Alex Ross: The Rest Is Noise

Stanley Kubrick Was My Friend, Too

by Alex Ross

The New Yorker, Aug. 2, 1999.

A few years ago, at about two in the morning, the phone rang, and a voice said, “Will you accept a collect call from Stanley Kubrick?” Stanley always was a cheap bastard. “No," I said, irritated at the lateness of the call. I soon regretted my refusal, however, and I dialed *69. I found myself on the line with the auteur of "2001" and "Full Metal Jacket." We often laughed afterwards at the fact that I had penetrated the defenses of so famously reclusive a man with so simple a device as *69. It was a loophole that his security specialists had somehow overlooked. The problem was quickly addressed, and the next person who tried to *69 him was electrocuted.

Stanley and I talked for thirty-six hours. We touched on every subject under the sun: St. Thomas Aquinas, suspension bridges, Beethoven’s “Missa Solemnis,” chicken farming, “The Dukes of Hazzard.” Stanley was a big fan of “The Dukes of Hazzard,” it turned out, and he had seen a “Where Are They Now?” article I had written about the show for TV Guide. He wanted to know what I thought of John Schneider, who had portrayed Bo Duke. “I’m thinking of making a movie about Hitler,” Stanley told me, “and I think Bo Duke might be perfect for it.”

“The role of Hitler?” I asked, dubiously. “No-no-no,” he said, with that quick asperity he reserved for those slightly less brilliant than himself. "The role of Soldier No. 112, in the Battle of the Bulge.” “Is it a speaking role?” I asked. “No, he will be mostly hidden behind a snow embankment,” Stanley replied. I said I thought John Schneider would be perfect for the role, and I soon found myself on a plane to London.

When I arrived at Stanley’s mansion, a delightful dinner party was in progress. Stanley was thought to be a recluse, but he often had delightful dinner parties. Present at this one, if I remember rightly, were John Le Carré, Terrence Malick, J. D. Salinger, Kay Thompson, Syd Barrett, Doris Duke, Martin Bormann, and that man who jumped out of an airplane with lots of money in the seventies. Everyone had a wonderful time, and Stanley was at the center of it all. Stanley was widely considered a cold, geometrical tyrant of the cinema, but he was really a "people person,” and he nearly gave Doris Duke a seizure by slapping her heartily on the back. He told stories, cracked jokes, did card tricks, and, at one point, got up on the table and sang “Puff the Magic Dragon” and “We Shall Overcome.” When I went up to bed, he was still carrying on, trying to organize a midnight game of Kick the Can.

Stanley gave me some books to read on the way home: Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s "Der Turm"; Walter Scott’s "Count Robert of Paris"; the Earl of Stanhope’s four-volume biography of William Pitt the Younger; J. T. Scharf’s "History of Maryland from the Earliest Period to the Present Day"; "Eye on Cavett," by Dick Cavett; and John Grisham’s "The Firm." “There’s a movie in one of these books,” Stanley said to me. “Which one?” I asked. “I dunno, it’s not like I’m some all-seeing, all-knowing, cold, geometrical tyrant of the cinema,” Stanley shot back, with a knowing, ironical laugh. He paused, with the expert comic timing of a New York Jew, and then he said, “I believe you left an apple on your kitchen counter.” When I got home, I found out that I had done exactly that. I read all the books and called Stanley back. “I liked *The Firm,*” I said, “but I think they already made a movie out of it.” “I-know-I-know-I-know,” he said. “But I could do a better job. I will film it with IMAX cameras in natural light.”

I moved to London to begin work on the script for "Stanley Kubrick’s John Grisham’s The Firm," as we had to call it for legal reasons. Stanley always had trouble with actors, and he had the idea of casting this film entirely with his favorite cats and dogs. I struggled mightily with the limitations that this plan placed on my style. Each page of the script had to be submitted to his very favorite cat, Ophuls, who was only mildly amused by the material. The project gradually ran out of steam. Still, I treasure the memory of my collaboration with Stanley, especially the lighter moments: the time we recited pi to ten thousand places, for example. The matter of compensation, however, always caused me and my agent some distress. It turned out that in the end I was paying Stanley, at a rate of three dollars an hour. I protested to Stanley, and he said, “That’s below minimum wage.” So I paid him more.

The day Stanley died, my doorman said to me, “You know, a funny thing about that director who died today. A couple of years ago I got a call from someone claiming to be him, saying he’d pay me a thousand dollars if I went and put an apple on your kitchen counter. Of course I did it. Never did get the money. Cheap bastard. But a genius.” Amen.

Invisible Priest

by Alex Ross

Slate, Jan. 8, 1998

Wallace Stevens needs to be read in isolation. His poetry makes little sense in conjunction with anyone else's. Like many people, I was baffled when I first read his poems in high-school anthologies: "The Emperor of Ice-Cream" sounded like antique mumbo jumbo in comparison with the up-to-the-minute adolescent angst of "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock." Only when I began to read the 1954 Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens did I come to terms with him. Stevens eludes the anthologists because no one poem is the great one. It's the total book that counts. You can pick up the new Library of America edition of Stevens' Collected Poetry and Prose, turn to any page, and sink yourself into the unconditional, unfootnotable splendor of the voice. I am not sure if this edition is the ideal packaging of Stevens, even though it includes more of his work than any previous collection did. It may include too much — the words look smaller, the margins thinner. For a writer as worshipful of words as Stevens, these slight differences matter.

Stevens' rough chronological equivalence with Joyce and Eliot has created a mistaken notion that his poems are rich in complexity. Blessedly, they are not. Stevens offers a double liberation: first from meaning, then from modernist meaninglessness. His world is separate, immaculate. You do not need a Dublin map or a German phrase book to travel in it. Academic interpreters have failed to meet the challenge posed by Helen Vendler in her landmark study On Extended Wings — to give up the search for intellectual subject matter and to treat Stevens as "pure sound." Vendler herself sometimes fails to meet that standard. She offers ingenious paraphrases and elaborations, but she imposes a false order on a genially chaotic world. She looks for process and argument in a poet who excels at sudden revelations in miniature. She and others have also promoted the idea that the greatest Stevens is to be found in his ambitious long poems. But it is in those poems — "Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction" and "An Ordinary Evening in New Haven" — that his language is driest, his images dullest. Stevens came closer to the Supreme Fiction in short forms, in fragments.

Rather than try to launch a new exegesis, I want to name a few simple technical devices with which Stevens makes his verbal music. More often than not, he writes in iambic pentameter, the antiquated base rhythm of English poetry. Take the famous opening line of "The Idea of Order at Key West": "She sang beyond the genius of the sea." He chooses the sounds with great care. In this line, the vowels almost rhyme: "ee ah, ee aw, eh ee, yuh oh, eh ee." Only two words have more than one syllable: Stevens follows to extremes the old schoolhouse rule that short words work better than long ones. Like Shakespeare, he loved the heave and ho of a line in which each beat has its own word. (Much classic oratory relies on monosyllables: "The only thing we have to fear is fear itself"; "Ask not what your country can do for you.") In Stevens, monosyllables run riot, sometimes saturating several consecutive lines, as in the vertiginously beautiful climax of "Esthétique du Mal":

       One might have thought of sight, but who could think
       Of what it sees, for all the ill it sees?
       Speech found the ear, for all the evil sound,
       But the dark italics it could not propound.
       And out of what sees and hears and out
       Of what one feels, who could have thought to make
       So many selves, so many sensuous worlds,
       As if the air, the mid-day air, was swarming
       With the metaphysical changes that occur,
       Merely in living as and where we live.

Twenty-seven monosyllables in a row, then twenty-one. Twelve polysyllables among eighty-six words. This has to be some sort of record in the English language.

Back to "The Idea of Order," which culminates in another highly monosyllabic line: "And when she sang, the sea,/ Whatever self it had, became the self/ that was her song, for she was the maker." But as the language grows ever more chiseled and incisive, the picture grows more vague. That woman singing on the beach is dissolving into abstraction. It seems as though some principle is being preached. At this point, if you read the poem in high school or college, you may remember deadly questions intruding from the poetry anthologies: "Does the sea represent language? Is the woman the poet?" Any question about meaning in Stevens, whether well or badly formed, ruins the trance. His words are a dream melody of language, bells from nowhere. You can hear as much in tapes of Stevens reading aloud; he is so intent on keeping an even, magisterial tone that he occasionally loses himself in the convoluted syntax on which Vendler expends such analytic energy. Stevens fashioned a new oratory free of meaning; he wrote a surreal, agnostic King James Bible culled from dilettante philosophy, dated chinoiserie, and picture-postcard Americana.

Stevens' grandeur is an inch away from absurdity, if not in the thick of it. This is by intention. He liked to deflate solemnity with silliness. His humor is his least noticed attribute, probably because it is so widespread. Even his titles — "The Revolutionists Stop for Orangeade," "The Emperor of Ice-Cream" — undercut their own pomposity. Sometimes I think Stevens was a collegiate prankster who never gave away the joke he played on literature. He comes close in some of the offbeat writings that appear toward the end of the Library of America edition--especially in such nonsense aphorisms as "A poem is a cafe," "A poem is a pheasant," and "All men are murderers." More than a few of the poems, I think, are self-parodies, although it's hard to say which. (A good candidate is "Of Hartford in a Purple Light": "A long time you have been making the trip/ From Havre to Hartford, Master Soleil,/ Bringing the lights of Norway and all that.") Stevens, securely employed for much of his adult life by the Hartford Accident and Indemnity Co., could afford to laugh aloud at the pretensions of the poetry business.

The closeness of the sublime and the ridiculous, of the daft and the grand, is central to Stevens. The poem that sets it out most clearly is "The Man on the Dump," in which he writes: "One sits and beats an old tin can, lard pail./ One beats and beats for that which one believes." The monosyllables are the meaning of the poem--the acting-out of a literary philosophy, which is to hammer new beauty from well-worn words and modern bric-a-brac. The poem goes on to ask these questions about the poet's task:

       Is it to sit among mattresses of the dead,
       Bottles, pots, shoes and grass and murmur aptest eve;
       Is it to hear the blatter of grackles and say
       Invisible priest; is it to eject, to pull
       The day to pieces and cry stanza my stone?

Yes it is; this is what poetry is. But Stevens frames his manifesto in questions, as if uncertain. I think he's pointing up a contradiction. The poetry that he imagines being murmured on the dump — "aptest eve," "invisible priest," "stanza my stone" — is not in itself distinguished; by intention, it's a bit ridiculous. The sublimity comes in the way those fragments of a Romantic vision glide together with artifacts of ordinariness--bottles, pots, shoes, grass. The poem performs its theme; it is self-sufficient, it runs on its own power.

It is the purity of Stevens' language that makes the Library of America edition — edited by Frank Kermode and Joan Richardso — seem a bit "off." Not only do the poems look better in the Collected Poems (which, to be sure, omits great ones early and late); they are also unencumbered by comparison with the "uncollected poems," which include a lot of mystifying mediocrity. It's good to have all the poems in one place, and also the published prose and a smattering of letters. But it's also distracting and, occasionally, misleading. You can't find the real Stevens voice in the early poems, but you can find it in early letters not printed here. In one, the teen-age Stevens writes a dead-on Stevensian description of a motley village band — "the piping of flamboyant flutes, the wriggling of shrieking fifes with rasping dagger-voices, the sighing of bass-viols, drums that beat and rattle, the crescendo of cracked trombones." Eight years later, the young man writes flamboyantly to his fiancee, "I believe that with a bucket of sand and a wishing lamp I could create a world in half a second that would make this one look like a hunk of mud." For all its omissions, Collected Poems is the better picture of that awesome world.


Original publication: Alex Ross, "The Emperor of Ice Cream," Slate, Jan. 8, 1998.

Alex Ross

Alex Ross has been the music critic of The New Yorker since 1996. From 1992 to 1996 he wrote for the New York Times. His first book, The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century, became a bestseller and has been translated into sixteen languages. Selected as one of the New York Times's ten best books of year, The Rest Is Noise won a National Book Critics Circle Award and the Guardian First Book Award, and was a finalist for the 2008 Pulitzer Prize. Ross has served as a McGraw Professor in Writing at Princeton University and received honorary doctorates from the New England Conservatory and the Manhattan School of Music. In 2008, he was named a MacArthur Fellow. His next book, Listen to This, will appear in October 2010. A native of Washington, DC, Ross now lives in Manhattan. He is married to the actor and filmmaker Jonathan Lisecki.

Contact: Alex Ross, The New Yorker, 4 Times Square, NY NY 10036. Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 18 West 18th Street, NY NY 10011; fsg.publicity [at] fsgbooks.com. Literary agent: Tina Bennett, Janklow & Nesbit. Lecture agent: Bruce Miller, Washington Square Arts, 310 Bowery, 2nd Floor, NY NY  10012; 212-253-0333; bmiller [at] washingtonsquarearts.com (inquiries regarding speaking engagements only, please). New Yorker listings: If you wish to have a concert listed in the New Yorker's Goings On About Town, please send the information at least three weeks in advance to Russell Platt, The New Yorker, 4 Times Square, New York NY, 10036. Reprints: New Yorker articles become available for reprint sixty days after the date of publication. Write to me at The New Yorker, 4 Times Square, New York NY, 10036 for permission. There is no need to request permission to photocopy articles for academic courses.

Photo credit: David Michalek.

Longer bio:

New Yorker Columns 2004

Britten's Peter Grimes / London Symphony

Murder Will Out. The New Yorker, Feb. 2, 2004.

Thomas Adès' Tempest

Rich And Strange. The New Yorker, March 1, 2004.

Messiaen's Quartet for the End of Time

Revelations. The New Yorker, March 22, 2004.

Karita Mattila's Salome

Mysteries of Love. The New Yorker, April 5, 2004.

Leon Fleisher

The Sonata Seminar. The New Yorker, April 19, 2004.

Student Composers

Ignore the Conductor. The New Yorker, May 10, 2004.

Charles Ives

Pandemonium. The New Yorker, June 7, 2004.

Schlingensief Parsifal at Bayreuth

Nausea. The New Yorker, Aug. 9, 2004.

Shostakovich, Volkov, et al

Unauthorized. The New Yorker, Sept. 6, 2004.

Figaro, Netrebko CDs

Warhorses. The New Yorker, Sept. 27, 2004.

Julie Taymor's Magic Flute

Taymor's Mythology. The New Yorker, Oct. 25, 2004.

Downtown Music on Election Eve

America the Baleful. The New Yorker, Nov. 8, 2004.

James Levine in Boston

Maestro North. The New Yorker, Nov. 29, 2004.

Bolcom's A Wedding, Met Rodelinda

A Lovely Couple. The New Yorker, Jan. 3, 2005.

Prokofiev's War and Peace

by Alex Ross

The New Yorker, March 4, 2002.

To make an opera out of "War and Peace" seems like a conceptual mistake. Tolstoy's novel is, among other things, an assault on the great-man theory of history, dismantling the illusions of individuals and exposing the nameless, anarchistic energies that drive life forward. Napoleon's reputation has never quite recovered from the novel's Battle of Borodino scenes, in which the Emperor is made out to be neither magnificent nor malignant but simply irrelevant. This is not how opera sees the world. Opera is an art of grand personalities, of illusion and exaggeration. Our vision of musical history is the great-man theory in excelsis: the canonical composers look down at us like the heroes of Valhalla. It is no surprise that Tolstoy parodied opera alongside Freemasonry as one of the chief idiocies of high society, and praised folk song as the only truly authentic music. But what is "War and Peace" if not a self-consciously great and difficult work? Readers would not bother with it unless they believed in advance that its author was a generalissimo of the written word.

If a "War and Peace" opera had to be done, Sergei Prokofiev must have seemed the wrong person to do it. He had made his name with the "Scythian Suite" and the "Classical" Symphony, with machine-age rhythms and satirical pastiches. But there was an unexpected earnestness behind the urbane façade; Prokofiev, no less than Shostakovich, wished to map his country's destiny in sound. An exile in America and in Paris throughout the early Bolshevik years, he returned to Russia in 1936, and wrote the first version of "War and Peace" during the Second World War. He revised it in the late forties and early fifties, during the period of the 1948 Zhdanov Decree, which attacked obscurantist tendencies in the music of leading Soviet composers. The fact that Prokofiev had padded his opera with patriotic choruses failed to impress the authorities, who went out of their way to humiliate him. He died in 1953, having never heard his masterpiece complete.

And a masterpiece it is: Prokofiev made a successful stab at an impossible job. The note of detachment in his style—the everlasting icy grace—approximated Tolstoy's magisterial narrative voice, which always had a caustic undertow. Prokofiev's inability to dramatize his inner life in the manner of Shostakovich may have made him the lesser of the two in the symphonic arena, but it stood him in good stead in the more objective realm of "War and Peace." His ability to pick up the tempo of wildly disparate scenes, which he honed through his film work with Sergei Eisenstein, allowed him to address the entire sweep of the novel, from ballroom to battlefield. The first part of the opera centers on young Natasha Rostova, the pure-hearted but woefully unfocussed daughter of an impoverished landowning family, who falls in love with the Hamlet-like Prince Andrei and then with the scoundrel Kuragin. The second part tells of the Battle of Borodino, Napoleon's occupation of Moscow, and the subsequent winter retreat; the nightmare of history becomes a backdrop for the second meeting of Natasha and Andrei and for their tragic reconciliation.

