previously
La Cieca thanks a particularly loyal member of the cher public for pointing out the most recent bit of hard-hitting arts coverage in the Wall Street Journal, as copied and pasted by that hardest of all arts hitters, Terry Teachout. La Cieca says “copied and pasted” because in this piece Teachout manages to blather on for over 800 words without introducing a shred of new reporting or even a sliver of fresh observation.
For those of you who have not been paying any attention at all to what’s been happening at the New York City Opera since, oh, around the time the last woolly mammoth died out in these parts, La Cieca takes the liberty of emulating the Teachout’s reporting technique and pasting here a few choice snippets:
New York’s second-biggest opera company is closing up shop — temporarily. Lincoln Center’s New York State Theater, home of the New York City Opera, will be undergoing major renovations throughout City Opera’s 2008-09 season. The company had originally planned to present a series of concert opera performances in various locations around the city, then decided to trim costs by cutting back. . . .
. . .the repertoire will consist of six 20th-century operas. No Handel, no Mozart, no Puccini — just [list of operas]. All of these works are widely admired, but none has ever been mistaken for a box-office draw.
Gérard Mortier . . . has said that New York needs “a new vision in opera,” and his first season definitely fills the bill. . . .
. . . the State Theater [was] built with dance, not opera, in mind. Among other things, the house was designed in such a way as to deaden the sound of dancing feet — the opposite of what should happen in an opera house, where the goal is to make the singers on stage more audible, not less. . . .
In Europe [Mortier] has long been identified with ultratrendy, government-subsidized updates of familiar operas, most notoriously a “Fledermaus” in which Johann Strauss’s lovable characters snorted cocaine and got beaten up by Nazis. . .
. . the Metropolitan Opera, City Opera’s neighbor at Lincoln Center, has changed its once-stodgy theatrical ways. Under Joe Volpe, the Met offered a steady diet of blandly staged warhorses spiced up with an occasional dash of Eurotrash. But Peter Gelb, his successor, is bringing in stage-savvy directors like John Doyle and Bartlett Sher. . .
. . . . Mr. Mortier may be remembered as the man who turned out the lights at the New York City Opera — for keeps.
As La Cieca’s tipster comments, “How resourceful of him to publish a piece that summarizes the previous 267 articles already written on the subject without a single new insight. So very saving of labor.”
Lincoln Center is an embarrassment and should have been torn down right after it was built. It’s hideously ugly inside and out. And they should have buried the architects and designers who foisted this monstrosity on NYC.
Now they are supposedly giving it a make over. While doing so they are inconveniencing everyone who has reason to be there.
I suspect in the end the band aid will do little to change the disaster it is. If it weren’t for the artists who appear there, one would never set foot in the place.
And the restaurant at the MetOpera was cited for vermin or some other health department violation. Jeez lousise they can’t even get the rats out!
blah blah blah blah blah. Opera in NYC is dead. I am moving to Chicago.
What do you expect?–anyone who can’t get a better writing gig than the Wall Street Journal…and Commentary Magazine (oy gevalt…) , with an occassional bone thrown to him from the neanderthals at The New Criterian, has to be living in a time-warp to begin with—Terry probably doesn’t know what century he is living in, right now!
Certainly does say something about the WSJ’s journalistic standards reagarding anything not strictly business.
Next week he’s going to write about the MET’s brand new simulcast program.
but more importantly: the wholly mammoth is dead?? Does that mean the Eagle will close?
WOOLY, not wholly, or at least not there. Is the wooly mammoth wholly dead?
I could be wrong but isn’t Terry a woman?
Hesitant:
Terry Teachout is..rather unfortunately..all MAN…
Yes, it does seem a little odd to imagine that someone who’s writing a libretto for the Santa Fe Opera based on an old Bette Davis movie and a Somerset Maugham story — anyway, that such a person could possibly be a heterosexual male, but, yes, Terry Teachout is just that.
This article is not great, but before everyone starts trashing the Wall Street Journal, let’s remember that the paper scooped the New York Times on the Peter Gelb/Met deficit story in April, and also did a good job on the Universal/management story: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB121244733967139457.html. Neither of these stories was reported as well in the Times.
“Einstein on the Beach” could certainly be “mistaken for a box-office draw.” It sold out its New York premiere performances at the Met in 1976, and then it sold out 12 performances at BAM in 1984. I believe it did similarly well at its revival in 1992. If anything’s for certain about the 2009-10 season, it’s that “Einstein” will sell out again.
Of course, that doesn’t mean that Mortier is going to make any money off the opera. After the 1976 performances, Glass was deep in debt and had to go back to driving a cab.
