Alex Ross: The Rest Is Noise

Dudamel is not the savior of classical music

In finely measured fashion, Bob Shingleton lodges a protest against the idea that Gustavo Dudamel is, to quote a recent Newsweek article, "saving classical music." Classical music has many saviors, Bob replies; all over the world, musicians, teachers, administrators, and ordinary music-lovers are working to extend a thousand-year tradition that has been tested many times and never been broken. And what is it that classical music needs to be saved from? Among other things, from media outlets that have all but eliminated classical music from their coverage, paying attention to it only on the rare occasion when an artist acquires the weird chemistry of "star value." Stardom in the American mode is a devouring force, and Bob is right to warn Dudamel — a greatly gifted musician, with room to grow — to be wary of the corporate machine that churns behind it. The ultimate elite, as I've pointed out before, resides in pop culture, and classical music is oddly lucky to be on the other side of the great celebrity divide.

CD of the Week: New York Polyphony

"Mem" from Crecquillon's Lamentationes Jeremiae, from New York Polyphony's album endBeginning (BIS-SACD-1949, available 2/28; eClassical download already available).

Two fun facts about New York Polyphony baritone Christopher Dylan Herbert: in his capacity as an observer of Middle Eastern affairs, he has worked for the Defense Advanced Projects Research Agency's Integrated Crisis Early Warning System; and he is Martha Stewart's nephew.

Miscellany: Finckel, Fairouz, Philly, etc.

There's been something of an earthquake in the seldom seismic world of chamber music: David Finckel, the big-toned cellist of the Emerson String Quartet for all but three years of its thirty-six-year existence, will exit the group at the end of the current season. Because his place will be taken by the gifted Welsh cellist Paul Watkins, no one feels great alarm. Still, it's a bit of a shock.... The Opera Company of Philadelphia, evidently bucking the trends that shuttered Opera Boston and nearly brought down New York City Opera, have announced an adventurous 2012-13 season: Britten's Owen Wingrave, Adès's Powder Her Face, and Kevin Puts's Silent Night alongside La Bohème and The Magic Flute. David Patrick Stearns has more.... On Thursday, Miller Theater presents the world premiere of Poems and Prayers, the third symphony of Mohammed Fairouz.... Juilliard's AXIOM give Rihm's Jagden und Formen a spin on Feb. 17. On Feb. 27, Jeffrey Milarsky leads the annual concert of Juilliard student composers. Both shows are free.... In coming days, the Avant Music Festival offers a centenary performance of Pierrot lunaire, a rendition of Eve Beglarian's Songs from the River and Elsewhere, and a Randy Gibson piece with a really long title.... The Electronic Music Foundation presents electronic works of Luigi Nono between Feb. 26 and Feb. 28.... Stucky time in NYC: the Philharmonic plays his Son et lumière Feb. 23-28, the Pittsburgh Symphony his Rachel Carson-inspired Silent Spring on Feb. 26. (The New Yorker published Carson's work just shy of fifty years ago.) ... Notable musicological tomes now in stores: Susan McClary's Desire and Pleasure in Seventeenth-Century Music, Christopher Gibbs's one-volume "college edition" of Richard Taruskin's Oxford History of Western Music.... Worth a close read: John Halle's extended essay on new music and Occupy Wall Street. A footnote to the section on Obama and the arts: his FY 2013 budget calls for a slight increase in arts funding.

Clipping

"One does not write, luminously, on a dark field; the alphabet of stars alone does that.... Man pursues black upon white."

                — Mallarmé

Nothing says forever like an Alban Berg Valentine

DR. SCHÖN: Now — comes — the execution . . .

(While Lulu prepares for her dance number, the curtain falls.)

                            — Lulu, Act I

Previously: An Alban Berg Valentine, Another Alban Berg Valentine, Yet Another Alban Berg Valentine, Return of Alban Berg Valentine.

Classical music in America

The Asian-American basketball star Jeremy Lin, talking about his experiences playing on the Ivy League circuit in 2008: "I hear everything: 'Go back to China. Orchestra is on the other side of campus. Open up your eyes' . . . They're yelling at me before, during and after." (Via Andrew Patner.)

