800 Words: Not Bach, Mahler!

I.

I love Bach, I just don’t believe in Bach. I’ve prattled endlessly on this blog about how that final level of greatness to Bach seems to elude me while blessing everyone else. There’s an endless amount of music by him which I love, and two endless amounts which bore me to tears.

I should admit, I have a bit of an allergic reaction to church music, but that can only explain so much of the problem. Bach’s religious belief was not the core of his problem, it was, like Wagner’s anti-semitism, merely a symptom of the real trouble.

Bach’s true religion was order. He believed in a joyful, Leibnizian God who runs the world as though it’s as perfect as a grandfather clock. All the suffering of our lives is just the briefest test we must undergo to prove ourselves worthy for the joys that come from an eternal world. A God of an eternal heaven must run the world in such a way that his infinitely complex greatness is always manifest, even if the ways he displays his glory can be elusive in the extreme. Bach’s music was a mission to discover the extremely elusive glory of his god, and in order to expose such glory, his music had to be craft itself.

Form is what gives music its physical definition, and when it came to creating the finite limitations which gives music its substance, Bach’s craft is truly infinite - a craft never beaten in any artistic realm, and probably not equaled (Dante?). Just as Newton discovered the formal patterns and possibilities of physics, Bach laid bare the formal, contrapuntal, and harmonic patterns and possibilities of music - he marked the end of a counterpoint-dominated music and the beginning of a harmony-dominated one. He also marked the end of an old concept of form, but he did not mark the beginning of a new conception. That was left to the next generation.

Because when it came to the infinite, ineffable possibilities of music - melody, instrumental timbre, rhythmic variety - Bach was thoroughly human, seeing little need to hear his music in a fourth dimension. There are plenty of great melodies in Bach, but they are the exception that proves the rule. For a musician to have created so venerated great music, and for so few a percentage of them to contain melodies we remember for all time, tells us that there was something limited, or limiting, about Bach’s genius. The same goes for instrumentation; most of Bach’s music can be played on an infinity of instrumental combinations, and while that demonstrates his universality from a certain angle, it also demonstrates his lack of thought about tone color and timbre.

Many composers have died too early, but Bach died a different death. The Church was always at the center of Bach’s inspiration, but Bach was so committed to the church that his last twenty years were by-and-large spent not composing. Until the flowering of his final three years, he spent his more venerable years training and educating his choir boys and simply recycled his church music for the next time it was required for performance. When Bach exchanged the court instrumentalists for the church choir, the quality of his music already took a step back from the ‘divine’. Whereas his music could once stretch out to the infinite with instrumental suites and partitas, it became beholden to the dogmatic strictures of whatever Biblical lesson he had to impart for that week’s homily.

Imagine if Bach could have taken a step back from his Church obligations and become a bit more liberal in his secular sympathies as he aged. Imagine if he were not quite so intractable about the idea of polyphonic forms and allowed himself to write in the new styles. Perhaps we could have Bach symphonies, Bach operas, Bach string quartets. Like many great classical musicians of our day, Bach had a tin ear for new developments, and the loss to music and posterity is incalculable.  

II.

I recently heard an interview on television which beautifully summed up the difference between Christianity and Judaism as follows. Christianity is a religion of denial - their Messiah has come, but he left and the world appears no better, so they say he will come again and do right what he did wrong last time. Judaism is a religion of depression - their Messiah has never come, they wait, and wait, and wait, and yet he never arrives.

Judaism can be every bit as insular and denial-ridden as Christianity. But for Mahler, Judaism was merely the beginning - a springboard for his cosmopolitan consciousness through which he could spring into the entire world. In Mahler, history finally arrives at a composer whose vision is compromised neither by religious dogma, political dogma, nor practical consideration. We’ve arrived at a composer with both the intellectual means of articulating a worldview through music and the musical means to translate his worldview into sound with absolute freedom of thought.

I don’t understand how people draw so much spiritual sustenance from Bach. His music is like the beautiful and dangerous lies which religious people tell lonely potential converts who crave a community at their meet-and-greets. We’re all insecure, we need assurance that someone has heard our suffering, and if we’re not careful, we’d all be willing to believe that we’ll be rewarded for it. But the probable truth remains that nobody will reward us for our tribulations, and we all have to keep going in spite of it. How do we do it?

In all likelihood, our existence precedes our essence, and we need music and art that doesn’t lie to us about that. We need composers who reject the lies of the insular community and reach out into the wider world with all its diversities and dangers.

