Boulez's Wagner

 Whatever one thinks of Boulez otherwise, and I loathe him... he was as good a Wagnerian as ever existed, because he had absolutely no patience with the veneration of Wagner as a sacred monolith. Most Wagner is much too slow, and if you are a Wagner skeptic like me, sitting through Knappertsbusch and Goodall is just a deeply unpleasant experience...

Perhaps it takes a megalomaniac to understand another megalomaniac, but what Boulez actualized in sound is that Wagner did not mean the scores as ends in themselves. Wagner may have been the greatest genius in the history of the arts, but Wagner, like Boulez, was activist first, intellectual second, musician third. They both intended to form the world in their images, and both were brilliant enough that it's astonishing how close they came - brilliant in the practical know-how to achieve their vision, brilliant enough as people to manipulate them to serve their ends, and brilliant enough to elucidate a total world-vision of music and its uses in society. They're both geniuses enough that you can't ignore them, even if you hate them. Their monomaniacal visions of human nature are a part of the human story, and in order to make that darkness palatable to unsuspecting masses, you need to find the light amid it.

Dave Hurwitz said that Wagner is a French composer in disguise, and it's absolutely true. His vision of music was based on Meyerbeer and Berlioz. Boulez's Wagner is like Historically Informed Performance that strips off the varnish and shows Wagner's kinship with his contemporaries: Berlioz, Liszt, Mendelssohn, Schumann, only Wagner was even more inventive than those geniuses, and through Boulez as perhaps no other conductor, we hear Wagner's full bag of tricks.

The Furtwängler/Barenboim axis is equally good in its way, an ecstatic, revelatory experience that finds long-range harmonic relationships in the score of which I'm not even sure Wagner wanted us to hear, but I think Boulez's more straight-forward way is what Wagner intended, seducing us into thinking that the power of this music is entirely normal and not the Milgram experiment set to music.

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

Conductor Comment: Franz Welser-Möst

 Is anyone a Franz Welser-Möst fan? I mean really a huge fan? Some people hate him like anything, I've never quite understood that, but it's not like his performances ever give revelations among revelations.

Until now.... these new releases from the Cleveland Orchestra's new label are goddamn revelations, just about every one of them I've heard so far. The only truly mainstream work on them is Schubert 9, and it's one of the most magnificent Schubert 9's ever set down. Whatever else Welser-Möst is, he perfectly understands the oral tradition of native Austria: Schubert, Mozart, Bruckner, Haydn, Johann Strauss, it's all genuinely magnificent. I remember, years ago, a revelatory (of all things) Mozart 28, which the Cleveland Orchestra took on tour to DC, followed by a Pathetique which if not particularly Russian, was extraordinarily detailed and resembled the Mozart and Schumann Tchaikovsky so loved - I was put in mind of Markevitch and Dorati. The next day, the Carnagie Hall leg of that tour received a critical savaging by Anthony Tomasini in the New York Times, particularly that Mozart 28.

I also remember, during a summer I lived in London, a Zurich Opera concert performance of Die Meistersinger with Jose van Dam as Sachs that, again, played up Wagner's debt to predecessors like Mozart and Schubert. It was the fleetest, lightest Meistersinger anyone had ever heard. For those of us who are Wagner-skeptics, it was perfect. But again, it recieved a critical savaging for being so understated and uninterested in traditional dramatic notions. But the beauty of the Zurich Opera orchestra was unlike anything I'd ever heard, a perfectly euphonious klang for the German tradition. This was clearly both an extremely unorthodox maestro and also a talent to be reckoned with, however strange his results.

But it can't be denied, FWM has given incredibly diffident performances, probably hundreds of times. At 30 years old, he was given the absolutely impossible task of following Klaus Tennstedt. Nobody could have succeeded a cosmic rocket like that with success, and next to Tennstedt's ultra-weight and drama, nothing could have sounded more disappointing than FWM's ultra-transparency and litheness. FWM, mystifyingly, made more recordings in London than he has ever since, and only one of them in my experience is a real necessity. The Bruckner 5 is worthy of Furtwangler, it both strips Bruckner of the cumbersome weight that weighs his music down unnecessarily (particularly in the fugues), and its Tennstedt worthy sense of drama also shows just how indebted Bruckner was to Beethoven.

Many artists who show extraordinary promise are given everything much too early. Their failures are entirely in the public eye, they sink or swim, they have to learn music under the pressure of constant touring and too high expectations. Some, usually the studious type like Abbado/Haitink/Davis/Barenboim, thrived in that pressure, at least eventually, while other more virtuoso types like Maazel/Mehta/Ozawa/Dutoit never developed probity to go with their innate musicality. And nobody quite remembered why they were ever taken so seriously.

Nobody really knew why FWM took over Cleveland from Dohnanyi either. At one point, FWM was rumored in the New York Times to imminently take over a great lower profile American orchestra like the St. Louis Symphony, but a curious thing happened: for the better part of twenty years, FWM kept being savaged in the press, but everybody agreed that the Cleveland Orchestra was as wonderful as ever. FWM programs, were, if anything, even more adventurous than Dohnanyi's, and if broadcasts were any indication, he particularly thrived in those eclectic, unknown pieces, both new and old, where there was no precedent and he had one of the world's great orchestras at his disposal to sink their teeth into unknown music with relish. And he was a true music director: conducting something like 16-18 weeks a year at a time when other music directors were fly by night and rarely stayed with the orchestra more than 10 weeks.

