Book Review: Said On Opera by Edward Said

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In a gratifying instance of musical synchronicity, I was listening to Les Troyens when I encountered The New York Times’ August 6 feature about Hector Berlioz. The opera is the subject of an essay in Said on Opera. The recently published collection of the late Palestinian intellectual Edward Said‘s opera commentary compelled me to investigate a work I hadn’t previously heard.

As Said and the author of The New York Times piece suggest, Les Troyens has always been denigrated partly because it’s decidedly odd. Their insights make navigating the peculiarities of Berlioz less troublesome.

Said on Opera also includes considerations of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s Così fan tutte (Alfonso is underappreciated) Ludwig van Beethoven’s Fidelio (initial drafts are superior to the final version) and Richard Wagner’s Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg. (his antisemitism isn’t disqualifying). Reading the excellent Said on Opera is almost as engrossing as listening to the works.

Opera Review: The Metropolitan Opera’s Tannhäuser at Lincoln Center

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The death and destruction wreaked by the coronavirus pandemic is tragic. I was lucky. Blessed by good health while holed up in Kansas, I gained new appreciation for my expansive suburban home and marvelous life partner.

I took advantage of the free streams offered by the Metropolitan Opera on more than 150 evenings during the days of isolation. I’ve been looking forward to returning to Lincoln Center ever since.

Remembering I was dissatisfied with $25 tickets on a remote balcony at the massive opera house in January of 2019, I elected to splurge on seats to watch Donald Runnicles conduct Richard Wagner’s ​​Tannhäuser on Wednesday, December 6.

The most expensive concert tickets I’ve purchased didn’t allow me to rub shoulders with masters of the universe. Instead, I was surrounded by fellow opera fanatics from the Americas, Europe and Asia who appreciated being close enough to Runnicles to hear the maestro’s strenuous gasps.

As with the National Football League, experiencing the event in person is in many ways inferior to viewing a polished television broadcast. Even so, I relished hearing the unfiltered voices of Ekaterina Gubanova, Elza van den Heever and Andreas Schager for the duration of the four-hour and thirty-minute performance.

Infinite Dread

Original image of George Bernard Shaw’s The Perfect Wagnerite: A Commentary on the Niblung's Ring by There Stands the Glass.

I persuaded one of my houseguests to watch Bayreuth Festspielhaus’ 2022 production of Richard Wagner’s Der Ring des Nibelungen with me over the holidays.  Doing so required signing up for a free trial of Deutsche Grammophon’s Stage Plus streaming service.

The decision was wildly unpopular with those who might have preferred to view sports and holiday movies on the single television monitor in my compound.  After all, Wagner’s cycle is a notorious test of endurance.  

Powering through the outrageous updates of Das Rheingold (154 minutes), Die Walküre (234 minutes), Siegfried (244 minutes) and Götterdämmerung (274 minutes) took more than 15 hours.  I loved it, but I’ll admit to growing restless during the twilight of the gods.

Contemporary elements such as using humans to represent the titular ring thrilled me. Yet a scene featuring the famed soprano Lise Davidsen in Das Rheingold is so jarring that I literally ran screaming from the room.  I’m still shook.  Here’s The New York Times’ review of the production.

Stage Plus’ video and audio quality is superb.  And the lifelike fidelity of the Dolby Atmos version of Peter Gregson’s Quartets Three & Four gave me goosebumps.  I’d rather pay for Stage Plus than Amazon Prime, Apple TV, Disney+ and Hulu.  So why did I cancel the service before I was billed $149 for a full year?  There’s a glitch.

While I could access everything Stage Plus offers on my laptop and phone, only about a third of the video options were accessible on AirPlay.  Here’s Stage Plus’ response to my concern about the matter: “we are already aware of the problem and our developers are currently fixing it.”  Yet the issue remained unresolved six days after my objection.

Concert Review: The Lyric Opera of Kansas City’s "Tosca" at Muriel Kauffman Theatre

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I didn’t know what to make of the lovely family seated near me in the cheap seats of Kansas City’s splashy opera house on Friday, May 7.  After witnessing scenes of torture, attempted rape, murder and suicide in Giacomo Puccini’s provocatively melodramatic 1900 opera “Tosca,” two perfectly behaved little girls in matching dresses and their doting parents walked out of the Kauffman Center for the Performing Arts as if they’d just taken in a showing of Disney on Ice.

The Lyric Opera of Kansas City’s production rattled me.  “Tosca” was the first professional opera I’d experienced in-person since 2019.  As documented extensively at this site, I came to opera late in life.  I immersed myself in the form during the pandemic.  When I finish watching the Hungarian State Opera’s mesmerizing new four-hour rendering of Richard Wagner’s “Parsifal,” I’ll have taken in 303 online operas in the past two years.

