casting out

Philip Schuyler’s coming down. By the ruling of the mayor, who is listening to members of her staff who know enough history to know that, yes, he was our local general in the Continental Army, but also yes, he was a slave owner. As were many local prominent people of his day, and many Continental Army generals. And that point, though not newly discovered, has finally been elevated from biographical footnote to chapter heading.

This follows Christopher Columbus losing his head and/or his pedestal in more than one location, and the Italian-American Governor of New York defending him (or his bronze representations) as points of pride for Italian-Americans. Some people have suggested replacing him (the statue, not the Governor) with Verdi. But Verdi, by some accounts, though artist and philanthropist, was also a Type A asshole and not above using the word Jew as a negative epithet in his personal correspondence, and people will eventually figure that out.

Of course in other areas of the opera world we’ve had our own recent seasons of iconoclasm, mostly to do with living people with careers and now rap sheets to go with them. Time will tell how all that levels out. But opera people, given the long run, are pretty good at parsing art from artist – just ask any liberal lefty Wagnerite. In the short run, the hammer of justice swings hard, as it should.

There has been debate over what should go on the pedestal in place of Philip Schuyler. And no doubt it has already prompted people to survey the inventory of city monuments, so here is our incomplete list:

• Moses in the park -- more than a bit campy in light of the tulip beds surrounding him and legions of little kids climbing over the rocks at his feet, and a bit ironic when considered in an Old Testament context. Commissioned by the prominent husband of a prominent wife who felt women had no right to a public voice (aka the vote) and used her prominent wifely platform to say so a lot;

• Spanish-American War Guy – nobody here really remembers what that was about but you get extra points if you don’t confuse it with the Spanish Civil War and gold star if you mumble something about remembering the Maine;

• American Civil War cenotaph -- not presently arguable, but long a point of contention between history nerds and skateboarders;

• Police memorial –- unimaginative, derivative in style, ruined a really nice park fountain, and memorializes a PD that has a long, well-documented history of racism and general cack-handedness. So, entirely representative of what it seeks to represent, really. But restore the fountain to the community and find some other way;

…and

• Nipper. Our Nibbles Woodaway. Unofficial mascot of the city, parked on a building downtown that used to belong to RCA. A grass-roots movement to replace Schuyler with Nipper is gaining momentum, but would eventually clash with whoever owns the trademark now. And what does this dog represent? If Schuyler points to the region’s proud and problematic Revolutionary War history, Nipper points to the region’s better-than-average music scene. Cast that in bronze.

18 Brumaire Posting from the Ministry of Noise

Things being what they are this week, I had this song by Brian McNeill on the brain. Twenty and change years old and about another place, but no less relevant for that, I think. And it points in the direction we need to go, should the dust ever settle enough for us to see our way.

 There's no gods, and there's precious few heroes, 

 but there's plenty on the dole in the Land o' the Leal, 

 and it's time now to sweep the future clear 

 of the lies of a past that we know was never real...

Today the Alien Hairpiece was demanding to know where it would end, which icon of American history would be next. But of course the answer is all of them. We're way overdue for a reevaluation of our political mythologies as a whole, from the beginning, wherever that might be, and to whatever end. And, it should be needless to say, South and North.

Last week at the Borg Cube, Mouthy Liberal Supervisor and Kneejerk Conservative Minion were discussing whether or not the arrival of European colonists was really that bad for Native Americans. [Spoiler: Yes, yes it was.] The discussion was punctuated with a lot of questions ending in "I don't know". But they never got to the real question: Why don't we know? And we're seeing the results of not knowing, the results of a void in historical literacy that somehow binge-watching shows on the History Channel doesn't address.

It was true at one time that Ken Burns' multi-part documentary The Civil War was by far the highest-rated show in PBS history. It's probably still true. It's probably also responsible for what 99% of the non-history nerd American populace knows about the American Civil War (plus bulking out Jay Ungar's bank account, we hope). As much as it may have helped rehab the documentary genre, the down side was perhaps it lent a little too much of a white schoolboy Civil War buff's romanticism to the proceedings. Which is where the above song comes in, and the line about "sweeping the future clear". What we need to ask ourselves out of all this is how these narratives make or break us... or perhaps how they do the one while seeming to do the other.

Monday Posting from the Ministry of Noise

These are days that might bring out the cranky New Englander in anybody, so have some cranky Early American Folk-Punk Hymnody, and take a shot of strong water every time the phrase "shining city on a hill" spews from a Mouth of Sauron.

quelle surprise

Remember a few months ago when Senator Chuck Schumer (D-NY) said the Dems' resistance would be "vocal, not to say operatic"? Well, sorta. We might consider what opera Congressional Democrats are performing right now and what opera they should be performing right now. But meantime, the NYT's chief critic reports that the Operatic Resistance is a Thing. [That sound we just heard is every dead composer you ever heard of snerking from the grave].

hashtag IWD

As we wonder whether they shouldn't just change the name to International Windowdressing Day, Twitter provides an avenue for historical perspective.

