Hoping to build on the strength of my initial appearances at S.I.N.’s Comedy Night performing Borscht-Belt style comedy (a video documents my first performance and is available only on Facebook), I once again took to the stage this past Thursday, merely three days after returning to Berlin. Boy, was it a tough crowd! Under the circumstances, I think it went off pretty well. The great thing about the recording that I’m posting below is how you can’t tell when I lose my place and need to glance down at my notes! That, and the girl who was taking audio is laughing especially loudly - which creates the illusion that the whole bar erupted in peals of delirious laughter. Would that that had been the case.

Before posting this, I’m required by U.S. federal law to warn all minors that the following program contains obscene language, so please tune in kiddies!

p.s. - Apologies to my dog Alfie, who is in fact very much alive.

While the New York Philharmonic wraps up its Asian Horizons Tour, Avery Fisher is playing host to the London Symphony Orchestra led by Bernard Haitink. On Wednesday evening, the orchestra performed the first of two programs that pair symphonic works by Franz Schubert and Gustav Mahler.  Contrasting these composers’ early symphonic styles seemed to be the order of business. However, it was hard to see how the works chosen for the program complimented each other.

Schubert was all of 19 years old when he composed his Symphony No. 5 in B-flat major. It is an eminently tuneful and balanced work that strikes equilibrium between form and material. It is also surprisingly modest in its instrumentation (it was written for a small community orchestra) and a piece that the composer viewed as an exercise towards learning how to write more sophisticated symphonic music.

Compared to the Schubert, Mahler’s Fourth Symphony in G major is gargantuan. However, for Mahler, who was 40 at the time of the work’s completion, it was something of a step back from the harrowing dimensions of the second and third symphonies. If Schubert was trying to expand the sonic dimensions of his work, Mahler was consciously pairing down from scaling the heights in the second and third symphonies. Compared to those works (and indeed all of Mahler’s symphonies) the Fourth seems surprisingly modest.

In the Schubert, Haitink elicited a smooth and well-balanced reading from the LSO musicians. The first movement began at a steady gallop, and maintained a moderate, even tempo. Amid clear, open textures, Haitink infused every reiteration of the theme with a different character.  He drew a warm sound from the plaintive horns in the Andante and the unison strings, playing with judicious vibrato, took on a sort of organic swelling quality. The finale was where Haitink’s tightly controlled performance allowed for the most dynamic fluctuations and muscular playing. Adding to the overall sense of drama was a prominent horn ostinato that was never too insistent.

Mahler’s Fourth is a piece that Haitink has recorded no less that four times. On Wednesday night, however, the conductor pushed the boundaries of how much transparency to allow the composer’s intricate orchestrations. Especially during the first movement, the winds and French horns played with heightened effect, often on par with the ebbing melodies carried by the violins. This caused problems by drowning out some of the first violin’s solos. Otherwise, the diaphanous texture that Haitink achieved was fascinating. One sensed a methodical approach tempered by emotional investment. For that reason, the performance never became a clinical dissection à la Boulez. Crescendos and other climactic moments erupted with surprising vigor and violence. But Haitink usually pulled in the reins tightly and efficiently. He also mostly eschewed rubato, even having the trumpets pay slavish devotion to the beat.

In the second movement, the virtuosic scordatura violin of concertmaster Gordan Nikolitch was routinely overpowered by brass. There was a rugged quality to the sinewy bass clarinet line. The echo of the Wunderhorn tune ‘Ging heut’ morgen übers Feld” had a lustrous and otherworldly sheen, though the whole movement sounded a bit too trim and manicured.

The sublime adagio, which I clocked at 22 minutes, was the fulcrum of this performance. Haitink’s equipoise and restraint resulted in an effective reading that never sounded maudlin. One miraculous moment: when the violins leap up a sixth and the gates of heaven open, the shimmering orchestra attained a transcendent quality. In a highly polished performance, this climax was at once noble and elemental.

The final movement enlisted the talents of Swedish soprano Miah Persson (who is currently appearing as Sophie in the Met’s revival of Rosenkavalier) whose “Himmliche Leben” was affecting pure and honest. Her voice that was clear in all registers and capable of great dramatic expression. Here, Haitink might have better reined in the musicians, especially after the mischievous ritornello with its bells and shrill winds.

These worthy performances should pique interest in Friday night’s LSO concert, which will pair Schubert’s Eighth Symphony with Das Lied von der Erde. Haitink will hopefully have an easier time drawing fruitful connections between these late-period works.

Magyar Madness!

A Sunday afternoon concert presented by the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center packed Alice Tully Hall with a program of old and new music with a distinctly – and sometimes not so distinctly – Hungarian whiff that illustrated the pitfalls of overly varied programming.

