Beyond Glory: Joe Louis vs. Max Schmeling, and a World on the Brink
By David Margolick
Random House 2005
SRP: $26.95

Reviewed by A.J. Goldmann

 
 Spring has arrived and now struggles to banish a cold, lonely winter. The winter Olympics came and went and what most remember about the much-touted Turin games is the bizarre Felliniesque opening ceremony. In such a world, it’s hard to imagine a time when sports actually mattered in a vital way to millions of people. David Margolick’s fantastic and gripping new book “Beyond Glory: Joe Louis vs. Max Schmeling and a World on the Brink” is the saga of the 1936 boxing match between the Detroit-born African American Joe Louis and the darling of the Third Reich, Max Schmeling, and the 1938 rematch for the title of world heavyweight champion. 
    Margolick, a contributing editor to Vanity Fair, is a journalist first and a historian second. The bulk of the research for this book (if the endnotes are any indication) come from contemporary periodicals from America, Germany and throughout Europe. Both the breadth and the depth of his research allow Margolick to speckle his fluid, elegant prose with vibrant, colorful detail. The many quotes, tidbits and anecdotes allow the story to leap of the page, even if they do pretend to a sort of objectivity. Where Margolick’s historiographic method serves him best is in recreating the fights themselves. Culling together his various sources, Margolick is able to bring us into the ring in a way that is breathtaking and exhilarating. From there our perspective can jump all over the Stadium, to a farming hamlet outside Madgeburg, to the streets of Harlem. He describes the fights with such physicality and precise detail that reader feels the violence of every punch. But this is no meaningless exercise in visceral bloodletting; rather Margloick succeeds equally is setting the stage for both bouts. He makes the reader understand how much is at stake: for White America; Black America; the Jews; and for Germany.    
    That said, one comes away from the book with a far better sense of Schmeling than of Louis. Margolick often goes out of his way to make the case for him against accusations of Nazi sympathy: and one is inclined to agree that Schmeling becomes unwittingly a symbol of the purity and strength of the Aryan race, and that his hobnobbing with the Nazi head-honchos (he had repeated meetings with Hitler and was friends with Goebbels) is offset by his lifestyle before the war, during which he frequented Berlin cabarets with his many Jewish friends. And one is more inclined to agree with Margolick after seeing how Schmeling falls fairly out of favor the Nazi establishment after being knocked out by Louis after 2 minutes and 40 seconds in the 1938 match.     
   

While the reader is certainly sympathetic to Louis, he seems much more of an emotional and intellectual blank. As Margolick writes: “[Louis] had few deep feelings of his own, but he had an ability to generate intense passion in others.” He is a boxer who when fighting at the top of his game, can be an unstoppable killing machine, but outside of the ring was “largely passive, affectless, even dull.”   
    Often, Margolick paints more vivid descriptions of his secondary characters than of the main ones. One of the most colorful of these is Schmeling’s Jewish manager Joe “Yussel” Jacobs. In one of the book’s great scenes, Schmeling lifts Jacobs into the ring after knocking out Steve Hamas in 1935 in Hamburg. From a corner of the auditorium a recording of Lauritz Melchior singing the Prize Song from Wagner’s “Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg” fills the stadium. The song is not yet ended when the crowd bursts into “Deutschland über Alles.” Finding himself, effectively, in the midst of a Nazi rally, Jacobs raises his cigar in a Hitler salute. Other indelible characters include Louis’ trainer Jack Blackburn and his manager Mike Jacobs. Margolick’s damning account of Jimmy Braddock, the American heavyweight champ, is sure to shock anyone who has seen Ron Howard’s Cinderella Man.
    The most obvious problem with the book is the final chapter. Having reached the end of a long and thrilling chronicle, one would hope that Margolick would spend more time winding down. In an epilogue of some 19 pages, we learn of Schmeling’s postwar prosperity and Louis’ swift decline. After such a powerful build-up and exhilarating climax, one feels the need for a less hurried decrescendo.    