This 1930 Weltfrauentag poster and many more - thanks to @GermanAtPompey pic.twitter.com/PDu9HKcTDz #InternationalWomensDay

— Translated World (@TranslatedWorld) March 8, 2015

grouse

Ian Bostridge has a piece on Winterreise in the Guardian. I like Ian Bostridge, and what he says here is mostly fine, I guess, whatever, except leaning on this old stereotype is about as weak as talking about opera singers by their excessive weight:

"The simple classical delivery of a folk song by a “trained” voice may sound uptight and artificial to an audience used to hearing “Barbara Allen” or “O Waly Waly” in the nasal twang that has become associated with an “authentic” folk voice."

Since he doesn't bother to illustrate this notorious folk twang on Waly Waly (and seriously, dude, are those the best trad songs you could come up with, or just the only?), we'll do that for him:



Perhaps if he'd asked someone, they might have told him that the problem is with the word "simple". Also, I get the whole Schubert/Dylan thing, but doesn't it sort of add insult to injury to make the other pole of this argument the guy famous for lifting tunes off those nasally folk singer records and recording his own even more nasally versions of them without any attribution whatsoever?

Meanwhile, here's a couple of unskilled Leiermänner droning on and on with another irritating folksy tune.



Somebody once asked in an internet forum how a beggar could afford to own a hurdy-gurdy, given how complicated the instruments are in construction, and thus how expensive. I put the question to a guy who owned the most kick-ass instrument I ever heard -- a simple box design made in Hungary out of what appeared to be old barn siding -- and he thought for a moment and said "Long winters." There's unskilled, and there's unskilled.

I guess this article has annoyed me more than I thought. So in closing here's a video for Child Owlet made by seven-year-olds. Barbara Allen, pfffff. Weak.

Happy Big Pagan Holiday for All the Workers

sundry items

FT has a Glyndebourne Festival preview (preceded, in this geographic locale, by a somewhat creepy Fidelity Investments ad, sorry), some of which will be videocast over the web again this year.

In the Guardian, Stuart Jeffries does a preliminary assessment of the Don Giovannis of 2012 (new and revived), while the Telegraph's Opera Novice meets up with Rigoletto.

On Front Row, John Eliot Gardiner discusses that same Rigoletto and other operatic matters; Glimmerglass Radames-to-be Noah Stewart discusses stadium reverb and tenor stuff.

The Atlantic has the American Library Association's Top 10 Most Challenged Titles of 2011, "challenged" meaning formally complained-about to local public libraries by patrons who probably haven't read the book in question but who nevertheless have way too much time on their hands. Not sure whether "religious viewpoint" means the plaintiff doesn't like the alleged religious viewpoint of the given book, or just that the given book has one. Or doesn't. Meanwhile, we note that The Hunger Games moves from 5th place to 3rd on the list (and is the only one to get "occult/satanic", probably because we're in an election year and the Democrats are hoarding all the satan); Brave New World falls to 7th (but gets star bonus points for so exceeding its radioactive half-life); and Twilight, in a bit of a stunner, falls off the list entirely, losing 10th position to eternally-offensive-because-eternally-reified-by-reality To Kill a Mockingbird.

Late addition: In a move that makes the US publishing industry look increasingly like a season of Game of Thrones, Amazon -- you know how much we love them -- have succeeded in suckering the US Department of Justice into doing the heavy lifting in their bid to control what we read and how we read it. Because if there's price fixing to be done, obviously that responsibility should fall to Amazon alone.  Well done, DOJ, you bunch of tools.

And another: The Special Envoy to the Court of King Festus writes: "There is a poem about your coming plague!!!" Everything you ever wanted to know about the biology of tick-borne anaplasmosis, in verse form, brought to you as a public service by the US Centers for Disease Control & Prevention.

echt versus ersatz

Vesselina Kasarova relates to the Associated Press the trials and tribulations of an honest-to-god opera career, while over at The Telegraph, Steve Silverman suggests Katherine Jenkins stop claiming she has one...or will have one...whatever. Normally this would go without saying, but just having seen Susan Boyle described elsewhere in the mainstream media as an "opera singer" -- a claim I doubt Susan Boyle herself would make -- well...you know.

What Would George Eliot Do?

The "I could've told them that for fifty bucks" Quote of the Day:

Dr. Oatley and Dr. Mar, in collaboration with several other scientists, reported in two studies, published in 2006 and 2009, that individuals who frequently read fiction seem to be better able to understand other people, empathize with them and see the world from their perspective.

