Rosh Hashana Letter to Dad: Part 3

(note to readers: some heavy duty pretentious shit in this one, read at your peril.)

I think I have to start going back to synagogue. I don't know where I'd go, because there's literally nowhere where you can't hear all Israel, all the time: no matter pro-or-anti, but I got there late, because, well... I hate shul... 

Shortly after I got there was the Oonetane Tokef, the prayer by Rabbi Amnon of Mainz. The legend goes that Rebbe Amnon wrote it after his fingers and toes were cut off for refusing to convert. After every digit was severed he was asked yet again: "will you convert?" and Rebbe Amnon said 'no.'  Afterward he was taken home to his community and presented by the Bishop's guards to his family on a shield. Rebbe Amnon asked to be carried to the synagogue, where he composed aloud the text of this prayer said in every synagogue in the world. Three days later, he passed to Olam Ha'Baa. 

It was Zaydie's favorite prayer. It always seemed to have been your favorite prayer. It may well now be mine. 

It's a long prayer, but here's the paragraph everybody remembers: 

"On Rosh Hashanah will be inscribed and on Yom Kippur will be sealed – how many will pass from the earth and how many will be created; who will live and who will die; who will die at his time and who before his time; who by water and who by fire, who by sword and who by beast, who by famine and who by thirst, who by upheaval and who by plague, who by strangling and who by stoning. Who will rest and who will wander, who will live in quietude and who will be tormented, who will enjoy tranquility and who will be distressed, who will be impoverished and who will be enriched, who will be degraded and who will be exalted. But Repentance, Prayer, and Charity mitigate the severity of the Decree."

The melody was apparently Zaydie's favorite, and he would recognize the melody even in dementia. You seemed to sing it once a week for a time, and every Jew has, at one point or another, heard the famous lines 'Who will live and who will die? Who at his time and who before his time? Who by water and who by fire?" 

Leonard Cohen fans will certainly recognize 'who by fire?', but the one that struck me today was simply 'who will live and who will die?' 

After your father's dead, it hits completely differently. After you've been given your own diagnosis, it hits completely differently. Religion is a completely different notion once mortality enters. Before that, everything religious is an experiment, worship is like a fitting room where you can try on a pair of shoes. Now comes the real thing: staring down a future you don't understand, in places you don't know, amid one of the few institutions on earth which promise solace. 

I suddenly understand why former generations used to weep when they heard these lines. It was both for the lost they remember, and for their own passing yet to come. Whether it's you who dies or someone else, it is still the loss of those you love. When death stares at you, your crises of meaning become the most stark they could ever be. Your life matters, your parents' lives matter, your children's lives matter, and all of us are part of some greater community of the living, dead and unborn. We have prayers like the Oonetaneh Tokef because this tragedy is universal, it's part of literally everybody, and no matter what life's station, we all experience it in our various times.

No one is their entire self at any given moment. It's not good to bring Carl Jung into anything Jewish, but I'm sure you remember he talks about consciousness circumambulating around the true self in order so that the self may be perceived. But if we circumambulate around ourselves, why wouldn't everything else do too? Why wouldn't ideas circumambulate around us?  Responsibilities? Hobbies? Passions? People?  

The world is not just an orbit, the world is not just a cycle, but it's hard not to notice cyclical patterns everywhere. Arthur Schlesinger Jr., a historian I loved and you didn't, would say that cycles would happen on the earth, on the moon, in solar orbit, in the tides, in the rain, in the life cycles of age, why not in history? Why not indeed. Countries rise and fall, political ideas gain and lose popularity, so do political movements. With a long enough timespan, the standard of living rises and falls in neighborhood and town on earth.  

So let me add my own addendum to that: if so in history, why not in biography? Ideas return, places return, responsibilities return, joys return and people return. Most things of this earth we're not done with, and even after they disappear, the consequential ones stay in our memories forever. 

I doubt there could be anyone on earth who'd occupy more of my memory after 43 years, yet "remembrances of things past is not the memory of things as they were." Even as you defined my life, even as more of my biography derives from interactions with you than anyone else, I can feel the impressions of exactly who you were slipping away: not just exact details of how everything transpired, but exactly how you related to people--to me, to Mom, to J & E, to your friends and workers, to your world. Every new era changes a person. I'm different now that you and Bubbie are gone, I'm different now that E & J are here, I'm different now that I've gotten a bad health diagnosis and I'm different now that most close friends live elsewhere. 

It doesn't astonish me that I've got a serious illness. I've been preparing for that news for thirteen years. It's not that serious, not more serious than early stage cancer: but it's serious enough that I've been read the riot act to get my house in order, and even if I do, nothing's guaranteed, I could be gone relatively soon. But even at this illness's worst, I doubt I'll be dead before 50. I would, however, like to make it well past there, and live at least as long with this condition as you did. 

So what astonishes me is the change that comes over me in its wake. Pessimism now seems a luxury, cynicism now seems a luxury. I want to live. I'm desperate to live. Contemplating mortality makes me realize how much about life I love and how painful it would be to lose it. It's just like Dvarim (Deuteronomy) 30:19  says in that famous line: "Behold, I have set before you life and death, blessing and cursing: therefore choose life, that both thou and thy seed may live." I don't seem to have much seed of which to speak, but I do feel as though whomever is out there supervising us, be it Hashem or some Elon Musk simulation, grabbed me by the lapels and told me: either die or live NOW. 

I suppose I believe in cycles if I believe in anything at all. I suppose I believe in those loose, vague, nebulous cycles of existence the way you believed in the right angles of dialectics. You always thought in terms of analysis, I always thought in terms of metaphors. Neither of us really believed in those concepts, but we both used them messily when it was time to make a point. To you, far more precise, every action has a reaction. To me, far more approximate and comparative, every action is always like some other action: which is like a different action, which is like this one time I went to buy milk at a 7/11, which is like the time you ate french fries at Ed Debivi..... 

I suppose there is one thing above all which has given me a belief in cycles, and I'd like to believe, against all evidence, that my cycle of mental health has finally hit a long stopping point. I'd like at least to hope that this diagnosis gave my nervous system a long sought jolt; making me less susceptible to long Septembers in my soul and more able to remember the words of Mishlei 17:22 (Proverbs) that a cheerful heart is the best medicine. 

But, and I'll say two things fairly categorically: 1. there is no such thing as stopping a cycle. 2. there is no such thing as a deterministic cycle where we preordain the results. The book of cycles is Kohelet (Ecclesiastes), the best book on earth as far as I'm concerned. The fourth verse is "One generation passeth away, another generation cometh, but the earth abideth forever." 

Switch that order around: 

"The earth abideth forever, but one generation passeth away, another generation cometh." 

No season under heaven is ever truly the same: occupied by the same people in the same circumstances with rivers running with the exact same water. The wind returns according to its circuits, but eventually we learn that what we once called wind is nitrogen, oxygen and argon. To everything there is a season, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the very first time. Even the wisdom of Ecclesiastes comes back in new form in Eliot's Four Quartets. The mental health cycle is never going to stop, but at some point, it will change, and it very well might be now.  

I've never held with ultra-rationalists like Kant and Spinoza: monists who see the world so schematically they even map out the irrationality and therefore basically tell us that even what we think are our choices are not really choices at all because we are all just components in a machine of larger forces. I think the way we know that isn't true is that once we believe that we don't have choices, we can make any choice at all and justify it by saying it was predetermined or necessary, which, to me, says that we always had choices. 

Oy, Dad, I can hear you making fun of my pretension from here....

There is a kind of bizarre optimism in those formulations: it says that the world is a collection of schematics that can be understood, dissembled, reassembled and recreated. Once you start on that optimistic path that how thought works is a science to be mastered, the difficulty in mastering it creates more and more frustration, which leads to more and more nihilism. I think is a direct line from Spinoza's substance monism and Kant's categorical imperative to Hegel's annihilation of choice and the revolutionary cults of Marx. But what do I know? I don't have the brains for that sort of systemic logic: perhaps if I did I would believe in it. You did have the brains for it, and you didn't have much good to say about any of them. 

But the point is that with every return, with every seasonal orbit, with every tidal period, with every new generation, with every new stage in our life cycles, circumstances are inevitably different. 

My guide is Giambattista Vico; whom I remember you saying good things about. Making my way through The New Science is now on year twelve, but pretentious douche that I am, insofar as I have thoughts then next to Montaigne he is probably the single biggest non-fictional influence on my writing: with his nebulous concepts of cultural spirits, historical decline and renewal, distrust of logic and comprehensible prose. His main point is deceptively simple--the truth is not discovered but made. Which I take to mean that the complete truth exists, but the paradox is that we have to take that on faith: because whatever ultimate truths there are, our knowledge is not large enough to understand them, perhaps our brains aren't either. The smaller truths we know exist are only true in our little corner of the universe. They are true because we discover them and create what we believe to be universal truths out of them on insufficient evidence: we're as adept to understand the rules of this universe as chimpanzees in orbit.   

 One of the very ways we know the world has an equal amount of irrationality to rationality is that what a person believes to be true tells you more about them than about the truth, and yet that in itself is true because that subjective truth unique to the person in question is an objective truth. You must have read god knows how much in grad school, and knowing you, you did every page of the reading: not like me... who cuts corners as a reader everywhere in a book he can get away with it.  

You loved historians, but insofar as you permitted yourself good things to say about all the philosophers you read, you held with Montesquieu (who's basically a historian...): and somehow also with polar opposite de Maistre: from de Maistre you got that what matters in society is the hangman and the church, that revolution is a wholesale bad, that society socializes the individual, that there have to be institutions that symbolize absolute authority, that violence is the only thing which prevents violence, that we need religion to give the universe order and purpose, even if the purpose is false. Not gonna lie, Dad, this quadrant of your beliefs scared the crap out of me and may have explained a few things about you. 

