800 Words: Sense of Place

Biddeford, Maine: I have just gone on the first solo road trip of my life - up the East Coast, the one part of the world, save Israel which is really a small sliver of a part of the world, that I know with anything more than passing familiarity. After days spent on the couches and spare rooms of different friends and their spouses, I arrived yesterday morning at the house of my college best friend, whom after three years in Baltimore may still be my closest friend.

Even now, one-third of the way through my thirties, my mind still sees the years 21 and 22 as a very brief golden era. I was probably as miserable (or at least barely less) than I ever was. But there was something about the group in which I felt at home - a shared ethos, common values, a weirdly earnest cynicism, and a determination to have funny things to say about serious matters and serious things to say about funny ones. I probably didn't even know many of the friends I associate with those two years yet particularly well, and yet those two years set the stage for any consolation that came in later years that offset the misery that returned nearly unabated until I came to Baltimore. Inevitably, such groups can't last long, and much to my dismay, everybody dispersed to where life had to carry them. The loss was inevitable, it was also painful for a guy who direly needed a better period.

I love, truly love, my good friends in Baltimore. But I do not share many of their values, and I disapprove as strenuously of their values as I don't doubt they do of mine. I've written so many times about the differences that they require no revaluation here, but for the record, the values of Smalltimore are every bit as rotten and corrupt as the places from which we all had to so direly wish to escape in order to find ourselves amongst each other.

Even so, I worry that if my life yet again takes a sharp downward turn, I may yet view these first few years in Baltimore with the exact same halo, and I want it on the record here that if I start viewing those first few years in Baltimore surrounded by a gold plate, it wasn't at all like that, just as the last two years at AU weren't at all like that. A set of circumstances conspired to make those years only slightly less miserable than the years surrounding them. The anxiety attacks with their hand tremors and hyperventilation, the omnipresent facial tics, the helpless addiction to food, the physical pains and ailments, the compulsive going through money like water, the total inability to create the person you wanted to be, was exactly the same as it ever was. It only seemed, for a brief moment, like the fog was lifting, and you were finally, if ever so briefly, on the path to being that delusional image of a person you wanted to be.

In retrospect, there was one thing which all the people from those AU days shared: a shared devotion to, or at least an inability to escape, a certain place - a place different for each of us, but startlingly similar in particulars as all places are to the people who grew up in them. We all loved those places, even as we often hated everything about them. The roots haunted us all, the places from which we hailed gave us the wings they chose for us even as they tore asunder any wings we might have wanted to obtain on our own.

Over the years, I've traveled plenty of times to my friends' towns of origin. I've travelled so often to Biddeford Maine, or Toms River New Jersey, or St. Mary's Pennsylvania, that hometown friends of my friends have become friends of mine. I'll probably never have opportunity to visit other such hometowns of old friends like Watertown, New York or Homestead, Florida. But what I inevitably return to is that each these places are true places, with genuine senses of place within them, whereas my hometown is just a makeshift place that Jews settled because they were not from anywhere else.

When you go to Biddeford, Maine, you see a place worth preserving exactly as it is. You see the still waters of the coastline running against rocky cliffs of every color, both of which rub up against beaches that seem to stretch into infinity. Turn your head slightly away from the shores and you see land too pristinely green for a kid who grew up going the Delaware beaches to believe could exist within the same sightline. Life is calm and peaceful, surrounded by natural beauty at every turn, and every day as relaxing as a vacation. Everything about this place seems as quiet and untroubled as the landscape. A Jewish kid from Northwest Baltimore can't help wonder how a person could ever be so lucky to grow up in a place so beautiful.

When you go to Toms River, New Jersey, you see a similarly seaside town - far more ethnically diverse than Biddeford, but not nearly so attractive aesthetically. And yet the diversity gives every possible amenity, and makes life into a never-ending soiree. If you want to go to a beach, everybody seems to know someone who has their own piece of private beach where you can lie and swim, practically undisturbed. If you want a good meal, you visit the restaurant of your friend who became a chef. If you want entertainment or culture, you take a simple drive to Philadelphia or New York. If you want to hang out, you call the friends you've grown up and gone to the same gatherings with since you were in high school.

Provincial though these places may seem to people who've never been there, being born to places like them is better than living any big city, and worth the lifelong fight it takes to preserve everything that's worthwhile about them. Hopefully, your children can soon enjoy all the things that enliven your time upon this Earth just as you do now.

But for a Jew who wants to truly be a Jew, there is no such truly defined place from which to hail. For all Pikesville's Jewish concentration (and it's the largest concentration outside of Israel), it's just a makeshift Jewish community that people come to because Jews live there, and leave without a second thought when better opportunities arise. It's not particularly attractive, nor is it a place where people are particularly nice to each other, it's simply a place where some Jews feel free to be Jewish without judgement. Such a place is the long-cherished dream of those who might fancy themselves "Jewish separatists", and for those who dreamed of it, it is very much a place worth defending. But for those of us who look at the fanaticism which such a dream engenders, for those of us who disapprove of the right-wing paranoia and religious fanaticism such a place can't help but breed, it is a place we can't help longing to escape, even as we feel gratitude for everything with which it provided us.

Being a Jew, by definition, means that there is no place where you should feel truly at home. There is no place on this planet where a true Jew feels accepted, and I doubt there ever will be. Many Jews thought that America, not Israel, is the true Promised Land where we can be integrated among the American population, but for many Jews integration turned out to be the same as assimilation - once you're fully American, you're no longer fully Jewish. And for all New York's Jewish heritage, it will always be a scattered, multicultural place. According to Lenny Bruce, if you live in New York, you're automatically Jewish. But if your primary attachment is to New York, then your religion is New York and there's no room for a second primary affiliation. If you live in Israel, your right to existence is questioned on a daily basis by the world, and living among other Israelis, your existence is a life permanently in conflict. Even if Israelis weren't known for being of an extremely abrasive and confrontational temperament, the challenge of creating and sustaining a productive, dynamic country in the desert, among people who wish us dead and a world that expects us to accept that wish without objection, would make any Jew who lives in Israel feel extreme rancor.

There is nothing comfortable or harmonious about a Jewish existence. I don't know the origin of the term 'People of the Book', but being a Jew is the definition of being at home nowhere but in your own thoughts, and a properly applied mind is an extremely turbulent place to live. Whether among themselves or among non-Jews, Jews thrive best in an atmosphere of conflict, defiance, opposition. Wherever we're from, our sense of place will always be filled with tension, and tension is the lifelong burden which every Jew takes on himself. There is no inner harmony to Judaism, and no sense that life should be fun. There is only constant debate and argument. The hightened state in which argument exists produces many crucial things that improve the quality of life, but it is not a life to be enjoyed.

Mad Men vs. Game of Thrones (part II of) Part 2

Life is a state of Mad Men, with Game of Thrones always creeping in. Mad Men, recreating an era of ersatz American perfection which turned out to be a prison from which America had to escape, and doing so with its own claustrophobic perfection.

