History of the Symphony - Class 10 - The Symphony of Destruction - Complete

All things must come to an end. We're now in the home stretch of this class, and we've stepped through all kinds of doorways, we've experienced all kinds of joys, we've experienced pathos, we've death and resurrection, and post-resurrection we flew around in pieces of music that seem to express the whole kingdom of nature. But in a time and place where every form of life is so thriving and vital, it's inevitable that the something so lively will indulge in self-destructive behaviors, and if you behave in ways that court self-destruction, eventually the behaviors will pull you down.

Let's just listen for a minute to Carl Nielsen's Inextinguishable Symphony (Barbirolli/Halle). String players especially dread Carl Nielsen, his music is full of these whirling lightning fast counterpoint. Today, musicians string players play that passage almost too well and precisely. You have to hear the struggle, it has to sound like a rocket, a smear of notes that's always moving so you can never hear exactly which note is placed when. This symphony is called the 'Inextinguishable', and Nielsen wrote of it in May 1914:

I have an idea for a new composition, which has no programme but will express what we understand by the spirit of life or manifestations of life, that is: everything that moves, that wants to live ... just life and motion, though varied – very varied – yet connected, and as if constantly on the move, in one big movement or stream. I must have a word or a short title to express this; that will be enough. I cannot quite explain what I want, but what I want is good.

August 1914, the famous month that ended the long European piece, was just a summer away. And the great irony of Nielsen's Inextinguishable Symphony is that 18 million lives were being extinguished as he wrote it, with another 23 million wounded. The elemental will to live itself was being put to the test. It's hard to believe that Nielsen didn't realize it. Near the end of the symphony we encounter a battle between the two timpani players. (Rattle/Royal Danish National)

Last week I said that of all Beethoven's successors, Nielsen is probably the one who channel's Beethoven's spirit most directly. He's a heroic, volcanic, optimist, a composer of towering humanity who uses the symphony to give hope and solace. The world needs to hear Carl Nielsen much more than they ever get to. Here is the climax of the whole piece. (Barbirolli/Halle)  I don't need to say anything more about it than I already have, you'll get the point.

That was Nielsen's 4th Symphony, written during World War I. When Nielsen began it, he probably didn't mean it to be a statement of life in the face of death, but that's what it absolutely became. So now, let's listen to the end of Elgar's 1st Symphony, because while Nielsen found a way to adjust to the new world, Elgar could not.

Believe it or not, if you asked most music lovers whom the greatest composer was in exactly 1910, they wouldn't say Mahler or Debussy or Sibelius or even Puccini. Some of them would say Richard Strauss, but most would, believe it or not, say Edward Elgar.

The pressure on Elgar to write a symphony was more massive than any composer in history has ever experienced, including Brahms, and Elgar waited until he was fifty-one to issue his first. The difference in age between Elgar and Nielsen is eight years, but this is music of a completely different generation. Elgar wanted to write a symphony about General Gordon, who was considered the great British military hero of the imperial era and led a siege against a native uprising that lasted for an entire year. He abandoned this idea, but I wanted to tell you this to give you a sense of just how out of step Elgar was with how the world would change in just a few years. Elgar wrote to a friend:

There is no programme beyond a wide experience of human life with a great charity (love) and a massive hope in the future.

We're not going to have time to listen to any of the Second Symphony, which is probably the greater piece. Elgar only wrote two symphonies, and both are genuinely great pieces even if they're both twelve minutes too long. But I do want to give you a sense of the enormity of the event that Elgar's First was and how important it was for Elgar to rise to the challenge. He begins the symphony with what sounds like a hymn, or a prayer - twice through, first very quietly, and then at full voice like a group of Episcopals in Church (Solti/London Philharmonic) with a march-like tread that clearly sounds a bit military - or at least it does when played at Elgar's metronome marking... The prayer basically disappears for most of the symphony - it comes back at the end of the first movement and at the end of the piece in, what sounds very much like some kind of battle, maybe even a sea battle...  (Solti/London)

Elgar was a great melodist and a great orchestrator, he was not at all a natural symphonist. Both of his symphonies have all sorts of passages which really have no reason for being there except as padding to make a work that was 'Important' with a capital I. But Elgar was so gifted at what he was good at that it's amazing how good both of his symphonies are in spite of how bad they are in other parts. . After World War I, Elgar was a relic who couldn't come to terms with the modern world, and while he lived until the mid-Thirties, he barely wrote any music for the last fifteen years of his life.

Nielsen, on the other hand, was a great symphonist, and maybe even greater than the Inextinguishable, his Fourth, is his Fifth Symphony, which has no title. We're going to listen to the first few minutes, (Bernstein/New York) because I want you to hear how gradually something incredibly pastoral becomes something incredibly military.

So now we fast forward a few minutes, and the music becomes a prayer - a hymn, and as it grows in intensity, Nielsen does something truly shocking. Against his hymn, he has the snare drum play a march figure in a completely different tempo, and then he gives the snare drum player the instruction to improvise "as if at all costs he wants to stop the progress of the orchestra." (Horenstein/Philharmonia) It's a prayer and a military march - like a prayer to spare those in battle whom we love.

It took Nielsen the coming of the war to realize that a new era was upon us, but in the case of the two great symphonic masters, they seemed in their work to intuit something was coming. Last week we played the opening minute of Sibelius's Third Symphony, which I don't think gets enough credit, but Sibelius 3rd is both the first symphony by the fully mature Sibelius and an uncharacteristically cheerful work by him. Here's the last minute and a half.  (Davis/Boston)

Even Sibelius's cheerfulness is stormy. So how dark will Sibelius sound when he isn't being cheerful? (Maazel/Vienna). There is plenty of emotional turbulence and storminess in other composers, but has there ever been any other symphony in the history of music which had the nerve to be as dark as Sibelius's 4th? This was premiered in 1911, the same year that Elgar's Second Symphony premiered, and here's what the beginning of Elgar's Second Symphony sounds like.  (Solti/London)

This is not to say that Sibelius intuited in any way saw that war was imminent, but it is to say that something in Sibelius seemed to feel that the world was changing in some very fundamental way. Sibelius had written dark symphonies before, but they're a very different kind of dark. Listen to how Sibelius builds something that sounds like a storm in his first symphony, which, even if it's clearly the work of a genius, is so obviously influenced by Tchaikovsky. (Vanska/Lahti I think...) Or think of the end of his symphony. Tchaikovsky can end with pathos and resignation, but he can't end with anger. Sibelius sounds as though he's going to end with the pathos of Tchaikovsky, but the pathos turns into wrath.  (Karajan/Berlin)

It's like the young Sibelius needs the Russian-style melodies as a way of disguising what he's really doing. But listen to what Sibelius does a couple minutes into the Fourth Symphony to create what sounds, at least to me, like a winter storm. He starts with forty seconds of just the violin sections playing a semi-non-sensical series of notes against each other, eventually joined by tremolos in the rest of the strings.  (Maazel/Vienna)

Sibelius 4 is completely unique, even to Sibelius. There is not a single moment when the entire orchestra plays together. Unlike Mahler, where nearly every moment is a shareable excerpt, Sibelius is almost impossible to show in isolated excerpts, because what's fascinating in Sibelius is the transitions, you have to hear every moment in the context of every other. Even Sibelius 4 has its lighter moments, but what I can do to show you how this symphony is so unique is two excerpts that show this incredibly spare, harmonically strange piece of music. It sounds like Schoenberg but it's nowhere near as colorful or flashy or romantic as Schoenberg often is. It's literally just a pure grayness, like a musical Rothko or that old conception of Schoenberg as 'Brahms with wrong notes.'  It's a depiction, as best we can tell, of the experience of what it is not just to be in Sibelius's forest, but to be the forest itself. And just to hammer the point home, here is the incredibly abrupt ending. 

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Just two more excerpts of Bruckner here. Bruckner, in his ninth symphony, dedicated to God. The 1890's, his unshakeable faith in God is now shaken, he is in despair, thinking his work worthless, and he continually revises his symphonies and does not have time to finish the finale of his 9th. His life, of unbroken service to God through music, is not necessarily enough to earn him his place in heaven. Even Bruckner intuits this crisis of faith.  (Jochum/Dresden) And he imagines something that, to me at least, seems like a dance of the demons.  We'll get to the slow movement, the last he completed, in the last class, when Bruckner makes peace with God and the world.

And so we now come to Mahler's Sixth Symphony, which Alban Berg called 'The only sixth, including the Pastoral.' It's sometimes called the 'Tragic' symphony, and, perhaps just this once, Tragic is exactly the right word.

I've been indulging in telling you extra-musical associations and programs all through this class, but it's important to say, over and over again, that the composer rarely specified these images I'm feeding you. There are exceptions and I'm tried to point them out. But in this case, an element of the program comes from Leonard Bernstein, who thought that the Vienna Philharmonic was not playing the beginning with the requisite intensity. So he told them that the beginning of the first movement was Nazis marching into your city, and the result was this. Listen to that last part again. (Tennstedt/London) When that effect is properly played, doesn't it sound like an explosion with the debris falling to the ground?

I had an online friend whom I used to talk about music with all the time. I had no idea that he was dying of cancer the entire time we talked to each other, and I'd like to think that our obsessive talking about music brought him a little bit of solace in his final months, but he passed away not long before this class began, and I only found out about his dying as I listened to Haydn's Funeral Symphony while preparing for the first class. He posited that this symphony is a kind of dystopian work about militarism. There is just so much in here that sounds that way that it's almost impossible to ignore. Was Mahler intuiting the World Wars? Certainly not directly, how could he? But I think it's impossible to live in the extreme military and imperial environment of the early 20th century, when there seemed to be military parades and demonstrations all the time without realizing that there was something incredibly excessive about it that could easily go to people's heads.

Mahler being Mahler, there is always an infinite variety to express. Remember, this is the composer who said that the Symphony must be like the world, it must embrace everything. So against all this militarism, there's low comedy that sounds like it belongs in Vaudeville (Bernstein/Vienna). and in this symphony, there is an outright duality between war and peace in an incredibly rural environment that can just as easily be a battlefield. (Tennstedt/London) The symphony is in A-minor, the exact same key as Sibelius 4 - A-minor is the key that has no sharps or flats - pure negative feelings.  But these passages take place in E-flat Major, the exact most distant key from A-minor.

So why, ultimately, is this tragic music rather than pathetic as Tchaikovsky Six or Brahms Four are? The reason is because victory always seems like the likely outcome, but Mahler can never quite get there. Here's the famous second theme, the Alma theme, in which Mahler said he represented his wife in music.  (Bernstein/Vienna) War vs. Love. Perhaps love is what enables the hero of this symphony to keep fighting. And it's on this note of love that Mahler ends the movement.  

