François Girard’s production of Richard Wagner’s The Flying Dutchman is tonight’s free opera on the Metropolitan Opera website, available also tomorrow until the early evening when Rigoletto takes over. It’s new as in, having premiered in 2020.
I heard & read some horribly negative reviews, and so I had very low expectations, yet was pleasantly surprised and recommend you have a look if you have the chance. The singing is wonderful, and there’s nothing wrong with the production, at least nothing when you compare it to Girard’s previous work. This is the same director whose Parsifal was to grace the Canadian Opera Company stage last fall but for the pandemic, and who had previously impressed with Siegfried and Oedipus Rex, to say nothing of his cinematic work which I’ll omit except as far as saying it raises the stakes and audience expectations. I adored Parsifal (as the Met broadcast the same production years ago, and I have it on DVD), while being conflicted about the other two. The cast for the last incarnation of the Siegfried included some of the best talent I’ve ever seen on a COC stage, making up for shortcomings in the production.
Dutchman is a fascinating opera, Wagner’s first masterpiece, even if it sometimes seems to be straddling the boundaries between genres, perhaps evidence of the birth-pangs of something new in the theatrical world & Wagner’s imagination. While the story of Senta & the Dutchman concerns spiritual matters, they inhabit a world that mixes romantic comedy and gothic romance. I think the chief problems I see in all the negative reviews concern Girard’s choice to mostly ignore the conventions of the earlier forms, and focus the entire opera on Senta & the Dutchman.
Senta is the focus. We see a picture frame with an eye that might be that of the Dutchman inside it. The story centres on the ballad of the Dutchman, whose image is in a painting we encounter in Act II; but Girard shows it to us in the overture, and from time to time throughout the work. Girard frames the Act II chorus of young women as a kind of portrayal of the norns, as we see huge ropes strung across the set, strummed and eventually tangled.
Girard’s Flying Dutchman production, set design by John Macfarlane
The trick is not to show up with stipulations, disgruntled by what’s missing, but instead to allow Girard to do what he’s doing and see it for what it is. No it’s not working in the usual ways of a romantic opera, but at times it’s spell-binding, beautiful, effective: at least for what it is.
While we see parts of the ship of Senta’s father Daland and the sailors of that ship, we never see the Dutchman’s vessel nor his sailors even though that’s in the score. The change isn’t a big deal if you surrender to what Girard is doing, which is quite effective. There’s a computer-generated effect that reminds me of something we saw in Robert Lepage’s designs for Damnation of Faust, where the movements of the Dutchman are animated into huge ghostly shadows, synchronized with his movements, that sometimes dominate the background.
Musically it’s wonderful, the Met Orchestra sounding great under Valery Gergiev. Anja Kampe sings a glorious interpretation of Senta, a role that sometimes comes across as crazed in her obsession, totally convincing even in the close-ups of a high-def broadcast. Evgeny Nikitin, a late replacement for the injured Bryn Terfel, was restrained, mysterious & otherworldly in his dignified portrayal of the Dutchman; he’s more of a baritone, wonderful in the higher parts of the role.
Evgeny Nikitin and Anja Kanpe
Franz-Josef Selig was a conventionally comic Daland, while Sergey Skorokhodov stole the show as the best Erik (a hunter in love with Senta) I’ve ever seen.
If there’s a problem it’s with the weighty objectives of a director determined to show profundity in an opera that’s often light-weight & comic in tone. Yet it works if you let go of your assumptions and the score and simply go with it, seeing what’s in front of you. The choral set-piece in the last act is totally unlike any I’ve seen before, quite lovely & a curious companion piece to what we see in Parsifal, another opera where Girard assembles groups that are all of one gender (although in Dutchman it’s actually written that way).
The staging of the ending is a bit weak but that’s true of every production I’ve ever seen. Directors all struggle with the requirements of the story, and this one is far from the worst.
I heard from Larry Beckwith, who is Artistic Producer of Confluence Concerts, that they’re offering something titled Mandala: The Beauty of Impermanence:
“Premiering Online Wednesday, January 27, 2021 6:30 pm Pre-Concert Chat: Make a Mandala 6:50 pm Concert Available until Wednesday, February 10, 2021 on Confluence Concerts’ YouTube Channel CLICK HERE”
Mandala is a word, rich with associations in different cultures.
Erika designed a birthday card awhile ago that included a mandala.
Erika Barcza’s original design for a birthday card for a friend.
I recall the Buddha statues in Afghanistan, destroyed by the Taliban. I couldn’t help thinking that if we could ask the Buddha about it we might be told something like “don’t worry, this too is what it is”, because of course, whether we speak of a small circle of coloured sand erased by the sweep of your hand, or a huge statue exploded by dynamite: the lessons are the same.
Lately concerts or performances have often been postponed or cancelled due to the coronavirus. Businesses have gone under, and of course, many lives have been cut short.
If we are very precise in our language, we think of the mandala as a shape, a design, a symbol. But we may recall that a mandala is a kind of model for the world and life. The shape becomes a mirror or even a portal through which we look as we meditate, helping us to shed our immediate concerns (what’s for dinner? Did I pay that bill?) to peer deeper at what’s right in front of us.
There’s a bit more in the message from Confluence, from Suba Sankaran
Welcome to Mandala: The Beauty of Impermanence. Mandala is a universal symbol meaning “circle” in Sanskrit. It is a spiritual and ritual symbol in Hinduism and Buddhism, representing the universe. The circular designs symbolize the idea that life is never-ending and everything is connected. In this concert, and in every song and poem, you will experience a mandala within the music itself, whether sacred or secular, be it as a singing round, a ground bass, an ostinato pattern, a recurring rhythmic cycle, or within the lyrical or poetic context.
From ancient to modern, spanning several centuries and styles, the repertoire ranges from Hildegard von Bingen to Joni Mitchell, Schubert to Steve Reich, and Monteverdi to Sting. You will hear music from India, the U.S., Canada, the U.K., Europe and Iran, original compositions and arrangements, and Sufi poetry as well.
I’m excited and humbled to have an embarrassment of riches with the artists participating in this show, and I want to thank them for the many gifts they brought forth. These artists include Confluence Concerts’ artistic producer Larry Beckwith and artistic associates Andrew Downing and Marion Newman, as well as Gordon Gerrard, Bijan Sepanji, Sheniz Janmohamed, my husband, Dylan Bell, my father, master drummer Trichy Sankaran, and my dear friend and bandmate Ed Hanley, who makes a cameo appearance playing a singing bowl, in addition to having captured and edited most of the video for this show.