Admittedly, the score has some dry patches. The bombastic newsreel music accompanying Marshal Kutuzov's patriotic monologues is an all-too-blatant attempt to comply with Stalinist aesthetics. (Scene 10, in which Kutuzov discusses battle tactics with his generals, could easily be dropped altogether.) Infinitely more gripping is the music given to Natasha, who sings an endless melody of wayward beauty. The ballroom dances and salon tunes of Part I have a glorious lilt and carry with them an undercurrent of emotional unease. In the first few minutes of the opera, all the faded beauty of the Rostov household fills the air. It occurred to me, as Prokofiev's off-kilter waltz themes revolved in the orchestra, that the opera is like Ravel's "La Valse" stretched out on an enormous canvas: here, too, a golden age is spinning fitfully into oblivion. "Valse! Valse! Valse! Mesdames!" shouts the Host of the Ball, over a sinister vamp in the bass. This is Tolstoy to the core: a mirage of splendor, the pistons of history churning in the background.

The Met's "War and Peace" is a truly awesome thing—the most visually compelling opera production that I have seen in New York in many years. A co-venture with the Maryinsky Theatre, in St. Petersburg, it was directed by the filmmaker Andrei Konchalovsky, with sets by George Tsypin, costumes by Tatiana Noginova, and lighting by James Ingalls. The team's strongest work comes in Part II, at precisely the moments when Prokofiev's inspiration flags. The succession of scenes around the burning of Moscow—religious madmen in a sadomasochistic procession, a dreamlike skyline aglow with flame, Napoleon reviewing the chaos on his white steed, the chorus marching forward with torches in their hands—echoes some of the great tours de force of the Russian cinema, such as the sacking of Vladimir Cathedral in Tarkovsky's "Andrei Rublev," a film which Konchalovsky worked on in his youth.

The aristocratic settings in Part I, however, are a shade too precious and fantastic—they don't smack of the real. The vertiginous downward curve of the stage floor gives the ballroom scenes an overwrought surreal quality. We get the point, early and often— the world is changing, the world is changing. But there are magical details throughout, and many of them take on a deeper significance toward the end. Ingalls should have taken a solo bow for the lighting: with the help of Elaine McCarthy's projections, he creates the illusion of ever-changing weather, of storms gathering and of sun breaking through clouds. The entire production is a swirl of meaningful motion in which nothing feels tacked on for effect. Tolstoy's critique of Napoleon comes to life in a single image: the Emperor is last seen rushing through the snow in a motley crowd, his role in the drama reduced to a walk-on part.

Valery Gergiev was the conductor, winning another battle in his worldwide campaign to install Prokofiev in the front rank of opera composers. He brought with him scores of fine Russian singers from the Maryinsky, many of whom were making their Met débuts. The most important was Anna Netrebko, a young lyric soprano with a pearly, gleaming tone, who projected her voice effortlessly into the house. She embodied the role of Natasha so sparklingly that it was impossible to imagine anyone else singing it. Her partner in glamour was Dmitri Hvorostovsky, as Andrei; his silver hair and golden baritone have long been admired, but his acting has taken on new gravitas in recent years. As he staggered out of his deathbed to dance a final waltz with Natasha, I doubt that I was the only one on the brink of tears.

The cast was huge—sixty-eight roles in all—and I can list only some favorites. Gegam Grigorian made good use of his rugged tenor in the role of Pierre Bezukhov; he caught Pierre's nobility and kindness and also his disorientation and rage. Elena Obraztsova personified the old aristocracy in a few room-shaking mezzo tones. Ekaterina Semenchuk sang gorgeously as Natasha's cousin Sonya. Victoria Livengood found an edgy expressiveness in the awful Hélène Bezukhova. Oleg Balashov, a robust-voiced tenor, gave a charming veneer to the equally awful Kuragin. Vladimir Ognovenko commanded the room for a minute or two as the impossible old Prince Bolkonsky. Samuel Ramey, as Kutuzov, sounded underpowered on the wide-open stage, but he exuded a wise old fighter's dignity. Nikolai Gassiev delivered a vibrant sketch of Platon Karatayev, the ultimate Tolstoy peasant. And Vassily Gerello made a powerful caricature out of Napoleon. (Be forewarned: one or two sections of the opera feel as long as this paragraph.)

Gergiev, who made his American début with "War and Peace," in 1991, in San Francisco, showed an unerring grasp of the architecture of the score. Those who think of him as a brutish conductor should listen to his delicate shaping of the lyric scenes, particularly Andrei's death. The Met orchestra played as if it had lived with the music for years. The chorus sang lustily and acted with commitment. Even the extras had an air of dire purpose; there was none of the usual half-hearted milling around.

I did not witness the production's notorious opening-night mishap, in which one of the extras tumbled into the orchestra. If, as the Met administration darkly hinted, this was a bid to cause mischief or attract attention, it succeeded; for a day or two, the episode seemed to get more space in the Times than Enron. A friend suggested that the Met should respond by hiring an overacting warden. On the second night, there were no signs of impending catastrophe, and the only story worth reporting was that the Met had brought about a marvel of opera staging.

Back to Alex Ross: The Rest Is Noise.

Coming Apart

by Alex Ross

The New Yorker, April 1, 2002.

What is wrong with Lincoln Center? The problem goes deeper than the virtuoso bickering over redevelopment which, to judge from reports, fills the corridors of what is called "the world's largest cultural complex." The chief personalities of the place—Beverly Sills, Joseph Volpe, Paul Kellogg, and the rest—make entertaining copy, and it would almost be a pity if the soap opera were to end. But, no matter who is in charge, Lincoln Center will remain Lincoln Center, and that is not entirely a positive thing. A nimbus of corporate blandness hangs over the institution. With the exception of the mighty Met, which still brings forth wonders, the major resident musical organizations—City Opera, the New York Philharmonic, the Chamber Music Society, New York City Ballet—have a faintly spiritless air. They put on good shows, they draw good crowds, but, to quote Bertolt Brecht's libretto for "Mahagonny," something is lacking. It's telling that Great Performers at Lincoln Center has lately created a buzz by staging events outside Lincoln Center. It's also telling that City Opera, buoyed by a fifty-million-dollar donation, may move out of the complex altogether, possibly to a new arts center in the vicinity of the World Trade Center site.

Given that there is now a $l.2-billion renovation plan on the boards, New Yorkers might want to ask how well Lincoln Center has done its job. Robert Moses conceived the complex as a shining city of the arts, taking the place of neighborhoods that he called "dismal and decayed." It did succeed in sprucing up the Upper West Side and placing the companies in a secure cocoon. But Lincoln Center has never been able to foster an ideal cultural populace that delights equally in opera, ballet, and symphony. In my experience, opera people, ballet people, and symphony people seldom overlap comfortably. The lumping together of such distinct art forms has made it harder for each company to define itself crisply in the public eye. Ensconced in the limestone fortress, they have become subspecies of "the performing arts," whose main characteristic, the curious onlooker might decide, is an edifying stuffiness. For whatever reason, a lot of well-educated younger people of my acquaintance do not often make the trip to Broadway and Sixty-sixth Street. I once waited in vain for a friend from the East Village because he was unable to find Lincoln Center.

One great difficulty is the look of the place. Even purists have to admit that what they hear is affected by where they are and what they see. Lincoln Center is an environment with little warmth. You might call it an airport terminal for the performing arts, except that most airport terminals offer better spots to sit and wait. (When I have time to kill in the area, I look for a comfy chair at the Barnes & Noble across the street.) City Opera, the most sprightly of the constituents, is stuck with the most soulless of the spaces; the State Theatre is not so much acoustically bad as acoustically null. The music sags and dies in front of you. Attempts to support the singers with amplification have done little more than give the hollowness a ragged edge. Also, the configuration of the seating—endless rows, no center aisle—stifles communication among the listeners. You cannot move around and talk to other patrons; there is no sense of a shared experience. Instead, you shuffle awkwardly to your seat, sit for the duration, and shuffle out.

Compare the New Jersey Performing Arts Center, in Newark. N.J.P.A.C., to use its grim acronym, is, after Carnegie Hall and Symphony Hall, in Boston, the best orchestral space in the Northeast. With its classic horseshoe shape, glowing dark-wood interior, and warmly resonant acoustic, it exudes the personality of a nineteenth-century room. On a recent visit, I found myself wishing that it could be transported in one piece to Lincoln Center, preferably to occupy a vacant lot left by Avery Fisher Hall. New Yorkers may also feel a pang of envy upon visiting Philadelphia's new Verizon Hall. Like N.J.P.A.C., Verizon (how much uglier can these names get?) was designed by the firm of Artec, which understands the weird science of psychoacoustics. The acoustic itself has problems—the sound is vivid but hazy, suggesting an incredibly good but not quite lifelike stereo system—but the hall seduces the eyes with its mahogany veneer. There is a glorious open-air lobby to beckon the public inside. The most ambitious of the Lincoln Center renovation plans called, similarly, for an enclosure of the entire plaza, designed by Frank Gehry, but this has been voted down. Too bad: the pizzazz of a Gehry design, or any kind of design, might have seeped out onto this stretch of upper Broadway, which gets very sleepy after ten o'clock.

City Opera should jump at the chance to leave this rudderless ship. It has always been in the Met's shadow; there was never a good reason to have the two opera companies side by side. Lincoln Center's plaza is Met-centric, giving visitors a self-important thrill as they stride toward the Met's pompous façade. City Opera needs to angle itself toward the public in a completely different way. Its best bet is to be small and think big—the exact reverse of the prevailing Lincoln Center philosophy.

Since Paul Kellogg took over as general and artistic director, in 1996, City Opera has become markedly more stylish and distinctive. It has done excellently with Baroque opera and tuneful twentieth-century fare. Last season it presented a beautiful, meticulous revival of Korngold's "Die Tote Stadt," an opera that haunts the mind in ways that its twenty-three-year-old composer could never have anticipated. Coming soon is a new version of Handel's "Agrippina"—the sort of freewheeling rewrite of the Baroque that City Opera has managed well in the past. If the company were to move into a considerably smaller theatre—one that contained, say, eighteen hundred seats—it would be able to give this repertory an intimacy that eludes the Met.

Despite the talk of moving downtown, Kellogg's City Opera remains a decidedly uptown institution. It is not the sort of place where a younger audience might go to seek adventure. If City Opera wanted to blaze a new trail, it could radicalize its repertory, delving seriously into contemporary opera. So far, however, the Kellogg regime's most successful contemporary offerings have been of the safe, neo-Romantic variety—Tobias Picker's "Emmeline," the three-composer omnibus "Central Park." Last fall, the company presented "Lilith," by Deborah Drattell, which began with a powerful, mysterious choral scene and then proceeded to move around in circles for a very long time. Next season will bring Jake Heggie's "Dead Man Walking," which, to judge from a new recording of the San Francisco Opera's première production, is a flashy treatment of a gripping subject. In part, City Opera is captive to the torpor of American opera, an art form that has never quite broken free of the nineteen-forties populism of Aaron Copland and seems perpetually lost in that well-travelled prairie. There are other worlds waiting to be explored, and the company's admirable commitment to the American repertory should not limit its field of vision. What about the minimalist classics of Reich, Glass, and Adams? Or such spiky new masterpieces as Thomas Adès's "Powder Her Face" and Osvaldo Golijov's "St. Mark Passion"? Or European conceptual works by HK Gruber and Heiner Goebbels? Why not open dialogues with pop musicians who are incorporating classical elements into their work—the likes of Radiohead, Björk, and Rufus Wainwright?

City Opera also lacks a sharp profile in the standard repertory. Decades ago, the company billed itself as a people's opera, a place where neophytes could get their first taste of "La Bohème." Today, with so many seats in the ninety-dollar range, City Opera can no longer be called a bargain, and the Met, with its wider range of ticket prices and its introduction of high-tech subtitles, has an equal claim on the populist franchise. A new production of "Don Giovanni," directed by Thor Steingraber, looks fatally like a junior version of the austere bombast that has often passed for innovation at the Met. Huge doors going nowhere, window frames hanging in space, a gigantic mirror: it's a cool, spare, Lincoln Center-ish aesthetic, and it swallows up the lusty life of Mozart's masterpiece. A few years ago, at Glimmerglass Opera, Kellogg presented a fresh take on "Don Giovanni" in which the title character was a dirty old invalid, and, whatever the merits of that approach, the audience went out talking. City Opera chose the path of no comment.

A young, gifted cast struggled to find drama in this arid setting. The Don was sung by the Australian baritone Peter Coleman-Wright. He was a lively, confident presence, spitting out recitative at breakneck speed. Amy Burton, one of the company's most accomplished regulars, delivered a warm-toned, richly detailed portrayal of Donna Elvira. Alexandrina Pendatchanska, as Donna Anna, showed a dusky, forceful lyric voice. Kevin Burdette brought high spirits and a booming bass to the role of Masetto. Nathan Berg and Raul Hernandez also sang well. George Manahan, in the pit, gave a strong shape to the music, even as the acoustic defeated him at every turn. In the end, these singers failed to send out any psychic shivers, but they might have had more impact if they had simply been somewhere else. I pictured them in an atmospheric little theatre on a bustling downtown street, where the audience could walk in and be clobbered by the demonic force of Mozart's tale.

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Operapolitik

by Alex Ross

The New Yorker, December 16, 2002.

Only in Berlin would an argument over the future of three opera houses take on the dimensions of a constitutional crisis. Here is how things stand in the first days of December: the Social Democratic Party, which governs Germany with the Greens, supports a plan to unite the Staatsoper, on Unter den Linden, with the Deutsche Oper, in the west. Daniel Barenboim, the Staatsoper's music director, fiercely opposes the idea. The Christian Democratic Union, meanwhile, wants to put not only these two companies under one administration but also a third—the smaller-scale Komische Oper. Thomas Flierl, Berlin's cultural tsar, who belongs to the ex-communist Party for Democratic Socialism, has yet to commit himself one way or another. Berliners have lost all patience with this mess, but visiting Americans may be charmed by the fact that politicians here take an interest in opera at all. I realized that my sojourn in Berlin had taken me into uncharted waters when, during an intermission one evening, Professor Christoph Stölzl, the chief of the Berlin C.D.U., took me aside to talk about Arnold Schoenberg. Any right-minded American politician would sooner be photographed dangling a baby over a hotel balcony—as Michael Jackson was, in a startling contribution to the city's musical politics—than be caught dead at the opera.

In the past few months, Berlin's opera houses have maintained their place in the limelight by presenting an array of unusually outré productions. The Komische Oper led with a beery, working-class version of "The Bartered Bride," which the critic Manuel Brug described as "Schmettana instead of Smetana." The Deutsche Oper responded with a "Werther" that had Goethe's star-crossed lovers meeting in a laundromat—a mise en scène so realistic that clothes were seen tumbling in the windows of the dryers. ("Others throw bombs, I direct opera," Sebastian Baumgarten, the gifted but erratic young director, proclaimed.) The Staatsoper weighed in with a heavily congested production of Shostakovich's "The Nose," conceived by the painter Jörg Immendorff. The orchestra wore space-alien bodysuits, while singers and chorus members impersonated major players in Middle Eastern politics, from Saddam Hussein to Kofi Annan. We were even treated to a singing Osama bin Laden. The staging seemed designed to provoke a scandal, and, in anticipation of rotten tomatoes, Immendorff told Der Spiegel that he would go to the première dressed in "washable fabrics." But the scandal of "The Nose" was that there was no scandal; the creative team received a unanimous round of tepid applause. There was no need for Immendorff to drop by the Deutsche Oper to get his laundry done.

Does a city really need three opera houses? Probably not, but Berlin has long taken pride in its embarrassment of operatic riches. If one house closes, the city will end up with the same eminently sensible—and thus eminently predictable—arrangement that applies in New York, Paris, and London. There will be the "big" house, like the Met or Covent Garden, presenting de-luxe productions with international stars; and there will be the "alternative" house, like New York City Opera or English National Opera, staking out slightly more adventurous repertory. With three companies, you never quite know what you're going to get: perhaps a flamboyant diva performance set against a strict Brechtian concept; perhaps a cast of unknowns trapped in an avant-garde nightmare. Since all three houses are strapped for money, you tend to see fewer international stars, more hungry young singers, and, even on the lunatic fringe, better nights of theatre.

The "opera misery," as one critic has dubbed the situation, honors a long local tradition of byzantine cultural-political imbroglios. Many of the same battles were fought in the nineteen-twenties, when the Staatsoper faced competition from two new entities—the Städtische Oper, on the site of the present Deutsche Oper, and the Kroll Oper, on the Platz der Republik. Suddenly, the city had three companies of international reputation, and though it lacked the capital to keep all three going, a brief golden age unfolded. At the Städtische, Bruno Walter electrified the standard repertory with first-rate casts. At the Kroll, Otto Klemperer led legendary avant-garde productions and premières of contemporary works. And, at the Staatsoper, Erich Kleiber presented, among other sensations, the world première of Berg's "Wozzeck." Meanwhile, at the Theater am Schiffbauerdamm, Kurt Weill unleashed the revolution of "The Threepenny Opera." If I could travel to any time and place in the musical past, it would be to the Berlin of 1928.

Several productions in Berlin this season harked back to the twenties, when, all over Europe, it seemed as though the nineteenth-century art of opera were being remade in a twentieth-century image. "The Nose," a razor-sharp dramatization of Gogol's tale of a nose with a mind of its own, emanated from Bolshevik Russia, where, for an illusory moment, radical art and totalitarian politics went hand in hand. Alexander Zemlinsky's bewitching one-act opera "The Dwarf," which played at the Komische Oper, alongside a companion piece, "A Florentine Tragedy," had its première in 1922, under Klemperer's direction. Finally, at the Deutsche Oper there was Janácek's "Jenu°fa," a 1904 masterwork that found international renown in the twenties. Erich Kleiber's unveiling of the opera in 1924 may have marked the moment when an international audience first came to terms with the overpowering beauty of Janácek's art. The Deutsche Oper, compensating for a series of mishaps that led the magazine Opernwelt to call the house "Vexation of the Year," imported Nikolaus Lehnhoff's magnificent Glyndebourne production of "Jenu°fa," and the sixty-something Anja Silja made a triumphant Berlin return as the benighted, infanticidal Kostelnicka.