We're not going to get into the controversy of which movement comes next. But Mahler's Sixth Symphony is one of only a handful of symphonies by Mahler in the traditional four movement form, and half the world's Mahler experts think that slow movement comes next, and half of them think the scherzo comes next. I personally think the Scherzo works better second, but the greatest performance I've ever heard of it placed the slow movement second.

In spite of the fact that the Scherzo is fantastic, we're going to skip it and just talk for a moment about the slow movement. The slow movement is supposed to be the exact opposite of the opening. It takes place in E-flat major, the exact most distant key, and it is almost utterly peaceful, almost too peaceful. Let's just listen to a moment or two from the central section, when it pivots to two other oppositional keys to A-minor. First it goes to C-major, which is what we call the relative major to A-minor - meaning that it has the exact same number of sharps and flats, and in this case, none. It then goes to A-Major, which is, of course, the root of A-minor. This may not mean anything to you but what this harmonic drama does to the listener subconsciously is to disarm you, it makes you think that everything will turn out alright and you'll be spared the worst. (Bernstein/Vienna) But then it sours, as though even in your most peaceful moments, when you're watching your children play, you know that neither you nor they can be spared. Mahler wrote this tragic work during the happiest period of his life, perhaps he was so traumatized by the first forty-five years that he couldn't help but know that the trauma wouldn't let up, or there was an element of self-destruction in it as great artists tend to have.

And so we come to the last movement, which sounds, to my ears and a number of others, like an uncanny prediction of what was less than ten years away. Along with the first movements of the the ninth, it is the most complex and ambitious and deep piece of music Mahler ever wrote - though I'd argue the opening of the Third is on that level as well even if nobody else would.

Listen to the beginning and tell me you can't hear the rain, the mud, the explosions, the chaos, the terror of Somme or Verdun or the Spring Campaign or the Hundred Days Offensive as you prepare for battle.

So now that we're five minutes in, you hear the trudging marches of the two sides toward each other, and the chaos of a military charge. If properly played, it's uncanny and unmistakable.  (Rattle/London)

We then come to what's called the Three Blows of Fate. Many people connect this to the three great tragedies which overcame Mahler after he wrote this piece. First, his resignation as director of the Vienna Opera. Many experts who were in Vienna during Mahler's ten years as director said that it was not just the Golden Age of the Vienna Opera, but of Opera itself, that no conductor ever got more transcendent performances than Mahler did. (Fischer/Verbier) What's more important than the actual blows of fate is the change of harmony in each. Two of the three blows sound like they're going to resolve in the major key, but they misdirect, they signify a change back to minor. Again, it's tragic, the hero can't start low, he has to fall. Supposedly from the second blow came the death of Mahler's daughter. And then came the diagnosis of the heart condition that would kill him before he turned fifty-one. As with all these concepts, it's a little too mystical to be true, and yet there's an element at least of symbolic truth to them. Don't take it seriously, but because Mahler was superstitious and saw these blows of fate as predictors of his own life, it's important to remember his own superstitions.

And that's why I'm don't want to play the other hammer blows. The music is too powerful for casual listening, so instead, I'm going to tell the story of how I came to believe there's something a little weird about the effect this symphony has.

The greatest performance I ever heard of it was last year, the night before Yom Kippur, I was in New York, at Carnegie Hall. Simon Rattle, probably my pick for the greatest active conductor, was conducting the Philadelphia Orchestra. The first two movements, nothing special. The scherzo was extraordinary, tempo changes seemingly in every bar. The last movement was so devastating, so all-extinguishing, that I'd never experienced anything like it. The whole hall sat in silence for about ninety seconds after it was over. It was like we knew that a ghost was raised. It's this kind of tragic sublimity we experience in works like King Lear or Moby Dick, or Michelangelo's Last Judgement or the cartoons of Goya. From Rosh Hashana until Yom Kippur, the Gates of Heaven are said to be open, and after that performance that seemed to incinerate the earth, it felt like some avenging spirit had escaped to wreak vengeance on us. And don't forget, Carnegie Hall is two blocks away from the Trump Tower. One month later....

So if we have time, then we'll talk about the path which this destruction led us down. It's unfortunate that we're going to have to give short shrift to Shostakovich, because in order to talk properly about Shostakovich, you have to talk about the environment in which he lived. You have to talk about World War II, you have to talk about the very different environment of Communism, and you have to talk about the artificial second nineteenth century in which the Russian intelligentsia were forced to live. It breaks my heart, because I believe that Shostakovich is a greater composer even than Mahler or Sibelius, and lots of musicians still don't forgive him for writing great music that's still tonal. But nobody needs me to tell them to listen to Shostakovich, but people do need to be told that certain symphonists are truly great - older contemporaries of Shostakovich like Arthur Honegger and Nikolai Myaskovsky, but also composers of the recent past like Alan Hovahness, Einojuhani Rautavaara, Alfred Schnittke, Krzystopf Penderecki, and we're not going to even get into composers who are still fully active. But for the purposes of this class, the best I can do is devote a significant portion to Ralph Vaughan Williams.

I know that the common image of Vaughan Williams is this. But at a certain point, Vaughan Williams woke up to be the only figure left of his generation. And what a generation that was: Mahler, Sibelius, Puccini, Richard Strauss, Debussy, Ravel, Rachmaninov, Elgar, Scriabin, Janacek and a dozen others. This is possibly the greatest generation of composers, and next time I get a music class this is what I hope to cover.  The only figure of that generation who lived as long as Vaughan Williams was Sibelius, and Sibelius didn't compose after the late 20's.

But when the Second World War was gathering, RVW became an almost completely opposite composer from the popular image of him.  (R. Wigglesworth/LPO) That's not the opening to an alien invasion movie, that's the opening of RVW's Fourth Symphony. Vaughan Williams pretty much sustains this mood for an entire half-hour. Here's the ending. The elderly Vaughan Williams is a completely different, more interesting composer, than he's ever allowed to be in the public imagination. A hundred times more passionate and intelligent - like a British Bartok. Listen to the beginning of the Sixth Symphony, (Norrington/San Francisco) this is not the composer we think he is. We'll talk about him and others at what is, unfortunately, our final class. Maybe I'll do one or two more afterwards to get us further into history and email you the results when I record them.

See you next week!

The History of the Symphony - Class 10 - The Symphony of Destruction - 90-95%

All things must come to an end. We're now in the home stretch of this class, and we've stepped through all kinds of doorways, we've experienced all kinds of joys, we've experienced pathos, we've death and resurrection, and post-resurrection we flew around in pieces of music that seem to express the whole kingdom of nature. But in a time and place where every form of life is so thriving and vital, it's inevitable that the something so lively will indulge in self-destructive behaviors, and if you behave in ways that court self-destruction, eventually the behaviors will pull you down.

Let's just listen for a minute to Carl Nielsen's Inextinguishable Symphony (Barbirolli/Halle). String players especially dread Carl Nielsen, his music is full of these whirling lightning fast counterpoint. Today, musicians string players play that passage almost too well and precisely. You have to hear the struggle, it has to sound like a rocket, a smear of notes that's always moving so you can never hear exactly which note is placed when. This symphony is called the 'Inextinguishable', and Nielsen wrote of it in May 1914:

I have an idea for a new composition, which has no programme but will express what we understand by the spirit of life or manifestations of life, that is: everything that moves, that wants to live ... just life and motion, though varied – very varied – yet connected, and as if constantly on the move, in one big movement or stream. I must have a word or a short title to express this; that will be enough. I cannot quite explain what I want, but what I want is good.

August 1914, the famous month that ended the long European piece, was just a summer away. And the great irony of Nielsen's Inextinguishable Symphony is that 18 million lives were being extinguished as he wrote it, with another 23 million wounded. The elemental will to live itself was being put to the test. It's hard to believe that Nielsen didn't realize it. Near the end of the symphony we encounter a battle between the two timpani players. (Rattle/Royal Danish National)

Last week I said that of all Beethoven's successors, Nielsen is probably the one who channel's Beethoven's spirit most directly. He's a heroic, volcanic, optimist, a composer of towering humanity who uses the symphony to give hope and solace. The world needs to hear Carl Nielsen much more than they ever get to. Here is the climax of the whole piece. (Barbirolli/Halle)  I don't need to say anything more about it than I already have, you'll get the point.

That was Nielsen's 4th Symphony, written during World War I. When Nielsen began it, he probably didn't mean it to be a statement of life in the face of death, but that's what it absolutely became. So now, let's listen to the end of Elgar's 1st Symphony, because while Nielsen found a way to adjust to the new world, Elgar could not.

Believe it or not, if you asked most music lovers whom the greatest composer was in exactly 1910, they wouldn't say Mahler or Debussy or Sibelius or even Puccini. Some of them would say Richard Strauss, but most would, believe it or not, say Edward Elgar.

The pressure on Elgar to write a symphony was more massive than any composer in history has ever experienced, including Brahms, and Elgar waited until he was fifty-one to issue his first. The difference in age between Elgar and Nielsen is eight years, but this is music of a completely different generation. Elgar wanted to write a symphony about General Gordon, who was considered the great British military hero of the imperial era and led a siege against a native uprising that lasted for an entire year. He abandoned this idea, but I wanted to tell you this to give you a sense of just how out of step Elgar was with how the world would change in just a few years. Elgar wrote to a friend:

There is no programme beyond a wide experience of human life with a great charity (love) and a massive hope in the future.

We're not going to have time to listen to any of the Second Symphony, which is probably the greater piece. Elgar only wrote two symphonies, and both are genuinely great pieces even if they're both twelve minutes too long. But I do want to give you a sense of the enormity of the event that Elgar's First was and how important it was for Elgar to rise to the challenge. He begins the symphony with what sounds like a hymn, or a prayer - twice through, first very quietly, and then at full voice like a group of Episcopals in Church (Solti/London Philharmonic) with a march-like tread that clearly sounds a bit military - or at least it does when played at Elgar's metronome marking... The prayer basically disappears for most of the symphony - it comes back at the end of the first movement and at the end of the piece in, what sounds very much like some kind of battle, maybe even a sea battle...  (Solti/London)

Elgar was a great melodist and a great orchestrator, he was not at all a natural symphonist. Both of his symphonies have all sorts of passages which really have no reason for being there except as padding to make a work that was 'Important' with a capital I. But Elgar was so gifted at what he was good at that it's amazing how good both of his symphonies are in spite of how bad they are in other parts. . After World War I, Elgar was a relic who couldn't come to terms with the modern world, and while he lived until the mid-Thirties, he barely wrote any music for the last fifteen years of his life.

Nielsen, on the other hand, was a great symphonist, and maybe even greater than the Inextinguishable, his Fourth, is his Fifth Symphony, which has no title. We're going to listen to the first few minutes, (Bernstein/New York) because I want you to hear how gradually something incredibly pastoral becomes something incredibly military.

