Adams' Behemoth

Opera is an anachronism. It was an anachronism from the moment it was invented—wasn't it?—the last gasp of the neoclassical tendencies of the Renaissance, as an attempt to revive the musical dramas of antiquity, and it's even more of an aesthetic archaism today, now it that exists almost entirely as a repertory of 200-year-old "classics."

So, yes, that's the "joke" of Nixon in China, the opera by composer/librettist/director team John Adams, Alice Goodman and Peter Sellars, that you've got characters from the age of television, Richard and Patricia Nixon, stepping out of a flat 747 and singing rhymed couplets with vocal techniques invented to sing the music of composers born in 1813. But it's a lot more than that, too.

It was all Sellars's idea—he hand-picked Goodman, a former student of his, and had to talk Adams into it, convince him that the "joke" was not all there was to the project. Aside from his Adams collabos, his most famous (though far from only) ventures have been stagings that transplant the settings of classical operas into the present day, and the critical resistance is usually predictable, and partly justified—attempts to make opera "relevant" to a contemporary audience can seem at once redundant ("Mozart's operas are immortal; they were never irrelevant, and require no updating!") and futile ("Is a Nozze di Figaro set in Trump Tower going to win over anybody who'd otherwise be watching reality TV?"). But insofar as there is ever a distinction between concept and content in a theatrical production—and a Sellars show may be keen to narrow the gap between the two—these objections respond only to the former, in the abstract, and not to the latter. Sellars' agenda is more nuanced than updating sets and costumes.

For instance, when he decided to stage Handel's oratorio Theodora, about the persecution of early Christians, Sellars was addressing a genre of musical drama that has no obvious analogue in contemporary culture. Oratorio tells a story without sets or costumes or even action, instead being a series of monologues and choruses—it's a presentational mode of drama, of the sort that has all but disappeared from popular entertainment in recent centuries.

But in translating Theodora to the operatic stage, Sellars dramatizes the Emperor's opening arias as a Presidential press conference, at which the Chief Executive promises to hunt down and torture the infidel, and the "audience" onstage responds with a chorus choreographed to look like a TV commercial, pointing to cans of diet soda when they get to the couplet about how "sweeter than the trumpet's sound / Their groans and cries are heard around!" Absurd, yes. (Or not? That actually sounds a lot like a few press conferences from the past decade or so.) But by connecting Handel's forms to contemporary politics, he demands that we reconsider the emotional stakes of what might—without his anachronistic touch—be merely beautiful. By reinventing the action in terms of television, he illuminates not only the politics of the drama, but also the politics of our age, the politics of the musical form, and the politics hardwired into our media.

For his first opera with John Adams, Nixon in China, Sellars proposed a subject that would run his anachronistic alchemy in reverse. In the first act, instead of turning the conventions of opera into the stuff of television, Sellars, Adams, and librettist Alice Goodman took a televised event and turned it into grand opera. All the conventions of grand opera are there: choruses, pageantry, down to the the drinking song that ends the first act and the ballet in the second. The libretto itself is in rhymed tetrameter. But while opera usually treats a familiar myth or historical subject, in place of the usual heroic tableaux—the death of Dido, the damnation of Faust—Nixon draws upon a new, different sort of cultural memory. What struck critics most at its first appearance, prompting many to dismiss the opera (as they would dismiss many of Sellars' stagings) as a facile postmodern gimmick, was the contemporaneity of its subject matter. That is, Nixon's visit to China not only had taken place within living memory, but Nixon himself was actually invited to the premiere (he declined), and most of the audience had probably witnessed many of the dramatized events on television at the moment they took place. The idea of an opera about the President, specifically about President Nixon, was a novelty—a joke—even if it was a good one.

Well, about twenty years later, the novelty is gone. Nixon is dead now, a whole generation of operagoers has been born since his trip to China—but the opera remains fundamentally relevant. Not only because it's well enough put together to stand up to two decades of close listening, but because its observations on the essentially changed nature of cultural memory in the age of television will remain timely as long as there's still some kind of TV.

In Thomas May's indispensible John Adams Reader, May asks Sellars about the label "CNN Opera," as it was applied to his and Adams' Death of Klinghoffer specifically and to their history operas in general. Sellars responds:

One of the most important reasons to do these operas was to say precisely that we aren't getting the actual history of our times. We are used to the media feeding frenzy, with the rush to judgment and the rush for the scoop, and then it all gets dropped. In the Age of Information we are strangely underinformed about what is going on and what is at stake—exactly because there's a historical blank for so many Americans. The way journalism has evolved context is not reported very deeply. [As artists] we have to make a structure which is context rich. Opera is able to go inside to a place where the headlines aren't going. The classic thing with Greek theater is that it's not, say in Oedipus Rex, about what does an exploding eyeball look like, but about why someone would dig out their own eyes. Whether it's about suicide bombers or 9/11 or any of these events that have happened to America, the question that is not allowed to be asked to this day is "Why would people do this?" That's the question, of course, that drama asks. Exactly to find what was not in the news, what was missing from the news: that's why we worked in this genre.

The fact, in other words, that opera is out of step with our times is why it is absolutely essential.

Act One gives us, to a large extent, what has made it into the public record. While the President's entrance aria is an internal monologue, even that monologue is on the subject of outward appearances and public persona:

News has a kind of mystery
When I shook hands with Chou En-lai
On this bare field outside Peking
Just now, the world was listening.
…Though we spoke quietly
The eyes and eyes of history
Caught every gesture…
Transforming us as we, transfixed,
Made history.

