Alex Ross points to this terrific summary of the situation regarding the Hungarian government, media and arts, by Iowa-based commentator Bernard Sherman. András Schiff, one of the finest musicians on this earth, has been singled out by anti-Semitic demagogues over there, and of course he has! What better way to protect your nation's cultural heritage, after all, than by shitting all over the human treasures it has produced? And if someone's going around saying he's troubled by political developments in his home country, you should DEFINITELY call him a dirty Jew, because that'll get him to change his tune real fast.
Ahem.
In much happier news, Ross also has some brief but excellent commentary on the recently unveiled New York Phil season. (Here's the season; here's the full press conference.) A few stories here: this year's can't-miss new-music bonanza is a performance of Stockhausen's Gruppen at the Park Avenue Armory; there's a new amazing digital archive of Philharmonic materials and lore; the season has no female composers on it at all.
I'm really not dismayed, should I admit this?, by the orchestra's ongoing championing of living European composers. Who in the heck else is playing European new music in this country? How else are we going to hear it? But I do think Amanda Ameer is right that the brilliant German violinist Frank Peter Zimmermann was maybe not the most exciting choice for NY Phil artist in residence—he's replacing Anne-Sophie Mutter, after all, a German violinist of the very same generation, and it would appear that his programming choices are pretty dull: Brahms, Bach, Beethoven, Berg, and somehow a D (Dvorak) slipped in there by accident. Now, I love all these pieces, I love Zimmermann's playing, and these concerts are going to be fantastic, but he's playing NO new works?
And now, here is a picture of Alan Gilbert that I have doctored so that it looks like he took it with an iPhone.
Thank you.
The L.A. Phil's new season is up, too, and the big news there is (for me anyway) the premiere of a new sacred oratorio by John Adams, entitled The Gospel According to the Other Mary. Maybe he gave it that title to distinguish it from a forthcoming work by Mark Adamo.
What? No, I meant because Mark Adamo's writing The Gospel of Mary Magdalene for the San Francisco Opera! Why, what "mary" did YOU think I was referring to?
Speaking of whom, is there anyone else who really, really misses Mark Adamo's blog? Because I sure do. I spotted him before the premiere of Bernstein's Quiet Place last year, and afterwards I was DYING to know what he thought of it. And now Nixon in China's up at the Met, and I'm dying to know what he thinks of that! Somebody lean on him, would you?? I'll put up my own take on Nixon soon (spoiler: it's a fucking awesome piece), but the operatic blogosphere ain't the same without his POV.
Alright, I'm outta here—now all y'all get on that train and go see Nixon in China, tonight.
So one of the big highlights, for me, of John Adams' talk in New Haven, was when he discussed the criticism his unorthodox Doctor Atomic libretto had received in the press. "Opera is bloodsport," he said, and began to quote one of his detractors—whose words I instantly recognized as Mark Adamo's! Well, Mark Adamo's blogging again, and he is again too much. I cannot wait for the day that Adamo and Adams and Marshall and Muhly all sit on a panel together at some festival and then all go home and blog about it.
What? Mark Adamo's blog is having a dark night of the soul! Or at least an intimately lit fifteen minutes.
Look, I'm still enjoying, way too much in fact, the Adamoblog, which was deservedly crowned Best New Music Blog (2008) over at Life's a Pitch. (Not so deserving: Ron Rosenbaum's dismissive and infantile "review" of Doctor Atomic. Compare to Adamo's vastly more nuanced, cliché-free thumbs-down.) He's got a gift for posting articles that want to spark a dialogue, instead of demanding to be recognized as the final word. Maybe that's something I should try once in a while... provoking thought! But, so, here are some thoughts our M.A. has provoked:
1) This post was the first to link me to this video, which in turn reminded me of a zany Diva Anecdote. It seems that our heroine—wait, you didn't click on those links yet. Okay FINE, you've probably seen the video anyways, it's that one with all those people (including, yay, Melissa Fogarty!) talking about what a great thing NYCO is (true that), with the refrain, "I am City Opera" (great slogan!). But, so, anyways—
It seems our heroine, City Opera's most celebrated diva, is singing at City Opera's summery sister, the Glimmerglass Opera upstate, and stops into the office to see some old photos of herself from the archive. A pretty reasonable request, except that officially speaking, those production photos are strictly controlled by Glimmerglass Opera, and the intern on duty at the moment is under explicit instructions not to show them to anyone, not even the people in them. "I'm sorry, those are for in-house use only," says the young gay.