So now we fast forward a few minutes, and the music becomes a prayer - a hymn, and as it grows in intensity, Nielsen does something truly shocking. Against his hymn, he has the snare drum play a march figure in a completely different tempo, and then he gives the snare drum player the instruction to improvise "as if at all costs he wants to stop the progress of the orchestra." (Horenstein/Philharmonia) It's a prayer and a military march - like a prayer to spare those in battle whom we love.

It took Nielsen the coming of the war to realize that a new era was upon us, but in the case of the two great symphonic masters, they seemed in their work to intuit something was coming. Last week we played the opening minute of Sibelius's Third Symphony, which I don't think gets enough credit, but Sibelius 3rd is both the first symphony by the fully mature Sibelius and an uncharacteristically cheerful work by him. Here's the last minute and a half.  (Davis/Boston)

Even Sibelius's cheerfulness is stormy. So how dark will Sibelius sound when he isn't being cheerful? (Maazel/Vienna). There is plenty of emotional turbulence and storminess in other composers, but has there ever been any other symphony in the history of music which had the nerve to be as dark as Sibelius's 4th? This was premiered in 1911, the same year that Elgar's Second Symphony premiered, and here's what the beginning of Elgar's Second Symphony sounds like.  (Solti/London)

This is not to say that Sibelius intuited in any way saw that war was imminent, but it is to say that something in Sibelius seemed to feel that the world was changing in some very fundamental way. Sibelius had written dark symphonies before, but they're a very different kind of dark. Listen to how Sibelius builds something that sounds like a storm in his first symphony, which, even if it's clearly the work of a genius, is so obviously influenced by Tchaikovsky. (Vanska/Lahti I think...)

It's like the young Sibelius needs the Russian-style melodies as a way of disguising what he's really doing. But listen to what Sibelius does a couple minutes into the Fourth Symphony to create what sounds, at least to me, like a winter storm. He starts with forty seconds of just the violin sections playing a semi-non-sensical series of notes against each other, eventually joined by tremolos in the rest of the strings.  (Maazel/Vienna)

Sibelius 4 is completely unique, even to Sibelius. There is not a single moment when the entire orchestra plays together. Unlike Mahler, where nearly every moment is a shareable excerpt, Sibelius is almost impossible to show in isolated excerpst, because what's fascinating in Sibelius is the transitions, you have to hear every moment in the context of every other. Even Sibelius 4 has its lighter moments, but what I can do to show you how this symphony is so unique is two excerpts that show this incredibly spare, harmonically strange piece of music. It sounds like Schoenberg but it's nowhere near as colorful or flashy or romantic as Schoenberg often is. It's literally just a pure grayness, like a musical Rothko or that old conception of Schoenberg as 'Brahms with wrong notes.'  It's a depiction, as best we can tell, of the experience of what it is not just to be in Sibelius's forest, but to be the forest itself. And just to hammer the point home, here is the incredibly abrupt ending. 

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Just two more excerpts of Bruckner here. Bruckner, in his ninth symphony, dedicated to God. The 1890's, his unshakeable faith in God is now shaken, he is in despair, thinking his work worthless, and he continually revises his symphonies and does not have time to finish the finale of his 9th. His life, of unbroken service to God through music, is not necessarily enough to earn him his place in heaven. Even Bruckner intuits this crisis of faith.  (Jochum/Dresden) And he imagines something that, to me at least, seems like a dance of the demons.  We'll get to the slow movement, the last he completed, in the last class, when Bruckner makes peace with God and the world.

And so we now come to Mahler's Sixth Symphony, which Alban Berg called 'The only sixth, including the Pastoral.' It's sometimes called the 'Tragic' symphony, and, perhaps just this once, Tragic is exactly the right word.

I've been indulging in telling you extra-musical associations and programs all through this class, but it's important to say, over and over again, that the composer rarely specified these images I'm feeding you. There are exceptions and I'm tried to point them out. But in this case, an element of the program comes from Leonard Bernstein, who thought that the Vienna Philharmonic was not playing the beginning with the requisite intensity. So he told them that the beginning of the first movement was Nazis marching into your city, and the result was this. Listen to that last part again. (Tennstedt/London) When that effect is properly played, doesn't it sound like an explosion with the debris falling to the ground?

I had an online friend whom I used to talk about music with all the time. I had no idea that he was dying of cancer the entire time we talked to each other, and I'd like to think that our obsessive talking about music brought him a little bit of solace in his final months, but he passed away not long before this class began, and I only found out about his dying as I listened to Haydn's Funeral Symphony while preparing for the first class. He posited that this symphony is a kind of dystopian work about militarism. There is just so much in here that sounds that way that it's almost impossible to ignore. Was Mahler intuiting the World Wars? Certainly not directly, how could he? But I think it's impossible to live in the extreme military and imperial environment of the early 20th century, when there seemed to be military parades and demonstrations all the time without realizing that there was something incredibly excessive about it that could easily go to people's heads.

Mahler being Mahler, there is always an infinite variety to express. Remember, this is the composer who said that the Symphony must be like the world, it must embrace everything. So against all this militarism, there's low comedy that sounds like it belongs in Vaudeville (Bernstein/Vienna). and in this symphony, there is an outright duality between war and peace in an incredibly rural environment that can just as easily be a battlefield. (Tennstedt/London) The symphony is in A-minor, the exact same key as Sibelius 4 - A-minor is the key that has no sharps or flats - pure negative feelings.  But these passages take place in E-flat Major, the exact most distant key from A-minor.

So why, ultimately, is this tragic music rather than pathetic as Tchaikovsky Six or Brahms Four are? The reason is because victory always seems like the likely outcome, but Mahler can never quite get there. Here's the famous second theme, the Alma theme, in which Mahler said he represented his wife in music.  (Bernstein/Vienna) War vs. Love. Perhaps love is what enables the hero of this symphony to keep fighting. And it's on this note of love that Mahler ends the movement.  

We're not going to get into the controversy of which movement comes next. But Mahler's Sixth Symphony is one of only a handful of symphonies by Mahler in the traditional four movement form, and half the world's Mahler experts think that slow movement comes next, and half of them think the scherzo comes next. I personally think the Scherzo works better second, but the greatest performance I've ever heard of it placed the slow movement second.

In spite of the fact that the Scherzo is fantastic, we're going to skip it and just talk for a moment about the slow movement. The slow movement is supposed to be the exact opposite of the opening. It takes place in E-flat major, the exact most distant key, and it is almost utterly peaceful, almost too peaceful. Let's just listen to a moment or two from the central section, when it pivots to two other oppositional keys to A-minor. First it goes to C-major, which is what we call the relative major to A-minor - meaning that it has the exact same number of sharps and flats, and in this case, none. It then goes to A-Major, which is, of course, the root of A-minor. This may not mean anything to you but what this harmonic drama does to the listener subconsciously is to disarm you, it makes you think that everything will turn out alright and you'll be spared the worst. (Bernstein/Vienna) But then it sours, as though even in your most peaceful moments, when you're watching your children play, you know that neither you nor they can be spared. Mahler wrote this tragic work during the happiest period of his life, perhaps he was so traumatized by the first forty-five years that he couldn't help but know that the trauma wouldn't let up, or there was an element of self-destruction in it as great artists tend to have.

And so we come to the last movement, which sounds, to my ears and a number of others, like an uncanny prediction of what was less than ten years away. Along with the first movements of the the ninth, it is the most complex and ambitious and deep piece of music Mahler ever wrote - though I'd argue the opening of the Third is on that level as well even if nobody else would.

Listen to the beginning and tell me you can't hear the rain, the mud, the explosions, the chaos, the terror of Somme or Verdun or the Spring Campaign or the Hundred Days Offensive as you prepare for battle.

So now that we're five minutes in, you hear the trudging marches of the two sides toward each other, and the chaos of a military charge. If properly played, it's uncanny and unmistakable.  (Rattle/London)

We then come to what's called the Three Blows of Fate. Many people connect this to the three great tragedies which overcame Mahler after he wrote this piece. First, his resignation as director of the Vienna Opera. Many experts who were in Vienna during Mahler's ten years as director said that it was not just the Golden Age of the Vienna Opera, but of Opera itself, that no conductor ever got more transcendent performances than Mahler did. (Fischer/Verbier) What's more important than the actual blows of fate is the change of harmony in each. Two of the three blows sound like they're going to resolve in the major key, but they misdirect, they signify a change back to minor. Again, it's tragic, the hero can't start low, he has to fall. Supposedly from the second blow came the death of Mahler's daughter. And then came the diagnosis of the heart condition that would kill him before he turned fifty-one. As with all these concepts, it's a little too mystical to be true, and yet there's an element at least of symbolic truth to them. Don't take it seriously, but because Mahler was superstitious and saw these blows of fate as predictors of his own life, it's important to remember his own superstitions.

And that's why I'm don't want to play the other hammer blows. The music is too powerful for casual listening, so instead, I'm going to tell the story of how I came to believe there's something a little weird about the effect this symphony has.

The greatest performance I ever heard of it was last year, the night before Yom Kippur, I was in New York, at Carnegie Hall. Simon Rattle, probably my pick for the greatest active conductor, was conducting the Philadelphia Orchestra. The first two movements, nothing special. The scherzo was extraordinary, tempo changes seemingly in every bar. The last movement was so devastating, so all-extinguishing, that I'd never experienced anything like it. The whole hall sat in silence for about ninety seconds after it was over. It was like we knew that a ghost was raised. It's this kind of tragic sublimity we experience in works like King Lear or Moby Dick, or Michelangelo's Last Judgement or the cartoons of Goya. From Rosh Hashana until Yom Kippur, the Gates of Heaven are said to be open, and after that performance that seemed to incinerate the earth, it felt like some avenging spirit had escaped to wreak vengeance on us. And don't forget, Carnegie Hall is two blocks away from the Trump Tower. One month later....

History of the Symphony - Class 10 - The Symphony of Destruction - First Third

All things must come to an end. We're now in the home stretch of this class, and we've stepped through all kinds of doorways, we've experienced all kinds of joys, we've experienced pathos, we've death and resurrection, and post-resurrection we flew around in pieces of music that seem to express the whole kingdom of nature. But in a time and place where every form of life is so thriving and vital, it's inevitable that the something so lively will indulge in self-destructive behaviors, and if you behave in ways that court self-destruction, eventually the behaviors will pull you down.

Let's just listen for a minute to Carl Nielsen's Inextinguishable Symphony (Barbirolli/Halle). String players especially dread Carl Nielsen, his music is full of these whirling lightning fast counterpoint. Today, musicians string players play that passage almost too well and precisely. You have to hear the struggle, it has to sound like a rocket, a smear of notes that's always moving so you can never hear exactly which note is placed when. This symphony is called the 'Inextinguishable', and Nielsen wrote of it in May 1914:

I have an idea for a new composition, which has no programme but will express what we understand by the spirit of life or manifestations of life, that is: everything that moves, that wants to live ... just life and motion, though varied – very varied – yet connected, and as if constantly on the move, in one big movement or stream. I must have a word or a short title to express this; that will be enough. I cannot quite explain what I want, but what I want is good.