So much for sola fide, we must now be Justified through Science. And don't get me wrong, I like science, and I have no problem with spending huge amounts of cash to develop complex narratives about all sorts of things.  But so driven by Wall Street Mentality are we that it seems we now have to prove scientifically the market value of every bit of cultural activity we have been actively devaluing for decades. By the way, singing is now good for you.

Nevertheless, speaking as a tiresome pedant myself, let me point out that the deal with Casaubon is not that he's a tiresome pedant ("Ma'am, step away from the Cliff Notes."), but that he has so heroically dedicated his life to reinventing the wheel.

Sunday morning Malvina from the Ministry of Noise

"Everybody thinks my head's full of nothin',

wants to put his special stuff in,

fill the space with candy wrappers,

keep out sex and revolution,

but there's no hole in my head.

Too bad."

miscellaneous portents

In the interest of having all these in one place when it's the Met's turn, here's a roundup of (ex post facto) Klinghoffer@ENO print reviews, from Culture Wars, the arts desk, The Guardian, The Telegraph, The Independent, and (via tweet de la Cieca) Bloomberg. 

Speaking of the Met, in case anybody missed it, here's the 2012/13 HD season. Huzzah for their deciding to HD the Ponnelle La Clemenza di Tito, but we wonder if that means this production's due for the axe. This prospect could prompt a lot of whinging on our part, but having done Lamentations of the Old Opera Geek in the previous post, all we'll say is: Wouldn't it have been nice if they'd gotten it together to get this on some sort of visual medium back in 2005, when they had both ASvO and Frank Lopardo, a Tito who could actually, y'know, sing the notes -- all of them, in the order in which they were written, even -- instead of... well, never mind. We're sure it will be fine. Dammit.

the revolution will be HD-cast

Lucy over at Opera Obsession has a thought-provoking meditation on opera and audience.  Having lived through a few decades of the Imminent Demise of Opera™, it always seemed like mine would be the demographic cohort destined to kill the lights and slam the door on the way out (if there turned out to be enough of us, which was doubtful). Now people who probably weren't born yet when I was hearing my first dire predictions are trading tweets about how much it sucks to be missing the Khovanshchina prima.  That's the prima I'm listening to right now, leisurely on a Monday night, not in some hard-won, barricade-defended Saturday afternoon NPR ghetto.  Kewl :-)

On the other hand, I was just listening to a Met broadcast from 2005, and the degree to which Margaret Juntwait has changed her game is quite striking.  Back then, of course, she was replacing the magisterial Peter Allen, and she was a solo act. I kind of preferred it to the Juntwait & Berger (or Siff) Show.  Yes, I suppose it's a more, uh, user-friendly presentation now.  But, frankly, nothing blows the atmosphere faster than two bright-voiced people brightly chatting about the auto da fe that just happened in Don Carlo or the kid about to go over the cliff in Peter Grimes.  And what will they do with those Carmelite nuns next year? Gives me the willies just thinking about it.

Oh wait, one thing does blow the atmosphere faster, and that's interviewing the singers at intermission.  Remember that absolutely drop dead awesome exposition of Billy Budd John Culshaw did for some intermission back in...Probably not, I think it must still have been the Carter (Trudeau/Thatcher/Schmidt/d'Estaing) Administration(s). Not all intermissions were like that, and I grant that Boris Goldovsky could be kinda freaky.  But you learned a lot, and it wasn't about where Anna Netrebko bought her frock.

Can intermissions be made user-friendly, not to say informative, without being like an interview with ARod? Maybe not. Lucy writes of being an evangelist for opera. I was, once, too. But not long ago I decided it was no longer warranted. Now people can find their own way just fine into some iteration of the opera house without anybody having to Virgil them. Above all, they want no details, smooth or spikey, to come between them and the surface experience: they don't want to know how Iago starts that riot just by sliding off the beat or how Isolde, at a mere suggestion, makes the hunting horns morph into the sound of the fountain right there, and suddenly, despite your better judgement, you're in her world, not Brangäne's. 

Which means what they don't want is to know exactly why this stuff really is as amazing as it is.

This is an unstated doctrine of the Gelb revolution, and I know it to be true.

Does it matter?  

incoming

The Met has released its new season cyber-prop. David McVicar wins.

John Adams' The Death of Klinghoffer looms this weekend at ENO. According to The Telegraph, the rhubarb has already sprouted. Meanwhile, over at The Guardian, Tom Service suggests there might be some music to consider in there somewhere.

Indiana University Jacobs School of Music students get their Rosenkavalier on, free video streaming this Friday and Saturday night here, starting at 7pm EST.