The initiative altered my expectations. Having seen Luciano Pavarotti play the ill-fated painter Mario Cavaradossiin in two filmed productions of “Tosca,” my standards are now unreasonably high. Only Marina Costa-Jackson’s turn in the title role didn’t disappoint me last night. Other positives: the Kansas City Symphony was electrifying, the lighting was excellent and the informal banter among patrons in the peanut gallery was refreshing.

Album Review: Bill Callahan and Bonnie “Prince” Billy- Blind Date Party

Freak-folk landed between opera and trap-latino in the personalized annual “top genres” notification Spotify sent me four weeks ago.  I certainly listened to gobs of Richard Wagner and Bad Bunny, but I don’t recall spending much time singing along with folk outsiders like Bill Callahan and Bonnie “Prince” Billy during the first 11 months of 2021.  

Things have changed.  Released December 10, Blind Date Party, a 90-minute compilation of covers overseen by the two Bills, is in heavy rotation at There Stands the Glass headquarters.  Abetted by an impressive slate of like-minded peers, the freak-folk luminaries reinterpret compositions by artists ranging from Billie Eilish (a loopy dressing-down of “Wish You Were Gay”) to Jerry Jeff Walker (an elegiac version of “I Love You”).

I miss my father, but I’m relieved he’s not around to hear the hilarious desecration of “O.D.’d in Denver,” one of his favorite Bocephus bangers. Alastair Roberts’ contributions make an interpretation of Dave Rich’s gospel song "I've Made Up My Mind" my favorite track. The bots at Spotify got it right after all.

Grunting and Snorting

Photo of pages 221-222 of John Culshaw’s Ring Resounding by There Stands the Glass.

John Culshaw writes about the incidental noise issued by conductor Hans Knappertsbusch in Ring Resounding.  Sure enough, Knappertsbusch’s “grunts and snorts” are clearly audible at the opening of a 1951 recording of Parsifal.

Studying the book is part of an ongoing investigation of Wagner corresponding with my burgeoning interest in classical music.  Culshaw’s detailed account of the first complete recording of Der Ring des Nibelungen is filled with delectable gossip and substantive musings.

Discovering that the disruptive ambient noise accompanying many of the classical concerts I’ve attended isn’t an aberration came as a shock.  Ill-timed coughs and the creaking of seats are also part and parcel of live recordings.  The non-musical sounds created by artists further altered my connection with the so-called fine art.

For instance, a pivotal moment of Deutsche Grammophon’s otherwise wonderful new recording of Krystian Zimerman’s Beethoven: Complete Piano Concertos is marred when members of the London Symphony Orchestra clamorously adjust their sheet music.  And the breathing of pianist Behzod Abduraimov is clearly audible on one of my favorite albums of 2021.

When I put on headphones and queue up Beethoven, Debussy or Wagner, I’m no longer surprised when the ostensibly pristine and often ethereal sounds are accompanied by grunts, snorts, murmurs and heavy breathing.  The humanizing revelation is one more indication classical music and opera aren’t nearly as arrogantly inhospitable and formidably precious as they initially appear.

The art of opera has nothing to do with obscene galas. Culshaw hoped his landmark recordings would make the form more equitable: “The sickness of opera has been, and is, that it is a very expensive and exclusive closed shop… Richard Wagner abhorred this attitude a hundred years ago, and we are only now beginning to make the slightest progress towards a change.”

Book Review: Wagnerism: Art and Politics in the Shadow of Music by Alex Ross

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An amusing reference to Richard Wagner’s Götterdämmerung is made in the 2021 zombie saga Army of the Dead.  I watched the irredeemably trashy flick because I’m an uncultured rube.  Or at least I was prior to the pandemic. As sporadically documented at this site, I dedicated much of the quarantine to an immersion in opera.  My nascent fascination with Wagner led me to Alex Ross’ deliriously dense Wagnerism: Art and Politics in the Shadow of Music. Ross documents and analyzes Richard Wagner’s immense influence on music, cinema, visual art, literature, philosophy, politics and other aspects of contemporary society.

I treated Wagnerism as a textbook.  Although I have a firm grasp of history and read Thomas Mann’s doorstop The Magic Mountain for the first time last year, I was woefully ignorant of many of the intellectual and academic concepts Ross examines through the lens of Wagner. My cultural illiteracy forced me to pause every few pages to get up to speed.  The methodical process lasted four months.  I’m not entirely to blame.  Ross occasionally writes unfortunate sentences like this: “He proposes an ontology based on the rational operation of mathematics, at the same time, he stresses the infinity of being, defining it in terms of multiplicity.”