August 1914, the famous month that ended the long European piece, was just a summer away. And the great irony of Nielsen's Inextinguishable Symphony is that 18 million lives were being extinguished as he wrote it, with another 23 million wounded. The elemental will to live itself was being put to the test. It's hard to believe that Nielsen didn't realize it. Near the end of the symphony we encounter a battle between the two timpani players. (Rattle/Royal Danish National)

Last week I said that of all Beethoven's successors, Nielsen is probably the one who channel's Beethoven's spirit most directly. He's a heroic, volcanic, optimist, a composer of towering humanity who uses the symphony to give hope and solace. The world needs to hear Carl Nielsen much more than they ever get to. Here is the climax of the whole piece. (Barbirolli/Halle)  I don't need to say anything more about it than I already have, you'll get the point.

That was Nielsen's 4th Symphony, written during World War I. When Nielsen began it, he probably didn't mean it to be a statement of life in the face of death, but that's what it absolutely became. So now, let's listen to the end of Elgar's 1st Symphony, because while Nielsen found a way to adjust to the new world, Elgar could not.

Believe it or not, if you asked most music lovers whom the greatest composer was in exactly 1910, they wouldn't say Mahler or Debussy or Sibelius or even Puccini. Some of them would say Richard Strauss, but most would, believe it or not, say Edward Elgar.

The pressure on Elgar to write a symphony was more massive than any composer in history has ever experienced, including Brahms, and Elgar waited until he was fifty-one to issue his first. The difference in age between Elgar and Nielsen is eight years, but this is music of a completely different generation. Elgar wanted to write a symphony about General Gordon, who was considered the great British military hero of the imperial era and led a siege against a native uprising that lasted for an entire year. He abandoned this idea, but I wanted to tell you this to give you a sense of just how out of step Elgar was with how the world would change in just a few years. Elgar wrote to a friend:

There is no programme beyond a wide experience of human life with a great charity (love) and a massive hope in the future.

We're not going to have time to listen to any of the Second Symphony, which is probably the greater piece. Elgar only wrote two symphonies, and both are genuinely great pieces even if they're both twelve minutes too long. But I do want to give you a sense of the enormity of the event that Elgar's First was and how important it was for Elgar to rise to the challenge. He begins the symphony with what sounds like a hymn, or a prayer - twice through, first very quietly, and then at full voice like a group of Episcopals in Church (Solti/London Philharmonic) with a march-like tread that clearly sounds a bit military - or at least it does when played at Elgar's metronome marking... The prayer basically disappears for most of the symphony - it comes back at the end of the first movement and at the end of the piece in, what sounds very much like some kind of battle, maybe even a sea battle...  (Solti/London)

Elgar was a great melodist and a great orchestrator, he was not at all a natural symphonist. Both of his symphonies have all sorts of passages which really have no reason for being there except as padding to make a work that was 'Important' with a capital I. But Elgar was so gifted at what he was good at that it's amazing how good both of his symphonies are in spite of how bad they are in other parts. . After World War I, Elgar was a relic who couldn't come to terms with the modern world, and while he lived until the mid-Thirties, he barely wrote any music for the last fifteen years of his life.

Nielsen, on the other hand, was a great symphonist, and maybe even greater than the Inextinguishable, his Fourth, is his Fifth Symphony, which has no title. We're going to listen to the first few minutes, (Bernstein/New York) because I want you to hear how gradually something incredibly pastoral becomes something incredibly military.

So now we fast forward a few minutes, and the music becomes a prayer - a hymn, and as it grows in intensity, Nielsen does something truly shocking. Against his hymn, he has the snare drum play a march figure in a completely different tempo, and then he gives the snare drum player the instruction to improvise "as if at all costs he wants to stop the progress of the orchestra." (Horenstein/Philharmonia) It's a prayer and a military march - like a prayer to spare those in battle whom we love. 

It took Nielsen the coming of the war to realize that a new era was upon us, but in the case of the two great symphonic masters, they seemed in their work to intuit something was coming. Last week we played the opening minute of Sibelius's Third Symphony, which I don't think gets enough credit, but Sibelius 3rd is both the first symphony by the fully mature Sibelius and an uncharacteristically cheerful work by him. Here's the last minute and a half.  (Davis/Boston)

Even Sibelius's cheerfulness is stormy. So how dark will Sibelius sound when he isn't being cheerful? (Maazel/Vienna). There is plenty of emotional turbulence and storminess in other composers, but has there ever been any other symphony in the history of music which had the nerve to be as dark as Sibelius's 4th? This was premiered in 1911, the same year that Elgar's Second Symphony premiered, and here's what the beginning of Elgar's Second Symphony sounds like.  (Solti/London)

This is not to say that Sibelius intuited in any way saw that war was imminent, but it is to say that something in Sibelius seemed to feel that the world was changing in some very fundamental way. Sibelius had written dark symphonies before, but they're a very different kind of dark. Listen to how Sibelius builds something that sounds like a storm in his first symphony, which, even if it's clearly the work of a genius, is so obviously influenced by Tchaikovsky. (Vanska/Lahti I think...)

It's like the young Sibelius needs the Russian-style melodies as a way of disguising what he's really doing. But listen to what Sibelius does a couple minutes into the Fourth Symphony to create what sounds, at least to me, like a winter storm. He starts with forty seconds of just the violin sections playing a semi-non-sensical series of notes against each other, eventually joined by tremolos in the rest of the strings.  (Maazel/Vienna)

Sibelius 4 is completely unique, even to Sibelius....

History of the Symphony - Class 10 - The Symphony of Destruction - Beginning

All things must come to an end. We're now in the home stretch of this class, and we've stepped through all kinds of doorways, we've experienced all kinds of joys, we've experienced pathos, we've death and resurrection, and post-resurrection we flew around in pieces of music that seem to express the whole kingdom of nature. But in a time and place where every form of life is so thriving and vital, it's inevitable that the something so lively will indulge in self-destructive behaviors, and if you behave in ways that court self-destruction, eventually the behaviors will pull you down.

Let's just listen for a minute to Carl Nielsen's Inextinguishable Symphony (Barbirolli/Halle). String players especially dread Carl Nielsen, his music is full of these whirling lightning fast counterpoint. Today, musicians string players play that passage almost too well and precisely. You have to hear the struggle, it has to sound like a rocket, a smear of notes that's always moving so you can never hear exactly which note is placed when. This symphony is called the 'Inextinguishable', and Nielsen wrote of it in May 1914:

I have an idea for a new composition, which has no programme but will express what we understand by the spirit of life or manifestations of life, that is: everything that moves, that wants to live ... just life and motion, though varied – very varied – yet connected, and as if constantly on the move, in one big movement or stream. I must have a word or a short title to express this; that will be enough. I cannot quite explain what I want, but what I want is good.

August 1914, the famous month that ended the long European piece, was just a summer away. And the great irony of Nielsen's Inextinguishable Symphony is that 18 million lives were being extinguished as he wrote it, with another 23 million wounded. The elemental will to live itself was being put to the test. It's hard to believe that Nielsen didn't realize it. Near the end of the symphony we encounter a battle between the two timpani players. (Rattle/Royal Danish National)

Last week I said that of all Beethoven's successors, Nielsen is probably the one who channel's Beethoven's spirit most directly. He's a heroic, volcanic, optimist, a composer of towering humanity who uses the symphony to give hope and solace. The world needs to hear Carl Nielsen much more than they ever get to. Here is the climax of the whole piece. (Barbirolli/Halle)  I don't need to say anything more about it than I already have, you'll get the point.

That was Nielsen's 4th Symphony, written during World War I. When Nielsen began it, he probably didn't mean it to be a statement of life in the face of death, but that's what it absolutely became. So now, let's listen to the end of Elgar's 1st Symphony, because while Nielsen found a way to adjust to the new world, Elgar could not.

Believe it or not, if you asked most music lovers whom the greatest composer was in exactly 1910, they wouldn't say Mahler or Debussy or Sibelius or even Puccini. Some of them would say Richard Strauss, but most would, believe it or not, say Edward Elgar.

The pressure on Elgar to write a symphony was more massive than any composer in history has ever experienced, including Brahms, and Elgar waited until he was fifty-one to issue his first. The difference in age between Elgar and Nielsen is eight years, but this is music of a completely different generation. Elgar wanted to write a symphony about General Gordon, who was considered the great British military hero of the imperial era and led a siege against a native uprising that lasted for an entire year. He abandoned this idea, but I wanted to tell you this to give you a sense of just how out of step Elgar was with how the world would change in just a few years. Elgar wrote to a friend:

There is no programme beyond a wide experience of human life with a great charity (love) and a massive hope in the future.

We're not going to have time to listen to any of the Second Symphony, which is probably the greater piece. Elgar only wrote two symphonies, and both are genuinely great pieces even if they're both twelve minutes too long. But I do want to give you a sense of the enormity of the event that Elgar's First was and how important it was for Elgar to rise to the challenge. He begins the symphony with what sounds like a hymn, or a prayer - twice through, first very quietly, and then at full voice like a group of Episcopals in Church (Solti/London Philharmonic) with a march-like tread that clearly sounds a bit military - or at least it does when played at Elgar's metronome marking... The prayer basically disappears for most of the symphony - it comes back at the end of the first movement and at the end of the piece in, what sounds very much like some kind of battle, maybe even a sea battle...  (Solti/London)

Elgar was a great melodist and a great orchestrator, he was not at all a natural symphonist. Both of his symphonies have all sorts of passages which really have no reason for being there except as padding to make a work that was 'Important' with a capital I. But Elgar was so gifted at what he was good at that it's amazing how good both of his symphonies are in spite of how bad they are in other parts. . After World War I, Elgar was a relic who couldn't come to terms with the modern world, and while he lived until the mid-Thirties, he barely wrote any music for the last fifteen years of his life.

Nielsen, on the other hand, was a great symphonist, and maybe even greater than the Inextinguishable, his Fourth, is his Fifth Symphony, which has no title. We're going to listen to the first few minutes, (Bernstein/New York) because I want you to hear how gradually something incredibly pastoral becomes something incredibly military.

History of the Symphony - Class 10 - The Symphony of Destruction - First Paragraph

All things must come to an end. We're now in the home stretch of this class, and we've stepped through all kinds of doorways, we've experienced all kinds of joys, we've experienced pathos, we've death and resurrection, and post-resurrection we flew around in pieces of music that seem to express the whole kingdom of nature. But in a time and place where every form of life is so thriving and vital, it's inevitable that the something so lively will indulge in self-destructive behaviors, and if you behave in ways that court self-destruction, eventually the behaviors will pull you down.

