Six months today Dad

You didn't live a short life and survived many health scares, but it was still much too soon. You may not believe me, but I miss you all the time, which is unbelievable even to me because I sense your presence every minute of the day. It still utterly feels like you're here and will send an email or call or enter a room at any moment. Such is the force of your personality that I do not even feel a void where you once were. You make yourself felt even in your absence.

Authenticity

So here's the problem: 

The guy who writes this page is a good writer, a really good writer, maybe ever a great one. If he ever finished a book, people might be really impressed with what he does. He happens to also be a really smart guy who is extremely modest..., and so he hears from most, great company, always ready to make himself vulnerable, loyal to a fault, solicitous to the welfare of those for whom he cares, in spite of his physical ailments a 6'5 adonis, and does his admittedly mediocre best to be reliable in action. 

He's also a little crazy. 

He's no fool, he knows what's going on, but he's also not a model of balance. He's not nearly as crazy as he seems from description, but also crazier. He could try to conceal the extent of it for more than a short term, but if he did, it wouldn't be true to himself, and he'd lose a lot of the authenticity people find most appealing about him, not to mention; 50% of his best writing. 

He writes in the hope that the daemon (demon?) on the page is exorcized, so that he is free to live his personal life with the appearance of a (not particularly) normal person. Some people just have to be creative, and unfortunately it takes precedence over just about everything else in life, because if they do not sacrifice themselves to creating things, the creative urge devours them, and the mind creates situations that sail over its own resistance, even of people with great capacity for rationality. Over the years he's learned a few things about keeping this pack of hounds at bay: the usual psychiatric things of course, but also an extremely steady appetite for learning. The more actively the brain is learning other things, the less actively the brain works against itself.  

In terms of craziness, he's probably an 8 out of 10, maybe a 7.7 at this point. Going from 9 to 8 was extremely hard-won, and he'll exert continual effort to lower that number for the rest of his life. In terms of difficulty, at this point in his life, he's probably a 5.25: no pushover but also a person who goes along to get along and lives by a near-religious belief in the importance of compromise, and over the years the trajectory of his number has gone steadily downward. Recent relationships have been a bit stunned by how easy he is to get along with. 

No matter what people aspire to be, they have to be themselves, but they can't simply present themselves exactly as they are on the first interaction. That would be still greater madness than any he already knows, and no matter what is discovered afterward, it would be a terrible imposition to admit to a complex situation as a first interaction. One can allude to it, but one can't simply tell it. 

Some people manage to conceal truths over a lifetime, but the concealment comes at horrific personal cost of suffering and fear, what could possibly make that worthwhile?

He has learned to hope over the years, not because he's put any great store in hope, but because life has no improvement without the practice of hope, and over the years his hopes have borne out some improvements. 

He still doesn't have much audience, though he does have at least a couple dozen devoted readers. He's a little terrified of the concentration and distraction it requires to do serious publicity, but he writes in the hope that he can hold out hope to others in the still darker situations which he, like all of us, fears are imminent for us all. He's accumulated a lot of experience over the years, joy as well as suffering, fun as well as humiliation, courage as well as fear, hope as well as depression. What matters to him, what matters to us all, is the affirming flame, the importance of using the voice one is given as a call to our better angels. 

He tells his own story not for his own masturbatory arrogance (or so he hopes), he hopes that by telling his own, he is in fact telling a story of his time, his place, of people like him, even of people who aren't. He's writing about themes common to us all: loneliness and community, suffering and joy, history and the future. Every writer needs an address, a camera through which they perceive the wider world. This camera just happened to be the one at hand. You work with the material you have. This is, for the moment, his best camera, though he hopes to improve some of the others before too long. 

He would like to get away from provocative political prognostications, which have gotten him far too easy an audience (such as it is), and get to those things people really care about. The soul-feeding place from where people can derive the inspiration to keep going. 

It's a journey. Slowly but surely, he's getting there. As an artist, whatever that means, and far more importantly, as a human. He is not obligated to complete the work, but nor is he free to abandon it, and whenever the darkness deepens and helpers fail (whomever they may be), he will abide. 

For Tamas Vasary (1933-2026)

 Tamas Vasary was one of the greatest performing musicians of all time. Full stop. His playing is instant catharsis, his conducting scarcely less so, and he was conducting and teaching to nearly the end. In his youth, Deutsche Grammophon recorded and marketed him as a virtuoso. What a shame. In those years, DG's pianist of probity was his fellow Hungarian Geza Anda, whom I think never got to the level of Vasary. In Anda you heard technical perfection: utterly even passage work and balanced chords, god knows what practice it took to get him there, but I've never heard music.

There are a number of ways to make the highest level of music. But one of my favorites is art so subtle that it sounds as though they're playing the music as straight through as Anda, but they're not. It's just phrasing so subtle it can't possibly be noticed. You only notice it by the cathartic effect it has on you. One could call it flow or glow, but it's past even there. It's fully in the 'next world.' Who gets there? Well, it's so few, you'd probably have to look past just pianists. Along with Vasary, Sandor Vegh, Menachem Presler, Adolf Busch, Gustav Leonhardt, Helmut Walcha, Marcel Moyse, Josef Suk, Brendel and Schiff and Kempff at their best but only at their best, if I'm feeling charitable then Grumiaux and Lupu. There are a few who get close: De Larrocha, Pires, Rubinstein, Moravec, Lipatti, Curzon, Milstein, Enescu, Oistrakh... I honestly wonder if that's it. You'll notice how many of them were not just instrumentalists: they were all-around musicians--chamber musicians, teachers, and conducting being their very last priority. This is the very top of the mountain of musical performance, where full-time conductors don't belong. Neither crowd nor craft matters as much to them as music, and music is all they are.

Mozart Piano Concerto No. 17 - London Philharmonic Orchestra - Tamás Vásáry (piano) (RFH, 1981) 

Folie a deux

.

I made the mistake tonight of ingesting a slight bit of a spice my stomach couldn't take, so I'm up for the night to ponder tonight's interaction.

I was where I was because a good old friend came down from Philadelphia. Not a friend I've seen much for twenty years, but he's one of the more consequential relationships of my life. When I knew him best he was the coolest kid in school: every girl we knew was in love with him and it wasn't hard to see why. He was charismatic, he radiated positivity, he was the guitarist and lead singer to my sideman violin with all the connotations. To my disappointment, the bastard was thoughtful too, and always had answers at the ready to my practiced cynical poses--which were really a cover for terrible despair and doubts from which I had no idea how to recover.

We both were in Ha'Aretz (Israel) in our mid-twenties, blessed in a sense with time to figure things out, and in another sense, stuck. We were musicians trying to practice in the desert, but there was little else to do but drink. I think we did our mighty best to ply our trade, and had unforgettable experiences playing both in cities and in the desert forty miles away from any town at all. Clearly, the long and strange experience of Mizrach HaTikhon seeped into his pours and made the same searing impact on him it made on me. Twenty years later, he's clearly as affected by the experience as I, and we both have devoted large parts of our lives to figuring out the lessons we learned there. We were adrift in the larger half of Israel, the barren half, the desert Israel was supposed to make bloom, but most of we saw there was abandonment: abandonment of citizens, abandonment of moral obbligations, abandonment of dreams. Those of us there were left to contemplate: what went wrong?

