Artur Bodanzky today.
I both love opera dearly and terribly tire of it. The problem with opera is that - with a very few exceptions like Mozart, Janacek, and Sondheim - it's not true to anyone's lived experience, and is not supposed to be. The great scores of orchestral, chamber, and solo music, is unlimited by context, the music literally mimics the complexities of our emotional transitions. It does not express mere primary emotions, it expresses many emotions all at once and the always gradual transitions between one emotion dominating our being and another. But when you tie such a powerful force as music to specific situation, the situations must generally be very very simple.
It says something about opera's limitations that its most complex, thoughtful, meaningful composer is Richard Wagner, the fucking psychopath. With the exception of Meistersinger, it's impossible to hear lived experience within his work, it is meant to express the work of mythical beings from legend and history, beings larger and more important than we, archetypes who represent distinct parts of the human psyche while walling off the rest of human experience. The end result is that the music seems to promise possibilities of human experience that are impossible to realize, humans are not meant to realize the ideals Wagner leads them to expect from life, and the ecstasies to which Wagner's driven tens of millions are unspeakably dangerous.
I certainly don't hate Wagner, rather I hate that part of myself and others which is often entranced by his music. The extraordinary power of his music wears down the resistance of the brain until one can't listen to anything else. It is not music to make one moved or feel connected to others in the manner of Beethoven, Bach, even Verdi, it is music for disconnected times such as these, promising a great bonfire of the vanities after which greater human connection is possible. Human destruction is inevitable, as this era demonstrates, and that is the destructive source of Wagner's power, but the price of these cleansing events is so overwhelming that what can a person who truly listens to his conscience do but resist the temptation to aid in knocking society down? How can wholesale destruction be worth the price of better things that come in their wake?
But if one has to make Wagner a palatable experience, the best way is through Artur Bodanzky. The tempi are so much faster and more flexible than today's, and performed with cuts all over the place. Nobody yet had occasion to realize the full destructive potential of Wagner's music, and perhaps thus Bodanzky can almost make Wagner sound like normal opera - little different in its impact from Strauss or Puccini. Bodanzky was a Mahler assistant, and we of course have no record of Mahler's conducting. Mahler, forever attacked for his fast tempos and whiplash tempo changes, forever criticized for giving his public musical intensity so great that they couldn't possibly keep up, must have sounded something like this, and this may be the closest we can get to understanding how he conducted this most powerful of music.
But Mahler only got ten years to realize his intentions with the Vienna Opera and only two years with the Metropolitan Opera. With the Met, Bodanzky refined his interpretations for a quarter-century. He died in 1939, so the sound is of course terrible, but the voices of grand opera in this era were so much better than they are today: more secure, better interpreted, and more engaged. Opera today has other strengths: the early opera of the Baroque is obviously 100x better than it used to be, and so are performances of 20th century opera. But standards in the 'standard repertoire' have dipped so precipitously that it begs belief. If you truly want to understand how opera inflamed the world for so long, listen to the old Metropolitan Opera broadcasts from the 30s and 40s conducted by Artur Bodanzky, Ettore Panizza, Bruno Walter, Fritz Busch, Dmitri Mitropoulos, even Fritz Reiner and George Szell. This is a lost art of opera performance.
I honestly don't know if it much about this style pre-dates this era of the Met. The 30s-40's Met was an unprecedented gathering of the greatest talents from all around the world fleeing war in Europe. Together, they could make miracles of performance that I am skeptical its like could ever have been achieved in any other time and place - even under the baton of earlier greats among Met conductors like Mahler, Toscanini, and Seidl. Certainly early opera recordings from elsewhere, great as they are, do not have THIS much flexibility of pulse, stentorian singing, and impossibly charged orchestral fireworks. What must have all this been like to hear live! It makes you understand how classical music lovers in New York could have been so insensible to the great developments of popular music all around them. What music-making could possibly be more powerful than this?
By the time After Rudolf Bing came on as manager in 1950, he seemed to do everything he could to dismantle this stunning achievement, dismissing most of the world's greatest conductors so that he could reign unchallenged, and creating a theater for the Met so enormous that the challenge of projecting into it shortened the careers of untold dozens of great singers. There are so many great and famous conductors who were often begging for engagements at the Met whom we will never know how they conducted all sorts of operas for which they were well known elsewhere but would never have been preserved on radio broadcast as the Met has been for nearly the last 100 years: Monteux, Beecham, Coates, Klemperer, Stokowski, Munch, Erich Kleiber, Victor de Sabata, Rodzinski, Barbirolli, Dorati, Fricsay, even Lenny. One cannot begin to fathom the memory of tradition classical music lost by their absence.
Thanks to a seventy-year decline, the Met is now seeing its darkest days in its long history, when it may go bankrupt, and bankrupt forever. The decline was in many ways slowed by the constant presence over 40 years of James Levine, but it came at a horrible price of Levine's terrible open secrets, which would inevitably become a horrifying scandal to the public at some point. Levine was a very fine conductor whom at times could rise to greatness. There are too many great performances in too many composers to ever deny that Levine had true achievements, but he was the perfect conductor for New York's corporate era: creating tapestries of velour orchestral luxury in lyrical moments, precisely the opposite of Bodanzky's revelatory drama; and pure brassy steel in the loud ones that seemed a perfect reflection of midtown's imposingly impersonal skyscrapers. He was, perhaps, the most reliable conductor of his generation, rarely ever giving a terrible performance even though he did more than a hundred opera performances every year for more than thirty, but nor was he a conductor who changed the earth's curvature the way Lenny was, the way Mahler was, and the way Bodanzky and Panizza were.
Whether or not its audience realizes it, the Met is a dinosaur of an organization, a decadent antique that has been coasting on old achievements since the end of World War II. Its current problems were completely foreordained by its unending string of bailouts from the easy money of corporate patrons who demanded there be no reform from the way opera used to be. Opera itself is far more antique and decadent than it should be in no small part because of the Met's role in slowing opera's evolution to the slowest possible crawl. To hear Bodanzky at the height of his powers is to hear opera at its healthiest, so vital that it could propel opera's largest organization forward another seventy years with barely any more innovation. With only a very few exceptions, the same repertoire as was done then, only now with worse voices, less exciting conductors, and a behemoth of a hall that on any given night may only be half full.
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