During the pre-concert chat, Sheniz’s voice will guide the audience through a nature mandala creation. Don’t forget to take a photo of your creation before you “disappear it”! Send a copy of the photo to manager@confluenceconcerts.ca. We hope to create a community collage of your spontaneous inventions! A MESSAGE FROM SUBA SANKARAN This is a reminder that these beautiful mandala creations are in-the-moment and then disassembled, giving one the sense that nothing lasts, and so we must enjoy the experience in the now. That is the hope of this concert, Mandala: The Beauty of Impermanence. Experience and enjoy this musical journey and audio-visual feast as fully as you can, as it happens, and gracefully let it go as it naturally comes to an end.
As I was choosing my wardrobe for a trip to my mom’s place for lunch, I opted as usual to try to look a bit nicer for her, pulling out a pair of dress-pants that I realized haven’t been touched for months.
When I was trying them on, I felt a ticket stub in the pocket. Wow it’s the last show I saw, a week into March 2020.
March began with such promise.
Sunday March 1st was a matinee of the National Ballet. Chroma, then Marguerite and Armand marking the farewell of Greta Hodgkinson, and finally the world premiere of Crystal Pite’s Angels’ Atlas.
Thursday March 5th was a Koerner Hall concert by James Rhodes, my first Beethoven concert of what was supposed to be a year celebrating his 250th anniversary.
And finally Saturday March 7th was that Toronto Operetta Theatre’s HMS Pinafore.
After 67 days (31 days of January, 29 for February + 7 days in March) that was it for live performance in 2020.
Suddenly it was all about cancellations. Nederlands Tans Theater with another work from Crystal Pite,…? Jan Lisiecki to play Beethoven with the Toronto Symphony,….? and the next week, Yuja Wang, to play Brahms….? The spring season of the Canadian Opera Company….? All either gone or postponed.
I’m not sure when I became conscious that this was going to last, but I was incredibly busy at work, writing procedures, doing long hours…So I couldn’t blog as often, and when I did it was more likely to be about a book or a film, or music I was making at home. And I was being extra careful to stay positive (as Stacey advised me), which is a big reason I talked so much about Sam the dog lately. She cheers me up.
If she could talk, she might say “you again?!”
I’m publishing this today because it feels like a natural beginning: January 20th being a significant date south of the border. As a retrospective for 2020, I don’t think I can do the usual best of Pollyanna thing as in other years, not when “the year” was so short. Instead I will make a couple of observations.
Alexander Neef has been succeeded as General Director of the Canadian Opera Company. The Neef decade was remarkable for its casting triumphs, for a fascinating parade of directors & productions, and for some unanswered questions about company finances. I’m hopeful that Neef’s successor Perryn Leech will be good for the health of the company, coming during this natural break imposed by circumstances.
Perryn Leech, incoming General Director of the COC
The next show will be a new beginning.
Meanwhile, am I the only one who found it odd that the COC were promoting their flagship attraction of Parsifal (meant to premiere in the fall, but cancelled) as “monumental”, trumpeting about how many hours long it is? Monuments are what you put up for dead people. Monuments are big heavy things, no? Long shows don’t usually attract an audience, especially not with this kind of language. Why not just hand out sleeping pills. And—a tiny quibble—if you’re going to play a sample of the opera for the audience at the season launch, why not try to excite the listeners? Why not give us the first ninety seconds of Act II, and played with conviction? Perhaps I’m asking too much, but I’m a subscriber. I was not impressed, even though as a devoted Wagnerian and admirer of the production, I’d be sure to see it at least a couple of times.
I have been pondering a few questions for months now, and confess that I don’t have the answers. We’re in a funny place right now, where the arts are prohibited in the usual venues in the usual ways, but are sometimes permitted in a variety of virtual arenas, depending on the medium. The rich are getting richer, whether we mean the companies like Shoppers Drug Mart, Walmart, Amazon, youtube, and telecom companies who profit during our lockdowns, or the clever entrepreneurs. And some are in big trouble.
I’ve been wondering about whether the virtual media are only a temporary replacement or the new normal. And my gut feeling is that we have to face facts. Of course I prefer live to the artificial, I’d rather singalong with Messiah than see it on TV, I’d rather be at a concert venue or theatre, always. The business model was always a bit precarious, leaning heavily on government & private support. I think circumstances have forced a great many artists to learn how to zoom, how to record & share their art. I hope the coming year –whenever we get to the promised land after COVID of course–sees a huge explosion of audience gratitude, even as I cringe thinking of artists & companies who are suffering, trying to pay bills with so many gigs cancelled. Virtual has been competing with live for quite awhile now. Long before the high definition broadcasts, there was already a fund from the recording industry in support of live music. This isn’t a new issue but one that has been underway for decades, if not centuries.
I wonder too about trained voices, meaning the ones that can be heard without amplification. I couldn’t help noticing that the virtual realm changes the paradigm. In Messiah / Complex the most authentic looking and sounding performers were the Indigenous voices not the powerful trained voices. It’s not terribly logical of me to use one event as somehow indicative: except that it confirmed exactly what I expect. I am reminded of the time of the early talkies, as captured in Singin’ in the Rain, when the rules changed due to a paradigm shift. Obviously it’s way too early to be making pronouncements, predicting winners and/or losers, but I think it’s a fascinating time. Hang on to your hat, the winds of change are blowing.
So I would recommend that you think about who and what you really like, who you want to support, and then if at all possible, to lend a hand. Whether you prefer dance, opera, music, a place of worship, restaurants,… they all are hurting in different ways right now. I wish our government would offer paid sick-leave, as I saw the advantages this confers while at the U of T, where they had the vision to be super lenient with staff whose possible illness might or might not be that virus. Mr Ford, this is no time to be cheap and worried about the deficit. There are lives at stake.
In the meantime, you know what to do to stay safe.
Sam the dog seems to be getting better. Her bloodwork shows that the antibiotics have worked. Her recovery is the main message I wanted to convey for anyone who had been worried by my previous messages.
As you probably know, there’s no such word as “Samiotics”. The title is a mashup, a crude imitation of something academic, perhaps echoing Fareed Zacharia while messing around as in a Frank Zappa song. Sam makes lots of yellow snow in the backyard, and Zappa has a song about that.
“Samiotics” is a word I just invented, combining “Sam” (our dog’s name) with “semiotics”, the study of signs. I’m interested in Sam’s communication. Semiotics has the same root as semaphore, that old signal system used between ships, communicating silently using flags.
Did you know for instance that the peace symbol comes from the semaphore for the initials “ND” for nuclear disarmament?
Semaphore for “N”Semaphore for “D”
Combine the flag positions of those two initials, and you get Bertrand Russsell’s ironic repurposing of a system used between naval ships during wartime to make a statement about peace.
So let’s turn to the study of samiotics, Sam’s communication. Don’t worry, while her vocabulary is pretty remarkable for a dog, it’s still pretty small.
1. “Good girl” means pretty much what it means to any other dog, largely communicated by our vocal tone and either pats or a treat: although we’ve been carefully avoiding treats lately while she’s unwell.