The audience at the HD broadcast I attended chuckled at these lines:

Millions more hear what we say
through satellite technology
than ever heard a public speech
before. No one is out of touch
telecommunication has
broadcast your message into space.

John Adams's opera, which he described as "a media event about a media event," had become a global satellite broadcast about a global satellite broadcast. (Note that the word "broadcast" is used precisely three times in Nixon, and only once does it refer to the act of transmitting a signal over the radio; the other two times, it uses the word's original meaning, the act of scattering seeds in every direction.)

Act Two of the opera introduces another strategy essential to all Adams' stage works: the counterbalance of the Heroic, the Public, the Yang, by an equal and opposite force. The focus of the drama turns to Mrs. Nixon, the model First Lady on her seemingly inconsequential tour of the capitol, the opera becomes something very different.

"Mrs. Nixon went to look at the Summer Palace of the imperial Manchus in the western suburbs yesterday," reported the Times (in an article headed, "All Peking's a Stage"), "and as she passed through the Gates of Longevity and Goodwill she laughed and said, 'That's prophetic.'" Goodman spins Pat's soundbite into "This is prophetic," an aria that asks the audience to reconsider the monumental in intimate terms:

Let the expression on the face
Of the Statue of Liberty
Change just a little, let her see
What lies inland: across the plain
One man is marching—the Unknown
Soldier has risen from his tomb;
Let him be recognized at home.

The aria signals a turn from the monumental to the intimate, and sure enough, the opera's heroic narrative begins to unravel. Chiang Ching—Madame Mao, the anti-Pat responsible for the horrors of the Cultural Revolution, presents her ballet, The Red Detachment of Women, and the characters in the opera soon find themselves unable to distinguish between this drama and their reality, as if all of Peking really were a stage, and the story of the opera suddenly veers off from the historical record.

The exploitative imperialist letch singing and dancing in Red Detachment bears, as Mrs. Nixon notes, a striking resemblance to Henry Kissinger, and is in fact played by the same singer; unable to bear suffering of the main character—a brutalized peasant girl—the First Lady drags her husband into the drama within the drama; a storm erupting within the ballet gets the onstage Nixons "sopping." With her appearance her at the midpoint of the opera, artist-tyrant Chiang has torn through both the art of politics and the politics of art to open a wound through which historical reality bleeds out, and when the prima ballerina misses her cue, Mme. Mao finally interrupts the action of the ballet with a literally show-stopping aria, "I am the wife of Mao Tse-Tung" ("When I appear," she sings, "the people hang / Upon my words") as metadramatical chaos breaks out.

It's a perplexing scene, but if you're wondering why this half-hour metadrama has been interpolated into an opera about Richard Nixon, you've got it backwards. Before he proposed Nixon, Peter Sellars wanted to put on his own staging of The Red Detachment of Women. It was only after his failure to mount this Communist propaganda ballet during the Reagan years SOMEHOW FELL THROUGH that he asked John Adams to write this opera, and it remains, in some ways, its raison d'être, in the same way that the death of Siegfried is the reason for Das Rheingold. It's this insane, beautiful moment here…

…that Nixon exists to justify.

When Act Three begins, the characters have retreated entirely into the private sphere—into dream and memory. This last act was actually written to depict the last banquet before the exhausted Nixons returned home to the States, but Sellars, in a typical move, restaged it into a literally private space, with twin beds instead of tables in order (among other things) to emphasize the scene's dreamlike qualities. The music is often hushed and sweet, rejecting the set pieces of the first two acts in favor of a through-composed score that weaves together all the characters' reflections on their respective lives and homelands.

Ultimately, this is the enterprise at the heart of Nixon—the artists were much more interested in allowing the men and women who took part in this meeting to plead their own cases lyrically and eloquently than in, say, punishing Mao for the brutality of his regime, or Nixon for the Vietnam in his past and the Watergate to come. Adams and Sellars went on to take the same strategy with all of their operas, and this is the form's greatest strength: not to document or narrate (text and photographs do that better), or even necessarily to "dramatize" in the conventional sense (don't the movies do that better?), but to allow each participant in the drama to express him/herself directly, fully and eloquently (only the operatic tradition offers arias, ensembles).

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This means Alice Goodman has to hit a very tricky tone in her libretto, a combination of the long-lost art of high rhetoric with the sort of language a Dick Nixon might have used (astoundingly, the one F-bomb in the opera is not his), and she more than lives up to the challenge (as, I hope, you've noticed from the passages I've already quoted). But while the text is often lovely and smart in its lines and phrases and passages and particulars, what really amazed me on this listening was the overarching symbolic structures.

For instance: "The people are the heroes now," goes the piece's most famous couplet; "Behemoth pulls the peasant's plow," "Behemoth" here representing (among other things) the monstrous power of the state, and the inexorable force of history, harnessed—according to the Communist myth—in the service of the people. Think Thomas Hobbes too, of course: Behemoth and Leviathan go hand-in-hand (hoof-in-flipper?) in the Hebrew Bible.

But Behemoth (pictured) comes back—twice!—in the second act, in the form of the elephant sculptures Pat Nixon encounters on her tour. She does and doesn't recognize its significance:

This little elephant in glass
brings back so many memories.
The symbol of our party, prize
of our success, our sacred cow
surrounded by blind Brahmins, slow
Musclebound, well-dressed, half-awake,
with Liberty upon her back.
Tell me, is it one of a kind?