If I had to make a list of pieces which articulate a whole worldview in sound, it wouldn’t be a long list: Wagner’s Ring, Haydn’s final two oratorios, Janacek’s Cunning Little Vixen, Sondheim’s Into the Woods, Beethoven’s Ninth, Mozart's Da Ponte operas (at least when taken as a whole) perhaps Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring or Ives’s Fourth Symphony or Shostakovich's Fourteenth or Berio's Sinfonia or Kurtag's Jatekok or even Coltrane's A Love Supreme or Sufjan Stevens's Illinoise. And if you limited it to visions of the world uncompromised by dogma, you’d have to take off Wagner’s Ring, Haydn’s Creation, even The Rite of Spring. But above all other ‘worldview’ pieces, one head and shoulders above all others.

The more I listen to Mahler’s Third Symphony, the more it seems to me the most spiritual piece of music ever written. It’s a piece whose grandeur is very easy to dismiss. Here is what Alan Rich, one of my favorite music critics, wrote about it:

I love all that masquerading in the Mahler Third: the fake blood that oozes constantly in the first movement while Mahler giggles up his sleeve, and the delicious pomposity at the end, where the crowd really ought to be forced to its feet singing patriotic verses as white doves are released. It’s all a great con;

The first time I heard the Mahler’s Third Symphony was during the summer between my freshman and sophomore years of college. My parents somehow had an extra ticket to hear Yuri Temirkanov conduct it with the Baltimore Symphony. To my astonishment, I’d still never listened to it. I went to the music library and took out Jascha Horenstein’s famous recording. As I was with virtually all the Mahler symphonies, I was utterly blown over. But nothing could have prepared me for the concert itself.

My mother and I both started cackling during the famous ‘marching bands in a storm’ sequence during the first movement. Mahler was so hell-bent on drama that he’d gone utterly over the top. It was absolutely impossible to take seriously, and yet the more we heard of what happened afterward, the more it seemed that lack of seriousness was the point. And yet, by the end of the final movement, all three of us were awash with tears.

Many people call it Mahler’s worst symphony, I think it’s his greatest - the one where Mahler’s imagination was in fullest flight, the one in which he literally articulated a philosophical worldview from Schopenhauer and Nietzsche and completely humanized their rather anti-humanist conceptions of the world.

That said, of course it’s a kind of con. You absolutely can’t take the philosophy in Mahler’s Third Symphony completely seriously, and I sincerely doubt we’re meant to. Mahler, unlike so many artists of an intellectual bent, realizes that he’s an entertainer first and an intellectual second. The dramatization of his ideas is more important than the ideas themselves. When he calls his first movement, ‘Pan Awakes, Summer Marches In’, summer is announced with a bunch of military marches that sound as though they belong in the Macy’s Day Thanksgiving Parade. It’s impossible not to hear what he’s depicting, but it’s also impossible not to enjoy it on its own terms. When orchestral instruments play so many weird sounds that clearly sound like animal noises, how can we take it completely seriously? How can we be meant to take it seriously?

Far more than Wagner ever did, Mahler takes Schopenhauer’s concept of the Will to life and sets it to music - depicting six stages of evolution over ninety minutes. He begins with nature itself, moving on to the beauties of plant life, to the animal kingdom, to mankind, to the angels, to love itself.

(“O Man! Take heed!” Mahler’s rendering of Nietzsche)

It's interesting that when Mahler arrived at the fourth movement, entitled ‘What Man Tells Me’, he reached for Nietzsche’s Thus Spake Zarathustra to express mankind’s plight. After the amazing third movement, which depicts the animal kingdom as though it’s a low-rent circus, he expresses something that sounds like the lowest possible spiritual darkness. Here is Nietzsche’s text:

“O Man! Take heed!

What says the deep midnight?

"I slept, I slept—,

from a deep dream have I awoken:—

the world is deep,

and deeper than the day has thought.

Deep is its pain—,

joy—deeper still than heartache.

Pain says: Pass away!

But all joy

seeks eternity—,

—seeks deep, deep eternity!"

If this setting is any indication, Mahler understood Nietzsche better than Nietzsche understood himself. Nietzsche’s image of a dead god and a will to power is one of utter nihilism, which, as Nietzsche admits here, is a world that seeks an eternity it can never find. Is Nietzsche right? Perhaps, but we’d all better hope he isn’t.

But after this spiritual darkness and longing for light comes the light itself in a movement entitled ‘What the angels tell me’ - replete with treble instruments, boy choir, and bells. Here is its text.

Three angels sang a sweet song,

with blessed joy it rang in heaven.

They shouted too for joy

that Peter was free from sin!

And as Lord Jesus sat at the table

with his twelve disciples and ate the evening meal,

Lord Jesus said: "Why do you stand here?

When I look at you, you are weeping!"

"And should I not weep, kind God?

I have violated the ten commandments!

I wander and weep bitterly!

O come and take pity on me!"

"If you have violated the ten commandments,

then fall on your knees and pray to God!

Love only God for all time!

So will you gain heavenly joy."

The heavenly joy is a blessed city,

the heavenly joy that has no end!