It was an ambitious if lopsided program that buried Bartok’s challenging String Quartet no. 3 between works by Brahms and Erno Dohnányi and, in the second half featured the New York premiere of David Del Tredici’s “Magyar Madness,” a 35-minute work for string quartet and clarinet that the staunchly tonal composer wrote in 2006 for the clarinetist David Krakauer and the Orion String Quartet. The hard working Orion players are vigorous champions of new music, and formed the backbone of Sunday’s concert.

Pianists Alessio Bax and Annie-Marie McDermott kicked-off the concert with animated, frisky and sometimes seductive four-hand arrangements of Brahms’ Hungarian Dances nos. 6, 10 and 5. McDermott and Bax treated the dissonant sonorities with a breezy, fanciful way and with jarring attacks that were quirky and amusingly off-kilter.

Plopped in the middle of the concert’s first half was Bartok’s highly compressed Third String Quartet. The Orion String Quartet began with a sinewy, shrill and at times ghoulish sound with forceful attacks from the violins. A feeling of uneasy calm was established and preserved until the announcement of the dance-like melodies in the second movement. Here the musicians played with clear textures and rendered the composer’s instrumental techniques with overt care: the con legno rattling of bones and evenly-deployed pizzicato. In all, it sounded a bit antiseptic and unvaried. While the work sounded fluid in their hands, this was a tightly reined-in performance whose emotional content sounded stifled.

The final piece before intermission, Dohnányi’s Piano Quintet no. 2, seemed like a programming misstep. The lush neo-romanticism of Dohnányi’s shimmering work inhabits a different sonic universe from Bartok, this music that sighs and dances around so wistfully. While the rediscovery of lesser-known works is commendable, the quintet’s inclusion on this program detracted greatly from the power of the Bartok.

The concert again shifted gears for in the second half, which was dominated by Del Tredici’s energetic and tuneful “Magyar Madness” - a title that echoes clarinetist Krakauer’s own well-known ensemble “Klezmer Madness!”

If the Orion players were feeling fatigued, they certainly didn’t show it. In the first movement, Krakauer was in control amid the frantic swirling of the strings as he played a modulating series of sequences and plaintively sustained tones in music whose stylistic variety often sounded like mere pastiche. The fractal scales and shifting accents seemed little more than exercises.

The string writing often had a transparent texture, with some unexpected gestures like an intriguingly slow-motion flurry of pizzicato. Krakauer didn’t have much to do until the 20-minute-long finale, which began with a virtuosic rising scale that brought to mind the famous opening to Rhapsody in Blue and which was mirrored later in the movement by an equally precipitous descent. Throughout, Krakauer and the Orion players were kept equally busy with scales and arpeggios in a furious, chase-like music that competed with a tuneful Hungarian-style rondo that was nearly bludgeoned to death by repetition. The old-world melody was less convincing than the anguished klezmer-like high notes the Krakauer landed. And it was these wailing tones that rang truest, even if they seemed out of place for a wide-ranging piece that never fully explored its melodic material and rarely seemed more than an exercise in style.

It felt like a very long late afternoon for an audience that was edified through popular and challenging repertory standards, a rediscovered work and a premiere – and for a concert that struggled to be more than the sum of its parts.

The Swedish Academy announced the 2009 Nobel Prize in Literature Thursday morning at 7 a.m. ET. This year’s winner is the Romanian-born German author Herta Müller.

In awarding the prize, the Academy called Ms. Müller an author “who, with the concentration of poetry and the frankness of prose, depicts the landscape of the dispossessed.”

This is the second consecutive year, the Academy has bestow the award on an author virtually unknown outside of his country. Last year’s winner was the French author and essayist, Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio. At the time of the award’s announcement, Le Clézio had one book translated into English. By way of contrast, Müller has four novels available in English, “Traveling on One Leg,” “Passport,” “The Land of Green Plums,” and “The Appointment,” and one short story collection, “Nadirs.”

Müller is also the second German-speaking female author to win in recent memory. The 2004 literature prize went to controversial Austrian author Elfriede Jelenik, best known for her novel “The Piano Teacher” (“Die Klavierspielerin”).

In recent weeks, rumors were circulating that Müller was on the short list for the prize along with prolific Amos Oz, who would have become the first Israeli to win that distinction, or the American novelists Philip Roth and Thomas Pynchon. An American author has not one the prize in the past 16 years. The last American recipient was Toni Morrison, who won in 1993.

The Nobel Prizes are considered highly political, which may explain why authors from America and Israel - two countries whose policies are often roundly criticized in Europe - have been denied the prize in recent years.