The audience laughs when Pat identifies the elephant with the GOP, and again when the chorus informs her proudly that the elephant is in fact just one of hundreds churned out by a factory. But this disconnect between her and her guides is Pat in a nutshell: the elephant is the Western symbol of memory (Pat's personal history), and the symbol of the GOP (Pat's personal America), she's right about that, but as she will again in "This Is Prophetic," her wishful thinking finds the personal in the monumental. To her, the individual is to be prized—to the Communists, what's great is not one handmade elephant but the ability to produce "hundreds every day." Like the "blind Brahmins" from the old parable of the elephant, the high brahmins of the Chinese and American diplomatic parties have both laid their hands on the same behemoth and mistaken it for two very different beasts.

In the opera's final act, there are several moments where the libretto obviously undermines the literal reality of Sellars's staging. Why is there a dance band in everybody's bedroom? How can Chou pass Pat a handkerchief, and give Kissinger directions to the bathroom? (DIGRESSION. How fantastic/insane is it that Peter Sellars went all Regietheater on HIS OWN OPERA, before even reached the stage? And then there were huge changes made to this act, or so I understand, between the beginning and end of its very first run—I can't say when it was added, but all kinds of crazy business was definitely inserted into this act between the 1987 broadcast from Houston and the 2011 broadcast from the Met. (In the other acts, the changes were mostly quite subtle.) A funeral procession brings the ailing Chou lilies, to foreshadow his death (the crackdown on mourning for Chou would prove to be the downfall of Chiang Ching and her Gang of Four); Mao's onstage jayo sesh with one of his secretaries was, I suspect, interpolated for recent productions, based on the scandalous 90s memoir of Mao's doctor.

(META-DIGRESSION. I've forgotten—was that Nancy T'ang (played by an appropriately funny and frightening Ginger Costa Jackson) with her hand on the Chairman's crotch? Please correct me. The scathing portrayal of T'ang (a.k.a. Tang Wensheng) in this opera sent me down quite the Google rabbit-hole. She was born in Brooklyn, apparently, became immensely powerful in Mao's last years, and not only is still alive but looks great. Much was made of the Met's decision to invite the surviving members of the American diplomatic party to come see the opera; I wonder if they invited Tang to see her opera-self jerk off the Great Teacher?))

But there are subtler hints about the team's original vision for the scene—dinner and food keep coming up in the characters' reveries. "We ate wild apricots," sings Chiang Ch'ing; "The taste is in my mouth," answers Chou. "Once we had roast / and a light film of dust" (dust being another of the opera's recurring symbols of history) "settled on each plate." Clearly, what's "supposed" to be happening here is that Chou and Ch'ing, eating a feast, are reminded fondly of much simpler meals from years ago.

Pat and Dick, on the other hand, are finding that Chinese food might not agree with them quite so well. Reminiscing about his service in the Pacific Theatre, he describes the nauseating jungle scene in terms of food:

I began to take in all the sights.
Picture a thousand coconuts
like mandrills' heads or native masks,
milk oozing from their broken husks,
the flooded rib of a palm frond
where several centipedes had drowned,
unsanded wood that smelled like meat…
Jesus, it grabbed you by the throat.

Not too hard to imagine Nixon pushing away a bowl of half-eaten Chinese beef and a coconut-milk dessert as he sings these lines. As if to say, I'd kill for a Quarter Pounder right about now, he goes on to reminisce about the little bit of home he managed to build, stationed in the Pacific:

I swapped
spam for hamburger meat and roped
in a few men to rig a stand.
They called it "Nick’s Snack Shack". I found
the smell of burgers on the grill
made strong men cry.…
Done to a turn, medium-rare,
Rare, medium, well-done, anything
you say. The Customer is King.

And this line, the Capitalist lie, finishes the arch stretching over the opera to that opening chorus and the corresponding lie of Communism: "the Customer is King," says America; say the Chinese, "the People are the Heroes."

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Oh, right, and there's music in this opera, too. I don't feel any need to defend John Adams's work, though maybe I'm projecting a bit, since I'm basically his biggest fan in the world. The first time I heard his orchestral piece The Chairman Dances, drawn from the music in the last act, I was overwhelmed by the way it combined the layered rhythmic vitality of the music I listened to for pleasure (Talking Heads, Nine Inch Nails) with the symphonic grandeur and harmonic sophistication of the classical composers whose music meant the most to me as an orchestral player. My brother bought me the disc of highlights for Christmas, and that's how I learned to love the setpieces from Acts One & Two, but the three-CD set went out of print for a few years around that time, so when I finally found the TWO-AUDIOCASSETTE box for sale at a Tower Records had to to buy it on AUDIOCASSETTE and got to know Act Three from popping the cassette into the tapedeck of our Honda Civic and driving around with it on a constant loop.

But it wasn't until this latest encounter with the piece, actually seeing it onstage (live at the first Saturday of the run, and then onscreen at the HD one week later) that I gained a real appreciation for Adams as a musical dramatist. It's difficult to verbalize—I'm not talking about the word-painting he does, like making the orchestra skip a beat when Dick says that "the nation's heartland skips a beat," but the subtle increase and release of tension that illuminates the subtext of, for instance, the otherwise arid first meeting between Nixon and Mao.