Musical Berlin between the wars generates such nostalgia because it heralded a brilliant future that Hitler made sure would never come to pass—one in which the Central European tradition would embrace the snap and tang of twentieth-century life. In the great operas of the twenties, telephones rang, jazz combos played, gangsters wined and dined, serial killers awaited their next victim. This was a worldly modernism—Joyce's, not Schoenberg's. In "The Nose," conventions of character and place disintegrate under the acidic pressure of Shostakovich's youthful style. In "The Dwarf," a heartbreaking fairy tale somehow becomes aware that it is merely a tale, and the leitmotif of the dwarf's longing for beauty—a smattering of notes over three disjointed minor chords—has the tone of a grandmother reading aloud from the books of her childhood. And, in "Jenu°fa," folkish scenes erupt in extreme neurosis and unspeakable violence, with the title character left clinging to her true love amid the ruins. Jiri Kout drew playing of high passion from the Deutsche Oper orchestra: the glorious closing melody surged around the ears like an ever-cresting wave.

Those who are rushing to downsize Berlin's opera system are unlikely to be swayed by the historical argument that when an opera house closes in Berlin nothing good seems to follow. In 1931, the Kroll Oper went under, ostensibly because the Prussian state government had no more money. Its last production, prophetically, was Janácek's "From the House of the Dead." Behind the scenes, right-wing elements had agitated for Klemperer's removal. In 1933, shortly after the Nazis took power, the Reichstag burned, and the new Reich Chancellor, who had longed to direct opera in his youth, moved the Parliament to the Kroll. From that stage, he delivered several of his most horrific speeches, including the announcement of the annihilation of the Jews. For the sake of world peace, it seems wiser to give budding opera directors every possible opportunity to fulfill their ambitions, so that they need not seek out a less suitable vocation.

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Messiaen's St. Francis

by Alex Ross

The New Yorker, October 28, 2002.

The artist who strives to create a work of everlasting genius faces many obstacles these days, not least a lack of popular demand. In the end, however, nothing stands in the way of immortality but a lack of mad ambition. Olivier Messiaen's "St. Francis of Assisi," the grandest grand opera since Wagner's "Parsifal," came into being in 1983, during the first Reagan Administration, when Men at Work topped the pop charts. Somehow, it has already acquired a historical aura, as if it were an antiquity whose head and paws are only now emerging from the sand. "St. Francis" may have to wait a century or two before it finds its proper public, but a few brave opera houses are venturing to stage it, and the history books should reward them. The heroic new production at the San Francisco Opera will probably be remembered long after the entire current season at the Met is forgotten.

"St. Francis" is not easy listening. It is five hours long, devoutly Catholic in content, and by turns dissonant, jubilant, voluptuous, and austere. There are eight tableaux, each recording a stage in the life of the saint. Francis kisses a leper, speaks to the birds, receives the stigmata, dies in a state of suffering joy. The libretto, which Messiaen wrote himself, would have posed no problems for an audience of fourteenth-century Loire villagers. The music is something else again: a twentieth-century echo chamber in which prosaic turns of phrase acquire shattering overtones. The composer once remarked that he saw the Resurrection as an atomic explosion; likewise, his Francis has to undergo a death that sounds like the apocalypse. Sitting through the opera is at times a physical challenge—even Wagner knew better than to write a two-hour second act—yet the experience leaves one feeling strangely liberated. It harks back to one of those archaic Christian liturgies in which spells of boredom give way to precisely staged epiphanies—as when, in the Greek Orthodox Easter service, the church goes dark and the light of a single candle remains.

Messiaen's great epiphany occurs in the fifth tableau, in which Francis meets a Musician Angel on the road. The episode is taken from Franciscan hagiography, according to which the friar once fainted after hearing an angel play a viol. He told his brethren, "If the Angel had played one more note—if, after down-bowing, it had made an up-bow—from unbearable sweetness my soul would have left my body." In Messiaen's version, the Angel prefaces his concert with lines borrowed from St. Thomas Aquinas: "God dazzles us by an excess of truth. Music carries us to God in default of truth." The strings play a soft, unceasing C-major chord; over it, three ondes martenot—antique electronic instruments with eerie, piercing voices—unwind a thread of melody that touches on ten of the twelve chromatic notes. As you listen, your ears are teased by two textures of sound: warm strings spreading out from the center; electronic tones pinging everywhere. At the same time, you try to reconcile the stasis of the chord and the drift of the theme. These tensions are not resolved; instead, they mark out an almost visible space, in which you may well catch a glimpse of whatever it is you consider divine. The San Francisco staging heightened the moment by creating one of the most striking tableaux in recent memory: Willard White, as Francis, lying on the ground, his body racked in ecstasy; Laura Aikin, as the Angel, dancing slowly in midair; and, at the end, ciphers from a medieval parchment materializing on a scrim. Someone behind me whispered, "My God."

***

The angel responsible for this quasi-miraculous evening is Pamela Rosenberg, the new general director of the San Francisco Opera. A veteran of the lively, sometimes demented European opera scene, Rosenberg wants to confront a much more conservative American public with something other than the usual picture-postcard Puccini. San Francisco operagoers, an enclave of old money in a city of anarchists, have never been ones to embrace experimentation; until the nineteen-nineties, the house had presented a grand total of two world premières. But at the performance I attended (the second of six) the black-tie crowd seemed game for the challenge. Whether because of the intensity of the music or the familiarity of the subject (the city's patron saint had come home), San Franciscans received the first stage of Rosenberg's revolution warmly.

Messiaen had narrow ideas about how his opera should be staged. He wanted a monastery, a forest, and an angel in the style of Fra Angelico. He was disturbed by advance descriptions of Peter Sellars's Salzburg production, which opened just after his death, in 1992, and probably would have hated the liberties taken by Nicolas Brieger, the director in San Francisco. Messiaen loved bright colors and favored loud shirts; this production went in for tony black and gray. A few of Brieger's touches did come off as willfully outré; the decision to dress the chorus in trenchcoats and fedoras, for example, lent a curious film-noir flavor to the final scene of death and resurrection. The production notes say that these costumes represent the worldliness that Francis transcends. But isn't the final chorus supposed to be throwing open the gates of Heaven? Evidently, a lot of Bogart impersonators will be standing around when the saints go marching in.

Costuming oddities aside, this "St. Francis" was done splendidly, with verve and devotion, and even a little wit. The stage was alive with meaning. Francis walked a luminous curving path, and the path often moved under his feet, rotating back and forth or rising into the air. Sudden bursts of light relieved the Germanic gloom. Willard White, a singer who is never as widely praised as he should be, presented a rock-steady, rich-voiced alternative to the famous Francis of José Van Dam—an earthier, more rugged saint. Aikin was both pure and sensuous; you couldn't take your eyes off her, especially when she was wearing blue sunglasses.Chris Merritt brought power and pathos to the role of the Leper. Donald Runnicles, the conductor, found a near-ideal balance between the score's violence and beauty.

Is Messiaen the new Mahler, the prophet for our time? In Berlin, where I am staying for the fall, he has been almost as ubiquitous as Beethoven. Simon Rattle placed the composer's "Three Small Liturgies" on one of his first Berlin Philharmonic programs; Kent Nagano, the conductor of the Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester, led "The Transfiguration of Our Lord Jesus Christ." There was also an adventurous but notably unsuccessful production of "St. Francis" at the Deutsche Oper, directed by the architect Daniel Libeskind. The sets, an array of rotating lettered cubes, had a grim beauty, but they found no rapport with the joyous spirit of the opera. Here, too, were many men in coats, scurrying around like pigeons in Trafalgar Square. When I found myself thinking of a Monty Python skit, the spell was broken.

Far more satisfying was Nagano's performance of "Transfiguration," a work that makes gruelling demands on a vast array of musicians and singers. Like "St. Francis," it is a synthesis of all the composer's styles, from riots of birdsong to episodes of celestial jazz, from ferocious dissonance to blazing tonality. Nagano, a conductor who becomes more masterly with each year, shaped this seeming chaos into perfectly rolling Scriptural paragraphs, every climax prepared by a pregnant silence. The Deutsches SymphonieOrchester played with astonishing virtuosity, losing little in comparison to Rattle's Philharmonic. The Rundfunk Chorus sang fiendishly complex sonorities as polished blocks. Chord by chord, the performers built another edifice of Messiaenic sound—a spectral cathedral that offered one or two glimpses of perfect joy, then melted into the night.

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Consolations: Arvo Pärt

by Alex Ross

The New Yorker, December 2, 2002.

A few years ago, a man who faced a terminal diagnosis of cancer asked a friend to give him some compact disks so that he could have a little music to help him get through the night. Among the recordings that the friend sent was "Tabula Rasa," on the ECM label, which contained three works by the Estonian composer Arvo Pärt. A day or two later, the man called to thank his friend for the disks, and, especially, for the Pärt. In the last weeks of his life, he listened to practically nothing else.

Several people have told me essentially this same story about the still, sad music of Pärt—how it became, for them or for others, a vehicle of solace. One or two such anecdotes seem sentimental; a series of them begins to suggest a slightly uncanny phenomenon. Patrick Giles, in an article for Salon, reported that when he worked as a volunteer for an AIDS organization, in the nineteen-eighties, he played "Tabula Rasa" for those facing the final onslaught of the disease, and they developed a peculiar, almost desperate attachment to it. Once, when Giles was away, the mother of one of the dying men called with an anxious query. "He keeps asking for 'angel music,' " she said. "What the hell is that?" The music in question was the second movement of "Tabula Rasa," in which a rustling arpeggio on a prepared piano leads into glacial chords of D minor.

According to the unsentimental evidence of record sales, Pärt's music reaches far beyond the conspiracy of connoisseurs who support most new classical music. He is a composer who speaks in hauntingly clear, familiar tones, yet he does not duplicate the music of the past. He has put his finger on something that is almost impossible to put into words—something to do with the power of music to obliterate the rigidities of space and time. One after the other, his chords silence the noise of the self, binding the mind to an eternal present. For this reason, anecdotes of listeners' experiences, whether extreme or mundane, may give a better account of the music than any analysis of its inner workings. For me, "Tabula Rasa" will always be a snowy New England afternoon in 1989, during which there was nothing in the world but this music and that snow.

* * *

Earlier this month, a festival called Music Around presented twenty-two of Pärt's works in various Scandinavian cities. The composer travelled from his home in Berlin to observe the event, settling into a hotel in Copenhagen. I talked to him there, in a smattering of English and German, at the hotel's restaurant.

Pärt is a gaunt man with a pale, gentle face and mournfully powerful eyes. His bald pate is balanced by a tightly curled beard of a few inches' length. He has been described as "monkish" so often that a German musicologist has undertaken a deconstruction of the term, but the word still springs to mind unbidden: he could pose for an icon of St. John Chrysostom, or another of the literary saints. Yet, when his large eyes fix on you, he becomes more worldly and formidable; his stare seems to ask, "Are you serious?" At times, he is unexpectedly impish, even antic. He needs few words to make himself understood, using a repertory of quasi-operatic gestures and clownish faces.

"My life is a river, and I am a boat being borne along the current," he told me. "I cannot relate to my life as a story, as a sequence of events, because I cannot get off the boat in order to see where I am. I do not see myself as moving forward or going backward." I asked him whether he believed in musical progress, in the idea of an avant-garde. He vigorously shook his head. "I do not know what this word 'progress' means, at least in the area of art. Progress in science can certainly be measured and described. But to talk about a particular style or a particular work as progressive or regressive is arbitrary, totally misleading. It reminds me a little of Brueghel's painting of the blind leading the blind. One man is tumbling down, his staff held out like a spear or sword in front of him, and the others are following behind him. They are all making progress, and they are all falling down. The story is found in the Bible. How many painters this word 'progress' has made blind! How many composers this word has made deaf! And they carried behind them generations!" He looked stricken for a moment, as if he had just seen a horror out of Bosch.

Pärt was born in 1935, in a small town in the Estonian countryside. According to Paul Hillier's study of the composer, he grew up playing an ancient grand piano that lacked a middle register, so that he made music only at extremes of high and low. He studied composition in the national conservatory, in Tallinn. He moved steadily through all the styles that were available to him, from neoclassicism to socialism and on to Western avant-garde techniques of serialism and chance. He even dipped into John Cage-ish happenings, once participating in a concert at which a violin somehow caught on fire.

Finally, in 1976, he turned inward, discovering a new, radically simplified language. "Tabula Rasa" was one of the first products of this style, which came to be called "tintinnabuli," after the Latin word for bell. In its basic form, it involves the interweaving of two voices, one of which moves by melodic steps while the other rotates through the pitches of a major or a minor chord. The method has something in common with the early minimalist pieces of Steve Reich, but the resemblance is better explained by the fact that both composers drew on the same ancient sources: polyphonic composers of the late medieval and early Renaissance periods.

The tintinnabuli works were also informed by an intense religiosity, flowing from Pärt's embrace of Russian Orthodoxy. This meditative strain contributed to his subsequent popularity in the nineteen-nineties, when records of Gregorian chant mysteriously showed up on the pop charts. But there was nothing fashionable about Pärt's choice of style back in the Estonian Soviet Socialist Republic. The composer had already established himself as something of a maverick; his 1968 work "Credo," in which a prayerful choral arrangement of Bach's Prelude in C Major sounds defiantly in the middle of musical chaos, drew official censure. By the late seventies, as Pärt began to acquire international fame, he found that he was not permitted to travel freely abroad, and that his works were being taken off the market. In 1979, at a meeting of the Estonian Composers' Union, Pärt denounced official policy while wearing a longhaired wig. The following year, he was able to obtain an exit visa to Israel—his wife, Nora, is Jewish. Alfred Schnittke, who had played the prepared piano in the first Western performances of "Tabula Rasa," arranged for the Pärts to stay in Vienna, and they ended up settling in Berlin.

Pärt said of his early, "wild" years, "I was writing music in which there were many notes thrown down on the page like so." He made a scattering gesture with his hands. "Notes were being strewn about like coins or jewels. I was not guarding these notes as treasures. I was not holding them, one after another, in my hands. Every note is decisive, every note is telling." Yet, for all his love of spare, repetitive textures, he does not treasure the minimalist label that has been attached to him. "Two composers, Philip Glass and Steve Reich, changed the world at that time," he said. "I have great respect for them. Still, I am not a minimalist. I understand that music critics will always find categories for my works and put them away in suitable drawers, but to call me a 'holy minimalist' sounds a bit ridiculous." He cupped his ear and listened to the hollow air.

***

As Pärt and I talked, a pan-flute arrangement of the "Titanic" soundtrack was playing on the restaurant's loudspeakers. It played over and over, in an endless loop. Although Pärt asked the waitress to turn it down, it refused to go away. The juxtaposition was ironic, because this composer has sometimes been accused of writing background music—a higher Muzak for sensitive souls. His works have been used on movie soundtracks and in other suspect environments. The false association with New Age aesthetics has perhaps inadvertently been aided by the exquisite care that ECM takes in recording him. Since the mid-eighties, Manfred Eicher, ECM's longtime director and chief producer, has given Pärt's music a distinctive ambience, a sonic halo. Even the packaging of the disks, all crisp lines and monochromatic fields, is a beautiful exemplar of minimalist style.

Recordings tell only half the story, however. They remain two-dimensional experiences, whereas Pärt is intensely concerned with the positioning of music in space. It was actively stunning to hear his works in the airy, chilly churches of Copenhagen, where the music seemed to crystallize out of the air and become an organic, multivalent thing. The Estonian Philharmonic Chamber Choir, under Tõnu Kaljuste, and the Latvian Radio Choir, under Kaspars Putnins, gave the music enormous immediacy: the voices buzzed against each other, then soared as one. Most commentators have overlooked the dramatic tension inherent in Pärt's work—the way an apparent state of equilibrium is undermined by one or two serpentine notes, or the way small harmonic shifts can turn into seismic shocks. When, in the choral work "Beatitudes," an intricately pivoting chain of modulations leads through twenty of the twenty-four major and minor chords, the effect is of a huge vista opening up from a narrow space. As happens so often, Pärt has found a precise musical image to explicate his chosen text: "Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of Heaven."

In recent years, Pärt has stretched his tintinnabulist idiom in order to accommodate a freer harmonic rhythm. He has set Latin, German, English, Spanish, and Old Slavonic texts, recalibrating his language to fit the demands of each. "Kanon Pokajanen," an eighty-minute-long setting of the Orthodox canon of repentance, mixes the rawness of folk ritual with the fastidiousness of theology. The English works, such as "Beatitudes" and "Litany," echo the soaring forms of Anglican hymns. "Como Cierva Sedienta," a Spanish-language setting of Psalms 42 and 43, has a strikingly vibrant, almost Fauvist orchestration and a richly ornamented vocal line; it is very nearly opulent. This recent work appears on ECM's latest Pärt disk, "Orient & Occident," which contains other intimations of new directions. The title piece, an elegy for strings, echoes the feverish intimacy of Benjamin Britten, whom Pärt reveres, while also forming unexpected links with Indian string writing and Arabic cantillation.

The composer acknowledged his latest tendencies with a guilty smile. "Yes," he said. "I got a little crazy, didn't I?" He mimed a gesture that suggested a flamenco dancer throwing tennis balls. The wild Pärt of the Estonian years, who mocked the authorities and played the holy fool, is still lurking below the surface. The austerity of his present style may really serve to hold the other self in check; one wonders how much turbulence lies deep within these chapels of sound, which come close to Bachian perfection. Often, in the spiritual sphere, faith hovers at the brink of disorder and sorrow.