But at the same time, you derived the exact opposite belief, that people of too much power become corrupt so power must always be separated. You could never quite resolve that contradiction, but I had the sense you were so nihilist that you even distrusted authority to prevent chaos. I always had the sense that you semi-didn't care what kind of government there was: you viewed it all as sort of cosmetic--like Montesquieu you sometimes seemed to think that even authoritarianism could be made to work, and I had a small suspicion that you didn't think much more of democracy than you thought of authoritarianism.  I've read some Montesquieu, and he's certainly an influence on my thinking too. But I took something different from him than I think you did: I think in spite of it all, you thought that everything in the world was universally true from place to place, person to person, and that universal standards should apply everywhere in order to maximize achievement, order, security and standard of living. Since you've died and your influence is not so omnipresent, I've found I do not hold with that: everybody is different, every place is different, every person is a collation of exceptions and codicils. Certain universal standards still apply, but we have to be very careful with what they are; precisely because without near-infinite flexibility, standards are foreordained to collapse. You can advise, you can reward and punish to maintain rule of law, but we cannot impose a single standard of how to live because we do not live as others live. I don't view this as relativism, I view it as the same pragmatism you had, just... well... improved...

But kinda like Goethe, whom you always thought a crashing bore (and you're right sometimes...), I think there's an irrational world, or at least an inexplicable one, that exists right amid this one. Is it the world of Hashem? I sort of doubt it as much as I doubt it's the world of Jesus or Allah, but I do think some small part of it is olam ha'baa, 'the world to come', and I think you're there, interacting with the rest of us in ways of which we are completely unaware (or aware, as the case may be, since the two times R and I did it in your house the lights in your car randomly turned on). Occasionally we see through to that other dimension where perhaps you are still present: not because of car lights, but perhaps because of paradox,  coincidence, deja vu, and the simple stretches of thought that come out of long conversation and reading. I don't think we ever see through to a noumenal world of inner truth, but we do to a world still more outer than this one. A world of still more and greater phenomena, with more possibility than beings like us could ever comprehend. How do so many paradoxes exist in this world? There have to be phenomena everywhere that we can't understand in three dimensional logic. We need a greater logic to understand it, one that corporeal beings of flesh cannot live in. I don't know how many dimensions you have now, but the first thing someone with your level of knowledge would do is accumulate the sources of new knowledge in the new world. 

But in this world, you knew that the most reliable way to see these greater phenomena is in the fullness of history: not instant by instant, but century by century, eon by eon: how does one generation pass to the next billions of times yet the earth endures forever with life sustaining itself all the way through, and even more than history itself: Jewish history, the most implausible phenomenon of the human world where a people who seemed to reach their evolutionary extinction 2000 years ago evolved themselves into a metamorphosis that prolonged the life of our culture, then evolved yet again, and again and again with the virtuosity to stay afloat amid force after force that tried to kill us?

Perhaps paradoxes make sense in your dimensions. Perhaps those things which confuse us here make sense there. We don't understand the world, we ultimately don't understand other people: but it is possible that people change, that situations you thought would never come to pass do pass, and it's even somehow possible that people can rise to them. You never believed that: not about your kids, not about history, not about yourself. 

People's beliefs are inevitable reflections of the person, not the truth. Pessimists are not bad people, I've spent much of my life a pessimist, and the mission of many pessimists is to alleviate others' suffering. You were usually that sort of pessimist, and you alleviated the suffering of so many people in your life. You deserved as large a funeral as you got, or even larger. But those who believe in the optimism of ultra-rationalism are my favorite people: not the people who believe in it theologically, not the people who make promises out of optimism, the people who pursue evidence that we should be optimistic. Like so many of my good friends whose empirical liberalism makes the world a better place, one policy at a time, it's the same with enlightened teachers who become the most inspirational figures in people's youths: who save knowledge from skepticism, who attempt to show that the truth is universal, that a rational and a moral life are not mutually exclusive. In both cases, it's not because of the blind belief in optimism: it's because they have a belief in other people great enough to persist in the continual, agonizing search for infinitesimal new specs of knowledge: statistic by statistic, nuance by nuance, collated and collected in good faith, then putting the results into action. I don't necessarily believe either are right. I don't know if the world ever improves, but if the world improves, and it's a big if, then it's because of people like them. Long before I'd trust someone who believes in ends rather than beginnings, I'd trust them as the most valued colleagues, confidants, friends, and beloved friends. 

A Rosh Hashana Greeting and Prayer

 Rosh Hashana falls on the 25th anniversary of 9/11. It is also the 41st anniversary of my grandfather's passing, who worked at the Pentagon, where, three weeks into college, I saw the smoke billow from the top floor of the dorm window.

This is a scary new year, the notions that held society up are creaking, young people are in despair and any safety net we have left is being gutted. The future looks bleak. What we have left is each other. Our communities still matter, the individuals in your life still matter, we can still believe in each other and assume the best of each other even as we sometimes get hurt. The world is worth it. Morale is worth it. Service is worth it. Responsibility is worth it. And so are rights, freedoms, dignities and pleasures.

A good and sweet new year to everyone. A year of blessings and without misfortune.

Amen

Rosh Hashana Letter to Dad: Part 2

 

But what if you, and Zaydie, and consequently I, were all wrong? What if there are greater possibilities out there? You and particularly Zaydie believed in ultrarealism when it came to everything about the world: the world doesn't change, people don't change, you have to be careful enough to size everyone up and base your decisions on what they are, and not just what they are, but what you are. 

But Zaydie was proof in himself that people DO change. The world literally wanted to kill him, kill Bubbie, kill Faygeleh, kill Rokhel, and after six years, just when they thought they were out of the darkness, the world did get to Faygeleh and Rokhel: through typhus and a gunshot crossfire (or a gunshot execution, I've heard two contradictory stories). But Zaydie came here, mastered new businesses, mastered English, mastered a new financial system, and by the time of his hematoma he was every bit the businessman he was in Poland before the War. Did he change who he was by doing so? Or was that always the person he was and the outrageous inner strength which he exhibited in the face of all and clearly passed on to his son? 

We don't know anything about other people: it is possible that people change, situations we think implausible do happen, and people rise to them who on paper seem unlikely. You never believed that: not about your kids, not about history, not about yourself. You were that you were: the world is as it is, and you made a life off appeasing a brutal realism, and that realism rubbed off on your oldest son. Your eldest son had enormous dreams that he thought impossible for decades, and to an extent he shelved them just like you did yours. The irony is that no one on earth was better cut out to make their dreams a reality.  

At various times you wanted to be a(n) historian, a real estate speculator and a Hollywood producer, with your abilities you could have done all three brilliantly, you could have run a Fortune 500 company, you could have been an innovator, an entrepreneur, a government public servant at the highest level; but you decided to play your life small: stay out of the arena, dominate your many friend groups with the size of your personality, always go for the risk-free investment and never spend an unnecessary penny. That was your life, you led it as you saw fit and you approached the world with a cynical irony; but I can't imagine it satisfied you, and it certainly didn't satisfy you when you saw that your children had big dreams. 

Whether it was children or friends or the world, you took a kind of glee in puncturing illusions. You were determined to make us realize that dreams were unlikely, and therefore not worth pursuing. But some of us struggled sufficiently with everything else that the dreams were the realistic pursuit and the conformity was your dream, we were backed into a corner because we had so little support to support what we were good at. In despair, we turned to your realism and aped your glee just as you aped your own father's. 

I can hear your protests in my head, and it's true, you went through the motions of support at every point, however tempted you were to withdraw it, cut me off, throw me out as a teenager and young adult, try to beat the crap out of me. But you made your opinion known at every opportunity. It's very difficult to have proper fortitude to pursue things when you hear only that your ambitions are stupid from the person whose support would have made the most difference to morale: and whether it was the actual ambitions or the compromises you wanted from me, the difficulty was much the same. 

I was never really cut out for realism, which involves a practical knowhow that eluded me from time immemorial. If I was capable of rising to practicality, it was made far more difficult by all the things you pointed out of what I did wrong. 

But after all this, I see how easily this letter can turn into a factory of grievance, and that is not what I want for our relationship going forward. I want us in memory to have the peace we didn't have in life. The family is a lot quieter now, and with such agreeable people around me it's much easier to see that the world can be a peaceful place. 

(Note from the next day: I would never speak the next two paragraphs to my father in life...)

Today is the 25th anniversary of 9/11. I was in DC that day: three weeks into college. I could see the smoke billow up from the Pentagon and realized I was face to face with the living history we'd already talked about so many times. My response to that solemnity was to meet a girl that day. By two o'clock we were making out in front of the TV. We had a couple hookups but she didn't want a relationship. She ended up getting engaged to my favorite professor, thirty years older. She was weird, I was weird, the professor definitely was weird... He's dead now, she's an FBI agent, I'm... what am I? 

Ten years later, a very close friend of mine showed me a clip of the 9/11 crash set to the Benny Hill music. I had a 30th birthday party at which at least 50 of my DC friends came to Baltimore to see me off to my new chapter: some came from as far as California, Massachussets, Maine, New Jersey, New York, and if I remember correctly Chicago and Texas. It was one of the best, worst, and weirdest weekends of my life, and after the woman I was involved with had a drunken freakout in my apartment at 5 AM as ten of my friends tried to sleep on my floor, a couple of my best friends and I consoled ourselves with that clip, which almost made us fall on the floor laughing. Your comment when you saw how well loved I was at that point in my life was "Who'd have thought you had so many devoted friends?" Then you were mystified why I got mad. 

Like you, I was not born with the gene for solemnity. Unlike you, the lack of solemnity was always who I was at my core. I was one of nature's bohemians who by thirty stuffed himself into the role of a bourgeois with extraordinarily unnatural contortions. You were talented enough that whatever your natural role in life, you could transform yourself into whatever was needed. I do not have that talent. I wasn't cut out for business, I wasn't cut out for suburbs, I wasn't cut out for synagogues. By seventeen I realized I was a writer by temperament and ability, and even in today's financial difficulties for anyone but people like you, I should have tried to live a life of the pen: writing small articles for small publications, meeting other writers, other journalists, other critics, other novelists and poets, getting manuscripts rejected a thousand times in the hope of one yes. 