The Israel of twenty years ago was a veritable united nations of Jews. The town we lived in was not just full of ignorant Americans like us but thousands of Russians who felt humiliated by their station and looked as ever to authoritarian leadership to deliver them from what they couldn't deliver themselves. It was thousands of Mizrachim, Sephardic Jews who felt humiliated by the Ashkenazim: the European higher social class, educated and mostly liberal, whom, to their thinking, sold their homeland and peace of mind out to the very Arabs who so oppressed them in their parents' countries of origin. I met Brits, Scots, Swiss, northern Africans, and people of absolutely indeterminate origin. It was home to Amos Oz, Israel's writer of writers, but we never saw him, and rarely did anyone we spoke to. Israel is a place that collects Jewish eccentrics and misfits, nowhere moreso than in the forgotten towns of the south. I met people there from every conceivable European background: all of whom seemed to carry some kind of disappointment by what life promised them, and no less by what Israel promised them. If we wanted to see where the powder keg was for everything that came next, it was right in front of us.

Other than him and maybe two others, all my closest friends on the program were the Europeans: British, Hungarian, Czech, Dutch, Scottish, French, and yeah... Israeli too. Most of the Americans and I never really figured each other out. They were the cool kids and as ever, I was a strange nerd: too cerebral and acerbic for American Jews, whom in our generation were still taught to be optimistic and full of action.

But somehow this guy saw fit to take me under his wing, his protection, and playing with him, talking to him, traveling with him, made a lot of the time there worthwhile. He's clearly of a far more optimistic bent than I, and it's served him well. He turned outward to activism, I turned inward to books (not that I'm reading anything like enough lately...). He turned to people, I turned to ideas. He's one of those guys whose answer to every question is 'yes.' No matter what the challenge, he takes the plunge, whereas I have always listened to the instinct for caution, perhaps even fear. My answer to every question has always been 'no'. I think I'm right, the world is what it is, the folly of humans persists from age to age, person to person, but what has being right ever gotten anybody in the world? He is writing the music he was ever meant to write, engaging with the people he was meant to engage. I write a steady stream of personal essays when all I want is to write the fiction and music that boils in my head but I have not the courage to make daily practice of setting down. What point is there setting things down when the majority of what you know how to write is doubts? I have some small degree of faith in God, but my God is not particularly benevolent. He, I would guess, has not made up his mind about us. Whether or not there's a god, we were sent here to make the world what we make of it. If we want to make it better, we have to see past the void and imagine better. Maybe it's not my nature or temperament, maybe life experience has taught me so to be, but imagining better has never been a great gift of mine.

He performed tonight, songs of his own composition in Hebrew and Arabic as Mizrachi as the roots Americana I remember us performing, and what I saw from him is something I'd never seen before. A righteous anger: not a personal anger, but the anger of the prophets, an earned anger that is the anger of our generation. I didn't agree quite with everything, I didn't need to. I wasn't even supposed to. The point of his message was that we all needed to hear points of view that jar our own, and hopefully he jars a lot of them, because few things need jarring more right now than Jewish complacency, which is writ small the complacency of both Israel and America.

But as he's gotten more angry, I've gotten more serene, and I don't quite like it. At the beginning of the night, someone said that they did not know a single Jew whose perception was not shifted by October 7th. At that moment, I realized, I was that Jew. Nothing for me changed on October 7th. I felt as though I was the only Jew prepared for the event and most of what would happen next was clear to my mind as a diamond. Nothing about what happened next surprised me. I felt terrible despair for the loss of life, I felt even more despair at saying goodbye to the world as I hoped it would be, but I felt no shock. Only 40 I may have been, but I'm acquainted with history, i'm acquainted with folly, and I'm acquainted with its grief. I felt a bit like I could be a guide through the new era for those who needed it, but it's not as though I much liked the situation I've been guiding through.

But then he did something that made my jaw drop. He had the courage to say aloud the question that is in every Jewish mind right now, even if they repress it--the question I write repeatedly but dare say to barely anyone in person: did Netanyahu put the defenses down on purpose? Has he done it before? Will he do it again? Will it be still worse next time? The sheer boldness, fortitude, self-security it takes to say it aloud right now is something so far beyond most of us, and here he was prepared to say it in front of a group of strangers, not knowing who might call him a traitor, a self-hating Jew, an antisemite, or worse, in a public square. The sheer bravery of it is something I can only aspire one day to emulate. I'm just a writer who puts ideas into people's heads, this guy is a true leader. We may disagree on a few particulars, but this person has a level of bravery and moral backbone so far beyond most of us that we can only aspire to be more like him even as we fail. When true moments for bravery come, most of us will have doubts about how well we'd handle ourselves. This guy will never flinch in pursuit of what's right.

We probably never thought it would happen, but we're now the middle generation, promised things in our youths by America and Israel both that never materialized, and now the first generation to take the reins of a society we know will get worse. Yet we have to drag it through, solving very little, but salvaging everything we can so that the next generation muddles through until such time comes when things can be solved, in the hope that it will be their generation's destiny to solve problems of whose making they are entirely yet innocent. We did not ask for this burden, but so long as there are enough people who can live up to his example, we will solve them.

Abi Gezunt and thank you for being a balm for my doubts, now as well as two decades ago.

Evan

A Digression on Soul in Music

Last night I went to a very bland performance of a piece that couldn't be less bland. My 'hotshot local conductor' led my local in Shostakovich 4: the most difficult, most terrifying, most unique, funniest and potentially best classical masterpiece of the 1930s: it's either this, Lulu, Shosta 5, RVW 4, or Bartok MSPC. It's one of the most ironic, bleakly comic pieces ever written. Last year I heard it in Philadelphia conducted by Tugan Sokhiev: a Ossetian Russian who comes from a war torn region and surely understands what this music is about in his marrow. But when our local did it, it was done with the wistful sincerity of Brahms 1.

Our local guy is not at all a bad conductor, he's just... well... he's a very earnest young man, and he makes music like one. A nice guy though a little full of himself as successful young people tend to be. But I get the sense he's so sincere that if one were to meet him and make a joke, there's a 50% chance he wouldn't get it.

Jonathon Heyward is going to be the biggest thing in American orchestral life since Michael Tilson Thomas, perhaps since Leonard Bernstein. No doubt he will grow into the roll, but I doubt he'll get there until he sheds the brash overconfidence of those two predecessors. It's just not him.

Our generation is full of all this talk about separating the art from the artist. Bullshit. The artist's temperament, character, background and beliefs are intimately bound up with it. If you respond well to an artist whose character is, as we say, problematic, one would do better to consider the problematic aspects of one's own character than simply eliminate their works from your consumption. The whole reason we have art is so we can contemplate it. A great artist's flaws of character are a large part of the process of understanding the works. Evil-natured artists give you a window into the mental processes of evil. If you want to understand evil, you would do well to keep paying attention to them.