***

At the end of our talk, I asked Pärt whether he felt lonely, both as a religious artist in a secular Western culture and as a classical composer in the kingdom of pop. He paused for a while, and the pan flutes filled the silence. "If loneliness brings bitterness and anger," he finally said, "then, I think, loneliness is a disease. We composers cannot brood, we cannot cultivate loneliness. Schubert, for example, never heard his symphonies in performance—they got no interest from publishers. But they are full of life. And his songs are nearer to Heaven than most music written for the church. He had the talent of love and the talent of compassion. Of course he was lonely, but his suffering gave out sweet nectar.

"We cannot know all the good people in the world," he went on. "Not many of the good people are composers. Twenty years ago, my friend Valentin Silvestrov, one of the greatest composers of our time, said that nowadays great music isn't made in concert palaces. Instead, it is created in lofts, basements, and garages. Here you are, with your feet in lukewarm water, and the pan flutes are making noise—"

He stopped, frustrated at the inability of either English or German to bring his image to life. He took a pen out of his pocket and put it in front of me, as if that would explain everything. "Schubert's pen," he said, "was fifty per cent ink, fifty per cent tears."

More on Arvo Pärt recordings.

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Shall We Rock?

by Alex Ross

The New Yorker, June 30, 2003

In the nineteen-twenties, various composers, not a few of them French, set out to write music inspired by jazz. The idea was that jazz would serve as raw material for the ultra-sophisticated imagination of the classical flâneur. It did not occur to these brave explorers of the musical wilderness that jazz was a new art form that had no need to be elevated by the European mind. Their conception of African-American music was opaque at best, racist at worst. “These entertainments are not art,” Jean Cocteau wrote in an influential manifesto. “They excite like machines, animals, landscapes, danger.” A scant two years later, Cocteau was declaring that jazz was over. In the end, all products of this sensibility, Stravinsky’s jazz pieces included, pale next to the three-minute masterpieces of Armstrong and Ellington.

The phenomenon of le jazz serves as an object lesson for composers who wish to adorn their works with the trappings of pop. It came to mind during the annual Bang on a Can festival, at Symphony Space. Bang on a Can is a loose association of self-consciously edgy composers and performers whose stated aim is to write music “too funky for the academy and too structured for the club scene.” They speak of their formative years this way: “We had the simplicity, energy and drive of pop music in our ears—we’d heard it from the cradle. But we also had the idea from our classical music training that composing was exalted.” This too-neat division of labor—funky fun on one side, serious structure on the other—threatens to repeat the mistake of Paris in the twenties. It undersells both the wildness of composition and the wiliness of pop. Try telling James Brown that his music isn’t structured.

If Bang on a Can’s slogans show a trace of high-mindedness, its programs are generally free of it. The two-day festival—an evening concert followed by a daylong marathon—offered music that could variously be called rock or classical or world music or none of the above. There were electric-guitar noisescapes by Thurston Moore, of Sonic Youth, and an ambient set by the downtown sound artist DJ Spooky. Steve Reich bestowed his impeccable coolness. The defining moment—the biggest bang—came when James Tenney rigged fifteen gongs around the hall and had them reverberate from silence to noise and back again. The climax was as loud as any unamplified sound I’ve ever heard, and it did wonderfully strange things to the brain.

The minimalists were the first generation of pop-savvy composers. When Steve Reich wrote stripped-down process pieces like “It’s Gonna Rain” and “Four Organs,” he was listening to Miles Davis, Bob Dylan, and Junior Walker, all of whom played powerfully within the frame of one or two chords (“So What,” “Subterranean Homesick Blues,” “Shotgun”). But whenever Reich discusses the nonclassical sources of his music he adds a caveat. He has written that a composer needs to study the structure of, say, West African rhythm instead of simply imitating the surface. Otherwise, he says, it’s just a case of “the old exoticism trip.” In a classic Reich piece such as “Piano Phase”—given an electrifying, video-enhanced performance by David Cossin at Bang on a Can—you can perceive the influence of modal jazz or Motown bass lines more than you can hear them. This implacably original sound influenced much pop music in turn, and the composer eventually found himself with the unlikely title of “Father of DJ Culture.” Various d.j.s, Spooky included, have honored him with remixes of his work.

Julia Wolfe, Michael Gordon, and David Lang, the founders of Bang on a Can, met while studying composition at Yale. They staged their first marathon concert in 1987, breaking free of the science-fair dullness of new-music concerts of the day. The roster of performers included an amplified ensemble called the Michael Gordon Philharmonic, which was similar in its makeup to Bang on a Can’s current ensemble, the All-Stars. That group—Cossin on percussion, Robert Black on bass, Lisa Moore at the piano, Mark Stewart on electric guitar, Wendy Sutter playing cello, and Evan Ziporyn playing clarinet—can take on almost anything, from atonality to minimalism and on to a decent replica of Sonic Youth’s art of noise.

The atmosphere of Bang on a Can concerts—there will be more of them at mass moca, in the Berkshires, in July—is casual, unpretentious, convivial. No one sneers or stares if you wear jeans and a T-shirt. The crowd is encouraged to wander in and out, mill around, chat unobtrusively, and shout “Yow!” if something lively happens. This is how audiences behaved back in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, before codes of concert etiquette evolved. People who complain that Bang on a Can’s informality is a marketing ploy may have it back to front: perhaps the dress-up ritual is the artificial construct, the one that values fashion over music. In any case, Bang on a Can is—God forbid—fun.

Wolfe, Gordon, and Lang have developed a kind of house style, which is shared to a greater or lesser degree by colleagues such as Eve Beglarian, Annie Gosfield, Mikel Rouse, Lois Vierk, and the multitasking Ziporyn. Although the minimalist influence is obvious, this music is never as hypnotically spacious as Reich’s “Music for Eighteen Musicians”; instead, it roots around in the grimiest and grittiest sonorities that classical instruments can produce. You hear a lot of irregularly driving beats and syncopations, rhythms that expand and contract and stop on a dime, much thumping of percussion and squawking of clarinets. “There’s a seedy undertow to everything I do,” the young Irish composer Donnacha Dennehy said.

With contemporary music adrift in stylistic confusion, it is refreshing to have a group of composers working in tandem toward common goals. That said, a few hours of Bang on a Can can approximate the feeling of racing down Canal Street in a cab with bad suspension. Any piece that begins quietly is guaranteed to end in a pounding climax. At high volumes, the instruments tend to become a blurry shriek in the loudspeakers. (Rock bands generally get a crisper sound from their guitars and amps, which are made for each other.) One piece after another seems to pump its arms in the air and shout, “Classical music kicks ass!” At some point, the urge to confound expectations becomes self-defeating. If a composition tries too hard to sound like rock, it sounds only like a lame, tame version of the real thing.

The occasional quiet spells came as a relief. Ziporyn’s “Shadow Bang,” a theatre piece created in collaboration with the Balinese shadow-puppet master I Wayan Wija, began with a Bang on a Can-y overture full of spasmodic syncopations and drum thwacks, but the middle sections, particularly the dreamlike underwater episode, moved into a world of shimmering, slowly shifting chords. Michael Gordon and David Lang have recently gone in a similar ambient direction. Large sections of Gordon’s avant-garde film soundtrack “Decasia,” issued last year on the label Cantaloupe Music, echo the cinematic grandeur of John Adams. Lang’s most recent CD, “Child,” recalls Arvo Pärt’s stillness and Brian Eno’s otherworldliness. Even here, though, wispy figures can become as unrelenting as heavy beats. Compare the classic pieces of Reich, in which slight changes become cosmic transformations, and something as basic as a bass line going down a half-step can send chills up the spine.

In the realm of radiant noise, none can outdo Thurston Moore. A lanky, shaggy-haired, eternally high-schoolish figure, he has been a mainstay of Sonic Youth since 1981, and before that he played in the minimalist electric-guitar orchestras of Glenn Branca. At Bang on a Can, he presented two conceptual works, “Stroking Piece #1” and “Pelvic Noise.” The first of these re-created, with the help of the All-Stars, the hazy melancholia of Sonic Youth classics like “Schizophrenia.” In the second, an homage to the Fluxus movement, he was joined by his wife, the bass player Kim Gordon. The two slowly walked toward each other from opposite ends of the stage, their amps cranked up to such an extreme that the tiniest movement set off caterwauling vibrations. Eventually, the couple met and embraced, as did the guitars. The piece managed to be both touching and terrifying—touching because it was a kind of lovers’ ritual, and terrifying because the noise approached potentially ear-wrecking levels as the bodies joined.

DJ Spooky, by contrast, was the picture of digital cool. His real name is Paul D. Miller, and he is also known as That Subliminal Kid, the Ontological Assassin, and the Semiological Terrorist. As versed in the classical avant-garde as he is in d.j. culture, he uses turntables and laptops to create eclectic collages of sound, threading them together with silken dance beats. He is at work on an audiovisual deconstruction of “Birth of a Nation,” part of which appeared at Symphony Space. Daniel Bernard Roumain added cadenzas on electric violin, dismantling “My Country ’Tis of Thee” in Hendrix style. In comparison with the d.j.’s other work, this set was a little too studiously spare, as if something had dropped out of the mix. You wished that the Bang on a Can All-Stars could have joined in, confirming the obvious relationship between Spooky’s twenty-first-century aesthetic and the older mission espoused by John Cage—to “make available for musical purposes any and all sounds that can be heard.”

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Last Thoughts

by Alex Ross

The New Yorker, June 9, 2003

"The Death of Franz Liszt,” a new book by Alan Walker, belongs to the curious subgenre of books about the deaths of composers. In truth, I know of only two others, but each is a macabre little classic. One is Alexander Poznansky’s sober-minded “Tchaikovsky’s Last Days,” which shows that the composer of the “Pathétique” did not commit suicide at the behest of a homophobic cabal of law-school alumni, as some have claimed, but died horribly of cholera, as his doctors said he did. The other is Hans Moldenhauer’s melodramatic “The Death of Anton Webern,” which describes the accidental killing of the most esoteric of twelve-tone composers. It happened in 1945, during the American occupation of western Austria. Webern had stepped outside to enjoy a cigar and was on his way in when he collided with a jumpy G.I., who summarily shot him. The soldier later drank himself to death. The ultimate blame, Moldenhauer says, lies with “strange and inscrutable fate.”

Liszt’s death was neither mysterious nor violent. He died of a heart attack at the fairly ripe old age of seventy-four. What makes the story of his final illness gripping—inscrutably fateful, even—is that it unfolded against the gothic backdrop of Bayreuth, where his comrade, son-in-law, and sometime nemesis Richard Wagner had forged the “Ring.” Wagner died in Venice, in 1883, and was buried in the garden of his Bayreuth home. Liszt died three years later, in the house across the street. It was, Walker suggests, not the place where he would have preferred to breathe his last. Liszt’s friendship with Wagner had always been a loaded and lopsided one. “To Bayreuth I am not a composer but a publicity agent,” Liszt once complained. He watched as passages of his own scores magically reappeared in “Tristan” and “Parsifal.” He brooded over the aloofness of his daughter Cosima, who, after an internationally shocking adulterous interlude, became Wagner’s wife, protector, and alter ego. Still, he venerated Wagner, even at the risk of putting his own staggeringly original music in the shade.

Liszt in his declining years was attended round the clock by Lina Schmalhausen, a fanatical and probably infatuated pupil. Her meticulous record of Liszt’s last ten days constitutes the main part of Walker’s book. Cosima had asked her father to attend the Bayreuth Festival of 1886 on the ground that it needed his support. He arrived suffering from pneumonia, but Cosima’s doctor somehow missed the seriousness of his condition. He dragged himself to “Parsifal” and “Tristan,” suppressing a cough throughout. He repeatedly expressed annoyance that he was falling sick in Bayreuth, of all places—“right under the noses of those people,” he said. Cosima put in appearances at his bedside but was more concerned with overseeing the festival. Schmalhausen had been barred from the premises, but she managed to observe the Master on his deathbed while hiding behind bushes in the garden. Although Cosima insisted that her father’s dying word was “Tristan,” the last thing that Lina heard him say was “Please continue sleeping.”

I read the grotesque tale of Liszt’s death—which ends with a botched embalming and a dispute over ownership of the corpse—on the way to Cincinnati, where the city’s long-running May Festival was presenting the world première of Liszt’s final, unfinished composition: the oratorio “Saint Stanislaus.” The score was put together by the musicologist Paul Munson, who located in the Liszt archive in Weimar about an hour’s worth of more or less finished music, plus an aria that he orchestrated himself. He sent the score to James Conlon, a conductor with a sharp ear for overlooked works, who placed it on the program of the May Festival.

“Saint Stanislaus,” which Liszt began composing in 1874, is a thrillingly strange piece that sways between the mundane and the arcane, as the composer’s later music often does. What happened to this artist in old age is one of the enduring mysteries of musical history: the former showman of the European salons rocketed off into regions that no other nineteenth-century composer, not even Wagner, came near. The journey had much to do with Liszt’s increasing immersion in the rites of the Roman Catholic Church, in which he had taken four of the seven holy orders by 1865 (including Exorcist). He determined to revive archaic modes of plainchant and Renaissance polyphony, and imposed upon them experiments in alternative scales and unconventional harmony. The result is a sound that is unsettling even to modern ears.

Liszt was able to finish the first and last scenes of a projected four-part epic. “De Profundis,” in the fourth scene, exemplifies his late style. This section of the score was published shortly after the composer’s death, but few people have ever heard it. The organ begins with a slow-motion melody that is defined by jagged intervals of the major seventh and the tritone. After two fearsome dissonant chords, the chorus chants “De profundis” on a single note, and a solo baritone (Donnie Ray Albert, making the most of a punishingly difficult part) takes up another meandering, quasi-atonal line. The entire sequence is static, repetitive, ritualistic. It sounds less like Schoenberg, whom Liszt is often said to have anticipated, than like Messiaen, whose harmony was also premised on the mixing of modes.

Just as shocking, in a different way, is the music that comes after—“Salve Polonia,” a festive choral movement on Polish national themes. Given that Stanislaus is Poland’s national hero, the patriotic ending makes sense, but the contrast is so severe as to be surreal. The May Festival chorus sang magnificently, with high passion and true intonation; the Cincinnati Symphony, under Conlon, provided a galvanic accompaniment. Still, they could not save the music from a certain pompous anonymity. There are many other striking passages in the “Stanislaus” score—beautifully austere Renaissance-style writing in the first scene, for example—but the over-all effect is bewildering. It is as if the composer were being torn by opposing forces in his personality—the desire to play to the masses and the urge to turn his back on them.

Liszt wrote some of “Saint Stanislaus” while staying with Wagner in Venice, in late 1882. Wagner had only a few months to live, but he was still in command of all his faculties, not to mention his cruelties. He told Cosima that her father’s newest music, which he probably heard floating through the walls of the Palazzo Vendramin, was a symptom of “budding insanity.” More perceptive was an earlier comment that Liszt’s dissonances seemed to display a certain self-disgust, as if the composer were compensating for his youthful excesses. There is something to this. Many observers were suspicious of the suddenness with which the debonair superstar of the Romantic piano—the epicenter of the phenomenon that Heinrich Heine dubbed “Lisztomania”—made himself over as the black-clad Abbé Liszt.

But he was no charlatan. Even in his decadent, dandyish days, he had worked at his faith, and in old age he became that rare Christian who practices to the hilt the principle of loving one’s neighbor as oneself. He was generous beyond the bounds of what seemed credible. Most of the century’s major composers profited from his enthusiasm—even those who denounced him. He gave lessons to hundreds of pianists and never charged money. He sent large amounts to total strangers who importuned him in the mail. When staying in hotels, he often let his manservant have the more luxurious room. His spirituality, in other words, took the form of concrete action. Here was the root of his difference with Wagner, who was self-absorbed on a Pharaonic scale, and whose idea of religion came dangerously close to self-deification.

All the same, “Parsifal” succeeds in becoming the spiritually radiant work that “Saint Stanislaus” and other Liszt sacred pieces only aspire to be. It is at once popular and mystical, festive and arcane. It illuminates the highest hope that religion holds forth—the hope for a healed world. Liszt probably knew this, which is why he made his peace with the inscrutable fate of dying in Bayreuth. With a martyr’s devotion, he even asked at one point to hear Wagner’s prose writings read aloud.

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Deep Song: Ainadamar

by Alex Ross

The New Yorker, Sept. 1, 2003.

Osvaldo Golijov’s chamber opera “Ainadamar,” which had its première at Tanglewood earlier this month, lasts about an hour, but it feels like a surreally extended moment, a long blink of an eye. The libretto, by the playwright David Henry Hwang, places us in a theatre in Uruguay, in the nineteen-sixties, where a venerable actress is about to step onstage for what will turn out to be her last performance. As she waits in the wings, she is overcome by a surge of memories, both happy and harrowing. The character is based on a real figure: Margarita Xirgu, the great Catalan tragedian, who, in the nineteen-twenties and thirties, collaborated with Federico García Lorca on several of his most famous plays. Joining her, in a series of dreamlike flashbacks, is Lorca himself, whose high ideals and dark passions dictate the opera’s tone.

Golijov is a forty-two-year-old Argentine-American composer who has an uncanny ability to don the masks of age-old musical traditions. Born in La Plata, he is descended from Eastern European Jews, and he first made his name with works derived from klezmer and other Yiddish styles. Three years ago, he unveiled the “St. Mark Passion,” a singing, dancing Crucifixion drama, which revels in Latin-American and Afro-Caribbean sounds. His works arouse extraordinary enthusiasm in audiences, because they revive music’s elemental powers: they have rhythms that rock the body into motion and melodies that linger in the mind. Golijov lacks the intellectual caution that leads composers to confine a quasi-tonal melody within knotty, twelve-tone-ish figures. Instead, he lets his melodies wing their way into the open air.