In more traditional repertoire, FWM has been completely obscured by that Austrian contemporary of his, less than two hours to his west: Manfred Honeck, who's worked miracles in Pittsburgh and created the best American orchestra for traditional repertoire since, well... Dohnanyi in Cleveland. But Honeck is ultra-traditional, and ventures into more modern repertoire only occasionally, and by many accounts is terribly ill at ease in it, the very area where FWM is at his best. Perhaps the golden age conductor Honeck most resembles Eugen Jochum - a humble Catholic who unassumingly gets the standard repertoire from the inside, and whose humility belies an ultrapassionate temperament, and who paid attention to current repertoire only cursorily. But if Honeck is Jochum, perhaps FWM is a modern Leinsdorf, a musical 'general practitioner' who can prepare an excellent performance of literally anything at all. But whereas Leinsdorf was a thoroughly unattractive personality whose unpleasantness came through in the coldness of his musicmaking, FWM now seems almost unceasingly warm. Perhaps the understatement of the past belied a shyness and introversion, because his musicmaking now seems as downright poetic and probing as Brendel or Lupu on the piano.

But an amazing thing has happened: over twenty years honing his craft with perhaps the world's most out of the spotlight great orchestra, FWM has genuinely become something resembling a master. Most of it is, thankfully, unfamiliar repertoire, the world doesn't need another Brahms cycle. But listen to that Schubert 9: it makes you long for a complete Schubert cycle from them, and is worthy of the very best Schubert, including Dohnanyi, who made two of the very best recordings of that work. But Dohnanyi is a structuralist, perhaps most comfortable in more unassailably German music like Mendelssohn, Schumann, Brahms. He is a musician of impeccable taste who finds the perfect tempo, balance, dynamics, and generally views works from the outside in. FWM, ever the Austrian, comes at Schubert from the inside out. We're suddenly in the world of D. 959 and 960. The sheer amount of subtle rubato is mind-blowing, and I wonder if the only conductors who've found this much color in Schubert 9 are Harnoncourt and Bruno Walter.

FWM's Prokofiev 3 is unlike any other Prokofiev 3 I've ever heard. I'm a Prokofiev skeptic too, I find his music unpleasant of character, much of it is deliberately ugly noise, much of it is deliberately over-simple, and rarely does he seem to take on the sophisticated expressive challenges of Shostakovich. But this Prokofiev is music, not noise, color, not ugliness. At times Mahler, at times Debussy. It's the first time I ever thought to myself that I could love Prokofiev 3. And then there's the string arrangement of Op. 132: the not even 14 minute Heiliger Dankgesang is obviously a little too fast but many of the pianissimo passages are spent on the fingerboard, and have an overtone-laden luminosity in a way you never could hear from even the best quartets. It almost sounds like the Tallis Fantasia. And the Varese Ameriques is maybe the greatest this very difficult work has ever received - the clarity is absolutely unprecedented, even by Boulez and Chailly, and the softer grain shows that Varese has a true debt to Debussy. There's plenty else, mostly unfamiliar, that I particularly look forward to listening to.

Those who didn't have opportunity to hear him regularly would never expect FWM (you remember his nickname...) to exhibit this kind of mastery. It is a different kind of mastery than the ultradramatic virtuosity we expect from most conductors. It is a much more inward, lyrical musicmaking that you rarely get from conductors, usually you only hear this kind of poetry from soloists, but FWM always was a very different kind of conductor, and he has truly come into his own and reveals himself as a very very unique kind of maestro.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OzMTYkysSr8

Underrated Classical Musicians - Frederick Jagel

 Before Jonas Kaufmann, there hasn't been a German tenor to make as big a splash in Italian repertoire since Frederick Jagel.

I know I know, Jagel was from Brooklyn, but come on, this is a guy who clearly grew up speaking German in his house. If Anna Moffo can be Italian Frederick Jagel can be German. And I know, German opera houses sang Italian opera in German until the sixties and there were all kinds of German singers who specialized in Italian repertoire, but Jagel was almost unique for his time in singing Italian repertoire in Italian.

There is an occasional hint of that stereotypical German bark, and yet just listen. This is a tenor who, for whatever reason, learned everything from Caruso, down to the atomic level. It may be an act of grand impersonation, but what an impersonation! What other way were non-Italians going to learn Italian style in the 1930s?

It's traditional wisdom that performers shouldn't learn anything from other performers because you might copy the other performer's mannerisms. But listen to the results - so often performers, particularly opera singers, are like blank slates. They don't know how to make the music come alive because they've rarely ever heard musicians who can.

I would advise performers to listen to recordings, and not just one recording.... Listening to one recording is damaging, listening to a dozen is an education. Whenever you're not practicing, listen to as many previous interpreters as you can, because you need to hear the range of interpretive possibilities. This recording shows that there are much worse sins out there than plagiarizing an interpretation. You're not standup comics, what you are is a medium through which the composer speaks; but the composer does not only speak through the score, they speak through the oral tradition, and the oral tradition can only be assimilated by hearing those who know it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WYtAfSxZ674&fbclid=IwAR2DRxuhb08yU28FbUTVO8P-NkFQCvP2MiybbzYyIGVK4zdnEgULTBPxUZQ

Tales from the Old New Land - Tale 3 - Parts 1-4

Dear Yaakov,

I really wish you would answer my letters more often than once every eighteen years. Your brother just wants to know that you’re doing OK and that your family is too. It would really be a help to not let me worry like this. I have to say, sometimes I still think that you think I secretly hate you but I keep telling you the same thing: we were young, we didn’t know what we were doing, and the real problem was Eema and Abba who were constantly playing us off each other like Hashem with Zaydie's head. I wish I thought you believed me and I know we thought we were going to kill each other for years even before the feud but like I keep saying, it was lonely all those years without you and it was so great to have you back in Canaan, I just wish we saw each other more often. Sorry to be so dramatic but that's how I feel.