Here’s a biography of Müller from the Dickinson College website:

“Müller is a highly prolific novelist and essayist whose works portray the human destruction of the Romanian dictatorship and the rootlessness of the political exile.
She was born in August 1953 in the German-speaking village of Nitzkydorf, in the Banat district of Romania. She left her village to study German and Romanian literature at the University of Timisoara. Here she became part of the Aktionsgruppe Banat, a group of idealistic Romanian-German writers seeking freedom of expression under the Ceaucescu dictatorship. After completing her studies she was employed as a translator in a machine factory, until she was fired for refusing to cooperate with the secret police. During this time she wrote the short stories that make up the collection Niederungen, but she had difficulty satisfying the censors, and this work was not published until 1982, and then in radically modified form. Niederungen was followed two years later by Drückender Tango.
In these two works Müller depicted the hypocrisy of village life and its ruthless oppression of nonconformists. She portrayed the zealously fascist mentality of the German minority, its intolerance and corruption. Not surprisingly, she was sharply criticized at home for destroying the idyllic image of German rural life in Romania.
Müller was working as a teacher when her uncensored manuscript of Niederungen was smuggled to the west and published by the Rotbuch Verlag to instant critical acclaim. After a trip to the Frankfurt book fair, where she spoke out publicly against the Romanian dictatorship, she was forbidden to publish in Romania. She continued to write, however, even as her situation in Romania became more and more intolerable. In 1987 she emigrated to the West with her husband, Richard Wagner. Since then, she has been living in Berlin.
Many of Müller’s works reflect aspects of her own history. Der Mensch ist ein großer Fasan auf der Welt (1986) chronicles the efforts of a Romanian-German peasant family to get passports to leave the country. Like her earlier works, this tale exposes the brutal corruption of the village by showing how its officials, from postmaster to priest, demanded ever more material and sexual favors from those petitioning to leave the country. It, like the collection Barfüßiger Februar (1987), was written while Müller was waiting for permission to emigrate to the west.
Reisende auf einem Bein (1989) portrays the problems of resettlement in the west, and the feelings of alienation that plague the political exile. Many of the essays in Eine warme Kartoffel ist ein warmes Bett (1992) are reflections on political events, written from the perspective of a woman reluctant to lay claim to words such as “homeland.” A second volume of essays, Der Teufel sitzt im Spiegel (1991) includes a series of lectures on “Gedanken zum Schreiben” that Müller held at the University of Paderborn in 1989-1990. It is an indispensable key to understanding the tensions and conflicts that give rise to the poetic imagery in her work. The volume includes a number of collages combining image and text. Müller published a complete set of 94 collages under the title Der Wächter nimmt seinen Kamm. Vom Weggehen und Ausscheren in 1993; although poetic images are densely concentrated here onto single, unbound pages, they form an evolving network of motifs that give unity to the whole.
The novel Der Fuchs war damals schon der Jäger (1992) is a complete reworking of a filmscript entitled “Der Fuchs der Jäger,” that she co-wrote with Harry Merkle. The main character is a teacher harassed by the Romanian secret police. Through synecdoche Müller portrays the fragmentation of self that occurs in a nation governed by fear. Müller’s latest novel Herztier (1994) is her richest portrayal to date of life in the Romanian dictatorship, in that she links the repressive childhood of her narrator with the brutal oppression of the state. Her most recent work, Hunger und Seide (1995), is a collection of essays, many of them reflections on her situation as nonconformist and dissident in Nitzkydorf and Timisoara.
Müller’s works are characterized by pure, poetic language and metonymic metaphors that recur and evolve throughout her tales. The oppressiveness of theme is alleviated by the beauty of her prose and the flashes of humor behind some of her imagery.
Through words and actions Müller continues to demonstrate her independence from the dogma of church and state. She has been an outspoken critic of those East German writers who collaborated with the secret police, and has recently withdrawn from P.E.N. as a protest against its decision to merge with its former DDR branch. She has won a dozen literary prizes, including the Marieluise-Fleißer Prize (1990), the Kranichsteiner Literary Prize (1991), the Kleist Prize (1994), and the European Literary Prize “Aristeion” (1995).”

Saturday night was the annual Long Night of the Synagogues, part of the Jewish Cultural Days that came to an end on Sunday evening. I wasn’t really planning on attending, but news of a concert by the Berlin Synagogue Choir (yeh - who knew?) a mere three blocks from my house roused me from my computer. I sped over to the Fraenkelufer Synagogue, a traditional congregation by the Landwehrkanal, a tree-lined tributary of the Spree that runs between Kreuzberg and its southern neighbor Neukölln. I was a few minutes late and had to make my way up to the ezrat nashim, or Women’s Gallery. Entering the sanctuary, I was stunned to discover how pack it was, and stared down from the gallery at the sea of black nylon yarmulkes bending in the direction of the choir loft, where the aforementioned “Berlin Synagogue Choir” (Berliner Synagogalchor)- five women and one of the synagogue’s chazzanim (cantors), Jochen Fahlenkamp, performed under the direction of Monika Almekias-Siegl, who accompanied on the electric organ.

The hour-long program consisted mostly of liturgical pieces, the majority plucked from Kabalat Shabbat, the tuneful Friday night service that welcomes in the sabbath day. The one exception was a lovely rendition of “Eli, Eli,” the well-known song based on the poem Halikha LeKesariya by the Hungarian-Jewish poet Hannah Szenes, who died as a partisan during the Second World War.