2. Any command must be prefaced by “Sam”, reinforcing her name but also making it clear that we’re asking her to do something, such as “Sam, come”. Her ears prick up when we say her name, so clearly she recognizes the word.
When I talk to her by name, Sam’s ears go up
3.“Come” means stop what you’re doing and come to the person calling you. I was never prouder than the time I had just released her off her leash, and noticed a big adult skunk lurking in a bush in our yard. The skunk was 60 feet away, Sam was 30 feet away. I said a stern “Sam come!” …. And she came. Talk about dodging a bullet! Thank goodness, I immediately leashed her and took her inside. The wind fortunately was in our favour, otherwise the story wouldn’t have been nearly so happy.
4.”Hurry up” means do your business. I learned this one from Irene & John Kirec who we knew back in the 1990s, through the Vizsla club here in Ontario. If you say this phrase every time your dog pees or poops, it will come to associate the phrase with the function. It’s Pavlovian I guess, and come to think of it, that whole concept of Pavlov began with a dog.
5.”sit”…. sometimes it works, sometimes it requires a few utterances.
6.”go home”, ah I love this one. Erika really taught it first. I’ve been using it and am astonished at what I see. We’ll be walking in the back yard, and I say this. She’ll sort of look at me, knowing what I mean. And if I come closer to her and say it again, she bolts for the house full tilt, sometimes crashing right into me. She may stop partway, so I’ll do it again: and she will again start galloping for the house.
7.“backdoor” is something I’ve been trying to teach her, when she runs to the side-door (our usual place of egress) and we used the backdoor instead. Sometimes she gets it…Let’s just say that we’re working on this one.
This list calls attention to the arbitrariness of signs. I could just as easily say “pee pee” as “hurry up” to encourage the bodily function. It doesn’t matter what word we assign so long as it’s unambiguous for the dog. What’s bad is when the word is confusing to the dog. Short words seem to be best, just as we see with humans come to think of it. I recall seeing something back when I was studying information theory (relevant to composition), that the possibility of error increases as the square of the number of items (a bad paraphrase of something I read back in the 1980s). “Samantha” might be her name but we stick to “Sam” when we command or call her, in the interest of intelligibility.
And speaking of vocal tone, I remember reading that baby-talk is actually useful. So we use it. When I say “good girl” and pat Sam, it’s accompanied by enough enthusiastic goo-goo baby-talk sounds to make you nauseous. Yes, we’re just normal dog owners, meaning that we love Sam, adoring her like crazy.
But wait, you probably noticed that the title is “The Samiotics of the Carolina Dog”….and I mentioned Bernie Sanders.
So yes…. While we were googling to find out what might be wrong with Sam –who is getting better after scaring us around Christmas & New Years—we found a few things.
Adjusting her diet might have been the single biggest game-changer. I am a bit obsessive about this, having gone head to head with a couple of doctors back when I was struggling to figure out what was wrong with me. One of the vets shrugged off my question (“what about her diet?” which is pardon my French ridiculously obvious when the animal has a liver problem) offering instead an expensive exploratory surgery. Diet can be the problem, and seems to have gone a long way towards making her healthy: along with the antibiotics that we were able to coax down her throat, with the helpful suggestion of another vet as I mentioned a little while ago.
The big surprise, though is Sam’s breed. Erika saw something about a dog that had died. The picture caught her attention. The original story earlier in the year led to Tuna the dog becoming famous as her video went viral as she was attentive to Bernie Sanders, yet slept when Pete Buttigieg spoke. Tuna the dog reminded Erika of Sam. We had assumed that Sam, a rescue who has had multiple owners, must be a mutt, a mysterious mix of different breeds: and that’s okay of course.
We were in the dark because we figured we were Sam’s 4th owner, an assumption based on the original story we were told. As owner #4, we got Sam in March 2019 from owner #3, who had her for a year or two, getting her from owner #2 who had her for roughly a decade after finding her in a park without a collar, at an apparent age of less than a year. And btw, owner #2 gave her up because of allergies that developed, sad to have to say goodbye to their beloved family pet Sam.
Sam had been found in a park, so it was assumed that there was an owner #1 before them who had lost the dog, as they tried (placing ads, putting up posters) for over two weeks in search of that original owner before giving up and deciding to keep Sam as their own.
Ah but there’s another possible scenario that came to us with a little help from Bernie Sanders, Tuna and writer Chris Stedman aka @ChrisDStedman on Twitter. The combination of Sanders and Tuna was magic. All that traffic made it possible for Erika to spot Tuna’s picture.
Chris Stedman’s Twitter photo
The first sentence of Stedman’s piece says ”for six years I shared my life, on- and offline, with a 38-pound Carolina Dog named Tuna.“ The “Carolina Dog” is now a recognized breed, although until Erika saw that article, I had never heard of them before. They are an American version of the dingo, a kind of wild dog known to live in places such as South Carolina, Georgia, and as far away as Texas.
Sam was found loose wandering without any collar in a park in Florida. We wonder now if instead of thinking of her as a mutt rescue dog with another owner, maybe she was in fact a Carolina dog who had been born in the wild. It’s especially intriguing when you look at the characteristics of this breed.
We can start with the appearance. Sam looks a lot like Tuna, especially the way she sometimes holds her ears straight up, at other times dropping them down in response to people.
Sam is a lot bigger than Tuna. Does that mean she can’t be the same breed? I think that’s an interesting question. I recall the notions of what is “standard” from my previous dog Monty, an American & Canadian champion Vizsla stud. Monty died in 1993.
Monty aka Comynara Deacon’s Barat (photo: Alex Richard)
At shows or meetings one might hear comments about how this dog’s colour isn’t right, that that one is too tall to be a real Vizsla. Note though that there was a great deal of insecurity about the validity of the stock, because the communists in Hungary almost killed off the breed, given its associations with the aristocracy: a dog rich men took out on the hunt. I heard a story that at one time the worldwide population of ALL Vizslas was as low as 10 dogs: because of the Soviet-Hungarian purge. Now transfer that to a dog that is essentially wild. Can there even be such a thing as a “standard”? I wonder. Perhaps Sam is too big, perhaps Sam is a child of an inter-breeding between a genuine Carolina dog and something larger? Or is the idea of a standard simply impossible under the circumstances. The American Kennel Club says they’re 30 -55 pounds, and Sam is in that range.
Carolina Dog image from AKC. No this isn’t Sam but she looks a lot like this
Normally females are smaller than males but in fact we’ve allowed Sam to get chubby on the assumption that she’s old & sick (she has a huge lump in one side that we were told could be cancer). Yes we spoiled her but since the change to her diet and her infection in late December, she’s lost weight on her new food.