It's Not Even Past #1 - Shakespeare in Love - Complete

Long before the era of Harvey Weinstein, I was completely ashamed of my love of Shakespeare in Love - which some people, usually too young to have ever seen it except on TV for ten minutes at a time, name the worst Best Picture of all time. Whether or not it is, and seriously, there are much worse (Gladiator anybody?), it is forever the epitome of the 'bought' Academy Award. Harvey Weinstein bought a dream team of Hollywood publicists not just to publicly advertise for Shakespeare in Love, but to go to Hollywood parties and talk about how great the movie is. The campaign cost at least 5 million dollars. This movie's purplest prose is often quoted by younger movie lovers to demonstrate it's stupidity. The one I'm about to read is one of the most embarrassing quotes ever allowed into a great movie, and there are probably another dozen of these howlers in Shakespeare in Love.:

Not the artful postures of love, but love that overthrows life. Unbiddable, ungovernable, like a riot in the heart, and nothing to be done, come ruin or rapture. Love as there has never been in a play. I will have love. Or I will end my days...

 The great musician Thomas Beecham once said that 'the arts in America are a racket run by unscrupulous men for unhealthy women. Let's be just a little uncharitable to a number of people here. This is, to be likely, a sentiment which a lot of middle class people from the Victorian era up to the Eisenhower era probably viewed as typical of Shakespeare - particularly women, as they had little option but to stay in their own homes and therefore obviously had more time to devote to the arts. Many middle class people still view the arts a kind of suppository for the high passion that they never got from their dull spouses who lost interest in them twenty years ago. And to be fair, there is a certain amount of that in Shakespeare, nobody in real life falls in love as quickly as actors in Shakespeare do except other actors. Nor is this kind of outsize passion unique in great art to Shakespeare. But in this movie, these sentiments are clearly a very cynical tug at the heartstrings of old retirees of both genders who want to feel young again. 

We can't get around it, there is a very cynical side to Shakespeare in Love, that plays on old notions of love that recent generations of Americans discard. A lot of people have an allergic reaction to the sad comedies, which seem so soulful that they tug at your heartstrings even as they make you laugh, because in something so human, there inevitably something hypocritical about it. Woody Allen made immortal tragicomedies about adult relationships while he was assaulting a little girl, John Lasseter made immortal tragicomedies about child relationships while he was assaulting adult women. Aaron Sorkin wrote tragicomedies about the dreams of liberals while being completely blind to how he was negating women, Frank Capra made tragicomedies about American patriotism while being completely blind to how he was negating people of foreign origin just like himself. Whatever particular cynicism is your hot-button issue, you will see right through the whitelies of these movies and TV shows and it will inhibit your enjoyment. It doesn't mean that these works are actually bad, but it does mean that there's probably a flaw in each of them that stands out. Nobody who's seen a lot of Woody Allen movies can fail to notice his Pygmalion complex, where he's inevitably trying to teach his girlfriends and form them into the women he wants, similarly nobody who watches an Aaron Sorkin show should fail to notice how he uses women as the more ignorant party in a conversation so the men can charismatically explain the real truth to them. And for the moment, let's not even get started on Pixar or Disney. There's something cynical and exploitative about all of these works. It doesn't make them bad, but let's not pretend they're Shakespeare either.

In the same way that Disney panders to children, Shakespeare in Love panders to the elderly. It was not a movie made for people my age, it's a movie made for people old enough who have a prettified view of the British, who grew up when there was still the remnants of the Old Europe aristocracy, and before the tabloid scandals of Chuck and Di. When they went to sleep at night, many of them dreamed of the high society world of David Niven, Audrey Hepburn, Deborah Kerr, Robert Donath - the ballroom or the cocktail lounge where Noel Coward or Ivor Novello is playing the piano, everybody is dressed immaculately and always had a perfectly placed bon mot, in which the humdrum realities of middle class America were all left behind because servants are ministering downstairs to your needs. And most importantly, these people had vivid memories of seeing Laurence Olivier's movie version of Henry V in 1944. Olivier's Henry V was practically a British victory party, and the opening scenes recreated the singular cultural place of which the English are most proud, the Globe Theatre, which probably premiered all of the plays in the second half of Shakespeare's career - never mind that the Globe Theater had yet to be built for at least five years when Shakespeare wrote either Henry V or Romeo and Juliet... But for the first time since Henry V, a real view of the Elizabethan world from which this world of perfectly placed hair and vowels was made. 

One of the great things about Shakespeare in Love is how blatantly it shows this glamorous world of highfallutin' speech begins in a Warwickshire shithouse. To me, the archetypal line of dialogue from Shakespeare in Love is when Shakespeare says to his producer:

"My muse, as always, is Aphrodite."

To which the producer replies:

"Aphrodite Baggett, who does it behind the Dog and Crumpet?” 

In its way, Shakespeare in Love is as brutally honest about the corrupted ideals that go into making every piece of art we love. I'm sure I don't need to tell you again that everything about Shakespeare in Love now somewhat wreaks, and I'm sure I needn't tell you of whom, but the enjoyment of every dirty pun, every lofty phrase, and even the most genuine parts of the movie which show how commerce and compromise and disaster can wreck even Will Shakespeare, are partially spoiled by knowing Harvey Weinstein's corrupting hands were all over it. 

The original concept is by Marc Norman, a screenwriter whom from all other appearances is a hack. His other big credit is Cutthroat Island, one of the biggest cinematic bombs of the 90's. He's a California screenwriter who literally worked his way up from the mailroom, and since Shakespeare in Love, he hasn't had a single screen credit. Apparently, the idea wasn't even his, it was his son's, who called home one day in the late 80's from college with it. Maybe no one but a Hollywood hack would have the idea of taking one of the world's most famous works of art and showing how commerce completely polluted it, perhaps on some level he meant it as a justification for his career. But regardless, I'm sure that the half of the movie which feels like a prim housewife's view of both love and Shakespeare is his. The other half of it carries the kind of ironies that feels written by Shakespeare himself, and I think we can reasonably assume that this half was written by the co-writer, Tom Stoppard, perhaps the greatest living English playwright even then, and how much more so now? 

Let's take this a little further. Tom Stoppard is a rarity in the world of the British arts because he's such an establishment figure. Stoppard came over from Czechoslovakia as a child refugee from the Holocaust, and even now, his extreme upper-class English accent still has a weird Eastern European tinge. Stoppard is different from the average playwright in all sorts of ways. But the one that exists above all is that the theater has always been the refuge for the 'different', who don't fit in with conventional society, and almost all modern playwrights who have even a small political interest have been quite far to the left. Think of Harold Pinter, Arthur Miller, Tony Kushner, Bertold Brecht, even Henrik Ibsen. 

Tom Stoppard on the other hand, is a bona-fide conservative. Not necessarily a reactionary, but certainly a conservative in the sense of a Margaret Thatcher supporter, and a clarion voice in the press for the dissident Eastern European writers whom fate allowed him to leave behind for a very plush life in England. . 

On the one hand, Stoppard is the most intellectually ambitious playwright... ever? He's very funny, but he doesn't care much in the way of character development or human motivations. Like in Bernard Shaw, the characters are really just mouthpieces for the exposition of his ideas, but the ideas are genuinely complex and interesting. As many of you know, he began his career with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, which is literally Hamlet from the point of view of its two least consequential characters. In later plays, he asks us to care about the repressed homosexuality of A.E. Housman, to sit for eight hours for a disquisition on the formation of the 19th century Russian intelligentsia, and sit through a play that's basically an exchange of ideas between James Joyce, Lenin, and the inventor of Dadaism. And yet, a certain kind of audience, an extremely sophisticated London audience who grew up watching plays by Shaw and Wilde, usually in London, eats it up; something with real ideas in it is mana from heaven for people who are bored with the usual musicals, and claustrophobic family dramas, and sermons about capitalism. Stoppard doesn't translate well in America - even if some audiences can hope to get his plethora of references and ironic snark, the actors certainly don't... I don't even think Stoppard is the greatest living playwright in England, for me that's Alan Ayckbourne - find a youtube production of The Norman Chronicles cycle if you get a chance, Ayckbourne is a playwright of real humanity - but I doubt Stoppard will ever be completely forgotten, and in our age when knowledge of cultural history is thought of as the least necessary thing on the planet, his stock will go down for a while. 

On the other hand, Stoppard has worked as a hired screenwriter, most famously on Shakespeare in Love, but also some very different kinds of political work than the usual - like Terry Gilliam's Brazil - a science fiction that takes place in a dystopia that seems much more like an exaggerated Soviet Union than the usual exaggerated United States, and also Spielberg's adaptation of Empire of the Sun, about an upper-class British boy becoming a POW in a Japanese internment camp - it's a movie almost dares right-wingers to crow 'and you think we're bad...' And then you add to that the rumors - that Stoppard was a hired screenwriter who wrote drafts not just of movies everybody knew would be a hit like Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, but of movies everybody knew would be a flop, like Revenge of the Sith!

There is no living writer in the English language more highbrow than Tom Stoppard, and because of that, he's had no trouble slumming into the commercial world - knowing that his credentials against a 'selling out' accusation are unassailable. And what, ultimately, is Shakespeare in Love about? Much moreso than either love or love of art, it's about business. Maybe it has a ridiculous glorification of love at its center so that it can surround the center with a very stark look at how the sausage gets made and the extreme dangers of keeping your illusions about how beauty is used, and from this mixture of trash romance and serious business, we get a real work of art that does Shakespeare some small level of justice.

Stoppard really is that good, but I have a hard time believing that anybody would think of him as a genius on the level of Shakespeare. Artistic genius, real artistic genius, the kind that can conjure literally any person, place, or thing, is very rare, it probably happens only a dozen times a century. How many of them created for the theater? Shakespeare, maybe Chekhov and Moliere, if you count musical lyricists then certainly Stephen Sondheim, if you count composers it's Mozart, maybe Janacek, and then I draw another blank. Certainly there are one-hit wonders who have moments of genius, but a theatrical creator who has a whole career of genius the way Shakespeare and Sondheim and Mozart did is clearly only once every two hundred years. Shakespeare is Shakespeare because he can give us every kind of person in every situation, rational and irrational, tragic and comic, sublime and vulgar. But in Tom Stoppard, god forbid there's any vulgarity.

So many great Hollywood movies are happy accidents of chemistry in which a limited talent finds another limited talent that completes them perfectly. Shakespeare in Love completes Tom Stoppard, it gives him the vulgarity he needs to create something that, if it isn't better than his plays about the debates of Czech intellectuals behind the iron curtain or 19th century drawing room conversations about physics, is at least more universal. I doubt many people have the mind or stomach to properly appreciate Arcadia or Coast of Utopia, but a story that deposits Shakespeare into the situations that mirror Romeo and Juliet, that is something everyone who loves Romeo and Juliet can love.