Adams was not quite as virtuosic at the helm of the Met Orchestra as he was at his desk. He wasn't bad either—he certainly brought out moments of great emotional intensity in the score—but if you saw Alan Gilbert conduct Doctor Atomic you know how much more dazzling and detailed that band's performance could've been.

With a single exception—James Maddalena, the terrific singer and actor who, a bit hoarse at the live performance I saw, found himself in truly dreadful voice at the HD—the cast was uniformly superb. Richard Paul Fink was not only funny as Kissinger, but offered moments of loveliness the role has probably never seen before. Russell Braun was exquisite as Chou En-Lai, the work's agonized conscience, and Robert Brubaker was superhuman as Mao, just HANGIN' OUT in the treble clef while sitting in the stooped posture of a decrepit old man.

Now I TOLD you people that Kathleen Kim was going to rock your world as the Wife of Mao Tse-Tung, and sure enough, she was a perfect terror of demonic intensity, but still flawlessly in tune on every high D. But my favorite was Janis Kelly as Pat Nixon. Her two performances actually seemed (to me) quite different in terms of the little emphases and rubati, really thinking about each word and each note coming out of her mouth right in the moment, digging ever deeper, intellectually, into the score to arrive at new emotional depths. Between the two of them, I was on the verge of tears for most of the second act.

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And at the end of the third, I left the theater in a daze. I was stupefied. I could hardly speak, let alone articulate a reaction. This is, of course, the effect that a form like Nixon's is designed to produce—it supplanted my modern, quotidian experience with reflection, meditation, introspection. When I left the opera house, I stumbled to the next train out of town and fell immediately asleep; when I left the afternoon broadcast, I stepped out onto the sidewalk and discovered that the sun had set while I'd been in the dark, watching. The sky'd gone all orange and blue and was seemingly cloudless, but a thin flurry of huge white flakes snowed down as if from nowhere and then, after a moment, it stopped.

First, the Bad News

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.

Lives of the Great Composers: John Adams' Librettist Calls Him a Dickhead

There is an interesting and somewhat problematic interview with John Adams up at the Guardian. It's one of those articles that tells you a lot more about the author than its subject. Just f'rinstance, here is the part that really gets me:

During the Vietnam war, he dodged the draft, dosing himself with caffeine and over-the-counter drugs to ensure that he failed the medical. Yet 30 years later, when asked by the New York Philharmonic to compose a 9/11 elegy, he succumbed to what he acknowledged was his "civic duty". Has the coyote been collared and tethered?

Because I guess going off to kill and/or die in a distant jungle is basically the same as accepting a commission from the New York Phil? In terms of doing your civic duty?

So weird. The article is full of stuff like that! This passage is also kind of confusing—

Alice Goodman, who wrote the text for of [sic] Nixon in China, is now an ordained minister of the Church of England, dispensing piety to her flock in the shires; holy orders did not restrain her from denouncing Adams as a "dickhead" when their opera was performed in Brussels.

I guess this is technically true? But kind of misleading. "Holy orders did not restrain" Alice Goodman (litotes?) because she was not an ordained minister at the time—in fact, I think she was Jewish. Also, he says "their opera," but the opera in question wasn't Nixon in China, as this passage seems to imply, but The Death of Klinghoffer, their second collaboration. Also, she didn't actually "denounce" him as a dickhead, since "denounce" implies a public statement, and actually it went something like this, according to Goodman at least (quoted by Rupert Christiansen in Thomas May's indispensable John Adams Reader, p. 253):

Anyway I'm very happy I read this article because it reminds me that I Was Looking at the Ceiling and then I Saw the Sky, Adams' foray into… light opera? popular song?… is coming to London! And the cast sounds great! Even if this production flops, it should be fascinating; the candid dissection of the original Ceiling/Sky productions was one of my favorite parts of Adams' memoirs. But maybe it will be a smashing success! History will judge! Here is some video to whet y'alls appetites: and there are more videos + info here. I would like a FULL REPORT, please, from anybody in London.

Is It Okay if I Write a Post About Nixon in China–Related News that Doesn't Make a Joke about How "News Has a Kind of Mystery"? Okay Cool

So one reason a lot of us were really excited when we heard that Nixon in China was going to play the Met, because that meant the possibility of an HD broadcast, because that meant the possibility of a video recording, and Peter Sellarses production of Nixon in China is one of the best things he ever did! But then we found out that it was not on the HD schedule and we all cried, softly, into our signed copies of the I Was Looking at the Ceiling and then I Saw the Sky libretto. BUT NOW IT IS ON THE HD SCHEDULE, HOORAY, THAT IS SO AMAZING!!! Even if there is no recording, it means that anybody who hasn't sent away for a bootleg DVD of the old Great Performances broadcast (complete with Walter Cronkite commentary) will finally get to see what the opera is supposed to look like, on the BIG SCREEN, deliciously filmed and amplified. Did I mention I AM SO EXCITEDDDDDD

More from the Hell Mouth

Boosey's wonderful Sarah Baird points out that John Adams is going to be speaking at Yale TODAY, so all (er, both) you local readers can get on that—4:30, Whitney Humanities Center, and then again tomorrow, same bat-time. Hey look, some provincial hack did a write-up for the town rag.

This Should Be Interesting

I'm told that world's greatest musicologist Richard Taruskin once sent one of his infamous postcards (goose quill dipped in venom) to John Adams, with the message: stop talking to the media.

