parterre box

41 comments

• kashania says:

  What is The Awl? At the beginning, they mention that they hardly ever cover opera but then reveal themselves to be quite knowledgeable. Anyway, it was fun to read.

  on December 17, 2009 at 6:14 PM
• rysanekfreak says:

  And any Rysanek clip always wakes my ancient sleeping balls up and makes them go all tingly again. (Pardon me if you feel I have overshared.)

  on December 17, 2009 at 6:31 PM
• squirrel says:

  The Awl also has a lovely recipe for Latkes:
  http://www.theawl.com/2009/12/how-to-cook-a-latke

  on December 17, 2009 at 6:37 PM
• Cassandra says:

  Matthew Gallaway is a writer who I’ve heard is the boyfriend of the head of production at the Met. Choire Sicha writes at The Awl and has been employed/not employed off and on for the past few years I believe at Gawker?

  on December 17, 2009 at 7:22 PM
  • Dan Johnson says:

    And Seth Colter Walls used to write for Newsweek, I think? I think of him as an Alex Ross “type,” if we can call it a type: commonsensical, democratic, but not pandering.

    I LOVE the Awl and while I didn’t think this was a terrifically insightful article, I was thrilled to see an opera piece this long and involved turn up in a mainstream blog. Too often even the self-styled cultural literates like to pretend that music was invented in 1963; the Awl, for all its (smart! engaging!) coverage of rock and hip-hop, does not. They joke, but they are very serious. I read every single one of their posts. <3.

    on December 18, 2009 at 2:20 AM
    • sethcolterwalls says:

      Oh hey, DSJ! I’m still at Newsweek, btw. Have a 2-page thingy about jazz in the issue currently on newsstands: http://www.newsweek.com/id/226331. And obviously the difference between myself and A. Ross is the diff btwn Bullock and Rysanek (or worse, for me).

      But yes, since NW doesn’t really cover live performances, the Awl is a fun and serious side sandbox where I can use swears. As a frequent lurker here (and at My Fave Intermish), it was cool to see La Cieca and Maury D turn up in the comment thread over there. At root, the idea behind the post was to get some new people to think about maybe-somehow giving opera a try.

      *Goes back to listening to this new hip-hop release.*

      on December 18, 2009 at 8:24 AM
• alex says:

  What is their beef it Julie Taymor?

  on December 18, 2009 at 2:56 AM
  • Maury D'Annato says:

    In absence of any actual knowledge, I’m going to project and say it’s about universal acclaim in response to variable output. I know I find the Met’s Zauberfloete alternately wonderful and headache-inspiring, but it’s going to pop up every season or two until we’re all dead.

    on December 18, 2009 at 10:42 AM
  • Maury D'Annato says:

    Absent any actual knowledge, I’m going to simply project and say it’s about uproarious, nearly universal acclaim in response to variable output. I know I find the Met’s Zauberflöte alternately wonderful and headache-inducing, but it’s going to be up there every year or two until we’re all dead.

    on December 18, 2009 at 10:46 AM
  • MDannato says:

    Absent any actual knowledge, I’m going to project and say it’s about uproarious, almost universal acclaim in response to variable output. I know I find the Met’s Zauberfloete by turns inspired and headache-inducing, but god knows it’s going to be up there every season or two until we’re all dead.

    [Having some comment-posting issues. Hoping this does not show up thrice or frice.]

    on December 18, 2009 at 10:52 AM
• Henry Holland says:

  Seth Walls is a Schrekerite, so I’ll trust his opinion without question from here on out.

  on December 18, 2009 at 2:09 PM
• mrsjohnclaggart says:

  I’m too tired to post there but I thought a lot of the comments were ridiculous. First of all it’s silly and reductive to think there was a ‘greatest’ 20th century composer. But if I had to pick one it would be Stravinsky. He was the first to use noise as an aesthetic building block, he was the first to compress and essentialize ‘tunes’ and chants and incredible rhythmic variety into an intense, condensed noisy miracle like Les Noces (1916). And he kept re-inventing himself.