Endings are tricky, they're much easier to do well when the show was flawed, because the show can then be about the ending itself. Was there any truly great TV show, or great novel, that landed its ending on a level as estimable as the rest of it? Any story longer than the story itself is not about capturing the story, but the passing of life itself. The passing of life and time can't simply end (unless it's The Sopranos), it has to wind down and show that life still goes on even if we don't see it. 

Mad Men was a victim of its own achievements. It was, in my firm opinion, the greatest TV Drama that ever there was, or ever there could be. But subjecting that level of examination to life as it happens, to 'lifeness', can never be sustained forever. Just as life seems to, the story can go on forever, even if we're not around for it. But in the real world, every story has to end, and it's almost a given that a story that so deeply questions what pure life experience is made of will have no idea how to correctly land its ending, because no person has seen their end and lived to tell us what it's like. There was only one appropriate ending for Mad Men, and it was already used by The Sopranos. 

The final half-season of Mad Men was perhaps its weakest. It did not end with a bang, it simply wound down to an ending that is completely in keeping with the tone of the show itself, yet it felt completely wrong at the same time. To see the shock of Don Draper becoming a fervent follower of an Ashram is so banal, so petty in comparison to the mythic man he once was, that it diminishes this larger-than-life figure to smallness. It leaves a horrible taste in our mouths that we've been following ten years in the life of a man we thought was of mythic dimension, only for him to confess his sins and in his first moment of true vulnerability, show that he's just a human as gullible as the next person. And yet, in keeping with history, in keeping with the tone of the show, it's still absolutely perfect. 

Mad Men is a study in the glories, and the limitations, of perfection. It is as flawless a work of art as has ever been created, but its flawlessness is its flaw. It's a prison from which the only escape is to ignore it. By Season 5, their best in my humble opinion, the world no longer cared about Mad Men. It had moved on to Game of Thrones. Mad Men is about trying to grasp the mysteries of human personality, Game of Thrones is about showing us how cheap human life is. Mad Men is a work whose creator is a single authority who allowed no compromise to his vision and no telegraph as to what was in store. Game of Thrones is a work defined by collaboration, whose plot is developed in concert with the original novelist whose work half the audience already knew from the books before it's shown on TV, and whose work may further be developed by suggestions from the audience. Mad Men is meant as a work of Art with a capital A, Game of Thrones is a work of awful magnificence, but like so many works of great art, it is primarily intended as entertainment. Mad Men is a micro snapshot of our world and history, Game of Thrones is a macro panoramic view of an historical world that isn't even our own. Mad Men deals in perfection, Game of Thrones deals in the infinite. 

Perfection is a prison from which the life force which is nature has to escape. The classical age of TV is over. Mad Men is our Mozart, our Leonardo, our young Shakespeare, our Tolstoy, our Jean Renoir. The elegance, the naturalism, the formal perfection, is so finely honed that the only way forward is to smash the rules it sets out into a million pieces. In the control which the showrunner has, Mad Men recalls the Hollywood's Golden Age of the Director, when Coppola and Scorsese and Altman could fulfil a genuine artistic vision. But in its achievement, perhaps Mad Men goes even past Coppola and Scorsese, with their concessions to potboilerdom, and is an achievement to rival great figures from the Golden Age of World Cinema - Renoir, Ozu, Ray, DeSica, Bergman and others of similarly gilded eminence to the World of Great Art. Except perhaps for Altman and Bogdanovich, no director from America's Golden Age mined the problems of real people so deeply.  

But maybe great art needs that potboiler aspect to it. We are as much dust as divinity, and without the ability to be entertained, who will pay attention? Even I can admit that Mad Men had its dull, even wooden moments that didn't ring true at all. Perfection is an enclosed space from which by definition, you can't reach higher than its limitations. But when the White Walkers come spilling into Hardhome like latter day devils making their first inroads into Elysium, when Ned Stark is senselessly beheaded in front of his family, when Daenerys Targaryen emerges alive like a goddess from the fire - completely nude with baby dragons on her shoulders, when a condemned Tyrion Lannister curses the entire audience of the showtrial his father convened to have him killed, when Oberyn Martell's head smashes like a falling melon, when half the remaining Starks are butchered when they finally recover from the loss of their patriarch, when Stannis Baratheon - TV's Macbeth, or King Saul - literally sacrifices his daughter to fire as a last desperate attempt to fulfill his ambition, you realize that you're dealing with a different, wholly more potent and terrible, kind of sublimity. Mad Men merely hints at this horrific, warnographic sublimity in its 2nd to last episode when an Oklahoma WWII veteran alludes to his brief dalliance with cannibalism on the Western Front. Game of Thrones stands, perhaps lesserly, but still very much present, in the tradition of Beethoven, Michelangelo, older Shakespeare, Dostoevsky, or Orson Welles. It grasps at the infinite, and goes higher and further into the sublime than Mad Men ever could. It's strong evidence, like Dostoevsky and Shakespeare at his worst, that only works that sink so low can rise so high. No amount of absurd, bad, or trashy scenes can take away the horrific and disgusting greatness Game of Thrones has achieved. 

800 Words: In Praise of Betty Draper

The Golden Age of TV was not kind to women. We hate ourselves for loving Tony Soprano, Walter White, Jimmy McNulty, Don Draper, and yet, to a man, we love to hate their spouses.

No spouse was more hated than Skyler White, and the actress who played her: Anna Gunn, was rewarded for how faithfully she executed Vince Gilligan's requests to be the shrewish counterpart to Walter's evil with death threats. But at least Breaking Bad granted Skyler her own personhood. Betty Draper/Francis spent Mad Men longing for a liberation from her husbands Don and Henry. In Breaking Bad, it was Walter who longed for liberation, and Breaking Bad granted him more liberation than Walter could ever imagine. But the whole point of Betty's character was that her liberation would never happen. To their dying days, women like Betty Draper are  designed to stuff their humanity into a two-dimensional beauty that is clearly less than human casing.

Nobody ever likes Betty Draper - whatever small bits of personality she exhibited was as shockingly unattractive as the figure from which it issued was beautiful. It is a mirror opposite of Shakespeare's Richard III, whose ugliness has turned his soul ugly. Betty's beauty has, in a sense, wilted her soul. She is personally unattractive because being disliked is the only way that her human qualities could even be noticed.

I vividly remember a G-chat status by a friend of mine - a guy of course - who was a few seasons behind on Mad Men from me. He wrote in all caps: "BETTY DRAPER IS HITLER!!!" I knew exactly which episode of Season 2 he'd just watched. But assuming Betty Draper is Hitler assumes that she has personality enough to have an unattractive personality. Unlike the male fantasies which exist in so many works of art, not merely a person, like Vertigo's Judy Barton, she is barely more than a chimera, a person designed to capture men's imaginations. But, if anything, Matthew Weiner's rendering if this beauty myth is at very least a degree more artful than Hitchcock's. Whereas Judy Barton (or Madeleine Ferguson) is coached to ensnare men to so that a movie plot can be set into motion, Betty Draper is coached by an invisible society of time and place which only exists in our imaginations and the social mores of people who soon will be deceased.

