Alex Ross's Blog, page 233

Remembering Prof. Lieberson

Justin Davidson, New York music and architecture critic and sometime Noise guest blogger, has written a remembrance of the late Peter Lieberson for the New York Times. The passages about Lieberson's teaching especially strike home for me, since I took the same class a year or two later. Justin knew Peter much better than I did, and beautifully captures his complexities and inner conflicts. It's good to be reminded of what a potent piece the First Piano Concerto is. Perhaps Alan Gilbert — another Lieberson student – will consider reviving it.

Oregonians triumphant

Photo: Melanie Burford for NPR.

Spring for Music is heading into the home stretch, with two concerts remaining. Last night's performance by the Oregon Symphony, under the direction of Carlos Kalmar, was pretty extraordinary; you can listen online. The good folks at NPR Classical are archiving all the concerts in the series. I will have more to say in a future issue of The New Yorker.

Dylan speaks

Last month I joined a considerable crowd of people in complaining about Maureen Dowd's attack on Bob Dylan in the New York Times. Among other things, I pointed out that no evidence existed to back up the main conceit of her piece: that Dylan had been censored by Chinese authorities and prevented from playing several of his famous early-sixties protest songs. The setlists for his shows in Beijing and Shanghai looked no different from those he had been offering all over the world in the past year or two. Now Dylan himself — who celebrates his seventieth birthday on May 24 — has made the very uncharacteristic gesture of responding to the hubbub on the official Dylan site. He writes: "As far as censorship goes, the Chinese government had asked for the names of the songs that I would be playing. There's no logical answer to that, so we sent them the set lists from the previous 3 months. If there were any songs, verses or lines censored, nobody ever told me about it and we played all the songs that we intended to play."

Update: In a Times report on Dylan's post, Dave Itzkoff writes, "Bob Dylan...weighed in on his much-discussed recent performances in China, saying that he had shared the names of the songs he intended to play with the Chinese government and was able to play the set lists he intended." No, this is not what Dylan says. He says that he sent them "the set lists from the previous 3 months." As far as I can tell, he didn't play any songs that weren't on those lists, but he denies announcing his particular choices in advance.

LOC jukebox

Sousa's Band, Siegfried Fantasie, 1906.

The Library of Congress has unveiled an enormous online Jukebox containing more than ten thousand Victor Talking Machine recordings from the early years of the twentieth century. More than a thousand of these are of the classical persuasion. There are the well-known classics — Caruso, Melba, Schumann-Heink, and the rest — alongside all sorts of fascinating oddities. Some of the Wagner selections are unsurprising, but I was taken aback by Sousa's rendition of the second transformation sequence in Parsifal.

Wilhelmine information overload

"With the tremendous acceleration of life, we grow accustomed to using our mind and eye for seeing and judging incompletely or incorrectly, and all men are like travelers who get to know a land and its people from a train."

                     — Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human

Bülow on Nietzsche (more)

Curious to see more of Hans von Bülow's fascinatingly cruel 1872 letter to Nietzsche, I looked it up in the Nietzsche Briefwechsel. Here is my rough translation:

Your kind message and enclosure have placed me in an awkward position, one whose discomfort I have rarely felt so acutely in such cases. I ask myself whether I should say nothing or offer some civilized banality by way of reply—or whether I should freely speak my mind. This last calls for a boldness bordering on temerity: in taking that course, I must first say in advance that I hope you are firmly convinced of the admiration I hold for you as a scholar of creative genius . . .

But down to business: your Manfred-Meditation is the most extreme case of fantastic extravagance, the most unedifying and anti-musical instance of notes placed on music paper that I have come across in a long time. Several times I had to ask myself: is the whole thing a joke, and did you perhaps intend a parody of the so-called music of the future? Did you consciously flout all the rules of musical language, from the higher syntax to simple matters of correct notation? Apart from the psychological interest—your musical fever-product gives evidence, despite all the confusion, of an uncommonly distinguished spirit—your Meditation is from the musical standpoint the equivalent of a crime in the moral world. I could discover no trace of Apollonian elements, and as for the Dionysian, to be frank, I was reminded more of the morning after a bacchanalian orgy than of an orgy per se. If you really have a passionate urge to express yourself in musical language, it is indispensable that you acquire the rudiments of this language: giddily fantasizing on a remembered gluttony of Wagnerian sounds is no basis of production. Wagner's most unheard-of audacities are rooted in the drama and justified by the text (in purely instrumental pieces he prudently abstains from similar monstrosities) and can always be recognized as grammatically correct, down to the tiniest details of notation; if an educated connoisseur like Herr Dr. Hanslick is incapable of grasping that much, then it is evident that one can only really appreciate Wagner if one is "musicien et demi." If, as I must still doubt, your detour into the realm of composition is seriously meant, highly honored Professor, at least confine yourself to writing vocal music, and let words be the oar that guides your boat as you bob on the wild ocean of sound.