I've grew up listening to a long list of live podium musicians. When you hear them, after a while you begin to feel as though you know them. You feel as though you know their personalities and life stories through their music, and they take on the qualities of friends.

David Zinman was a New Yorker of the 1950s who grew up in the era of Sid Caesar and Golden Age Broadway. He is of the same generation as the 'sick comics', educated comics who pushed the boundaries of acceptable discourse beyond the Borscht Belt: Woody Allen, Tom Lehrer, Nichols and May. Zinman, who paid his way through college with stand up gigs, is perhaps the funniest man who ever stood in front of an orchestra, and you hear that wit in his musicmaking. He spent his career trying to be Leonard Bernstein, who was half Harvard professor and half rock star, but he should have been the American Charles Mackerras. He wanted to be known for his Mahler and Brahms, but he should have been far better known for many others who don't demand quite so much existential depth: Mozart and Haydn, Tchaikovsky and Rachmaninov, Ravel and Stravinsky, Berlioz and Richard Strauss. He could make extraordinary noises in fortissimo and pianissimo, but they were used with extreme intention. His musicmaking was always fastidious, urbane and full of wit: there was always lightness and retraint. The extravagant angst of German romanticism seemed almost completely alien to his nature. Zinman was music's truest high comic, and rather than Zurich, he, not Slatkin, should have followed Andrew Davis at the BBC, where he could have been the most beloved Last Night conductor of all time. Now, I could mention the incredible virtuosic precision of a Zinman performance and their dancably pulsating rhythms, the magnificent ear for balances, or his ability to project harmonies and linear transparency, but it's frankly not the most important thing about him.

Yuri Temirkanov was obviously very different. He was funny in a very different way, but his musicmaking was suffused with heart. Temirkanov was, apparently, an enormously passionate reader, and I remember a profile in Baltimore when he said he would rather never listen to music again than give up reading. His way was not the animal passion of Svetlanov, it was emotionally specific, suffused with many different emotions at once. In many hands, perhaps most, Tchaikovsky sounds like melodrama. In Temirkanov's, T's music sounds like masterpieces as emotionally complicated as anything in Tolstoy or Pushkin. His musicmaking went almost simultaneously between passion, terror, joy, rage, humor, romance, melancholy, and all of it suffused with exactly the kind of winking irony you get from the great 19th century novelists. He was a giant of a musical poet whose poetry unlocked the works of the Russian masters as I'd never heard anyone unlock them live but Mariss Jansons and, occasionally, Valery Gergiev. But before a Shostakovich 13, one of the greatest performances of anything I'd ever heard, he did a Haydn 104 that probably sent flies dropping to the floor for how much air was sucked out. I could mention Temirkanov's ability to stretch a vocal line for minutes at a time, his ability to create an overtone glow in the string section, the way he tied rubato to harmonic tensions and resolutions, and of course, the bodily power of his fortissimi--niceties of linear clarity be damned, and, of course, the constant imprecisions. But that's not what made him memorable.

Then came Marin Alsop. Alsop, like Zinman, is a New Yorker, but she is a Boomer, a woman, and once upon a time, a musical hustler going gig to gig. I didn't know Alsop particularly well. She knows who I am, but I met her less than half-a-dozen times. Everybody I knew who knew her testified to two things: 1. She is formidably demanding. 2. She is a very nice person. Alsop is, at heart, an ambitious New Yorker. You always heard the brashness of those pieces, the cynicism, but you also heard the sincerity and lyricism. She was a better Mahler conductor than Zinman and probably even than Temirkanov. She was fantastic in Richard Strauss and Stravinsky and Shostakovich and Prokofiev and Hindemith and Britten, and, of course, all that mid-century American music. She's grown over the years, and after her Vienna years she's learned how to do German romanticism in a way she never used to. But it can only get you so far. Hearing her in the first movement of Beethoven's Eroica was like a balloon leaking helium as the tempo got slower and slower, and I found her Tchaikovsky 5 so dull that I outright walked out to catch a rock band down the street. I don't think she has the earnestness of Beethoven and Tchaikovsky in her character: that simplicity, that unbridled optimism or pessimism. I think a person like Alsop is a realist who takes things as they come. I get the sense she realizes that life is never one thing or the other. I could mention that the orchestra was dominated by a big, LSO like, brass sound, and the rhythms always seemed to swing in a groove like a piece of American pop music. I could mention that over the years she developed a bloom in the string sound that at first she obviously found extremely hard to do, even with her background as a violinist. But that's inside baseball. It's not why anybody comes to the concert but nerds like all of us.

On the other hand, it strikes me that that earnestness is exactly who Jonathon Heyward is: a sincere young African-American from that very earnest region, the South, who sees the world in primary emotions. His sincerity therefore makes him magnificent in Tchaikovsky, Brahms, even Verdi. He is clearly a devoted champion of new music, but he also wants to be known for the early 20th century classics: Mahler, Sibelius, Stravinsky, Bartok and Shostakovich which require a 20th century pessimism he does not understand. I get the sense he wants to be an updated version of Simon Rattle, but he clearly lacks Rattle's weirdness, Rattle's probing for the minutest details, Rattle's willingness to be polarizingly bizarre. Rattle is, at heart, a Carnaby Street hippie, and responds to the psychedelic in music. I could be very wrong, but at heart, I get the sense he's much closer to an earnest romantic like Giulini than a hippie postmodernist. He can get a deeply impressive noise, visceral and bass heavy, but when it comes to conveying complicated emotional states: pessimism, wit, sarcasm, he has no idea what he's doing. When he does Beethoven, he does it at fast tempos he does not yet have the technique to sustain, and it sounds as though he doesn't truly feel a thing about it.

One day, this guy may be a great conductor, but not yet. In a few decades, after a lifetime's stresses and frustrations and sadnesses, he may understand these things much better, but the essential temperament of a person rarely changes.

The problem with being a musician is that the conscious self can only get you so far. Being an artist of quality is not a matter of brain or even heart, it's a matter of stomach. You can do all the work in the world, bring out all the countermelodies and cross rhythms and balance all the harmonic dissonances, but you have to find a way of making art that coincides with the person you are. Perhaps you can fake it for a little while, but if you try to be someone else than the person you really are, it will burn you out. Look at Carlos Kleiber: he seemed to be so joyous up there, but everyone testified that he was in absolute agony, so he could only do it once a year.

Had my life worked out very differently and I ended up the conductor I wanted to be when I was three years old, I would have loved to be a musician with the bittersweet glowing naturalness of Pierre Monteux, Rafael Kubelik, Fritz Busch, Zino Francescatti, Fritz Kreisler, Benno Moiseiwitsch, Wilhelm Kempff, ... obviously I'd be much worse than these guys.... But good or bad, I'm not that guy. I'm a Jew who grew up solely among Jews, speaking Yiddish and Hebrew whose grandparents survived the very worst of the 20th century under both Hitler and Stalin. If I wanted to express what was in my soul, it would probably sound like highly mediocre versions of Klemperer, Horenstein, Kletzki and Sanderling, at certain moments maybe Tennstedt, Scherchen, Harnocourt, Kubelik, Fricsay or Mitropoulos. Extreme dynamics, slower-than-average tempos, massive rough sounds interrupted by lyricism. That's what my violin playing was always like (the slow tempi were because I didn't practice enough...). But at heart, whether or not I'm a musician, I'm probably first a Jew who missed his calling as a historian. I'd probably be best in those composers who articulated the crises of the 20th century from various sides: Mahler, Janacek, Bartok, Nielsen, Shostakovich, the 2nd Viennese school, Hindemith, Britten, Messiaen, Ligeti, Ives, Schnittke, even Vaughan Williams and Mussorgsky. I doubt my natural temperament could find a way into the unbridled romanticism of Wagner or Verdi, and my temperament has very specific notions of what the greatest masters like Mozart or Bach should sound like that are extremely different from any traditional view.

