked by two examples of musical Orientalism – Ravel’s The Princess of the Pagodas and Rimsky-Korsakov’s Scheherazade. These sublime touristic visitations were juxtaposed with Harrison’s informed fusion of Eastern and Western idioms. Doug writes:

“To make the connections and context clear, the program began with a stage conversation between Gier and Horowitz and a short video introducing Harrison. And it wasn’t just informational – context isn’t just about more information, it’s about finding ways to locate what you’re hearing in a set of experiences that help give them meaning. So: an introduction to gamelan and how it can sound and is traditionally used.”

And finally:

“This orchestra doesn’t sound like others. Players come from around the Midwest, as far away as Minneapolis and Chicago, and Gier says they keep returning because they like the camaraderie and the freedom they have there. That players seem to listen differently he attributes in part to their work with musicians from the Lakota Indian nation in the western part of the state. . . . The encounters have taught Symphony musicians to listen to one another differently, and this has been infused into the larger group.”

In short: these are concerts that demand a wider audience and an influential role. I next visit South Dakota for Mahler’s Third Symphony this coming April. I’ll spend more than a week in South Dakota in February-March 2025 for “New World Encounters,” a festival exploring the American impact on the arts abroad. Our soloist will be Jean-Efflam Bavouzet (who will explore “Ravel and jazz”). Former US Ambassador to Russia John Beyrle, an inspired practitioner of cultural exchange, will also take part. We will partner with local universities. The result will be a grand cross-disciplinary adventure – an experimental showcase —  funded by the National Endowment of the Humanities “Music Unwound” initiative. I can hardly wait.