NOT BLOODY LIKELY, the dude just published his MEMOIRS, for chrissake. Also, someone has to defend him in print from such unhinged or uncharitable critics as, say, Richard Taruskin. But I have to admit, I did not see this coming: ladies and gentlemen, the John Adams Blog.

It is called HELL MOUTH, because John Adams is a huge fan of Buffy.

Well I, for one, cannot wait to see what comes flying out of this Hell Mouth. Welcome to my blogroll, John Adams! And the URGENT folder of my RSS reader.

(UPDATE!)

On the Double Sextet Recording (and Shocking Bonus Surprise Steve Reich Content)

O Internet! Every day is a little journey. Each link leads to another link leads to another link and that's how I never get anything done. Today's journey began thus: I read Nico's blog this morning, which repeated an oft-twittered complaint, namely, "How come I can't buy the recording of Double Sextet yet?" Well, one reason is that there isn't a studio recording yet, just that live recording with the eighth blackbird/Oberlin CME dodectet that you may have heard streaming for a limited time online. It's an exciting document, certainly worth hearing (and surreptitiously downloading to your iPod while you, Reich addict and clever URL-hacker that you are, had the chance), but not really worth shelling out for when there's going to be a nice audiophile studio recording in the pipeline. Like, listening to it now, I think I hear a little "unintentional phasing" around 3:30 in the first movement. Totally excusable in concert, not so much in a permanent document—and who's going to pay twice for both downloads? But that's not what Nico is saying, I don't think. (Is he?) He's saying, how come I can't buy the recording till 20fricking11? Isn't that kind of ridiculous? Well yeah, it is kind of. Now to be fair, Nonesuch is usually a pretty good label for this sort of thing—they're less interested in packing a disc with the standard 60-80 minutes of music than they are in putting a piece in its appropriate context. Kronos Quartet has put out series of "singles," long pieces that wouldn't fit onto one of their crazy grab-bag records but wouldn't fill out full-lengths on their own; John Adams' On the Transmigration of Souls would have made awkward company for any pairing (Side A: Transmigration, Side B: Scratchband!!! Um, no); and perhaps most perversely, they did a Nellie McKay with his release of Dharma at Big Sur and Yo Momma Blew Charles Ives, reflecting his bicoastal sensibility with a two-disc set clocking in under the length of a single disc. But it doesn't have to be all or nothing. Just frinstance, while we continue wait for a CD of the Thomas Adès Violin Concerto, assuming that EMI has not crumbled into dust before they find something to pair it with, we can make do with the mp3 recording up on those iTunes. Nonesuch is usually a little ahead of the curve with this sort of thing—like, you get a free download of every purchase when you buy the disc off their website, and Steve Reich alone has two download-only releases available from them already—but is this a sign that they could be a little further-ahead still? Lossless soundfiles, maybe? Downloadable booklets? The DG Webshop already offers those things with downloads of their new releases. Why can't everybody be more like the DG Webshop? DG Webshop, stand up, you get a gold star. OH HEY BUT SO BUT!! I clicked on the link in Nico's post, which led me to this interesting Steve Reich interview, whose comment section, in turn, led me to this YET MORE INTERESTING interview, a revealing double-profile of Steve Reich and Beryl Korot, which you should all go read right now now now, even though the default when you click on that link is an annoying full-screen mode which, if you are me, you will immediately disable. It also includes, are you EVEN ready for this, a bonus clip from the primitive MIDI demo mock-up of Reich's forthcoming piece for "all rock-and-roll people," 2 x 5:

Steve Reich - 2 x 5

Okay, CRAZY. I gotta hear how this turns out. (In 2011.)

Lives of the Great Composers: Ingram Marshall Impersonates Julia Child

Guess who was at the grocery store the other day! Composer Ingram Marshall. He's the greatest! We hang out all the time, he and I, just kidding no we don't, I'm namedropping. But so he says to me, "Kyle said you were laughing about the Julia Child thing," and at first I had no clue what he was talking about, like honestly at first I thought he was referring to the forthcoming Julia Child biopic starring Meryl Streep (pictured) but then he said, "He said you guys were reading Hallelujah Junction..." and OF COURSE, Kyle (my colleague at ye olde record shoppe) and I had both read the following passage from John Adamses memoir and then laughed like idiots about it:

Ingram, when I first met him, lived in a drafty garage space under the Fell Street freeway ramp. Dressed in an old Marimekko striped pajama, a relic of his days at the Swedish Radio, he cooked gourmet meals for any number of guests with a wok and a green two-burner Coleman camp stove. Only a few feet away froom the cooking area was his Serge modular synthesizer, his microphone, and several two-channel Revox tape recorders that constituted his studio. Nearby next to a case of prized California wines, slept a large, phlegmatic dog of uncertain breed named Ibu. On one occasion, during my brief fling with video art, I filmed Ingram doing a Julia Child impersonation while he cooked fonds d'artichaut farcis, lecturing the camera at every step of the preparation while Strauss's Ein Heldenleben soared in the background.

Unfortunately, Marshall reports, this work has been lost; "Videotape was expensive back then," and they had to tape over it and record something else. The good news is, I hear rumors of an upcoming anniversary concert at Carnegie Hall, for which So Percussion, Kronos Quartet, Philip Glass and Wu Man will all dress up like Julia Child and cook us a lovely artichoke dish, in order to pay tribute to this minimalist masterpiece. I'll see you there!