Interpretation is not a question of what the musician thinks it should sound like, it's a question of what their subconscious needs to express. If they're able to translate their conscious thoughts to sound, they firstly need to have the temperament and grace under pressure to do something so purposeful to the intellect. If they don't, they have to find their way in, and the way in is to relate to the music on a human level, not an abstract one.

The technical aspects of music have their own sort of fascination, but so do boardgames. Obviously, the technical aspects matter very, very much. But they're only the beginning. Many artists are not even aware of how they've interpreted unless they hear a playback. The 'why' of art is so much more important and interesting than the 'how.' You can't just listen to the notes of music, you have to listen behind them. The 'how' of art obviously matters, but it's usually a question best left for the practice room. 'How' is a question for the left brain: far more important to math, science and technology. The humanities are those murky waters that only exist in metaphor and context. If the emphasis of a climax is placed on the physical impact and not on the harmonic resolution (or dissonance), what's important is the why: what it makes you feel like and what it might make the musician feel like. I think it was Oswald Spengler who said 'metaphor is the algebra of the right brain.' What matters is not whether a countermelody is brought out, but why it was, how it made the audience member feel and what the artist wanted to communicate. In the arts, there is no 'this is that', there is only 'this is like that.' As I've said before, the key to understanding art is not emotion or intellect or message or didactic purpose or beauty or empathy, the key to art is meaning, and meaning takes in all those aforementioned notions and a thousand others besides. Meanings are simultaneously universal and deeply personal.

As Ralph Waldo Emerson said: "Who you are speaks so loudly that I cannot hear what you're saying."

Five and a half Months

 Something I started a week ago...

Well Dad,

It's finally hit me. You're gone. Gone forever. You've bought the farm, cashed in your chips. You're doing the long limbo, making a call from the horizontal phonebooth, in the marble mailbox, taking the final curtain, in the pine penalty box, dancing the hokey crokey, flying the marble kite, tipping a dirt maitre'd, pushing up Miss Daisy, shopping at the mahogany mini-mall, riding the soil sidecar, staying at Club Mud, passing the Grave Poupon, doing the worm wave at stiff stadium, driving the wood Buick, eating moss muffins, in that dull playground in heaven. 

Almost all that comes from a Johnny Carson skit for the funeral of the editor of Roget's Thesaurus. It was a few weeks before Johnny went off the air. I must have been ten. You and mom allowed me to stay up late sometimes. Why? Was it to view Johnny Carson? Could I already not sleep at normal hours? Was it another day of my childhood when I could not concentrate well enough to do homework and was up until 11:30 trying to complete what took other kids ten minutes? 

One day we had a fight, then we sat in your house's den for an hour, three feet from each other, and didn't say a word. I was mad enough that I was waiting until the next morning to sufficiently cool down and apologize. By ten o'clock the next morning, you were gone. it took me months to get over the idea I killed you, and it still occasionally comes back. 

I was in a relationship when you died, a good one, and we were very much in love. It's very difficult to think properly about one change when another one was going so well. We've gone no contact for a month to help get over each other (mostly me), and suddenly my life is back to what it was. Everything is as it was before R----, and every minute of the day I see your face and note what's missing. However much we fought, I miss you overwhelmingly. The giant who was part of my life past 99% of parents is gone, and now I find out what life is without you. 

Female Conductors: A Progress Report - Parts 1 and 2

It's been a full five years since I last wrote about this, and much has developed in the intervening time.

A certain youtuber who adores me just had a video about his belief that most of the best conductors today are women. I would not go quite that far, and I would also go further. I would say no one really knows the kind of artist a conductor will be until well after 40, but it is beginning to look very much like the future is female. Almost all of the most promising YOUNG conductors are women. When you look at the generation under forty, there's beginning to be no question. Over forty, we have these bombastic batons who sound a bit like a musical rendering of toxic masculinity. The cautiousness of their early years turned the dial all the way in the other direction. What used to be careful now sounds like rage, and suddenly we have major forces in the field like Karina Canellakis, Dalia Stasevska, Eva Ollikainen, Xian Zhang and Oksana Lyniv who sound like nothing so much as the jet set virtuosos of 50 years ago: Maazel, Muti, Ozawa, Dutoit, Mehta, with their giant walls of sound that sell records by brutalizing the music.

One conductor who has disappointed me terribly in recent years is Nathalie Stutzmann. As she ascended the career ladder, she too has left her gentle ways behind for mannerism: driving Schubert without mercy, playing Brahms with heaviness and rubato that sounds more pretentious than affectionate. Singer or conductor, she is such a talented musician, it's a shame to see the gift curdle just when she made the big time.

Nathalie Stutzmann: Gentle no longer. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eb2GxweVEyk

Of these Orchestra with Capital O meastras, Canellakis, the American, strikes me as both the most talented and the most brutalizing. Talented, intelligent, nuanced, sure, with an absolutely massive dynamic range which she uses at every level, and as many 'wow' moments as any musician ever has. She absolutely raises the pulse, but she's utterly 'hard' like her mentor Jaap van Zweden. Even in the strings, the textures never stop sounding like cold steel. I've heard Stasevska (Ukrainian-Finnish), Zhang (Chinese) and Ollikainen (Finnish) live, and the intensity of all three was undeniably thrillng, but I struggled to hear much subtlety or care beneath it. What will they do when they're old and the galvanizing energy can't be summoned anymore? I was also there for the Ukrainian Oksana Lyniv's American debut, and she has a warm heart beneath her iron discipline, and it really is iron: not a bowstroke out of place, but there isn't much subtlety: things are often just monodynamic and unphrased. If she develops well, she could be another Jansons. If she doesn't, she'd be another Zubin Mehta. One that strikes me as a slightly deeper artist is the Estonian Kristiina Poska, who is as fiery as any of them, but is also possessed of serious thought and detail work.

Canellakis on her best foot forward: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UT6U8Y0u0pg

Lyniv: Iron discipline concealing sincerity and vulnerability, not much subtlety. Make allowances for the orchestra, it's a youth orchestra in wartime, but listen to the fragility of expression here. The heart breaks in the largo. Dvořák: Symphony No. 9 From the New World | Oksana Lyniv & Youth Symphony Orchestra of Ukraine 

Poska: Fire and subtlety. Beethoven - Symphony no. 7 - Flanders Symphony Orchestra, Kristiina Poska

But looking just a very little bit younger at those who haven't turned forty yet, and the field is much, much more promising. Look past Mirga, whom we'll talk about later, and just think of a few who seem, at least I think, like the coming best in the business.