Anyway, getting House of Esav off the ground is no Lag B’Omer picnic. No wonder Zaydie went crazy…. But just so you know I’ve got a big piece of news. Eliphaz has a son now: Korah, named after our kid you never had a chance to meet. He is incredibly cute and of course was born with a full head of red hair… I expect it will only be three years before we include him on our season ticket plan for the Petra Selahs. I’ve said this to you before but you would love stoneball, the game has so many statistics and records, so much history, and the commissioner just issued a ruling that Jews can own teams - I don’t suppose you’d be interested in a sports investment…….Would you?.... Seriously....

Eliphaz thinks our hunting business can vastly expand if we move into bounty hunting so once my grandson is thirty or forty I’m going to pay for Eliphaz to go to school to become a bounty hunter. I think it’s a waste of money but as I’m sure you remember he was always so eager to do what I told him, so this gives him something of his own to be passionate about.

The kids all say hi. Reuel is getting pretty loopy with his new religion and keeps talking about going to Midian to study how to be a priest for some god named Baal. If Dad could see what’s happening to Reuel he’d go blind... Yeush is a big help with everything, always happy to do whatever we need; cleaning stables, watching sheep, gutting the animals we bring back, he’s just a very nice kid.

Anyway, aside from the news that I’m now a Zaydie I‘ve got no reason more urgent than that to write this letter, I just thought you might be interested to know what your nephews were up to and want to check on you to make sure you’re doing OK.

Love,

Esav

-------

Dear Yaakov,

It's been a good three years since we got a letter from you. I realize that when we all live to a hundred fifty that's like six months, but it really hurts me that you're not responding to anything I write. I'm sure you've got your hands full with twelve sons (seriously, that sounds like sheol), but it really wouldn't kill you to occasionally just let me know how you're doing because when I don't hear from you I figure things must be really hard.

But life here in Seir is so much nicer than in Canaan. I swear on both Yahweh and Qos that if you saw this area you'd drop everything to move out here - there are wadis everywhere and it rains three times a year! They have these growths called "trees", they're like our bushes but much thicker and harder to break - not that they're any match for your brother but I guarantee you've never seen anything like them in Canaan. Maybe you saw them when you were living in Mesopotamia but these are obviously much closer, you really ought to come see them. Eliphaz and I were even allowed to cut some of them down, so we brought the wood to Petra and built a permanent summer home! It's a really wonderful place, we have outdoor plumbing and we can make weekend trips to Aqaba and Eilat to go to the beach. In Eilat they let women on the beach go topless, there are all day lifeguards for swimming, and you can even rent a boat to go out fishing (and oh my qoz the quality of the hookah in that place...).

Unfortunately when we first built the summer home some Nabateans tried to burn it down once or twice so I hired a live-in security guard named Tzachi who's really reliable. He keeps guard over it when I'm not there and during the rainy month he puts a tarp over it. I may have to find new help soon though. He's really old and a little eccentric. He keeps bleating like a sheep so I think he must have Tourettes.

Honestly Yaakov, you could come live with us in Seir and still hire a couple sons to watch over your properties in Canaan. I'm sure Reuven and Shimon must be old enough that you can leave them in charge of that part of the business. At our age we both deserve a break from business and you should leave it to your kids while you still have the chance for a long retirement.

Anyway, please just think about it.

Love,

Esav

------

Dear Yaakov,

I'm really begging here, please respond to this one because I so badly need your input on this.

Tzachi is now telling me his name is short for Yitzhak, he's from Canaan and HE's the son of Avraham who Zaydie almost killed. In other words, he's Yitzhak and Dad is Yishmael!

And that's not all. Tzachi was willing to die and when Zaydie flinched he yelled at him to finish the job, but Zaydie fainted before he could kill Tzachi. Then Eliezer untied Tzachi and told him to leave Canaan and never come back or else Eliezer would finish the job and sacrifice him to Enki!

And there's more. He also claims Sarah never died but left Avraham to go on the road with Tzachi and they quickly settled in a place called Mecca! And not only that, he claims Abba visited him in Mecca three times and the dates check out with when Abba was on the business trips to Gerah before the family move!

At first I figured this must be a complete grandmother's tale and he's just trying to get adopted into my house, but I've never told him any of the family dirt, and both Eliphaz or Yeush swore a blood oath that they didn't either. I figure the only person who could have told him is Korah, but Korah's still only twenty-three. He's barely not a toddler anymore and much too young to understand anything about this! So how can Tzachi's story be anything but true?

Tzachi claims two servants of Avraham named Paebel and Keret took him to Mecca, where a voice told him to build a cube. I don't know what the fuck that means but it sounds like he's as crazy as Zaydie and in just the same way. He'd been living for a century in the Paran Desert with the Jurhun until he was thrown out for begging everyone in the tribe to put him on their paschal alter and finish the sacrifice his father started. Now he's constantly begging me and my sons to kill him.

Please Yaakov, I need you here right away and I need your advice about what to do with this guy. It's likely that he's our uncle and all this time he might have been the rightful heir to House Avraham. This guy wants me to kill him, so if you want me to do it so that word doesn't get out about this, it would the easiest thing in the world. The only reason I haven't yet is because I suspect you're going to be squeamish about what Yahweh really wants so I know I ought to ask you before I do anything.

Please, either come or tell me what to do about this, I think we need to settle this right away, say, in the next two years or so,

Love,

Esav

-----

Dear Esav,

For Yahweh's sake, just come back to Canaan with this guy and we'll sort this thing out. I swear I need this right now like a hole in the head. You must remember that word 'Tzuris' that Zaydie always used, so I don't know yet if any of this is true but I kind of don't care right now. You have no idea the tzuris I have with my kids. I'm sorry I haven't written you more often but when you get here I'll explain what happened. There are enough lies going on in my house already and I'm not going to let this guy get killed just to cover up yet another one I didn't know about.