AKC says “Hesitant with strangers, they will sound the alarm when unaware of who’s at the door, but once they see their people, they are ecstatic.” That is exactly what Sam does. She is the ideal guard dog, barking at us until she can see that’s it’s one of us and not an intruder. She is a hunter once she gets into the yard. I know of at least a couple of times she killed smaller creatures outside. They’re known to self-groom almost like a cat, with nails that grow faster than other dog breeds. And that’s what we’ve seen with Sam, who will trim her own nails if we don’t do it for her.
As we had been doing a bit of painting in the room with the piano, furniture had been moved about a bit. Sam lay beside my bench rather than underneath while I played. The dropsheet was now off the piano, but my music was all still downstairs, so I had to play everything from memory.
Erika observed that I play better when I play from memory. I think Erika & Sam are my two best teachers, each making me play better & in new ways. So the repertoire included the thoughtful middle movement of Beethoven’s Pathetique sonata, the Moonlight Sonata’s first 2 movements (while I know the third it’s hard to play such a thing softly), the 2nd Scherzo of Chopin, (again omitting the loud stuff that ends the piece, instead ending in the soft middle section) and Debussy’s 1st Arabesque. The room has been emptied a bit for painting and so it’s no wonder we noticed that the piano seems louder, the upper octaves carrying an extra ping no matter how softly I play. Yes the clarity of the sound is inevitable with bare floor space and bare walls to bounce the sound, even to human ears, let alone the canine ones.
2020 ended with a pair of Z’s that could just as easily be seen as the start of 2021. After Fareed Zakaria’s book, it’s Zappa, a documentary released late in 2020. Where Fareed is analyzing historical trends with an eye to our possible futures, the Zappa doc is entirely about the past. But Zappa is possibly the most inspiring film I could suggest for a creative spirit, especially musicians or composers. Its subjects are vitally important any year, let alone now in the midst of a pandemic that has disrupted artistic activity. If you’ve been looking inward, asking yourself who you are and what you should be doing, you’ll find Zappa a great way to begin the year.
We’re watching a biography full of analysis, probing the Zappa phenomenon and his creations, while exploring the cultural context. The structure is not especially original but that makes it easily intelligible, that we’re on a familiar path. We begin near the end of Frank Zappa’s short life, not in America but in Czechoslovakia, one of the places where Zappa was recognized & adored, at a kind of zenith in the early 1990s just before his untimely death in 1993 at the age of 52. We then flash back to the beginning of his life, tracking through in step by step fashion until we get to the final years.
If you want to know who Zappa really is there’s no better place to start than this film. I say start because there are numerous ways to answer that question. Some of us have been listening to his music for decades yet still haven’t decided who he really is, at least in sum because there’s so much to him. He was a composer, a guitarist, a comedian, a political satirist: often in the context of the same 3 minute song. And the way he is embraced by different groups speaks to the diversity of his output, resistant to pigeonholing.
He can come across as a comedian.
But he was a serious artist. There’s no contradiction.
I see his unmistakeable influence in some of my favorite composers. Sometimes his music resembles “pop music”, but in quotes given that he was pushing back heavily against the mainstream. He also had another life composing in a variety of styles that are recognizably modernist in their approach.
Some of the credit for the film belongs to director Alex Winter. Although you probably know him for the three Bill & Ted movies, he has fewer acting credits (28) than directing credits (37) according to IMDB.
Here’s Winter’s ambitious directorial statement, which is totally borne out by the resulting film.
It seemed striking to me and producer Glen Zipper that there had yet to be a definitive, all-access documentary on the life and times of Frank Zappa. We set out to make that film, to tell a story that is not a music doc, or a conventional biopic, but the dramatic saga of a great American artist and thinker; a film that would set out to convey the scope of Zappa’s prodigious and varied creative output, and the breadth of his extraordinary personal and political life. First and foremost, I wanted to make a very human, universal cinematic experience about an extraordinary individual. What helped make this vision possible was Gail Zappa granting us exclusive access to Zappa’s vault; a vast collection of his unreleased music, movies, incomplete projects, unseen interviews and unheard concert recordings. With this wealth of material, and the minimal addition of present-day interviews with Frank’s closest friends and musical collaborators, we built a narrative that is both intimate and epic in scope. But before we could set about making the film, we needed to preserve a great deal of material from the vault that was deteriorating and in great danger of being lost forever. So we created a crowdfunding campaign, and were lucky to break funding records for a documentary related project. And thus began an exhaustive, two year mission to preserve and archive the vault materials. When this was completed, we set about making the film. Frank Zappa was not only a creative genius, but also a great and eloquent thinker who articulated the madness of his times with extraordinary clarity and wit. A legitimate maverick who lived and worked amongst other extraordinary people in historic times. Ultimately, ZAPPA is not a retro trip into the past, but a thoroughly modern exploration of a man whose worldview, art and politics were far ahead of their time, and profoundly relevant in our challenging times.
While I’m grateful to Winter & his team of collaborators (including son Ahmet Zappa) the real lucidity on display is from the brain of Frank Zappa, a self-taught composer & musician who has a lot to teach us.
Full disclosure (and this may take a bit…): my admiration for Frank Zappa is enormous, unreasonable, bordering on a kind of madness. He appeared in my life at a time when I was very impressionable, grabbing me as firmly as any of the opera composers I came to love, and with added credibility as a critic of the very society I saw myself loathing, meaning the plastic American war machine of the 1960s. My own self-sabotaging self-critical self saw a kindred spirit in Zappa.
Nobody even attempted to do what he did.
I was blown away by my first encounter back in 1969 on a compilation album titled Mothermania, when I was young. I had loved Sergeant Pepper and Magical Mystery Tour in 1967 (and the first 45 RPM single I acquired in 1967, namely the unsurpassable Strawberry Fields / Penny Lane), yet they didn’t move me nearly so much.
My older sister (who bought Mothermania) showed it to me, amused & intrigued.
We didn’t listen the same way, of course. I was overwhelmed, trying to figure out how they did it, counting the odd time-signatures, the complex harmonies that I tried to reproduce at the piano, where I confronted bitonality (although it would be much later via Stravinsky that I would learn what to call it).
I see him as a genius, the single biggest influence on me. He defies classification. He was self-taught and for that alone is an avatar to anyone who had doubts about the value of academic study, particularly in music. I put him alongside figures such as Claude Debussy (also famous for his fights with academic conservatory thinking), Bernard Herrmann (similarly conflicted, torn between the music that made his money and the music he wanted to write) and both George Gershwin & Leonard Bernstein (both with a similar divide between a popular sound and compositions that were more palatable in the halls of classical music). While I admire the aforementioned composers a great deal, none of them except Debussy took on the additional task and hazard of articulating a critique of the cultural industry.
While there are appearances by a great many famous faces–stars flashing across the Laurel Canyon firmament such as Jean-Luc Ponty, Lenny Bruce, John Lennon & Yoko Ono, Ringo Starr, Eric Clapton, Joni Mitchell, Zubin Mehta, Alice Cooper– you will be disappointed if you want a concert film, a film full of rock and roll. This is not that film.