Marie Jacquot: subtlety, glowing overtones, flowing phrases. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5aaXzYn86GU

The French Marie Jacquot gets mixed reviews, but nearly every video I've seen shows me that she is magnificent. No matter what the size of the orchestra, she sounds more as though she's leading a chamber orchestra than an Orchestra with a Capital O. She seems like my dear Kubelik or Ivan Fischer, if there's excitement they certainly accept it, but like them, she's going for something far more elusive. The music simply flows and glows. At least on youtube, the textures are absolutely luminescent, the phrases seem unending for minutes at a time even as they rise and fall. She seems to deliberately keep things a little loose, perhaps even a little overly gentle and smooth, but she knows that that the subtle unpredictabilities of performance are where the real music happens. Mark my words, in seventy years she will be remembered by the next generation of weirdos like us as one of the truly great artists of the podium.

Delyana Lazarova: Jacquot is for the connoisseurs, Lazarova's for the public. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TtslKjYDORk

The Bulgarian Delyana Lazarova is just stepping up to the big time, but like with Marie Jacquot, we already seem to hear an artist fully formed. This is a podium artist with absolutely everything. An absolutely explosive talent full of energy, intelligence, heat and warmth, a 'complete' one who simultaneously engages nerves, mind and heart. Like K. Petrenko or C. Kleiber, when you hear her, you can feel as though you're hearing the music's absolute truth: the thing in itself. Is she that good? Well, those are once every fifty years miracles, so probably not, but obviously we'll know with time. But even if she isn't, she's going to be an indisputably major name by 2030. Listen to her in the above Beethoven 2. here's one of the few podium musicians who can sustain a risky tempo in the opening without everything slowing down, generating more fireworks than anybody since the 1950s, then give an utterly beautiful, nuanced larghetto. There are very few conductors who 'get' Beethoven 2, a work that's ostensibly sunny but is actually full of panic and rage (and comedy). I used to think there were four conductors who really 'got' it: Mengelberg, Beecham, Mitropoulos, Scherchen. There are now five.

Joana Mallwitz: Pure light and agility. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KcWIdZz4C44

The German Joana Mallwitz is about the most un-German conductor there's ever been. Everything is champagne-like, effervescent and fun, but also artful, sometimes stunningly so. One would think that a conductor this propulsive would be utterly without substance (I'm looking in the direction of the Met...), but like Charles Munch, there is a breathtaking amount of thought and nuance going into what seems like an unreflective entertainer. Every few seconds there seems to be a subtle rubato or accent that catches your breath.

Han-Na Chang: The rare soloist who's just as great a musician when she picks up a baton. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i9svn1d1Kao&list=PLRFYPLKjaThtJ_Dn4ZL7M8COaTVo7w_ey&index=22

Then there's the slightly older Han-Na Chang, whose musical bona-fides were proven long before she took up the baton as one of the great cello soloists of her generation. I heard broadcasts and youtubes of her doing Tchaikovsky 5 and 6 and they absolutely stunned me. Any idiot can pick up a baton and get a standing ovation in Tchaikovsky, but hers was actually individuated, with a newly minted detail in every bar. Her Tchaikovsky was both the composer's, and unmistakably her own. After hearing that, I was sure she would be able to do more serious repertoire just as well. I was right. Go on youtube, find her doing Mozart or Beethoven. This is still greatness, mixing old fashions and new, coming up with her own interpretations. Like Leonard Bernstein, she might be a little ostentatious in both interpretation and podium manner, but beneath the flamboyance is very real musicmaking.

Ariane Matiakh: Wit and irony flitting between light and dark. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xWDIwsfgQnE

Another slightly older one is the French Ariane Matiakh. Like Mallwitz, she is a lighthearted one, but with Lazarova's fire, and a very sophisticated tongue-in-cheek pointedness to her phrasing: not quite mannered, but the phrases are deliberate enough that you sense a darkness underneath her lightheartedness. There seems to always be some instrument playing staccato within the general legato, accents within the quiet passages that are surprisingly strong. Everything seems to surprise with her. I can't wait to hear her in one of the big Mozarts. She reminds me a bit of Beecham.

There are others of course: the interesting but hyperactive Anna Bihlmaier, the extremely Italian in both name and style Speranza Scappucci, the Norwegian Tabita Berglund who has genuine heart but not much in the way of detail. In part 2, we'll talk about the great hopes of the field and the weight of expectations on them: Mirga, sure, but also Elim Chan, more about Mallwitz and Lyniv, we'll talk about Simone Young and Susanna Malkki and what expectations did to them, and, god help us, we'll even talk about Marin Alsop.

We'll talk about Joanne Faletta sometime still: the patron saint of underrated composers of every era and country. Others care about headlines, she cares about music.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XEYukjiGMxQ&list=OLAK5uy_lsJvWAnnLIJwDCm7MdixhaVyh-RdWdEg8

-----------------------------------------

 The problem every woman conductor faces is the problem present in every line of work for celebrity entertainers, only in this case, having broken a glass ceiling, you needn't be a true celebrity to undergo the same problems. You have to develop artistically under scrutiny. The scrutiny comes both from terrible sexism, and from the very people most rooting for them to succeed. The expectations on them are not just to score a victory for women, or to prove chauvinists wrong, the expectation is to let your excellence speak not just for yourself but for all those who were denied your opportunities before you? In a sense, even your victories aren't allowed to be your own. 

How many among us can properly flourish in that environment? What steel do you have to be made of to not get dizzy in the highest climbs? Can a musician made of less than steel flourish in it? Will that fortitude show up in their work? Will it make them less sensitive? 

The one who was supposed to be the next Lenny, Mirga Grazynte-Tyla, is clearly not made of steel. She walked away, probably to raise her kids. She now appears as seldomly as Carlos Kleiber, and generally plays music like Weinberg and Kutavicius nobody else plays. Good for her. This is the life she wants, this is the music she wants to do. She's a much better musician because of it. So many celebrities are not the artists they should be, because when you're a celebrity, you don't have permission to fail, you don't have permission to risk. Celebrities fail all the time, but when they fail in the public eye, they usually learn the lesson to always be cautious: do not be yourself, be who the public or the handlers want you to be. Rarely after the public notices them does an artist get better than they were before they were truly famous, and a lot of them get worse. Even if an artist is merely eminent in their field, it's very different from being a celebrity. A celebrity cannot fail without humiliation, risk becomes harder, and if you don't risk, you don't learn. Furthermore being a touring musician is not a life, whatever genre. You stay in hotels, you go to restaurants, you meet fans, you meet colleagues, but you don't have family or friends close enough that their conversation accompanies your daily life. When her kids are grown, maybe she'll come back, and the experience of a real life will come out in her musicmaking. It already is. 

Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio France - Anton Bruckner - Symphony No. 6 in A major, WAB 106

Forget all the Weinberg for a moment, magnificent as it is. Listen to her in this border piece of the trad rep, Bruckner 6, and don't be fooled by the brisk tempo in the first subject. I used to think MGT was as vapid as most of the other musicians who lived their whole adult lives as celebrities. Then she walked away and my jaw dropped to the floor: my god, a real person whose family matters more to them than fame! This is a genuine person with real concerns. While Karina Canellakis's musicmaking sounds compressed into tubes, MGT sounds now like a real voice, singing out. It's steady, not much rubato, but it sounds all the more genuine for its steadiness. Barring one awkward tempo switch at the end of the first movement, it's as inevitable as a cathedral arch: serene, delicate, yearning, at times even ecstatic. If Giulini did Bruckner 6 around 1970, it might sound like this. It's not exactly the way I prefer, I prefer a slightly more flowing tempo in the second movement, but it's great even so. There are as many ways of being a great artist as there are works of art, and if this is the artist MGT becomes, she will both be one of the great podium artists of all time, and be an entirely different kind of one than people want from her. Let people go to YNS for speed and volume, let people go to Dudamel for emotion and passion (assuming he keeps improving...), let people go to Petrenko for immutable truth, but let Mirga be the one to console them. We are still waiting for the woman who will take us to the height of emotional vulnerability the way that (to me) the most necessary artists do: artists of a long proud line like Giulini and Lenny. You know it when you hear it, and you need to know what it means to live a real life with all its setbacks and tragedies. Artists used to live through wars and unmedicated illnesses, you don't learn that from a luxury seat on a plane. 

Elim Chan conducts Brahms - Symphony No. 4 in E minor, Op 98

A similar weight of expectation is currently on the Hongkonger, Elim Chan. I wasn't impressed by her. I thought she was quite mid and bland. There's youtube videos of her virtuoso repertoire by rote, with nothing really to say or contribute. Then I heard her do Brahms 4, and in this much more emotionally sophisticated piece than Scheherazade or Tchaikovsky 5, she utterly rose to it. All kinds of titans get tripped up by the latter two Brahms symphonies (don't ask me who, you'll disagree of course), but she achieved what they did not. It was a little too virtuoso and brilliant at times, but mostly in the scherzo which is already a little virtuoso and brilliant. To my ears, Brahms 4 is one of the most emotionally sophisticated works of art in the world, it goes through the motions of dance rhythms while its heart breaks, and Chan seemed to completely understand it. 

Whether you're in classical, jazz or rock, probably even hip-hop, if you want a big celebrity career, you have to do the splashy stuff that gets you noticed and gets the audience to their feet in a second and a half. But if that's the majority of what you're doing, how do you get the necessary experience with the truly deep works of art which can't depend on adrenaline to get their message across? What separates truly great artists from the second tier is what they can do when they can't hide behind adrenaline. 

Having heard that Brahms 4, there is no question in my mind that Chan is capable of artistic perception and achievement at the highest level, but can she repeat it over and over again. Sources tell me the Cleveland Orchestra, arguably the most probing ensemble of musicians in the world, is seriously looking at her for their next director. If she can't repeat that level of artistic understanding over and over again, it's going to be a disaster. Apparently she hasn't even presented a work of new music to them yet. All the good will in the world will not allow her that kind of on the job training without Cleveland spitting her out. 

An incredibly warm and fiery Sibelius 5 that's in danger of flying apart from first bar to last: Sibelius: 5. Sinfonie ∙ hr-Sinfonieorchester ∙ Dalia Stasevska 

Apparently Dalia Stasevska is being looked at too. I find this a little comical because Cleveland is the most precise, fastidious ensemble in the world, and having heard Stasevska, she is a musician who operates entirely on adrenaline and cares about precision about as much as Elon Musk. There can be no more terrible temperamental fit in the field. Stasevska has a lot of good qualities, but she's become an out and out Russian-style romantic like Yevgeny Svetlanov or Yuri Temirkanov for whom every moment is a chance for extravagent passion, and her performances take such enormous risks that the ensemble seems to fall apart just as often. 

https://youtu.be/CoKE3WIEOvs?si=TnKAB_SPJQgD0jNW&t=2088

If they want a woman who's ready for it, look at Oksana Lyniv. Is Lyniv a true great? No, not yet at least. But neither was Welser-Most when he came. There are better women conductors out there, but not with that level of experience, not with that amount of time spent learning away from widespread scrutiny, and not with priorities so similar to Cleveland's. She is precision with heart: simultaneously cold and warm just as they are. Absolute precision, terraced dynamics with not much phrasing, but a truly long line and warm sound all the same. She's not the very best out there, while MGT and Chan may eventually be that, but she's ready and can rise to the occasion. There are better candidates out there, but if they want a woman, she's the one they should pick, and the musical partnership could flourish magnificently. 

Opera Ranting

 Here it is, the most legendary production of Boris. Not the most legendary performers, just a document of the most legendary staging: Andrei Tarkovsky in his only opera production. Can you believe they actually got the director of Andrei Rublev to do it? It's even less likely than getting Werner Herzog to stage the Ring, and fully as well-matched.

Tarkovsky would be dead a year after he did this staging. I doubt he ever could have done another production like this, much as we might wish for a Tarkovsky Parsifal or Don Carlo, Boris was uniquely situated in the Russian canon to elicit a connection to Tarkovsky's extremely Russian Orthodox spirituality. The sets are full of the thick smoke of incense, chiaroscuro lighting and horrifically suffering peasants. The chorus is staged in such detail that every grouping of three or four seems to be its own little world with its own story. The images are full of that specifically Russian gaudiness that betrays a unique mixture of the Christianity and paganism which should be present in every Boris production.

But ultimately this is not about Tarkovsky, this is about Robert Lloyd, the great British bass who somehow finds himself on the stage of the Kirov Opera in the soon to fall Soviet Union singing the most iconic role in all Russian repertoire in the opera Stalin never missed a Bolshoi performance of.

I grew up on Lloyd's performance of Mussorgsky's Songs and Dances of Death with Mariss Jansons conducting the Shostakovich orchestration: it was one of the most gripping, horrifying things I'd ever heard. You could have knocked me over with a feather as a teenager when I heard Lloyd being interviewed at the Met while singing Sparafucile, and he sounded like he'd grown up a Dickensian street urchin who matured into the voice of Bill Sykes. And yet as an actor, Lloyd looks like he has the weight of the world upon him. It is not merely a protrayal of histrionics, but of Boris in three dimensions. Look at Lloyd in the Clock Scene. Other Boris's explode. Lloyd implodes as though he cannot say his thoughts aloud.

I was raised listening to the radio to broadcasts of what will probably be remembered as the last great generation of Metropolitan opera singers: not just Domingo and Nucci, but Americans like Fleming, Upshaw, Flicka, Hampson, Norman, Battle, Morris, Ramey, Baltsa, Millo, Zadjick, Stratas, Vaness, Studer, Hadley, Leech, Croft, Plishka. It's an admirable list, but when I was in college and had a summer internship in London, I began listening to Radio 3, and one would begin to compare the Brits of the same period: Te Kanawa, Lloyd, Tomlinson, Allen, van Allen, Jones, Lott, Margaret Price, Veasey, Anne Evans, Plowright, Langridge, Tear, Keenlyside, McIntyre, Howell, Shirley-Quirk.