The heavenly joy was granted to Peter

through Jesus, and to all mankind for eternal bliss.

Imagine the audacity of following a Nietzsche text with an utterly Christian one in the 1890’s. Whose side in this great debate is Mahler on? Has he taken a side? The answer, if there is one, is seen in the very last line of the fifth movement’s text.

The heavenly joy was granted to Peter

through Jesus, and to all mankind for eternal bliss.

“Eternal bliss to all mankind?” If this is a Christian text, it flies in the direct contradiction of every piece of Christian dogma. This is clearly not the Christianity as most of history envisioned it. This is the Christianity of the sinner pleading for heaven's acceptance, the Christianity of that universal longing for higher joys than our mundane lives endow us. It says that we should all believe in the possibility of eternal joy, even if hardly any of us receive it. Because it is the belief in the possibility of eternal joy which gives us the power to experience joy at all.

And that joy is to be found in the last movement, a roughly twenty-two minute orchestral prayer called ‘What Love Tells Me.’ Love, not God or Will, is Mahler’s thing-in-itself. 

Mahler Three has become my highest article of faith. It is a battle cry, a prayer, and a love letter which tells me that life is always worth living. That it could come from a man like Mahler with such a great talent for suffering could have composed it makes it all the more meaningful. It is, to me, the most spiritual piece of music ever written. It does what music seems meant to do to me better than any other piece I know, and therefore it may even be the greatest piece of music I've ever heard. Throughout all its oddities, and perhaps because of them, it has given me all that solace that Bach never could.


(The best performance of the first three movements I've ever heard. Shame about the sound...)

New Kind of Friday Playlist #20: The Ten Commandments, Mahler 9, Louie

Movie: The Ten Commandments

If I ever were able to write an opera – and let’s be perfectly clear, if I wanted it to be any good it would take me until I’m sixty if I started tomorrow and until ninety to produce – the first opera I’d ever write is the story of Moses in Egypt. No, not the Book of Exodus, instead it would be the C. B. DeMille Hollywood perversely sexed up yet tortuously boring version which is inculcated into every Jewish kid’s lexicon from the time he’s five until he can recite the whole movie at his Bar Mitzvah.

Let’s be perfectly clear. The Ten Commandments is an awful, awful movie. It’s very nearly unwatchable without copious doses of liquor – and yes I’ve learned that the fun way; when I was about 23, some friends of mine and I watched the whole 220-minute monsterpiece which I could barely sit through when I was six and took a shot every time a character said the word ‘bondage.’ At least one of us threw up (I don’t remember who).  

But let’s be perfectly clear. The awfulness of The Ten Commandments is of a particular time and place that has completely vanished from any modern sensibility. C. B. DeMille made this move, his last, in his mid-70’s. He grew up an upper-class kid in the late-19^th century, an era of Empire and Great Power Poltiics when electronics did not exist and the most feverish pitch of excitement was made through gigantic displays like the circus or the imperial army drill. It’s a sensibility as alien to us as James Cameron’s movies will in all likelihood be to our grandchildren. A certain type of person, perhaps a particularly authoritarian one, would respond to DeMille’s gigantic displays of coordination even in our day.

So let’s be perfectly clear. I can’t stand the agonizing loftiness of this movie where everybody speaks in a Hollywood’s vision of the King James Bible and the special effects are not even as effective as a B-Movie thriller. If I have a soft spot in my heart for it, I can’t even call my love for it ironic. It’s simply a cornerstone of my life, something I first watched when I was three or four and which I could never imagine my life without.

Finally, let’s be perfectly clear. If I ever tried to make an opera out of it, it would fundamentally be a popera in which the slaves sing gospel and the taskmasters sing heavy metal. The spirit of The Ten Commandments – with its notes of freedom and shaking off oppression – is entirely contemporary and is why the story of the Exodus still means something to billions of people. The problem is that the sensibility of The Ten Commandments – the gigantism, the loftiness, the sluggish pacing  – was dated by the time DeMille’s career began.

Classical Music: Mahler’s 9^th Symphony -

(Bruno Walter and the Vienna Philharmonic, which premiered the work 100 years ago this week, perform Mahler 9 in this live recording – two weeks before the Anschluss.)

It’s honestly not one of my favorite Mahler symphonies (3, 4, 1, 7, DLVDE, 5, 9, 10, 6, 2, 8). I love all 11 of Mahler’s Symphonies (and he wrote 11), but while some of them touch the kind of universality you find in Mozart and Beethoven, there are also symphonies which settle either for a kind of doom-and-gloom or a theatrical bombast which we’re supposed to interpret as profound. Less great Mahler is still greater than nearly any other orchestral composer, but by his own standards, perhaps most of Mahler’s later works were not quite as meaningful as the ones which came before.