Instead, I have a blog with thousands and thousands of posts which I write in near-isolation: not really sure who my readers are but trusting on faith that I have them. I'm still paid to write articles: they've even won major local awards. I'm a performed composer by a few major organizations. I have volumes of incomplete novels of breathtaking ambition: and even if they're esoteric I know they're good, and I know in my bones that one day they will have a small audience, even as I know that one day my essays could have a larger one. I have been a d-list local celebrity as a violinist in a popular local band. I have been a conductor and opera director. I've taught at Hopkins adult education. At the end of that class I made a student cry with my summation, and another told me I'd be world-famous one day. I was a featured writer at the Times of Israel and my tribute to Amos Oz on his passing was featured more prominently than the feature from the President of Israel. I've taught Jewish literature at synagogues: Kafka, Babel, Singer, Zweig, Bellow, Grossman, and have shared bills as a musician with some of the most well-known musicians in Baltimore and DC. And yes, there's the odd right call in business, right calls on big issues which you got wrong and were forced to admit later in moments of humility, which did exist even if you should have had more. It's not a life without real distinction. But I think by the end you decided to turn a blind eye to whatever I was doing professionally, knowing that whatever little success I had, you would disapprove of the direction it took. 

More importantly, for twenty-five years I've kept up a network of friendships since college that defined my life far more than my friendships locally ever did. What they had, what they share, is an idealism you always discouraged except in moments when it was convenient to upbraid us for having bad attitudes. It's 2026, but their New Deal democratic liberalism gave them the morale, the will, and the practical sense to make the world a better place to live, one policy at a time.

It's not because they have blind belief in optimism: it's because they have a belief in other people great enough to persist in the continual, agonizing search for infinitesimal new specs of knowledge: statistic by statistic, collated and collected in good faith, then putting the results into action. I don't know if the world ever improves, but if the world improves, and it's a big if, then it's because of people like them.

You could have been one of those people: you could have been their leader had you believed in them. Your authority thundered so loudly that if you had believed in people, if you had even faked believing in people, the world would listen, and it would have been a better place to live: not just for me but for tens or hundreds of thousands, maybe millions. But you retreated to cynicism, you retreated to the idea that people were bad, chaos was everywhere. You told me many times that attitudes are self-fulfilling: that the world will only be as good as we make it, or will ourselves to think it can be: yet in so many other moments you refused to practice it.

A Letter to Dad on Rosh Hashana: Part 1

He knew. 

 I told you Dad...

I told you. I knew he knew. I always knew he knew. In your gut, you always knew he knew too. Every Israeli knew. Every Jew knew. Even if they didn't know, they knew. The nervous system of every Jew knew he knew in their kishkes from the moment it happened and we all stuffed it down like a seventh course apple cake on Rosh Hashana.  

A few months ago, I retracted my suggestion that he knew about it and deliberately did nothing. Not because I didn't believe it, but because in the face of no evidence, what can we go with? If we trust every gut feeling that passes through us we'd all have either spent our money in Vegas or would never leave our rooms. It seemed like a conspiracy theory again, and even if it wasn't, it would be taken up by the banner of conspiracy theorists within two seconds (as it likely will now...). Here's what I wrote on April 18th: 

So for a time, a period of at least a few months, I managed to convince myself that Bibi Netanyahu let October 7th happen deliberately, a belief I warned at the outset of all this would circulate among antisemites like wildfire. This is a belief akin to the idea that Roosevelt deliberately allowed Pearl Harbor. This is an unacceptable, out of bounds belief, for me or anyone else. This is a belief that the minds of millions could justify anything at all to rid ourselves of him, including a mass murder of Jews. As truly horrific as Netanyahu is, his incompetence is so much more likely an explanation. An irony about propaganda is that even the purveyors of it come to believe their own claims. Propaganda only works when it requires a thin film of truth, and when you're fed that thin film enough times, it becomes a meal, and you've swallowed supposed truths that are 99% a drug meant to drive you mad. 

I may not have done enough work to understand this issue I've been trying to understand my whole lifetime, but I'm trying. For anyone that this issue makes passionate, you need to do the work too. A lot of our future depends on us all making the effort.

There is no validation inherent in getting it right: if it is right--and there's still a... 30% chance it isn't? 25? 20?--it's the nature of falsehoods that one conspiracy theory proven right will result in another fifty that are demonstrably false. History is outlandish enough, but the more outlandish history grows, more outlandish falsities people believe about history. No matter how strange the real truth is, it is the nature of people to believe that the truth is still much stranger. We may be right about a few things, but we're wrong about many more, and if Netanyahu was warned about October 7th and did not notify his cabinet, then it will be so easy to convince 50% of the world that the entire cabinet knew, and 25% that the military leadership knew, and 5% that all of military intelligence knew, and 1% that the perpetrators were just Israeli soldiers in Kaffiyas. 

Months ago, I was furious when I read something on a British friend's wall. Britain frankly has a bit of a reputation now as one of the countries where anti-Zionism will likely spill over into antisemitism. On this friend's wall, this guy didn't say that Netanyahu knew, he didn't say that the Israeli government knew, he said that ISRAEL knew. 

Oh I know, I know, it was just a shorthand. But this casual shorthand implicates every citizen of the country and every foreigner who supports this country: whether intended or not, the implication is that the 90% of the world's Jews who are Zionists are blithely willing to sacrifice 1000 of our own people in order to complete our military objectives. 

Whether or not anybody I casually encounter socially believes it, I guarantee there are many millions who do, and that belief is given sanction by this lack of care about how Jews are implicated in crimes we did not perpetrate. Even if you think Jews are uniquely responsible for certain crimes--and clearly many people I know do, only Jews are supposed to accept that there will be linguistic vagaries in the admonishments of us that sound like microaggressions. What's true for us is true for everybody else: either microaggressions don't matter for any group at all, which is certainly possible, or you all need to be 1000x more careful in the way you talk about Jews, and Jews are entirely right to bristle at the double standard. 

I have so much more to say about this, but this is about you Dad, not the goyim. 

Goyim suck, there's nothing we can do about it. Even the righteous goyim suck. Some of them are amazing, truly. I'd trust M... M.... and A..... T...... with my life, but the thing is, we really don't know who to trust in those moments until the very moment we need to know: and by then, our best guesses come to gossamer. Other people have to survive too, and you can't expect even your most trusted friends to willingly risk their lives if it means taking families of ten with them. The same would go for Jews if we have to be the ones to rescue others. Everybody thinks they'd acquit themselves well in the Holocaust until it happens, and then everybody realizes that survival in war is the world's most complicated mess. Some people who went with Hitler were evil, but most were just people: lied to about how to reclaim their dignity in the face of humiliation, trying to survive as anybody would, and more importantly, trying to get their loved ones to survive. People can lay down their own lives, but is a hero a hero when the hero's contribution sacrifices their family? 

You were a hero Dad. You sacrificed again and again and again and again, sacrifice was your religion: not Judaism. But the fact that other people did not completely acknowledge the extent of the constant sacrifices, particularly your children, particularly one child, provoked a fury in you that towered even over the good moments. There often didn't seem to be a single comment from you that did not have 20 implications: 17 of them not entirely complimentary. You would often say, not just to me but often to me, 'Everything I say you take as an insult.' to which I'd volley back 'Because everything you say you mean as an insult.' 

I don't know how you found Mom, I don't know how you found such a saint, I don't know how she did it for almost 51 years, I don't know how you produced adults as considerate as Jordan and Ethan, and my life is now a long process of sifting the many, MANY good lessons you imparted to me from the bad. The gifts you gave me were not just the knowledge, the humor, the business, and yes, the sacrifice... Occasionally you would complain about our ingratitude and I would put my hands up and lean my head over as though on a cross, and I'd sing out 'CRUCIFIXUS ETIAM PRO NOBIS!...' One time you complained about how ungrateful we were and ..... picked up a pillow, put it against your face and said "It'll all be over soon. Don't worry." Another time you'd done something to really frustrate ...... and he complained to me "When he goes we're gonna need thirty years just to say 'Alright, what the hell was that?!'" You somehow expected that a million jokes at our expense would not be repaid: I hope you retained some small measure of pride in how hilarious all three of your children are: we learned how to make fun of people at Jack Tucker's dinner table. 

What the hell was that indeed? You weren't an ordinary father because ordinary fathers let go of their children. I'm sure some would just call you an old world, immigrant father, who snarled disapproval as a way of maintaining authority, but that model died out precisely because it left such discontents. You didn't have to act that way. You chose it, and then acted astonished when people resented it. 

One of the reasons your disapproval so stung was because, at bottom, you were not a bad listener: you simply chose not to listen when it was to your advantage. What was best about you was your attentiveness: no one could accuse Jack Tucker of being anything but the most devoted parent, but it wasn't just time and thousands of favors, it was attentiveness. It was that you wanted nothing more than six hour conversations with your children: even if the conversation could sometimes be one-sided and turn acrimonious because of something you deliberately said. But you wanted nothing more than your childrens' company, and oh how you got it...

You brought all three of us into business. My involvement in the business has long since become a figleaf. I have time to read and write, not that I do much reading these days except in audiobook form, but thanks to you I am in some small senses a 19th century gentleman of leisure who chose his own personal cultivation over success. I owe you such a debt of gratitude for that, but oh how you hated that like anything: you wanted me in the world and to get me there I won't say the names you called me or the depths you sank to to try to hurt and humiliate. But after that childhood, I was far too bruised and scared of the world at 25 to properly go into it. I will say, in that regard, you were not exactly a help. And when it came time to figure out how to be nice to people: you were not exactly a help either, even as you constantly lectured on how surly was the social grace of a son who, like you, was clearly on the autism spectrum. 

It's only since you've been gone, in my mid-40s, that I've learned that you don't always have to say the clever line or make the impression that lights up the room. I've done what I can to be nicer, I've done what I can to be more forgiving, and more importantly to you, I've done what I can to be more responsible and conscientious. I still have a path to tread with all that, but I am going to walk it. 