Rewatching the early episodes of Mad Men is always instructive when you realize just how important Betty Draper used to be in the show, and equally instructive when you realize that January Jones's acting has been grotesquely maligned. No one will confuse January Jones for a master thespian, but no one was confusing Kim Novak or Janet Leigh either. These were movie stars, not actresses, who had a very specific part to play and were cast at least as much for how they looked on camera as how they acted. The only difference between Betty Draper and Marion Crane was that in the intervening half-century between their creations, the plight of women like them gained sympathy, and therefore a voice.

But did Marilyn Monroe ever seem more at ease with her onscreen role? Did your elderly but well dressed female cousin who got a divorce in the days when divorce was a scandal? Betty Draper is, in many ways, the truest to life, fully realized, character in the entire Mad Men universe because there is so little life to realize in her. She is barely human because that is all she is allowed from her life. And when the show ends, she will disappear into memory, as so many women have, because the memories of men is all to which they were allowed to appeal.

800 Words: The Origins of Shoah Bet Part 2

But it was the very perilousness of Israel’s situation that made Netanyahu’s attempts to create a securer Israel so extraordinary in its danger. There were many right-wing administrations before Netanyahu, some brutally so, but the Netanyahu administration was the first in Israel’s history to so covet an honored place among nations that he would attempt to take it by force.

Benyamin Netanyahu’s relationship to the West, and particularly to America, was Shakespearean in its tragic depth. He was a modern-day Saul whose premiership followed a long series of Davids and Solomons. Like his biblical antecedent, he was the king nobody wanted - a Nixonian figure, anointed by whatever god controls destiny as a leader of convenience, isolated upon his throne and beloved by nobody. If the ‘founding generation’ of Rabin, Peres, and Sharon inspired their followers with pre-1948 visions of what Israel could become, then Netanyahu, Prime Minister for nearly as long as those three leaders combined and the first and only Prime Minster born after the State’s founding, represented with eerie exactitude what Israel seemed to be. Netanyahu exemplified everything with which the modern Israeli was stereotyped - intransigent, overachieving, bellicose, temperamental, brilliant in precisely that low cunning sort of way that history falsely associates with Judaism from time immemorial, and symbiotic with turn-of-the-century America to the point that he seemed to control it like a puppet.

And yet the ironies of how he came to exemplify the modern Israel are stupendous. Netanyahu was descended from Israel's intellectual royalty. His father, Benzion Netanyahu, was one of his era’s most eminent scholars of Jewish history and served as personal secretary to Ben-Gurion’s most eminent right-wing rival, Ze’ev Jabotinsky. His uncle, Elisha Netanyahu, was a famous mathematician and dean of Israel’s once-famed science institute - the Techniyon. His aunt, Shoshana Netanyahu, was an Israeli Supreme Court Justice, and his grandfather, Nathan Mielikowski (later Netanyahu), was a writer who moved in the earliest Zionist circles and was widely known as early Zionism’s greatest orator. As an older man living in Palestine, Mielikowski broke so definitively with mainstream Zionism that he personally defended the two men accused of assassinating the eminent left-wing Zionist leader, Chaim Arlozoroff.

Still more ironic is that Netanyahu was perhaps more American than he was Israeli. Until he turned forty, a full half his life was spent in the United States. So privileged was Netanyahu’s upbringing that he lived the majority of his formative years not in scrappy early Israel but in then-prosperous Philadelphia, where his father was a tenured professor. After five years of army service, he spent the majority of his twenties as an architecture student and economist in Boston, and spent the majority of his thirties as a high-ranking ambassador - first in DC as Israel’s Deputy Ambassador to the United States, and then in New York as Ambassador to the United Nations. From the beginning of his career, Netanyahu was fast-tracked because of his Americanness during a period when Israel began to look to America as its sole ally of consequence. Like the far more diplomatically suited Abba Eban before him, Netanyahu spoke an English so beautifully eloquent that he easily out-orated most of his American allies in their mother tongue. In time he became, in so many ways, the right-wing leader turn-of-the-century Republicans desired for America. But only an Israeli intellectual could covet an honoured place among American conservatives at the moment when the American Conservative was the most hated person on the planet.

Whereas Yitzhak Rabin presonified a "Sabra" who seemed just as comfortable on a Kibbutz as he was with a rifle (even though he grew up in Tel Aviv and his knowledge of farming was purely by academic training), and Shimon Peres's elegant polish personified the 'Yekke' - one of the sophisticated German Jews of intellectual bent who were so important to giving Israel credibility in the world's eyes during its early years (even though he was actually from Polish peasant stock), and Ariel Sharon seemed like the ultimate 'Chayyal', the soldier who exemplified the fighting spirit that was so crucial to Israel's establishment (even though he grew more obese with every promotion), Netanyahu seemed to have nothing of Israel's pioneer spirit about him. To Israelis, he exemplified the 'Yordim,' Israelis who left Israel in the 50's and 60's and were heavily looked down upon because they left Israel at its time of greatest need. But once the Yordim and their children began to return, richer and with extremely valuable work experience, the wisdom from the outside world which they accumulated made them re-embraced. To the world, Netanyahu was Israel, but to Israel, Netanyahu was the world - the wider world they longed to see and take their place among as an equal member. 

But to Netanyahu himself, he was Israel's conscience - all that stood between Israel and the second Holocaust he unwittingly helped to facilitate. The more he saw of the wider world, the more afraid he became of it, and the more determined he became to protect Israelis who slept soundly in their beds, not knowing the horrors which could await them without his protection. At the heart of Netanyahu's worldview was his father's. His father lived to the ripe old age of 102, and in his many years, pronounced so many apocalypses that some of them had to come true. At Benzion's 100th birthday celebration, the son recalled his father uncanny prescience about antisemitic elements - having predicted the European Holocaust in 1937, the attack by Islamic fundamentalists upon the World Trade Center in the early 1990's, and towards the end of his life, the nuclear attack in Israel arranged by the Iranian government.   

In an era that saw the height of the Bush family, Osama bin-Laden, Vladimir Putin, Kim-Jong Un, Bashar al-Assad, Viktor Orban, Tayyip Erdogan, and the toppling of Qaddafi and Mubarak, there was not a single world leader who inspired the vitriol heaped upon Netanyahu. The more hated he became by the wider world, the more determined he became to isolate Israel from her remaining allies. The more Israel’s Arab neighbors grew militant, the more his heart was hardened to match them militance for militance. The greater the gulf between the world’s criticism of Israel and its excusal of her neighbors’ intransigence, the more determined Netanyahu became to show his contempt with actions that seemed designed to make his people all the more hated.

800 Words: The Origins of Shoah Bet - Part 1

Chapter XVIII

By 2015, the rational postwar liberal was not quite deceased, but he was very much a dying breed, and he could almost sympathize with the worldview of Prime Minister Netanyahu. For every moment from its founding to the unspeakable manners of its destruction, the State of Israel was an encircled, besieged state; never a refuge from Diaspora but an extraordinarily compromised part of it.