REVIEWED BY A.J. Goldmann

Paul Klee, the Swiss-born painter claimed by the Dadaists, cubists, surrealists and abstract expressionists, never set foot inside America. This fact alone makes the Neue Galerie’s new show “Klee and America” somewhat confusing. What in fact the raison d’etre of this exhibit, on view until May 22, to highlight the role played by American art dealers and collectors (of mostly German-Jewish descent) in bringing Klee to prominence in the 1930s and 1940s after his work was labeled “degenerate” by the Nazis in 1933. This is, admittedly, an odd concept around which to curate an exhibition and one that the show really doesn’t make much of. As such, the intimate show never really adds up to more than the sum of its parts.

A key into Klee’s method is found in something the artist wrote during a trip to Turin in 1914: “Color has taken possession of me; no longer do I have to chase after it, I know that it has hold of me forever.” The few dozen works on display in the three elegant rooms of the Neue’s temporary exhibit space show Klee’s remarkable and often unexpectedly meaningful use of color throughout the range of his output. Iconic watercolors like “Yellow House” (1915) and “Tunisian Gardens” (1919) show the artist’s exuberant embrace of color. Many of the other works are mixed-media compositions of oil transfer, watercolor, pencil and ink. They run the gamut of Klee’s career, showing the integrity that underlies the artist’s various forays into Modernism’s various schools. There is much here that one can consider typical Klee, a sensibility at once transparent and opaque: a love for symbols and non-representational notations and a certain juvenile simplicity. The artist’s enthusiasm for the possibility of new techniques and experimentation is seen is works like “Flowers in the Night” (1930), a cornucopia of color and disembodied form. In 1922’s “Fool in Christ” – one of the most striking works here – a totem-pole figure with flopping ears and wrinkled dugs, the grotesque effect is enhanced by the grim combination of browns and yellows. The result looks like a Picasso gone horrifyingly wrong.

The influence of cubism and futurism is seen clearly in “Nocturne for a Horn,” a tryptich from 1921: amidst the geometrical precision, the jarring colors of a face and horn pop out amidst an otherwise muted palette. Also in the futurist vein is 1913’s positively psychedelic “When God Considered the Creation of Plants.” Klee packs this small work – notable for its sophisticated use of shading - with almost obsessive detail of plants, people and stars jutting out of every facet.
A dream-like sensibility that lurks in the background of all Klee’s work comes to the fore in works like “Tropical Garden Plantation” (1923), “Colorful Meal” (1925) and “Village Carnival” (1926). The last of these is a Chagall-like scene of figures of dogs and people floating amidst rooftops, the sun, the moon and stars. The saturated palette lends the work a more somber tone than the Russian artist’s. Similar surreal impulses lie behind 1927’s “Conjuring Trick,” where a disembodied eyes, nose and mouth are propped up in a black space amid a background of various shades of red. Striking in its violence, “Slavery” (1925) seems unique in the degree of its sexualized content. It depicts a hurried sketch of a woman lying prostrate with a hideous grimace as the thick, burgundy legs of a man pin her down.

The third and largest room of the exhibit contains mostly works from the 1930’s. In “Lion Man” (1934) soft wisps of watercolor form the cartoonish figure of a man. The most ominous of these often abstract pieces is 1934’s “Fear” in which a serpentine form is directed by arrows to its target, a blank oval face with a red pupil in its only eye. Similarly intriguing is “The Path into Blue” (1934) in which a goldish brown path swirls amidst a turquoise background, with a blue sphere (reminiscent of Yves Klein) in the center. Another standout is the pointillist-inspired “At Anchor” (1932). Klee depicts a ship in jagged strokes; the beads of light that speckle the ship represent light reflecting off of the setting sun.
The exhibit makes pitiful use of their fourth and smallest room, which contains information about Klee’s early collectors in America. Music of Beethoven and Chopin plays in the background, possibly to help visitors from going stiff with boredom.