I sometimes think many people pass when they can't find a way of reconciling themselves to the present. Obviously that doesn't hold true all the time, but I sometimes think it always holds true in our family. You were such a bizarre mixture of saint and tyrant that there is no way to judge you in 2026. You sacrificed everything for a family that only wanted you to pursue your fulfillment. Your life was a distraught preparation for a defeat that completely avoided you. People like you make the world go round, and would that 2026 had anyone allowed to contain as many multitudes as you did: simultaneously the world's most gregarious and remote person, the world's friendliest and most authoritarian, the world's funniest person and the most lethally serious. People like you achieved enough to create better worlds: and not for yourself, but for loved ones, for communities, for thousands and thousands who would never know your name. And yet people like you made the world of 2026 necessary. We now live in the detritus of this better world's cost, and if the world is to get better by any definition: freer, more secure, more equal, more moral, better educated, better cultured, better represented--then we have to unpack whirlwinds like Jack Tucker who got us this far: whether his name is Lyndon Johnson, or Henry Ford, or writ small Jack Tucker, the story is the same: men of limitless intelligence, limitless energy and limitless work ethic who pushed and pushed and pushed to get the best possible results out of subordinates, and were mystified when their subordinates rebelled because they thought subordinates should always remember that he understood the world better than they. 

And that is the crux of where you left the world. For a man who made such a religion of moderation in all things but his family, who was so skeptical of all claims of certainty, you somehow WERE certainty. Not just the bagel in the morning, the sitcoms constantly in the background, the constant reminders about everything we had to do that day; you WERE the idea that the world could be completely American and completely Jewish, that Zionism could be completely nationalist and completely liberal, that culture defines everything about human beings, that history goes by dialectical thesis and antithesis, that all excesses of historical actors in controlling human affairs would result in rebellion (which is extraordinary considering the difference between your belief about that and how you lived your life...).

It almost seemed as though moment you left the world was the moment the whole world decided that was all a load of shit. 

Both notions are deeply mistaken, and simultaneously not wrong. For all your electrifying brilliance in a hundred areas, I don't think you ever understood at your base level that two contradictory things can be true at the same time. 

-------- 

Does Anybody Read My Writing Or Is It All Bots?

I Am Nothing: Complete Roughish Draft

   On the holiest night of the year, the chorus intones the Kol Nidre when we tell God we won't keep our promises, then the Barchu when we bow to the Lord and bless Him to the world forever, then the Shema when we proclaim the Lord is One, , then the Eighteen blessings and the Vidui which is so holy we say it as we die, then the Selichot where we stretch the confessions of the Vidui to ten minutes, then the Piyyutim when we chant Byzantine poetry in acrostic, then the plead for forgiveness to our Father and King that is the Avinu Malkeinu, and finally the Aleinu and Mourner's Kaddish. 

Aleinu is the common prayer which we say multiple times a day. But on the High Holidays the Aleinu is so holy that the clergy don't just bow down, they bow to the floor. 

Here at Odessa's Greycer Choral Shul, the prayer is considered so important that the Rabbi exclaims every year before the Holy Ark and God "Forgive me Lord, I am nothing." Then the Cantor declares "Forgive me Lord, I am nothing." 

I became shamesh in 1849 of Odessa's Greycer Choral Shul, and in my first year as a shul clergy, I bowed down and exclaimed "Forgive me Lord, I am nothing!" And I heard the Rabbi whisper to the cantor: 

"Nu? Look who's nothing."  

I have been sexton of the Great Choral Synagogue for forty-eight years and survived three rabbis, four cantors. Every Shamesh of my generation has died off, and all Odessa's wondered when I'd retire for twenty years. Every day I awake at four in the morning, five-thirty in the winter, two-thirty at the beginning of the summer, have a breakfast of tea and a hard-boiled egg, start walk to the shul twenty minutes after I get up. It's half a Russian mile. As a young man it took thirty minutes, now it takes eighty. I never slip. When I get there I sneak a piece of cake from shabbos. Every day I sweep the entire floor: the shul floor, the women's balcony, the offices of the Rabbi, Cantor and Board members, the chapel, the hallway, the mikveh, the coat closets and outhouses; then I mop them and change the water in every room: twice before a wedding. That makes it just in time for the morning service. Some tired schnook slips twice a year, I get yelled at by the board, then everybody goes back to work. In the early days I would cry, and every time I cried they would give me a raise. Around 1870 I stopped crying and since then nobody's changed my salary. Every year I spend less and less money, but all my time is spent at shul so I have no time to spend it.

Every weekday I lead the morning prayers, the afternoon and evening. I learn the weekly Torah portions, read the fragments every Monday and Thursday and coordinate the Aliyahs. In the early years members read torah for me, but now hardly anybody knows the Hebrew and nobody's willing to put in the work, so I read it for them. In the evenings after gymnasium I teach the students their torah portions. Nu? Some of them are very nice, some of them are very smart, some of them are idyots and horrible. I yell at most of them and klap a few on the head: some fall asleep, some make faces, some try to change the subject, some don't practice; but some are interested, I kvell over those students but by the time they're sixteen they don't say hello. 

The two breaks I have during the week are during the eighteen blessings: the Shmoneh Esrei, and Rabbi's sermon, and nu? Every rabbi's the same. Every cantor's the same. They used to make me plotz with excitement, especially the chorus of the yinglach. Some I tutored for their bar mitzvahs, some became cantors themselves, or at least went to chazzan school; I even hear some of them became opera singers, so with that chorus, even the schmegegge cantors seem like they belong up there at the Bolshoi. But nu, what do they do now you didn't hear fifty years ago? Both the rabbis and cantors have their one chance a week to be a macher, and nu they use every minute of it: shouting and shraying, spitting and shpaying. Every rabbi slouches but they grow a foot on the bimah. Every cantor skips services during the week and on the Bimah becomes Odessa's most righteous tzaddik. On that bimah, the biggest nebbish turns into a golem. I go outside, nu? No shulgoer's there, and I have my two cigarettes a week and for a whole hour I hear the Rabbi here, there and everywhere. I go back in and nobody smells the cigarette because nu they all go out and smoke cigarettes while I'm layning. 

Outside there are two groups. The Yiddsheh schnorrers who get off work at the factory's night shift. They eat pork and trink, and the goyisher coachmen to the rich machers who go to shul by carriage. They eat pork and trink too, but they never talk to the Yids. I'd hear the kibbitzing of both groups and it's always the same: what they would do with the money of the Yiddisheh machers in shul, whistling at the maydlach who walk by, kvetching about their wives, kvetching about their bosses, kvetching about the children, kvetching about the hurs who make them sick. When somebody has money they sit at an outside table of the deli. No matter how cold it is, they sit out there, they play cards and eat sausage. 

But nu? I can't hear them anymore. Now I can't even hear the Rebbe, because this year I hear a yingele who would make a Rabbi sound like he sounds on Tuesday. 

I know this boy. It's Yevno Zhabotinsky's boy: Volf. "Volodya" when I knew him--I can even remember when he was called "Vovka." Great student, arrogant little pischer. He'd show up, pick fights with me about religion for forty-five minutes, then layn the Torah perfectly the last fifteen. I could have let him go months before his Bar Mitzvah knowing he'd learn the whole thing, but I didn't like him, so nu? I made him come in every week. These days, half the smart boys in Odessa pick fights about religion with me. Zhabotinsky was the smartest. Not the smartest of the last few years, the smartest I ever taught. Some rabbi he'd be but nu he wants to be a golem all week long. 

He probably got up as early as me just to study every day, but nu? What does he study? Just like all these secular Jews it doesn't matter. They go without god and suddenly it's all this thing, that thing; this cause, that cause. All this thing they call 'literature' and math and history. Nu? Whatever they learn they're always gonna use it to turn the world upside down, then everything plotzes on its head and everything's gonna be destroyed. 

This is what that Haskalah thing fights for: that German chazerai invades the heads of Odessa's kinder and turns them from Jews to dybbuks. Nu? We have it better here than anywhere else in the history of Judaism: in Odessa, in Warsaw, maybe even in New York, and what do we do with it? We use it to stop being Jews. And not just stop being Jews: we provoke the goyim too! Be atheists! Be socialists! Be capitalists! Be communists! Workers of the world unite! Throw away your talises! Eat pork! Make all the money! Maybe I should retire to a shtetl. At least there we mind our own business. 

Every week he's out there now during the Shmoneh Esrei, and what does he preach about? All this Zionist drek about how we have to move to Palestine to make a new Jewish state in the middle of a desert. It's the usual schlock about how all the Russian nobles are farkakteh thieves, the goyim are farkakteh murderers, God's a liar who doesn't keep his promises and Jews are sheep who don't fight back. So we fight back by fleeing halfway across the world? The message isn't there is no God, the message isn't even make all the gelt. It's move to the desert and parch yourself to death! Nu? There's no people there! Why? Cuz nobody wants to live there! Everybody wants to live in Odessa: so many people wanna live here nobody can get an apartment! 

Everybody remembers Yevno Zhabotinsky the wheat trader: never went to shul but gave half his money here and half his money for the society for menschlechkeit so the homeless schlemiels don't freeze or starve. Nu? I hadn't seen Yevno in thirty years (back then he was Yussl) but anybody who gives money like that is either a greycer mensch or does shreklech things with his wheat. 

Sawf-kal-sawf he dies. Nu? All his money given away and Vovka doesn't have a kopek for school. He and his mother and sister come every day for a free dinner and glassen tey. We saw the Mameh wrap the cookies in the babushka every day and didn't say anything. Vovka is apparently the best gymnasium student in Odessa, from the time he's eight every Jew knows about this illui. But nu he never comes to Hebrew school, he never comes to services. Apparently he's always in the greyceh library and reads everything in it but he barely speaks Yiddish or Hebrew. When I gave him lessons at twelve he quoted all these goyisheh philosophers, from memory in Latin and Italian! Just to tell me Hashem doesn't exist!

And all that Latin and Italian he quoted is in his Russian as he shreks to the crowd. He writes everything down, nu? Every word. But he always looks like he's looking at both the paper and the Yids.