It doesn’t help that a kind of DeMille-ish sanctimoniousness has come over many Mahler performances in recent years; for the most part the tempos get slower and slower, the playing smoother and smoother. Even at his most classically balanced, Mahler is not a composer who wrote anything by half-measures – too few artists attempt the very peaks and valleys of creation which you find on every page of Mahler’s scores, and if the listener doesn’t feel that overflowing diversity of vision, it’s not a true Mahler experience. As in so many performances of classical music, audiences would be a lot more inspired by sloppy playing if it had more commitment and character.

One of the biggest problems with Mahler 9 is that Mahler didn’t live to hear it performed. All of Mahler’s earlier symphonies underwent a trial-and-error process in which he revised his scores from performance to performance to get precisely the effect he wanted. And as I think about it, my real trouble with Mahler 9 comes from the first movement, often hailed as Mahler’s single greatest composition. I love the other three movements, but the first never does enough for me. It has too many inner voices and too many clumsy transitions (which seem undeliberate) for the ear to follow. Conductors don’t help matters by slowing the tempo down so we can hear everything. A great performance of the first movement, of the  type one finds from Abbado, Barbirolli, early Bruno Walter, Szell, Kubelik, Hermann Scherchen (and now Jukka-Pekka Saraste), has performers who understand that this is every bit the manic Mahler of the early years and there should be no trace of church-like solemnity. All those inner voices are not meant to be heard, they’re meant to be felt. The first movement is every bit as much a fist-shake at the heavens as anything in Beethoven.

Last year, I wrote about Johnny Cash and compared Mahler 9 to his America IV. Both are dirty, almost shitty mud-wrestles with death, but by the end the listener can detect a kind of peaceful transcendence – as though the musician has resolved that he can’t triumph, and peacefully starts his journey into the beyond. It’s only twelve years after what Leonard Bernstein termed the ‘Century of Death’, and perhaps because of the dark experiences of the 20^th century we’ve managed to overrate Mahler 9 a little bit. It’s a wonderful piece of music, and it’s not a work completely about death, but it doesn’t embrace life in the way the very greatest music should. If I want an overwhelming spiritual experience, I go to Mahler 3.

TV:  Louie

I just finished watching Louie’s third season premiere. Or should I say, I watched half of it because I accidentally pressed a wrong button and it took me at least ten minutes to figure out how to correct whatever I did. What I saw was what exactly what I’ve come to expect from the show – which is that I have no idea what to expect. What I can say is that Louis CK clearly looks older; he’s even more bald, his ghoti is greyer, his skin hangs further off his face. And true to form, he’s letting us see every bit of it.

I’ve been planning on doing a long post on Louis CK for most of the time I’ve been doing the 800 Words thing. There’s a lot to say that I’ll hopefully get to by the end of Season 3, but no comedian seems to play a truer version of himself than Louis CK. He routinely exposes parts of his private life onstage to which no person in his right mind would ever allude, but the reason his talking about his personal life seems so dangerous is that we can all relate to it. In doing so, Louis CK says all the things about our own lives that we’re afraid of other people knowing.

I read an article the other day on Slate (I think) which claimed that Louie is the best show on television. I don’t know if I’d go that far, but the writer made the best possible case: think of all the TV shows you watch – now think of how many in which you have absolutely no idea what’s going to happen from episode-to-episode. No matter what the show is, 99.9% of them have a genre and a style, so even their surprises aren’t all that surprising.   The plots of most shows are either linear or surreal, which mean that you ultimately know exactly what kind of sensibility the show will give you. But occasionally, and I mean really occasionally, a show comes along that expands the Universe – TV’s that is. The universe of Louie is so large that literally anything can happen from low comedy to high tragedy, linear realism to the most surreal turns, and yet it all feels truer to life than most ‘realistic’ shows. Every episode is completely different from the one before, every moment of every episode can be completely different from the one before. In this way, Louie is truer to life than most ‘realistic’ shows. But when I think about that question, the only TV shows I can come up with which can do what Louie does are The Simpsons and I, Claudius. Is Louie really that good?

...Maybe….

For Kurt Sanderling (1912-2011)

(Shostakovich's 10th Symphony)

He was the last remnant of the generations of conductors for whom classical music was music itself. He was a Jew who survived Hitler and a German who survived Stalin. He was Shostakovich's closest friend among conductors and offered a warmer interpretation of Shostakovich's music than the chilly shocks of Mravinsky.


(Rachmaninov's 1st Symphony with the Leningrad Philharmonic. Dunno why it's accompanying this video...)

From the time he was thirty years old, he was the co-conductor of the Leningrad Philharmonic with Yevgeny Mravinsky. The arrangement lasted for eighteen years, until the Soviets ordered him to East Berlin to lead the Berlin Symphony - designed to be the Communist answer to the Berlin Philharmonic. Sanderling was much beloved wherever he lead orchestras and was named conductor emeritus of both the Madrid Symphony Orchestra and the Philharmonia Orchestra of London.