Aptest eve

In a column on Philip Glass in this week's New Yorker, I say that Einstein on the Beach "shows how great art can be assembled from junk fragments of an anti-artistic society." Not coincidentally, I end with lines from Wallace Stevens's 1938 poem "The Man on the Dump." Here is the closing section:

One sits and beats an old tin can, lard pail.
One beats and beats for that which one believes.
That's what one wants to get near. Could it after all
Be merely oneself, as superior as the ear
To a crow's voice? Did the nightingale torture the ear,
Pack the heart and scratch the mind? And does the ear
Solace itself in peevish birds? Is it peace,
Is it a philosopher's honeymoon, one finds
On the dump? 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?
Where was it one first heard of the truth? The the.

Joan Richardson, in her two-volume biography of Stevens, notes that the poet was fascinated by a trash dump near his home in Hartford, Connecticut, and took particular interest in a Russian refugee "who built a shack out of old boxes, tin cans, and bottles" and "lived there as a semihermit for several years." That image becomes a metaphor for the dilemma of the artist in the modern world. Helen Vendler, in On Extended Wings, describes three possibilities: "to sit on the dump and say 'I am sitting on a dump'; to sit and say 'This is not a dump but a garden'; to sit, see that the scene is a dump, and nevertheless say 'This dump is a flower garden.' Stevens is unwilling, as a poet, to give in to the depressing naturalism of the first; the second seems to him a romantic falsification; but he does not know quite know whether the third is possible, and hence resorts to questions...." I'd note also that when Stevens has something supremely important to say he often reduces his language to monosyllables.

What's wonderful about the conceit is that the bits of poetry that Stevens imagines being uttered on the dump — "aptest eve," "invisible priest," "stanza my stone" — are outdated, musty, redolent of some student attempt at Symbolism. Yet in conjunction with the dull matter of the scene — bottles, pots, shoes, grass — they assume sentimental power. The great poem takes in both the gutter and the stars, to adapt the famous phrase from Oscar Wilde. All this has something to do with why Einstein — an opera built from miscellaneous images, meaningless scraps of language, and jingle-like musical phrases — exerts such incalculable force. Incidentally, Stevens attended the world premiere of Virgil Thomson and Gertrude Stein's Four Saints in Three Acts, a crucial predecessor to Einstein, perhaps its only predecessor. (Mark Morris presents Four Saints at BAM in March.) To Harriet Monroe, Stevens wrote: "While this is an elaborate bit of perversity in every respect: texts, settings, choreography, it is most agreeable musically, so that, if one excludes aesthetic self-consciousness from one's attitude, the opera immediately becomes a delicate and joyous work all round." The same could be said of Einstein.

Björk in Queens

Today I dropped by the New York Hall of Science to see the set-up for Björk's Biophilia residency, which incorporates live shows, interactive technologies, and educational programs. Below, the Great Hall, with light filtering in from outside and the singing Tesla coil in action. A bit more on the project soon.

John Williams at 80

When Close Encounters of the Third Kind was released, in 1977, I was nine, and I went to see it five or six times. In retrospect, it was probably John Williams's dazzling, polystylistic score that mesmerized me most; this was my introduction to the sounds of the twentieth century. Williams deserves praise not only for writing a pile of splendid scores — Close Encounters remains, I think, his finest work — but for sustaining the tradition of orchestral film music at a time when synthesizers and pop-song montages threatened to put it out of business. As I noticed when I wrote about Michael Giacchino for The New Yorker a couple of years ago, many people in the Hollywood music community feel that Williams saved their jobs. Happy birthday!

La main du maître

Feldman's Guston on CD

From Fanfare magazine, November/December 1992.

 

FELDMAN: For Philip Guston.  Eberhard Blum, piccolo, flute, and alto flute; Nils Vigeland, piano and celesta; Jan Williams, glockenspiel, vibraphone, marimba and chimes.  hat ART CD 4-61041/2/3/4 [DDD]; 65:50, 67:35, 65:39, 66:12.  Produced by Pia & Werner X. Uehlinger.

FELDMAN: Piece for Four Pianos.  Intermission VI.  Piano—Four Hands.  Two Pieces for Two Pianos.  Two Pianos.  Five Pianos.  Le Bureau des Pianistes.  SUB ROSA SUB CD018-41 [DDD]; 72:38.  Recorded by Anne Fontigny.