And nu? This yinger trombenik writes the most beautiful Russian I ever heard! And he yells it out for 50 minutes every week with such ruakh! Oy, a second Shakespeare this one! About how all the Jews will be in Israel free of pogroms, free of murder, free of fargevaltigung. Kinder able to grow up secure and happy, old people cared for and honored as mensches after a lifetime of tsuris. Nu? By the end of it I'm ready to move to Israel for about a minute and a half, then the rabbi finishes up and I have go in to read the Torah and make sure no alteh macher drops it. Then I go back out for when the Cantor does the eighteen blessings. 

Nu? Two weeks ago a fruit cart starts going in front of the greyceh shul. A salesman sells his fruit, and the fruit starting to rot he gives away. This week that Vovka's especially mad he works up a greycer ruach about the Jews he hates. Nu? Would you believe it? The boy isn't just obnoxious, he's a real antisemite! He can't get through a farkakteh sentence without another kvetch about how Jews are this, Jews are that: just lambs, just superstitious, just a pack of dogs who obey every command their noblemen owners shrek at them. Nu? If he's such an antisemite what's he care how we are and what  we're doing? 

Some weeks they listen. Some weeks they just eat their pork: usually the weeks they can buy sausage. This week there's no pork at all and he's got them listening. He's not even looking at them. Nu maybe he's a little nervous, but he's still shouting: all the hand motions, high voice, pretending to be banging on something, right fingers raised in the air. 

Nu. He starts saying something a little dangerous. I picked up the paper he dropped, most of it's not this khutzpadik but here's what the nudnik said: 

"...Ergo we must not be Jewish but Hebraus! Citizens not of God but blood! Colonizers who take what is ours as right! We who do not deign to pollute our blood with the genus of others! And we must do it before others incur the sanguine land of our blood! 

We are permitted to speak in the sonorous tones of Dostoevsky and Pushkin, but through our veins courses the words of Solomon and Isaiah! Through our vena is the blood of David and Joshua that stood with robust fortitude among the spilled blood of Amalek and Canaan!  Who can build his body into the salubrious chests of Goliath so he may sling his rocks not against a large opponent but against the world in total!" 

Nu, so much Latin! Such Latin! Apparently he translated the Mayufes into Russian, but nu I've spoken to him. He can barely get out a sentence in Hebrew but I heard him talk to a professor at his Bar Mitzvah in Latin, and that flew out of his moyl twenty words a second.

"But today's Jews... the Jew of today. Today's Russians are more correct about us than our Jews! Today's Yid is little more than that word of shuddering horribilis: a Zhid! Deformed, morbid, rude, grubby, slobby, pathetic, lacking in basic norms of respect and protocol, always trampled upon, despised, disrespected and deserving nothing less! Accepting the blows of the world's fate with groveling obseqium!" 

It was that moment that all the Jews threw the rotting fruit at brave Zhabotinsky all at once. And when they were done with that they went up to the Arabber's cart and pelted Volodya with fresh fruit. It probably hurt but Volf kept going...

"And today's Russian. Bozhe moy, today's Russian. He is liberated in body but his soul is still serf to ancient superstition and boyars' slave! He is a land of hatred and indecency, a constitutional body of brutality! Nothing but hatred and malitosus! Today's Russian is a homo odium: a vulgar, ferocious, barbarous, illepidous rabble of rustics to whom we hope to pledge our assimilation. We play at trying to be their friends, but such is their barbarism that they will certainly come to a fatum most horrible. Do not be friends with the Russian! They accuse us of destruction when they do nothing but destroy themselves. 

Then the goyisher coachmen threw fruit at him too.

Nu, one hit him on the glasses and they broke. Poor Zhabotinsky had blood issuing from his eye. He dropped his paper, he looked like he was going to fall down the stairs. He had to leave to wipe the blood from his face.

But one of the Jews clapped. One of the Jews who pelted a fruit right between his eyes. 

Just then I realized I was late for the Torah service. Everybody in the synagogue was glaring at me and whispering. I thought I heard 'alter kocker', 'naar', 'stupid schlob' but nu who knows what I'm hearing at my age? 

I finish the Torah service, I go back out to smoke my second papiros and who do I see? It's not Volodya Zhabotinsky, it's the only boychik I can't stand more than him, that manipulative schmuck Lyov Bronshteyn. 

The elters at shul just assumed to call him Laybl. He didn't correct them. He must have been about seventeen, was never a pupil of mine, he was some kid from Yanovka who just came in every morning last year for six months. He davened shacharis, once even lead it. He kibbitzed to the young people in Russian and answered the alter mensches in Yiddish that was perfect except for a strong Kherson accent. It sounded a little komisch but really he convinced us he was one of us. 

After the first month he even started coming to the dawf yaymi study before the service. Everybody else was half asleep on their Talmud but within ten minutes he was lecturing us all for the whole hour in Yiddish about the succession struggle between Rabban Gamliel and Rabbi Yehoshua-ben-Khananyeh and everybody was wide awake. I remember another week when he talked about Rabbi Yehoshua's dispute with Rabbi Eliezer and Rabbi Eliezer's excommunication. You'd think the elters would hate being interrupted, but they thrilled to this bokher! He didn't dress like a bokher but they thought they were in the presence of the next Savran Rebbe. Not even the Rabbi minded! Soon we all were coming just to hear what Leybl had to say and all the fathers were talking about introducing Laybl to their tochters, but all the daughters got bashful around a bokher that handsome. 

Meshuggeh things started small of course: He'd just bring up "Why is Hashem referred to as Adonai sometimes and Elohim others?" he'd cite Rashi and Genesis Rabbaw, even Midrash Tanhumaw. But he didn't say Adoshem or Elokim, he said the real names, but everything comes from Heaven so nobody batted an eye. 

Then he'd bring up the two different versions of the Ten Commandments in Shmot, and he explained it with Rashi and ibn-Ezra citing the pronouns of each, but then he said 'Nothing about pronouns makes sense!' No one in there had ever heard someone question Rashi. You could hear a pin drop, but a wise person sees far ahead and nobody had ever met anyone as wise as Laybl. 

Then one day he brought up that there's differing views on what happens after we die: Dahniyel says that there's judgement and resurrection, but Iyov and Koheles say that afterward there's nothing and he says 'They both can't be right.' 

Finally Elya Krik says "Please, forgive me Laybl." 

And Laybl said: "Please, all my best friends call me Lyov, and you all are my guter freints." 

"Maybe I'm wrong but maybe it's not our job to question Hashem?" 

And suddenly Laybl was not Laybl: "Not question the ways of Hashem? What are we doing here layning the Talmud if we're not questioning his ways?" 

"I just thought..." 

"Even in Menakhus, God brings Moyshe Rabeinu into the future to see Rebbi Akiva's teaching and questions why God could let such a great khokhem be murdered ot azay!" 

"But Reb Laybl," 

"Call me Lyov, please..." 

"We're not being murdered." 

 Laybl even banged on the table for emphasis."I will answer your questions but you need to be silent for a moment!"

And from that moment of banging like a teapot, I knew Lyov Bronshteyn was not what he said he was. I wasn't even sure he was an Apikeyres, I just knew he was in this synagogue to lure us away from Torah. 

He didn't seem to lure any of the Dawf Yaymi students away, but he did lure a daughter. Chava Eikhbaum, daughter of Mischa Eikhbaum, one of the richest machers in Odessa. I caught them in the synagogue balcony. I won't say what he was doing but in fifty years I have never done such a thing to my wife. I told the Rabbi. He told me he didn't believe me. I told him that if he didn't do something about it, I would tell Mischa. Nu, he didn't want a scandal so he reported his favorite congregant to the police as a potential subversive and Lyov would know better than to come back to the Greyceh Choral Synagogue. 

But there he was, on the steps of the shul, and he wasn't daw with Chava Eikhbaum. He was there with Golda Pinsker! Daughter of another macher in the Greyceh Shul! 

I've known Goldinkeh since she was a little girl. Nu? I can only imagine what her Tateh gedenks of all this and all the tsuris in his hartz. But as Lyov's right hand held hers, he was shouting and makhn with his hand in just the same way Volodya did! 

But Lyov had no text. Goldinkeh was carrying a handbag, but Lyov was, like always, talking from memory and his free hand was acting all meshuggeh like it had a kep of its own. His Russian was just as good as Volodya's. A little more accented, but nu? He didn't even write it down and none of that farkakteh Latin! 

But after Goldinkeh had to leave, she'd dropped the handbag after being schlepped away from the shul by her father, and didn't have enough time to pick it up, so even if I knew I was being un-tzniustic, I searched through it and nu? I found a paper with a list of all the 'greycer' things Lyov said like he was some sort of Rebbe: "Perkai Laybl." Oy. Some of the things in there: if only this bokher was an Apikeyres. And it wasn't Lyov's handwriting, I knew Laybl's from looking at him schreib every morning, this could only be Goldinkeh's. Ochen vey, she must bow down to Lyov like he's the Goldene Kalb. 

But then I looked at the quotes and so much of it was narishkeit. Listen to these!

"In playing the role of being absorbed by the role of sage and absorption in questions of administration, the old generation grows accustomed to thinking and decisions, as it still does, for the privileges of the synagogue board. For the masses, it appoints rabbis who are purely bookish, and allows the appearance of participation in synagogue life, yet without elementary training in politics or examinations of congregants' knowledge. Thus the bureaucratism of the apparatus, the cliqueness, the exclusive internal life, in a word, all the traits that constitute the profoundly negative side of the old course." 

"The goal to be attained by the overthrow of the synagogue is the reestablishment of the role of working Jews, expelling from it the present bureaucracy. In the task of regenerated Jews to collaborate with religious revolution and the building of a society of Jewish socialism. The overthrow of the bureaucracy therefore presupposes the synagogue as a control of production's means, synagogue ownership of property among Jews, and implementing the synagogue as a means of planned economy."