(The Berlin Symphony led by Sanderling. Playing the opening of Sibelius's 4th Symphony)

When he was 90 years old, Sanderling shocked the world by doing something hardly any other conductor had ever done: he retired. Not that he needed to, Sanderling was still doing fabulous work. But it was particularly shocking because Kurt Sanderling was the last giant in a generation of conductors that had all too many giants. But perhaps all people needed to understand his decision was there in his music-making.


(The Final movement of Mahler's 10th - beginning. Sanderling was perhaps the most important early champion of this unfinished work.)

He did not conduct with the outsize interpretive personality of a Bernstein or Celibidache. Sanderling's music-making was every bit as personally involved as theirs, but he never seemed to impose it. If you could tell that a performance was Sanderling's, it was because of their complete faith in patience. The tempos were always relaxed, the sound was always warm, yet you still found yourself utterly absorbed by the drama.


(Slow Beethoven with Klemperer's Philharmonia...)

Like his hero, Otto Klemperer, Sanderling was in no hurry. He had an emphatically 19th century view of structure, giving huge works by Bruckner, Mahler and Shostakovich all the time they needed and more to unfurl and absorbing the listener totally. What might seem boring at minute 5 seems utterly mesmerizing by minute 50.


(Der Abschied from Mahler's Das Lied von der Erde)

There are some musicians who simply view music in grand terms, taking the grandest, most weighty possible approach even when it's not completely warranted. Sanderling was a musician who leant himself well to music on a gigantic scale. For composers who aimed for the epic scale like Bruckner, Mahler and Shostakovich, it was a perfect approach (what might a Sanderling Ring Cycle have sounded like?). For composers like Beethoven, Brahms and Sibelius, whose tendencies leaned toward something slightly more intimate, Sanderling blew them up to his grand scale. It wasn't always right, but it was always interesting.


(Just in case people thought Sanderling was all darkness and ultraseverity...)

How Mahler's Second Symphony Should Have Ended

Happy Birthday In The Style of Mahler

Some Badass Mahler

Heilige Dankgesang! I've only listened to the first two movement of this, and this may be the finest performance of Mahler 3's 32-minute opening I've ever heard, or of the much smaller second movement. Eliahu Inbal is one of the world's most underrated conductors, and here he got hold of the world's greatest Mahler orchestra, the Concertgebouw of Amsterdam, by subbing for their regular director at the time, Riccardo Chailly. Much as I love Chailly much of the time, his interpretation of Mahler 3 is far the most exciting one can hear. I remember a review of this particular performance in a British newspaper in which members of the orchestra was said to look extremely irritated with Inbal. I can only imagine that it was because because Inbal pushed these players to a level of commitment for which Chailly's cool demeanor would never allow. Next to Rafael Kubelik, I don't think there's a conductor whose conception of Mahler is closer to my own than Inbal's. Mahler's music has become far too easy for most orchestras, and along with the mastery comes a lack of need to demonstrate commitment. Mahler is now as easy to make boring as Beethoven ever was. Go to Universal Music's Mahler Anniversary website and you can hear interviews with famous conductor after conductor who rails against Mahler interpreters who carry the music to enormous excess (which is of course conductorese for 'Screw You Leonard Bernstein'). But what both Kubelik and Inbal show in their numerous Mahler recordings is that you don't have to rein in the dangerous passions of Mahler's music in order to preserve his formal structures. There is no rambling here, yet none of the bizarre phantasmagoria that make Mahler Mahler is lost. This is a Mahler who looks backward to Beethoven at the same time that he looks forward to Shostakovich. Form and content synthesize seemlessly (and anybody who thinks Shostakovich was anything but precise in his construction needs to reexamine the music). In bad performances, this monsterpiece can spin boredom by the yard. In this performance, every note matters. That, ultimately, is the definition of a great music-making.

A Mid-Afternoon Protein Shake

(Evan sits in his office. As Jordan and Ethan look up building listings in Florida, Evan is having his customary mid-afternoon protein shake with Werner Herzog, Stephen Sondheim and Dave Chappelle)

Herzog: You cannot compose music if you are not willing to commit wholeheartedly to the ecstatic truth which displays the only greatness which the little people of the earth will ever see.

Sondheim: Does he always talk this way?

Evan: You have no idea.

Herzog: We are just a small collection of matter and anti-matter, put here by random chance and assembled by greater chance through electro-chemical wiring. We will not understand the greatness of the universe unless it is shown to us by force. You must insist upon it, or retire quietly into dignified silence.