SanderO :
“Lincoln Center is and embarrassment and
should have been torn down right after it was built”
I believe it was the film critic Penelope
Gilliat who said that Lincoln Center looked like it
had been ordered on the phone by Mussolini.
Droneon (a/k/a Teachout) DOES know what century he’s living in: Gertrude Himmelfarb’s imaginary 19th century, when gays and lesbians kept out of sight and there was none of this nonsense about racial equality.
No Handel?! Hallelujah!
Mortier = The Sun
Teachout = a dim lightbulb
I thought it was, by far, the best commentary yet written on the subject. Far better than the puff piece that Tommassini keeps writing about NYCO and Mortier which rarely, if ever, goes below the surface and addresses any real issues.
Of course, some “can’t handle the truth” as Mr. Nicholson would say.
Boo hoo.
Anyone who thinks that “Einstein on the Beach” is a box office draw is living in a bubble somewhere. It sold out 20 performances in 32 years and that makes it a “box office draw?”
Please. When it sells out year after year like a Boheme or Aida or Carmen then it will be a box office draw.
Methinks some people here don’t even know the correct usage of certain terms. Is this who Mortier is programming for?
Lights out, indeed.
No one seems to even recognize the biggest problem with this stagione system. It leaves out anyone who doesn’t live in New York City.
How many of NYCO subscribers and patrons come from all over the world? Will people come to NYC 10-12 separate times during the year to see ONE production?
This is so short-sighted it isn’t even funny and yet I have yet to see it addressed anywhere in the media.
Lights out indeed.
I agree with Mark…obviously the TIMES and Tony T. have the pom-poms out for Mortier…it’s nice that SOMEONE else is calling it like it is.
Terry Gross is a woman.
Terry Teachout is a man.
Terry cloth is what my sweatbands were made of, which I used to wear while aerobicizing to Olivia Newton-John’s “Physical.” (Those sweatbands were often peeled off and hurled across the room during the “animal” verse.)
And that’s how I keep all three Terry’s “straight”.
>Brooklynpunk> wrote about Teachout: >What do you expect?–anyone who can’t get a better writing gig than the Wall Street Journal…and Commentary Magazine (oy gevalt…) , with an occassional bone thrown to him from the neanderthals at The New Criterian, has to be living in a time-warp to begin with—Terry probably doesn’t know what century he is living in, right now!<
Oh my dear, NO ONE has EVER asked you to write about ANYTHING for free, let alone for a fee. It’s entirely obvious why. WSJ is read internationally by a different public than the Times. Mr. Teachout matters far more than you have ever or will ever matter. Rave on here under a pseudonym and on Opera Hell under your real name — no one even has to flush the toilet to be rid of you in cyber space, as they must in life.
Yes, and I am so sick of regietheater haters always always always pointing out the it state-supported in Europe. I am not a regie fan, but the lumping together of regie, government sponsorship of the arts, and gritty, leftist political themes evident in regie is sick-making.
Mark, La Cieca is not sure she follows your logic here. It does seem almost certain that Einstein on the Beach will sell very well indeed for its scheduled run. The NYCO is not planning (so far as I know) to revive the work, so it’s really irrelevant to compare it to Boheme or Aida — any more than you should compare the previous NYCO’s programming of (say) Partenope. In fact, Einstein and the NYCO Handel productions are comparable cases in that each plays to a decent number of well-attended performances in one season.
As for the more familiar works like Pelleas and Mahagonny, Teachout is right that their recent stage history cannot be called box office success. I do think that there is an audience for provocative new productions of these works, particularly in the debut season of a new intendant when the public will be curious.
It seems to me that there is no particular virtue in repertory opera programming, especially when there is another opera house right across the plaza doing repertory. A stagione system works something like a festival which (ideally) means higher artistic standards and more attention by the company to each work in turn. I have my doubts whether out-of-towners were flocking to NYCO’s Boheme and Carmen in such great numbers anyway.
My complaint with Teachout’s piece is not that he said anything untrue, but rather that he didn’t seem to be thinking very much about the issues in question. To characterize Mortier’s entire career with that single festival production Fledermaus is misleadingly reductive. What’s more, I can’t imagine that Teachout is so ignorant that he doesn’t realize it’s misleading, which suggests to me that he’s simply pandering to the bourgeois anti-art prejudices of the WSJ’s audience.
I’ll just choose to disagree with you, La Cieca.
The Festival idea is a good one but I’ve never heard of a successful festival anywhere where they only do one work during the festival. It just won’t work
My point is that NYCO has done no research on any of thses subjects. They are just jumping in the deep end which seems shortsighted to me.
