Alex Ross: The Rest Is Noise

The super-cool hippie aunt

Taylor Ho Bynum's funny and moving reminiscence of his long friendship with Lorraine Hunt Lieberson. (Via Do the Math.)

Met opening

Alas, no pictures of Jude Law.

Dyer not dire

Richard Dyer bids farewell after thirty-some years as critic of the Boston Globe with an eloquent, hopeful essay on music's future: "The whole history of Western music is all there as a resource and an inspiration for the person who wants to discover it and for the composer who wants to use it. But the paramount issue remains: how to make a person want to discover it. In the final analysis that's not a question for the music business or the educator or the media, although they can help or hinder. This remains, as it has always been, the primary challenge for the creator or the interpreter, the composer who creates the message and the performer who delivers it. If the message and the performance are human, compelling, craftsmanlike, and honest, they will reach the public. `From the heart,' Beethoven wrote on the score of the Missa Solemnis, 'may it go to the heart.'"

Met begins world domination

You may not have heard, but some new things are happening at the Metropolitan Opera. On Monday, the company opens its season with Anthony Minghella's production of Madama Butterfly. There will also be live broadcasts out on Lincoln Center Plaza and in Times Square, and Sirius Radio will kick off the Met opera channel. The Met website is bursting with fresh material, including an advice column called Ask Figaro. (Q: "Do I have to go out and find one of those glasses on a stick that Mrs. Howell used to use on Gilligan’s Island? Please help! A: They’re called 'lorgnettes,' and they haven’t been spotted at the Met in about 80 years. But, hey, don’t let that stop you. If you feel like making lorgnettes hip again, wielding a set on the Grand Tier would be a great place to start.") More on these lively initiatives in the New Yorker soon. The critics were asked not to comment on the Butterfly dress rehearsal, which was opened to the public at an unprecedented "open house" on Friday, but I will say this: If you are interested in attending a performance, you might want to get tickets now, because once people see what Minghella has done with the opera the run is going to sell out very quickly.

Lorraine one last time

Fervor. The New Yorker, Sept. 26, 2006.

WGBH will broadcast a live recording of Peter Lieberson's astoundingly beautiful Neruda Songs, with Lorraine singing, this Sunday at 2PM. You can listen to a web simulcast here. I am told that a recording will be available before too long, although details are yet to be announced. The three great recordings are the Bach Cantatas, the Handel Arias, and the DVD of Theodora; also fairly essential are Adams's El Niño, the Idomeneo, and the Bridge Lieberson CD with Rilke Songs. About to be released on Naxos is an excellent John Harbison CD, with the singer lavishing her blues style on the song cycle North and South. A fairly complete discography is available below. For the New Yorker's fast-growing website I did a podcast, in which you can hear part of "Deep River." Thanks to Steve Smith and The Standing Room for their help.

Photo: Avie Records.

Mahler's salary corrected

When Peter Schledorn mentioned my recent post on a Mahler discussion list, he drew a reply from none other than Henry-Louis de La Grange, author of the monumental, four-volume Mahler biography, who asserted that the figure of $90,000 quoted in the English edition of Mahler's letters to his wife is a misprint, and that it should have read $30,000. This correction is happily entered in the record. The average salary in America in 1910 was, incidentally, $750 a year.

Event

Tonight (Sept. 19) I will be appearing at a panel on "Critics and the Arts," in the distinguished company of the New Yorker's Joan Acocella, Greil Marcus, Mark Stevens, and Wendy Lesser. It's at Lang Recital Hall at Hunter College, at 7PM.

"Grimes, Grimes, Grimes, Grimes..."

Video of Jon Vickers's devastating performance as the sadistic fisherman. (Via Steve Smith. Available on a VAI DVD, "Jon Vickers: Four Operatic Portraits.")

Karajan pigeon action

Mitchell Agoos recalls the time he protested one of Herbert von Karajan's first American appearances by releasing pigeons from the balcony of Carnegie Hall. (Via Matthew Guerrieri.) Richard Osborne, describing the episode in his Karajan biography, said that only three pigeons took flight, and that two others were found suffocated in a briefcase. The two-time Nazi surely deserved some kind of protest, but was it necessary to kill pigeons in the process? Those were the days, in any case.

Is Mahler overpaid?

Eyebrows have been raised over recent reports that James Levine receives a salary of $1.6 from the Boston Symphony and $1.9 million from the Met, and that Lorin Maazel gets $2.6 million from the New York Philharmonic. Excessive or no, salaries on this scale are nothing new. Not long ago Cornell University Press published Gustav Mahler: Letters to His Wife, in Antony Beaumont's meticulous translation, and I found there a detail that I hadn't noticed in previous Mahler tomes: in March 1911, even as his health went in fatal decline, GM signed a new contract at the New York Philharmonic for ninety concerts at a fee of $90,000. I ran that through the inflation calculator and came up with the figure of $1.8 million in today's money. Not bad for a man who thought his time had not yet come.

Update: Kenneth Woods runs more figures and finds that Mahler was paid $20,000 per concert, as opposed to $58,000 for Maazel. "Mr. Maazel deserves everything he makes and more," he proposes, adding that Peyton Manning gets $1 million for every football game he plays. Indeed, classical music is very small potatoes compared to the remainder of the American military-industrial-cultural complex. By the way, the person in charge of the Philharmonic in 1911 was Mary R. Sheldon, the wife of the treasurer of the Republican National Committee.

Further update: According to Mahler biographer Henry-Louis de La Grange, the new edition of Mahler's letters contains a misprint: the figure should be $30,000, not $90,000.