Our diva, naturally, realizes that she's put the intern in the position of either (a) displeasing the star talent or (b) risking his thankless low-paying job, and after a moment's calm discussion, takes the matter up with someone who has the authority to grant her request.
LOL no just kidding, she flips the fuck out:
"I AM GLIMMERGLASS OPERA!!"
No buildup, no recitative ("Don't you know who I am??"), just straight into bellowing, like a scornèd pharaohess, at the intern.
Can we make a fundraising video like that, please? Because that is what opera is all about. If the diva won't do it, NYCO can hire my friend to impersonate her. He can totally do the voice. "I AM CITY OPERA, DAMMIT!!" Hahahaha.
2) I'm probably not equipped to properly address his Ainadamar review, for a number of reasons. While I enjoyed the recording, I haven't seen the piece live, and can't really say how it functions as a stage work; also, Kelley O'Connor (the lady who plays Lorca) went to 'SC with me and is completely my hero, so I am in the tank. [PLUG: Kelley is singing in the NY Phil's Ravel program at Carnegie Hall next Tuesday! You should go!]
Still, I think there are some nice points Adamo is missing. I do have some reservations about Golijov's music; I remember reading a Gramophone article where somebody (Upshaw? the composer himself?) described his technique as modulating between different musical languages—vernacular and classical, contemporary and traditional—the way other composers modulate harmonies, to which I muttered, yeah well, harmonies are important too. It was a weak moment, but you get the idea: I am more impressed with a Golijov score as a series of effects than as a working-out of the usual concerns of classical music, all that harmony and melody and counterpoint stuff. Sort of a Bernstein without the impeccable Teutonic technique, but is Teutonic technique what Bernstein ever gets credit for anyway? No. Rightly or wrongly, he gets credit for creating a convincing series of dramatic effects, and that's what Golijov scores in Ainadamar, one of his, to my ear, most accomplished pieces.
So when Adamo complains that "refresh these tropes" of "pan-Latin musical sensibility" in the way that Revueltas or Ginastera did, he's missing the point a bit. Golijov is not interested in doing how they do, refracting the light of the vernacular through the distorting prism of 12-TET and classical performance practice, but rather in suspending the cultural hierarchies that suggest that such an experience of vernacular music might be preferable to an unmediated one. That Golijov's music, in Adamo's words, "could easily back a new Marc Anthony single" speaks to the success of his project—provided that the moments that refer to classical music succeed as classical music, which I think they do. To say, "I wish this artist’s work bespoke the creator more than the importer" is a little backwards—you're not really talking about the text, here; you're complaining only about what the art implies about the role of the artist. You've got to judge the artist by the art.
As for Peter Sellarses theatrical mode. Peter Sellars takes a lot of risks, and makes, let's be clear about this, a lot of mistakes. But I think the mistake is Adamo's when he characterizes Sellars' tendency to ritualize rather than dramatize his subjects as mere "inertia" and "glibness." Adamo advocates a reformed opera, a unified drama, in which historical scenes are re-enacted, where time flows ahead steadily instead of leaping forward or backward and then standing still. He wants showing, as the writing-workshops cluck, not telling.
Sellars would argue—has argued—that we don't need opera to do these things. We have television. If you want to show the hijacking of the Achille Lauro as it actually happened, you can make a TV movie; if you want to see history re-enacted, we have the History Channel. But the things that Peter Sellars does in Ainadamar can only happen in opera. (I keep misspelling the title of that opera, and spellcheck is no help. Ainadamar? Ainamadar? Almodovar? Ennisdelmar? Apologies in advance if I slip up.) He looks to pre-reform forms; he looks to opera seria and oratorio and masque. This isn't so much laziness as it is an awareness that musical theater had richness and value before the classical period. Think Bach, think Handel, think Stravinsky, think Messiaen.