I don’t live in New York City. I come to New York 4 times or so per year. Under the old system I could see 80% of NYCO’s season on those four visits. Under the new system, I will probably only be able to see 25% if that.
I buy two subscriptions of 15 performances or so there each season. Now I will just buy a couple of single tickets because I won’t be able to come to NYC 12 times per year to see their entire season.
I know at least 30 or 40 people around the country who do the same. Not a single one said they would renew if that had to keep coming back to see single productions, one at a time.
So I guess NYCO will truly become NYCO — for New Yorkers only. That’s a shame.
I also know people who buy tickets to multiple performances of the same work because they want to see it more than once. They have told me … I’d see something 3 times in a month or six weeks but I’m not going to see the sometime 3 times in the space of 2 weeks.
That’s what Baker (big surprise) and Mortier are missing. There have been a series of meetinss (I was invited to one) in which these questions were put to both of them and you get blank stares or PR blather.
They clearly have not thought any of this through which is why I have only cause for pessimism as much as I want to see innovative works and interesting productions.
And you are completely wrong about the so-called “anti-art” prejudices of the WSJ audience. All of the arts lovers I know read both the Times and the WSJ. And, lately, some of the WSJ arts coverage has been far better than the Times which continues as a cheerleader for New York arts orgs and doesn’t ask tough questions.
Case in point. Alan Gilbert’s appt at the New York Phil. I have yet to see a single word in the Times that doesn’t make you think this is the second coming of Leonard Bernstein when if you ask arts people around the country what they think and they say “safe choice, second rate hack, uninspiring.”
You won’t read that in the Times because Pravda is just towing the line from the Politburo.
Well, I guess since 30 or 40 people around the country won’t buy season tickets, NYCO must truly be dying.
As for Lincoln Center’s architecture, I might point out that the World Trade Center towers were pretty reviled when they were built, but are still sorely missed in the skyline. I know that when I travel over the Manhattan or Brooklyn Bridges, or down the West Side Highway, I still scan the skyline expecting to see them. I didn’t like them, but they were part of NYC. When I go down to the Upper West Side, I expect to see Lincoln Center. I do think, however, that the revitalization of the Center is not going far enough. I think tearing down the walkway over the street is a great improvement, but I wish the plan for the glass canopy over the plaza had been approved. DOes that mean I couldn’t appreciate a facility like Gehry’s in LA? Of course not. And Lincoln Center isn’t really any worse than The Kennedy Center; both were built at roughly the same time and in roughly the same style, which unfortunately hasn’t aged well. And I think I think we live in a disposable society where when something becomes outdated, we tear it down. There are occasions when it’s appropriate. The Time Warner Center is no great beauty, but it’s a vast improvement over the Coliseum. NYC has bigger fish to fry at the moment than tearing down and rebuilding Lincoln Center… like maybe finally building something in the pit at the World Trade Center site. If only the folks behind Yankee Stadium were in charge…
Mr. Teachout matters far more than you have ever or will ever matter.
But is his writing any good? Just because somebody has a high-profile platform doesn’t mean his writing’s any good. And I for one have yet to read anything by Teachout that would persuade me that his writing is worth its platform. Really, why must we have so much reverence for critical authority?
Indiana Loiterer 111, your point is well taken and I don’t disagree. I thought the arrogance of the person I snarked at appalling, since ‘his’ implication was that ANY FOOL can get paying work writing about the arts, except HIM. Teachout is just typical, well connected and in his case political. He’s not a fool or even inept, but he is hardly inspiring or insightful. But I look around and see no one compelling being published and he is far from the worst. There is a difference between understanding that someone is a professional, and an anonymous blogger implying that ‘he’ somehow knows better. Teachout doesn’t have to be Virgil Thomson to disprove that.
i’m going to don my flameproof jammies and rise to the defense of terry teachout. (before anyone asks: i’m not terry teachout. i don’t know him; i don’t know anyone who knows him. i read his reviews; that’s all.) first, the wall street journal’s readership isn’t following every twist and turn in nyco’s programming; it’s a national publication for business people. what may be a thrice-told tale to opera buffs in manhattan is actual news to folks in the great beyond. second, teachout is primarily a theater reviewer; his regular readers are likely not conversant with gerard mortier’s career in opera. third, i enjoy teachout’s generosity of spirit — no one writes a better rave, and he’s not afraid to say drop-everything-and-see-this-show even about relative obscurities and regional theater. i’ve never seen any evidence that he’s pandering to the (presumed) “bourgeois anti-art prejudices” of his readers. his writing is lively and direct, he generally knows what he’s talking about, and he certainly hasn’t earned the abuse being heaped on him here.