And for that alone I am deeply thankful to Alex Winter & the team that assembled Zappa. How do you honour such a complex personality? Surely not by caving in to commercial demands, especially in the case of a composer who continuously mocked that dynamic. Exhibit A would be the parody of Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band called We’re Only in it for the Money. Or right in the trailer I posted earlier, you see him suggest that when the audience screams for more, he’d have the band play a dark modern Varese piece guaranteed to clear the joint. Yes he understood music as a business and at least part of him loathed the necessity of making money.
You may be aware of the four surviving Zappa children, famous at least for the names that Gail & Frank gave them. In order they’re Moon (1967), Dweezil (1969), Ahmet (1974) and Diva (1979). Gail outlived Frank (Born Dec 21st 1940, died December 4, 1993), dying in 2015. If you google “zappa family” you’ll see pictures and various stories about the conflicts between the siblings, although I’m hopeful that this film signals reconciliation and a new co-operation.
The basement of the Zappa home in Laurel Canyon, California, is practically a character in the film. We see an enormous archive of scores & tapes that resembles that last scene in Raiders of the Lost Ark. It becomes clear that you can’t believe all the legends about Zappa. The man we meet in this film is a workaholic, a perfectionist, compulsive in his pursuit of his compositions. Gail speaks of him not as a rock star but as a composer, endlessly writing, revising, creating.
You may wonder: did he use drugs or condone their use? Not according to what he has always said, including a few quotes in this film. But then again much of his adult life was split between home in Laurel Canyon with the wife & kids, notwithstanding visits from fans & groupies and the time on the road with his band: when he tells us explicitly that he screwed around. And Gail tells us how she coped (which may remind you of a certain river in Egypt). I only mention this in context with the drug question; if he lived a double life between home & the road, perhaps he indulged in more than groupies when he was away from Laurel Canyon, and was never caught nor prosecuted.
But the man was a workaholic, writing incessantly, pushing his band to levels of performance that you would never expect from a cursory look at the pictures on the album covers. The level of musicianship in his band is simply the highest I have ever experienced in anything we might want to call pop or jazz.
In live performances they (whether the original “Mothers” or later incarnations of the band with other players) work between multiple idioms within the same song, sometimes seeming to improvise, (that is, playing something that is scored in such a way as to seem improvisatory), sometimes playing very slow & cool, sometimes conducted by Zappa, especially when executing difficult rhythms in perfect unison.
But Zappa was also a composer pushing towards something modernist, a bit of a synthesis of influences including Varese, Stravinsky, and all the popular idioms he encountered as a child growing up in the 40s and ‘50s.
There are aspects of the Zappa aesthetic that will forever be mysterious. In the film he speaks of growing up in Maryland near a factory where his dad was employed manufacturing poison gases, likely a factor in his frequent use of gasmasks as a concert prop. One of the biggest differences between Zappa and Bernstein or Gershwin is in his love of grotesquerie, his embrace of freaks and his self—image as a purveyor of freak culture. In this respect he reminds me of a counter-culture version of Gustav Mahler, whose famous story from his session with Sigmund Freud, running outside to escape a traumatic fight between his parents to hear a barrel organ’s melodies, serves to explain his tormented music of ambivalence. Zappa had his own epiphany, when his studio was raided by puritanical police and he was thrown in jail. The imprinted message was a different flavor combination than that of Mahler, this one comprised of absurdly stupid authority figures imposing upon an innocent populace. I wonder if I’m projecting in calling Zappa’s genius troubled, reading ugliness implicit in brute force & arbitrary power.
While there are beautiful moments in his songs, they’re a very different sort of beauty.
This film is in some respects like a new beginning, given how many have been influenced by Zappa. While I watched that basement in Zappa’s house full of tapes & scores in respectful awe, the next step must be for someone to explore, study, catalogue and perhaps share. Just as there are libraries with old scores by JS Bach or Claude Debussy in Europe, so too with the Laurel Canyon treasure trove. In that sense it is a beginning.
Zappa tells us that he disbanded the Mothers in 1969, reminding me of another beloved ensemble of the time Blood Sweat & Tears, and Canadian David Clayton Thomas who (as I recall) explained how touring was the only way some members could make money.
Zappa said “we were going on tour so I took $400 out of the bank for money to eat, and ended up $10,000 in the hole…” One of the musicians at the time said “We didn’t even get a 2 week notice.” It was rough, one of them mentioned having just bought a car….
But the point is, as we’ve seen with opera, touring a big band is at best a shaky financial proposition.
Zappa would start his own label.
Later there was to be a London Symphony Orchestra concert of Zappa music. He was asked if the concert and/ or its recording will make money.
“No” comes his blunt reply.
“Why then do you do it?”
“Well I think any artistic decision you make on whether you’ll make any money is not really an artistic decision , it’s a business decision. And there are a lot of things I can do to earn a living. “
Letterman asks (on TV) “how do you get the London Symphony to play your stuff”?
Zappa: “you pay them”.
Zappa also said “get a real estate license if you expect to be a composer in the United States.”
Alice Cooper said “I think Frank was afraid to have a hit record. I mean he could have written hit records all day. I think he sabotaged a lot of his records. It was interesting because everyone was going for the hit record and he never did”.
Zappa also said “This is the dawning of the dark ages again. Never have the arts been in such bad shape in the United States… The business of music is all about this fake list of who sold what. The whole idea of selling large numbers of items in order to determine quality is what’s really repulsive about it”.
He never sold out. And he worked very hard.
If you can see the documentary, currently offered for example via Rogers and likely on other PPV services I recommend it with only one caution. His music is still swirling in my head.
I always figure, if you’re going to have an ear-worm, let it be brilliant.
The title grabs you, doesn’t it? Ten Lessons for a Post-Pandemic World portends something well-informed, if not brilliant. As 2021 begins I wonder what’s to come, and wish i could turn to someone knowledgeable to tell me what’s to come.
If you watch CNN you would recognize Fareed Zakaria, host of a weekly magazine of international affairs GPS: “the Global Public Square”. It’s on Sunday, and I never miss an episode, just about the best thing on that network. He also writes for the Washington Post. Zakaria was educated at Yale and Harvard, where he received his PhD, having been editor Foreign Affairs and Newsweek International, among other professional gigs.
I wonder if his influence extends as far as conceptual templates in the literary world. I saw an Atlantic piece today. New York Magazine had a piece just a few days ago. Are they copying Fareed? I’m tempted to join the club. For months now I’ve been thinking of doing a piece with a title like “five lessons from Sam” meaning the lessons my dog (Sam) has taught me.