For the entirety of its existence, Israel was a state that strove mightily to be a democracy, yet with every year it seemed to fall farther short of its goal. This Jewish country which never contained more than a few million Jews was encircled upon every side by three-hundred million Sunni and and Shia Muslims, and every poll indicated that the vast majority of their neighbors, at times nearly a unanimous majority, viewed Israel as an enemy combatant whose very existence should be extinguished at the nearest possible opportunity by any and all means.

Like every country, Israel was enabled to exist because of an unspeakably terrible original sin, and its original sin was to forcibly and violently relocate more than half a million native Arabs into still tinier corners of its tiny territory. Jeffrey Goldberg, a famous journalist of the time, posited the analogy that twentieth century Europe of the was a burning building out of which the Jews had to jump lest they be destroyed, and they fell onto an innocent bystander on the street - the Palestinians. It was a horrific act born of the most extreme desperation, enabled by more prosperous Arabs all too willing to allow violence upon their impoverished brethren for their own benefit, perpetrated by Israelis mostly with regret, sustained and consented to by most Israelis with a fervent hope for its eventual end. But colonization born of desperation is still colonization. Israelis grew ever more comfortable with this arrangement with each passing generation, and as Israel grew into one of the most reliably prosperous countries for business in the entire world, she saw no reason to compromise her prosperity for a people who never passed up an opportunity to pass up an opportunity. If generations of Arab despots in every Arab country were categorically unwilling to embrace greater political freedom for their Arab citizens, why should Israel embrace greater freedoms for her own? Had any neighboring state been a functional democracy for any period, they could have absorbed a Palestinian population as hungry for opportunity as anyone in the world had ever been.

At the twenty-first century’s commencement, nearly half the world’s countries suffered from authoritarian rule, and many more had authoritarian leanings that threatened their democracies at their very foundations. But not a single one of these countries earned more than a fraction of the international approbation continually heaped upon Israel - a state that always imagined herself democratic to the marrow. Israel’s actions vacillated between extreme principle and extreme opportunism, its leaders were everything from lions of liberalism to war criminals, yet criticism and censure of her remained at the highest possible level for the entirety of her lifespan.

The original Zionist dream was built upon sand both literally and figuratively. It is a fool’s errand to create a parochial state that is absolutely committed to the primacy of one religion over others, yet also to the most liberal values of secular democracy. But the doomed attempt to fuse these two concepts was the only way in which millions of Jewish lives would ever be saved, for a time at least. The tension between Israel’s religious dictates and secular aims was the tension which enabled the unprecedented worldwide prosperity of the Jewish people. No longer were Jews a people without a land, and after two thousand years, there was finally a dear price to pay for persecuting Jews.

At the same time that Israel was a triumph for Jews, it was a triumph, perhaps the ultimate triumph, of liberal principles. In nearly every conceivable sense, Israel was the vital center of worldwide discourse - geographically positioned at the absolute cross section between Asia, Europe, and Africa; politically positioned at the exact center between secular values and religious, legally positioned at the exact place between a liberal democracy and an authoritarian dictatorship; economically positioned between capitalism and socialism, and historically having a strong claim at being both the most obviously colonized and most obviously colonialist people on Earth. Upon every issue which the world debates, modern Israel was the ultimate experiment to see if the modern world, with all its contradictions, could long endure. Israel, alleged to be an exclusionist society for every day of its existence, was in its way the most pluralistic country in the world.

Absolutists of nearly all stripes - Islamists, pan-Arabists, Christianists, Libertarians, Marxists, Socialists, Libertarian Socialists, Libertarian Communists, Anarchists - decried Israel for its many sins with a viciousness it reserved only for Zionism as though Zionism was a more totalitarian ideology than any of theirs. Most of them claimed that their motive was human rights, but in fact, their enemy was the permissive modernity that allowed a state as contradictory as Israel to exist. Such worldviews cannot allow for accommodations to pragmatism, and therefore the Jewish state always struck a terrible wrench into their absolutist worldviews. Zionism was always a practical compromise to reality, an ideology as corrupt as any other, allowed to govern a country only because the world is too imperfect to allow any other way to maintain the Jewish people’s security. And for a time, Zionism did ensure that the Jewish people remained fundamentally safe from persecution.

Because of its many contradictions, Zionism was a venture destined to fail from its inception. But so long as it was permitted to exist, the modern world, with all its permissiveness, its imperfect liberties and equalities, knew that it could survive and fight another day to better itself. Jews have long been the petri dish by which the world could gauge its health. A society that allows this consistently overachieving people to flourish is a healthy one, a society that segregates its Jews is an underachieving society, and a society that kills Jews is killing itself. When a society mistreats its Jews, it is not long before every other underclass is still more mistreated. Judaism, a portable religion grounded not in faith and authority, but upon book learning and debate, has always been the yeast by which all the societies which make space for them are allowed prosperity far greater than they would ever have had without them.

800 Words: New Tonality Playlist Part 3 - Bruckner

The Bruckner Motets

This isn’t the place to go into my long and deep love of Bruckner - how his music came to me at the cusp of my life’s lowest ebb, and how his ecstatic faith convinced me, if not of God, then that a world better than mine was possible. That post will one day come to be, I don’t doubt. It also is not the place to talk about how Bruckner anticipated all sorts of developments - from the heavy chromaticism of atonalists like Schoenberg and Webern to the cell-like mitosis of minimalists like Glass and Adams.

This is the post to talk about Bruckner’s impact on the future. Bruckner, for all his Teutonic heaviness, for all his reliance and reverence for the tried-and-true Western forms, is a strangely un-German, almost Byzantine-sounding composer. There is something about his music so unbelievably estranged from the German way of doing things that his closest parallels come not from music but literature and art. His music may sound superficially like Wagner, but the spirit of his music is diametrically opposed to Wagner’s. Wagner created a system of drama, instrumentation, vocalism, acoustics, and general aesthetics, meant to turn the world upside down: to overthrow traditional notions of Christ’s salvation with a Buddhist influenced concept of renunciation, replacing communal religion with Greek-influenced drama; upending bourgeois propriety and replacing it with a pagan-like embrace of bodily love’s holiness, and replacing the Bible with enactments of primal mythology.

Bruckner utilized many things from Wagner’s system - certainly he loved Wagner’s scale and even utilized an instrument or two from Wagner’s arsenal (Wagner Tubas, multiple harps) but his foremost desire was to fortify traditional authority. With only a few exceptions, Bruckner’s orchestra was entirely traditional. Wagner intricately interwove the densest and widest varieties of orchestral effects, counterpoint, and motifs; whereas Bruckner’s simplicity of means was almost monomaniacal. Bruckner developed 80 minute symphonies from two-note motifs, used the orchestra as though it was never more than three separate registers from his beloved organ, and used counterpoint as though the examples were lifted straight from a textbook. Wagner and Bruckner saw a kinship in each other because they both loathed the frivolity of contemporary society and its music, which they saw as distracted from eternal questions. But Bruckner’s and Wagner’s answers to those questions could not be more diametrically opposed. Wagner wanted to foster a golden age of Athens-like democracy with drama replacing organized religion as its spiritual guide.