Sondheim: Who cares about the greatness of the universe? Just get it done. If you're any talented, one in every three things you write will be any good, one in five might be great. But you shouldn't worry about quality, just write what you want and get it done.

Herzog: (to Sondheim) You do not understand the workings of the universe.

Sondheim: Clearly.

Herzog: You strive merely to represent the human, you care nothing for creation's grandeur or the greatness of untrammeled human aspiration. You care only for our little concerns, our bills to pay.

Evan: What's wrong with that?

Herzog: If you try to accommodate those problems it will kill your passion for true living. You must cherish all that is unvarnished within you. Only then can you be free to the universe's discoveries.

Chappelle: (whispers to Evan) Who the fuck is this guy?

Evan: He's made some great movies.

Herzog: I do not make movies, the universe makes them. I am but an inadequate vessel for their passage.

Chappelle: Shit man, this guy's fucked up.

Herzog: You of all comedians Mr. Chappelle, should understand that striving. You came up against the elusive poetic truth, and for a brief moment the universe aligned so that you could be the holy vessel through which Black and White humor united. Yet you realized that it could not last, and so you walked away so that you would only be remembered for your finest hour.

Chappelle: I just walked away from all the bullshit.

Herzog: Yes, yes you did. And that was your greatest accomplishment.

Sondheim: I have a real problem with this.

Evan: So do I.

Sondheim: You can't just say that the world has truths to discover. The world is what it is and we won't necessarily be changed by knowing more or less about it.

(in walks V.S.Naipaul)

Naipaul: You called?

Sondheim: Yeah. Just a second. If we're so small, why then do we have to emphasize how small we are against other things? Why can't we just make things by our own scale for the concerns that we little people have?

Naipaul: Because the condition of human beings is contemptible, and if we do not seek to understand something larger within the circumstances of each human being's life, we animals would hurl ourselves into the ocean for our despair at realizing our own hopelessness.

Sondheim: Alright. You're not helping.

Naipaul: That's ok, I just wondered if you had an extra Double A battery.

Sondheim: Oh, here you go. (reaches into Evan's desk, gives Naipaul a battery)

Naipaul: Thanks!

(Exit VS Naipaul)

Evan: But if we're just small beings incapable of greatness, what then is the point of making good art at all?

Chappelle: Fuck man. If I didn't do shit I'd just die of boredom.

Herzog: He has a point. The man has true vision.

Chappelle: Man, I just wanted to show race relations as they really were. Everybody's a little racist, and we know it. But we don't talk about it and that's the worst part of it all.

Evan: I'm not racist.

Chappelle: Sure you are. So am I.

Evan: No, I dislike everybody pretty much equally.

Chappelle: Well Sondheim definitely is. You ever see a black character in one of his musicals?

Sondheim: He's right. I just don't like minorities, poor people and non-New Yorkers. But what about Werner?

Herzog: Yes, I suppose it's true. I really have no interest in non-White characters except to show how oppressed they've been by the madness of white people.

Sondheim: And Evan, don't you find though that people have redeeming qualities that makes them worth the hell they inspire in one another?

Evan: Not often. The world is a dumb, sometimes dangerous, place. There are certain things that make life worth living, but not all of us had the good fortune to grow up next to Oscar Hammerstein and become Stephen Sondheim. So for most of us, great life-redeeming stuff is a little harder to come by.

Sondheim: I'll tell you what. Let's view this as an equation.

Herzog: OOOOOOH! I LOVE MATHEMATICS!

Sondheim: We all start at zero, we then have the frustrations that make life not worth it: bills, obbligations, stress, loneliness, misunderstandings, make your own list. So each of them is a -X variable and you have to subtract from zero for however much each of them affect you. We then have the things which make life better: entertainment or art, activity, sports, sex, friendship, occasionally even love. Each of those are a positive X. For most people, there's always enough that the +X will make the -X worth it.

Chappelle: That's the dumbest fucking equation I've ever heard! My three year old daughter could do better!

Sondheim: Be that as it may, that's my view of the human condition.

Herzog: Of course. You realize that your view has no Y-axis, but why would a middlebrow purveyor of mere entertainment ever think of anything more?

Evan: If Sondheim is middlebrow, then there is no high.

Sondheim: No Evan, he's right. I want to make art that everybody understands. I think that's the point of it actually. Whether you're a genius or a simpleton, or if you're refined or unwashed, you should be able to understand my shows. Werner is the first person who gets it.

Werner: Of course, I understand everything human because everything human is so banal. If every human is only capable of happiness or unhappiness, how could they ever strive towards anything greater than human happiness?

Sondheim: Why do we need anything more?

Herzog: Because there is more to the universe than happiness, and if we want a chance for lasting happiness we are compelled to find it. This is why I believe that there are two human conditions which dwarf our human states of emotion. One is the baseness of animal man, who contents himself with fornication and asphyxiation. He is a man unevolved and corrupted by nature, who does not perceive the transcendental within the possibilities of his life. This is the -Y axis.