Just as taking in Die Zauberflötein last year allowed me to see layers of significant subtext that had previously been invisible to me, Wagnerism heightened my capacity to experience life more meaningfully.  The Wagner joke in Army of the Dead would have sailed over my head a few years ago.  I’m still a pitiful excuse for a scholar. Yet given enough time, this country bumpkin might manage to transform his life into an admirable Gesamtkunstwerk.

Space Jams: An Appreciation of Jacob Fred Jazz Odyssey

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I envy Deadheads.  Not only are they part of an interactive community open to all like-minded enthusiasts of the Grateful Dead, their single-minded obsessiveness simplifies their leisure time.  I fret over whether to invest four hours in a production of Parsifal (the last “major” opera I have yet to see), investigate the new 10-hour William Parker boxed set, luxuriate in Whodini’s "Five Minutes of Funk" or brace for a round of Kansas City punk. Deadheads merely have to decide which vintage show they’d like to hear next.

A fresh slate of old Jacob Fred Jazz Odyssey recordings arouses a related form of reassuring nostalgia in me.  The first two of the scheduled five albums were released on May 7.  The previously unreleased 2008 studio album Winterwood is a cheeky update of Ellingtonian swing and juke-joint boogie-woogie.  The Spark That Bled: Tour '05 includes live interpretations of compositions by the Flaming Lips and Charles Mingus, a representative reflection of the ensemble’s sensibilities.

A corresponding 27-minute documentary champions the manic intensity, wild eclecticism and unlikely evolution of the band from Oklahoma. I’ve long flirted with full-on fandom. I interviewed front man Brian Haas for Plastic Sax in 2009. The band’s ambitious concept album Race Riot Suite was my favorite album of 2011. Come to think of it, I could do a lot worse than listen exclusively to Jacob Fred Jazz Odyssey. Deadhead? No man, but I’m perilously close to becoming a Fredhead.

Album Review: Michael Wollny- XXXX

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I’m 200 pages into Alex Ross’ dense 2020 tome Wagnerism: Art and Politics in the Shadow of Music. The altercations in defense and denunciation of Richard Wagner’s controversial innovations at eventful performances described by Ross fascinate me. One hundred and fifty years later, another German is making similarly divisive sounds, albeit in a far less prominent realm. Many of Michael Wollny’s brash revisions to improvised music are as discordant as Wagner’s work must have sounded to his contemporaries. The keyboardist is joined by Emile Parisien (soprano saxophone), Tim Lefebvre (bass and electronics) and Christian Lillinger (drums and percussion) on the magnificently abrasive XXXX. The album consists of aggressive manipulations of live recordings made at Berlin’s A-Trane in 2019. XXXX fills in the gaps between Ludwig van Beethoven’s piano sonatas, John Coltrane’s Ascension and Aphex Twin’s I Care Because You Do without seeming beholden to the disparate works. Participating in the Wagner festspiele in Bayreuth is near the top of my bucket list. It would be inconsistent with Wagner’s visionary spirit to not also attempt to pay my respects to Wollny when I finally make it to Germany. And with any luck at all, I'll manage to instigate a brawl about the validity of revolutionary glitch-jazz at A-Trane.

Gesamtkunstwerk

Screenshot of Uwe Schönbeck in Komische Oper Berlin’s production of Jacques Offenbach’s “The Tales of Hoffman” by There Stands the Glass.

It’s over.  My daily opera initiative will end on New Year’s Eve when I finish watching the 285th opera I’ll have taken in on 285 consecutive days.  The binge expanded my worldview, enhanced my appreciation of all forms of music and provided an ideal diversion during the pandemic.  Yet it’s become a burdensome chore.

Now that my taste has developed, I’m no longer willing to accept whatever’s available.  I’ve grown frustrated by the scarcity of productions consistent with my sensibilities.  Multiple versions of hits like “La Bohème,” “Die Zauberflöte” or “La Traviata” are always on tap, but tracking down videos of operas I haven’t seen is increasingly difficult.

More significantly, the obligation became a hassle.  Rather than enjoy an unseasonably warm day a couple weeks ago, I was tethered to a four-hour and 45-minute production of Richard Wagner’s “Götterdämmerung.”  Brünnhilde wouldn’t approve of my decision to stay indoors to see her self-immolate a third time. 

I don’t intend to go cold turkey.  I’ll still watch an opera when the mood strikes me, maybe once a week.  Viewing 52 virtual operas a year sounds about right.  And I’ve just begun exploring the colossal vault of opera recordings.  Even so, I have a crucial void to fill.  I have a few tricks up my rolled-up sleeve as I await my vaccine injections.

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I ranted and raved on KCUR’s Christmas Eve broadcast about The 10 Best Songs to Come Out of Kansas City In 2020 and The 10 Best Holiday Songs by Kansas City Artists. And no, I didn’t title the segments.