Lorca makes a natural subject for an opera. His famous death—he was executed by Fascist soldiers early in the Spanish Civil War—was a scene out of “Tosca.” He also supplies countless cues for music in his writing. No other poet could have compared the crescent moon to a fermata, a held note interrupting the harmony of the night. He was an accomplished pianist, a part-time composer, and something of a musicologist. He worked with Manuel de Falla to stage a festival of the authentic form of cante jondo, or “deep song,” as the most substantial branch of flamenco is known. Of the siguiriya form of cante jondo, Lorca wrote, “The melody begins, an undulant, endless melody. [It] loses itself horizontally, escapes from our hands as we see it withdraw from us toward a point of common longing and perfect passion.” This description also captures the essence of Golijov’s music.

The first lines of “Ainadamar” come from Lorca’s historical drama “Mariana Pineda,” whose heroine died for liberal ideals in nineteenth-century Granada. The aging Xirgu, preparing to play the role for the umpteenth time, recalls her pioneering performance back in 1927; it was this production, with sets by Dali, that launched Lorca’s dramatic career. The relationship of author and actress was not a physical one—neither opted for the heterosexual life style—but they worked together in a kind of creative ecstasy. As the opera tells it, she is deeply haunted by Lorca’s death, which she believes she could have prevented. It happened in August, 1936, in the place that the Moors called Ainadamar, or Fountain of Tears. According to Lorca’s biographer Leslie Stainton, Xirgu heard of the killing just before performing “Yerma”; in a rage, she changed her final line from “I myself have murdered my own child” to “They have murdered my child.”

The opera begins with prerecorded sounds that contain traces of the Lorca world. You first hear gurgling water, presumably from Ainadamar’s springs, then furious galloping patterns, which evoke the violent hoofbeats that the poet heard in his nightmares. In a brilliant stroke, three percussionists pick up the beat with drumming and clapping, in a dynamic pattern of four against six against twelve. Over this a chorus of six girls cry out the opening ballad of “Mariana Pineda”—“How sad it was in Granada / The stones began to cry.” When Xirgu reflects on her younger self, the flamenco furor gives way to a rumba, and we fall into a languid, late-summer suspension of time. The part of Lorca is played by a handsome young mezzo-soprano; this, perhaps, is a nod in the direction of Xirgu’s (or Lorca’s) sexuality. The poet once imagined a version of “Romeo and Juliet” in which Juliet became a fifteen-year-old boy.

For all his provocations, Lorca had no fear of exploiting traditional images of Spanish culture. As a dramatist, he knew that clichés could thunder if spoken in the right tone. Golijov, likewise, invests himself ardently in the most familiar flourishes of Spanish music. He understands better than his exoticizing European predecessors—think of Bizet, with his castanets—that the so-called “Spanish sound” is a fiendishly complex blend of European, Arabic, and Hebraic influences, and he teases out all of them in turn. The Fascist functionary Ramón Ruiz Alonso condemns Lorca in a wailing cantillation that sounds more like a muezzin’s call to prayer than like a salute to Franco. The writer, whom Ruiz Alonso branded a maricón, or “faggot,” is led to his death in a fantasy reënactment of the Crucifixion, which is solemnized by intimations of a Gregorian chant. Golijov even makes music of the guns that end Lorca’s life, transforming the sound of the shots into a percussive electronic ballet.

In the closing section of the opera, composer and librettist took a considerable risk that didn’t quite pay off on opening night. The action becomes almost entirely inward: Xirgu, musing further on her life, comes to accept the role of survivor that she has played. “I have done my best to keep you alive, to pay for my crime: the crime of living,” she sings. She walks onstage to sing Mariana’s final monologue, and falls dead. The Tanglewood production, which was directed by Chay Yew, strained to find visual cues in this last part. The young Xirgu and Lorca wandered on and off the stage, a blown-up photograph of the poet descended, and Lorca came back for a final pantomime appearance. Despite many poetic touches, Yew’s production failed to differentiate reality from fantasy, the elderly Xirgu from her complex of memories.

Something different should be done with the ending when the opera comes to the Brooklyn Academy of Music, at the end of October, and to Los Angeles’s new Disney Hall, in February. It is difficult to think of anything that could be cut; the music is sensationally beautiful throughout. Xirgu’s epiphany takes the form of two spellbinding orchestral crescendos, one called “Delirious Sunset” and the other “I Am Liberty.” While Golijov was working on the opera, he found himself listening to the not very Spanish strains of Richard Strauss’s “Daphne,” and in particular to the sublime Transformation Scene, during which the nymph of the title turns into a laurel tree. Although there are no outright echoes of “Daphne” in “Ainadamar,” you can sense the kinship: in each, a heaving polyphonic climax gives way to a quiet release. At the very end, Golijov asks his brass players to improvise freely on the single note C, creating a strange, shimmering drone, while the chorus repeats in muted tones the lament of the opening.

Tanglewood has a limited but excellent track record with modern operas. In 1942, Serge Koussevitzky, the music center’s founder, gave Benjamin Britten a thousand dollars to write “Peter Grimes.” The singers and players at the “Ainadamar” première, most of whom came from Tanglewood’s student ranks, were at a fairly exalted level. Robert Spano, who led the “St. Mark Passion” in Boston two years ago, once again showed staggering control of Golijov’s genre-busting variety of styles. Dawn Upshaw, in the role of Xirgu, dropped some of the cutesiness that she has lately favored and sang with unaffected intensity and thrust. Kelley O’Connor and Amanda Forsythe, both Tanglewood Vocal Fellows, showed crystalline, finely expressive voices in the roles of Lorca and Young Margarita.

On the same evening, Tanglewood presented another new chamber opera with a hot-and-heavy Spanish theme. This was Robert Zuidam’s “Rage d’Amours,” which told of the strange, obsessive love of Queen Juana, the nominal ruler of Castile, for her unfaithful and later lifeless husband, Philip the Handsome. In a climactic set piece that one-ups Salome’s sickening love for John the Baptist, Juana holds Philip’s decomposing corpse in a desperate embrace. If it sounds ghoulishly entertaining, it wasn’t; the music was weirdly solemn and static—a little corpselike itself. Zuidam showed impeccable craftsmanship, but he leaned heavily on hoary devices of twentieth-century technique, making much, for example, of the gruff bass-clarinet arpeggios from “The Rite of Spring.” Unlike the flamenco touches in “Ainadamar,” these intellectually gratifying references carried with them no dramatic specificity or strong emotional charge. The frustrating sense of distance was not helped by the fact that the part of Juana was divided up among a trio of sopranos. Lucy Shelton, Rochelle Bard, and Amy Synatzske all sang beautifully, but as a kind of diva committee they were never entirely in sync. The student players, under the direction of Stefan Asbury, played with extreme virtuosity.

The trouble with having two premières side by side is that the evening inevitably became something of a popularity contest. Zuidam received respectful applause; Golijov won a shouting, stomping ovation. No doubt a few old-school Tanglewood cerebralists went away complaining that Golijov had pandered to the audience. If so, they were pandering to their teaching assistants. The composer is triumphing not because he uses an accessible language—anyone can string together superficially pleasing chords—but because he speaks it with dire conviction. His sincerity is avant-garde.

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Invisible Cities

by Alex Ross

The New Yorker, August 4, 2003.

Andrew Porter, who wrote warmly erudite music criticism for this magazine from 1972 to 1992, used to travel out of town for stagings of neglected Russian operas, commenting that even a threadbare production of something like “Ruslan and Ludmila” gave off more sparks than a lot of standard operatic fare. This was before the advent of Valery Gergiev, the fiery angel of the Russian repertory, who has seemingly sworn not to get a full night’s sleep until Glinka’s operas are as familiar as Puccini’s. Early this month, Gergiev arrived in town with the collected forces of the Maryinsky Theatre, of St. Petersburg, bearing his latest enthusiasms. The company gave twenty performances at the Metropolitan Opera House, under the auspices of the Lincoln Center Festival. On the bill were Prokofiev’s “Semyon Kotko,” Rimsky-Korsakov’s “The Legend of the Invisible City of Kitezh,” Moussorgsky’s “Khovanshchina,” Rubinstein’s “The Demon,” Tchaikovsky’s “Eugene Onegin,” and, the odd man out, Verdi’s “Macbeth.” It wasn’t exactly a cavalcade of hits, and attendance suffered. But those who made it to Lincoln Center in the July heat were given a crash course in the golden age of Russian opera.

Gergiev had some rocky moments guest-conducting at the Met last season, so it was good to see him back in form, summoning phenomenal sounds from the Maryinsky orchestra. One sharp observer of the music scene suggested that the Met should have given its own orchestra free tickets to all these shows, so that the players could hear what style Gergiev has been trying to elicit from them. The Maryinsky’s strings are second to none; when its remarkable double basses sing out at full voice, a new dimension is added to the music. Woodwind lines glow like daubs of color on a canvas. Trombones and tuba make noise to wake the dead. The chorus matches the orchestra in richness of timbre, and the singers, even when overworked, give their all. This is red-blooded opera—risky, raucous, and alive.

"Semyon Kotko,” the most obscure of the Maryinsky’s offerings, was written in 1938 and 1939, at the height of Stalin’s Terror. Set in the period after the Bolshevik Revolution, it tells of a Ukrainian soldier who beats back Germans and capitalists and learns how to be a bland Soviet hero. Despite its impeccable Socialist-Realist plot, it was doomed to failure from the outset. A week before Prokofiev finished the vocal score, his collaborator, the director Vsevolod Meyerhold, was arrested. Then, in August, 1939, the Hitler-Stalin pact was announced, necessitating a last-minute revision of the anti-German element. The stench of Stalinism permeates the scenario; Tkachenko, who betrays his village to the Germans, stands in for the kulaks, or wealthy peasants, who were among the principal victims of the Terror. Satires of kulaks belong with cartoons of banker Jews in the gallery of genocidal stereotypes.

Yet there is stupendous music in “Kotko.” The ending of Act III, in which the Germans and the Ukrainian anti-Bolsheviks overrun the village, rivals the Coronation Scene of “Boris Godunov” in sheer malevolent splendor. Indeed, Prokofiev modelled his musical material partly on Moussorgsky’s: as in the Coronation Scene, a chord progression sways across the interval of the tritone, in unrelenting pendulum motion. Over these chords, singers and orchestra repeat downward motifs of lamentation, building to such an intense articulation of despair—“They plunder and burn / Our Ukraine is lost / All is lost!”—that listeners may end up thinking not of the events of 1917-18 but of the Ukrainian “terror famine” of 1932-33. “Kotko” hardly seems like a subversive piece, but it is legitimate to ask why Prokofiev thought back to “Boris Godunov,” the tale of a homicidal Russian ruler, when he was supposed to be depicting a German invasion.

Gergiev delivered this quintessential problem opera with all possible conviction. Yevgeny Strashko showed a solid, agile tenor in the title role; Irina Mataeva had lustrous moments as Kotko’s lover, Sofia; Fedor Kuznetsov, a superb young bass, found power and pathos in Tkachenko; Irina Loskutova led the lamentations of Act III with a big, piercing soprano. Yuri Alexandrov’s production worked hard to rescue “Kotko” from Soviet kitsch, and mostly succeeded, although the decision to include Maoist garb and little red books in the final tableau was a puzzler. Better was the idea of staging the Act III finale in the manner of the legendary film director Andrei Tarkovsky. One of the most unforgettable sequences in Tarkovsky’s “Andrei Rublev” depicts the sacking of Vladimir Cathedral; throughout the scene, a church censer is shown swinging from side to side, in ironic counterpoint to the mayhem. The director used a similar image in his Covent Garden production of “Boris.” In “Semyon Kotko,” the Tarkovsky pendulum, a marker of Russian destiny and doom, becomes, ominously, a globe of the world oscillating in the air.

In March, 1940, a month after Meyerhold was shot, Anna Akhmatova wrote a poem titled “The Way of All the Earth,” in which she pictured herself as “the woman of Kitezh,” wandering in search of eternal rest. Kitezh, in Russian folklore, is a city that dissolves into mist when invaders approach, leaving behind only the ringing of its bells. The legend acquired new life in 1903, when Rimsky-Korsakov, working with his librettist Vladimir Belsky, made it the basis of a post-Wagnerian ritual opera. In their hands, Kitezh becomes something more like the heavenly city of Zion—a Christian paradise that lurks in the folds of the Russian landscape. Rimsky-Korsakov lavished on the piece the utmost refinements of his style: opulent, glittering orchestration; attenuated, silvery melodies; an idiosyncratic harmonic method that amounts to a parallel universe of enchanted chords. Granted, there is a great deal of Wagner in the score—perhaps too much. Every fifteen minutes or so, the strings play the “Magic Fire” music. But Rimsky subsumes all these effects into his own surpassingly gentle vision: of a love persisting past the point of death; of callow betrayal and saintly forgiveness; of a city indivisible from nature.

Back in 1995, Gergiev brought a fairly traditional staging of “Kitezh” to the Brooklyn Academy of Music. The new production, by Dmitry Cherniakov, is altogether bolder. Kitezh has become a kind of synthetic Russian community, a blend of tsarist, Soviet, and contemporary motifs. If I am not mistaken, Cherniakov took many of his images from the Akhmatova poem—a “charred depot,” a woman carried on a sled, a “white ascetic rite.” Less Akhmatova-like was the image of the Tartar prince riding in on a sci-fi contraption straight out of the “Alien” movies. Despite a baffling lack of activity during the lovers’ entry into Kitezh—did someone miss a cue?—this was a compelling vision from an imaginative director. Unfortunately, I saw it with one of the less distinguished casts of the festival; Sergei Alexashkin was the only standout, singing Yuri with a booming, charismatic bass.

In “Kotko” and “Kitezh,” homeland idylls are overrun by marauders. In “Khovanshchina,” the enemies come from within, and no one is sure who they really are. It is impossible to summarize the plot of so byzantine an opera in a sentence or two: suffice to say that it succeeds in making a plausible evening’s entertainment out of the seventeenth-century split between the Old Believers sect of the Russian Orthodox Church and the modernizing forces of Peter the Great. The achievement is not entirely Moussorgsky’s; he died at the age of forty-two, leaving behind a manuscript that was an unorchestrated mess, and its epic shape only came into focus eight decades later, when Shostakovich undertook to make his own performing version. The secret to Shostakovich’s orchestration is in the brass. There are so many gleaming chords and burnished pedal tones that the opera seems to rest on steel girders.

The Maryinsky has re-created Leonid Baratov’s 1960 staging of the Shostakovich version—a picturesque, storybook production that neatly frames the action. Gergiev, in some of his finest moments on the podium, brought out both the massiveness of the conception and the poetry of its detail; you had a sense of human voices caught in the machinery of history. Olga Borodina sang the part of Marfa, who has forsaken her aristocratic origins to join the Old Believers; it is one of the mezzo’s signature roles, and she invested every note and every gesture with meaning. Three first-class low voices—Valery Alexeev, Gennady Bezzubenkov, and Alexashkin—sang Shaklovity, Dosifei, and Prince Khovansky. Best of all was the Maryinsky chorus: it gave lusty power to various mobs and militias, and also brought us deep inside the distant world of the Old Believers, who immolate themselves rather than submit to the will of Peter the Great. Richard Taruskin, in a splendid essay on the opera, speaks of the Old Believers “stepping out of history and into eternity.” They, too, are walking to Kitezh.

Back to Alex Ross: The Rest Is Noise.

Blood Wedding

by Alex Ross

The New Yorker, Feb. 3, 2003.

A few minutes before the end of Leos Janácek's "Jenufa," now at the Metropolitan Opera, the orchestra unleashes a long-drawn-out, floor-trembling storm of sound, in the elemental key of C. A pause follows, during which the audience may be tempted to make a noise of its own, particularly when a singer of the magnitude of Karita Mattila has been working at the height of her art. But the hall is silent; even those who do not know the opera feel that something remains to be said. Over pulsing chords, which have the rhythm of heavy breathing, violins and soprano begin to sing an entirely new melody, in the new key of B-flat—a long, sustained note, followed by a quickly shaking figure, with a shadow of C below. The music has the motion of a bird in flight: it glides, beats its wings, dips down, and soars again into blue heaven. Then another new theme surfaces, one that cuts through the octave like the sun at noon. The music disappears into brilliant chords of E-flat, bedecked with overtones and shimmering arpeggios.

It is one of the most uncannily beautiful scenes in opera, and all the more remarkable for coming at the end of one of opera's creepiest tales. Jenufa is a Moravian peasant girl who has had a baby out of wedlock with her cousin Steva. When Steva learns of the infant, he flees, and shortly thereafter the baby disappears. Laca, Steva's jealous half brother, steps in to marry Jenufa, which he has wanted to do all along, to the point of violent rage. In the middle of the wedding, terrified shrieks rise offstage: a baby's corpse has been found beneath the ice. Jenufa recognizes her child, and the villagers advance on her with murderous intent. Then Jenufa's stepmother—the Kostelnicka—makes a blood-curdling confession: in an effort to save the reputation of the family, she killed the baby herself. Once the pillar of the village church, she is dragged off to what will surely be a bad fate, and Jenufa is left alone with her new husband. This is where Janácek stages his fake climax in C major, and we realize that the preceding horror has been a test for the couple. That birdlike melody expresses Jenufa's loving resignation, as she gives Laca permission to walk away from the ugliness that is surrounding her. Laca answers, "I would bear far more than that for you. What does the world matter, when we have each other?" At that moment, Janácek's two closing melodies merge into one.

"Jenufa" is a deceptively "folkish" opera that reasserts its greatness with each performance. It begins small, with colorful scenes of village life; the vocal lines follow the rhythms and pitches of conversational speech. By the end, Janácek is working on a grand scale, his music radiating an almost religious ecstasy. There is another melody in the repertory that glides and shakes as Jenufa's song does—the theme of reconciliation that rises over the ruins of Valhalla, at the end of the "Ring." The love of Jenufa and Laca, like the love of Wagner's Brünnhilde, acquires a cosmic, world-changing force. Yet Janácek never loses touch with the grit of the real. What we hear is the sound not of transcendence but of simple happiness, which subdues darkness by forgetting it. "Jenufa" glows from within.