You Endured the Opera, NOW Wear the Dress

Via Mind the Gap, we can add another item to our catalog of composer-inspired merchandise! J. Peterman's new 40's Bow Dress (pictured), inspired by... well, read on:

The San Francisco Opera House is exactly the same, same coffered ceiling, same sweeping balconies, but the music isn’t. I’ve been invited to sit through 3-1/2 hours of Dr. Atomic, the new opera about Robert Oppenheimer and the first atomic bomb test. ... You made it through Parsifal, Peterman, I keep reminding myself. Then I notice her next to me. She’s leaning forward intently. ... After the bomb goes off and the lights come up, she cries “Bravo!” and flashes me a brilliant smile. “Wasn’t that wonderful?” she asks. The sight of her in this dress is almost enough to persuade me to give Schönberg a second chance.

ARRRRRRRGH CAN WE PLEASE NOT USE SCHOENBERG AS THE STRAW MAN EVERY SINGLE EFFING TIME WE WANT TO MAKE A POINT ABOUT er sorry I mean ohhh, Mr. Peterman, you're incorrigible! Of course, when I think of operas and little black dresses, I'm not thinking Atomic, I'm thinking Ariadne, but that anecdote might be a tougher sell. Still, I guess I shouldn't complain. Maybe a few more J. Petermans (J.'s Peterman? J. Petermen? What's the plural) can help us to give new music its much-deserved aura of glamor, like how Mary-Kate did for the Met Gala. Wait, what?

ADAMOMANIA

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?

