Alex Ross: The Rest Is Noise

Let's play pfootball!

I'm flattered to find that Seattle blogger-singer Peter Garbes has named his fantasy football team the Hans Pfitzner Blues Explosion, in honor of an old post on this site. The Fredösphere is the great originator.

Merkel's Wagner

It appears that Angela Merkel might become the next Chancellor of Germany. Which would mean, among other things, that Germany would once again be run by an enthusiastic and knowledgeable Wagner-lover. Before you see anything sinister or regressive in that potentiality, though, you should read some comments that Merkel made in July of this year, in an interview with the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. The article ran to nearly five thousand words, and it was devoted entirely to the subject of Wagner. An excerpt, roughly and hastily translated:

F.A.Z.: In the third act of Parsifal, God himself speaks. Or so said Romain Rolland. As a Protestant minister’s daughter, what did you make of the voodoo-magic which Christoph Schlingensief unleashed last year in Bayreuth?

Merkel: After Schlingensief’s Parsifal in Bayreuth, I attended Lehnhoff’s Parsifal in Baden-Baden. I confess I had a better time there. On the day of the Bayreuth opening, I resolved to be an open listener. I did not want to batten down the hatches; I wanted to give the new a chance. But this production made excessive demands on me. Herr Schlingensief had many very interesting ideas, but I found that the piece now radiated too many stimuli, a multilayeredness of perceptions, which had a distracting character. The music moved into the background, which led some singers to have the impression that they were no longer at the center of things. It is also interesting to learn from younger people that they had a better time dealing with this immense quantity of stimuli. I probably should admit to the fact that I belong to the over-fifty crowd, and that younger people obviously have an easier time navigating this flood of stimuli around us. I belong among those who are comfortable with silence. For example, I regard Lufthansa’s innovation of playing disembarkation music as no improvement on my quality of life.

F.A.Z.: Kundry experiences redemption through annihilation. It is well known that she is not the only figure in Wagner’s oeuvre in whom traces of anti-Semitism have been discovered. On the other side we know about Hitler’s Götterdämmerung fantasies in the Führer bunker. As a Wagner-lover today, can you simply set this aside this dimension of the work?

Merkel: To set aside is to suppress. One cannot dismiss the concatenation of Wagner with National Socialism, because it was, unfortunately, a historical reality. That is the way it is. Wagner’s work must be interpreted anew and seen anew for today's time — as has been tried in various ways since the end of National Socialism. For me, the Kundry figure is a rather interesting female character. Nevertheless, we should be at all times conscious of where anti-Semitic tendencies might lie. Once you put it out in the open, you banish the danger that such a connotation could remain implicit in interpretations which are no longer acceptable [or something like that]. The total reduction of Wagner’s music to the ideological dimension, which happened in the National Socialist period, later led many people to a total rejection of Wagner. That reduction was an abuse, which covered up the unbelievable many-sidedness of the music, its textual and motivic connections, its progressive tendencies, and it still blocks the entrance to Wagner today. As a result, the modernity of Wagner’s music is, alas, completely overlooked. Many twentieth-century composers partook of Wagner’s compositional technique. I urge that the abuse of Wagner be looked at an open and critical fashion, so that more people can gain access to this great musician. And it’s good to see that exactly this is already happening.

Trent Lott's sonata

There is now a composition entitled Trent Lott's Porch, courtesy of M. Keiser. It uses the first of the two Katrina hexachords.

All things shine

Having spent five days locked in a hotel room writing, I escaped for a few hours and drove up Highway 1 to the paradise of Point Reyes. Next week, a New Yorker column on new CDs, plus notes on many more recent recordings on the blog.

Dr. Gene Scott

The admirably weird Dr. Gene Scott is still on TV here in San Francisco, despite the fact that he died last February. During the dismal post-college year that I lived in Berkeley (my fault, not Berkeley's), I fell into the habit of watching Dr. Scott in the middle of the night, trying to grasp what on earth he was driving at. He was a maverick televangelist with a Captain Ahab beard who held forth in an inexplicably mesmerizing Idaho baritone on a bizarre variety of topics, from the minutiae of Hebrew, Greek, and Latin versions of the Bible (he was evidently quite learned, and earned the "Dr.") to the secrets of the Pyramids. Sometimes he would disappear from the screen for long stretches, to be replaced by footage of racehorses or polka dancers. One evening, as he was reading aloud from the occult pop history Holy Blood, Holy Grail. I decided to make a tape composition out of his recitation of facts concerning the Spear of Destiny, and combined it with a loop of the final notes of Salome. The result was judged uniquely disturbing by the two people who heard it. Dr. Scott seemed free of the hard-heartedness that drives other pseudo-Christians on TV; he avoided hot-button social issues, although he did once advise George Bush Sr. to nuke Iraq. There were questions about the financial structure of his church, which, no doubt, the IRS is still busy sorting out. If he did engage in chicanery, he couldn't really be accused of being a hypocrite, since his religious system was so murky to begin with. He was a divine American kook of a sort they don't manufacture anymore.

No argument there

Peggy Noonan: "...it's a bad sign.... No president should be surrounded by dry heavers."

Miau

Justin Davidson: "The Metropolitan Opera commissions new works with the cautiousness of a cat on the edge of a bathtub."

One Eagle Hill

I essentially haven't moved from this hotel room in three days, except to buy new socks and meet a couple of people. I'm trying to write a very long article in a very short span of time. As you can see, I have been working on the world's smallest desk. I am quite proud of the improvisation with the ironing board. The red book on the desk is Richard Rhodes' The Making of the Atomic Bomb, which might give you some clue as to what I'm doing here. (No, not that, Homeland Security!) Sade's Lovers Rock is playing — a record that gets better with time.

Cupcake wars

There is an entertaining but erroneous article about cupcakes in New York magazine. The author expends much ink detailing a feud between the Magnolia and Buttercup bakeries, failing to acknowledge that Billy's is better than either.

New blogs

Please welcome Marc Geelhoed, who promises to deliver sharp coverage of the music scene in Chicago, and Classical Domain, which aims for a comprehensive listing of classical events in New York City. (More new music, bitte, but this is a great resource that I'll be checking every day.) And note two singer blogs, which are new at least to me: Histoires de Moi and the Canadienne. In my last column for The New Yorker, I touted Jeremy Denk's site; I'd have done the same for Mostly Mozart breakout star Erin Wall (aka the Canadienne) if I'd known she was in the game. Blogging seems to be an excellent outlet for singers on the road: living in hotels can be lonely. Here I am, watching Adamsian tankers rise from San Francisco Bay.