FELDMAN: The Viola in My Life (1).  False Relationships and the Extended Ending (2).  Why Patterns? (3)  Morton Feldman, conductor; Karen Philips, viola; Anahid Ajemian, violin; Seymour Barab, cello; David Tudor, piano; Paula Robison, flute; Arthur Bloom, clarinet; Raymond DesRoches, percussion. (1)  Morton Feldman, conductor; Matthew Raimondi, violin; Seymour Barab, cello; Paul Jacobs and Yuji Takahashi, pianos; Arnold Fromme, trombone; Richard Fitz, percussion. (2)  Eberhard Blum, flute; Jan Williams, percussion; Morton Feldman, piano. (2) CRI CD 620 [ADD]; 74:58.  Produced by Carter Harman (1,2)  and Carter Thomas. (3)

 

            Listening to these works of Morton Feldman, which range in length from 1'46" to four and a half hours, I thought repeatedly of Gustav Mahler.  Nothing in the sounds suggested the association; rather, it was the shadowy intent behind the music, the purposes around which the notes were arranged.  Both composers force basic questions upon us:  How does music relate to the world?  How does music relate to this world, a world increasingly inimical to the uses of musical tradition?  Mahler famously proclaimed: "The symphony must be like the world; it must embrace everything."  But his music sometimes strains to escape, to reach some white and empty refuge—the uncanny stillness of "Ich bin der Welt abhanden gekommen" and the closing section of the Ninth Symphony.  These episodes of utter abnegation in Mahler are not touched by pathos, by the imminence of death or other platitudes; rather they are the meditations of a mind so far-reaching and subtle that the future course of musical history lay clear and open to it.  Mahler foresaw another way; Feldman followed it.  Music must not be like the world, it must embrace nothing.

            I am prompted to bring up Mahler for two reasons.  One is the question of Jewishness in the music of both composers.  Mahler strived to grasp everything under the sun, but avoided material of a recognizably Jewish character; Feldman, at the opposite extreme, forbids anything recognizable, anything "from outside"—except those Hebraic melodies which momentously haunt his works on occasion.  He said in an interview: "I want to be the first great composer that was Jewish."  That utterance was not arrogant but deliberately precise: Feldman would be the first great composer to affirm his Jewishness in spite of the world.  While his music might be lost to the world, the world is not lost to him.  Through George Steiner, Feldman received Theodor Adorno's dictum that art might not be possible after Auschwitz, and he hung that thought over every bar: the music can exist, but at a terrible price.  It can divorce itself, it can descend into the utmost solitude and quiet, but it cannot be at peace.    

            Mahler also comes to mind when one is contemplating the question of musical scale.  For Philip Guston is vast, one of the largest fully notated instrumental works ever recorded.  (It is the largest, if one averages total timings for the two recordings by which its chief competitor, the Sorabji Opus Clavicembalisticum, has become available.  An even longer Feldman work for string quartet awaits recording.)  Yet the problem of size seems rather insignificant.  Listening to the Sorabji, and to the Brian Gothic Symphony, I am bothered by the question of necessity—does the music need to present itself on this scale?  Feldman's immensity arrives like a natural phenomenon, a meteor-impact in the landscape of an ordinary day.  There is no question of sampling the work, of examining fragments: the four-and-a-half-hour span is unbroken and indivisible.  As in Mahler and Bruckner, the length seems inevitable; but unlike the Austrians, Feldman provides no clear features in his landscape by which forward progress might be marked, by which the passage of time might be judged.  Quotidian space-time is lifted away.  To reemerge into the world from this work is to see everything in its colorlessness, its drabness, its impurity.  There is no frame around the music's beauty; it therefore poisons the outside.

            This extravagant length of this gift-work has an ironic subtext.  Feldman (1926-1987) was very close to painter Philip Guston in the New York abstractionist heyday; the friendship faded as Guston allowed figuration and other worldly traces to intrude on his canvases.  Feldman, in contrast, stayed intransigently true to the late-modernist approach that also produced the writings of Samuel Beckett and the paintings of Frank Stella.  (There is a cinematic analogue as well: Michael Snow's Wavelength, a 45-minute film consisting of a slow zoom toward pictures on a wall.)  Feldman offers us the prospect of a trance, but forces us to stay awake.  What first appears to be a serene landscape turns into strange and confusing terrain, covered by minute growths that mysteriously  impede progress.  A few particularly alarming instances: the appearance of slithering chromatic motifs (II/4/13:05: the four-note utterance on the bells), the insistence on single tones (II/4, intermittently throughout), dreamlike the repetition of seductive rhythmic patterns (III/4/6:28: 5/4 vs. triplet rhythms, with spastic accents from the flute).  And across this terrain, phantoms pass, near-diatonic harmonies that flicker in the ear; they disappear before one can make associations.  The passage for flute and vibraphone at I/4/5:56 is an example; the motif C-G-A flat-E flat that resounds through the work is another.  At the very close, Feldman unveils an uncanny scale-like melody that descends by jagged intervals: some revelation seems to be at hand, but the end comes suddenly.  (Only once, to my knowledge, did Feldman let the fog lift entirely: at the end of Rothko Chapel, he let the Jewish viola-melody stand alone in simple harmonic garb.) 