LA PHIL SEASON ANNOUNCEMENT LIVEBLOG

I'm liveblogging the press conference announcing the Los Angeles 2009-2010 Season, their first with Gustavo Dudamel! The critics are all yelling at each other over whether this guy is The Next Leonard Bernstein or The Great White Hype, but whatever, that's a lot of noise. He's an interesting artist, from what little I've heard, and the buzz from inside the organization is Great—the players like him, and they say he's bringing to L.A. the same commitment to education that he brought to, uh, whatever place he's from. I never liveblogged anything before! Do you think this will work? 4:22 - The press conference is supposed to start in 8 minutes I think. Right now I am looking at a bunch of empty chairs and I am cursing Los Angeles for opening their stupid gorgeous Disney Hall as soon as I moved away. The stream is working fine though. I can see the little tiny people taking their seats in the auditorium. 4:24 - Should I be Twittering this instead? I still don't know what that Twitter is for. Do you do Twitter? 4:25 - These times are all East Coast, btw. 4:27 - JoJo's computer, which I was streaming this on whilst I liveblogged, went into Sleep mode and had to be reawakened. Must remember to guard against this as liveblogging continues. 4:28 - Are there a lot of people in the auditorium? I can't tell. 4:34 - Oh cool I just found FULL SCREEN MODE. This is much better. 4:35 - I can't decide whether I'm hungry or thirsty. Maybe I want some black tea with milk. 4:36 - My mom cans her own jams and jellies. I bet some apricot jam on bread would be prefect, with some Earl Grey and milk. 4:37 - WAIT HOLD ON WHAT'S GOING ON THERE ARE PEOPLE NOW. The chairman of the Phil is telling us how exciting it is for him to be the chairman in these challenging times. He just got back from the inauguration! There was a lot of classical music at the inauguration. 4:39 - President and CEO Deborah... Gordon? is talking now. This press conference is being webcast live, she says. 4:40 - Ooh, they're going to welcome him with a cinematic somethingorother! Short Ride in a Fast Machine is playing. Mariachis! Surfers! Dancers! Hahaha the KNBC anchorpeople! Buddhist monks! At the observatory! Rock and rollers! Somebody at the Getty! Frank Gehry! Plácido Domingo! Esa Pekka: STILL SEXY. I think he's younger than I am. 4:43 - Okay that's over, it's back to real people. Jesus, Gustavo literally is younger than I am, isn't he? I'm SO OLD. Gustavo Dudamel: "Wow." Haha he made a joke about the comically loud movie screen still rolling up behind him. 4:45 - He's speaking Spanish! I speak Spanish! He's saying, he's very excited. 4:46 - Barbara is also very excited. 4:48 - TALK LOUDER, GUSTAVO. Um, he wants to bring classical music to the people. He wants to say hello to his wife, who is watching on the internet in Venezuela!! 4:50 - The inaugural concert will be broadcast around the world! He made some "very unconventional decisions," including a World Premiere! 4:51 - "L.A. has a tradition of new things," he sez. "With the traditional repertoire, new repertoire." Hahahaha "a premiere is always CRAZY, like WHAT WILL HAPPEN???" They're also doing Mahler 1. 4:53 - "It's actually very rare that there's a world premiere on the telecast!" says Barbara. God, what's wrong with America. OMG WHAT'S GOING ON!!! SOMETHING CRAZY!!! Is John Adams about to come out??? YES OMG OMG OMG 4:54 - Hahahahaha Gustavo is ADORABLE. He's acting all nervous and shy with John Adams. Hahaha "The LA Phil audience has been witness to some of my triumphs... and some of my fiascos." (He means Dharma at Big Sur.) 4:56 - John Adams is writing his FIRST SYMPHONY for the L.A. Phil, subtitled "City Noir." [I thought he said something like, "The piece is called Symphony ('City Noir')," though maybe he said, "The piece is called, simply, City Noir."] 4:57 - It's inspired by the music from film noir, and that's the jumping-off point, but it's also concerned with his Grand Theme, which is what is the music of California. Now I'm wondering if I misheard, and he said Adams's 1st Symphony and not Mahler's? [No, I heard right, they're doing both.] 4:58 - This is SUCH a good idea. Adams is a big crowd pleaser. He says he had GD's interpretation of Mahler 2 in mind when he wrote the piece. 5:02 - Talking about tour plans. And John Adams is directing a festival! A sequel to Minimalist Jukebox as it were. It's called WEST COAST WEST COAST, or maybe he said WEST COAST BEST COAST. [WEST COAST LEFT COAST.] 5:03 - NAMES: Lou Harrison Piano Concerto, Salonen LA Variations, Mel Powell, Bill Kraft, Henry Cowell, Daniel Lentz, Amy X Neuberg, Morton Subotnik, Harry Partch, Ingram Marshall (WHOO!), Frank Zappa, Leonard Rosenman - Rebel Without a Cause. 5:05 - Joshua Redman! Christian McBride! A big hand for Tom Newman, who's going to write for the Kronos Quartet a concerto Adams thinks will have "a very long shelf-life." 5:06 - Gustavo's also doing a festival? Of American music? He's still talking way too quietly. Ginastera, Copland, Carlos Chavez, something something. He wants to create an America without divisions. Like the Golijov Passion. Or something. 5:10 - He's talking about a poet? Named Alberto something? What's going on. 5:11 - Stephen Hartke organ symphony!! Derek Bermel!! Plus John Adamses piece and two other world premieres. [Whoa, I must have misheard: a total of NINE world premieres this season, not five.] Thomas Adès will be in residence. Terry Riley dubbed the Disney organ HURRICANE MAMA, which is awesome. My battery is about to die. Who's the other composer she named? [Unsuk Chin. She is a great pick, and not an easy one.] 5:16 - Gustavo is talking about the Youth Orchestra of Los Angeles and how much he loves conducting them. Basically it's the American Sistema, is what they're sayin'. Did I mention he's adorable? "I think it's [his educational project in L.A.] one of the most important projects happening in the world." 5:17 - Adams on the Sistema: "The extraordinary thing you feel, when you're in Caracas, is that young people think classical music is cool." 5:19 - Time for questions for the audience. "THIS IS ALWAYS DEATH." (Krusty the Klown.) But first, did you know the L.A. Philharmonic has the second biggest budget in the US? Yay that's cool. 5:20 - GUSTAVO I STILL CANNOT HEAR YOU. I've just fallen in forever love with you but baby I CANNOT. HEAR YOU. 5:21 - The cat is clawing the crap out of this loveseat, but it came with the apartment and was already clawed to hell, so I'm gonna let it slide. She's so CUTE! 5:23 - Buffering. 5:23 - What in the HELL is this lady talking about. "Bel canto tuning." GUSTAVO WILL YOU PLEASE SPEAK OUT ON THIS IMPORTANT CONTROVERSIAL TOPIC. HOW DO YOU INTEND TO TUNE THE LOS ANGELES PHILHARMONIC 5:25 - what the 5:26 - Did the feed just cut out? What's going on. 5:26 - Black screen. LADIES AND GENTLEMEN THE FUTURE OF PRESS CONFERENCES 5:27 - I wonder if maybe the Powers that Be brought the press conference to a halt because they knew we couldn't handle the truth about tuning. 5:28 - Okay the picture's back. And the cat is here! Gustavo calls Frank Gehry "Pancho." 5:31 - FINAL QUESTION. The question was not recorded. BUT Barbara says they are they took a hit with this lousy economy, sure, we all did, but they have a long-term plan and they're sticking to it, they're not letting some Depression put the kibosh on their AWESOME FUTURISTIC PROGRAMMING. THE END Okay wow, that was pretty exciting, and not just because everybody kept saying over and over how excited they were. The picture of the new L.A. Phil is pretty clear: they're damnin' the torpedoes and charging ahead into a comprehensive program of music education and new-music advocacy. "The composers are the heroes now" are not the exact words Barbara used, but something close to that. Dudamel has accepted the baton from Salonen and is running with it: like Salonen's, this is programming designed especially for Los Angeles, California, America and the Americas, music from the "here" and "now" in very small and very large senses of the words "here" and "now." Something truly great is happening over there. [More coherent coverage here. Full press release here.]

Adams Addendum

As if it weren't enough that my previous posts on Doctor Atomic contradicted each other and themselves, I've just come back from seeing the piece a second time, and this experience was radically different from the first. Worth discussing? Myih. I also noticed that I was sitting just behind everybody's favorite CT/NY power-couple, omnipresent librettist J.D. McClatchy (who will, don't you worry, get his very own episode of Libretto Problems) and amazing fanastic brilliant graphic design genius Chip Kidd (who came up with the dust jacket of every single book you've ever bought just because of the dust jacket). Managed to restrain myself from running up and saying HEY J.D. MCCLATCHY WHAT DID YOU THINK OF THAT at the intermission, but I am dying to know what he was thinking. Also! Let me point out that you can download the whole libretto here, from the Met website, for study or meditation. Okay to bed.

I Speak According to the Book, CONTINUED: Libretto Problems, Part III

(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!

NO, David Hajdu, NO. BAD David Hajdu.

First sentence of David Hajdu's review of Hallelujah Junction, John Adams' memoirs, in the New York Times Book Review:

John Adams is the Care Bear of the American avant-garde.