I basically got my introduction to opera from the Met list, but I think the Covent Garden list of that period is artistically more satisfying. Maybe it's the repertoire: the emphasis on the German classics in London vs. the posh Italian of Levine's Met, but compare the Wotans of Tomlinson and Morris. Morris has the most amazing voice, but which of them would you rather listen to more than once? Compare the Violettas of Studer and Stratas to Angela Georghiu and Marie McLaughlin (we'll call Glyndebourne a CG extension). I know which I prefer.

The Met is, always was, and remains, the terrain of stars. It has provided literal thousands of transcendent nights: or, more to the point, it provided transcendent nights three minutes at a time. Levine could instill more sense of ensemble than you ever got in the Bing or Johnson eras, but you can't completely defeat the house aesthetic, particularly when the sense of ensemble is built around stagings gaudy enough to decorate three Broadway shows.

Covent Garden certainly gets all the stars, but unless they're native Brits, stars don't really make CG their home base. Pavarotti and Domingo always were always at the Met, Domingo multiple times a season, in London? Domingo went... once a year? Once every other year? Pavarotti could be absent for years at a time even if he sang concerts at Hyde Park.

England is the land of theater, and theater makes its mark in opera with an aesthetic that cares more about ensemble and drama than vocal production. A composer like Benjamin Britten would not be possible in the US, Britten makes his impact through drama as much as music, and he needed a 'house ensemble' who worked hard with each other to master this material which works as well as they do. We in America have no equivalent to Britten. I suppose our best equivalent is John Adams, but Adams's operas are basically oratorios with stage accompaniment, and even his banner opera Nixon in China couldn't get a performance at the Met for twenty-five years.

Then came Pappano, and he gave Covent Garden another golden age while the Met underwent its time of troubles. Operas stars burn more dimly in every generation, but the Met now appears to be on surer footing with the disgrace of the Levine's ending mostly behind them, but can Yannick really instill a sense of ensemble? Does he want to? Like Levine, he has real strength in Mozart and Verdi, but Levine could be transcendent in those two. YNS? Not quite. He's good in them, but his real ability is in the Frenchies. I will never forget watching his PBS debut of Carmen with the incredibly sexy Elena Garanca, a hellcat in a brunette wig with a low cut shirt and a skirt she'd exploit every opportunity to lift up. If I were Roberto Alagna in that production I'd have left Georghiu and (let's face it) Netrebko and jumped at the chance for Garanca. YNS's rubato seemed to change the tempo in every bar, and it was so natural it seemed to stop time and breathe with the audience. Impressive as some of his Mozart recordings are, it was nowhere near that Carmen. After that, I'd even listen to him conduct Pelleas!

Nezet-Seguin is a very talented podium musician with very real strengths and musical sense. He is also a very vapid one who would take a look at a score like I look at him, like I listen to him, and he gives every indication of a superficial personality. Ideal for party pieces with lots of fireworks and heat where he can be fast, loud, and colorful (and he's a master colorist). But when it comes to the true stuff of the soul, I'd trust even Dudamel and Nelsons before I'd trust that guy. When I heard him do the Firebird and Petrushka, I had the time of my life. When I heard him do Mahler 3 and 9, or Bluebeard's Castle, he didn't have a clue. Meanwhile, Covent Garden is about to get Jakub Hrusa. Hrusa is 44 I think, but he conducts both himself and music like an old man. Focused entirely on probity rather than fireworks. If it's exciting, he accepts it, but he wants depth. And therefore, in both cases, the house styles continue well into 2050 and beyond.

Anyway, this was supposed to be about Robert Lloyd...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kEuWBZCpNno

Bad Faith: Palestine vs. Iran

I maintain as I always have, your ability to decipher what goes on in Israel-Palestine is a direct test of your worldview and its efficacy. If you take a side in the world's most complicated conflict, your judgement cannot be trusted, you care more about ideology than results, and you are effecting the destruction of precisely what you love. I have never made any apology for that statement I've made so many times, and I never will.

I am no centrist, but I am pro-Israel, I am pro-Palestine, and those who see people like me as one or the other neither understand my point of view nor their own. If I seem to lean more toward Israel, it is not because the Israeli claim is innately more right or more moral, it is because the Israeli way of looking at the conflict is more practical and effective. The Israeli way is so effective that it's lethally so, and causes exactly the hatred of the world they fear. The Palestine side remains as ever prisoners of their own resentments, Westerners as well as people native to the region, and prove over and over again that a plurality of them would rather sacrifice themselves to death than share the land. Meanwhile, a plurality of the Israeli side means not to justify their claim to the land, but to simply steal it. So many pro-Israel people claim it's in the name of security, but it isn't security, it's jingoism. They expand into settlements not because they need the land, but because they can have it and nobody can stop them. What they don't understand is that the settlements live on a volcano, and the smallest tactical mistake from Israel could cause an eruption of ghettoized Palestinians into their settlements where settlers could easily be massacred in the same numbers Palestinians are.

The ceasefire semi-holds right now, not really but Israel's doing a lot less than they were. And, of course Hamas uses it to consolidate power, re-arm and restore their rule with an iron hand. Who's providing the armaments? Probably Qatar. What are they doing to consolidate power? Probably killing any opposition either known or suspected. What does this mean? Sooner than we know, we'll be back at exactly the same wars as before. There is no stopping the Palestinian death tolls until the end of radical Islamism in the territories and the end of the Israeli right. Neither will happen in the foreseeable future, and the world may subject Israel to more and more pressure and sanctions until such time that Israel can no longer fend for itself and Israelis die in the exact proportions they currently inflict. There is no such thing as a winning streak that doesn't end, and just because it took twelve days to kneecap Hezbollah and the Iranian nuclear program this time does not mean it will be nearly so easy next time.

If 12,000 are dead in Iran, and some still say it's only 2,800, that means that Iran massacred a quotient of their own people that is one-sixth the amount of the official number of Palestinians killed in the Gaza war. So in one week they did nearly 20% of what Israelis have done in two years.

It's worth remembering:

1. In spite of the yearly $3.8 billion subsidy Israel gets from the US, Israel is a net lender nation to the United States. The US sends $14 billion in products, Israel sense $22 billion: this from a country with 1/30th the US's population, a number that counts the residents of occupied territories.

2. People claim that America's Israel subsidy makes gives us a unique involvement in this conflict and therefore justifies protesting this conflict over others. But if we give Israel $3.8 billion a year in loans, we give China one-fifth of our economy, and China uses it to run roughshod over the human rights of a billion and a half people.

3. And if we're talking about involvement in foreign countries, what then do you call the involvement of Trump and Putin?

4. People point out that there are anti-Zionist Jews and use that to convince others that their opinion that a Jewish state should not exist is morally justified. Of course there are anti-Zionist Jews, there are black and gay republicans too. There are pro-Russia Ukrainians. There are anti-immigration immigrants. There are pro-Israel Palestinians. In each case, the tokenism is used to justify a position that some part of them knows is morally indefensible. Every other state in the world is de facto comprised of a majority religion, why can't the world's oldest monotheistic religion have a place of their own the size of New Jersey?