  Neo-classicism was his idea and those scores are fabulous. He refused to use a harmonic ‘system’ (until very old age where Craft manipulated him into using his own version of twelve note procedures) and yet his solutions to age old problems were original, surprising and ‘new’. He also invented neo-romantic writing, though again on his own terms (the incredible treatment of Tchaikovsky tunes in Baiser, the breathtaking beauty of Orpheus, the eruptive tension of Agon).

  And finally there is Rake, an amazing opera that cites Handel, Mozart, Tchaikovsky and Verdi yet is finally wholly original and very moving.

  Strauss? He kept writing the same way over and over, trying for the same effects that were no longer spontaneous, easy or earned. Only the naive confuse output with genius. In terms of influence, Mahler had much more to do with the Second Viennese School — the nucleus of Schoenberg’s Chamber Symphony is in the first movement of the Mahler 9th. Berg made the piano reduction of Mahler’s 6th and some of that shows up as late as Lulu. In Wozzeck Berg does a nasty send up of Strauss in act two scene 4, with on stage band that evokes the scoring of the off stage orchestra in the start of act three of Rosenkavalier, and a deliberately silly Landler that erupts grotesquely in much the same way that Strauss’ waltzes do.

  Schoenberg explicitly rejected Strauss’ counterpoint (so did Stravinsky who made brutal fun of it). Schreker was a friend of Schoenberg’s (he conducted the first performance of Gurrelieder) and his harmony could not be more different than Strauss’, it is far stranger, and more individual.

  I’m always a little suspicious of excessive Strauss love, since there is so much that is merely banal and inflated. Bartok was influenced for a time especially by Strauss’ orchestration, but abandoned that influence totally to become a great composer, partly by adopting Hungarian folk rhythms and intervals, partly through his own insistence on intellectual rigor (as look at the quartets).

  on December 18, 2009 at 7:26 PM
  • Cassandra says:

    I agree the commentary was sketchy at best, and not particularly interesting or insightful, as expected. I skimmed most of it.

    Definitely feeling the Stravinsky love right now as I’m currently working on Pulcinella, and adoring every moment of it. I do love Strauss though.

    on December 18, 2009 at 11:02 PM
• Henry Holland says:

  Points taking about the Stravinsky but I still wouldn’t trade every note he ever composed for the last 20 minutes of Salome.

  I’m always a little suspicious of excessive Strauss love, since there is so much that is merely banal and inflated

  Yes, but Salome, Elektra and Frau are great operas, certainly better than The Rake’s Progress. I agree with Britten who said about the Stravinsky “I liked everything except the music”.

  on December 18, 2009 at 11:44 PM
  • Alto says:

    Britten’s RAKE comment sound like something our own dear Vicar might have quoth.

    on December 19, 2009 at 7:21 AM
  • ilpenedelmiocor says:

    Britten should talk.
    One of the first operas I ever saw was Albert Herring.
    I thought I would die before it ended.

    on December 20, 2009 at 6:29 AM
• mrsjohnclaggart says:

  And Stravinsky on Britten before that comment: “I believe someone named Puccini got there first.” And “He’s written an opera on A Midsummer Night’s Dream? There’s music in the play. What did he add?” And “I think Tchaikovsky would have properly identified those sequences as brain rot and drunk the contaminated water after burning them.” Britten also detested R. Strauss, “appalling” — and he threw Graham Johnson out of the house after he defended Rosenkavalier (Pears got Britten to accept Johnson’s apology, though it was insincere).

  I love Screw and Death in Venice, I think most of the music in Grimes is thrilling but has everything to do with paranoia and guilt (Britten’s) and nothing to do with a rough fisherman in Suffolk who takes legal advantage of the apprentice system (in the opera; in Crabbe of course he’s a serial murderer of boys driven mad by their vengeful ghosts — rape is implied).

  I think the folk song arrangements are divine (Velocity Clit and Langridge do the complete set on Naxos), as are the early cycles for Pears especially Winter Words and the Michelangelo Sonnets (but the best recording of the first is Rolfe-Johnson, and of the second, a pirate with Jonas the K, there is a great Serenade from Koslovsky, and a great Les illuminations from Doulukhanova). I respect the third string quartet and cello symphony though the last looks and sounds like someone working hard to get a tough voice back after too many boys and twee larks. Our Hunting Fathers is an amazing work from a very young man. But…

  You are of course entitled to love those particular or any Strauss operas. I have yet to read a convincing musical defense of the endless sequences, false counterpoint and preposterous repetitions as well as the melodic barrenness in Frau — though cut and well cast it can be very effective live, as can be the much less pretentious, sweaty and equally thin Adriana Lecouvreur. And yes, I’d rather see Frau circa 64 with Christa, Leonie, or 67 in Munich with Borkh, Moedl, Bjoner, Fidi, Sawallisch conducting.