Just come as soon as possible, I should have lots of availability in four years,

Yaakov

Tales from the Old New Land - Tale 3 - Parts 1 and 2

Tales from the Old New Land - Tale 3 - Parts 1 and 2

Dear Yaakov,

I really wish you would answer my letters more often than once every eighteen years. Your brother just wants to know that you’re doing OK and that your family is too. It would really be a help to not let me worry like this. I have to say, sometimes I still think that you think I secretly hate you but I keep telling you the same thing: we were young, we didn’t know what we were doing, and the real problem was Eema and Abba who were constantly playing us off each other like Hashem with Zaydie's head. I wish I thought you believed me and I know we thought we were going to kill each other for years even before the feud but like I keep saying, it was lonely all those years without you and it was so great to have you back in Canaan, I just wish we saw each other more often. Sorry to be so dramatic but that's how I feel.

Anyhow, getting House of Esav off the ground is no Lag B’Omer picnic. No wonder Zaydie was so crazy…. But just so you know I’ve got a big piece of news. Eliphaz has a son now: Korah, named after our kid you never had a chance to meet. He is incredibly cute and of course was born with a full head of red hair… I expect it will only be three years before we include him on our season ticket plan for the Petra Selahs. I’ve said this to you before but you would love stoneball, the game has so many statistics and records, so much history, and the commissioner just issued an edict that Israelites can own teams - I don’t suppose you’d be interested in a sports investment…….Would you?.... Seriously....

Eliphaz thinks our hunting business can vastly expand if we move into bounty hunting so once my grandson is thirty or forty I’m going to pay for Eliphaz to go to school to become a bounty hunter. I think it’s a waste of money but as I’m sure you remember he was always so eager to do what I told him, so this gives him something of his own to be passionate about.

The kids all say hi. Reuel is getting pretty loopy with his new religion and keeps talking about going to Midian to study how to be a priest for Baal. If Dad could see what’s happening to Reuel he’d go blind... Yeush is a big help with everything, always happy to do whatever we need; cleaning stables, watching sheep, gutting the animals we bring back, he’s just a very nice kid.

Anyway, aside from the news that I’m now a Zaydie I‘ve got no reason more urgent than that to write this letter, I just thought you might be interested to know what your nephews were up to and want to check on you and make sure you’re doing OK.

Love,

Esav

-------

Dear Yaakov,

It's been a good three years since we got a letter from you. I realize that when we all live to a hundred fifty that's like six months, but it really hurts me that you're not responding to anything I write. I'm sure you've got your hands full with twelve sons (seriously, that sounds like sheol), but it really wouldn't kill you to occasionally just let me know how you're doing because when I don't hear from you I figure things must be really hard.

But life here in Seir is so much nicer than in Canaan. I swear on both Yahweh and Qos that if you saw this area you'd drop everything to move out here - there are wadis everywhere and it rains three times a year! They have these growths called "trees", they're like our bushes but much thicker and harder to break - not that they're any match for your brother but I guarantee you've never seen anything like them in Canaan. Maybe you saw them when you were living in Mesopotamia but these are obviously much closer, you really ought to come see them. Eliphaz and I were even allowed to cut some them down, so we brought the wood to Petra and built a permanent summer home! It's a really wonderful place, we have outdoor plumbing and we can make weekend trips to Aqaba and Eilat to go to the beach. In Eilat they let women on the beach go topless, there are all day lifeguards for swimming, and you can even rent a boat to go out fishing (and oh my qoz the quality of the hookah in that place...).

Unfortunately some Nabateans tried to burn the summer home down once or twice but I've hired a live-in security guard named Tzachi who's really reliable. He keeps guard over it when I'm not there and during the rainy month he puts a tarp over it. He's a little eccentric though and keeps bleating like a sheep. I think he must have Tourettes.

Honestly Yaakov, you could come live with us in Seir and still hire a couple sons to watch over your properties in Canaan. I'm sure Reuven and Shimon must be old enough that you can leave them in charge of that part of the business. At our age we both deserve a break from business and you should leave it to your kids while you still have the chance for a long retirement.

Anyway, please just think about it.

Love,

Esav

------

800 Words #8: Bob Dylan is 80

 Ten-ish years ago, I was conducting a choir in DC and made a choral arrangement of I Shall Be Released, inspired by its star-studded performance in The Last Waltz. I made a video of the choir singing it at a farmer's market. The video sucked. The singers couldn't hear each other outdoors and went flat, and the arrangement wasn't very good to begin with; but the chorus needed promotional material, so I posted the video online.

Within TWENTY SECONDS lawyers sent my youtube page a form letter informing how to give the proper attribution to Dylan and that failure to do so immediately would result in youtube taking the video down.

What amazes me about the Dylan mythos is how easily people buy into it when he tried so hard to create it. Dylan incarnates 'American authenticity' but he's as coiffed a product as Tom Cruise. Dylan mastered the persona of the folk hero, and he did so through a team of record executives, lawyers, and agents. Even the Copland 'hoedown' with which he enters the stage every night screams imposterdom. The real problem with Dylan was never his voice, it's the delivery. There's nothing of the real person in it. I always want to scream STOP PRETENDING YOU'RE JOHNNY FUCKING APPLESEED!

Dylan's greatness as a songwriter is so beyond doubt that if you doubt it you're not looking hard enough, but you could spend your whole life looking through them for insight into the human condition and not find a single one. As a human being, Dylan is The Beatles' Nowhere Man. He became the voice of a generation by the time he was twenty-one, he never knew an adult life as anything but 'Bob Dylan.' Where's the Robert Zimmerman beneath him? Where is the Minnesota childhood in anything but the Christmas albums (and did any of us want to hear three CD's of Christmas Classics sung by the Angel of Death?)? Where are his parents? Where's his brother? Where's the Jewish inheritance in anything but an Israel song and some Chabad shit which I'm sure he wishes never happened? Where are his children?!? He writes lots of songs about brief relationships with women, but memorable songs about long-term relationships or even friendships are very few.