Here are some musical selections from that evening. Enjoy!

Benjamin Moser

Oxford University Press

July 2009

A.J. Goldmann

The French writer Hélène Cixous likened her to a female Kafka and the Elizabeth Bishop claimed she was “better than Borges.” In Brazil today, her books are sold in vending machines in subway stations and her image adorns postage stamps. But the Portuguese-language author Clarice Lispector has yet to secure a place of widespread literary recognition in this country.

Now, we have the first English-language biography of the writer from Benjamin Moser, New Books columnist for Harper’s Magazine.

The unfortunate dearth of translations of her works has meant the sensual and utterly unique prose of this “radical mystic author” is not as widely known as it should be. In the English-speaking work, her reputation mostly rests on the collection of short stories Family Ties and her final novel, The Hour of the Star.

Clarice Lispector was born Chaya Pinkhasonva on December 10, 1920 in Checkelnik, part of the western Ukrainian province of Podolia. Her parent fled the pogroms that followed the Russian Revolution, and arrived in Brazil when Clarice was not a year and a half old. The family settled in Recife, where the first synagogue of the New World, Kahal zur Israel had been founded in 1637.

“Madame Bovary c’est moi,” the mysterious and beautiful author once responded to a journalist’s question about similarities between her and one of her fictional creations. Throughout this unique biography, Moser uses her novels as a key to unlock the mysteries of her life, which he often examines through the prism of Jewish mysticism.

“I am a mystic,” she once professed in an interview. Moser argues that Lispector struck out in search of the God who abandoned her and recorded that search through her writings as bound up in questions of language and its utility in understanding God. Moser claims that Lispector partook in the mystical experience by “removing language to discover an ultimate and necessarily nameless, truth.”

The connections the Moser makes between Lispector’s spiritual atheism and the Jewish mystical tradition is the most interesting part of his analysis, although he doesn’t give himself the space necessary to make a thoroughly convincing argument. For instance, Moser uses mysticism to fuse Lispector’s preoccupations with God and language as represented by “the great holy name of God, which for the Jews is simultaneously unknowable and the ultimate mystical goal.”

Following Gershom Scholem, Moser claims that “mysticism as a historical phenomenon is a product of crises.” Moser contends that the “tragic consistency” of the Jewish experience allowed Lispector to recreate ”the entire ethical and spiritual structure of Judaism” in her fiction. Jewish motifs are, he claims are, “reworked, disguised, but undeniably present,” he claims. But were they deliberate? In a footnote, Moser tells us that the Jewish ideas in her fiction “seem to have developed from her own insights, not from any prolonged study of other writers.”

The exception here is Spinoza. Moser mentions the recent discovery of a French anthology of Spinoza in Lispector’s library that explains the Spinozian echoes in her first novel, Near to the Wild Heart. There she wrote: “Nothing else can be created, only revealed.” Like Spinoza, she rejected the idea of a conscious God as “horribly unsatisfying.” In essence, part of the vision of the novel is of the world as a constant flow, “an infinite chain of cause and effect.”

Lispector was often accused of being obscure and avant-garde, but she herself claimed to never be playing games. Moser makes a convincing argument for seeing her unique writing style as part of her lifelong quest for an “authentic language in which meaning and expression are finally united.”

In Near to the Wild Heart, Lispector wrote that “vision consists of capturing the symbol of the thing in the thing itself,” which Moser links to the mystical quest of “the word that has its own light”: “Just as God, in Clarice’s writing, is utterly devoid of any moral meaning, so does language signify nothing beyond what it expresses,” he argues.

Moser uses the cabalistic notion of striving for nothingness as a way of encountering the divine to describe Lispector’s agenda. Moser most successfully integrates his discussion of mysticism, Spinoza and language in discussing The Passion According to G.H. It is here, Moser contends, that she describes her encounter with God, whom she approaches only passing through “the opposite of the thing being approached,” until she reaches the conclusion that “beyond mankind, there is nothing else at all.”

As Moser shows, Lispector was not always a critical darling. Critics wrote of “the writer tangled in her own web of precious images” and prose that “succumbs beneath the weight of her own richness.”

Even after we’ve been being guided through “one of the most extraordinary careers in twentieth-century literature,” Lispector remains as cryptic as much of her fiction, since Moser serves us generous helpings of mysticism and literary criticism. It is equally puzzling when her reputation was made. At various points in the book, Moser tells us “by now, she was a household name,” or “she enjoyed a great reputation throughout Latin America.” The book leaves off with the author’s death in 1977 and does not discuss her posthumous reception and influence.

While the book is thoroughly researched and well written, Moser’s analysis of Lispector’s output is somewhat uneven (he hardly discusses Family Ties except to say that it “cemented her reputation”) and the book suffers in places from frequent repetition and a not a few grandiose statements.