What a phenomenon Karita Mattila has become! Her voice is a complete instrument, a thing of beauty and power. She sails over the orchestra without effort, retaining the honeyed warmth of her tone even at the highest volume. Perhaps a Czech singer would have brought tangier diction to the part—when Gabriela Benacková sang Jenufa ten years ago, in the days before Met titles, you could fool yourself into thinking that you understood Czech—but, all in all, who cares? As other star singers acquire weird mannerisms or overreach themselves, Mattila keeps it simple and conquers all. And, yes, she looks fabulous, even when chugging a beer. Let's hope that the punishing role of Salome, which she sings in Paris this fall and at the Met next year, does not damage her voice.

The rising tenor Kim Begley, who, as Laca, is making his Met début, was a bit overshadowed by the Mattila extravaganza, but he sang from strength, showing no strain when he reached up to a high B-flat toward the end. His tone lacked some color, but it still rang true. Christopher Ventris, another big-voiced young tenor, made for an impetuous, colorful Steva. Deborah Polaski sang the stepmother, and, though she supplied her usual glowering intensity, she competed unsuccessfully with my vivid memories of Anja Silja, who sang this role with ferocious psychological specificity at the Deutsche Oper, in Berlin, last year. We don't have a sense of who Polaski's Kostelnicka really is, or why she does what she does. With Silja, it was as if you had read an entire Tolstoy story about the character the moment she walked onstage. Something about the way she folded her laundry made a gruesome climax inevitable. An excellent new recording of "Jenufa" on the Erato label, led by Bernard Haitink, gives us Mattila and Silja together; this is singing of intelligent fire.

The Met's new staging, which runs through February 13th, is more or less the same as a recent Covent Garden production, from which the Erato recording derives. It begins with a vaguely realistic depiction of a mill in a wheat field, but in Act II the stage is occupied by a huge, annoying rock; a friend suggested that it represents Society's Oppressive Conception of Sin. In Act III, the rock is still there, though now it's broken into fragments, so that it no longer looks like a mixup at the set shop. On opening night, the stage movement lacked energy and purpose; even Mattila occasionally seemed unsure of herself. But Vladimir Jurowski, the gifted new music director of the Glyndebourne Festival, took command with his forceful, Karajanesque conducting, choosing some riskily slow tempos but drawing out a sumptuous, Wagnerian sound. The Met orchestra clearly likes him: such finesse is usually heard only when James Levine is on the podium. Never mind the high-school symbolism—this "Jenufa" makes a glorious noise.

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To Hell and Back

by Alex Ross

The New Yorker, March 31, 2003.

"Berlioz believed neither in God nor in Bach, neither in absolute beauty in art nor in pure virtue in life,” his friend Ferdinand Hiller recalled. The composer of the “Symphonie Fantastique” retains a fashionably satanic aura, and the reputation is well earned. The “Fantastique,” his masterpiece, anyone’s masterpiece, remains a totally shocking work after all these years, and no modern music has ever really matched it. The symphony’s inexhaustible novelty comes not from the discovery of new sounds—although there are many—but from the diabolical manipulation of familiar ones. The C-major coda is brilliant, triumphant, and horribly wrong, the God-given natural scale smeared with flat notes. Thus ends a voyage into Hell undertaken not for moral reasons but for the sheer joy of going under. As Satan remarks in “Paradise Lost,” explaining why Hell is better than Heaven, “Here at least we shall be free.”

Lincoln Center’s festival in honor of the bicentennial of Berlioz’s birth, which began with three astonishing concerts by the London Symphony Orchestra, is called “Fantastic Voyages: The Genius of Hector Berlioz.” This hits the mark, although it was genius of a particular kind. Unlike Mozart, Schubert, and other prodigies born with music in their blood, Berlioz came to the art from the outside, in a spirit of intellectual adventure. He read about it in encyclopedias, imagined it in his dreams, and, in adolescence, decided to conquer it. He grew up in a small town in the South of France, where his musical diet consisted mainly of marching tunes, comic-opera ditties, and Gregorian chant. Not until around the time of his eighteenth birthday, in 1821, did he hear a full-scale classical work—“Les Danaïdes,” by Salieri. He had come to Paris to attend medical school, and he alarmed his fellow-students by singing Salieri’s arias while sawing the skulls of cadavers.

Berlioz’s understanding of music was all up in that big, hawklike head of his: reality had to be bent to accommodate his ideals. In his youth, he would stand in the stalls of the Paris Opera and rage against every small inaccuracy and embellishment. “Who has dared to correct Gluck?” he would shout during a pause. “Not a sign of a trombone; it is intolerable!” Conductors began to heed his pronouncements, and soon enough he himself was the dictator on the podium, forcing musicians to follow the letter of the score. He also earned money in the field of music criticism, and his slashing commentaries set the standard for this little art. His compulsively readable “Memoirs” are at once a picaresque narrative of a wild life and a mockery of the very idea of putting a life on paper. After telling us how he taught himself to play a tune on the recorder, he sardonically adds, “What biographer worth his salt could fail to detect here the germ of my aptitude for large-scale effects of wind instruments?” When you talk about Berlioz, you can’t escape the feeling that somewhere he is sniggering at every earnest word.

The “Memoirs” suggest that in some perverse way Berlioz saw his failures as his greatest successes. In a threepage description of the disastrous première of his “Sardanapalus” cantata, in 1830, he writes, almost exultantly, “The decrescendo begins.” He devotes only three sentences to the subsequent triumph of the “Symphonie Fantastique.” The last pages of the “Memoirs” are particularly striking in their bid for antipathy. The first draft ends with the sentence “I despise you all, and trust to have forgotten you before I die.” The second version ends, “I have neither hopes, nor illusions, nor great thoughts left . . . I say hourly to death: ‘When you will!’ Why does he delay?” The final manuscript ends with Macbeth’s remarks about life signifying nothing. Berlioz accomplished the rare feat of putting the last nail in his own coffin.

The “Symphonie Fantastique” was written in 1830, within the space of about six weeks, although the idea had been germinating for years. Program notes invariably emphasize the symphony’s connection with Berlioz’s imaginary love life at the time of its composition—his unrequited passion for the English actress Harriet Smithson, a supporting player who came to Paris in 1827 and made a great impression on French intellectuals. Smithson rejected Berlioz, or, more precisely, avoided his stalking advances. In the end, she was only playing a role that the composer had written for her—she was “an ideal which I created myself,” as he later admitted. It was a passion destined to fail, so that the artist could vault all the extremes of feeling and land in the hell of his imagination. A little later, Berlioz actually succeeded in marrying Smithson, and began to lose interest.

As David Cairns argues in his huge biography of the composer, “Symphonie Fantastique” is really a Faust work, possibly the remnant of a Faust symphony that Berlioz had been planning. Faust’s journey begins not with an affair of the heart but with an affair of the mind—a passion for the dark and the strange. The “Fantastique,” likewise, starts with a vague longing and ends in an inferno. As in Goethe’s version, all these demonic doings are contained within strict, rigorous forms. Some passages are actually quite anachronistic for the year 1830; the composer’s concept of the “fantastic” is more Baroque than Romantic. As Cairns puts it, “Berlioz writes nineteenth-century music with an eighteenth-century sound.” In other passages, the music sounds brand-new, as if it had been written last month by a young genius of postmodernism.

Colin Davis is a supremely good conductor of Berlioz, and his rendition of the “Symphonie Fantastique” was one of the most gripping orchestral performances I’ve heard in years. Davis began the piece in a wondering, sensitive, almost hesitant mood; by holding down dynamic levels, tugging back on the beat, and letting Berlioz’s long lyrical phrases hang for an extra moment in the air, he created a sense of music afraid to go over the brink. In the middle movements, “A Ball” and “Scene in the Fields,” the orchestra produced textures of remarkable clarity, so that one was constantly aware of the stray flutes and sinister tubas prowling at the edges of the picture. In the “March to the Scaffold,” Davis straightened out the tempo, stripped away the color, and let the brass and percussion run rampant. Right through to the end, the orchestra played like a cold, fatal machine; there was none of the carnivalesque, Halloween atmosphere familiar from standard interpretations. The final effect was overwhelming, and more than a little frightening—the man on the podium, standing in for the protagonist of the symphony, seemed to have undergone a Jekyll-and-Hyde transformation. In this, Davis was faithful to the spirit of a composer who chose to live on the mental edge, without illusions.

By the end of the bicentennial year, New Yorkers will have heard, in the opera house or the concert hall, almost all of Berlioz’s major works. The Metropolitan Opera, having mounted a monster production of “The Trojans,” has announced the grandly ebullient comic opera “Benvenuto Cellini” for next season. The London Symphony, under Davis’s direction, has already given us “Harold in Italy,”“Damnation of Faust,” and “Romeo and Juliet”; next month, Davis will return to lead the New York Philharmonic in “Beatrice and Benedict,” Berlioz’s autumnal Shakespeare comedy. Last month, Charles Dutoit led the Philharmonic, the Westminster Symphonic Choir, and the tenor Paul Groves in a cool, masterly performance of the “Requiem.” I only wish that someone had taken on the “Symphonie Funèbre et Triomphale,” in which Berlioz raises the military band music of his youth to awesome heights.

It used to be said that the “Symphonie Fantastique” was Berlioz’s sole masterpiece, and that his later works unmasked him as a “genius without talent”—a dilettante who mixed magnificent orchestral effects with inept fugues and insipid arias. Berlioz scholars, such as Cairns, Jacques Barzun, Hugh Macdonald, and Peter Bloom, have argued forcefully that the composer knew exactly what he was doing, and that whenever he sounds awkward he is actually ahead of his time. Indeed, pieces like “The Trojans” and “Beatrice and Benedict” show Berlioz fast-forwarding through the entire modernist revolution into the world of the neoclassical Stravinsky. Their austere vocal lines and gossamer textures sound strange only if the listener is waiting for a reprise of the “Fantastique.” Berlioz specialists, like Davis and Dutoit, know how to sustain tension over long lyrical paragraphs, which otherwise threaten to meander into a meta-stylistic nowhere.

The challenge in listening to this composer is to resist the preconceptions that we bring to nineteenth-century music, especially those derived from Wagner. It is a tricky thing to do, since Berlioz and Wagner resembled each other in so many ways. Both sought unheard-of masses of sound, and both used isolated orchestral timbres as themes in themselves. What’s more, Wagner ripped off many of his ideas directly from Berlioz, as a side-by-side comparison of “Romeo and Juliet” and “Tristan und Isolde” attests. But the two Romantic revolutionaries were opposed on almost every aesthetic question of the day. Wagner wanted to break down historic musical forms; Berlioz wanted to preserve them. Wagner threatened to discard melody as a concept, whereas Berlioz wrote easy-flowing tunes of almost aggressive sentimentality and naïveté.

Berlioz’s music should somehow be played and heard in an alternative universe in which Wagner never existed. This is what Davis understands so well; instead of marking time until the next sonic spectacular, as James Levine sometimes did while conducting “Trojans” at the Met, Davis exulted in all the oddities and incongruities. In “The Damnation of Faust,” he whipped up Hungarian marches, student songs, and peasant rounds as enthusiastically as he did the shimmering string effects and jagged assaults of the brass. He convinced us that this stop-and-start narrative—in which Faust never advances far into the realms of the sublime without being interrupted by some form of street music—came out of a dramatic, keenly ironic sensibility. His singers, the tenor Stuart Neill, the mezzo-soprano Petra Lang, and the bass Alastair Miles, took up the idiom without a trace of awkwardness or self-consciousness. Lang’s singing of “The King of Thule”—gentle on the surface, tense and sad beneath—afforded a glimpse of the composer’s innermost world, where, for once, no shadows fell between the music and the heart.

For decades, modern French composers have been devoted to precisely the sort of stylistic purity and progressive ideology that Berlioz disdained. But a recent concert of the music of Marc-André Dalbavie at the Guggenheim Museum suggested that a new diversity may be emerging in the world so long governed by Pierre Boulez. The Dalbavie concert was part of a monthlong, citywide festival called Sounds French; still to come are Pascal Dusapin’s opera “To Be Sung,” an eerie blend of voices and electronics, and Olivier Messiaen’s opulent piano cycle “Catalogue d’Oiseaux,” to be played bravely in one sitting by Roger Muraro.

Dalbavie, who is perhaps the most widely performed of French composers younger than fifty, has written a fair amount of music of the twittering, skittering, Boulezian kind. But the three pieces heard at the Guggenheim broke free of modernist clichés. “Palimpsest,” for violin, viola, cello, flute, clarinet, and piano, conjured an extraordinary variety of sounds from fragments of a Gesualdo madrigal, at one point erupting into furious scales right out of a Vivaldi concerto. “Sextine Cyclus” was a beautifully arranged though somewhat overextended anthology of medieval songs; Jean-Paul Fouchécourt sang them with loving eloquence, and members of the Orchestre de Paris provided a glistening accompaniment.

Most striking was “Chants,” for six singers and a chamber ensemble, based on Ezra Pound’s adaptations of classical poetry and troubadour songs. This was a world première, and a significant one. Tonality seemed to dissolve and reform several times, as if a new language were struggling to be born. The splendid vocalists of the New York group Lionheart, for whom the piece was written, stood in a ring around the audience, answering each other antiphonally or uniting in high, unearthly harmonies. I thought for a moment of the Tuba Mirum of Berlioz’s “Requiem,” in which the trumpets of the Last Judgment sound from all corners of the hall. Dalbavie’s music felt like the last echo of that catastrophe as it dissipated into empty space.

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Mavericks: Lou Harrison

by Alex Ross

The New Yorker, March 3, 2003

The composer Lou Harrison, who died on February 2nd, at the age of eighty-five, described himself not long ago as "an old man who's had a lot of fun." He was a great deal more than that, though what posterity will make of him is difficult to say. A roly-poly guy who reminded everyone of a sun-kissed Santa Claus, Harrison seemed for a long time to be the only happy composer in America; unlike so many of his congenitally embittered ivory-tower colleagues, he not only accepted his marginal status in the nation's culture but revelled in it. Yet he was, in many ways, an imposing figure—at once the prophet of the minimalist movement and the last vital representative of the mighty populist generation led by Aaron Copland. His music was so spare in design as to seem naïve, but it was not simple, and he was not a simple man.

Harrison—I have an urge to call him Lou, though I never met him—tends to be categorized as the quintessential West Coast composer, an accurate enough description. He was born in Portland, Oregon, in 1917, and moved to the Bay Area as a boy. After a troubled stint in New York, during which he befriended Charles Ives, he returned to Northern California in 1953. He spent the last forty years of his life outside Santa Cruz, in a house overlooking the Pacific. He had many of the characteristics that you would expect to find in a man who lived in the vicinity of Santa Cruz: he wore a ponytail, he hated war, he was fascinated by non-Western cultures, he collected found objects and played them as percussion instruments. He spoke Esperanto fluently and set several texts in that language. He was unashamed of being a gay man, and proclaimed it even back in the fifties.

But hippy-dippy clichés do not suffice. Harrison also belonged to the California of the mind—to the high horizon of the national imagination, the limitless expanse that Emerson hailed and Melville feared, what Wallace Stevens named the American Sublime, the "empty spirit in vacant space." There was much merriment in Harrison's work, much hummable song and rollicking dance; but there were also dark, questing rivers of chant, machinelike ostinatos, erupting dissonances, enveloping silences. He had a rumbling, visionary side—this must have been the basis of his connection with the crusty Ives. It must also have caught the attention of Arnold Schoenberg, who taught Harrison in Los Angeles, and bestowed on him rare praise. "Use only the essentials," Schoenberg always said. Probably against the grain of what the Master intended, Harrison took this as permission to vacate the overcrowded city space of modern music, to camp out in a desert landscape of long drones and mesmeric patterns.

During the week before Harrison's death, the Juilliard School held a celebration of the composer's eighty-fifth birthday. I attended the last event in the series, a concert by the Juilliard Symphony, under the direction of Reinbert de Leeuw. I went mostly to hear de Leeuw, one of the unheralded great conductors of our time, who drew fireworks of sound from the student players. But the revelation was the "Elegiac Symphony," a grand, cryptic work that I had heard before but never really understood: it was like walking over an ordinary hill and discovering a secret ocean. I went home and began revisiting recordings of Harrison's music, of which there are many on the New Albion and CRI labels. While listening to "Rhymes with Silver," a luminous ballet for cello and ensemble, I received an e-mail from a West Coast colleague saying that Harrison had died suddenly of a heart attack, on his way to a festival of his music in Ohio. He was probably having a gay old time right up to the end. So long, Lou.

Hector Berlioz, who celebrates his two-hundredth birthday this year, was the godfather of all composers who go their own way. Having released the Romantic torrent in music with his still astounding "Symphonie Fantastique," he proceeded to go against the stream of his own revolution and adopt a refined, neoclassical manner. With "The Trojans," a five-act grand opera based on the Aeneid, he aimed to resurrect the high-flown lyric tragedy of Gluck; when the Paris Opera refused to stage the work, in 1863, Berlioz fell into a black funk that lasted until his death six years later. The Metropolitan Opera has mounted a new production of this unlucky masterpiece, heralding a citywide, yearlong tribute to the composer's bicentennial. A Lincoln Center festival, "Fantastic Voyages," begins in early March; "The Trojans" plays at the Met through March 27th.