The problem with that is that in the last generation or so, there is no play by Shakespeare whose fortunes have changed quite the way Romeo and Juliet has. I cannot tell you how many people I've met, and one must say, almost all of them women, who have an extremely jaundiced view of the world's most famous play.

There are all sorts of things in Romeo and Juliet, or at least Romeo and Juliet as it's traditionally been interpreted, that do not seem to translate to this generation. Look up 'everything wrong with Romeo and Juliet' on google and it autocompletes. You'll get think piece after think piece, seemingly by every English major in the world. There are multiple think pieces about how Romeo's actually the villain, either a casual seducer or a creepy stalker. Of course the play has an antiquated notion of virginity's importance. And Friar Laurence seems to be a character who is the precise incarnation of everything considered offensive in our zeitgeist. A Catholic priest who marries underage couples, prescribes them potions that seem uncannily like date rape drugs, and a centrist who wants to bring the two irreconcilable parts of the state together in understanding.

All these R&J haters are not wrong, they're just not completely right either. A great work of art is great because there are thousands of meanings that take thousands of years to reveal themselves. Just take Friar Laurence's introduction in Act II scene ii and try to unpack the dual meanings here. Every sentiment is balanced by its opposite.

The grey-ey’d morn smiles on the frowning night,
Check’ring the Eastern clouds with streaks of light,
And fleckled darkness like a drunkard reels
From forth day’s path and Titan’s fiery wheels.
Now ere the sun advance his burning eye,
The day to cheer and night’s dank dew to dry,
I must up-fill this osier cage of ours
With baleful weeds and precious-juiced flowers.
The earth that’s nature’s mother is her tomb;
What is her burying grave, that is her womb;
And from her womb children of divers kind
We sucking on her natural bosom find:
Many for many virtues excellent,
None but for some, and yet all different.
O, mickle is the powerful grace that lies
In plants, herbs, stones, and their true qualities;
For nought so vile that on the earth doth live
But to the earth some special good doth give;
Nor aught so good but, strain’d from that fair use,
Revolts from true birth, stumbling on abuse.
Virtue itself turns vice, being misapplied,
And vice sometime by action dignified.
Within the infant rind of this weak flower
Poison hath residence and medicine power;
For this, being smelt, with that part cheers each part,
Being tasted, stays all senses with the heart.
Two such opposed kings encamp them still
In man as well as herbs, grace and rude will;
And where the worser is predominant,
Full soon the canker death eats up that plant.

'Two such opposed kings.' Night and morning, frowns and smiles, weeds and flowers, tombs and wombs, fair use and abuse, virtue and vice, poison and medicine. Right after the balcony scene, the end of Romeo and Juliet is hinted at right there. Everything which centuries of audiences and readers find so moving about the Balcony scene is exactly what will eventually kill the star-cross'd lovers. Every great virtue is also a great vice. Implicit in every sweet thing is poison. Therefore, Romeo is both an epitome of love, and a seductive creep; Juliet's virginity is both a great prize and a senselessly valued thing that imprisons her; Friar Laurence is both a very wise and loving man and an evil fool with bad ideas. No concept in the world can ever exist in a vacuum. Just like morality always evolves, meanings always evolve and often cycle. Because Shakespeare can conjure every kind of person in every kind of place, expressing every idea, he can also conjure the interrelation between all of them; so every great text always takes on new meanings, and outlives every intellectual system that means to interpret it with any kind of finitude. Critics have reminded us for two centuries that Shakespeare is Shakespeare because he always anticipates our changes in morality and is ready with a new way we can interpret his work; he's an infinite staircase we'll always be climbing.

Shakespeare in Love, on the other hand, is beginning to look like its vulgarities are beginning to pull it into history's dustbin. I still think it's a great movie, but if Harvey Weinstein hasn't killed its reputation forever, then converting it into a play just might. As of this year, Shakespeare in Love has now been rewritten as a play, and fair Baltimore, where we lay our scene, is but one of fifteen American cities that host regional productions of it just this year.

Don't let anybody tell you that good theater is impossible outside of capital cities. It's certainly less possible, but regional theater can be great, and bad theater is certainly possible in New York and London, it's just a lot more expensive.

In any event, this risible show cost 20 bucks, and while it wasn't the worst spectacle I'd ever seen, it was among the more depressing. It combines the worst of Shakespeare productions - the hammy fast-paced physical shtik that shows directors think Shakespeare incapable of standing on his own and the wooden uncomprehending acting; with the worst of regional touring productions - the money-strewn overproduction with money put into lighting and scenery effects rather than hiring the best actors. When you put a movie on stage, you are expecting people to come so they can relive what they loved about the movie, which then means that the stage show can never take on a free life of its own outside of what the movie already did better than the stage show ever could.

If you go on wikepdia, it would seem that there are a hundred-ninety-five produced musicals based on films. Not just the famous ones like The Producers and Spamalot, but everything from Frozen to School of Rock to Reefer Madness to Debbie Does Dallas has been made into a musical in recent years. As you can see, a lot of the adapted movies are very recent, but some of them are revived classics, though I don't know if you could even call Reefer Madness a classic. I'm sure some of these musicals are very good, a lot of talented people put a lot of skill going into these adaptation, and of course, most of them come from very good source material - that's the other half of why this concept became so successful so quickly. But what's undeniable is that every film made into a musical supplants money that could be given to an original concept. Since a lot of these productions are meant to be enfranchised to many cities, a lot more thought and money put into the production design than is ever put into the script, and certainly a lot more than is ever put into the acting.

Hollywood movies are in serious trouble. If it's not a superhero movie, it rarely ever grosses serious money, and even a lot of the superhero movies bomb. It would seem that Hollywood, whose original concepts are growing dryer every year, is finding a way to recreate their old glories by making them into musicals, and more and more, Hollywood seems to be killing the originality of theater too. This year was the arrival of Shakespeare in Love, next year will mark the arrival of Network, and the new screen adaptation of that great movie will probably tour in the same fifteen American cities, and sell just as many tickets to older Americans, nostalgic for an era when all they had to be mad as hell about was the upcoming Carter Presidency.

The decline of Hollywood is a much bigger problem than either Harvey Weinstein or Hollywood's potential takeover of theater. As of 2015, the arts account for six-hundred ninety-eight billion dollars of the US economy. That's about 4.3% of the United States's Gross Domestic Product. 4.7 million people are employed in the arts - we in the arts do more for the American economy than construction, tourism, transportation, travel, and agriculture. Hollywood, with all its movies, advertising, TV, distribution, video services, and production, is probably responsible for somewhere between a fifth and a quarter of all the arts in America. And most importantly, thanks to Hollywood, the arts is one of the only industries in America that exports much more than it imports - is there any other industry in America that has a twenty-five billion dollar trade surplus? Millions depend on Hollywood for their work, and if Hollywood declines, millions can get laid off, and there's neither movies or theater in America that can afford to pay them much of anything for their services.

If theater is completely taken over by movies, it will be the ultimate insult. Having to compete as it does with movies, theater has always been one of the most maligned artforms in America. You can count the number of plays most Americans have heard of on your hands: Death of a Salesman, Streetcar Named Desire, Our Town, at this point maybe Angels in America, and then what? New plays in America have always been on the verge of extinction, confined to avant-garde industrial parks converted into no-budget blackbox theaters that are barely up to code. Surroundings like that can't help but influence the products they house, and so long as there's mass culture in America, there will always be an avant-garde of people who go shows less out of enjoyment than as a religious ritual or a statement of defiance; each of these scenes have a hundred people - each of whom are unique in exactly the same way and preach the necessity of their particular quirkiness to the already converted in manners that nobody gets but the others who speak the exact same avant-garde jargon they do. And as theater becomes more and more just an attendant arm of Hollywood, where beloved movies are reproduced onstage with absolute predictability, these avant garde theater troupes will seem more and more like the only unpredictable thing theater can give us, and people will take theater that much less seriously than they already do - because the only original thing left might be a place where any of the most simple minded stream of consciousness or protest theater can be considered original. If everything is unpredictable, that's its own predictability, and the mind can only process it with boredom.

Like these these endlessly reproduced movies, a few of these avant-garde productions, against all odds, can be very good, but you have to swim so far upstream to make something of durable quality that making a truly great production of a great play, which is already next to impossible, becomes an achievement of the impossible - it's all the more miraculous when it happens, because it happens so unbelievably rarely.

But nobody wants to know the nightmares that go into manufacturing great art, but the nightmares are voluminous and deep and terrifying. A hundred years of men have known that if they want to satisfy any craving, all they have to do is go to Hollywood, get on the C-list, and dangle a role in front of a struggling actor. When they reach the A-list, they don't even have to dangle. They can simply assume that the satisfaction will come to them, and if it doesn't, they can take it. 

Hollywood was built and sustained on the objectification of women. I have serious doubts it can survive their humanization, and who can pretend it deserves to? Hollywood movies are a 20th century concept that outlived their usefulness, based on a kind of faux-glamor that was outmoded by 1968. And yet Hollywood outlived its glory for fifty years. 

One of the first tales I wrote in my other big writing project, Tales From the Old New Land, my podcast/meganovel/I dunno exactly what it is about the nature of Judaism, is the story of a Hollywood producer who was a chronic abuser of women, and in moments of particular savagery he would quote all kinds of Jewish texts. We all know the archetype. The Jewish Hollywood producer is such a stock character in the American imagination that I don't need to explain it, because the whole world knew exactly what Hollywood producers are particularly known for doing long before the latest scandals.  

The point is that the high arts now languish in a kind of shadow world where they pretend that they can accomplish anything of quality without compromises to money and power and popularity, the kind of compromises that Shakespeare and Mozart and Sondheim and Chaplin and Hitchcock could never become who they were. I don't know if there is a connection between the insistence that artists have today that they can do their work without compromises to finance and popular taste, and the fact that the entire world seems to ignore what they do - but it doesn't seem coincidental. But the worst part of that equation is now that there is less and less middle ground every year on which artists can create real art for an audience of more than a few hundred people. In order to create something that appeals to more than the people who share your very particular worldview, you need feedback, sometimes brutal feedback, from other artists, from producers who are not willing to indulge your every whim, and from laymen fans who are, ostensibly, the people for whom you're creating it. Meanwhile Hollywood's become a caricature of itself, because in Hollywood movies, commerce has completely subsumed art for the last thirty-five years. TV is the only place that still seems to be going very well, but if the Hollywood Golden Age of the 70's is any indication, that won't last very long either. 