The Metropolitan Opera:
Fidelio - March 20, 2006 at 7:30pm
Don Pasquale - March 31, 2006 at 8:00pm

Reviewed by A.J.Goldmann

    While classical New York continues to mourn the absence of James Levine from the remainder of the season, there is much cause for rejoicing in the sopranos at the heart of the Metropolitan Opera’s current productions of Fidelio and Don Pasquale.
    Karita Matilla and Anne Netrebro are very different singers. They are two of the most exciting sopranos working today. Netrebko, who works mostly with the Italian repertoire, is known for the wide tonal range of her lyric soprano and her effortless high notes. Matilla, a dramatic soprano in the process of owning the most challenging roles in the German repertoire, is known for her vocal daring and power as well as her dramatic flair.   
    Beethoven did not compose music with the effortlessness of Mozart. His sole opera, Fidelio, occupied the composer for some dozen years and much of the composer’s frustration is heard in the beautiful music. The music of Fidelio is perhaps the greatest contrast to Donizetti. If the music of Don Pasquale flows as naturally as a running brook, everything here is about struggle, tension and hardened determination.
    Karita Matilla, 41, has established herself as the greatest German-opera soprano of the present age. She is also the first convincingly disguised Leonore I have seen. It’s also hard to imagine a Leorore who is both more moving and more sensual. The Finnish soprano wears her hair cropped in the new production, but become mere cosmetics, she struts and swaggers like a man. Her voice, like her character, was at once muscular and yielding. The powerful bass-baritone Alan Held, who was heard earlier this season as Wozzeck, sang the villainous Don Pizarro with dark complexity. In the other roles, Richard Margistan was perhaps not the heldentenor that one wishes for Florestan, but he sang admirably and gave an account of despair tinged with hope that characterizes the whole opera. The great bass James Morris even made a cameo as Don Fernando. He was a little unsure of himself, but commanding nonetheless. In the triumphant finale, the chorus rushed about a little too chaotically, but sounded well prepared and unified.  
    Paul Nadler, filling in for Levine, did the score justice in a solid, if not particularly revelatory, reading. The orchestra shone brightest perhaps during the thrilling and pulsating Act 2 prologue, with especial richness emanating from the full brass and percussion. In Jürgen Flimm’s compelling production, the action is updated to an anonymous dictatorship somewhere in the 20th century. Robert Israel’s prison sets are at once elegant and edgy and a simple and uncluttered use of the Met’s cavernous stage.   

    A few months ago, Anne Netrebko made headlines when she canceled a solo recital at Carnegie Hall that was to be her Carnegie debut. In the new production of Donezetti’s Don Pasquale, the 35-year-old Russian soprano milks her lyric soprano to the hilt, singing with such determination and assurance that one if at a loss to understand how she could get cold feet for her Carnegie debut. On opening night of Otto Schenk’s marvelous new production of Don Pasquale, she was the brightest star in a glittering cast.
    Though at bottom a comedy, Don Pasquale is fraught with more human drama and pathos than most bel canto operas. Though Donzizetti retains many aspects of opera buffa, it also diverges in many ways from the traditional model. Most of the opera unfolds in ensemble scenes  (there being only two arias as defined in the traditional sense of the word) and the small cast did marvelous both individually and as a team.
    When Ms. Netrebko sang her first aria, there that was legitimate cause to be concerned that she wasn’t saving her voice for subsequent acts. But not once during the evening did she ever sound tired or unsure. Like her physique, her voice is sexy and bright and she has an endearing tendency to round her notes with an affecting vibrato. Simone Alaimo in the title role was crabby and forceful and he gave his character an appropriate amount of self-pity and sympathy. Juan Diego Florez, a satisfying lyric tenor with creamy tones, sounded vocally superb in the first act, even if his overacting got in the way of the overall performance. Before Act 3, he dropped out and was replaced by the ardent Barry Banks. Mr. Banks lent the role a suitably histrionic dimension and wowed the audience by impassionedly serenading Ms. Netrebko, even if his high notes were a bit shaky. The lover’s duet that follows was a qualified success. Conductor Maurizio Benini dropped the tempo and while both singers sounded great, they had trouble communicating with each other and they failed to strike the same sort of balance that had characterized the entire evening.