            Much of what I have been struggling to say about this music is said clearly and eloquently in Art Lange's notes for this release:  "The length of For Philip Guston is deceptive.  Like a visual artist, Feldman was concerned with scale, not size, so that his near-obsessive concentration on intricate detail and his sensual attraction to the material sensitizes and energizes space, erases the time frame, alters our sense of perspective.  Despite the seeming simplicity of intervals and rhythms, the music is constantly changing; for example, though the the three instrumental lines are frequently coordinated and interact in various ways (syncopation, hocket, Klangfarbenmelodie, etc.) ... a simultaneous juxtapostion of meters (3/16 with 3/8 and 3/32, or 7/4 with 5/4 and 6/4) means they are never perfectly synchronized.  Similarly, motifs that seem to recur at various places seldom if ever repeat literally.  So the tranquility of the music's surface is an illusion; feelings of melancholy, confusion, wonder, sorrow, and affirmation exist equally in the moment and in the memory."  To come to terms with the piece, Lange allowed himself the luxury of writing in a loose, aphoristic structure, under the heading "13 Ways of Looking at For Philip Guston."  This extraordinary music defeats ordinary attempts at description.

            The performance is nearly as difficult to describe.  Its principal qualities—evenness of tone, chilling exactitude of execution, imperturbable patience—might not seem praiseworthy in another context; but as Mike Silverton has pointed out in past reviews of this hat Art ensemble, the avoidance of emotional expressivity is crucial in this music, whose character is not displayed bar to bar but rather emerges over the long span.  The sounds are not expressed, they simply occur; in Feldman's remote and inverted universe, their beauty is therefore magnified.  The remarkable recording performs a similar service.  Conventional wisdom might have dictated a distant and ambient setting: hat Art plunges us into the midst of the ensemble, almost uncomfortably close, but without a hint of distortion.  Another paradox is therefore achieved: Feldman, aloof from his listeners, engulfs them. 

            I do not mean faint praise when I say that this recording is difficult to confront and comprehend: Feldman was one of our greatest artists, and For Philip Guston will count among his principal achievements.  But it is also a frightening and unsettling event, not to be rapidly consumed.  Most of us live our lives at a pace that will exclude this music automatically; unlike the symphonies of Mahler, its hour may never arrive.  My guess is that Feldman's choice to work on larger and larger canvases toward the end of his life was dictated by a need to put that hour off, to make his art more and more remote from the noise in the street.  I am reminded of another poem by Wallace Stevens, Esthétique du Mal: "The greatest poverty is not to live / In a physical world, to feel that one's desire / Is too difficult to tell from despair."  The pleasure-seeker in me wishes that Feldman had written more works like Rothko Chapel, in which a slender hand is stretched out to the world at the end.   

                                                                                               

            Sub Rosa's collection presents Feldman at lesser extremes.  The works for two or more pianos are anchored in an aesthetic of sonorousness, and their much smaller scale does not result in the time-bending disorientation characteristic of the later music.  All but one of these pieces date from the 1950s, and the texture is rather more active and uneven.  Two Pieces for Two Pianos (1954) is a fully notated work in an almost Webernian mode, with bursts of sound replacing the signature sustained tones; Intermission VI (1953), while more typical of the later Feldman, is also aphoristically brief.  Two Pianos, Piece for Four Pianos, and Piano—Four Hands, from 1957 and 1958, show the full influence of John Cage: the players proceed at their own tempi, or alter freely the durations of the chords.  The fifteen-minute Four Pianos strikes me as an early masterpiece—the basic melodic material, in rising fifths, is voluptuous, and Feldman allows it to unfold generously.  The final work on the program, Five Pianos from 1972, is much longer than the others, and extends their techniques and moods.  Feldman does not introduce his principal material until three minutes in—an almost sentimental motif in falling fourths, with the pianists humming softly underneath, followed by a complex and upward-seeking scale-melody.  The working-out of these subjects occupies the rest of the half hour. 