IU Rosenkavalier update: staging needs work but singing was fab, and orchestra had its Straussian mojo workin.  It's a different cast tomorrow night.

Also, the news via Towanda is people on the left side of the Atlantic could make it a Strauss double-header.

sundry items

late addition: "After two hearings I still couldn’t fathom whether it was a comedy or a tragedy." The answer is Yes. Sameer Rahim, Opera Novice, scales Mt. Rosenkavalier.

and NYC Arts has an interview with Angela Gheorghiu, wherein she says pretty much the usual Angela Gheorghiu things (starting about 9 minutes in):

Watch NYC-ARTS Full Episode: Angela Gheorghiu, Spanish Dress on PBS. See more from NYC-ARTS.

Previously:

"I do not think that the function of the visual world...necessarily needs to mimic or copy or even add to the narrative surface of the opera." From back in October, John Conklin talks about "the performative power of design".

Countdown to Klinghoffer: In anticipation of the ENO premiere, Jessica Duchen rounds up the controversy, and librettist Alice Goodman discusses the aftermath.

Money and ideas: The FT has the numbers on the business of converting novels to film.

sundry items

From the Noise Ministry: Sumi Jo talks Mozart on The Strand. 

Also, Arte's got a Beethoven 9 with Matthias Goerne, Sally Matthews, Steve Davislim and Karen Cargill, who was pretty excellent in the Mahler 3 rehearsal I caught at Tanglewood summer before last (and here with Runnicles/BBCSSO), and whose Met debut will be the last Waltraute of this year's run of Götterdämmerung, whereupon maybe they will figure out that she can hack it and give her more fun stuff to do.

From the Ministry of Histrionics: sterling yet in England, Donmar Warehouse Richard II reviews here, here, and here.

From the Ministry of Ranting, Office of Buzz-Mumbling, commentary on Amazon's bold new app for market monopolization here and here.  As a former bricks n' mortar record store employee who had at least one former customer apologize to me about my job "but, you know, Amazon just had better prices", my only question is what's taken them so long?  But consider, o Christmas shoppers, what Amazon is doing is not just beating the competition but actively moving to obliterate it, even as they sell their proprietary e-reader and make direct deals to cut out publishers altogether. My job fell to a variety of market forces, but all that means is it's a lot harder to find some stuff Former Customer could once have relied on us to have.  We shrug. We live. She gets to find something else to listen to.  But seriously, not to be paranoid or anything, but all the above taken in the aggregate, do you really want the likes of Jeff Bezos determining what's worth reading and how you read it, and keeping a record of it all the while?  Kinda looks like fascism to me.

Modulate Wall Street

Seth Colter Walls reports in The Awl on Occupy Wall Street's visit to Lincoln Center for the last performance of Satyagraha.  

Alex Ross has the key video of Philip Glass addressing the 99%...via the People's Mic, which is somehow fitting. 

So were two music journos the only members of the "mainstream" fourth estate on the scene? Surely it seems the New York Times knoweth not of these things.

fellow travelers and undesirable elements

From the NYT, an article about Britain's artist visa process, at which all Americanistanians may rejoice, since it seems theirs is as punitively byzantine as ours. (There was a time when I would ask "How did Foreign Performer X manage to book a tour?" and the answer would always be "Because she/he/they live in Brooklyn." Now I just assume.)

The article does beg the question, though, of why the violist would "sail through" while the violinists are sent for interrogation and the cellist is deported outright. Is this because they couldn't believe anyone would hire a violist to play for money?

This was all so much easier when it was just about commies.

1913

Everything old is the same only more so.

mission creep

A Thirdfloorian expedition to the last standing big box bookstore in the whole of Upper R-wijk has reported a roughly 33% decrease in shelf space for Literature/Fiction due to encroachment of Toys/Games from the Kids' Enclave.  Also, the Corner of Ostentatious Intellectual Display (once identifiable by its two Comfy Chairs and presence of the Poetry Section) has now been displaced by Dogs. Or was it Sports?  I forget.  Probably Sports, because the chairs are still there.  Poetry, however, has shifted it down the line to a Hooverville not far from Dodgy Histories of Europe, and is now reckoned to be about half way to End Cap status.

The good news: The ratio of German lit in translation to Anglo fiction seems to have risen. Slightly.  (This is probably entirely due to Heinrich Böll, Hans Fallada and Melville House Publishing, because tokenism favors one-stop-shopping. But of course it may also just be because they've gotten rid of a lot of stuff.)  Also, no works of Nobel Prize for Literature winners were discovered in the Red Sticker Rubbish bins with the out-of-favor manga series and the bad Dan Brown knockoffs. This time.