Among the artistic giants, Bruckner’s closest contemporary spiritual brothers were not from the world of music but, surprisingly, from literature. Like his contemporary, Dostoevsky, Bruckner truly believed that salvation from the agony of human individuality which they dramatized so well can only be gained by belief in a divine heirarchy: an all-knowing God, His holy mother Church as intercessor, and a strong Emperor serving as His divinely anointed governor on Earth. Like another contempoary, Walt Whitman, Bruckner believed in vast, public statements that broadcast his faith from the mountaintops to the valleys below. Like still another, Dante Gabriel Rosetti, Bruckner believed in religious ecstasy far more than bodily ecstasy, and his most powerful work comes from his enactment of that ecstasy.

Bruckner learned the musical language of Bach and Mendelssohn, but the musical language Bruckner required to portray that ecstasy practically bursts the seems of what Bach’s language makes possible. In order to create his music, Bruckner needed to reach out to other influences, and he found those influences not in Wagner but in the early music of the Catholic Church he loved so dearly. Brahms, another important antipode to Bruckner, derived his musical language from almost all the exact same music. Both hailed from a time when musicological study made great swaths music of a distant past available for the first time. But these two musical titans appreciated diametrically opposite qualities in the same music. Brahms loved the counterpoint, the formal experiments, the spirit of humility which they exuded, the micro qualities of the old masters. Bruckner loved the old masters’ macro qualities: the modal harmonies that sounded like another musical continent, the massiveness of the sound, the spirit of ecstasy.  

Bruckner’s musical language is a world apart from the Germanness of his time. He hailed from a small town outside Linz during a period when Krakow constantly traded hands between independence and subservience under Austria, which means that in his youth he may have heard nearly as much Polish spoken by native Poles moving over the porous border (or perhaps even Yiddish) as German. Whereas Brahms’s musical language, even when it’s experimental and chromatic, sounds fully ‘Western’ in its tonality, Bruckner sounds like he comes from a couple hundred miles East of where he hails - an almost Balkan or Russian composer. His chromaticism, compared to the ingenious tensions of Brahms and Wagner, comes in long sequences where the ideas are quite basic. His chords were fully Western (there’s a famous quote I can’t find about how Bruckner loved to play a long sequence of chords in the same key on the piano), but the way he modulates them is so unexpected, so distant from anything traditional harmony tells us to expect, that it surely must come from a different source and place. Brahms, almost entirely self-taught, had a mastery of form so innate that his music seems to have no awkward edges. Bruckner, an eternal student with more degrees than virtually any great composer ever attained, spent his whole career making ‘mistakes’ with form which Brahms must have found the height of amateurishness. As often as not, his symphonies sound like magnificent fragmented parts with no whole conception to keep them together. No matter how hard Bruckner tries to integrate them, his final triumphs often sound as though they come in no harmonic relation to what happens before. His transitions are not so much transitions as awkward-all-stop-emergency-breaks, his harmonies have no real relation to anything at all. As a result, his music has a visceral, emotional directness that in Brahms’s masterly yet humble hands would feel contrived.

Bruckner, for all his gigantism and erudition, was like a simple folk musician who found the world’s largest folk instruments at his disposal. His music has as much in common with Mussorgsky and Bartok as it does with Mozart and Beethoven. It is a music whose time has is still yet to come - when the sounds of different tonal scales, harmonies, and modulations intermingle freely, Bruckner will be seen as a foremost progenitor of the newly modern modulation - capable of expressing shifts in tonality both musical and (therefore) emotional at which no other composer before or since has arrived. Perhaps his closest musical kin is Tchaikovsky. Both tried mightily to stay within the bounds of Western forms, but both wrote music far too emotional to be contained within its bounds. In both of them, we hear in embryo a new kind of music - more visceral, more emotionally frank, less concerned with form and more concerned with challenging the listener.

Bruckner Playlist: (Bruckner requires a free hand. Most conductors insist on keeping the rigid structure of his music, which in a composer so untraditional in matters of structure, only goes to its detriment. There is an insistence in his music by gerontocratic conductors on funereal, rigid tempos, which many music lovers think are deep, but ultimately does little for Bruckner but preach to a small coterie of music lovers who regard Bruckner’s solemnity with reverence but have little regard for his ecstasy. Here is a composer who, like Mussorgsky and Janacek, composes as much by free association as he does by rigor. He needs a conductor who does the same: Furtwangler, Jochum, Barenboim, Kubelik, Abendroth, Volkmar Andreae, Tennstedt, Welser Most (surprisingly…), even Knappertsbusch… Here are Symphonies 3-9, in classic and modern recordings that do justice. Almost inevitably, the older performance is preferable - worse played and in worse sound, but to my mind, more exciting and ecstatic in spite of their flaws. But the newer performances are no slouches, and come in much better sound that can give novices a better sense of the awesome grandiloquence of Bruckner’s music when experienced live. My advice is the precise opposite of everybody else's when it comes to Bruckner. Don't be patient. Find a performance that grabs you within the first minute.)

(classic) Symphony no. 3 , (classic) Symphony no. 3 (if you didn’t know the later symphonies, you’d think this the strangest thing you’d ever heard in your life), (semi-modern sound) Symphony no. 3, (semi-modern sound) Symphony no. 3,(modern sound) Symphony no. 3

(his most traditional and popular...) (classic) Symphony no. 4 (classic) Symphony no. 4 (modern sound) Symphony no. 4 (modern sound) Symphony no. 4 (modern sound - has to be heard to be believed) Symphony no. 4

(classic) Symphony no. 5 (In my humble opinion, he greatest, most daring, symphony written in the era between Beethoven and Mahler… Both successful by the German standard of coherence, and by my personal standard of 'strangeness'.), (classic) Symphony no. 5 , (classic) Symphony no. 5 (semi-modern) Symphony no. 5, (modern sound) Symphony no. 5

(classic) Symphony no. 6 (some great performances in semi-modern sound) Symphony no. 6 (a still stranger symphony…), Symphony no. 6 , Symphony no. 6, (modern sound) Symphony no. 6, (modern sound) Symphony no. 6

(classic) Symphony no. 7 (The greatest slow movement ever written - IMHO) (classic) Symphony no. 7 (semi-modern sound) Symphony no. 7 ( (semi modern) Symphony no. 7, (semi modern) Symphony no. 7 (modern sound) Symphony no. 7

(classic) Symphony no. 8 (I don't know what to say about it except that this Symphony changed my life) (semi-modern) Symphony no. 8 (semi-modern) Symphony no. 8 (semi-modern) Symphony no. 8 (semi-modern) Symphony no. 8 (semi-modern) Symphony no. 8 (modern sound) Symphony no. 8 (modern sound) Symphony no. 8 (still more modern...) Symphony no. 8 (still more) Symphony no. 8 (original edition in modern sound) Symphony no. 8

(strangest of all…) (classic) Symphony no. 9 (classic) Symphony no 9 (classic) Symphony no. 9  (semi-modern sound) Symphony no. 9 (semi-modern sound) Symphony no. 9 (semi-modern sound) Symphony no. 9 (modern sound) Symphony no. 9 (modern sound) Symphony no. 9

800 Words: Charlie Hebdo: When Facebook Posts Become Blogging Part 2...

http://www.patheos.com/blogs/camelswithhammers/2015/01/answering-16-of-the-worst-jesuischarlie-charliehebdo-memes/

“So, as a white western left winger who passionately speaks out about torture of Middle Eastern detainees, about racist policing in America and numerous other human rights problems in the West, I don’t appreciate those who try to appeal to the seriousness of those issues to try to minimize the utter and complete seriousness of the violent massacre. You are not allies to free speech. You are attempting to silence the kind of free speech you don’t like. You are apparently so ideologically partisan to whoever you simplistically see as marginalized and against whoever you simplistically judged as privileged that when innocent people are massacred your knee jerk reflex is to minimize the importance of the injustice done to them however you can. That’s more offensive and insulting to humanity than anything I’ve seen from Charlie Hebdo.”