            This semi-indeterminate music requires not only sympathetic execution but creative collaboration,  and Le Bureau des Pianistes supplies both.  The ensemble consists of Laurence Cornez, Kaat de Windt, Jean-Luc Fafchamps, and Jean-Luc Plouvier; Stephane Ginsburgh joins them for Five Pianos.  The Feldman that emerges has a tinge of Romantic intensity, not at all inappropriate in these earlier works.  The sound is excellent, although a greater depth of field might have been preferable; documentation is intelligent but sparse.  Sub Rosa is an absolutely fascinating Belgian label that disregards conventional barriers in choosing repertory to record.  I have heard three other things from them, all mesmerizing: a magnificent anthology of Dadaist, Futurist, and Surrealist compositions (Russolo's noise-machines, performance art by Marinetti and Jean Cocteau, semi-electronic music by Marcel Duchamps, Kurt Schwitters' crucial Sonate in Urlauten, and much else); Break Through in Grey Room, a compilation of cut-up tape experiments from William S. Burroughs and Brion Gysin (including a 1973 Burroughs-Ornette Coleman duet); and the pompous, barbaric, and thrillingly off-kilter Baptism by the Slovenian industrial-rock band Laibach (replete with quotations from Liszt's Faust Symphony).  I hope more Sub Rosa releases, from all genres, will arrive at Fanfare.

            Finally, CRI continues its "American Masters" series with three works from Feldman's middle period.  Two of these—The Viola in My Life and False Relationships and the Extended Ending—are familiar from CRI LPs; Why Patterns? has been recorded by hat Art and New Albion, although this reading with Feldman at the piano has lain unheard since 1978.  Eberhard Blum and Jan Williams, performing with Feldman, are two-thirds of the hat Art ensemble that gave us both For Philip Guston and the recent Why Patterns? (CD 2-60801/2; ravely reviewed by Mike Silverton in Fanfare 15:1).  Differences between Blum/Williams/Feldman and Blum/Williams/Vigeland are hard to discern, but they are there: the earlier Blum is not as glacially smooth and regal as the later, and Feldman accentuates moments here and there at the piano that Vigeland glides over (a bit of menace in repeated strokes just before the six-minute mark, for example).  CRI comes in two minutes ahead of hat Art, and a minute behind members of the California EAR Unit recorded by New Albion (NA039CD)—whom Silverton rightly described in 15:4 as more "dramatically expressive," with an air of "subtly enraptured fantasy."  That severe hat Art sound which Silverton called "pure and non-referential" remains the most persuasive, although this slightly more gestural composer-led reading must be taken into account.

            CRI also gives us Viola in My Life, one of two works bearing that title (the other is scored for full orchestra).  In his superb notes for this release, Nils Vigeland finds Viola to be "exceptional" in Feldman's output, standing with Rothko Chapel as "the only music of Feldman which suggests some equivocation on his part concerning the extraordinary absence of traditional concepts of contrast and development in the rest of his music ... There is a decidedly tonal quality, often diatonic, to this melodic writing ... [passages that are] associated with expressions of loss, highly personal in character."  The diatonic ghosts of which I spoke earlier are indeed thick across the page in this unusually eventful work, although there is no unrestrained eruption of melody as at the end of Rothko Chapel.  (New Albion's recording is very fine, but it does not match the intensity of the original Gregg Smith Singers recording on Odyssey, in which ice-cold pillars of choral sound loomed over the solitary song of Karen Philips' viola.)  False Relationships and the Extended Ending has a playful title but is dominated by dark undercurrents; as Vigeland notes, "two groups of instruments (violin-trombone-piano and cello-two pianos-chimes) go their separate ways," but a forceful structure emerges through the insistence on a single tone (E-flat/D-sharp), and particularly through the stark utterances of the trombone.  One need only glance at the distinguished names in the headnote to know that the composer-conducted performances are authoritative; CRI's recordings capture the colors of these unique ensembles, and tape hiss is unobtrusive in the all-important silences.  All three recordings under consideration are essential additions to a Feldman collection; I would recommend the CRI particularly as a good first approach to the composer.