1-be nice 2-show gratitude 3-be gentle 4-feed me! (if Sam could talk, much of the time she would either say “feed me” or “let me go outside I need to pee / poo”) 5-when in doubt play the piano pianissimo. (recalling that Sam lives under the piano)
But I don’t mean to mock Fareed whose erudition & learning come across in every sentence, whether I’m listening to his wisdom on GPS or reading his book.
Even so, I’m conflicted. You see, there’s a small detail that I can’t ignore. It’s January 2021 as I continue to read Fareed Zakaria’s excellent book, and in case you didn’t notice, the pandemic isn’t over. Even if the title does dare to give us a name for the promised land, we are a long way from a post-pandemic world.
In the meantime I suppose his book is a fascinating study, perhaps a bit of futurism, pondering possible changes. What will life be like?
I’m not going to do the cheesy thing and tell you the ten lessons. I hate spoilers in movies (where someone spills the plot details spoiling the surprise), and won’t do that here even if it’s non-fiction. It’s fascinating reading with or without the surprises one gets turning the page.
The title is less an indication of the book’s objectives than an organizing principle, a way to structure the conversation, and helpful as a guide to the topics being covered. Fareed pulls in lots of sources while offering a discussion on a series of topics such as urbanization, the impact of computers & AI, or comparing different approaches to political economy. The prose flows (and I giggle to think that my assonant phrasing may have stopped you, pondering what I mean when I say that…How ironic that my comment on how his prose flows, might stop you, because mine: doesn’t. So it’s a terrible illustration actually). But just as it’s a great pleasure listening to Fareed on GPS, so too reading his thoughts & how nicely he segues from one to the next. I’m in awe of his writing & his thinking.
It seems especially poignant with recent events in Washington DC. I recall the disdain with which many received Kelly Ann Conway’s construct of “alternative facts”, a euphemism for the messages originating with her former boss. But as of 2021 one can’t deny that there is an enormous amount of information out there, including a great deal that is totally unreliable. Authority is a compass to orient us. The red light or green light is what we look for before we press the gas pedal. We will not know where we are nor who we are if we can’t rely on the location of the North Star, if all the alternative sources confuse us and problematize truth. Our ability to think clearly is clouded when everything becomes a matter for controversy, subject to doubt. Perhaps it should go without saying, but in a trustworthy book, you know where it’s coming from, its sources properly documented, the author’s objectives clear. We’re in a troubled time when experts are questioned merely for being experts when our leaders have to have body-guards to protect them from those who question the legitimacy of the electoral process.
It’s a pleasure reading Fareed. I only wish that whenever I emerge from the book & turn on the TV, that the world were as trustworthy, as civilized, as uplifting, as the discourse I enjoy in Fareed’s book.
As we come to the end of 2020, we may wonder. Where do we go from here? Now what?
It’s in that spirit that I invoke a Schubert song, “Wohin” from his cycle Die Schöne Müllerin.
First there was a poem written by Wilhelm Müller. Schubert makes a cycle of songs from some of Müller’s poems, including this one.
Ich hört’ ein Bächlein rauschen Wohl aus dem Felsenquell, Hinab zum Tale rauschen So frisch und wunderhell.
I hear a creek rustling, from its source, descending into the valley so fresh & clear.
Ich weiss nicht, wie mir wurde, Nicht, wer den Rat mir gab, Ich musste auch hinunter Mit meinem Wanderstab.
I don’t know what made me follow with my walking-stick
Hinunter und immer weiter Und immer dem Bache nach, Und immer heller rauschte, Und immer heller der Bach.
Downwards and ever further, and always beside the brooklet, clearer, fresher…
Ist das denn meine Strasse? O Bächlein, sprich, wohin? Du hast mit deinem Rauschen Mir ganz berauscht den Sinn.
Is this then my path? Speak to me little brook, which way? Your sounds intoxicate my senses.
Was sag’ ich denn vom Rauschen? Das kann kein Rauschen sein: Es singen wohl die Nixen Tief unten ihren Reihn.
What do I say to the murmurs, that are the singing of the water-nymphs.
Lass singen, Gesell, lass rauschen, Und wandre fröhlich nach! Es gehn ja Mühlenräder In jedem klaren Bach.
Let them sing, friend, and wander near. The millwheel goes in every clear stream…. And one may wonder where one can still find a clear unpolluted brook with a millwheel. Sigh….
So let’s listen to a version of Schubert’s song “Wohin”.
When baritone Thomas Quasthoff sings, it’s 2:14 in length.
Or there’s Mattias Goerne, much longer at 2:44. I prefer the more reflective pace, the river still intoxicating but the observer lost in thought.
When I was young I usually accompanied baritones (beginning with Peter Barcza) so it feels natural that baritone performances were and remain a starting point on the journey.
It’s not just because I’m a tenor that I prefer tenor versions, but this has come to feel more natural to me, perhaps because I emerged from the “cocoon” of my early role as an accompanist, to sing the songs myself (although with Schubert attempting to sing & play at once can be as slippery as the rocks in his little stream). But listen for example to Fritz Wunderlich who does it in 2:26….. Was there ever a prettier voice singing this?
Like Schubert, he died young.
Or Peter Schreier, 2.22 who recently left us.
Now of course Schubert lives on in other forms. There’s the inevitable piano transcription from Franz Liszt. Notice that Liszt seems to have the piano sing the song, so we have both the brook and the singing voice as though it were an observer of the cascades of notes: that originally flow through Schubert’s score, albeit with more subtlety.
Liszt regularly edits the songs in his transcriptions. For instance he chooses to repeat the line “O Bächlein, sprich, wohin?”…It is a stunning idea, really. The observer is paralyzed, wondering which way to go. Why not repeat it? And he’ll do the same thing at the last line of this middle section (“Du hast mit deinem Rauschen /Mir ganz berauscht den Sinn.”). Why not repeat that affirmation of the intoxicating powers of the stream? Liszt will add a bit extra towards the end as well. Part of me marvels at the new creation, its beauty & self-assurance: while the fundamentalist inside me proclaims that the original is still best…Schubert’s subtlety matching Müller.
How wonderful that we don’t have to choose. We have both.
And then later we’d get Rachmaninoff literally at piano. This is a piano roll of Rachmaninoff himself. It’s 2:06, much faster than the actual song. I doubt whether Rachmaninoff would play it this way in a live performance, with no space for reflection. There’s little romance when you’re showing off. But it’s a piano roll after all, the audience to applaud you is virtual.
Shades of 2020.
Let me find a more reflective reading of Rachmaninoff. I love this piece, and have even played it as a postlude in church a couple of times. The first time was at new years, aware that the song is really a meditation on the future & the possible paths we might follow.
Whatever paths you follow, whether you become intoxicated by beauty or keep a safe distance, I wish you a happy New Year.
Last week began with her staggering weakly, doing a scary impersonation of a carcass (lying on her side so forlorn in appearance that a couple of times I was asked to check whether she was still breathing!), and rarely even barking at the window.