There's no true sense in Dylan that he shares any part of his deepest self with us. He wants to have an advantage over us: he speaks to us, but we never speak to him. He commands worship from the music world rather than love. His biggest fans talk about him in religious terms reserved for a deity, and like the religious faithful, they seem sadomasochistic-ally disappointed by the vast majority of everything he gives them. McCartney and Springsteen may be just as manufactured, but there're real human beings beneath the personas who love their fans and want to be loved; but Dylan thrives on indifference to fans, and fans eat it up.

Dylan plagiarized his Nobel Speech entirely from Cliffs Notes, that was proven immediately, but he's also proof that you can be a simultaneous naif and a great artist. The implicit meanings behind his songs are so infinite that he's as much a fact of American poetry as Dickinson and Frost. They're sublime things, entirely American creations that sing a democratic worldview. They have nothing to do with the hierarchical world of old Europe, yet our relationship to Dylan is as fascist as anything in Wagner.

Dylan's problem is not a lack of greatness. His songs are awesome creations ringing with religion, history, myth, grandeur, and meaning, but they make us think of the world as a beautiful earthquake. The Dylan worldview sees violence and inhumanity as something epic and beautiful. The way we're moved by Dylan's best songs isn't to love each other more, but to think of ourselves as important because of how we take part in history. The Beatles teach us how to be small as well as great, but when Dylan tries to be human, he only shows us how inhumane he is.

I think the right way to view Dylan is with a mixture of affection, skepticism, and a weird kind of fear. Dylan incarnates American romanticism; not romanticism as in love songs, but the romanticism of reaching out for infinity - Dylan conjures an image of a transcendent world where we can create the world as we dream it. But we can't, and in that way, his songs are a beautiful lie. Art's as much fakery as truth, so Dylan is nevertheless a great artist, but he's also an imposter.

"I May Have Been A Little Hasty In My Sweeping Declaration Tuesday."

Evan Tucker is not intentionally provocative, he's crazy, there's a difference. An intentionally provocative person doesn't leak all his private shit over the internet where a thousand people can mock it in private, or bring it to light whenever they want to use against him, or use what he posted about others against them.

An intentionally provocative person wants people to feel worse because others' discomfort gives him pleasure. A crazy person makes people feel bad because he already does, and spends hours vomiting every thought he's had over the course of a day in public at the first sign of stress. What he posts may be provocative, but he thinks it's always been clear that behind the posts is a lunatic who's barely held it together for the nearly ten years he's been in Baltimore, and if he seems any more sane than that, it's because there's one way in which he's fortunate: his mania endows him the appearance of intelligence. The lunacy has cost him nearly everything, and he's quite sure it will cost him still more.

No matter how Tucker phrased finding Baltimore/Baltimoreans 'loathsome' in the other day's controversial post, it was an exaggeration in one of the many moments when his person becomes whatever emotion overwhelms him at that moment. He is extremely irritated by Baltimore, but he certainly doesn't hate it or most people within it, particularly friends....

He does fear Baltimore, but his fears about Baltimore are apiece with his fears for a country and a whole world that, to his obviously flawed perception, resembles ever more the whirlpooled contours of his head. Just as his head shouts future misfortune to him constantly, it shouts to him more and more every day about people he knows: it makes him fret the direction he's going, the city's going, the country's going, the world's going, and also the direction his own friends are going. In doing so, he is being both selfish and scared for us all. It's partially a question of fearing that no matter how ridiculous it sounded when relatives told us about how gentiles can only be friends up to a point before they stab you in the back might turn out true, and also a question of what becomes of people he loves once they turn into the fanatics he fears.

Everything which is true for other minorities is true as well for Jews, except that with Jews, it always seems inconvenient to consider Jews the underprivileged until one day you wake up and every Jew you've ever known is gone.

And more than anything else, it's a question of nuance vs. belief. Nutters don't ever have the luxury of letting go of their skepticism, but if you normies believe whatever you believe too passionately, you become the psychos, not us. We know the signs, because when a delirious mind is at its most frantic, it sees connections which aren't there - invisible structures for which there's no hard evidence, or mythologies and cultures whose truths seem incontrovertible. There is a part of the brain which craves meaning, and meaning comes from learning about the humanities and spirituality. You don't have to believe in the religions you learn about, you don't have to like the books and art you study, but that kind of learning is the healthy place to find meaning in life - and speaking personally, without them, he would have been in a permanent looney bin by college.

But when people don't have broad humanistic or spiritual learning, they try to find meaning in the realm of politics, a world so complicated that there is no possible conceptual meaning. There is only statistics and practical applications. If you want politics to conform to unbreakable rules, you will never ever reach success. You'll only reach failure, and double down with every attempt to make the world conform to your vision, and eventually, no solution seems extreme enough and all solutions can be justified.

When people are being honest with themselves, they know that life gets deeply, deeply complicated. Maybe it's Tucker's own failure of imagination, but he, who lives irrationality every day, doesn't understand how people who know in their bones that life is complicated forget their better angels so easily. Once a one paragraph political ideology tells them an invisible system or a simple mythology is responsible for ordering life in the fucked up way it does, everything becomes justified to prove it right, and every year they come closer to the realization that if they want to dismantle the oppressive invisible system they think exists, they'd have to dismantle the whole world. If that ever happened, Tucker would be remembered the sane one, and you're the ones who'd be remembered by your grandchildren as the nutcases.