There was a period, about sixteen or eighteen years between the late sixties and early eighties, when art looked like it finally triumphed over commerce. Hollywood turned the keys to the dream factory over to a series of brilliant young men, fresh out of film school, and let them make exactly the pictures they wanted to make. It says something about the quality of the product that so many of the implicated sexual harassers and assaulters have been these old men whom, when they were young, ruled the world's most important artform like gods: Woody Allen and Roman Polanski of course, but also James Toback, Oliver Stone, Dustin Hoffman, Richard Dreyfuss, even Al Franken who started work on Saturday Night Live in '75. When Molly Ringwald talked about a film director who kissed her when she was fourteen, the director she was working with at that age was Paul Mazursky. 

Except for Dustin Hoffman and Al Franken, these are names whose luster has faded in recent decades. They are of an ethos that no longer exists in Hollywood or anywhere else. They are liberals formed by the Mad Men era, and if pressed about their behavior, they'd probably justify it by saying that their accusers have a prudish and conservative conception of sex. For nearly half a century, most liberals and leftists rejected any kind of sexual censure, saying that this was the kind of sexual policing that leads to sexual repression. We have to face the fact that to many older leftists, this kind of talk about the line of consent and sexual power dynamics doesn't just seem strange, but outright destructive. Talk to them and you'll get an earful about it. And these are the moviemakers that Harvey Weinstein spent his career working with. 

I suppose I have to give the proviso, in case it's not blindingly obvious, that in no way should this be seen as an excuse for their behavior. There's no reason to ever feel sorry for anybody with lots of money and power, they have their whims satisfied for decades, and with power comes the inevitable abuse of power. It's one thing to shame the sins of the powerless, but when powerful people are stripped of their power for a good reason, we should all yawn. 

The mistake, though, is to think that abuse of power can ever be stopped. In a new era with different moral concerns, it can take on an infinity of different forms, and no doubt will. We already heard just today as I write this about James O'Keefe's organization trying to cast doubt on the credibility of women who are accused by spreading a false report of Roy Moore having an affair with a teenager in addition to his many real ones. It was easily busted by the Washington Post, and while the attempt was risible, there can be little doubt that this will become more and more common as a way to spread doubt about women's claims, it's in the interests of so many abusive men, and much too obvious a tactic to not exploit in the era of fake news. Sexual harassment itself will probably become a little less common as men figure out that the chance that there might be accountable has gone way up. But I sadly doubt there aren't also less well-known psychopaths who are taking notes of all the various things they hadn't thought of yet that they might be able to get away with.

There are two reasons I love Shakespeare in Love. One is because it shows so well how difficult it is to create something worthwhile. No artist is in control of the work we produce. We don't dictate to the art, the art dictates to us, and while the stereotype of the suffering artist is not popular these days, you don't create art because you want to, you create art because you have to. No one else would put themselves through the terrible stress and suffering and setbacks of creating new things unless they need an outlet for a hole in their lives that nothing else can fill. If you're not working out some kind of hell in your life while creating something, whether it's in art or politics or business or any other field where the risk is high, you're probably not creating much that's very good. 

The other is because, in spite of glorifying an utterly false, prettified version of love, it also holds a mirror up to the terrible dangers inherent in it. The world has not moved on from the age when women were bought and sold for marriage like cattle nearly as much as we think. Love itself is, and will always be, an utterly dangerous state of mind that not only breaks hearts forever but puts some people in mortal peril. It continually amazes me that love still exists in a world where hatred is so much more common and imbalances of power between lovers can be so obvious. Yet all those states are inherent in love, because love is a state in which we all get selfish in our desire to pursue the other person at the same time that we want to selflessly give them part of ourselves. It is literally the desire to renounce part of ourselves to make ourselves part of a larger whole, and evolutionarily, what better explanation of love is there than that? We can no more stop ourselves from loving than we can from hating, and as Friar Laurence said, one state of mind inevitably leads to the other. 

It's Not Even Past #1 - Shakespeare in Love - Three Quarters

Long before the era of Harvey Weinstein, I was completely ashamed of my love of Shakespeare in Love - which some people, usually too young to have ever seen it except on TV for ten minutes at a time, name the worst Best Picture of all time. Whether or not it is, and seriously, there are much worse, it is forever the epitome of the 'bought' Academy Award. Harvey Weinstein bought a dream team of Hollywood publicists not just to publicly advertise for Shakespeare in Love, but to go to Hollywood parties and talk about how great the movie is. The campaign cost at least 5 million dollars. This movie's purplest prose is often quoted by younger movie lovers to demonstrate it's stupidity. The one I'm about to read is one of the most embarrassing quotes ever allowed into a great movie, and there are probably another dozen of these howlers in Shakespeare in Love.:

Not the artful postures of love, but love that overthrows life. Unbiddable, ungovernable, like a riot in the heart, and nothing to be done, come ruin or rapture. Love as there has never been in a play. I will have love. Or I will end my days...

 The great musician Thomas Beecham once said that 'the arts in America are a racket run by unscrupulous men for unhealthy women. Let's be just a little uncharitable to a number of people here. This is, to be likely, a sentiment which a lot of middle class people from the Victorian era up to the Eisenhower era probably viewed as typical of Shakespeare - particularly women, as they had little option but to stay in their own homes and therefore obviously had more time to devote to the arts. Many middle class people still view the arts a kind of suppository for the high passion that they never got from their dull spouses who lost interest in them twenty years ago. And to be fair, there is a certain amount of that in Shakespeare, nobody in real life falls in love as quickly as actors in Shakespeare do except other actors. Nor is this kind of outsize passion unique in great art to Shakespeare. But in this movie, these sentiments are clearly a very cynical tug at the heartstrings of old retirees of both genders who want to feel young again. 

We can't get around it, there is a very cynical side to Shakespeare in Love, that plays on old notions of love that recent generations of Americans discard. It's not, and has never been, a movie made for people my age, it's a movie made for people old enough who have a prettified view of the British, who grew up when there was still the remnants of the Old Europe aristocracy, and before the tabloid scandals of Chuck and Di. When they went to sleep at night, many of them dreamed of the high society world of David Niven, Audrey Hepburn, Deborah Kerr, Robert Donath - the ballroom or the cocktail lounge where Noel Coward or Ivor Novello is playing the piano, everybody is dressed immaculately and always had a perfectly placed bon mot, in which the humdrum realities of middle class America were all left behind because servants are ministering downstairs to your needs. And most importantly, these people had vivid memories of seeing Laurence Olivier's movie version of Henry V in 1944. Olivier's Henry V was practically a British victory party, and the opening scenes recreated the singular cultural place of which the English are most proud, the Globe Theatre, which probably premiered all of the plays in the second half of Shakespeare's career - never mind that the Globe Theater had yet to be built for at least five years when Shakespeare wrote either Henry V or Romeo and Juliet... But for the first time since Henry V, a real view of the Elizabethan world from which this world of perfectly placed hair and vowels was made. 

One of the great things about Shakespeare in Love is how blatantly it shows this glamorous world of highfallutin' speech begins in a Warwickshire shithouse. To me, the archetypal line of dialogue from Shakespeare in Love is when Shakespeare says to his producer:

"My muse, as always, is Aphrodite."

To which the producer replies:

"Aphrodite Baggett, who does it behind the Dog and Crumpet?” 

In its way, Shakespeare in Love is as brutally honest about the corrupted ideals that go into making every piece of art we love. I'm sure I don't need to tell you again that everything about Shakespeare in Love now somewhat wreaks, and I'm sure I needn't tell you of whom, but the enjoyment of every dirty pun, every lofty phrase, and even the most genuine parts of the movie which show how commerce and compromise and disaster can wreck even Will Shakespeare, are partially spoiled by knowing Harvey Weinstein's corrupting hands were all over it. 

The original concept is by Marc Norman, a screenwriter whom from all other appearances is a hack. His other big credit is Cutthroat Island, one of the biggest cinematic bombs of the 90's. He's a California screenwriter who literally worked his way up from the mailroom, and since Shakespeare in Love, he hasn't had a single screen credit. Apparently, the idea wasn't even his, it was his son's, who called home one day in the late 80's from college with it. Maybe no one but a Hollywood hack would have the idea of taking one of the world's most famous works of art and showing how commerce completely polluted it, perhaps on some level he meant it as a justification for his career. But regardless, I'm sure that the half of the movie which feels like a prim housewife's view of both love and Shakespeare is his. The other half of it carries the kind of ironies that feels written by Shakespeare himself, and I think we can reasonably assume that this half was written by the co-writer, Tom Stoppard, perhaps the greatest living English playwright even then, and how much more so now? 

Let's take this a little further. Tom Stoppard is a rarity in the world of the British arts because he's such an establishment figure. Stoppard came over from Czechoslovakia as a child refugee from the Holocaust, and even now, his extreme upper-class English accent still has a weird Eastern European tinge. Stoppard is different from the average playwright in all sorts of ways. But the one that exists above all is that the theater has always been the refuge for the 'different', who don't fit in with conventional society, and almost all modern playwrights who have even a small political interest have been quite far to the left. Think of Harold Pinter, Arthur Miller, Tony Kushner, Bertold Brecht, even Henrik Ibsen. 

Tom Stoppard on the other hand, is a bona-fide conservative. Not necessarily a reactionary, but certainly a conservative in the sense of a Margaret Thatcher supporter, and a clarion voice in the press for the dissident Eastern European writers whom fate allowed him to leave behind for a very plush life in England. . 

On the one hand, Stoppard is the most intellectually ambitious playwright... ever? He's very funny, but he doesn't care much in the way of character development or human motivations. Like in Bernard Shaw, the characters are really just mouthpieces for the exposition of his ideas, but the ideas are genuinely interesting. As many of you know, he began his career with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, which is literally Hamlet from the point of view of its two least consequential characters. In later plays, he asks us to care about the repressed homosexuality of A.E. Housman, to sit for eight hours for a disquisition on the formation of the 19th century Russian intelligentsia, and sit through a play that's basically an exchange of ideas between James Joyce, Lenin, and the inventor of Dadaism. And yet, a certain kind of audience, an extremely sophisticated London audience who grew up watching plays by Shaw and Wilde, usually in London, eats it up; something with real ideas in it is mana from heaven for people who are bored with the usual musicals, and claustrophobic family dramas, and sermons about capitalism. Stoppard doesn't translate well in America - even if some audiences can hope to get his plethora of references, the actors certainly don't... I don't even think Stoppard is the greatest living playwright in England, for me that's Alan Ayckbourne - find a youtube production of The Norman Chronicles if you get a chance, but I doubt Stoppard will ever be completely forgotten, and in our age when knowledge of cultural history is thought of as the least necessary thing on the planet, his stock will go down for a while. 