And while Adamo argues that working from these traditions to dramatize historical subjects—as Sellars does so often—is a cheap reliance on the weight of historical reality to lend emotional depth to the piece, I would raise the counterargument that perhaps these traditions are the only way to do justice to the subjects Sellars has chosen. Not laziness, reverence—can you imagine a Christian writing an post-Verdian style opera on the life of Christ? I mean, I'm sure it's happened, it's just not a great idea—clearly there are other, possibly more respectful ways it should be presented—and so it should be, perhaps, with the lives of our secular "martyrs." Nobody walks out of the St Matthew Passion saying, "Y'know, I couldn't really get into Jesus's head."
[HOLY CRAP I just realized, hours after I posted this, that Adamo was just formally awarded a commission (.pdf) from San Francisco Opera to write EXACTLY THE OPERA I'VE JUST DESCRIBED, a dramatic depiction of the life and loves of Jesus Fucking Christ. Which is to say, MARK ADAMO FTW. I cannot step to that.]
And finally:
Argue, if you will, that flamenco is to Latin-American mourning what the blues is (are?) to African-American mourning: a way of making suffering endurable by freeing the body to move to it. But is this a viable dramatic method? If so, where are the great blues operas?
Grrl it's called Porgy & Bess, you need to LOOK IT UP:That there is the blues, sir, or at least a kissing cousin thereunto.
3) The Death of Klinghoffer. Always a problem. There's a funny Original Sin to this opera that nobody ever talks about; it's always accused of Jew-hatin' but nobody can articulate why. Really the reason is that at the premiere performances, in like Belgium and Brooklyn I think, there was a whole first scene that depicted a family of Jersey Jews watching the hijacking on TV, being as self-involved and judgmental as Americans tend to be in front of the TV news, and bickering with obviously Jewish rhythms. Think Seinfeld, to which it has been usefully compared. (Or just read the whole thing yourself in Thomas May's essential John Adams Reader.) Nobody had a problem with it in Belgium (I WONDER WHY—BELGIUM) but the audience at the American premiere realized that this was a horrible idea, that this came off as a representation of American Jewry, and not of Americans in general or of this family of imaginary American Jews in particular, and so the first scene was excised forever.
This notion that the opera portrays Jews as self-absorbed bourgie twits comes chiefly out of this miscalculated (and deleted) first scene, but the piece's reputation precedes it from house to house—which is why you've never seen a live performance if you live outside New York or Europe. (E.g., when its Los Angeles run was canceled, without explanation, George Tsypin's massive and expensive sets for the piece were destroyed.) Consequently, some really discerning music critics have gone into the piece looking for ideological trouble and, natch, found it: no less a musicological mind than Richard Taruskin, noting the piece's similarities to the Passions of Bach, suggested—choosing, mysteriously, not to identify the various "breaches of evenhandedness" to be found in the libretto—seized upon John Adams' voicing of certain chords to suggest that, if Death of Klinghoffer is, as the Adams has claimed, his version of Bach Passions, then the Arab terrorists are its Christ figures. Can we notice no similarities between other characters in The Death of Klinghoffer, an opera about an innocent Jew who is executed for no crime other than speaking his mind, and the passion of Jesus? Maybe aforementioned Jew? As in the PERSON WHOSE DEATH IT IS OF?
So Adamo's in pretty good company when he goes into Klinghoffer sniffing around for anti-Jewish bias, though not, I think, much more successful in flushing it out. He dives into the opening of the piece's Chorus of Exiled Jews—
When I paid off the taxi, I had no money left,
and, of course, no luggage. My empty hands shall
signify this passion, which itself remembers.
—and comes up with:
What passion? The passion of empty hands? Of no luggage? (And who retreats into exile in a cab?)