Halftime music

There's much discussion of a Chrysler ad that aired during the Super Bowl, a popular American sporting contest. I was pulled in not only by the rasp of Clint Eastwood's voice but also by the intriguingly dour score, which avoids the ersatz Coplandisms you might expect in this context. (Compare the infamous Rick Perry "Strong" ad.) It reminds me a little of Jóhann Jóhannsson's music for The Miners' Hymns. A few minutes' search on the Internet yielded the information that the score is the work of the Portland musician Alison Ables, who plays in the instrumental trio Strange Holiday. The brass section includes Lydia Van Dreel, professor of French horn at the University of Oregon School of Music and Dance. The producer is Collin Hegna, another musician active in the Portland indie scene, and the current bass player of the neo-psychedelic band Brian Jonestown Massacre. No wonder Karl Rove doesn't like it.

Boston in vain

Jeremy Eichler, masterfully evoking a recent performance of Georg Friedrich Haas's in vain by Sound Icon: "...the lights go out and you listen in complete, disorienting darkness. The walls are gone. The musicians are gone. Your neighbor is gone. It is night, and you are suddenly alone with this music of a strange, tremulous beauty."

Hitler's favorite opera?

Various media outlets are making much of a story about the Deutsche Oper being forced to reschedule a gala performance of Wagner's Rienzi that would have coincided with Hitler's birthday. Amplifying the outrage are claims that Rienzi was "Hitler's favorite opera," "Hitler's favorite Wagner opera," or, more oddly, "Hitler's favorite Wagner production." I recall James Jorden some time ago skeptically cataloguing contradictory statements about Hitler's Lieblingsoper, though I can't seem to find the post. In any case, typing the relevant phrases into Google shows the problem. The special opera is said to have been Rienzi, Die Meistersinger ("probably Hitler's favorite," Ernst Hanfstaegl said), Götterdämmerung, Tristan, Parsifal, Lohengrin, Eugen d'Albert's Tiefland, and The Merry Widow. To avoid trouble, German opera houses may have to avoid programming any of these works on April 20.

The main thing that is known about Hitler and Rienzi is that a 1905 performance of the opera in Linz inspired him to begin thinking of a political career. Hitler identified strongly with Wagner's portrayal of the "people's tribune" — a nobler figure than the ultimately decadent demagogue of Edward Bulwer-Lytton's novel — and drew political lessons from Rienzi's defeat, as Hans Rudolf Vaget, the brilliant Thomas Mann scholar, has noted. In the essay "Hitler's Wagner," which appears in the anthology Music and Nazism, Vaget observes that in 1930 Hitler evidently spoke to Otto Wagener of his "special liking" for Rienzi. (Wagener had assumed that Hitler wouldn't care for the opera because it shows a popular leader falling prey to intrigues. They were deciding whether to see Rienzi or Rosenkavalier.) And, yes, the autograph manuscript of Rienzi may have gone with Hitler to the bunker, along with the original scores of Die Feen and Das Liebesverbot and various manuscripts related to the Ring. (Interestingly, though, Sven Friedrich, the director of the Wagner archive in Bayreuth, believes that this material stayed at Hitler's villa in Berchtesgaden, and may still resurface.) So Rienzi had a powerful, even pivotal, effect on Hitler. But there is no basis for calling it his "favorite opera."

In the end, the question should be left unanswered: in the case of Hitler, above all others, we should not assume more knowledge than we have. The documentary record does hint, however, that Hitler, like so many others, may have been most deeply affected by Tristan — ironically, the least "political" of the music dramas. In a notebook from Landsberg prison, Hitler wrote that he was “dreaming of Tristan and his kin." In January 1942, according to Monologe im Führer-Hauptquartier, 1941-1944, he said, "Tristan is surely [Wagner's] greatest work. We have the love of Mathilde Wesendonck to thank for it." (“Der Tristan ist doch sein grösstes Werk. Es war die Liebe zur Mathilde Wesendonck, der wir das verdanken.”) And Hitler's secretary Christa Schroeder recalled him saying that he wished to hear Tristan when he died. He had a primal encounter with Tristan at the Vienna Court Opera in 1906; years later, in conversation with the director Alfred Roller, he could describe the production in detail. In 1998, while working on a piece about Wagner and anti-Semitism for The New Yorker, I puzzled over the fact that extant descriptions of the episode in the Hitler literature did not name the conductor. So I sent a fax to the Staatsoper, asking who led Tristan on May 8, 1906. It was, unsurprisingly yet shockingly, Gustav Mahler.