That last tendency –barking at everyone including me & Erika—earned her the nickname “Cujo” from a neighbour who would hear her curious welcome. That’s in both senses of the word “curious”, given that she was both an object of interest and also expressing her own curiosity.
In the last week she’s become stronger every day, walking faster, then moving to a canter and lately, sometimes galloping full-tilt, especially when she scents another dog. And yes that leads to lots of ‘bark bark bark’.
On the day after I published the review of Alex Ross’s big Wagner book, I had the composer still on the brain, and so inevitably played something of his for Sam today. I sat down with my Tristan und Isolde score to play the last pages, as I often do (at least once a week). In the spirit of the serenade I spoke of in a previous blog, I undertook the piece a bit more deliberately, ignoring the usual tempi & most dynamics. Everything was slower, more careful, and almost entirely piano or pianissimo. The exception is the section where the accompaniment seems to burst forth in waves of sound, going from fortissimo to pianissimo; for this section I preserved the contrast although on a much smaller scale, ie mf to ppp rather than ff to pp.
I was pleasantly surprised to discover how moved Erika was by the performance. It’s a familiar piece after all (given that I inflict it on her so often) but played in a different way.
She liked it.
I then pulled out the Songs without Words, perhaps still mindful of Ross’s book and wanting to offer something tranquil from the other side of the conversation, namely that colleague & rival whom Wagner attacked for being Jewish, even though—like Meyerbeer—he was also an influence and a composer from whom he got some of his ideas. Yes I’m speaking of Felix Mendelssohn, a man with whom I identify very strongly. I mean there I am in church, playing the organ or singing, yet someone comes up to me to wish me a Happy Chanukkah. OR Hanukkah? Don’t ask me to spell it, I’m not Jewish even though I have enough of a sschnozzz on my face that by Hitler’s way of thinking (whereby “Juden” signifies a race not a religion)… I’d be sent to the showers. I identify with Mendelssohn, who gave us the stirring Reformation Symphony employing the melody from A Mighty Fortress Is Our God (a hymn I have trouble singing, because my voice tends to break over some of the words…. i never make it through the last verse, which always brings me to tears). Yet his contemporaries treated him with disdain, and that’s without thinking of a passionate anti-semite such as Wagner. Oh well…
I was again selective in what I played, as Sam had come over to the piano during the Wagner & was still lying quietly under the instrument.
First, #4 of the first book, Op 19.
Does it add an additional layer, that Barenboim is the pianist? you be the judge.
As you can see it has the additional advantage of brevity, all on a single page. I didn’t do any of the FFs as anything much beyond a mezzo-piano. One can still shape a piece softly, especially when the audience is so close as to practically be INSIDE instrument.
Then I played the previous one, perhaps because I was peering at its last page. Op 19 #3 finishes on the page opposite #4 in my copy, another treasure brought home from a used book store for all of $15.
Beautiful: and it sits perfectly on the piano
There are some pieces that are almost irresistible, the pleasure verging on something sexual. This one, Op 19 #3 is such a piece, the pianist enacting a kind of hunt with horns & horses, exhilarating, ESPECIALLY if you manage to play it right.
Not so much if you and your horses stumble.
Again, I was mindful of the doggie who isn’t supposed to be bark bark barking as part of the chase, no matter how loudly her master might want to holler “Tally HO!!”
While I do usually play it quickly & loudly, today was different, like a sleeping person recalling a hunt. Indeed we sometimes see Sam’s paws twitch in her sleep as though she were chasing squirrels in her dreams. This was like a hunt seen from afar through gauze or in an old black & white movie.
I’m mindful of black & white movies when I play from this book because I’m certain that Erich Korngold played these pieces in his preparation for collaboration with Max Reinhardt on Midsummernight’s Dream, first as a live performance and then in the Warner Brothers Film of 1935.
“Certain(?)” you may well ask.
I played two of the three piano pieces that Korngold repurposed & then orchestrated in his film-score.
The Venetianisches Gondellied (Venetian gondola song) that is #6 and last in book 1 (op 19), becomes a lullaby sung by Titania to Bottom.
She intones “sleep thou” solemnly (as in the melody in the piano), while he harmonizes with the occasional solemn “hee – haw” in reply. All by itself it’s one of the most beautiful things I’ve ever heard, simultaneously gorgeous and funny at the same time. Faeries prepare Titania spiders spin a gossamer veil accompanied by that ideal sort of music, a spinning song (the last thing I played today for Sam).
Korngold orchestrates it of course.
And later there’s another tune –that I didn’t play today—that Korngold uses to get the faeries to lead Titania & Bottom to bed, Op 67 #6, and right there in the same book with the spinning song Korngold used earlier in the same scene of the play. I’m intrigued that it’s a Wiegenlied (cradle song), which is stunningly apt: because it’s a cradle song and yes, because it’s pretty energetic. But hey, if you’re the queen of the faeries going to bed with a donkey perhaps it’s not likely to be a problem.
They weren’t going to bed merely to sleep, right?
The way Barenboim plays this, it isn’t bad as a cradle song, nowhere near as wild or libidinous as Korngold makes it.
That would be how I’d have to play it for Sam…. Next time I suppose.
I’m ending 2020 with a pair of complementary book reviews. No they’re not in any way similar in their topics, yet they frame the transition to a new year rather well. Fareed Zakaria’s Ten Lessons for a Post-pandemic World, (the next review you’ll see in this blog) would dare to predict the path ahead, while Alex Ross’s book about Wagner & Wagnerism offers the look in the rear-view mirror, in its massive summary of cultural influences.
Wagnerism: Art and Politics in the Shadow of Music is a big book, 784 pages in the hardcover edition. But in a study of the phenomenon of Richard Wagner how could it be otherwise? “Wagnerian” is an adjective that connotes weight and massive size.
Yet the pages flew by. I will read it again soon.
I won’t subject you to a long preamble before saying that I think Ross’s book is worth reading. Trust me, it’s important if you can find time to read it.
I’m fascinated thinking about who should be reading this book and why.
There are those for instance who think opera is dead, irrelevant, a museum piece in the 21st century that has long outlived its importance. They probably represent the vast majority, readers who won’t even give Ross’s book a second thought, and so might wonder why I would insist on its importance. They may have trouble imagining why one would bother reading about something (opera?) so peripheral and insignificant.
But that’s not really what Ross’s book is about. Such a reader would be in for a colossal surprise, at the unexpected connections, the influences. Because Wagner matters far beyond the realm of opera. Indeed it doesn’t feel like musicology.
Are you a student of film? While I am fascinated by film music and its connections to Wagner, I did not expect to be reading about DW Griffith or Eisenstein in Wagner’s shadow.
Or are you simply interested in the history of Western Europe in the 20th century? Wagner is the bedrock upon which the culture has been built, long before Hitler reared his head.