[Sigh.]
a) No, not "the passion of no luggage," the passion he feels for the lover to whom he has returned, like a Jewish exile returning to Israel. He is about to signify that passion by running his hands over her body, which he then does for the rest of the chorus. Get it?
b) Just because you call a cab does not mean you are a rich Jewish stereotype. It could mean that you can't afford a car, and are going to a place ill-served by public transportation, and more to the point, it could mean that you are returning home, and you won't need spending cash for a little while.
Then he complains that Leon Klinghoffer, as his soul slips free of his crippled body, mentions "Good furniture / Exposed to the rain"—like only Jews care about having their furniture ruined? But isn't this exactly the sort of language that the opera's Palestinians used, the language of simple creature comforts, when they describe the homes that they lost to Israeli usurpation?
The house was built of stone
With a courtyard inside
Where, on a hot day, one
Could sit in shade
Under a tree, and have
A glass of something cool.
The thing about Klinghoffer is that everybody, not just Jews, wants to have nice things and be able to relax in the shade with a cool drink and enjoy themselves (this is a pleasure cruise, after all!) and not have to worry about somebody pointing a gun at them or blowing them up.
And everybody in it is, in some sense, self-absorbed. There's no character, of any nationality, in the entire opera—Austrian, Swiss, English, American, Arab—who does not come off as self-absorbed for at least a moment in this piece. Please, let's put this anti-semitism in Klinghoffer thing to bed.
Anyways. It's so nice to have this "conversation" with somebody who's actually trying to like the piece! Why do so many critics think it's so much more interesting to kick an art form when it's down? Can we please have Mark Adamo reviewing everything instead, forever?
(See our last episode of Libretto Problems, here.)
Hooray, so I spent the night in the city after the excellent NOW/Dargel show at Le Poisson Rouge (more on this soon), and in a few hours I'm going to see the new production of Doctor Atomic at the Met—to my many fans in attendance I'll be the guy wearing a brown cap with no friends, who vaguely resembles the picture to the right only in need of a shave.
Okay where were we? Right right right! Mark Adamo.
We might have guessed that Adamo knew an awful lot about libretti when we read this insightful interview from NewMusicBox, regarding his Lysistrata. For instance, Adamo talks about how in prewriting his operas, he draws up (1) a synopsis of nothing but sounds, just a description of what you'd hear if you were listening to the opera being broadcast on the radio, in Hungarian or something. Then he draws up (2) a synopsis of nothing but physical action and stage business—the opera as silent movie, nothing but dumbshow.
Brilliant! He goes straight to the things that make opera unique. As opposed to Tommasini's eunuch-in-a-whorehouse type advice, this is the sort of trick an opera librettist or composer could actually learn something from. Opera is about the sounds of women's voices mingling offstage, and wordless cries from anguished baritones, but also about people clutching letters to their breasts and hesitating on staircases. On the one hand, music can be exploited as a tool for storytelling—but on the other hand, the music also abstracts the drama to the point where one cannot ask the dialogue to do as much work as it might in a piece of spoken theatre. A certain amount of physical melodrama, a few bold dramatic gestures, are key to the success of a big chunk of the operatic rep.
This strategy is a bit old-school, however. What works within a Verdian aesthetic might not work for John Adams. True, if we were to imagine a silent movie production of Doctor Atomic, we would probably imagine a bunch of dudes in suits talking to each other for a couple hours. But I'm going to cut a few yards of slack for this piece, just because the conventional music-drama is so obviously not the model Sellars and Adams are after, or have ever been after. A third of Nixon in China is dudes in suits talking to each other; the libretto of The Death of Klinghoffer, about a hijacking and murder, is structured like an oratorio, not like a conventional opera—the actual death of Leon Klinghoffer takes place offstage, for instance, instead of being dramatized. What sort of opera composer would leave out the death scene by accident? Clearly something else is going on there.