Leaving aside Trumpism and the modern Republican party, for whom the problems are so obvious that they require no comment on social media, there is another problem which the perpetual reaction to Israel makes manifest.

There are so many people we know in Baltimore who identify with varying forms of idealistic socialism which tells them all sorts of things are possible from a world without war to a world where all people get the material goods they need.

Tucker doesn't think they're so ignorant as to not realize the century their ancestors just lived through, but there has to be an element of willful ignorance to it. When progressive people decide to rehabilitate socialism after socialism so easily turned into Soviet communism, what is to stop conservatives in the next generation from rehabilitating fascism because 'it's not Nazism.'? That vine's already beginning to choke us.

We're going to have a lot more immigrants by 2050, and authoritarian reactionaryism is going to seem a very attractive option to our children's generation - not just the dumbasses who followed Trump, but the similarly sensible great-grandchildren of moderate Reagan voters who were so easily convinced in the 80s that there was no contradiction between greater liberty and the loss of liberty.

Socialists claim we need a more robust social safety net, and that's obviously true, but modern American liberalism has always been the ideology of social safety net; but of course, nobody likes liberalism anymore because liberalism did not rid the world of conservatism, and now is equated with a vague all-purpose insult 'neoliberal' which exists as a gaslight to make people equate liberalism with conservatism, so that economic revolution seems the only tenable option.

Liberalism is also associated with American imperialism abroad but.... did anybody see what happened whenever America's refused to intervene? Does anyone remember what happened when Soviet and Russian sponsored dictators from Mao to Assad did? Whatever figleaf of concern the CIA had for human rights is something the KGB and FSB never had, and even if we are responsible for Seko and Suharto, dictators like Seko and Suharto spilled just the right amount of blood for what the Soviet sphere wanted out of their proxy tyrants.

People don't want to hear that, they want to hear that you can pursue policy without getting your hands filthy, because they're insufficiently grounded by experience into thinking that you can live in the world without blemishing it, and those who would blemish the world immediately exploit their good faith. Idealism is never an option. How often is it an option to keep your nose clean while living one meaningful life at a time? Why would cleanliness be an option when people live a hundred million lives at a time?

Reading lots of books, fiction and non-fiction, should teach very well that there are only the 'less filthy' options. And therefore, when it comes to a peoplehood who can only survive by getting their hands dirty, they become the great enemy because the rules of what is good and bad seem turned on their heads. Zionists and Jews seem imperialists because they have a land barely the size of a small American state, they seem bellicose because their existence is perpetually threatened by a nuclear/chemical attack, they seem like aggressors because leaders on the other side constantly threaten genocide, and they seem like grifters of the US government because they get funding from the US which twenty other countries should have.

When you're crazy enough to view the world in two dimensions, none of this is clear, but when you remember how complicated the world is, Israel just seems as flawed as any normal country, with all the same problems, only their problems are exacerbated by hundreds of millions wishing their annihilation.

Nobody knows what comes next, for Baltimore, for the world, for Tucker, least of all himself. He said what he said in a moment of deep rage, which he's been known to have from hour to hour... but just because you're paranoid doesn't mean the world isn't out to get you.

What he does know is that in Baltimore, unlike his DC years, people over time always seem to decide they like him less. Not that he should, yet again, spill his tea in public, but he had a kind of social mass-extinction in 2015 brought on by a semi-breakdown during which he realized that in his corner of Baltimore, friendship is a much better game talked than by DC, but bonded by gossamer.

In the span of four months Tucker lost three bands, a choir he conducted, a girlfriend, and perhaps a dozen close friendships. Why? He's never quite figured it out except to say that he might have been a little more difficult than his usually ornery self, a personality of whose nature they were never under illusions, but he was not particularly difficult by his own august standards.... success never wore Tucker well and no doubt the stress from one part of his life carried over into the other parts. But to this day he wonders, what changed in the minds of so many people who already knew the roller coaster they signed up for?

Nevertheless, it's very difficult after that to believe that friendships in the various 'scenes' all we Baltimore bohemians frequent is anything more than ersatz and that people aren't looking for ways to turn whole social groups on each other. Life here was never the same thereafter and he has spent every year since wondering what he might do to finish off the rind which was left from his extended Baltimore honeymoon. If nobody in Baltimore saw him again except as this daily avatar he's always been, what would they have lost? Almost all his close friends live elsewhere, even his remaining close friends from the Baltimore years have mostly moved.

Perhaps all that the other day was posted by someone not quite in his right mind (in other words, a normal day around here...), but nobody has the zest for life in their 30s that they had in the innocence of their 20s. How much moreso is that true for their 40s? Regardless of whether he does it for spite or mental/physical health, going back to the party/show/bar scene may well kill him. He'd obviously rather it didn't, and if he did die at a party, he'd rather it be in the presence of company he trusts...

Underrated Classical Music: The 23rd Psalm

 I'm preparing to lead the service for a very close relative soon to pass. It could be tomorrow, it could be six months, it will probably be closer to tomorrow. She's in terrible pain, she's on narcotics, she can't watch movies or listen to music anymore, we're always worried she's going to fall and break a hip while going to the bathroom, all I can do is hug her as much as I can and remain in my parents house for however long it takes.

It's customary at Jewish funerals to chant the 23rd Psalm. Somehow I've never learned to sing the traditional melody, I've only heard it. Once the melody is in your bloodstream, it does not leave. It haunts you all day every day. I will not share it. Like so much Jewish music, no recorded version does justice to what you hear in person, and certainly none on youtube does. Nothing matches hearing a melody like this sung by a group of Orthodox Jews - it's like hearing a Welsh choir for the first time.