"Dialectical thinking is related to the masses in the same way that the Torah is related to rabbinic commentary. The Torah does not outlaw rabbinic commentary but is the origin that combines them relating to the laws of motion. Dialectics does not outlaw the laws of nature and thought, but teaches us to combine Rabbinic commentary as a means of bringing us closer to the unchanging Pentateuchal law." 

I'd say Laybl is an apikeyres but I have no idea what any of this means. 

Nu. None of this was like what Lyov said to the crowds. B'kitzer he started with the Russich and said just what Volodya said. The Russich are all schlekhteh yutzes. 

And the all the goyisher coachmen threw horseshit at him. 

Golda was ready for it, and as she cleaned him up and he kept talking, and the horsedrek hit her rather than him. 

But one of the Russians clapped, and one of the Jews clapped. Then he switched to Yiddish. I wanted to hear what he said so standing at the top of the steps I moved closer to him because I can't hern so good. 

And nu? That's when I fell down the stairs. 

Where The Aida Survey Is So Far

  Tucker's Law of Musical Performance: Verdi's Aida--78-88 years

This is not a consumer review, this is a kind of attempt, through the history of Aida performance on record, to make a pocket history of Italian opera in a long period when Italian opera doesn't matter through. 

Aida was premiered in Cairo in 1871. If we are to believe the Molajoli/Sabajno recordings, it took a lifetime as it always does to fully acclimate to the demands of a great work of art. Aida is one of the three or four most iconic operas ever written (ABCD: Aida, Boheme, Carmen, Die Walkure), but it does not play itself like Verdi's Big Three (Rig/Trov/Trav) which can be played by any ol' small opera company in reduced forces and still make its impact.

Aida is big, Aida is decadent, and it needs the greatness of a great orchestra, a great conductor, giant voices in a giant hall with giant sets. The Golden Age of opera had to be over by the time Aida ascended to the top of opera's pantheon. But is there a recording out there which portrays decadence without becoming decadent itself?

My answer is that there was a particular moment in the 50s when Aida was taken truly seriously. I forget who said it but some Broadway composer said that musical theater circles back every 80 years to old styles and relearns lessons it forgot, and to me, 80 years is roughly the time it takes for performers to be worthy of the greatest classical works: to understand and master them.

So in that sense, Aida is not a work of the 1870s, it is a work of the 1950s. So many performers around that time truly seemed to understand Aida, not as melodrama or exhibition, and not as just another comfortable night at the opera, but as a great work of art: gripping and challenging. Artists started coming to terms with it in the most serious way: Toscanini of course, but also Gui, Alberto Erede, Antonino Votto, and even John Barbirolli. Well known singers like Maria Callas and Lyonie Rysanek, and unknowns like Catarina Mancini and Mario Filipeschi, and serious artists like Antonietta Stella and Giulietta Simoniatto. There were complacent recordings in that era too, but the greatest achieved something that went beyond mere opera and became the great art that is always there in Verdi for those willing to find it. But by 1959-60 it was all over: the Solti and Karajan recordings were released, Aida became a blockbuster, not an opera, and while certain artists got it, they swam against the current. Aida became a lavish sets, high decibles and high kitsch. Those who understood it had to revive operas old traditions and reject the new ones. 

de Sabata/Cigna: Apollo to Dionysus Meter: 9

Panizza/Cigna: Apollo to Dionysus Meter: 10

Beecham/Caniglia: Apollo to Dionysus Meter: 8

The first essential recording of Aida, to me at least, is Victor de Sabata leading La Scala in 1937 Berlin. It's not deep, it's not art, it's not even complete--some of my favorite scenes are missing, but as an exhibition, it is magnificent: de Sabata, La Scala, Gina Cigna, Beniamino Gigli and Ebe Stignani. Is it a serious examination of Aida? Well... is Aida a serious work of art? It is great opera as great opera gets, but... um... the jury is out.... The same goes in the same year in New York. Gina Cigna somehow sings in both Berlin and at the Metropolitan in 1937. In New York she was partnered with the more 'heroic tenor' Giovanni Martinelli and Bruna Castagna, along with Ettore Panizza, the one conductor who played Verdi with even less subtlety than de Sabata. And if that isn't enough, you've got Gigli and Stignani two years later in London with Maria Caniglia, a slightly more lyric 'spinto' than Cigna's trumpet tones under Thomas Beecham, the world's greatest podium entertainer. The sound of all three is atrocious, but all three are glorious. They're more than art or entertainment, they're part of the history of the world: documents of how the grandest opera inflamed the world. Opera may be a thing of the past, but so long as opera can put on loud and lavish entertainments like Aida, it can offer the world things musical theater and movies cannot possibly match.

How's it done? Singers with technique so secure that they seem able to do anything at all: so secure that you can maintain the vocal line through all histrionics, hold notes out forever loud and soft, sing over the world's loudest orchestras (which may have been about half as loud back then...), phrase in such a way that the back of the hall hears the nuances as well as the front, float notes like velvet on air or hurl them out like a poisoned arrow. You hear great singers inspiring each other and if the conductor's great, he gets the orchestra to inspire the singers too. Electric sparks fly that could incinerate whole city blocks. You have conductors who follow them everywhere through whatever odd twists and turns they do in interpretations so outsize that they sometimes take twice as much time to get through a phrase as lesser stars did twenty years previously.  Just listen to the effects Beniamino Gigli constantly strains for: half his lines start a split second early with words like 'uh-NUUUU-MEN' as a way of catching your attention. Toscanini would throw him out of the theater, and in a work of elegant proportions like Traviata or Rigoletto, that's the height of vulgarity. But Aida? Well, it's pretty much in keeping with the whole thing's spirit. 

When you hear the Greek inevitability of Toscanini, the infinite colors of elderly Riccardo Muti, the nuance of Vittorio Gui, the perfect balance of Alberto Erede, the heart and soul of John Barbirolli, and when you hear the absolute miracles of texture Karajan works in his second recording (more on that anon), who can possibly doubt the artistic seriousness of this? But then you hear so much vocal grandstanding, so much conducting grandstanding, and you realize that this exhibitionism is built into the work at its pyramidal foundation. Some performances take Aida as a dare to make the work so larger than life that you can't even hear the peaks. Yet that said, there is enormous pleasure in high notes and orchestral fireworks and lavish sets just as there is in movie explosions and sex scenes. It's exhibition, but exhibition can be awesome.

But because there is so much exhibitionism, there is also so much complacency. Other performances sound so tired of Aida that they sound like just another runthrough by people who are as tired of hearing the piece as I often am.

How many recordings really do something like justice to the piece? Well, a lot if you want to hear opera as opera. I get somewhat impatient with that kind of exhibitionism as I get older.

Solti/Price: Apollo to Dionysus Meter: Breaks the scale 

The greatest vocalism? As far as I'm concerned, there's only one choice, and it's not the one people usually say. The greatest vocalism is Leontyne Price, Jon Vickers, Rita Gorr, Robert Merrill--four stars in the flush of youth in fantastic sound, under an all-too fired up Georg Solti. Unfortunately, the problem is the inexperience of it. Solti is still 49. It's not the loudness... ... ok it is the loudness, but not just that. Solti had just became a star, and he became a star because he was willing to amp up the fireworks to a level that more tasteful, more cultured maestri knew better than to do. Solti was a great opera conductor, and in more genial operas like Cosi, Zauberflote, Carmen, Onegin, he could be the epitome of magnificence, but then you get 'Grand Solti', the Solti we remember, and he was a voice wrecker: amping up the noise of his orchestra for excitement's sake while knowing that he risked blowing out the voices of his singers. We have been on this track ever since. like in his famous Wagner, he never quite mastered pacing in those years, and in between the fireworks of awesome excitement comes quiet parts that drain the blood from mosquitos.

Toscanini/Nelli: Apollo to Dionysus Meter: 3 1/2

If you want well-paced excitement, well... there's only once place to go: Toscanini, Toscanini, Toscanini. Nobody understood Verdi at the fundament like Toscanini did: every detail in 1949 was etched perfectly in hieroglyphs, with Robert Shaw's chorus and a magnificent handpicked orchestra of American musicians for NBC. The only problem? The singers. I doubt any star singer in America would put up with Toscanini's bullshit, his dictatorial mien, his legendary temper, or apparently his cheapness (apparently that was a thing...). Now, nobody generates more bullshit than singers, but Toscanini deliberately chose the most white bread singers, including a young and very nervous Richard Tucker (no relation) and his "pupil" Herva Nelli. But at least they could sing their parts: you also have to put up with the Amneris of one Eva Gustafsson, who sounds a bit like Julia Child.

Callas/De Fabritiis: Apollo to Dionysus Meter: 10

There is, of course, the famous live Callas in 1951 Mexico City where she tosses off a high E-Flat at the end of the Triumphal March. One youtuber called it the most famous opera recording ever... I never even heard of this recording until the era of youtube... It's certainly a high voltage affair--everybody keeps up with Callas: Mario del Monaco, Oriala Dominguez, Giuseppe Taddei, and Oliviero de Fabritiis lights a fire under a Latin orchestra that seemed to need no extra fire. The sound is quite bad, but that recording is great opera. It is not, however, great art. It's a shapeless mass that takes wing in the moment of the performance and relates no moment of the performance to the moment that came before or comes after. Great artistry had to wait for Callas to find a partner worthy of her.

Gui/Mancini: Apollo to Dionysus Meter: 6 1/2

But then things really start to cook. 1951 also hears such august legends of opera history as Caterina Mancini and Mario FIlippeschi assuming the principals. Unknowns they may be, but they are magnificent, as are better known singers like Giulietta Simoniato and Rolando Panerai, with RAI Roma under the watchful eye of the great Vittorio Gui, who would easily be the leading conductor of any country that didn't have Toscanini and de Sabata--but at this point I prefer Gui to them both. The vast majority of the time the tempi stays in the ballpark of Verdi's metronome markings, and yet within that framework Gui seems to set a new pace every fifteen seconds. The orchestra isn't great, but it's Verdi in Rome, do you really think they don't know how to play it? The only problem is the sound, which sounds as though it keeps the all important orchestra in the opera house next door to the opera house where it's playing. It is such a shame: this is probably the greatest conducting we have ever heard of Aida, and yet you can barely hear the orchestra.