Happily, Adamo's critical approach, unlike that of certain music writers I could name, while registering how the dramatic goals of the piece depart from his own tastes, is also capable of addressing the piece on its own terms. He identifies what is missing here that was present in Adams & Sellars' earlier history-operas: Alice Goodman, their visionary librettist.
Yes, this libretto is a collage, and draws on a certain poetic energy that only collage can provide. And so I think Adamo is wrong to single out Oppenheimer's John Donne aria for criticism—not only did the Trinity project borrow is title from the poem, but each line, in the context of the opera, takes on multiple meanings relevant to the situation. When Oppenheimer confesses that he is "betroth'd unto Your enemy," we wonder if he has, like the Doctor Faust alluded to in the title of of the opera, sold his soul for the enormous power he is about to wield; but when he sings, "ravish me," is he begging to be mastered instead by Good, or is he simply willing himself to surrender his own moral judgment to a higher political authority? Is he praying to God, or to the Bomb?
I'd go so far as to defend what somebody (who? remind me!) has called the "carbs aria" of General Groves, a musical recitation of his calorie intake. This is an opera about hubris, after all; Groves is trying to win the war in the Pacific, he's trying to split the atom, we even see him try to control the weather—but he can't even master his own body. It's a good and revealing joke.
(And while I'm being critical of Adamo's critique, I can't let him get away with this silliness: "Not since Szymanowski have we heard such opulent ninths and elevenths; not since Saarijaho, such shimmering harps and gongs." "Not since" Saariaho?? Saariaho is now. She is not dead yet. You cannot say "not since Saariaho," as that would mean, like, "not since last summer," which is to say, it would not mean anything. Nit picked, carry on.)
The shift between these two modes, between what is known about a given political situation (what was said in the presence of reporters, what happened in front of the TV cameras) and what will be forever unknowable (what they were thinking it happened) gets at the essence of the Sellars/Adams opera project in general. Nixon especially focused on the divide between public and private life, between the yin and yang of historical/heroic/male vs. personal/domestic/female. In Act One, we get to see Nixon shake hands with Chou En-Lai; we see him and Kissinger sit down with Chou and Mao, and the libretto sticks largely to realistic, political/philosophical dialogues. In Act Two, we meet the missus; Pat Nixon takes a tour of Beijing, Madame Mao puts on her terrifying ballet, The Detachment of Red Women, and the libretto veers off into fantasy. Act Three finds the whole gang in a liminal, half-dreamed space of strange rhapsodies.
And that's the thing—bringing a bona fide librettist on board allows you then to negotiate between those two spheres. Like, Pat Nixon did not really say, "Let Gypsy Rose kick off her high-heeled party shoes!" while taking her big stroll—that's a lyrical flight of Alice Goodman's fancy—but she actually did say, "That's prophetic!" to her Chinese handlers (and the assembled press corps), and Goodman then transmuted those two words into the aria, "This is prophetic." (See how a poet can massage a clunky turn of phrase into something musical—"that's" to "this is"?) In Klinghoffer too, actual quotations and historical facts are woven into arias of rhymed couplets; real and fictional characters share the stage.
But when Doctor Atomic shifts registers between documentary and lyrical, the thread is lost. We back off of the action just when we should be zooming in. Whole characters turn into a blur. Says Adamo:
Pasqualita’s rainsong is authentic Tewa lullaby, Rukeyser may have been acquainted with the Oppenheimers, and Groves’s diet worries are amply documented. But a libretto is not a program note. Pasqualita’s lullaby boasts impeccable historical pedigree. But what does it tell us dramatically? If this is characterization, what on earth is stereotype?
Bingo. I'll insist that there is nothing wrong with going all high-toned and dreamy once in a while, but the Native American characters never get a chance be human. They never get to count their calories. They just have to stand around and symbolize unspoiled Mother Nature or something. I mean c'mon, Pasqualita? More like Pasquahontas! LOL!