And then there are the opera-lovers, especially the Wagnerians. The latter represent a curious subset that I mention with a fraught mixture encompassing love & hatred: because in other words I’m looking into a mirror. Yes I’m also one of them. For Wagnerians reading Ross’s book, they will not only get the connections Ross makes between operas and the operatic allusions by poets & painters & novelists & film-makers, but will not need persuading.
We’ve already swallowed the Kool-ade. But wait a minute… that metaphor is just a modern version of a magic potion plot-twist in the first acts of Tristan und Isolde and in Götterdämmerung.
I need to revisit an allusion I made at the beginning of my review of Sky Gilbert’s Shakespeare book last month.
I recall hearing that there were more books about Jesus, Napoleon Bonaparte & Richard Wagner than anyone else: a factoid likely composed by a musicologist. But when I googled the question I see that it’s now 1-Jesus, 2-Napoleon and, 3- (you guessed it): William Shakespeare.
I remember the shock of seeing Jacques Barzun’s title Darwin, Marx and Wagner (1941) a study that I first read way back around 1970, when I was in high-school. I never dreamed that a composer could be important. At one time Wagner was understood to be much more than just an opera composer. I remember that feeling now all over again in coming to Ross’s study. As messy as the topic can be (given Wagner’s anti-semitism & his association with Nazism), as disgusting as I sometimes find Wagner the man & his beliefs, it’s a surprisingly positive experience, to once again see the affirmation of the centrality of Wagner, important both for sublime beauty & disgusting horrors.
I recall too the shock of my classsmates in my modern drama seminar back in the 1990s, when Professor Domenico Pietropaolo had Richard Wagner on our reading list. Yes he was a composer. But he was also a dramaturg in the original sense of the word, namely a theatre theorist & scholar.
That is just a small part of what Ross is after in his book.
I don’t think it’s an accident that I’ve come to the end of the year with these two books before me, like the two heads of Janus, the god from whom January takes its name. Ross might suggest that Wagner’s influence is universal, as pervasive as COVID-19; I’m perversely remembering Thomas Adès suggestion in his analysis of Parsifal that Wagner is “a disease”.
There’s a word Ross keeps using. Everyone thinks that they know what they mean when they say “modern”; “modernist” is not so well-known. One of the great joys of reading Wagnerism has been the chance to see Ross confirm suspicions I’ve long held. If I were to reduce Ross’s huge book to a single sentence –which may sound crazy—it would be that “Wagner is the most influential artist of the last 200 years”, a viewpoint that I share.
The chapters of such a big book vary greatly. At times I was reading something that more or less confirmed my beliefs, while I nodded along. So while Ross writes about Nietzsche or Baudelaire, yes it’s right, although at times I was surprised. And sometimes the chapter takes me entirely into new territory. I now have a desire to explore the novels of Willa Cather, not having suspected that she reframes Wagnerian materials in an American context. I want to look again at Bunûel & Eisenstein, TS Eliot, Virginia Woolf & Thomas Mann just to name a few.
William Blissett
I need to explore what William Blissett wrote, seeing that Ross has quoted him multiple times, a Toronto Wagnerian (and former professor at U of T) whose presence I’ve enjoyed seeing regularly at opera performances in town (I’m just another former student, nodding to him in the lobby). Ross makes me want to re-read and think again about what I’ve seen and heard. And Ross echoes my own suspicion, that for Brecht the dramaturgy of Wagner was the elephant in the room that everyone in his time knew & loved or loathed: now missing from the education of those who might want to understand the context when Brecht felt he needed to wake up a sleeping audience.
I thought I would be doing a disservice to readers if I didn’t somehow capture the breadth of the book: but I can’t possibly do so, not when my word count (somewhere between 800 & 1000) barely exceeds the number of pages in Ross’s book… The size of the volume reflects Ross’s enthusiasm for the subject, an unmistakable passion.
Last night Sam the dog went to bed but didn’t close her eyes. It’s disturbing. As you may have read in other recent posts, she’s sick. The liver isn’t working right, an incurable malady whether you’re a human or a dog. No she isn’t an alcoholic, and we’re not sure what might have caused the problem. She’s only come into our lives recently, late in Sam’s life, given that she’s a rescue and we (me & Erika) are Sam’s third home, after two previous owners.
Yes she was awake in the night. I am not sleeping terribly well to begin with, but also I have to check in on her when I wake up. She lies on the floor right beside my bed. And so while lately we are glad not to see any of the nastier symptoms from before (vomiting or peeing on the floor…at least not very much), every time I looked at her (at 1 am, at 2 am, at 3 am, at 5 am and again at 6:30): her eyes were wide open.
So it was an unexpected relief when I saw her eyes finally closed today in the afternoon, under the piano. I played a series of pieces out of an old anthology of modern piano pieces.
It’s a wonderful chestnut this Schirmer book. Speaking of things I miss during the pandemic, I miss browsing in bookstores, especially used bookstores, where I found this anthology selling for all of $3.00. There are several major works in it such as Ravel’s Jeux d’eau or his Pavane that in new 2020 editions would easily set me back $3.00 all by themselves.
On this occasion I didn’t play the big loud pieces (fast pieces from Percy Grainger, Igor Stravinsky or Bela Bartok). And I softened the dynamics to mezzo-piano or softer in everything I played. In effect the interlude was curated by Schirmer.
1 Serenata Andaluza by Manuel de Falla
2 Träumerei op 9 #4 by Richard Strauss… I really love this enigmatic little piece.
3 Romance op 24 #9 by Jean Sibelius: but always as softly as possible even when the piece calls for big effects. Yes I omitted the big powerful passages near the end, going for something softer instead. While Sibelius might have been offended, Sam seemed to like it.
4 Spring Night op22#8 by Selim Palmgren. One of the great things about anthologies is how you can encounter a composer you’ve never heard of.
5 Étude op4 #3 by Karol Szymanowski
6 Mazurka op25 #4 by Alexander Scriabin, played very softly.
7 Gavotte op12 # 2 by Serge Prokofieff, also very softly.
8 Prelude in E flat op23 #6 by Sergei Rachmaninoff… Rachmaninoff is “Sergei” when Prokofieff is “Serge” and that they say “Prokofieff” not “Prokofiev”. The title page of the book says “1940”, when there likely would be more inconsistency in the transliteration than what you’d see in 2020. But aha the accuracy comes at a price, right? much more than $3.00….In this lovely collection there are supposedly thirteen nationalities represented in 51 compositions. But I suspect it’s all the same to Sam.
9 Élégie op3 no 1 by S Rachmaninoff
To be honest I wasn’t watching her, I was playing. She lies underneath, and I was told her eyes were closed.
Oh but I did hear her loudly snoring, which is the ultimate compliment.
I think it’s a really useful pedagogical exercise to play as though you’re trying not to wake the old dog lying under your piano. Sam is a great teacher.
barczablog 