Chappelle: This is getting too fucking freak-show for me, I'm leaving.

Evan: Don't leave yet.

Herzog: Then there is civilized man. The man who never ceases his quest for the sublime and gives himself over to the cause of redeeming mankind's vulgarity through his quest for greater truths than the commonplace mundanities of your grocery list.

Sondheim: Do you really take this seriously?

Herzog: This is the positive Y axis. And it is the only way which mankind is redeemed from the mundane concerns of his life. What good is happiness against a hundred thousand days of repetition and smallness? How can man ever feel anything but misery in such a state. It is only by refusing to settle for such trivialities that we may grow against our circumstances and feel less small against the gargantuan chains of fate.

Evan: Isn't it possible that you're both right?

(Sondheim and Herzog look at each other)

Both: No!

(Knock at the door. Enter Gustav Mahler.)

Mahler: Evan, I have been listening at the door for twenty minutes. You must know that they are both idiots. Do you not see death's cruel hand following us everywhere? It runs roughshod over our most detailed plans and it is only through death's infinitely loving though spare mercy that we may experience life's joys both profound and mundane. One strives for life, yet life does not strive for you or I or anyone else. Life strives for death. And it is only through death that you shall understand life.

(both Sondheim and Herzog recoil)

Evan: I hate to admit this, but that makes a certain degree of sense. It's just a shame that you apparently have to be a creepy douchebag in order to make sense of life.

Mahler: I do not shield myself from such insults! I strive to experience the full misery of life so that its joys may be so much the greater relief!

Sondheim: God, this guy's unbearable.

Chappelle: I like this guy.

Herzog: How dare you!

Chappelle: This guy gets it. We're here until we fuckin' die, we don't have any choice. So if there's a chance to understand shit, he takes it. If there's a chance for a fuckin' blowjob, he takes that too.

Mahler: Actually, I don't.

Chappelle: Why the fuck not?

Mahler: Sex reminds me too much of death's cruel stink.

Chappelle: Alright, well, you can take it too far. But if he weren't fuckin' batshit insane, he'd totally get it.

Herzog: Scandalous!

Sondheim: Just awful!

(Herzog and Sondheim leave)

Evan: They'll be back.

Chappelle: I'm gonna go too. I'm gonna take this Mahler guy to a girl I know. But keep workin, long as you don't take it too seriously you're gonna write whatever the fuck you want.

Evan: Thanks Dave. Let's hang out again soon.

Mahler (to Chappelle as they walk out the door): Have you ever read Pure Logic by Edmund Husserl?

Concert Minis #6 (Mahler Mini #2 from Leipzig)

Mahler: Symphony #3 - Staatskapelle Dresden dir. Esa Pekka Salonen

Go here for Mahler-Mini #1

This is a series of reviews of the relays from the Mahler Festival in Leipzig. Every concert of which you all can listen to here.


My interest in this concert was more for its novelty than its content. Imagine Cole Porter and Aphex Twin on the same stage and you'll have some idea of how weird this pairing looks on paper. The thought of the world's most traditional orchestra - the 450 year old Staatskapelle Dresden - teeming up with ultra-modernist conductor Esa-Pekka Salonen is more than a little strange. Both are truly great at what they do, yet the qualities they expound so excellently are at opposite ends of the musical spectrum. The result is, as expected, truly bizarre. Individual moments of beauty were surely there, many enough as to make it doubly disappointing every time the performers brought the beauty to a halt by some singular peculiarity that stuck out like an ear-worm.

Neither the orchestra nor the conductor has, in my experience, shown great understanding of Mahler. The performance felt as though there was an open war between two conceptions, neither of which works. For all his ear for color and form, Salonen does not exhibit much understanding of melody. Rather than let the music breath with flexibility, he would simply change tempo if he felt it required. The Staatskapelle responded to Salonen's ultra-physical podium style with an un-Mahlerian reserve one could readily see Salonen trying to shake off. Yet gone was the famed 'Old Gold' Dresden sound which they produce for so many other conductors, and in its place was a surprising technical sloppiness. This pairing was an easily foreseeable mistake. The highlight of the performance was, without a doubt, the 4th movement vocal solo by Finnish mezzo Lilli Paasikivi. Her gorgeous voice and consummate phrasing worked like a nucleus around which both conductor and orchestra could briefly unite before returning to the battlefield.
C+

Concert Minis #5 (Mahler Minis from Leipzig)

This is a series of reviews of the relays from the Mahler Festival in Leipzig. Every concert of which you all can listen to here.