For an author as radically individualistic as Lispector, it is difficult to compare her with other authors, and Moser rarely attempts this. Brazilian literary critics often drew connections with modernists, but Lispector herself denied the influence of figures like Joyce and Woolf.

In the end, “Why this World” is an uneasy mixture of biographical sleuthing, mystical exegesis and literary analysis; the last of which is most successful in discussing G.H. and The Hour of the Star, the work where “her inflexible individuality would find its last and greatest expression.” What isn’t as persuasive is whether Clarice truly “became her own fiction.” Even so, Moser should be applauded for writing a biography that will hopefully introduce Lispector to a broader readership.

From Today’s WSJ / wsj.com:

A.J. Goldmann

Berlin

Copious Gropius

No artistic movement of the 20th century has been more lauded, ­debated, misunderstood and maligned than the Bauhaus, the interdisciplinary workshop for modernity whose name has ­become practically synonymous with the stripped-down functionalism that the movement brought to architecture and ­design in the short-lived Weimar Republic.

Bauhaus turns 90 this year and Berlin is celebrating with “Bauhaus: A Conceptual Model.” The exhibit presents a comprehensive overview of the school in all its plurality and paradox. The exhibit is organized by Germany’s three main Bauhaus institutes, the ­Bauhaus Archive Berlin, the Stiftung Bauhaus Dessau and the Klassik Stiftung Weimar, with assistance from the ­Museum of Modern Art in New York, where a more modest version of the show will be mounted in November.

With nearly 1,000 ­objects—including models, studies, paintings, photographs and furniture—spread over the ground-floor galleries of this stately neoclassical building, the exhibit is the largest Bauhaus retrospective ever mounted and the first time that the three Bauhaus institutes, once separated by the Iron Curtain, have collaborated.

“There are different notions, or different views of the Bauhaus in the three different institutions,” says Annemarie ­Jaeggi, director of the Bauhaus Archive Berlin. “There isn’t one Bauhaus, but many Bauhäuser,” she adds, stressing the amount of transformation within the Bauhaus itself during the years of the school’s existence first in Weimar, then in Dessau, and ­finally (briefly) in Berlin.

“Bauhaus” is often tossed around as a catchall phrase for the constellation of modernism, design and architecture. ­Another misconception is that Bauhaus refers to a specific ­architectural style noted for its clarity and functionality; in fact, this was true of only one phase of the Bauhaus, a two-year ­period in Dessau under the ­directorship of Hannes Meyer. “Many people think that Bauhaus is a style, or a period, or that Bauhaus stands for modernism, for everything that was created between the two World Wars and maybe even afterwards,” Ms. Jaeggi said. But, she noted, Bauhaus was only a piece in the puzzle of European modernism.

Walter Gropius, who founded the Bauhaus in Weimar in 1919, was fueled by populist ideas. He spoke of Bauhaus’s ability to unite individuals “using the idea of new producing, working and living communities.” Responding to the “eclecticism” of contemporary trends in art, his goal was to merge the arts under the wing of architecture. In 1923, he pronounced a new ideal: “art and technology—the new unity.”

The bursts of creativity and exuberance are seen in the roles that Bauhaus masters and students took in Expressionism, Cubism, Constructivism and Dadaism. It is discernible in a list of the school’s teachers: Oskar Schlemmer, László Moholy-Nagy, Lyonel Feininger, Paul Klee, Wassily Kandinsky and Josef Albers were internationally recognized artists all, but the Bauhaus was for many of them just one stage in a long and varied career.

At the Bauhaus, Gropius had a tough time controlling all the egos he had gathered around him. The Bauhaus masters could often outdo Gropius in the loftiness of their proclamations. Johannes Itten, who structured and taught the school’s preliminary course, the Vorkurs, told his students “to awaken the personal life that is inherent in the form.” Klee, who later taught the course, stressed a study of nature to “freely design abstract shapes that go beyond the forcedly schematic and arrive at a new naturalness, the naturalness of the work.” The exhibit showcases teaching materials and exercises from the Vorkurs, ­including myriad studies in composition, contrast, rhythm, material and form. What all these classroom analyses show is the intense dissection and experimentation being pursued by both masters and disciples.

The exhibit progresses both chronologically and thematically, with different colors corresponding to periods and topics. Most of the time, displayed items are left to speak for themselves, without much in the way of accompanying text.

One of the most extraordinary items is Moholy-Nagy’s “Light Space Modulator” (1922-30), a mechanical apparatus that fuses light and color with movement inside of a blue and purple display. In his Vorkurs, Moholy-Nagy emphasized visual and tactile perception. The importance that he ­attached to light can be gleaned through his photography and filmmaking, and this kinetic sculpture was, in a sense, a logical outcome of his fascination.