The reason I’ve posted so many articles on facebook and flooded everybody’s newsfeeds is that what we saw last week is a once-in-a-generation moment, like the Fatwa against Salman Rushdie in 1989 - a 9/11 for intellectual engagement. It's also a sanity test, and one of the world’s rare moments of true moral clarity. There is no turning the clock back from this moment. What is at stake now is nothing less than the direction which freedom of speech takes in our generation. Freedom of speech may be violated all the time on issues of national security, but at least those violators generally think they’re saving lives by doing so, even if they’re often wrong. But in this case, freedom of speech is being violated in literally the most lethal of all ways, simply because a long dead person’s honor was insulted. This is one of the very rare moments when there is no equivocation worth making, no complexity worth examining, no criticism of the victims worth offering, because the totalitarian mindset which perpetrated this act does not allow for complexity. We’re either on the side of free speech, or of repression, and anyone who equivocates now is what Stalin used to call ‘useful idiots,' no better than that professor who in the days after 9/11 referred to the workers in the World Trade Center as 'Little Eichmanns.'

The flip side to this is the side that would use this as a moment to make greater incursions into free speech because of national security. Contrary to popular belief, France’s hate speech laws do not prosecute anti-semitism exclusively or even a majority of the time (as though there's not more than a hundred years of reasons France might decide to do that...) and the state prosecuted anti-Islamic speech quite often - including against the movie star Brigitte Bardot for her anti-Muslim comments, which is akin to America prosecuting a star with Marilyn Monroe’s charisma and Elizabeth Taylor’s longevity. Even so, France’s laws against hate speech are utterly misguided and give crazy bigots of all types a chance to pose as martyrs for their supporters. It essentially gives nutjobs a recruiting tool.

And no one lately, not even the Tea Party, recruits better than the European far-right. Whether it’s France’s Front National, or Greece’s Golden Dawn, or Finland’s Finn Party, or Holland’s Party for Freedom, or Hungary’s Jobbik, or the Austrian Freedom party, or especially Russia's Putinism, they are Europe's ascendant wave. Imagine a continent populated by little Putins (liliputins...) for leaders, that is a potential future which every European now has to at least entertain. Marine Le Pen, second-generation leader of the Front National and daughter of an unreformed Vichy brownshirt agitator, was already leading French polls for the next presidential election. Her lead will only grow now. In no small part, this all is made possible because of a European left that, like the American left only moreso, is so unyielding that it refuses to make the necessary political compromises to fight the spread of fascism. Around many countries in southern Europe, the unemployment rate has consistently threatened to break 30%, and youth unemployment often threatens to break the 50% barrier (!). Their giant, lumbering social programs have no real industry to support them financially, so when the Great Recession hit, they had no steady source of income on which to fall back. The European Union was supposed to be an ideal society, and created the highest standard of living the world has ever seen. But its hubris seems to be destroying it. European governments have promised to keep social services running that they can’t possibly afford, and many Europeans are furious that they were lied to. Some of them are gullible enough to fall for scapegoats like Muslims (and Roma, and Jews, and Eastern European immigrants…, and let's not even get started about the effects of anti-Americanism...).

In Northern Europe, country after country elected a generation of American-influenced politicians who took control and mildly reduced social programs that were only made possible in the first place by America's still unmatched largesse in the Marshall Plan. Even among the moderate cuts, some were undoubtedly excessive and discriminatory, but nowhere near as excessive and discriminatory as those a truly far right politician would make. As a result, Northern Europe is mostly immune from the worst of the recessions and the resulting political chaos and extremism. Southern Europe mostly refused to deregulate at all. To them, dreams were more important than facts, principle was more important than compromise, and no solution is better than a solution that won't work 100% of the time. A whole generation of progressives, European and American, abandoned practical solutions for pie-in-the-sky dreams, and refused even a seat at the table in the negotiations to determine the fate of social progress. Do not let it become two generations...

Meanwhile, rather than attack the causes of discrimination, the Left, at least in our country, has taken to using petty censorship as a way to intimidate heretics who don't follow their dogmas to the letter. History repeats itself first as tragedy, then as farce. The same scared, prudish, delusional urge to censor which makes fundamentalist Islam so apoplectic to any depiction of their Prophet is exactly what causes so many leftists in the 'first world', particularly on the internet, to become in thrall to the dogmas of political correctness. The Left spent fifty years trying to wage a culture war against the Right's prohibitions on sex, only to mount its own prohibitions at the very moment they seemed to win this particular war against the Right. If the reaction to the Charlie Hebdo murders showed anything, it's that tropes about religion, about gender, about race, which some people find offensive can increasingly not even be used in defense of the disadvantaged without a massive, mob-like disapproval being voiced. Once again, today's Left's answer to an enemy is to pretend the enemy can be beaten simply by acting like saints. The more massively you censor simply because what people say might give offense, the more likely the counter-reaction is to be still more massive, and far more lethal. By trying to defend minority communities from any criticism at all, we've probably made life far more dangerous for them. And as always, what happens in Europe can easily happen in America...

Compromise is life itself, and the only way we can create peace within it. It applies to politics as to life, and whether the compromise is in regard to providing better healthcare for Americans, or peace in the Middle East, the alternative to compromise is fanaticism, and where there is fanaticism, there is only death.

...Back to my usual six facebook posts a day….

800 Words: The Speech I Probably Won't Give Tomorrow

Hi everybody. I’m so glad that you’ve all come out here for the first ever live performance of Schmuck. I say live performance because these musicians have already done lots of performance level work in our rehearsal space, this is just the first performance to which we’ve invited the public.

But I’m out here alone for a moment because I don’t want to give the impression that I speak for anybody in the band but myself. But when the murders happened at Charlie Hebdo, my first reaction was of course horror. The second reaction was, of course, extremely selfish - Dear God, why did this have to happen the week of the band’s first performance?

The main reason to do this project is because the music is so amazing. But as you can probably guess from the name, and the logo or description from those of you who have seen it, this project is in some ways a satire and a parody. As the band moves forward, we’ll see how those elements play themselves out. Like all parodies, it comes from a debt of love for its subject, but like all satires, it comes from dissatisfaction and anger that the subject it satirizes does not behave better than it does.