Wait, what? I—no. No, sh. Don't speak.

I Speak According to the Book: Libretto Problems, Part II

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.

Blogger Plugs Friends, Self

First! Everybody buy the new Kronos Quartet CD, which has liner notes by one of my favorite Gregs. The Nonesuch.com store has it on sale, which means you can download the mp3s right now AND get the CD in the mail and it'll still be a buck under the list price, even with shipping. (Buy it together with the new kd lang CD, which is one of her best, and shipping is free!) I've only heard snippets of the piece so far, but it sounds gorgeous, and anyway it's Kronos + Terry Riley + Wu Man, so you can be darned sure I'll pick up a copy at my local indie record shop (on account of I work there). As for the liner notes themselves, they are thorough, clever, and duly affectionate. Do read. Also! They ran my latest concert previews in the New Haven Advocate. Ezra Laderman, Alvin Lucier. The first commenter to count all the clichés in the article wins a signed copy of my book. Furthermore! Hope you all read Rebecca Mead's article in the latest New Yorker about my friend Nico Muhly. It quotes "music critic and blogger Dan Johnson," meaning me! But I thought some of the best parts of the article were actually the least flattering to Nico. Whenever I read a fawning magazine profile about the genius of the week I want to run out and stab said genius in the face. But this one turns out to be as much fun as her profile of Peter Gelb, which I hope you all read. Now, this isn't exactly unflattering, but I love that for a little perspective, Mead sought critiques of Nico's oeuvre from the composers he most admires. Namely, Philip Glass:

"The great anxiety among young composers is, when are you going to hear your own voice? But the real problem is, how do you get rid of it, how do you develop? Nico hasn't got to that yet. There is a lot of rapid growth in one's twenties, but the big challenge is to keep that alive over the long stretch, for the next forty years, and not let it get stifled by the meanness of the world we live in."

and John Adams:

...Muhly's music is "eclectic, nondenominational in the world of contemporary classical music, which tends to split off into lots of different orthodoxies. He obviously shows influences from the minimalist composers, but his music is not nearly as rigorously designed. It is very much like him: it is open, it is attractive, it is pleasing." Adams says that he hears his own influence on Muhly's work—"It's like meeting a twenty-year-old who looks strangely familiar, only to discover he's your long-lost son"—but adds that he finds it oddly untroubled. "I could use a little more edge, or a little more violence," Adams says. "At times, there is a surfeit of prettiness in Nico's music, and I am not sure it is a good thing for someone so young to be so concerned with attractiveness."

See? That's actually quite interesting. Glass's warning we can recognize as the product of his own bittersweet experience. The great Glass paradox is that there is at once no better established or more dismissed composer in American concert music. And indeed, this dual position stems largely from the strength and distinctiveness of the Glass idiom. It's worth considering, in light of his advice, how seriously Glass must have taken the long evolution of that idiom over the past few decades. As for Adams, I find he sums up Nico's music better than most critics do. For one thing, it is very like the music of John Adams. How come nobody points that out? There are echoes of Nixon in China all over Nico's orchestral scores. And it is also very like Nico himself. Some composers, if you meet them, you'll think, "That guy wrote that?" But Nico face-to-face is exactly the person you imagine when you hear Clear Music. And again, these are criticisms that shed a little light on Adams' own mature aesthetic. Criticisms, as a friend of mine pointed out, that have been leveled against Adams himself, especially early on in his career: derivative of minimalism, but without the rigor; pleasing and attractive to a fault. I would be the first to defend early Adams against these charges (and hey, I mount a similar defense re: Nico in the NYer piece), but perhaps it's still interesting to consider the extent to which both composers might be guilty—the young Adams, the young Muhly. Isn't Harmonium a lot less gratifying than the Klinghoffer Choruses, precisely because the latter pieces are a little less eager to please, a little more eager to put the "post" in "post-minimalist"? Anyhow, I spent a lot of time thinking about these remarks, which isn't something I usually do after I read an article about music. Why can't more criticism get me this excited? Clearly, what we need are more critics like this: practical, caring. Potshots are too easy. (If you read this blog, you know I take plenty of those.) It's so much more interesting to see people working out the problems in music they care about, rather than dismissing the stuff that doesn't excite them or cooing at the sheer perfection of the stuff that happens to accord with their tastes. Why not? Let's go just a little bit deeper. New Havenites, I'll see you at tonight's concert!

Regrettin' the Error

This review came out more than a few days ago, but I thought this was still worth mentioning:

Between Ms. Higdon’s works, Yousif Sheronick, a percussionist in the Ethos Percussion Group, played his own transcription of the piano line in 3 of the 11 movements of “John’s Book of Alleged Dances,” by John Adams. Percussion works here: Mr. Sheronick replaced the homogenous piano timbre with the hollow but exotic sound of what looked like a makeshift xylophone, and the quartet brought ample swing to Mr. Adams’s alternately bluesy and mechanistic passages.

I love this mistake because it's that rare instance where a word as seemingly subjective as "homogenous" can be said to have been used in a fashion that is factually incorrect. The "piano line" in the original version of the Adams is actually a tape made from samples of a prepared piano line, so that every note already has a different timbre from every other note. "John," of the title, isn't just John Adams, it's also John Cage, who invented this trick for making an ordinary piano sound "hollow but exotic" (and while I'm picking nits, do we really need that "but"?). My guess: Kozinn hasn't heard or doesn't remember the original version and is just BSin' for our benefit.