Philip Glass at 75

Number Nine. The New Yorker, Feb. 13 and 20, 2012.

Bonus track: ISSUE Project Room.

Previously: The Satyagraha protest.

Nightafternight playlist

Recordings of interest.

— Berg, Beethoven, Violin Concertos; Isabelle Faust, Claudio Abbado conducting the Orchestra Mozart (Harmonia Mundi)

— Tune thy Musicke to thy Heart: Tudor and Jacobean music; Stile Antico, Fretwork (Harmonia Mundi)

— EndBeginning: music of Brumel, Crecquillon, Clemens, Josquin, Jackson Hill; New York Polyphony (BIS)

— Bach, Well-Tempered Clavier, Book II; Peter Hill (Delphian)

— Sibelius, Symphonies Nos. 2 and 5; Osmo Vänskä conducting the Minnesota Orchestra (BIS)

— Cage, Number Pieces vol. 6; Essential Music (Mode)

— Besides Feldman; Rozemarie Heggen, Hilary Jeffery, Pamelia Kurstin, Patrick Pulsinger (col legno)

— Wim Henderickx, Tejas and other works; Martyn Brabbins conducting the Royal Flemish Philharmonic (RFP 003)

CD of the Week: Peter Hill's Bach

Fugue in D Major, from the Well-Tempered Clavier, Book II; Peter Hill (Delphian 34101).

Owens spricht

In advance of a recital on Feb. 21, the splendid Eric Owens takes questions from fans on Carnegie Hall's YouTube channel. (There are three other videos in the set.) His goal on any given night, he says here, is to "not phone it in." So far, he is most definitely succeeding. My question: will there be a Kurtis Blow encore?

Miscellany: Mostly Carnegie

The major musical event of the winter/spring season, by my lights, is the San Francisco Symphony's transcontinental American Mavericks Festival, which begins at home on March 8, stops in Ann Arbor and Chicago, and ends at Carnegie Hall on March 30. In addition to four richly stocked MTT/SFS programs — who could say no to an evening of Ruggles's Sun-Treader, Feldman's Piano and Orchestra, and Henry Brant's metamorphic orchestration of the Concord Sonata? — Carnegie has assembled a neat array of auxiliary events, including a So Percussion Cage tribute, an Alarm Will Sound show, a night with the indie bands WHY? and Danielson, a program of William Basinski and Tristan Perich, a JACK Quartet adventure (the great Ruth Crawford Seeger quartet!), and a recital by Lisa Moore. I covered the original Mavericks festival for the New York Times.... When the Berlin Philharmonic comes to Carnegie later this month, Deutsches Haus at NYU will mount an exhibition of David Friedemann's portraits of Philharmoniker musicians from the nineteen-twenties, with a chamber performance appended.... Seated Ovation smartly critiques Carnegie's 2012-13 season announcement — which, Beethoven excess aside, does have a strong lineup of premieres, not to mention a Joyce DiDonato recital entitled "Drama Queens".... Great Performers 2012-13 will bring, among other things, Paul Lewis playing the Schubert B-flat-major Sonata, Esa-Pekka Salonen conducting Wozzeck, Herreweghe conducting the "Christmas" Oratorio, a Timothy Andres recital, and the New York premiere of John Adams's The Gospel According to the Other Mary.... Georg Friedrich Haas's in vain is played by Sound Icon in Boston this Friday.... Beginning on Friday, the Dessoff Choirs mount a festival around Bach's Mass in B Minor, with various contemporary works in the mix, including Ingram Marshall's September Canons and Robin Holloway's Gilded Goldbergs. Dessoff director Chris Shepard blogs about the festival here.... The second edition of the Ecstatic Music Festival opens on Saturday, with works by Jherek Bischoff and company.... The fine young Icelandic cellist Sæunn Þorsteinsdóttir gives a free recital tonight at New York's Scandinavia house, celebrating her new recording of the Britten cello suites, on Centaur.

Gayby at SXSW

On a personal note, I'm ecstatically happy to say that Gayby, the feature-length directorial debut by my husband, Jonathan Lisecki, has been selected to play at the SXSW Film Festival. I have a tiny cameo in the movie, as does Dan Johnson.