Many, many people whom I’ve told the name of this band to, not least of which my mother, were a little appalled by the name Schmuck... and god knows what she’ll feel when she sees the logo. But the truth is that the shock which people have when they see certain elements of what we’re doing is exactly what I hoped would happen. People should be going out of their way to make others feel a little more disturbed, a little madder, a little more offended, than they usually do. We’re living in an age when too many people are too afraid to make other people feel unpleasant things. But the price of living in a free and diverse society means that we’re constantly rubbing up against people who believe things we hate. We not only have the right to express those controversial beliefs, but also the necessity - because no matter how offensive someone else might find your opinion, the most basic tenant of freedom is that you can express yourself without feeling that the consequences are too severe to not keep what you believe to yourself. And if more people feel inhibited from expressing themselves than they once did, then we are, by definition, a less free society than we once were - and perhaps less free than we were a short while ago. Because the more we repress those controversial opinions and feelings, the more explosive and violent they’ll be when they erupt at a later date.

But at the same time, we see the murders of Jews in a Kosher supermarket, and we have to acknowledge, even if this isn’t the kind of Jewish band which some Jews want, it’s as Jewish in spirit as any band could ever be. So in a rare spirit of reverance, no matter what you feel about the cartoonists of Charlie Hebdo, I’d at very least like to call for a moment of silence for the completely innocent victims at the Jewish supermarket.

800 Words: A New Tonality - A Playlist - Part 2

Modest Mussorgsky (1839-1881, Russian)

(God, this scared the bejeezus out of me as a kid…)

Mussorgsky occupies the same place in music history that Henri Rousseau does in art history. On the one hand, he was a self-taught dilettante, a learning disabled genius with ten times as many unfinished projects as completed ones. And yet who could blame him? Was there ever a musician who had less desire to look away from adult themes and terrifying truths? Because he had to rely on himself, Mussorgsky is the true father of an entirely new musical thinking. He had virtually no concept of development, that most German of all musical concepts, and after him, no composer needed to have such a concept if he so wished. After Mussorgsky, all that remained a requirement was the ability to redefine harmony, tone color, melody, and rhythm in whatever way a composer wished to maximize the vividness of his music. Composers before Mussorgsky took us part of the way to his path - certainly the “Music of the Future” of Berlioz, Wagner, and Liszt, paves the way. Perhaps we even hear a move away from traditional development as early as certain passages of late Beethoven. But Mussorgsky was the moment of emancipation. Thanks to Mussorgsky, music became pure experience.

Mussorgsky Playlist:

Songs and Dances of Death (has there ever been more terrifying music?), The Nursery (One is about death, including the death of children, the other is about a child awakening to life and beginning its understand what it means to live), 
The Puppet Show (somewhat self explanatory...), 
Sunless (Mussorgsky takes on the dread subject of depression), 
Song of the Flea (probably his most famous, look at the text underneath the video, he could have been executed for it. There are many, many other wonderful songs he wrote, which are still nowhere near as known as they should be.), 
Pictures at an Exhibition for piano (If you know the Ravel orchestration, try to get it out of your head. No French perfume here, no smoothing out of the awkward moments with artificial orchestral effects. Just pure pianistic vividness and conjuration from the same world as his unforgettable songs, done by the greatest pianist of the recorded era in his most legendary performance.), 
Boris Godunov (on the other hand, Rimsky-Korsakov’s Vegasization of Boris Godunov did him an enormous service. We’ll never know what impact Chaliapin or Golovanov might have made with the original, but smoothening the rough edges allowed Mussorgsky’s acceptance to happen quickly enough for Boris to become the Great Russian Opera, and for performers to put the roughness back into the music that Mussorgsky would have loved), 
Khovanshchina (Mussorgsky’s ‘sequel’ to Boris. It might even better - greater intrigue, greater character development, still more brutal indictments of Russian politics and history.), 
Sorochinsky Fair (including the famous Night on Bald Mountain - not a great performance, but this was to be the comic antipode to Boris and Khovashchina. Some light comedy it would have been if it includes Night on Bald Mountain..., but the fragments, both complete and incomplete - the Shebalin completion is not to be found on youtube - show us the awful truth: Mussorgsky’s early death was a tragedy for opera second only to Mozart’s.) 
Night on Bald Mountain (here’s the original orchestration by Mussorgsky - a hundred times scarier and darker than Rimsky’s)

Leos Janacek (1854-1928, Moravian Czech)

The composer who as an old man picked up where Mussorgsky left off, and superseded him. Janacek is, even if I’m the only one who believes this, the greatest name on this list - the only composer but Mussorgsky to take a new concept of harmony and use it to bring music still closer to life’s experience. The greatest miracle of Janacek, among many miracles, is his ability to use further levels of musical abstraction to bring us closer to human nature. The more mannered his music became, the closer it came to reality.

Mussorgsky’s songs work on a level which no previous songwriter achieved because he based his word settings on the patterns of human speech. Janacek took Mussorgsky’s insight and systematized it - notating people’s speech patterns as they spoke to him, and in the process, mastering the art of turning natural human speech into music.

And like Mussorgsky, only far more so, Janacek’s concept of harmony was something far beyond the reaches of his contemporaries - unpredictable not only far beyond the imaginations of Dvorak and Smetana (wonderful as they are), but beyond the imaginations of Mahler and Strauss as well. In the first decade of the 20th century, both Mahler and Strauss were piling occasional dissonances that paved the ground on which Schoenberg’s atonality walked. To Mahler, folk music was a way of recalling his early memories in his music, and perhaps his early traumas as well. He seemed to have very little interest in folk music as an adult. Strauss had little to do with folk music, one might imagine that popularity meant so much to him that he would have agreed with Elgar’s famous quote “I AM folk music.” As a result, they both walked in the byways of Bach’s tonality, and only felt the need for the type of escape that blows up the old but builds the new out of the old's pieces. But while the great German composers wanted to blow up the tonal dam, Janacek worked and walked among folk musicians, and through them heard tonal byways - intervals, progressions, modulations - which no composer further northwest ever fathomed. Janacek was the only true revolutionary among these great composers.

Janacek’s career, his true career, begins in 1904, the year after the death of his beloved daughter, whose dying breath he dutifully notated as he did every other human utterance. His opera, Jenufa, or “Her Stepdaughter” when translated from Czech literally, is the truest treatment of human beings on the operatic stage since Mozart’s death over a century earlier. From then on sprang forth a twenty-five year stream of bizarre and sometimes demented sounding masterpieces interrupted only by death. After Jenufa was Sonata 1. X, 1905 - inspired by the death by bayonetting of a University student, and sounding like Chopin on Meth. Then came the Male Choruses - like Teacher Halfar, Marycka Magdonova, and my favorite The Seventy Thousand - all three of which change tempo, rhythm, and harmony so often that they sound as though a group of fifty singers are improvising on the spot. Through all this, Janacek worked on his own version of The Well-Tempered Klavier - On an Overgrown Path - in which Janacek’s increasingly strange tonalities and rhythms manifested themselves clearly and completely. Then came the ‘statement’ pieces of World War I, when Janacek dipped into Moravian folk mythology to make statements about the need for peace and Czech independence. The Eternal Gospel, in which Janacek doesn’t yet have the secure grasp of how to be quite so bizarre on such a grand scale and sounds like it could be written by Sibelius - hardly something to be ashamed of. More interesting is ‘The Fiddler’s Child’, which is Janacek’s bizarre take on the violin concerto, which is in fact a symphonic poem about the supernatural for orchestra and violin soloist. All of these statements cumulate in Taras Bulba, his orchestral rhapsody which is in fact a love-letter to pan-Slavism - declaring his belief that Russian/Easten Orthodoxy will deliver Czechs from their Austro-Hungarian/Catholic oppressors, in which he finally transfers the bizarre carnival of his more intimate compositions onto a full orchestral stage.