It reminds you that music's natural state is oral. It's not meant to be written, and in many ways, written music is a mark of decadence. When you hear the simple power of a melody, particularly a religious one, intoned entirely by ordinary laymen with didactic purpose, there is nothing in Mahler or Shostakovich or even Bach which carries that much devastating power, that much history, that much pain. It's the music of essential need, passed down generation to generation in origins lost to eternity, yet too urgent to ever forget. Perhaps time has crystalized the melody, until its arrived to us in a process of refinement that took millenia to find its most perfect and emotionally articulate version of itself.

I've often made fun of the Jewish musical tradition. By any objective standard, it sucks. Music is so trivial to Jewish life that barely a single musician thought to write their music down in Western notation until the 20th century.

But music was not meant to be art. It is not meant to be decorative, it did not even achieve a complex written notation or polyphonic independence (so far as we know) until 4000 years after the first written documents. Music gives definition to primal emotion. Melody documents our emotional process, and while the classical musics of the world document a more complex emotional process, they cannot document those primal moments, individual and communal but so often ceremonial, in which humanity stands in its greatest emotional need

800 (852) Words #7: History's Cracks

Sunday's post was about an obscure Uprising in 1863 Poland.

Why?

Moral ambiguity follows Jews wherever we live because, as I said yesterday, the only place which accommodates us is history's faultlines. Jews are the world's unwelcome guests; we don't belong anywhere, so the morality of our living anywhere will be questioned.

So who do you think were the likely victims of that peasant uprising? Do you really think it was Polish aristocrats barricaded in their manors, or was it the middlemen handling their money, the administrators collecting rent, the defenseless shtetl-dwellers?

And who was the most important champion of the revolt? Karl Marx, a German Jew, born to privilege in the one country where Jewish security seemed complete, dreaming of revolution as only the privileged can.

Marx ruined German Jewry. The German psyche has a direct line from Marx to Hitler. The founders of Marxism and Nazism both grew up on German speaking lands where Jews and Gentiles had every reason to feel hope. German lands were the symbol of everything progressive: science, the arts, social welfare, economic security, religious tolerance. Yet a wealthy German Jew self-exiled to London and envisioned history's most radical transformation.

There's no certain explanation for why, but when you read enough history, something sticks out: why do people long to smash things up at the moments of their greatest prosperity? It's almost as though chaos of nature calls to us at the moments we're most shielded from it. There seems to be a homing device in humans that returns us to the world's madness.

Privilege reminds us of what we still don't have. It teases us with how close we are to better lives. Whether you're liberal or conservative, alt-right or intersectional SJW, that homing signal is the pull all Americans feel right now. If we've achieved prosperity, it makes us less satisfied, not more. Modern America's a better country than ever before, yet we've all been miserable since 2000.

If that seems true for modern America, how much more true for Israel? If American life is much better than 75 years ago, how much better is life for Jews and Israelis? The closer Israelis get to security, the more paranoid they get about losing it. The more Israel succeeds, the more humiliated they feel about the world's criticism.

Humans can deal with danger, they can't deal with humiliation. In danger, they form a heroic self-image that covers them in glory; but humiliation takes away their heroism. It reminds them of their powerlessness and shows the distance between who they are and what they want.

Objectively, there are worse places than Palestine; but to survive, Israel instilled policies which seem designed for maximum Palestinian humiliation; which makes Palestinians embrace a totalitarian ideology. Ever since, there's been a self-perpetuating cycle which exposes the greatest problem of our generation: survival vs. dignity.

Personally, I'd argue that dignity, or pride, is a vestige from the era of 'honor.' I believe no dignity's possible until we guarantee life itself; but billions of people disagree and jeopardize survival to pursue dignity. Christianity and Islam caught on because they gave people pride in themselves, so did Communism and Fascism, so now does MAGA and SJW. Pride is the center of the Nazi worldview, the Cossack, the Inquisition, the early Muslim, and the Roman.

The entirety of the Jewish story, from Abraham onward, is the story of delaying pride to survive, and when Jews like Netanyahu conjure the same dignity for us that other cultures have, Jews get killed. The only pride to take in the Jewish condition is that against all odds, we're still here.

As ever for Jews, Israelis live on the world's ideological fault line. Israel/Palestine is two worldviews that couldn't be more different facing off in a crisis existential for them both. If Palestinians don't stop Israeli occupation, they live centuries of imprisonment. If Israelis don't stop Palestinian terror, a nuclear or chemical weapon kills twice as many Israelis in a day as Israelis ever killed Arabs.

Do Palestinians deserve to be lumped with Nazis and the Inquisition? Of course not, but Middle Eastern dictators would had they ever been successful. They yearned for the power of a Hitler - including Yassir Arafat. Any dictator in the region could have resettled Palestinian refugees, and Israelis would have paid them for the service; but it serves dictators' purposes to keep Palestinians perpetually on Israeli territory. Since 1948, fundamentalist Muslims viewed Jewish control of Israel as a humiliation. Mohammed exiled Jews from Medina for treachery, and to avenge this humiliation, millions across the Middle East are happy to make Palestinians into martyrs for their holy cause.

Whether or not the Israeli worldview is right doesn't matter. There's no 'right' in a conflict when both sides are rejected by the world, there is only two peoples drawing on their traditions to find ways to live their lives. If either conceded to the other's worldview - if Israel decided to stop existing, if Palestinians agreed to humiliation forever, the conflict would end; but until the world changes in ways we can't predict, there's no end to this conflict.

What Terrifies Me

 Almost exactly seven years ago, I sat on the seat of my bike on the Charles Street sidewalk at the western corner of Penn Station, uncertain and afraid, as Park Heights Avenue squared off against North Avenue. Closer to Penn Station was a protest against the Israeli occupation. Farther away from the station was a demonstration in support of the IDF. On both sides were people I knew who provoked a terribly complicated web of desires - for approval, respect, esteem, love, and all the rest.... and I knew that by yet again not fully taking a side, I'd get none from either.