Mahler Symphony no. 2 - Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra dir. Riccardo Chailly

Go here for Mahler-Mini 2

For sheer craftsmanship, there is no conductor in the world more masterly than Riccardo Chailly. A Chailly performance emerges with perfectly calibrated dynamics, rhythms, and balances, and it does so only rarely at the expense of the music's energy and emotional content. The only thing missing in Chailly's makeup is a sense of exploration. A knowledgeable listener can guess exactly what a Chailly interpretation will sound like without having to hear it.

Back in 2002, I heard Chailly perform the Resurrection Symphony live in Washington DC with his old orchestra, the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra of Amsterdam. A few details aside, this was virtually the same virtuoso account I remember nine years ago, but with one major difference: While the Royal Concertgebouw has been the world's pre-eminent Mahler orchestra for the century since his death, their Mahler performances can also smack of a routine they know all too well. For over 200 years, the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra has been one of the great German orchestras. But excerpting Bruno Walter's brief pre-Nazi tenure, none of their directors until Riccardo Chailly were great Mahler champions. This performance had all the excitement of a new discovery. The Gewandhaus Orchestra tore into Mahler's apocalyptic passages with relish, and played the quiet passages with a truly rare level of expression. Ever the secure guide, Chailly elicited more nuance from the orchestra than most conductors can dream. For once, Mahler's sprawling (and occasionally dull) score emerged as something constructed with the rigor of Beethoven's symphonies. The combined forces of the Berlin Radio Chorus, the Leipzig Gewandhaus Choir and the Central German Radio Choir gave better choral work than perhaps I've ever heard in this piece. Soprano and Mezzo Christiane Oelze and Sarah Connelly, gave distinguished contributions, particularly Oelze, that couldn't help being obscured by the excellence of everything else.
A

First Ever Mahler Review in Chicago

March 23, 1907

Ugly Symphony Is Well Played Thomas Orchestra Shows Director Mahler of Vienna Writes Bad Music - by Miller Ular

Gustav Mahler is director of the Vienna opera. He is unequaled as an opera director, and almost unsurpassed as an orchestra conductor. He is a man of remarkable personality and of profound musical learning. So it is but natural that he should compose. His principal compositions are symphonies—six of them. The fifth, known as “The Giant Symphony,” was performed yesterday by the Theodore Thomas orchestra under the baton of Frederick Stock. It is a work an hour and fifteen minutes in length, 1 and before it was done, fully half the audience had fled. And with good reason. For Mr. Mahler, to judge by this one symphony that has been heard in Chicago, writes absolutely the ugliest music ever written. Why the symphony should have been termed “The Giant” is hard to say. Because of its ugliness, it might have been named “The Octopus”; because of its length, “The Dachshund”; and because it is without form, and void, it might well be termed “Chaos.”

Mr. Mahler’s compositions have nothing to do with the true, the beautiful and the good, which are supposed to be subject matter of poetry and music. Rather he deals with the false, the ugly, and the meretricious. His technical knowledge of the orchestra is equaled only by Richard Strauss, and his learning by Reger. But of originality, he has not the slightest trace. His themes are trivial, sometimes vulgar, always uninteresting and lacking utterly beauty of melodic curve. This symphony—which really is less of a symphony than any of
Tschaikowsky’s—is in five movements. Each of these movements is split up into innumerable subdivisions, by changes of tempo and rhythm. The result is a lack of cohesion and unity, producing an effect of intolerable tedium. Of these movements, the first is a funeral march, solemn and impressive, but which strikes one as lacking in spontaneity. The so-called scherzo is part waltz, part a sort of mazurka, and contains a piece of crass plagiarism on the scherzo from Beethoven’s fifth—I refer to the passage for strings, pizzicato. The
adagietto is the one oasis in the desert—a beautiful, slow movement for strings and harp; deep, thoughtful, melodious and expressive. Then it all ends with a rondo, based on the cheapest of themes, developed with a skill almost superhuman, but quite ineffective.
In short, it is a symphony which, it is devoutly hoped, will never again be heard in Chicago.

Mr. Stock’s own view of this work is interesting. Here it is, as it was expressed to the writer yesterday after the concert: “It is a pity that Mahler, with all his learning and ingenuity, has not more originality, more ability to conceive themes, to rise to real inspiration. It
is a pity he has a sense of beauty no more highly developed. Most of the symphony is very ugly, indeed, though it is all highly interesting to the technical student. But, after all, Richard Strauss summed it up correctly when he said, ‘Mahler is to the symphony of today what Meyerbeer was to the opera seventy-five years ago.’ I do not believe that this symphony is the kind of music that will live.” A verdict both cruel and true. The only redeeming feature about it was that the orchestra—increased to about 100 men—played with a
virtuosity it has never surpassed, making nothing of the unspeakable difficulties of the symphony. Each man and each group fairly surpassed itself, and the result was a truly remarkable rendition.

Listen to the piece reviewed here