It is a long, strange, uneven, and, in the end, hugely moving work. To strike home, it needs three furiously committed star singers and a conductor who breathes the idiom. In this respect, the Met has come up short, although a half-baked "Trojans" is still a feast. The only participant who seemed to be dwelling deep inside Berlioz's world was Lorraine Hunt Lieberson; as the love-drunk Dido, she delivered a tour de force of style and emotion. She is the closest thing we have to a Callas—an artist of supreme intelligence who is also a transfixing presence onstage. From the moment she made her entrance, you understood what Berlioz was trying to achieve: she gave those cool, hieratic vocal lines the detailed gravity of a Baroque lament, marking out the metrical heartbeat of the music while giving each syllable a precise expressive value. There were shaky moments at the beginning—she sometimes shrieked at the end of a phrase, as if the high notes were mice—but for the most part she mastered a role that many opera buffs had deemed too heavy for her. The lady can sing anything, including the blues.

Ben Heppner played Aeneas, Dido's workaholic, unavailable lover. The formerly bulbous Canadian tenor has lost some eighty pounds and looks like a completely different man. When last seen at the Met, in "Die Meistersinger," he had the air of one on the brink of disaster, which followed soon enough, when he lost his voice during a recital in Toronto. Now he sings with renewed confidence, and, despite a pair of cracked high notes, he conquered the ludicrously difficult Act V solo scene. But I worried about the break between the middle and the top of the voice: there, the notes had a sagging, smudgy quality. Perhaps this uncertainty of tone stemmed from a passing spell of nervousness, for reputable sources raved about his singing a few nights later. No such troubles for Deborah Voigt, the Cassandra: she sang with such golden, glowing strength that one hardly minded her all-purpose arm-waving and mismatched Wagnerian delivery. Dwayne Croft was a muted but affecting Coroebus; Elena Zaremba, a robust Anna; Robert Lloyd, a rock-steady Narbal. Two superlative lyric tenors, Matthew Polenzani and Gregory Turay, stood out in smaller roles. Polenzani sang Iopas' aria "Ô blonde Cérès" with a calm mastery of French style, spinning out a sinuous, unbroken line.

Opening nights at the Met seldom show a production to best advantage, and Berlioz's five-hour monster had a wobbly start. The Met chorus sang with lusty power but with no great beauty of tone. James Levine led a curiously absent-minded performance, hurried in places and static in others. It sounded as though only certain choice passages, such as the end of Act IV, had been thoroughly rehearsed. Perhaps Levine was distracted by the frenzy of what was happening onstage: Francesca Zambello, the director, working with set designs by the late Maria Bjørnson, filled the room with fractured fortress walls, dangling segments of domes, Damien Hirst fish tanks, parades and processions, ritual objects being earnestly carried to and fro, squads of dancers rushing to catch up with the music (shades of the "dance impressions" that sometimes enliven the Oscars), tenors floating in on swings, a subcompact Trojan horse, and so on. Some tableaux had a serene, composed beauty—James Ingalls bathed the outdoor scenes in his patented pale sunlight—but the net effect was cold and obscure, as if these Trojans were still trapped in a marble frieze. Once again, the Met has offered a glittering production with no strong dramatic core.

Franz Welser-Möst, the new music director of the supremely virtuosic Cleveland Orchestra, is a forty-two-year-old Austrian whose tastes and talents are little known to American audiences. Curly-haired and bespectacled, he bears a charming resemblance to Schubert. The heir to George Szell and Christoph von Dohnányi recently led the Cleveland in three concerts at Carnegie Hall, and the two that I heard were wildly inconsistent, which makes it hard to predict how the alliance will turn out. Beethoven's C-Sharp-Minor Quartet, in an arrangement for string orchestra by Dimitri Mitropoulos, lumbered along in slow motion, striving for the tragic and achieving the lugubrious. Mahler's gloriously whacked-out Seventh Symphony made a brilliant sound but lacked passion and wit, as if Welser-Möst were standing back and watching the music go by. Too often in today's younger conductors, one encounters this kind of affectless expertise; the week before, David Robertson and the National Orchestra of Lyon had presented a veritable autopsy of "The Rite of Spring."

After the intermission of the first concert, a different Welser-Möst walked out, and ignited a happy riot in the audience. Two Richard Strauss works were played in sequence, the C-major ending of "Death and Transfiguration" melting magically into the C minor of "Frühling," from "Four Last Songs." The orchestra was aglow and alive, sounding as fine as I have ever heard it. The relationship of solos to ensemble had the quality of cinematic deep focus, foreground and background perfectly defined. Felicity Lott sang the "Four Last Songs" and "Morgen" with immense dignity and heartbreaking directness; like Hunt Lieberson in "The Trojans," she didn't so much sing the music as embody it. The orchestra breathed, sighed, and smiled with her. If Welser-Möst can create this transcendent atmosphere in one out of every three concerts, he will become a great conductor.

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The Ray of Death

by Alex Ross

The New Yorker, Nov. 24, 2003.

A hundred years ago, in the fall of 1903, Gustav Mahler was rehearsing Fromental Halévy’s opera “La Juive” in Vienna. By Mahler’s time, the art of French grand opera that Halévy exemplified had gone out of fashion, its stylized set pieces and grandiose production values superseded by Wagnerian stream of consciousness and naturalistic plots. Nonetheless, Mahler believed in “La Juive,” and he lavished special attention on the finale of Act III, in which Brogni, a cardinal in fifteenth-century Switzerland, condemns the heretical love of Léopold, a Catholic prince, and Rachel, the “Jewess” of the title. “Anathema! Anathema!” the Cardinal sings. The word signified not merely excommunication from the Church but everlasting destruction at the hand of God. At the rehearsal, Mahler watched in irritation as his chorus stood around passively. He demanded, “Do you have any idea what it meant to be condemned in the period in which this opera is set?” He jumped onstage to mime the expression that he wished his singers to assume. It was, an observer recalled, the face of a man in extreme terror, retreating from “the ray of death.”

“La Juive” is now playing at the Metropolitan Opera for the first time in decades, in a production borrowed, fittingly enough, from the Vienna State Opera. The ending of Act III achieved exactly the effect that Mahler desired. The music is potent in itself: for the announcement of the anathema, Halévy pairs a deep bass voice with a relentless triplet figure in the trombones, and then gathers the full orchestra and chorus into a hurtling mass. But audiences also register the haunting historical resonances that have collected around this opera since its première, in 1835. It is a work by a Jewish composer in which anti-Semitism is a motivating force. Wagner, the foremost anti-Semite of the age, inexplicably loved it; Mahler called it one of the greatest operas ever written. It is, for all its melodramatic trappings, a profoundly unsentimental story in which hate engenders hate: Rachel’s father, the long-suffering Éléazar, becomes as fanatical as the Christians who denounce him. “La Juive” starts out like a creaky period piece but ends up revealing more fundamental human ugliness than audiences may want to see.

The man who unleashed this sophisticated horror was an easygoing professional who did nothing else nearly as remarkable in his career. Wagner described him as “open and honest, and not a premeditatedly cunning trickster like Meyerbeer.” (Wagner should have written, “like me.”) Halévy was no revolutionary, but he did make intelligent use of an enlarged orchestra and a dramatically foregrounded chorus. His greatest asset was Eugène Scribe’s blood-and-thunder libretto, which has one of the most impressively lurid kickers in the canon. At the very end of the opera, Rachel is thrown into a boiling cauldron, with Éléazar soon to follow. Before he dies, however, he reveals that Rachel is not his child, nor is she a Jew; she is, in fact, the long-lost daughter of Cardinal Brogni. Éléazar could have saved her with a single word, but his hatred of the society around him has grown too great. Verdi’s “Il Trovatore” arrives at a very similar you’re-burning-the-wrong-person epiphany.

What sort of statement the liberal-Catholic Scribe and the assimilated Halévy wished to make on Jewish matters is not really clear. Diana Hallman, in a book about “La Juive,” concludes that the intention was not so much to celebrate the Jews as to set forth a “critique of the intolerance and despotism of political and religious institutions.”Éléazar, the central character of the piece, is an ambiguous creation: he is shown as a devout man, presiding over a touching Passover Seder at the beginning of Act II, yet he also fits the stereotype of the Jewish miser. Many nineteenth-century anti-Semites were also enemies of the conservative order, which perhaps explains why the liberal Wagner found this opera so compelling. One of the great inspirations of “La Juive” is the ironic use of a church organ and the Te Deum as counterpoint to the action. Verdi and Wagner both copied the effect. Wagner, in addition, probably took his “Magic Fire” music from a weirdly glittering passage that plays after Rachel exposes Léopold as the lover of a Jew.

Mahler’s fascination with “La Juive,” which began early in his career, must have been based on a deeper identification. All around him were the narrowed eyes and mistrustful stares of those who saw a kind of heresy in his “marriage” to the Vienna Court Opera. He talked of transcending his Jewishness, yet, like Éléazar, he became defiant in the face of prejudice. So it is no surprise that reminiscences of “La Juive” can be found in his works. He was almost certainly recalling the instrumental introduction to Éléazar’s Act IV aria when he wrote a parodistic Jewish melody for a pair of oboes in his First Symphony. I also wonder whether the savage five-note up-and-down figure that recurs in several of the symphonies—notably, in the funereal brass melody at the beginning of the Third and in the stormy second movement of the Fifth—might be traced back to the music of Cardinal Brogni’s “anathema,” which the composer rehearsed so thoroughly in 1903. Finally, and most strangely, the choral exclamation “Bereite dich!”—“Prepare yourself! Prepare to live!”—in the Second Symphony is copied note for note from the chorus “Au pécheur, Dieu,” in Act V, in which the Christians pray for the Jews to be pardoned for their sins.

Tenors could be forgiven for thinking that some sort of curse hangs over the role of Éléazar. It was the last thing Caruso ever sang in public; early on Christmas Day in 1920, a few hours after appearing in “La Juive” at the Met, the tenor doubled over in screaming agony, the victim of an attack of pleurisy. He died seven months later. A few decades on, Richard Tucker was urging the Met to mount the opera for him; as a former cantor in New York synagogues, he had a special feeling for the part. One week after the Met finally relented, Tucker died of a heart attack.

Neil Shicoff, a cantor’s son born in Brooklyn, has broken the spell. In recent years, this veteran tenor has found new solidity in his singing and acting, and with “La Juive” he is having the triumph of his career. His Éléazar is a fully imagined and beautifully shaded portrait of a good man driven into a state of irremediable rage. At first, his voice sounded pinched, and he was in danger of being upstaged by the excellent young tenor Eric Cutler, who sang the role of Prince Léopold. In fact, Shicoff was husbanding his resources, and he gathered strength as the evening went on. In a very moving way, he applied touches of cantorial style—knowing, perhaps, that Scribe originally envisioned the character as a rabbi. His Act IV tour de force, “Rachel, quand du seigneur,” was a purely musical howl of emotion. Unfortunately, this production omitted the final cabaletta, although it would have further illuminated Éléazar’s motivation: his desire for vengeance is redoubled when he hears a mob calling for the death of Jews.

Shicoff’s performance would have sufficed for a brilliant evening, but Soile Isokoski, who sang the part of Rachel, drew an equally wild ovation. The young Finnish soprano is immensely secure across her entire range, with ringing high notes and a rich, expressive lower register. What’s more, she is an openhearted, transparently emotional singer—a major artist in the making. Also in the cast were the usually captivating soprano Elizabeth Futral, having a somewhat unsteady night as the Princess Eudoxie, and Ferruccio Furlanetto, who found not only the implacable will but also the deep-seated sorrow of Cardinal Brogni. The conductor, Marcello Viotti, is no Mahler, but he elicited a forceful, kinetic sound from the orchestra.

Günter Krämer, the director, drew crisply defined performances from all the singers. Unfortunately, he got only heavy-handed symbolism from his set and costume designers, Gottfried Pilz and Isabel Ines Glathar. The Christian “establishment” was dressed all in white, with ridiculous Tyrolean costumes predominating; the Jews lived in an inky-black underworld. A visit to the Jewish Museum in Berlin might have revealed the chilling pictorial possibilities of a more realistic approach. One of the most frightening artifacts of anti-Semitism that I have ever seen is a medieval image in that museum, showing the expulsion of the Jews from Nuremberg. An endless line of them stretches out from the gates, far more than a medieval city could possibly have held. The artist was expelling an infinite number of Jews from his mind. Perhaps Mahler was recalling such ancient scenes when he acted out ultimate terror on the stage of the Vienna opera, or perhaps he had an inkling of what was to come.

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Escaping the Museum

by Alex Ross

The New Yorker, Nov. 3, 2003

Musicians who specialize in performing works of the deep past, from the Baroque, the Renaissance, or before, eventually have to face up to the impossibility of their task. The philosopher Lydia Goehr, in her book “The Imaginary Museum of Musical Works,” shows that the concept of a “work”—an infallible score to be scrupulously realized in performance—did not exist until the Romantic period. Before then, scores were less like papal writs than like cooking recipes, leaving crucial details up to the taste of the performers. Singers would adorn their lines according to their abilities and whims. Instrumentalists would fill out their parts with ornaments and other sonic curlicues. Composers often doubled as virtuosos, throwing out ideas in off-the-cuff improvisations. In this repertory, the modern ideal of the note-perfect performance, so prized in conservatories, automatically produces an inauthentic result. Play only the right notes, and you play them wrong.

If you really wanted to re-create the musical culture of Bach’s time, you would have to stop playing Bach altogether and concentrate on contemporary composers. Before 1800, there was no great reverence toward the musical past, and even a living giant such as Bach had approximately the glamour of a TV weatherman. The historian Tanya Kevorkian suggests that Bach’s cantatas were received with something less than universal devotion; while some members of the congregation followed closely, others chatted, milled about, or went out for a smoke. “Mein Gott, here goes Bach with his tortured counterpoint,” the typical burgher might have said. Centuries on, a work such as “Ich habe genug” causes audiences to fall silent with awe. Lorraine Hunt Lieberson’s new recording of the cantata, on Nonesuch, is beautiful enough to stop a war, if anyone thought to try. Were Baroque listeners uncultured idiots? Or did they have a healthier attitude toward music’s place in society? At about the time audiences began treating composers like gods, it would seem, the truly godlike composers began to disappear.

The most authentic performance is the most alive performance. I can’t favor John Eliot Gardiner’s meticulous reconstructions of the “St. Matthew Passion” over Otto Klemperer’s Brucknerian renovation; the latter has too much august beauty to be dismissed. It’s not what Bach had in mind, but you can imagine him saying, as Stravinsky said when he heard Bernstein’s over-the-top “Rite of Spring”: “Wow!” Still, there is much to be gained by studying the past and recovering its habits. The music has a better chance of staying alive if the performer uses an appropriate instrument and knows some of the oral tradition that went along with the score. We are luckiest when we get a performer at once learned and fervid; and it was a very lucky crowd that came to the Frick Collection earlier this month to hear the violinist Andrew Manze.

Manze is a balding, bespectacled Englishman of deceptively professorial appearance. He made his name with a series of recordings for the Harmonia Mundi label. The latest is a delightful all-Mozart disk, in which he manages to give some backbone and bite to the dinner-party anthem “Eine Kleine Nachtmusik.” Manze is much in demand as a conductor, but at the Frick he showed up with only his 1783 Joseph Gagliano violin, playing solo works of Bach, Tartini, and Telemann. He commands an astonishing variety of colors, from eerie whisperings to guttural fortissimos, from pure-toned lyricism to a gritty attack one or two steps removed from bluegrass fiddling. A kind of live-action musicologist, he is able to marshal these sounds into a cogent narrative. His playing is at once spontaneously inventive and magisterially controlled.

First came Manze’s own arrangement of Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D Minor. In some comments beforehand—the violinist likes to preface his performances with wry, donnish lectures, which makes his flair for the demonic all the more arresting—he alluded to musicological speculation that this most famous of organ works might have been originally composed for violin (perhaps by Bach, perhaps by someone else). Even if it wasn’t, Manze would have been within his rights, as a headstrong Baroque virtuoso, to make the appropriation. In this version, the opening unisons, which create the familiar Halloween melodrama on the organ, become silvery tendrils of sound, spreading out like cracks in ice. A musicological puzzle was temporarily solved: the Toccata and Fugue emerged as a striking new composition by Andrew Manze.

Bach’s Second Partita in D Minor is most definitely by Bach; Manze plays from a copy of the composer’s manuscript. Bach’s immaculate handwriting, Manze declared, leaves “very little guesswork” for the performer. Following along in the score, I wasn’t so sure. Bach gives no firm tempo indications, very few dynamic markings, little about style of expression. Manze had to flesh all this out, sometimes drawing on performance tradition and sometimes applying his own ideas. He accepts Helga Thoene’s theory that this partita, with its monumental chaconne, is a memorial for Bach’s wife, Maria Barbara. In a performance of unforgiving intensity, Manze transformed the partita into a five-act monodrama of grief, in which the turn toward D major halfway through sounded like a failed attempt to smile through tears (big double-stopped chords came haltingly and effortfully) and the last statement of the theme became an X-ray of a spent and vacant heart. I’ve never heard the music played with such raw feeling.

The Frick’s music room was the perfect space for Manze’s intimate assault. Seating a hundred and seventy-five, it resembles the sorts of rooms for which Bach wrote. The concert series at the Frick remains one of the best deals in New York: tickets are free, Joyce Bodig’s programming regularly buses in brilliant new talents, and something about the space guarantees a joy of connection. The trick is in figuring out the cloak-and-dagger ticketing system. Details can be found on the Frick’s Web site, although a high-speed connection will get you only so far. Requests must arrive by regular mail on the third Monday before each concert, preferably with a ducal seal attached.

A week after Manze visited the Frick, the Pomerium vocal ensemble gave a concert of fourteenth-century music at Cooper Union, in the East Village. Like the Frick, Cooper Union is routinely lit up by lively programs, which are in need of support. Pomerium’s program centered on songs and sacred pieces of Guillaume de Machaut, one of the first composers in history to have put an unmistakable personal stamp on their music. He wrote partly in the wake of the Black Death, and his music is almost deliriously inventive, as if he were trying to forget the world around him by making a new one on paper.