On the other hand, Stoppard has worked as a hired screenwriter, most famously on Shakespeare in Love, but also some very different kinds of political work than the usual - like Terry Gilliam's Brazil - a science fiction that takes place in a dystopia that seems much more like an exaggerated Soviet Union than the usual exaggerated United States, and also Spielberg's adaptation of Empire of the Sun, about an upper-class British boy becoming a POW in a Japanese internment camp - it's a movie almost dares right-wingers to crow 'and you think we're bad...' And then you add to that the rumors - that Stoppard was a hired screenwriter who wrote drafts not just of movies everybody knew would be a hit like Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, but of movies everybody knew would be a flop, like Revenge of the Sith!

There is no living writer in the English language more highbrow than Tom Stoppard, and because of that, he's had no trouble slumming into the commercial world - knowing that his credentials against a 'selling out' accusation are unassailable. And what, ultimately, is Shakespeare in Love about? Much moreso than either love or love of art, it's about business. Maybe it has a ridiculous glorification of love at its center so that it can surround the center with a very stark look at how the sausage gets made and the extreme dangers of keeping your illusions about how beauty is used, and from this mixture of trash romance and serious business, we get a real work of art that does Shakespeare some small level of justice.

Stoppard really is that good, but I have a hard time believing that anybody would think of him as a genius on the level of Shakespeare. Artistic genius, real artistic genius, the kind that can conjure literally any person, place, or thing, is very rare, it probably happens only a dozen times a century. How many of them created for the theater? Shakespeare, maybe Chekhov and Moliere, if you count musical lyricists then certainly Stephen Sondheim, if you count composers it's Mozart, maybe Janacek, and then I draw another blank. Certainly there are one-hit wonders who have moments of genius, but a theatrical creator who has a whole career of genius the way Shakespeare and Sondheim and Mozart did is clearly only once every two hundred years. Shakespeare is Shakespeare because he can give us every kind of person in every situation, rational and irrational, tragic and comic, sublime and vulgar. But in Tom Stoppard, god forbid there's any vulgarity.

So many great Hollywood movies are happy accidents of chemistry in which a limited talent finds another limited talent that completes them perfectly. Shakespeare in Love completes Tom Stoppard, it gives him the vulgarity he needs to create something that, if it isn't better than his plays about the debates of Czech intellectuals behind the iron curtain or 19th century drawing room conversations about physics, is at least more universal. I doubt many people have the mind or stomach to properly appreciate Arcadia or Coast of Utopia, but a story that deposits Shakespeare into the situations that mirror Romeo and Juliet, that is something everyone who loves Romeo and Juliet can love.

The problem with that is that in the last generation or so, there is no play by Shakespeare whose fortunes have changed quite the way Romeo and Juliet has. I cannot tell you how many people I've met, and one must say, almost all of them women, who have an extremely jaundiced view of the world's most famous play.

There are all sorts of things in Romeo and Juliet, or at least Romeo and Juliet as it's traditionally been interpreted, that do not seem to translate to this generation. Look up 'everything wrong with Romeo and Juliet' on google and it autocompletes. You'll get think piece after think piece, seemingly by every English major in the world. There are multiple think pieces about how Romeo's actually the villain, either a casual seducer or a creepy stalker. Of course the play has an antiquated notion of virginity's importance. And Friar Laurence seems to be a character who is the precise incarnation of everything considered offensive in our zeitgeist. A Catholic priest who marries underage couples, prescribes them potions that seem uncannily like date rape drugs, and a centrist who wants to bring the two irreconcilable parts of the state together in understanding.

All these R&J haters are not wrong, they're just not completely right either. A great work of art is great because there are thousands of meanings that take thousands of years to reveal themselves. Just take Friar Laurence's introduction in Act II scene ii and try to unpack the dual meanings here. Every sentiment is balanced by its opposite.

The grey-ey’d morn smiles on the frowning night,
Check’ring the Eastern clouds with streaks of light,
And fleckled darkness like a drunkard reels
From forth day’s path and Titan’s fiery wheels.
Now ere the sun advance his burning eye,
The day to cheer and night’s dank dew to dry,
I must up-fill this osier cage of ours
With baleful weeds and precious-juiced flowers.
The earth that’s nature’s mother is her tomb;
What is her burying grave, that is her womb;
And from her womb children of divers kind
We sucking on her natural bosom find:
Many for many virtues excellent,
None but for some, and yet all different.
O, mickle is the powerful grace that lies
In plants, herbs, stones, and their true qualities;
For nought so vile that on the earth doth live
But to the earth some special good doth give;
Nor aught so good but, strain’d from that fair use,
Revolts from true birth, stumbling on abuse.
Virtue itself turns vice, being misapplied,
And vice sometime by action dignified.
Within the infant rind of this weak flower
Poison hath residence and medicine power;
For this, being smelt, with that part cheers each part,
Being tasted, stays all senses with the heart.
Two such opposed kings encamp them still
In man as well as herbs, grace and rude will;
And where the worser is predominant,
Full soon the canker death eats up that plant.

'Two such opposed kings.' Night and morning, frowns and smiles, weeds and flowers, mothers and tombs, graves and wombs, fair use and abuse, virtue and vice, poison and medicine. Right after the balcony scene, the end of Romeo and Juliet is hinted at right there. Everything which centuries of audiences and readers find so moving about the Balcony scene is exactly what will eventually kill the star-cross'd lovers. Every great virtue is also a great vice. Implicit in every sweet thing is poison. Therefore, Romeo is both an epitome of love, and a seductive creep; Juliet's virginity is both a great prize and a senselessly valued thing that imprisons her; Friar Laurence is both a very wise man and a fool with evil ideas. No concept in the world can ever exist in a vacuum. Just like morality always evolves, meanings always evolve and often cycle. Because Shakespeare can conjure every kind of person in every kind of place, expressing every idea, he can also conjure the interrelation between all of them; so every great text always takes on new meanings, and outlives every intellectual system that means to interpret it with any kind of finitude. Critics have reminded us for two centuries that Shakespeare is Shakespeare because he always anticipates our changes in morality and is ready with a new way we can interpret his work; he's an infinite staircase we'll always be climbing.

Shakespeare in Love, on the other hand, is beginning to look like its vulgarities are beginning to pull it into history's dustbin. I still think it's a great movie, but if Harvey Weinstein hasn't killed its reputation forever, then converting it into a play just might. As of this year, Shakespeare in Love has now been rewritten as a play, and fair Baltimore, where we lay our scene, is but one of fifteen American cities that host regional productions of it just this year.

Don't let anybody tell you that good theater is impossible outside of capital cities. It's certainly less possible, but regional theater can be great, and bad theater is certainly possible in New York and London, it's just a lot more expensive.

In any event, this risible show cost 20 bucks, and while it wasn't the worst spectacle I'd ever seen, it was among the more depressing. It combines the worst of Shakespeare productions - the hammy fast-paced physical shtik that shows directors think Shakespeare incapable of standing on his own and the wooden uncomprehending acting; with the worst of regional touring productions - the money-strewn overproduction with money put into lighting and scenery effects rather than hiring the best actors. When you put a movie on stage, you are expecting people to come so they can relive what they loved about the movie, which then means that the stage show can never take on a free life of its own outside of what the movie already did better than the stage show ever could.

If you go on wikepdia, it would seem that there are a hundred-ninety-five produced musicals based on films. Not just the famous ones like The Producers and Spamalot, but everything from Frozen to School of Rock to Reefer Madness to Debbie Does Dallas has been made into a musical in recent years. As you can see, a lot of the adapted movies are very recent, but some of them are revived classics, though I don't know if you could even call Reefer Madness a classic. I'm sure some of these musicals are very good, a lot of talented people put a lot of skill going into these adaptation, and of course, most of them come from very good source material - that's the other half of why this concept became so successful so quickly. But what's undeniable is that every film made into a musical supplants money that could be given to an original concept. Since a lot of these productions are meant to be enfranchised to many cities, a lot more thought and money put into the production design than is ever put into the script, and certainly a lot more than is ever put into the acting.

Hollywood movies are in serious trouble. If it's not a superhero movie, it rarely ever grosses serious money, and even a lot of the superhero movies bomb. It would seem that Hollywood, whose original concepts are growing dryer every year, is finding a way to recreate their old glories by making them into musicals, and more and more, Hollywood seems to be killing the originality of theater too. This year was the arrival of Shakespeare in Love, next year will mark the arrival of Network, and the new screen adaptation of that great movie will probably tour in the same fifteen American cities, and sell just as many tickets to older Americans, nostalgic for an era when all they had to be mad as hell about was the upcoming Carter Presidency.

The decline of Hollywood is a much bigger problem than either Harvey Weinstein or Hollywood's potential takeover of theater. As of 2015, Hollywood is still an enormously important segment of the American economy. That's about 4.3% of the United States's Gross Domestic Product. 4.7 million people are employed in the arts, and the arts contribute about six-hundred-ninety-eight billion dollars to the US economy - we in the arts do more for the American economy than construction, tourism, transportation, travel, and agriculture. Hollywood, with all its movies, advertising, TV, distribution, video services, and production, is probably responsible for somewhere between a fifth and a quarter of all the arts in America. And most importantly, thanks to Hollywood, the arts is one of the only industries in America that exports much more than it imports - is there any other industry in America that has a twenty-five billion dollar trade surplus? Millions depend on Hollywood for their work, and if Hollywood declines, millions can get laid off, and there's neither movies or theater in America that can afford to pay them much of anything for their services.

If theater is completely taken over by movies, it will be the ultimate insult. Having to compete as it does with movies, theater has always been one of the most maligned artforms in America. You can count the number of plays most Americans have heard of on your hands: Death of a Salesman, Streetcar Named Desire, Our Town, at this point maybe Angels in America, and then what? New plays in America have always been on the verge of extinction, confined to avant-garde industrial parks converted into no-budget blackbox theaters that are barely up to code. Surroundings like that can't help but influence the products they house, and so long as there's mass culture in America, there will always be an avant-garde of people who go shows less out of enjoyment than as a religious ritual or a statement of defiance; each of these scenes have a hundred people - each of whom are unique in exactly the same way and preach the necessity of their particular quirkiness to the already converted in manners that nobody gest but the others who speak the exact same avant-garde jargon they do. And as theater becomes more and more just an attendant arm of Hollywood, where beloved movies are reproduced onstage with absolute predictability, these avant garde theater troupes will seem more and more like the only unpredictable thing theater can give us, and people will take theater that much less seriously than they already do - because the only original thing left might be a place where any of the most simple minded stream of consciousness or protest theater can be considered original. If everything is unpredictable, that's its own predictability, and the mind can only process it with boredom.

Like these these endlessly reproduced movies, some of them, against all odds, can be very good, but you have to swim so far upstream to make something of durable quality that making a truly great production of a great play, which is already next to impossible, becomes an achievement of the impossible - it's all the more miraculous when it happens, because it happens so unbelievably rarely.