The exhibition makes clear the double sense in which Bauhaus was a school: It was a new approach to art, comparable to other European modernist movements; but it was also an academy, a community, a social entity. The photos of everyday life at the Bauhäuser—students playing sports, attending parties, playing music and creating their art—affirm this rapturous description in Tom Wolfe’s otherwise critical book “From Bauhaus to Our House”: “It was more than a school; it was a commune, a spiritual movement, a radical approach to art in all its forms, a philosophical center comparable to the Garden of Epicurus.”

In the artistically and experimentally charged atmosphere of the Weimar Republic, the Bauhaus strove to be exemplary and exceptional. To this end, its members harnessed propaganda to spread their message. Many items on display deal with how the school ensured it was talked about. Its name became a seal of quality and a label. This branding is responsible for the enduring misunderstandings about Bauhaus, as well as its lasting successes.

Ninety years on, it’s tough to pin the Bauhaus down, and the exhibit shies away from raising critical questions about its guiding philosophy. Concentrating on the 14 years of the school’s existence, the ­exhibit doesn’t interest itself in the Bauhaus’s origins or reception: neither the parallel theories of art education in Germany during the Weimar Republic nor the world-wide spread of Bauhaus in the postwar era.

But even without these perspectives, the show brings the Bauhaus vividly to life as a movement in a constant state of flux between idealism and ­indecision.

Originally Published in Tablet Magazine:
http://www.tabletmag.com/arts-and-culture/music/13917/lord-of-the-ring/

There is perhaps no modern artist for whom ideology figured more centrally than Richard Wagner, the subject of this month’s Bard Music Festival in Annandale-on-Hudson, New York.

In addition to a slew of concerts exploring Wagner’s entire musical output, the festival features a panel discussion on “Wagner and the Jewish Question” as well as performances of ambitious works from Wagner’s most famous Jewish rivals, Giacomo Meyerbeer and Felix Mendelssohn—the two main targets of Wagner’s infamous essay “Judaism in Music.” In early August as prologue to the festival Bard staged a rare production of Meyerbeer’s Les Huguenots, which, though little seen today, was among the most-performed operas of the 19th century, with over 1,000 performances at the Paris Opéra.

When not composing operas that exalted Teutonic ideals of bravery and purity, one of Wagner’s favorite pastimes was writing anti-Semitic tracts, even though, as the saying goes, some of his best friends were Jewish. And in the early 1840s, one of his greatest Jewish friends was Meyerbeer, the granddaddy of French Grand Opéra and one of the 19th century’s most popular opera composers.

Meyerbeer’s Grand Opéra was a powerful influence on Wagner’s notion of the Gesamtkunstwerk (Total Work of Art), a fact that Wagner tried to hide in a series of spurious arguments in the essays “Judaism in Music” and “Opera and Drama.” In terms of grandeur, Wagner’s music dramas are a direct outgrowth of Grand Opéra. Wagner merely outstrips the competition with “bigger, louder and longer” operas, as the scholar Thomas Grey has put it. You could say that Wagner wanted to out-Meyerbeer Meyerbeer.

Wagner’s damning of Meyerbeer has had unfortunate consequences in terms of how the French composer has been studied, to say nothing of his virtual disappearance from the opera repertoire for nearly a century.

In his youth, Wagner expressed admiration for the cosmopolitan dimension to Meyerbeer’s music, which was achieved through the mixing of different national styles. Such impressions can be gleaned from an 1837 letter, in which the 24-year-old Wagner identifies his sympathies with Meyerbeer’s international program, which for Wagner pointed toward a “new direction.” Wagner calls the elder composer “the perfect embodiment of the task that confronts the German artist” and endorses the mixture of Italian and French musical styles.

In 1840, Wagner went to Paris to seek Meyerbeer’s support. In letters and diary entries from the period, Wagner has nothing but admiration for his mentor. In one letter to Meyerbeer, Wagner writes, “Goethe is dead—but he was no musician; there is nobody left but you.”

After two years of failure and hardship in Paris, however, Wagner changed his tune. Soon he would hiss that Meyerbeer’s music is as bastardized as a Yiddish translation of Faust.

In a 1843 letter, Wagner vehemently denies Robert Schumann’s suggestion that Der fliegende Holländer (The Flying Dutchman) “smacks of Meyerbeer.” Wagner insists that to draw inspiration from Meyerbeer would be “the death-knell of my creative powers.” This letter highlights Wagner’s growing disillusionment with Meyerbeer while suggesting anxiety about his own creative state. Many of the points he makes in the letter to Schumann resurface in “Opera and Drama,” this time with an overtly anti-Semitic element.

Starting with the first version of “Judaism in Music,” which was published 1850, Wagner’s vilification of Meyerbeer, as both composer and as Jew, is complete. His campaign against Meyerbeer had it seeds in the events of the summer of 1847. After a failed attempt to get his Rienzi staged at the Prussian Court Theatre in Berlin, Wagner was near financial ruin and was contemplating suicide. That Meyerbeer had been involved in managing the funds for Rienzi sent Wagner into a fit; he put the blame for the opera’s failure squarely on Meyerbeer’s shoulders. Such accusations against a man who by all accounts did much to help and encourage the budding Wagner betray the deep paranoia and mistrust that came to characterize him more fully in later years.