Alexander Blachly, the leader of Pomerium, has been involved with early music for decades, and his thinking has evolved and matured along with the rest of the movement. He told me in a phone conversation that back in the sixties early-music specialists were obsessed with the ideal of “staying true to the work”; performances were correct, chilly, studiously inexpressive. “It all came out sounding like Hindemith training exercises,” he confessed. Now Blachly aims for a more elastic approach, for more shapely and sensuous phrasing. His current ensemble—on this evening, four women and seven men, with high voices dominating—easily meets his demands. Plain lyric strains gave a human touch to even the most ornate, mathematical designs; vibrato-free, church-choir tones alternated with a more red-blooded, vernacular style. The singers delivered Machaut’s great “Notre Dame Mass” with the same ardor that they applied to secular, love-drenched pieces such as “Dis et sept, cinq,” “Je sui aussi,” and “Quant Theseus.”

As I listened, I got a sense of Machaut as a familiar intellectual type—the self-imprisoned man who hides his passion behind a panoply of masks. He wrote reams of poetry and music in praise of a young noblewoman named Peronelle d’Armentières, whom he seems to have romanced in his sixties. Peronelle, having thrown herself at Machaut out of adoration for his art, soon abandoned him for a man closer to her age and station. Somehow it’s all too perfectly awful to be true. Like Beethoven in his “Immortal Beloved” period, like the Thomas Mann of “Death in Venice,” Machaut may have locked his highest passion in a region of his mind. Performers must not only follow the notes but set the emotion free.

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The Gentleman Composer

by Alex Ross

The New Yorker, Oct. 20, 2003

Ned Rorem will not go away. For decades, he has been an elegant anomaly among American composers, adhering to an austerely lyrical Franco-American style that went out of fashion sometime during the Eisenhower Administration. He came of age in the nineteen-forties, when a young composer could go to Paris, dash off a bundle of unaffectedly beautiful songs, and get written up in the weeklies alongside Norman Mailer and Montgomery Clift. Rorem was among the last American artists to pull off a plausible Parisian exile, and when he came back, in 1957, he found that composers were being hailed not for the excellence of their craft but for the extravagance of their theories. Time passed, and Rorem kept writing. The high-powered modernists who dismissed him as irrelevant became irrelevant themselves. Now he is celebrating his eightieth birthday, and, just as the man himself looks twenty years younger than he is, the music is sounding peculiarly fresh. Nothing in his thousand-work catalogue radiates genius, but the career gives off a kind of accidental grandeur—accidental because Rorem has famously disavowed the grand gesture in composition.

The oddity of Rorem’s career is that ever since he made his literary début, in 1966, with “Paris Diary,” he has been known more for his writing than for his music. The writing has an insolence and a swagger that the music lacks. The spectacular self-absorption of the diaries—“A stranger asks, ‘Are you Ned Rorem?’ I answer, ‘No,’ adding, however, that I’ve heard of and would like to meet him’”—made the young Rorem famous for being famous in his mind. He was, at the same time, a pioneer of modern gay culture, speaking freely and fearlessly of his desires. The musical essays and reviews hold up better; they may not be quite as deft as those of his mentor Virgil Thomson, but they are less often egregiously wrong. (After rereading Rorem’s superb appreciations of Benjamin Britten, I turned to Thomson on “Peter Grimes”: “not a piece of any unusual flavor or distinction.”) The “Ned Rorem Reader,” a recent compilation from Yale University Press, can stand beside Berlioz’s “Memoirs,” Debussy’s “Monsieur Croche the Dilettante-Hater,” and Morton Feldman’s “Give My Regards to Eighth Street” as one of the wisest and wittiest composer books ever published.

Rorem the composer is a more reticent being. He has his heart-on-sleeve moments, but more often he speaks in shy, gentlemanly phrases. Melancholy lurks in even the brightest corners of the music—a melancholy that has surfaced more strongly in Rorem’s recent writing, in particular his diary “Lies,” which recounts the final illness of his partner, the organist and composer James Holmes. Would we pay less attention to Rorem if he did not have such a way with words? Perhaps, but it is also possible that Rorem would never have acquired a literary reputation if he had not made his name in music first. As usual, he says it best: “I am a composer who also writes, not a writer who also composes.”

Early on, Time called Rorem “the world’s best composer of art songs.” The phrase has followed him around like a faithful puppy ever since. The songs are, indeed, among the best in the contemporary canon, showing Rorem’s uncanny ability to breathe notes into words while leaving a poet’s thoughts intact. In 1997, he produced a tour de force of his text-setting art, the cycle “Evidence of Things Not Seen,” which incorporates thirty-six poems by twenty-three poets. It takes the listener on a quietly epic journey from innocence to experience and on to solitude and extinction—essentially, the entire span of a human life. The Curtis Institute, in Philadelphia, will present the cycle on Rorem’s birthday, which falls on October 23rd; the Miller Theatre, in New York, will reprise it the following day.

The songs are a given; it’s the instrumental music that is in danger of being overlooked. In the last decade, Rorem has written three string quartets that rival any modern American efforts in the form. All are made of short movements in succession; most of Rorem’s longer instrumental pieces follow this pattern. The individual movements sound like genre studies or cast-off sketches, but they coalesce into unexpectedly gripping narratives. The Fourth Quartet, which the Emerson Quartet recently played at Zankel Hall, includes a once-in-a-lifetime movement called “Self Portrait,” in which the cello holds forth in a rambling, halting chant while the three other strings play frigid chords around it. It’s like a less innocent version of Ives’s “The Unanswered Question,” a work in which solo voices ring out against a background of unchanging, oblivious strings. Here, oblivion appears to encroach on the protagonist and eventually stamp out all embers of emotion.

Rorem’s writing for orchestra is equally impressive. He capitalizes on his reputation for understatement by saving huge sonorities for significant occasions; as a result, his rare musical outbursts seem not so much theatrical as visceral, as if they were blows sustained in real time. The thirteen-minute tone poem “Eagles” unleashes a welter of sound, but the clean, treble-heavy orchestration never thumps in place or plods along; it simply lifts off, like the birds of the title. The recent Cello Concerto nods several times to favorite predecessors—pealing, dissonant fanfares recall Messiaen; a kind of slide show of contrasting chords brings back the Interview Scene in Britten’s “Billy Budd”—but it also includes three extended songs without words which could have been composed only by Rorem, each one sadder, lonelier, kindlier than the next. There are many first-rate pieces of this kind—the Third Symphony, the Violin Concerto, “Lions,” “Sunday Morning,” the Piano Concerto in Six Movements—but it is a rare day that you hear any of them in the composer’s home town of New York.

A paradox haunts Rorem’s career. He insists that he has no interest in making “Major Statements,” yet he has always longed to be taken seriously—to have major statements made about him. He has grumbled many times in print over the genuflections rendered toward an atonal showman such as Elliott Carter, who happens to be celebrating his ninety-fifth birthday this year (and looks eighty). Indeed, Carter has benefitted from a version of the intentional fallacy, according to which any music that is complex in design is automatically held to be complex in effect. Rorem’s scores seem, by comparison, modest and naïve, but this description applies only to their surface, and not to their emotional or psychological import. Rorem resembles such latter-day figurative painters as Fairfield Porter and Jane Freilicher, who followed the onslaught of Abstract Expressionism with landscapes and still-lifes. Their deceptively conventional images conceal large, ambiguous worlds of feeling.

The recent diaries of Rorem are painful to read, not because the author is indulging the old exhibitionism but because he is exposing losses suffered by his ego. One entry shocked me: he notes that for nearly a year he heard nothing from the Beaux Arts Trio about his work “Spring Music,” which he had been commissioned to write for them. It’s one thing not to get a phone call returned—but a half-hour composition? Rorem may have a famous name, but he works down in the trenches with the thousand American composers who labor more for love than for fame, and never for money. Notably, his eightieth-birthday celebrations are unfolding not at Lincoln Center but at smaller venues like the Miller Theatre, Merkin Hall, and the 92nd Street Y and at music-loving churches such as St. Thomas and St. John the Baptist. (Likewise, Rorem’s music has tended to thrive on independent labels; among the best current releases are “Bright Music” and the three symphonies, on Naxos; “Evidence of Things Not Seen,” on New World; “Eagles,” on Albany; and “War Scenes,” on Phoenix.) If Rorem has been frozen out of the pretentious marketplace of neue Musik, he has the satisfaction of seeing his music prosper in communities for which it fills an immediate need. He is following Britten’s great injunction: “Our job is to be useful, and to the living.”

To read Rorem’s writing is to feel the agony and the bravery of composing in America. Anyone who writes music for a living is a hero, and Rorem is more heroic than most, because he has compromised so little of what he holds dear. His prose will outlast the sneering of his critics, and his music is too mysteriously sweet to die away. To him should go the final word: “The frustration of being nonexistent keeps us awake.”

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Karita Mattila's Salome

"Mysteries of Love"

by Alex Ross

The New Yorker, April 5, 2004.

The first time the Metropolitan Opera staged Richard Strauss’s “Salome,” ninety-seven years ago, J. P. Morgan’s daughter blanched at the sight of a soprano making out with a severed head, and the production was shut down after one night. The ballerina who had performed the Dance of the Seven Veils on the Met stage decided to take her act to a vaudeville house, where she had a considerably warmer reception. America was soon in the grip of a Salome craze. In January, 1909, Strauss’s opera reappeared in triumph at Oscar Hammerstein’s Manhattan Opera House, with the bewitching Mary Garden in the title role. Not long afterward, a singing waiter at Jimmy Kelly’s, in Union Square, wrote a song entitled “Sadie Salome (Go Home),” which told of a nice Jewish girl who dismays her sweetheart, Mose, by playing Salome onstage. “Don’t do that dance, I tell you, Sadie,” Mose pleads. “That’s not a business for a lady!” It wasn’t much of a song, but it sold well enough to win its composer a job on Tin Pan Alley. A few years later, he wrote “Alexander’s Ragtime Band.”

Karita Mattila’s performance in the Met’s new production of “Salome” is unlikely to inspire a commemorative number from the next Irving Berlin, but by rights it should. The only word fit for the occasion is a British one: Mattila left her audience gobsmacked. She sang one of the most taxing roles in the repertory as if it had been written for her, and she delivered a physical performance that might have had any stray Hollywood executives in the audience wondering how to cast her in a remake of “Double Indemnity.” She made an organic whole of this outwardly lurid, inwardly elusive part. Salome, the Bible tells us, danced for her stepfather, Herod, and demanded the head of John the Baptist as a reward. Jules Laforgue added the scandal of the kiss, and Oscar Wilde piled on arch Symbolist poetry: “The mystery of love is greater than the mystery of death.” But what kind of love is this, and how can we bear to watch it? In the opening scenes, Mattila portrays Salome as an intensely vapid young woman, a club-hopping heiress type, who apes the decadent culture that bred her. Then the game she plays to keep herself amused—seducing the religious fanatic that Daddy/Uncle has trapped in a cistern—becomes an uncontrollable obsession. Mattila makes the transformation so supple that the audience ends up feeling pity rather than disgust. The character is fearfully real.

Mattila sang all the notes, which is diabolically difficult to do. In “Salome,” a soprano goes up against one of the great monster orchestras in opera history. At the most gobsmacking moment in the score—the point at which the executioner makes a gift of the prophet’s head—a hundred instruments flood the spectrum of the chromatic scale, leaving almost no room for the naked human voice. Mattila held out heroically against the onslaught. Her high A-flats glowed like searchlights in fog. Her voice is both richly lyrical and riskily dramatic, and has the same balance of qualities that makes for a great Isolde, which Mattila is certain to be. Only in the lowest register did she lack penetrating power—notably, in the cavernous passage about the mysteries of love and death. But every soprano is missing something in this role. Mattila sings as well as anyone on the twelve recordings I own.

Plus, she did a little dancing. Ordinarily, the Dance of the Seven Veils is a would-be titillating moment that makes everyone uncomfortable: opera singers are not, by nature, physical performers, and even the fittest Salomes seem out of their element as they muddle through whatever choreography has been set up for them. In fact, you don’t need a Kylie Minogue physique to pull off the role. Deborah Voigt, who was recently fired by Covent Garden because she was too big for a tiny cocktail dress, sings a mighty Salome, and she should be doing it onstage, perhaps with an arty concept to replace the dance. If the scene is to advance the drama, it has to be about something more than a woman taking off her clothes. Mattila, exulting in a transvestite striptease routine that echoed Marlene Dietrich’s “Blue Angel” and Madonna’s “Material Girl” video, made it more about Herod’s mixed-up fantasies than about her own: the tetrarch has more than a little Wilde in him, and he gets off on the ambiguities.

There is physical nakedness, and there is emotional nakedness. Mattila gives us the first at the end of the dance, and she gives us the second at the end of the opera, when, after a devouring kiss and a scary spell of heavy breathing, she hangs her head backward over the lip of the stage and delivers the final part of her monologue: “Ah, I have kissed your mouth, Jochanaan.” No one will soon forget the desperation in her tone and on her face—the desperation of one who has performed the most extreme act and is still trapped in an agony of dissatisfaction. To this Salome, Herod’s closing words—“Kill that woman!”—may sound merciful.

In realizing her dream performance, Mattila had much help from Jürgen Flimm, whose productions at the Met and elsewhere—“Fidelio,” the current Bayreuth “Ring”—have put him at the forefront of a generally dismal science. He is the rare director who makes tension visible. The sets, by Santo Loquasto, place the action at some vague date in the twentieth century, in a Middle Eastern country where the occupying authorities have hired a security force from the native population. Herod’s palace resembles a grand hotel on the edge of the desert: partygoers in opulent clothes descend a serpentine staircase and pose on stainless-steel furniture. John the Baptist is imprisoned not in a cistern but in a desert mine shaft; he is brought up in a rickety cage. The Jewish theologians in Herod’s circle are not averse to sipping champagne as they argue the Law. Sand dunes stretch into the far distance, and James Ingalls’s lighting hints at a menace lurking in the dark. Black angels with white wings periodically appear, watching and waiting. There might be a provocative allegory at work here—these ostensibly Christian angels have a certain Al Qaeda look—but what really matters is that Flimm creates a charged space in which something terrible is bound to occur.

Happily, most of the campy clichés that dog this opera have been suppressed. Herod is too often conceived as a dirty old man, and an aging tenor is let loose to chew the scenery. In fact, Herod is supposed to be quite a bit younger than his wife, Herodias; she acts like his mother, which makes the incestuousness of the scenario all the creepier. Allan Glassman, stepping in on short notice for Siegfried Jerusalem, sang the part instead of rasping it, and in the process revealed some trace of nobility, some tremor of moral compass, at the heart of the wormy tyrant. Larissa Diadkova, on the other hand, was too composed as Herodias; she could have chewed a little more. Albert Dohmen was a rock-solid John the Baptist. (This week, Bryn Terfel takes over the role.) There were some notable singers in the smaller parts: Matthew Polenzani lent his stylish tenor to Narraboth, and Morris Robinson, a former Citadel college football star, showed a glorious bass voice as the First Nazarene.

The shaky link of the evening was, surprisingly, Valery Gergiev. The conductor knows this score by heart, and he obtains his usual painterly sounds. There were trombone chords like groans from Hell, string tremolos like moonlight on water. But the middle of the opera, from Herod’s entrance to the Dance, sped by in a confusing blur. Many lovely, eerie touches were obscured—the little woodwind runs that suggest Narraboth’s blood dripping on the floor, for example—and the brass sounded flustered throughout. Slow down, Maestro: “Salome” is one of the briefest operas in the repertory, and every detail is worth savoring.

Earlier this month, the Met unveiled a largely nondescript production of “Don Giovanni.” It caused me to reflect on the legacy of Joseph Volpe, the Met’s general manager, who recently announced that he would be stepping down in 2006. As usual, the cast featured singers of high polish: Thomas Hampson as the Don, René Pape as Leporello, Anja Harteros as Donna Anna, Christine Goerke as Donna Elvira, Hei-Kyung Hong as Zerlina. But with “Don Giovanni” polish is not enough; Hampson lacked demonic drive, the joy of excess. Pape so completely stole the show that many people may have wondered why he wasn’t singing the title role, as he has been doing in Europe. (Answer: contracts signed years in advance.) The best that can be said of Marthe Keller’s production is that it has none of the bombast of the affair that preceded it, by Franco Zeffirelli. High brick walls predominate, in front of which perilously little happens; it appears as if funding had been cut off halfway through set construction, which, given the Met’s current financial difficulties, might have been the case. The combination of this lacklustre “Don” and the sensational “Salome” encapsulates the lotterylike unevenness of the company’s productions in the past decade.

Dawn Fatale, the pseudonymous Internet-based opera watchdog, has posted a screed on OperaList arguing that the next general manager of the Met should be something other than a ruthless administrator with a knack for whipping divas into shape. Instead, Fatale says, Volpe’s successor needs to be “a compelling spokesperson for the importance of live opera performance in New York and America’s cultural life”—a charismatic executive with a unified theatrical vision and a flair for marketing. Volpe and James Levine have maintained the Met’s historic eminence, but they have done almost nothing to renovate the company’s image. For too long, the Met has subsisted as a tautology: it presents grand opera on a grand scale because that is what the Met has always done. Falling attendance figures suggest that such complacency is inadequate, even suicidal. Like every major classical institution, the Met must devise new ways to sell itself to an uncomprehending but not incurious culture. In truth, the cancellation of “Salome” in 1907 marked not the last gasp of Victorian mores but the beginning of a century of caution. Surely it is time for the Met to get the J. P. Morgan out of its system once and for all. Why does opera matter? Karita Mattila can tell you.

I write much more about Salome in the opening chapter of my book The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century, now available in paperback.