High c’s pirate:
My abuse towards Mr. Teachout stems from his often-times extremely political right-wing comments in his writings(not being a regular WSJ reader, I can’t vouch if they appear in his columns there, as often as they do in his other published works)
Unlike his fellow conservative critic for the NEW YORK SUN (a rabidly right-wing paper)-whereas that reviewer at least seperates his political opinions from the artistic matter at hand, Teachout more times than not, doesn’t.
Teachout has also been a Bush appointee to the NEA, and has mouthed the Party line concerning government funding (or the lack therof) for the Arts.
In discussing or critiquing the Arts, It isn’t essential to me to be as left-leaning as I am, as long as your political opinions don’t enter into the discussion, which unfortunately for Teachout happens more times than not.
I’ve been reading Teachout in the WSJ for years and I’ve never seen anything approached far right wing political comments. I do recall Frank Rich writing theatre reviews in the Times, however, that just couldn’t stop with the the far left wing comments.
Do you object to that as well? Or is the right wing you object to?
As for Sanford … that’s the kind of thinking that will close the company. Get your head out of the sand, dickwad.
If I know 30 or 40 people who won’t come …. how many more are there? As they say, for every 1 letter to the editor they assume there are 10-20 more who feel the same way.
And pissing off the people like me who have been most loyal to the company, donating, buying multiple subscriptions, and coming a great distance to hear opera there is not far-sighted.
Yep, that’s the way to run an organization … piss off your most loyal supporters.
I think saying that John Doyle has a clue of stage savvy is a new insight, though not one any rational critic would admit to under a byline.
Sweeney and Company were both pretty terrific.
They may not have been opera productions, but they were on stage.
I saw Company — it was ANTI-stage, made the thing into a song cycle. That was reasonable for Company (just omit the dances, which they did) — but it was precisely the wrong thing to do with Peter Grimes which IS a drama, though not when Doyle staged it. So, far as I can tell, he doesn’t know how to maneuver a stage piece on a stage. And certainly shouldn’t be invited back to the Met’s.
As far as the Met is concerned, I can’t say, as I didn’t see Grimes. I did see the Company, and I can’t agree that it was anti-stage. The show IS something of a song cycle- there’s no real narrative- but there was dramatic and theatrical invention to burn in that production. I was expecting to HATE the actor/musician thing, a much odder idea in Company than in Sweeney, but I thought it was handled with a deal of wit and understanding; the tuba as the ‘modern art’ in Bobby’s apartment, for example, and- magically- the fact that Bobby suddenly made for the piano for the intro to ‘Being Alive’. In many ways I found it more dramatically than musically impressive.
Ah well, if we all had the same opinions there’d be no point talking, eh?
Let’s see. This “Mark” person takes Alex Ross (ALEX ROSS!) to task as someone “living in a bubble somewhere” and then repeatedly rebuts anything she doesn’t like with accounts of what her friends think — which gains force from being precisely what she herself thinks. (This last device has most recently been used to questionable effect in the Clinton campaign’s constant use of: “people all over this country come up to me and say …”)
She resents the NYCO for trying more specifically to serve the city it was first invented to serve, with less of the pretense of being a second-rate international house that has been creeping over its identity in recent years.
It is perhaps charitable to pass lightly over her revelation of herself as having a Fox-like paranoia that only the right wing gets the hostile critical examination that persecutes poor Mr. Teachout here as she punctuates her genial observations by addressing one of the cher public of La Cieca (LA CIECA!) as “dickwad” for not falling in line with her opinions (and to be fair, those of her many friends — all munificent benefactors of the NYCO who, at her command, no doubt, will now divert the streams of their bounty in protest against the régime of someone called Mortier who has not the benefit of their profound insight and experience.
Oh, fuck it. Why go on?
high c’s pirate, et al: my “anti-art” complaint derives from Teachout’s choice of production details (from Fledermaus) that in context seem intended to depict Mortier as a spoiled radical chic parasite. That Fledermaus is not really representative of Mortier’s sensibility as an impresario except in the broader sense that he sometimes provokes the audience in order to get their attention. The reason I think the remark is anti-art is that it riducules the idea that art should or even can be political. The underlying idea here is that opera (and all art) is entertainment, a luxurious diversion — a frill, in other words. It is in the interest of materialists to marginalize art because accepting the idea that art is transcendent directly contradicts their belief that financial success is the prime goal of human endeavor.
Brava, La Ciaca!