Wagner sought to gradually oust Meyerbeer from the operatic pantheon and claim for himself all that he felt to have been once possessed by onetime mentor. In a surprisingly short period of time, Meyerbeer went, in Wagner’s mind, from being opera’s savior to its most nefarious corruptor. That Meyerbeer is not regarded as the foremost influence on Wagner today is testament to the effectiveness of his smear campaign.

Among Wagner’s criticisms of Meyerbeer is that his music is “fake revolutionary” and seeks only to gratify the listener. Wagner elaborates on his disdain for the Meyerbeerian world of the Paris Opéra House in his response to a letter by Franz Liszt, who had asked whether Wagner had penned “Judaism in Music” (the first publication of the essay was unsigned). “I cannot exist as an artist in my own eyes or in those of my friends, I cannot think or feel anything without sensing in Meyerbeer my total antithesis,” he wrote. The need to extricate himself from Meyerbeer becomes a “necessary act if my mature self is to be fully born.”

The basic critiques present in Wagner’s correspondence as early as 1843 resurface in “Judaism in Music” and “Opera and Drama” with bluntly anti-Semitic undercurrents. With its talk of mauscheln (so-called perverted speech that could in turn produce only perverted music), and its claim that Meyerbeer stole from Weber and Rossini, “Opera and Drama” argues that Meyerbeer was inherently incapable of producing absolute music: “As a Jew, [Meyerbeer] owned no mother-tongue, no speech inextricably entwined among the sinews of his inmost being.”

The litany of accusations includes a caricature of Meyerbeer as a gibberish-spewing creature of “monstrous ostentation.” Additionally, Wagner derides his cosmopolitanism, which Wagner now claims jumbled various genres, national styles, and stage effects together in one “mass of crude confusion.”

In vilifying Meyerbeer, Wagner was concurrently finding a scapegoat for his unhappy Paris years and a convenient way of denying any notion of artistic indebtedness. Indeed, in order for Wagner to become German opera’s new “Messiah,” he had first to distance himself as much as possible from the long shadow of his predecessor. In essence, Wagner argued that he couldn’t be like Meyerbeer because he wasn’t Jewish.

In this day and age, we are more convinced by Wagner’s music than by his rhetoric. Sadly, however, the enormous influence that Wagner exerted on the way that music is made and thought of has made a serious reassessment of Meyerbeer’s output all but impossible.

A.J. Goldmann is a writer based in Berlin. His articles on art and culture have appeared in The Wall Street Journal, USA Today and The Christian Science Monitor.

Lowery and Hosseinpour’s storybook staging of Orlando Paladino at Berlin’s Staatsoper © Ruth Walz 2009

Directors Nigel Lowery and Amir Hosseinpour joined forces with René Jacobs for Staatsoper Unter den Linden’s new production of the Haydn rarity Orlando Paladino, which had its premiere at the house on May 8. The event marked a reunion for the two directors and Jacobs, who collaborated on last season’s premiere of Telemann’s Der Geduldige Sokrates. (Like Orlando, the Telemann staging was a coproduction with the Innsbruck Early Music Festival.)

Once among the most popular of Haydn’s operas, Orlando is an intriguing mix of opera seria and opera buffa elements that brings to mind Don Giovanni, which it predates by five years. The libretto, based on an episode from Ariosto’s epic poem Orlando Furioso (the source material for countless other operas), tells of the paladin Orlando’s fury on discovering that his love, Angelica, queen of Cathay, has eloped with Medoro. While the lovers hide in a nearby castle, the king, Rodomonte — also infatuated with Angelica — pursues Orlando across the countryside and enlists the aid of the shepherdess Eurilla, who falls for Orlando’s squire, Pasquale. After much antic confusion involving the warring rivals and wild savages, the sorceress Alcina sets everything right by erasing Orlando’s memory of Angelica.

Orlando is an ensemble piece, and the Staatsoper gathered a persuasive cast of players that sounded superb both in the showy arias and en masse. German soprano Marlis Petersen was not an obvious choice for the noble, suffering Angelica. Her visceral performance and earthy voice might have struck a purist as out of place in a Haydn opera. But her dizzying coloratura was put to good use here, and her huskier tones enhanced the parlando writing, which she dispatched with judicious rubato. Her soulful account of “Aure chete,” a two-tempo rondo with oboe obbligato, was one of the evening’s high points.

The women surrounding her were equally impressive. The South Korean soprano Sunhae Im was a sprightly and adorable Eurilla. The petite singer twirled, pantomimed and whistled her way through this playful role with seemingly inexhaustible zeal. She sculpted her phrases beautifully, with agile, buoyant phrasing. Bulgarian soprano Alexandrina Pendatchanska made a spine-tingling Alcina, with her rich low register and even vibrato.