Hum. Some of Adamo's suggestions are not great. E.g., I shudder at the thought of a part for Harry Truman; one of the things that makes Dr Awork is its unity of place. And you know what? I love Doctor Atomic; I think it is a great piece, and I can't wait to see it again. While Adamo makes sure to distance himself from outright attacks on the opera, it's clear he doesn't enjoy it quite as much as I have. But this is twice now that I've read his comments on the art of libretto-writin' and immediately wanted to write somebody a big fat libretto (dude, composerfriends, call me). Who else is thinking this hard about dramatic problems in opera? We need more of this!
I want you to listen closely, people, because how often do I say this about anybody:
Mark Adamo is sooo right.
You got that? This is especially worth noting because I was an utter bitch to Mark Adamo last time his name was written here. But he's posted one of the best reviews of Doctor Atomic in the short history of this well-publicized opera, and you should click here and read it, right now.
Then while you're doing that, I'll continue to ramble on a related topic. Anthony Tommasini has written this thing about contemporary opera, which if not terrifically insightful on the subject of contemporary opera, is tremendously insightful on the subject of Anthony Tommasini. For instance, it has never occurred to him that he is dismissive of most new opera!
What? I consider myself a proselytizer for new opera, I said, someone who has urged companies to commission works and attended every premiere I could get to, always with hopeful anticipation.
See there, that's where you've made your mistake. Hopeful anticipation. Heh I mean, not really, but if you combine that hopeful anticipation with a set of weirdly specific standards, you're going to be cruelly disappointed every time. Because the U.S. opera scene, right now, seems to be dominated by two subgenres, both of which are bound to be loved by certain parties and hated by critics like Tony T.
First of all, we have the good old-fashioned American Melodrama. This is your standard opera commission. It is written by an Opera Composer—the sort of composer whose name you only hear in reference to his or her latest major opera commission—in a mostly tonal musical language that opera singers love to sing and opera subscribers love to hear, because it draws on the musical tradition set down by the great composers of the operatic repertoire. But who hates American Melodrama? Classical music critics! They want something that acknowledges Wozzeck, something that acknowledges the progress that music has made in the past hundred years, which is just as silly as all the folks who would complain that the operas of Thomas Adès don't acknowledge Turandot. Why are my fellow lovers-of-modernism so afraid to admit that Puccini was one of the greatest and most influential composers of the twentieth century? And while I may think that the "progress" of the past hundred years has been an exciting journey, I can still empathize with the guy who says "...but I wouldn't wanna live there."
Then we have the Prestige Spectacular. This is a big PR event for the opera company, it's the thing they can point to whenever somebody claims they don't do enough new opera, they pour a huge amount of money into it, and don't you just see every damn dollar onstage. Oh, and the names! The director is a superstar (he/she's done movies!), the librettist is a pretty big name, and the composer is... the director's friend. Audiences tend to like it—they're, god forbid, entertained—and music critics hate it. No wonder, since music is the weak link. So when Julie Taymor, JD McClatchy and Elliot Goldenthal put on their Beowulf, Tommasini objected, "Opera has long embraced spectacle, but isn’t it supposed to be a music-driven art form?" Yes! Or—well, wait, is it? Couldn't opera be an equal collaboration between different media? Or even, god forbid, driven by a great director, or a great text? (I wonder if Professor McJeebie had Tommasini's Grendel review in mind when he wrote this.)
These strike me as the chief craw-stickers for Tommasini. Every single contemporary opera he singles out for praise originates with a star composer, somebody who's as well-grounded off the operatic stage as on. His ostensible point, that "specifics" make an opera strong, as opposed to "mystical effusions," falls apart right quick.
The characters in Wagner’s “Ring,” as the critic and composer Virgil Thomson once quipped, spend a lot of time “predicting doom, describing weather, soul states and ecstatic experiences.” But has there ever been a more inventively detailed generational drama?
Yes. Yes, there have certainly been a few. Like for instance, some of you may be familiar with the Star Wars cycle, in which a father-son duo of fighter-pilot samurai wizards duel in outer space, with swords made out of light. Which, lest we overestimate the value of "invention" and "detail"... I'm just gonna say, Jar-Jar.I suspect that the real problem with "mystical effusions" is that they're so dang hard to write. They're a lost art, those effusions, a second language to writers of modern English, and so they always come out stupid.