So yes, the hypocrisy of the Palestine side is exactly as disgusting as we think it is.

BUT

The opposite is also true. The fact remains, even if the pro-Israel side can point to Hamas and the PLO as the ultimate reason for keeping Palestinians in squalor, the pro-Palestine side can, if they know anything at all about the Middle East, point to Iran's Shah as the ultimate reason for Iran's continuing problems. Even if the Mullahcracy may be worse, they're not THAT much worse, and there is no question that the rule of the Shah provoked the Iranian revolution.

Iran was another place I studied during my ignominious two minute grad school career. People forget just how draconian the Pahlavi family was. Shah Reza promised to turn Iran 'into a second America in a generation', but he banned all independent political parties, free press and trade unions. The Shahs used SAVAK, an intelligence apparatus to rival the Stazi and the KGB, to monitor Iranian citizens both at home and abroad. Torture was a fact of life. I won't repeat the methods here, but they would inspire as much horror and revulsion in you as anything in Nazi Germany, the USSR or imperial Japan. The Shahs weren't nearly as murderous as those regimes or the Islamic mullahcracy, but they were everything else.

All the apparatus of authoritarianism was already there. All the Ayatollahs had to do was come into power, keep the policies of the Shah going, and force former officers of SAVAK to switch their loyalties and all the policies the Shahs put in place continue to this day. The pro-Israel side could make the argument that Shah prevented Iran from going to communism, and that argument is likely correct, but the extremity of the Shah's methods provoked the Iranian revolution which resulted in a religious dictatorship no better and possibly worse than communists would have been to both Iranians and international security. Like so many dictatorships, including Israel's occupation of Gaza, the Shahs provoked their subjects into revolution, only for the revolution to bring to power rulers still worse. Bad as the Mullahcracy is now, it's not as bad as it was in its early years. So if there is a restoration of the Shahs, which is talked about plenty, why stand in solidarity with Iranians? What's the point? And even if a Shah doesn't come next, what takes over could easily be a military dictatorship under a brutal general from the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. So there is a decent chance that the next regime would be even worse.

So now we come to the bad faith of it all: so many people on the Israel side are up in arms about how everyone who protests the treatment of Palestinians has nothing to say about Iran. They're exactly right to do so. As it always is with such protestors, the hypocrisy is a disgrace. But so is the hypocrisy of the pro-Israel crowd who's long turned ignoring Israeli human rights abuses into an art, abuses that not only are counterproductive but easily fixable with precisely the violations of international norms that so excite Israel's supporters.

The fact remains, the Twelve Day War long since proved that Israel could have targeted Hamas leadership for assassination at any point during the last twenty years and orchestrated it perfectly in a matter of days. If they had a contingency operation to eliminate Hezbollah so easily, what are the chances they don't have similar means to eliminate Hamas, an enemy who operates in a territory Israel controlled for forty years? Such assassinations would of course horrify the international community and cause them to attempt precisely the sanctions we now worry about, but Israel is currently on-track to getting them anyway. Rather than slowly leaking a loss of American support, it would all be over in a few days, the US would have protected them from repercussion, some corrupt Fatah government would have replaced Hamas, and the imbroglio would all have been over in a month.

Netanyahu had thirteen years to do it before October 7th. He had four years to do it under Trump who would have given him a blank check. So why didn't he?

The reason should be obvious to any person who looks at the conflict without a state of denial: Netanyahu didn't assassinate Hamas because such a villain was useful to keep Israeli civilians afraid, and therefore keep himself in power. The ultimate justification for a dictatorship is enemy dictators, answerable to no one for their most violent acts.

Everybody involved with the Israel side has to face facts too:

1. Netanyahu is probably not going anywhere. He caused the worst breach of Israeli security, in the entire history of the country, including the Yom Kippur War in '73, and still he is in power. If he were capable of being replaced, it would have happened by now. Golda Meir repented for her catastrophic misjudgement and after a year bowed out when Yitzhak Rabin was ready to take over. Netanyahu shows no signs of bowing out, and even were he not in danger of jail, he could have easily ran a popular right-wing general for Israeli President (a half-ceremonial position as the true head of state) who would pardon him. He could have retired, moved to America for a corporate job, and he might have been a billionaire by now. He still hasn't, which to me, means he never had any intention of leaving even had he not faced criminal charges.

2. The permanent occupation of the territories caused a moral rot that let a leader with no scruples occupy the premiership in perpetuity. Those millions of us who hate Likud were so eager to believe it a necessity that we looked the other way at every tactic, every human rights violation, and never questioned whether every one of them weas necessary. It caused a slow motion, drip by drip ability for a demagogue to accumulate power who wants to rule Israel forever, and justify the necessity of everything he does over and over again under the necessity of security measures.

3. Why did Netanyahu ignore the warnings of October 7th? Would a politician this canny really not pay attention to the warnings of an imminent catastrophe? It flies in the face of every fact of Netanyahu's career. It only makes sense if you realize that Netanyahu's rule was threatened by protests against him of hundreds of thousands every weekend and constant bad coverage in the press, and he needed a disaster to happen to take Israeli minds off their hatred of their longtime prime minister. Netanyahu obviously didn't arrange October 7th, but at this point we have to concede, he likely let it happen, deliberately. Is it really so hard to believe?

Decades after the 1968 election, America found out that North Vietnamese premier Ho Chi Minh walked away from peace negotiations with the Johnson administration not because of any particular detail of the agreement, but because Richard Nixon promised him a better deal if he won the election, and the collapse of peace talks would help him. Even with a leader as unscrupulous as Richard Nixon, hardly anybody believed him capable of an act that evil. The war went on another seven years, even past Nixon's resignation.

So is a leader with a proven record of moral ignominy capable of acts such evil? The answer is absolutely. We would be irresponsible not to consider the possibility. The very leader we elect because of security's necessity is often the figure who compromises our security the most.

BUT

Regardless of Israel's conduct in the war, Hamas did not have to build its biggest tunnel entrances in hospitals, Hamas did not have to store weapons depots and missile silos in apartment buildings and schools. Hamas could have every single Gazan hide in 311 miles of tunnels. Since 1994, the Palestinians have received 40 billion dollars in foreign aid. $10 billion of that money ended up in the hands of Hamas's top three leaders: Ismail Haniya, Khaled Mashal and Moussa abu-Marzuk.

Hamas is not a political party, it is a totalitarian mission of death whose entire strategy is the same as dictators like Mao. Whether the opponent is Netanyahu or Chiang-Kai Sheck, the strategy is bait their opponents into killing enough people to earn international sympathy, get international help to win their war, then exploit the victory to install a regime still deadlier than the one it replaces. Until people get serious about Hamas, until people re-focus their hatred of Israel to a hatred of Netanyahu, this war will continue for years and years with exactly the same death counts as before.

Nobody with a partisan point of view on this war is viewing it seriously. They are causing endless suffering to Muslims and Jews alike in the name of alleviating it. The Middle East is the ultimate place where people devote their two minutes hate, and they do it in the name of love.