Erede/Tebaldi: Apollo to Dionysus Meter: 5

But the next year comes a recording overseen by Alberto Erede, one of those maestri di capella whom we took for granted, who on their average days made the trains run on time, and on the great days provided a level of involvement and inspiration that was never inhibited by a lack of knowledge about the idiom. All one can say is that this is greatness. Is Erede as great as Gui or Toscanini? Of course not. Erede was a maestro di capella, Vittorio Gui is one of the most underrated conductors of the 20th century. Erede cannot possibly hope to generate the fireworks of a star conductor and orchestra in the Triumphal March, but for once it seems like a solemn ancient triumph, not a state fair. But Erede was nobody's fool, once an assistant to Fritz Busch in Dresden. He's not as literal as Toscanini, not as supple as Gui, not as trusted by singers as Serafin, but he combines the best of all three (along with a magnificent octave up rewrite of the brass in the triumphal march scene); always in the ballpark of the score without being a slave to it, and here you can hear the damn orchestra! Just to give an example of how great Erede is: in Act 1 Scene II, my favorite scene, every time the male chorus ansewrs the Priestess's 'Possente' the chorus is just a little bit slower than the time before. Furthermore, we get to hear Tebaldi and del Monaco in embryo, two of the great voices of all time, young and hungry, ready to give absolutely everything. Even Tebaldi provides emotional involvement, and occasionally you can even hear a quiet note from del Monaco! The now seasoned Ebe Stignani is a little past her prime, but she keeps up with these young lions the way she once kept up with Gigli and Cigna.

Callas/Barbirolli: Apollo to Dionysus Meter: 8

And then there's the greatest romantic reading. Not the greatest Aida, certainly not the greatest sounding Aida, far from the most perfect, but romanticism at its best: John Barbirolli in an actual honest to god opera broadcast: twenty years after he swore off opera after making his bones (batons) there, here he is, showing what the fuss was over fifteen years before he returned to opera when he was already past it. Barbirolli and Callas, who would have ever thought? Giulietta Simoniato next to them, luxury casting in the basses with Michael Langdon and Giulio Neri, and no less than a 26 year old Joan Sutherland singing the priestess. The only unfortunate presence is entirely too German sounding Kurt Baum sounding like he wandered over from a production of the Merry Widow. I love Barbirolli the way I love Gigli: everything's over the top and I couldn't care less. He never misses a chance to start a rallentando five bars early, to linger on a recitative like it's already a love duet, but unlike certain more mummified conductors, at least he speeds up as much as he slows down. This is romanticism as it should be done: what comes out exhibitionist when done by de Sabata and Muti sounds like emotion itself under Glorious John. Known as the great accompanist of his time, he's the perfect partner for Callas, not just supporting her but encouraging her every dramatic instinct. I don't know if it's at all appropriate for Aida, it feels like Callas is singing Tosca, but her intensity is positively feral. For those who believe opera is mere melodrama, she schools us all here as everywhere else. Even if she doesn't have a Radames to match, she is so absorbing here that she needs no Radames at all.

So let's pause for a second: why, in my perception, is the Barbirolli/Callas so much closer to the spirit than other ultra-romantic performances from the late thirties? The answer is that one approach feels like an arena event, and one feels sacred. One feels as though it's meant to excite, one feels as though it's meant to move. What feels hammy at the old Met is felt at Covent Garden. What feels attacked in Berlin feels inhabited in London. What feels like a party fifteen years earlier at 30s CG feels like a rite of the soul in 50s CG.

And then, over the course of one year, you have three extremely imperfect recordings:

Milanov/Perlea: Apollo to Dionysus Meter: 4

This is often touted as the greatest of all Aida recordings, though not without protests from the Karajan and Muti communities. It is not that. It is a very comfortable recording where a timid conductor allows five of the world's greatest singers their head to do whatever they want in their parts and makes no effort to build an ensemble. It's a shame, Jonel Perlea is magnificent in moments of quiet intimacy. His lyricism in O Patria Mia is nothing short of gorgeous, and his ability to support singers is as good as any conductor has ever been. He was a magnificent conductor when the spirit moved him, as in Mozart, and he gets generally wonderful playing from the Rome's opera orchestra, but a grand Verdian he was not, and indeed, in moments of grandeur he turns utterly generic. And yet, something curious happens: the interpretation we think of as the traditional Aida heard everywhere comes from Perlea. It is as though everyone who performed Aida grew up on this recording. Ever since the Mehta recording ten years later, most conductors seem to take Perlea's tempos, tenors copy Bjorling's eternal high notes and suavity, mezzos copy Barbieri's consonants, Bjorling is a Radames with a gorgeous voice and entirely too casual about showing it: high notes last forever to no purpose, and without the excitement of Gigli and Martinelli. He shows his voice off as a luxury product. Zinka Milanov, a little past her prime, is an Aida of great authority, and it shows. In O Patria Mia the nuance of what she does is truly extraordinary: every small crescendo, color, consonant, accent and slide. But to me, the glory of this recording is the terrifying portrayal of Amneris by Fedora Barbieri. In Callas's recording she is overmatched and the chemistry isn't quite right, but here, she shines on her own: alternately vicious, charming, insincere, hurt, and eventually accepting. It is a magnificent portrayal, matched only by Boris Christoff's Ramfis, who needs only sound like Christoff to inhabit the awesome power of Ramfis's ceremonial authority. As Amanasro, Leonard Warren is mostly magnificent. The Act III duet between Aida and Amanasro is absolutely electric, but I do wish Warren wouldn't have so many deliberately off-pitch vocal accents and take the denunciation at a slower tempo so we can hear the words (I'm just going to take a guess that Perlea generally deferred tempos to his singers).

Serafin/Callas: Apollo to Dionysus Meter: 4

Maria Callas, Fedora Barbieri and a more mature Richard Tucker at La Scala under the ever-reliable Tulio Serafin. Callas is... not Aida. Some people will go for Callas in anything the same way some people will go for Olivier or Streep in anything. I am not one of them: mature women like Tosca and Violetta, sure, but ingenues like Aida and Gilda? Fuck no... Even when Callas was in her twenties she sounded 47 and had the romantic appeal of a lady in the Trump cabinet. Nevertheless, what makes Callas Callas is that even when she is utterly unsuited to the role, she finds things in it nobody else does. 'Actorly' it may be, but every line reading has intention and nuance and character: even if it gives the impression of a 60 year old Meryl Streep playing Juliet, it's still a wonderful performance of its type. Everybody else takes a back seat to the Callas show: only Tito Gobbi has a fighting chance to get the spotlight off her. Everything else is rather... mid?

Kubelik/Rysanek: Apollo to Dionysus Meter: 6

Still better than them both is my dear Rafael Kubelik, conducting the Vienna Opera with singers like Lyonie Ryzanek, Hans Hopf, Jean Madeira, George London... are we sure this is Aida and not a Wagner opera?... and sure enough, it's in German. But for what it is, it's absolutely glorious. If you can imagine Italian vowels amid all that vocalism, magnificently played and paced, put those brutal German consonants out of your mind.

Karajan/Tebaldi: Apollo to Dionysus Meter: 2

But then we start getting to decadence like that Solti recording, and also the first by that other voice wrecker: Herbert von Karajan: frankly the worse voice wrecker. More on that anon again. In 1959, Karajan is barely fifty, and he doesn't have many ideas about Aida yet. This is more a 'record' than it is a performance or an interpretation. It is clear, at least to me, that Karajan is not in charge here. The producer is: the once famous John Culshaw, who in his lifetime had a power that exceeded even Karajan's. Culshaw wanted an artificial soundstage, and Karajan, always intrigued by recording technology, provided everything Culshaw wanted. The result was that Karajan had a brand to manufacture rather than ideas. It is all very Karajanish: polished and so imposing in loud moments it sounds sculpted from marble, but the many intriguing ideas of Karajan's twenty-years-later remake are not here. In its place we have bombast: inflated tempi, inflated orchestral sound, inflated singer mic placements, inflated dynamic contrasts that leave you turning the volume dial up and down. In Renata Tebaldi, the world's greatest singer and worst actress, Karajan had the perfect Aida for his conception and the perfect Amanasro in Cornell MacNeill (must be a family thing...). Poor Carlo Bergonzi and Giulietta Simoniato thought they were recording Verdi but are stuck in an entombed monument. Simoniato was so good, so complex, so caught between ferocity and tenderness that in the beginning of Act IV, she briefly warms Karajan up, but otherwise this Verdi has more Wagner in it than Solti's Ring.

Mehta/Apollo to Dionysus Meter: Something this shallow breaks the scale. 

The next stage of decadence is 1965, when we get Birgit Nilsson as Aida: Wagner's trumpet herself, along with the most dangerous tenor of them all: Franco Corelli, who as always holds nothing back and whose electricity threatens to obscure even the largest voice and loudest orchestra, and that's what he gets. The Rome Opera Orchestra plays like the world's loudest orchestra when mic'd this closely, and they are inflamed by Zubin Mehta at all of 29, and still with us at 90. As always with Mehta, the sound defines thrills and passion and lushness, and there is nary a detail to be found. Nary an orchestral crescendo, nary a rubato, nary even a piano; all taken at the safest possible tempos at every moment to convey Mehta's massive mass. Even then, Mehta was a master of short cuts. The Act III prelude seems to be the one time he glances at the metronome, and it's one of the few markings that doesn't work--no violin section can ever coordinate those spiccatos evenly at that speed: and you realize Mehta takes it at the recommended speed because he has no desire to savor the delicacy and the langor. This recording announces it is unapologetic spectacle from the first 'guerra'. Visceral excitement everywhere, punching with as much force and speed as George Foreman. It is Aida the carnival, and this party rages. It's a great recording, it's also absolutely shameless. It is left to Grace Bumbry to keep up with these cyclones, and she acquits herself pretty well, but no mic can hide just how much more powerful those other two voices are. Bumbry is the only person here trying to find any seriousness. 