As for the men, Norwegian tenor Magnus Staveland was fully committed as the wishy-washy Medoro. He sang heroically, with precision and creamy texture. Italian baritone Pietro Spagnoli was likewise impassioned as Rodomonte, here dressed in full pirate regalia, but his singing was rough in patches and occasionally lacked finesse. Victor Torres, an impressive Argentine baritone, was charismatic as the Leporello-like Pasquale. He brought careful phrasing and warmth to his patter songs and love duets with Eurilla and earned laughter for his comical falsetto.

In the surprisingly small title role of Orlando, Tom Randle performed with full force. His searing tenor was well suited to the role of the mad knight, even if his lyric urgency often turned hysterical — an understandable turn of events, considering that he was directed to run around manically with an axe for a good part of the evening. Not surprisingly, Randle regained composure and control in the final act after Orlando’s rehabilitation, singing with heroic plangency.

The production’s storybook staging hardly succeeded in breathing life into the libretto’s one-dimensional characters. Much of the flavor of last season’s Sokrates was in evidence, especially in the deadpan slapstick, pantomime and heightened artifice of the sets. But this Orlando lacked any genuine stylistic and thematic coherence: it was a Monty Pythonesque collage of fairy tale, absurdist drama and cartoon. The mise-en-scène included a troupe of dancing savages in gray beards, a creaky castle, incongruous costumes and a giant pair of scissors that Alcina — so far as I could tell — used to lobotomize Orlando. Even if one admits that Haydn was somewhat unsure of how to integrate the buffa and seria styles in this opera, Lowery and Hosseinpour still failed the piece by sidestepping that ambivalence entirely in a staging that — however colorful and spirited — soon grew tiresome and frequently verged on the ridiculous.

Luckily, the lack of directorial clarity never seeped into the orchestra pit, where Jacobs led the Freiburger Barockorchester in his own performing version of the score. Among early-music specialists, the Freiburg musicians are known for performances that are both historically accurate and fresh. All evening long, they gave a polished performance that combined elegance and playfulness. In their hands, the music sounded alive, unpredictable and surprisingly flexible, perhaps nowhere more so than in the supple work of the very busy continuo, particularly the dazzling improvisations of the cembalo.

A. J. GOLDMANN

Deutsche Oper Berlin’s final new production of the season was the German premiere of Peter Hall’s elegant take on Rossini’s La Cenerentola (or Aschenputtel, as the fairy tale is known in German), originally staged at the 2005 Glyndebourne Festival (seen May 20). Coming at the end of an especially dynamic DOB season that saw premieres of forgotten operas (Die Ägyptische Helena, Marie Victoire) and striking — if not always successful — new visions for more popular fare (Tannhäuser, Ariadne auf Naxos), this traditional production of a repertory standard proved anti-climactic.

Stylish sets and costumes lent a decorous, somewhat musty flavor to the performance: although the designs were well-suited in a good old-fashioned way to the light, energetic nature of Rossini’s early masterwork, they generally lacked the edge and verve that this reviewer looks for in contemporary productions. The most artistically compelling design element on offer was Peter Mumford’s stark, finely focused lighting, realized at DOB by Jerry Skelton.

But there was plenty of good news in the vocal department. Romanian mezzo-soprano Ruxandra Donose lent her earthy, dark-hued voice to the title role. Her singing rang out clear, rich and well-balanced and she navigated the runs with remarkable ease and assurance, a few shrill high notes aside. Her highly polished “Non piu mesta,” capped a thoroughly accomplished performance and earned her showers of applause.

Martina Welschenbach and Lucia Cirillo sang the evil stepsisters, Clorinda and Tisbe, respectively, with appropriate histrionics neatly alternating malice and goofiness. They were a pleasure to watch, even if they often seemed vocally interchangeable. Of the two, Cirillo, an Italian mezzo-soprano, had more success distinguishing herself.

Top vocal honors among the men went to Mario Zeffiri, a Greek tenor known for his interpretations of bel canto repertory. He put his buttery, agile voice to heroic use, tearing through his runs with alacrity, few perceivable breaks and ringing high notes.

DOB ensemble member Simon Pauly, a German baritone, was less supple as Dandini, but he made up for his vocal imperfections with effective comic acting: there was much heft and wit to his somewhat rough-hewn singing.

The evening’s Don Magnifico was bass-baritone Lorenzo Regazzo, who wore his despicable character’s ruin almost proudly, communicating it through a pointed, seething delivery that was occasionally overwhelmed by the orchestra. The routine drowning-out of the soloists seemed due to a last-minute substitution for the scheduled conductor, Paolo Arrivabeni. Filling in for Arrivabeni was Guillermo Garcia Calvo, a young Spanish maestro who is engaged at the Vienna State Opera. He delivered an incisive, intelligent and lively performance that was rich with drama and humor despite its balance problems.

A. J. GOLDMANN