  Salome and Elektra have the benefit of his relative youth and a certain concision despite their reliance on silly waltzes (as in Chrysothemis’ music, the scene with Aegist and the dance at the end of Elektra and the kitsch of Salomes Tanz — derided by Mahler who liked some of the rest of the score). I believe Ariadne makes the best overall case for Strauss as a master, as opposed to a grotesquely swollen miniaturist. He said of himself, “I am a good second rate composer.”

  Dueling over Rake, or works like it (Falstaff, Pelleas, Cosi) makes little sense. One gets them or not, as can also be said of Shrecker, who I definitely love even if his may not have been a global talent such as I believe for example Bartok, Berg, Hartmann and Ligeti had).

  on December 19, 2009 at 12:36 AM
  • CruzSF says:

    Why was Stravinsky so bitter?

    on December 19, 2009 at 12:48 AM
    • Alto says:

      There are plenty of reasons to have reservations about Britten besides being “bitter.” And, besides, Britten was far more savage about, say, Brahms than Stravinsky ever bothered to be about Britten.

      on December 19, 2009 at 7:20 AM
      • CruzSF says:

        I didn’t mean only his comments on Britten. Stravinsky also seemed to have it out for Strauss and Tchaikovsky, according to the MJC’s quotes above.

        on December 19, 2009 at 5:31 PM
    • ilpenedelmiocor says:

      I worship Stravinsky musically, OK? I’d even go for best of the 20th century. But the man was a megalomaniac who constantly rewrote history to inflate his own self-importance. I had to research the facts surrounding the premiere of the Rite of Spring for a lecture I once gave, and the amount of falsifiable disinformation sown by Stravinsky was astonishing.

      on December 20, 2009 at 6:37 AM
  • CerquettiFarrell says:

    Oh this Strauss criticism is so 50s Adorno old news. Since Abate and Kastenbaum the Strauss appreciation has advanced so much and yet the Adorno shadow unbelievably looms over. Dividing musical contend from the dramatic / psychological context in Strauss’ stage work is as useless as saying that Monteverdi’s harmonic language is underdeveloped. Both create fascinating and enduring stage personae with their proper armoury. The waltz element is not “silly”, it is a manifestation of Strauss’ musical / personal makeup, as much as the Mahler doubling of oboe + clarinet. Der Rosenkavalier is no more a re-creation in sound of 18th Vienna than Elektra or Salome a representation of antique culture. The music is undoubtedly a reflection of its own time and Zeitgeist. The waltz element, as in Ravel, is clearly a reflection on the period in which the music was written. No person in his right mind would ever consider that Strauss, a man thoroughly aware of musical history and somebody who knew his Mozart well, should replace turn of the century waltz music for authentic court menuets. Rosenkavalier is clearly a depiction of early 20th century sensibilities, whereas Elektra juxtaposes recent research in hysteria (Bertha Pappenheim) with a fairly accurate description in musical sounds of Strauss’ own unhinged mother. I love Strauss because he has an uncanny ability to project the human and humane in any given situation. Frau is an interesting experiment, I still have to find my way around and through it.

    on December 19, 2009 at 8:20 AM
    • CerquettiFarrell says:

      Oh, and btw, I adore Schrecker. Somebody should put over Die Gezeichneten. There’s an excellent DVD production from the Felsenreitschule, highly recommended

      on December 19, 2009 at 8:25 AM
• The Vicar of John Wakefield says:

  RAKE can make an effect in the theatre when one has first-rate artists like Catherine Pope or Stafford Dean at hand, but the whole lot of Stravinsky’s ballet scores is not worth any five minutes of THE LITTLE SWEEP or THE HOLY SONNETS OF JOHN DONNE.

  Plus, why has no one mentioned RVW????

  on December 19, 2009 at 8:58 AM