Muti/Caballe: Apollo to Dionysus Meter: 8 1/2

Then there is that even more magnificent 1974 recording of Muti and Caballe. Magnificent of its type that is... Muti is absolutely ferocious in that Al Pacino way where everything is senselessly hammed in a manner that is more about the performer than the work, but nobody can deny the absolute charisma of it. The triumph scene is an absolute carnival: you can practically sea the roller coasters and cotton candy, but my god does he get the grandeur here: only Muti and Levine approach Toscanini in this all-crucial scene. Everything about this reading is melodramatic, but Aida is melodramatic. Furthermore, Muti at 33 did not yet have the cache to rein in interventionist singers like Caballe and Cosotto: so the scenes between them become a melodramatic campfest of hellcats. Caballe does not miss a chance for the kind of portamento and pitch losing accent that would drive Muti crazy, while Cosotto spits her accents out like a snake does her venom: dots are doubled all over the place. You can even hear the imperturbable Piero Cappucilli straining his voice to match Muti's knife-wielder energy. This is much more about the fireworks than Verdi. Some dynamics and accents are respected, but Muti conducts as though he's never heard of a metronome and with all kinds of interpolated rubatos that you'd only find elsewhere in the types of de Sabata and Panizza performances he spent a career railing against. And yet, unlike Solti, this is a performance by a conductor who knows his Verdi so well that he knows just how much romanticism this approach needs. We would wait for Muti to match his professed seriousness with substance for another thirty years. This is greatness, but it is definitely decadence. 

Chailly/Urmana: Apollo to Dionysus Meter: breaks the scale. 

And then there is Riccardo Chailly's pass at it. Chailly, unlike Muti, didn't need time to evolve. He was always a cold fish, but his musical values were bedrock from the moment he appeared on the scene in his early 20s, as was his utter intolerance for opera's bullshit. Not since Toscanini has there been a conductor who is such a stickler for the urtext. How he gets singers to comply with him is a mystery no one will ever solve, but as with every other piece, there has never been an Aida this thought through. Unlike in, say, Mahler, which has been thought through so many ways that another new approach can elicit groans, Verdi needs this sort of cleaning up badly. No one in recorded history, among those who got good sound at least, has considered so much how crucial certain orchestral lines are and just how they should balance against the voice. Some of the tempos are right on the metronome clicks, others are too slow as has become Chailly's latter-day mein in opera, and Chailly occasionally hews to tradition in manners he never would ten years earlier like slowing up for Aida's first stage entrance or at Amneris's cries of "Ah Vieni" at the beginning of Act II. As ever with Chailly, it is not the complacent slowness of Perlea or the mummified slowness of young Karajan. It is a means to get utter linear clarity and nuanced detailing. You might not like the aesthetic: I vastly prefer Chailly's mien here to what he does in most of the Germans, but even in when you don't like Chailly, he is a maestro among maestri, and this is one of the few truly great performances in the years after Aida's golden age. This isn't melodrama, it's not even romanticism, we hear, finally, Aida's full pyramid from just about all its sides: form, color, line, vocalism, characterization, spectacle, pacing and that indefinable pagan spirituality. Neither melodrama nor complacency here. It would have been nice to get this level of sound and orchestral playing with the singers of fifty years earlier, but finally, hear this, and you basically hear what Aida is.  

And yes... this is the famous production which Alagna left in a huff after getting boo'd after the first aria. Listening to how well he does here, I don't blame him. He is not as subtle as his female co-stars, and is not acting up their storm, but he is acquiting himself as a Radames whose singing is pretty close to magnificent in a century that doesn't have magnificent Radameses. On the other hand, the gods blessed this recording with two absolutely fabulous female leads: great singing actresses with powerful voices and a minimum of warble. Their Act II duet is absolutely electric: dramatic, colorful, characterized in three dimensions. You can hear both the smiles and the insincerity in Ildiko Komlosi's voice just before she erupts in rage. Violetta Urmana suffers as a truly great prima donna does, only to occasionally erupt in joy rather than rage. The only problem is Carlo Guelfi's Amanasro, whose vocal insuitability he conceals by snarling: not the worst solution... This performance, truly, is something to behold. 

Muti/Netrebko: Apollo to Dionysus Meter: 5

But then there is Muti's Salzburg performance in 2017. Forty-three years after the recording, only one bona-fide star in Anna Netrebko (is there more than one bona-fide star in any production anymore?), and otherwise the best Verdi singers you can find in 2017, who a very far cry from what they were in 1974. This is such a different Muti. It's far from perfect: the ego is still there, the departures from the score are all over the place. Muti still contorts Verdi in manners opposite from what he professes whenever it suits him, and yet the knowledge, the affection, the ability to find the right color, or tinta, the perfect Italian sound (sfumato--to use an art term) he gets from the Vienna Philharmonic, it's a miracle unseen in this piece since the days of Toscanini and Gui (his teacher). Perfection is not on the menu, nor supposed to be. Chailly is perfection, old Muti is infinity. He has all Karajan's ability to find the exact right color and balance the instrumental lines against the singers so that the orchestra becomes a participant rather than just an accompanist: but unlike Karajan, the orchestra never dominates. Muti may be the dictator, but he does not demand complete stardom here. This is the sort of late-in-life mastery we only get from conductors who've devoted their life to this music: the way we get that extraordinary aliveness from so many Brucknerians late in life: Blomstedt, Haitink, Wand, Skrowaczewski, Giulini, Jochum, Karajan... this is Muti in Verdi. Even the instruments sound like voices. 

Essential: * means especially so

de Sabata/Cigna '37 for its incredible visceral energy

Panizza/Cigna '37 for its incredible extravagance

Toscanini/Nelli '49 for an idea that is perfect, even if not more *

Gui/Mancini '51 for a near platonic ideal of a performance, if only we heard the orchestra better **

Erede/Tebaldi '52 to show precisely what impact Aida could make when the world knew this opera better than ever before or since. ***

Callas/Barbirolli '53 for a plumbing into Aida's soul *

Perlea/Milanov '55 for Barbieri's unforgettable Amneris, Milanov's extraordinary O Patria Mia, the Act III father-daughter duet, and to hear where today's interpretive template came from. 

Kubelik/Rysanek '55 for a ceaselessly warm chamber approach 

Varviso/Nilsson '64 for the most underrated conductor to stand in the opera pit

Mehta/Nilsson '65 for pure spectacle and visceral thrills

Muti/Caballe '74 for pure melodrama 

Levine/Price '84 for Price's last ever opera performance, for the most promising young maestro since 1950 who never delivered, and for a lifetime's experience from a singing actress who for thirty years, WAS Aida 

Chailly/Urmana 2004 for everything Aida is. ***

Muti/Netrebko 2017 for a revival of Verdian style from a master who has learned from this music his whole life. **

I don't want to condescend to Verdi, I've spent too much of my life doing that already, but the populism is part of what's great about him. If people want to say that Verdi is as great as Mozart and Beethoven, they have to play him as seriously as they play Mozart and Beethoven: and how much of Verdi's appeal does that shore?

Other people would disagree with me, but I think Aida is of a different variety from his greatest operas. It was written to be a grand summation of Verdi's career, but Verdi was mining his more populist side in Aida, not the side of great art which he found in Otello, Falstaff, Boccanegra and Boito. In Verdi's greatest operas, he starts with the story and creates music to set the story: that's how we get Rigoletto and Traviata and Otello and Falstaff. But in Don Carlo, one cannot help sensing that he began with the setting, and even moreso in Aida. Everyone talks about how great and dramatic Act III is, but after O Patria Mia I find Act III weak sauce. I feel as though Verdi is just moving through the gears of what an opera is supposed to do before he gets to the next amazing tableauxes in Act IV. Think of Amanasro's music where he disavows Aida. It's basically the Monterone music in Rigoletto.

The right conductor never got there: Karajan II and Gui got close, so of course did Toscanini in his way, and we might wish in this piece for masters as great as Mitropoulos, Fricsay, Giulini, Carlos Kleiber (either Kleiber really...), Franco Ferrara, but I think the truly right conductor for this piece was Guido Cantelli: a conductor with Toscanini's austere inevitability but without his rigidity: a Toscanini who could lower the temperature to warmth, the conductor James Levine threatened to become and never did. This is the recording we're missing and oh the tragedy. In my mind, I hear great singing actors like Franco Corelli, Giulietta Simoniatto, Shirley Verrett late in her career when she switched to soprano, all under the disciplining hand of Guido Cantelli leading the Philharmonia in a performance that's loud when it should be loud, quiet when it should be quiet, and formally perfect. The spectacle gets its entire due, but it stays in proportion so it never crowds out the intimacy. Cantelli would stick to Verdi's tempi like Toscanini, but he bends the rhythm 5 or 10 clicks all the time like Gui; he observes the accents without overdoing them the way Muti does in every bar, and he would have all the weight of sound Abbado lacks. 

And yet there is so much about Aida that is art at the top of Parnassus. I don't think it's the usual scenes people say. It's not the triumphal march, and it's not even really the tomb scene (except for the offstage choruses). It's the preparations for battle before Ritorna Vincitor, it's the ritual in praise of P'tah, or the offstage judgement scene. Aida is almost unique among Verdi in how it strives for ceremonial sublimity. You can feel it in the Triumphal March if it's not played as a carnival (good luck...), but even outside the Triumph scene, Aida requires a great chorus. A few Verdi operas require a great chorus, particularly among the early operas, but only Don Carlo requires a chorus to create something that seems anywhere close to this large: as though the scene is set of an entire civilization. As far as 'choral epics' go, it's up there with Boris and Les Troyens, and like in those epics, the chorus is what gives the scenes their vividness. I sometimes feel as though Aida is great in exact proportion to how much he gives the chorus to do, but in order to hear the greatness of Aida's most famous scene, you need an ascetic of the Toscanini/Chailly variety who rein tempos to absolute steadiness so that it doesn't feel like just 'elephants on parade.'