Take, for instance, the libretto for John Adams' latest opera, The Flowering Tree. Now, I haven't seen the libretto actually printed anywhere—perusal of Amazon.com user reviews suggest that the reason our record shop can't get ahold of any copies of the CD is that the physical libretto, the Little Book with all the words in it, was misprinted with no Act Two? Anybody have this problem? Anyway I only have a promotional copy, which I got a little while before the release date, and that was fun because I got to change all of the Act One track titles in the iTunes CD Database so that instead of being in English or Spanish they were all in LOLspeak. (In case you'[re wondering, I am also the person who changed the CDDB title of John Adams' My Father Knew Charles Ives to Yo Mama Blew Charles Ives. God, I am a genius.
So I can't quote much of the piece, is my point, but the first lines go something like:
Children, I want to tell you a story
of love, and then pain
and then love again.
I don't get this. Are love and pain mutually exclusive? You go from one to the other? And even then, is this is the most elegant way to express the idea? It's a hair away from self-parody! "Children, I want to tell you a story of love, and then pain, and then love again, and then a little more love, and then sandwiches, and then pain, and then a new dishwasher, then love, love, love, pain, love, pain, in that order."
Peter Sellars' Doctor Atomic libretto, while on the whole superior, is occasionally as clumsy in its particulars as Flowering Tree is in its generalities. Mind you, Adams' attention to the nuances of operatic text-setting is as keen as always, as in this passage on the dangers of radiation poisoning:
...enough of it in the human body
eats through vital tissues,
disintegrates human kidneys
and causes fatal bone cancer.
The triplet rhythm on the words "eats through vital tissues" syncopates eerily against the accompaniment, creating a visceral sense of unease; the word "disintegrates," tossed off much more quickly, seems itself to be dissolving into the air. The highest note in each of those last three lines climbs just a step higher than the line before it, as the symptoms mount, until our hypothetical patient finally expires on "causes fatal bone cancer" with a dramatic falling-off of rhythm and pitch.
Yes, if it were possible to wring music out of the words, "and causes fatal bone cancer," this would probably be it right here. But still the phrase creeks, clanks, thuds. What is wrong with these libretti? Who can help us diagnose them? ¿¿Y ahora quién podrá defenderme?? This looks like a job for...
Mark Adamo!!
To be continued.
It's already a little weird that Mark Adamo's article on harp writing suggests that the instrument is "tragically ill-suited" to music "based on the transformation of the ostinato." (Joanna Newsom, among many, many others, might beg to differ.) But then there's this...
Britten, the very model of the composer who shrugged at dogma, gave us some of the most substantia and moving pages written for harp in the last hundred years: but where's the Britten harp concerto? (He wrote one for piano.) ... [W]here's the Prokofiev, where's the Schnittke harp concerto? (As opposed to their piano concerti.) Bartók? Lutoslawski? Corigliano? [Zing! - DSJ] If, as these have, you can write a contemporary concerto for the piano—an equally percussive, harmonically resourceful (albeit chromatic) instrument—why not do so for the harp?
Okay, there are plenty of reasons why composers would write piano concerti and not harp concerti. For one thing, most composers play the piano, and so they write reams more piano concerti, piano sonate, and piano etudes than anything for the harp. But Adamo's also got his facts wrong! There is most definitely a Lutosławski concerto for harp and oboe, available on a sexy Philips recording starring the Holligers. He should--everybody should--give it a listen.
(Maybe he's not counting concerti for "harp and x"? But that would be splitting hairs, and I don't think I'll accuse him of being so uncharitable.)
I probably shouldn't pick these nits. His heart's certainly in the right place--classical music is full of instruments that never get a fair shake in front of the orchestra, or end up smothered in cliché, the harp not least among them. What's more, he seems to have given the Harp Problem a lot of thought and come up with some worthwhile, even exciting workarounds.