With Taras Bulba, Janacek reaches the cosmic proportions of his final decade. There has never been, nor will there ever be, music like Janacek’s ever again. He founded no school, and his sole truly gifted pupil, Pavel Haas (more on him later), perished in Auschwitz before he could realize the full extent of his gift.

The Diary of One Who Disappeared is a unique Song Cycle. It is about the love of a lower-class peasant for a gypsy girl, an his heartrending decision to leave home to pursue that love. It is both a celebration of love and an elegy for all the things which we must leave behind in order to follow our blis. Love is the stuff of Art Songs, and occasionally a song-cycle appears as this one does that documents love from the point of view of both people - but how many love songs or song cycles have three offstage altos singing with them? If you do not gasp when you hear their first appearance, you do not hear music.

Janacek’s final flowering was based on his love for a comely but ordinary middle class young woman named Kamilla Stasslova. Nobody knew exactly what Janacek saw in her, as she was hardly his intellectual equal, but she was his muse, and Janacek saw her as both the daughter he lost, and the wife he wished he had. His lifelong marriage was mostly a lifelong disaster, and his first string quartet called “The Kreutzer Sonata” tells their story. When Jenufa premiered, he nearly drove his wife nearly to suicide by having an affair with the lead Mezzo. The Kreutzer Sonata is not based on the Beethoven work, but on the Tolstoy story named after the Beethoven work in which a well-intentioned husband ends up demoralizing, abusing, and finally murdering his wife.

Five years later, in the last year of his life, came the companion quartet - ‘Intimate Letters’, in which Janacek put his last measure of devotion to Kamilla. There are 600 letters from Janacek to Kamilla, full of the most ardent (and dirty) love declarations. Even so, there is no definitive evidence that their affair was ever consummated, or even two-sided. In the same year, Janacek went out to retrieve her young son, lost in the woods, and contracted the cold which killed him.

In those intervening ten years, Janacek wrote his greatest orchestral work, the Sinfonietta, and his supreme choral work, the Glagolitic Mass - both inspired by the intense Czech nationalism, optimism, and pride of the Masaryk years - both of them major Beethoven-worthy statements of universal brotherhood and liberty.

But it is as an opera composer upon which his laurels must always rest. And in the 1920’s, Janacek wrote 5 extraordinary operas which are perhaps the only 5 that can compare with the finest five by Mozart.

Seemingly half of the world’s great operas take place in legend and fantasy, but The Excursions of Mr. Broucek is one of a handful of operas (let alone great ones) which deal in science fiction. Mr. Broucek journeys to the moon and time travels to the 15th century. Like most good Science Fiction, it is meant not as an alternative world, but a parallel world which can tell truths about our world in allegory which you can’t do in reality. No opera composer since Mozart, and no opera composer since, has ever done things this outrageous - and yet, like Mozart, even the most outrageous things are done with an astonishingly light touch, full of waltzes and parody songs which give the finger to the audience which expects a diversion.

The most beautiful, and in some ways the most heartbreaking, of the final great five, is Kata Kabanova. It’s a tale of a doomed, forbidden affair between a rich but absued young man and a married woman in a suffocatingly provincial small town. Kata is dedicated to Kamilla, and is clearly supposed to be Kamilla as Janacek saw her, the young angel of his desires, whose fragile beauty is doomed to be crushed by a cruel world. Janacek pictures himself as the figure of Boris, once again a young, vigorous man, able to consummate his desires and briefly tempt Kamilla away from her husband, but helpless against the suffocating claustrophobia of small town life.

But greatest of all is the third - The Cunning Little Vixen - in which the entire life cycle of nature - youth, old age, prosperity, poverty, love, hate, nature, nature’s destruction, eros, thanatos, birth, death, and rebirth, and all this is done in an opera populated by farm and forest animals, which itself is based on a newspaper comic strip. There are moments, not often but moments nevertheless, when I rate this opera above any by Mozart, and therefore as the greatest of all operas. Whether created by animals or humans, there is nothing about the experience of being alive that is missing from this opera about a fox. It’s an anthropomorphic animal fantasy, it’s a commentary and satire on human behavior, it’s a requiem for the passing of time, and a celebration of all the things that are still to come. Find a performance of this still much too unknown opera, if you have a soul, your life will never be the same.

Which is not to devalue his final two operas. The Makropoulos Case, in which Janacek merges Kamilla and himself into the personage of a brilliant 338 year old opera singer, assertive and volatile, ‘a passionate woman with flexible morals,’ but with a vulnerable core beneath her bluster. At one point in the opera, a long sought-after love affair is finally consummated, with disappointing results. It’s enough to make one wonder if the period in which he wrote this opera was the period in which Janacek finally bedded Kamilla, and wished he hadn’t. The Makropoulos Case is a bit like a detective novel, in which the enigma of Elena Makropoulos is gradually revealed in its full strangeness, both the plot and the musif growing ever more bizarre as it develops.

His final opera, From the House of the Dead, based on Dostoevsky’s novella about his prison experience, is no longer Kamilla or soprano obsessed. Instead, it returns to Janacek’s former political obsessions, about a Siberian prison and how the prisoners try to retain their dignity under inhuman circumstances. The foreshadowing of Eastern Europe in the 20th century should be obvious to anyone. To Milan Kundera, this opera, along with Berg’s Wozzeck, is the heart of the 20th century. According to many, Janacek was heartsick from Kamilla’s rejection, and planned for From the House of the Dead to be his last opera - perhaps he even  wrote From the House of the Dead as his own requiem. We will never know the true nature of their relationship, nor will we know precisely what Janacek saw in her. But like so many artists, love, and the possibility of it, was what inflamed him to levels of creativity which others can never see. When the possibility of love dies, the desire for life often dies with it.

All of this strangeness in Janacek is not possible without strange music. Between the very straightforward emotions of most great operas and art-songs, and the music of alienation which atonality brings is a chasm-wide gulf of ambiguity in which the real quirks of human behavior reside. What Janacek and Mussorgsky were able to do past virtually any composer of whom I can think is to plumb the deep ambiguities of human emotion, behavior, and condition. The questions they ask are eternal, but they are of a very different eternity than either the Church-bound masterpieces of the Renaissance and Baroque, or the State-bound masterpieces of the Classicism and Romanticism. This is music for the age of Democracy, for the age of Literature, music that not only demands freedom after the manners of Beethoven and Wagner, but asks us what that freedom is. We still don’t know, but at least we now know to ask these questions, and who knows if we would have without these two geniuses?