Once again—no offense intended—you yourself describe your music as "horrible"— it is, actually, more horrible than you realize, not in a way that is harmful to the common interest, but worse than that: harmful to you, who cannot more wickedly beat to death your excess of leisure than in this kind of rape of Euterpe.

I could offer no denial if you were to say to me that I have overstepped the outermost limits of civilité puérile. "Please regard my unapologetic frankness (rudeness) as a sign of my equally sincere respect"—I refuse to let this banality bring up the rear. I simply have to give free rein to my indignation at such antimusical tone-experiments: perhaps I should turn a portion of that indignation on myself, insofar as I am responsible for having brought Tristan to performance once again [Munich, June 1872] and thereby am indirectly guilty of having cast such a lofty and enlightened spirit as yours, very honored Professor, into such regrettable keyboard spasms.

Perhaps you will be cured by Lohengrin on the 30th . . . [Various other dates for Wagner performances follow, and Bülow ends with a conciliatory remark about Nietzsche's "magnificent book," The Birth of Tragedy.]

Nietzsche was understandably stunned — the Meditation is bad, but not that bad — and did not reply for three months. When he finally wrote back, he apologized for his alleged musical crime while at the same time taking up seriously Bülow's mocking conjecture that irony was intended. Bülow, for his part, continued to praise Nietzsche's non-musical writing, and various amiable letters were exchanged. Amazingly, in 1887, Nietzsche again ventured to send Bülow one of his compositions — the Hymnus an das Leben. This time, Bülow took the route of "civilized banality," asking his wife to write a note saying that he was overwhelmed with work and could not reply.

iPad

The talented Jason Schwartzman, who knows his way around a descending chromatic tetrachord (at 1:09), explicates the New Yorker's iPad app, which, as of today, is finally accessible to U.S. and Canadian print subscribers. (Overseas subscribers will have to wait a little longer, alas.) Since the app materialized last year, several of my pieces have included audio and/or video extras, and there will be more of that kind of thing in the future.

The Wagner case (ongoing)

Les Dryer, a retired Metropolitan Opera violinist, has a letter to the editor about my recent Wagner piece.

Honest assessment

I could not discover in it the least trace of Apollonian elements, and, as for the Dionysian, to tell you frankly, it made me think of the morning after a bacchanalian orgy rather than of an orgy itself.... Once again — don't take this too badly — you yourself say your music is "detestable" — it is, actually, more detestable than you believe, not in a way detrimental to the common interest, but worse than that: detrimental to you, who cannot more hideously waste your excess of leisure than in this kind of rape of Euterpe.

    — Hans von Bülow on Nietzsche's Manfred-Meditation

An era ending?

In recent weeks, James Levine appeared to be on the mend from his latest round of medical troubles, but he has suffered another setback. On Thursday, the conductor withdrew from a performance of Die Walküre, saying he was ill. Yesterday came a slew of cancellations: the Met announced that Levine would not join the company's forthcoming tour of Japan or lead a Met Orchestra concert on May 15 — Fabio Luisi will take his place — and the Boston Symphony said that Levine would not appear at Tanglewood this summer. All that remains on Levine's schedule for the coming months is a pair of Walküre performances, on May 9 and 14. He will take time to recuperate from recurring back problems, and, it is hoped, return to the podium for Don Giovanni in October. In today's New York Times, Daniel Wakin reports that the Met is now describing Luisi as Levine's "likely" successor. There will be an extraordinary atmosphere in the house for Levine's final appearances of the season, if in fact he is able to conduct. This is a very sad moment, and everyone wishes Levine the very best of luck in his recovery.