Like Larry David in the Palestinian chicken episode of “Curb Your Enthusiasm,” I felt, perhaps I was, directly in its center, with friends on either side, and tried to drive out visions of somebody pulling out an Uzi or pushing a button on a suicide bomb and mowing us all down. Demonstrations like that are exactly how civil wars get started.

Every Israeli military operation is like a holiday ritual for me in which I’m purified through a trial by emotional fire. I have experienced many visions of hell over the years, one of the more comic ones is what inevitably happens when Israel comes up. For years, I'd go about North Baltimore, which views me as the token Jew who mounts unconscionable defenses of Israel, then go back to Pikesville, which views me as the token progressive who mounts unconscionable defenses of Palestine. It used to be intellectual fire, but I made sure to read up so that I know more about the 'matzav' than anyone who talks to me to the point that the statistics can flow off my tongue without awkwardness.

Nevertheless, the tragicomic terror remains. As far as terrors go, it's obviously not much. My person is in no way threatened, but I have all too much experience that one wrong word on this subject of subjects is hours of verbal combat followed by followup fights that don't cease for years. People come up to me and ask me to 'explain' why people who disagree with them believe what they do, and inevitably I say something they find offensive, at which point they explain why people who disagree with them are so clearly wrong and they're so clearly right.

People who are not Jewish, hell, people who are, do not understand that Jews live in the cracks of history. We should not be alive now, we shouldn't have been alive since the Romans destroyed us after the Bar Kochba Rebellion in 135 AD, so the morality of our living in any place at all will be called into question, and it is only a matter of time before we're called into question in the United States - I can only pray that it doesn't happen until after my baby nephew is at least Bubbie's age and his children are safely elsewhere.

Jews are the world's unwelcome guests; we don't belong anywhere. How do you think, for those of you who know what it is (and you all should), the 'Wandering Jew' became a popular medieval legend?

The Wandering Jew is the Jew who taunted Jesus on the way to crucifixion, and is therefore condemned to wander the earth for all time until Jesus comes again. It was a myth which explained to Christians that there is a people expelled from country to country for well over a thousand years, whose suffering is eternal, and nevertheless, entirely deserve it.

No matter where we end up, there is always a reason good enough to throw us out. Every culture thinks itself having learned the lessons of the past, but every culture eventually comes to the same conclusion - that Jews are parasites, that we secretly control the reins of government to advance our own interests, that we bribe public officials to favor us. In every country the underclass thinks we collaborate with the establishment to oppress them, the establishment thinks we collaborate with the underclass to subvert them.

Had the Nakba happened to us, it would have been just a small and fitting coda to a much larger event, (and hell, the Nakba DID happen to us. As many Jews were thrown out of Arab lands as Arabs were thrown out of Israel) but since it happened to someone else in a manner that was partially of our doing - and not entirely, no matter what you think you know - we're now told that because of our murder at the hands of Nazis, we of all people should be held to a standard nobody else is.

And all the while, the worst humanitarian crisis of the 21st century is STILL happening directly to Israel's northeast - a crisis caused by the very Arab Spring people were so keen to welcome ten years ago and then pretend it never happened. As many as 594,000 dead in Syria and 6.6 million refugees (!), nary a single protest since 2011, not a single article shared, not a single demand that people speak up for them. Where is your rage for them? Where is your passion for social justice? Where is your demand that Assad answer for crimes worthy of the worst butchers in human history? Would it help if an iron dome missile fell in Syrian territory? Would it help if some AIPAC money went to resettle some Syrians in Israel? Because in the case of Syrian Druze I guarantee it has.

For years I've argued tooth and nail with other Jews that we have to give greater respect to Palestinians, to Baltimoreans, to Arabs and Muslims, to the African-American community, and the whole time, their argument back is that they'd spit our respect back into our faces. It's a very Christian notion that you should love people who hate you back, and Jewish history seems to demonstrate that Christian love is an impractical concept....

But now I'll tell you what terrifies me and keeps me up past five in the morning. What scares me most of all, by far, is the fact that the future is coming very clearly into focus for most American Jews, and the future of the Jewish people as a community who survives whatever comes next can only be with the Republican party, and if Jews like me stay with Democrats, we do so knowing that there is no way the Democratic party can ever again properly support us without alienating its new base.

The number of Jews who vote Republican increases in every decade. The Jewish future is so clearly its past. If the future of America is perpetual rule by the Republican party, then we will become, yet again, the model minority, the cudgel by which an authoritarian Republican party beats up every other American minority for not achieving on our level. We will never be the bosses, but certain fortunate among us will be their moneymen, middlemen, managers, the face of the establishment whom every member of the underclass deals with.

And as always, when rebellion comes and the authoritarian establishment gets thrown off, the establishment will be fine, but as always before, the populist mob will come for us instead, and if there is no Israel, there will yet again be no place to go but into the sea.

A Brief and Sad Message that I'm Sure I'll Regret in Fifteen Minutes

I just can't continue with most Baltimore peeps. I'm terribly sorry. It's so long past time and was always going to end this way. It's just too hard to keep going knowing the gulf between what they believe and what I do. It's not a safe space for Jews. That might not even matter if the left enclaves I've associated with since I got here didn't insist on safe spaces for everyone but Jews. It's only a matter of time before the slightest Jewish self-assertion is prohibited unless followed by a blanket condemnation of the Jewish community. The hypocrisy is so breathtaking.

There are all kinds of leftist Jews who give cover to the greater community of noxiousness exactly the way gay Republicans do and sell out the whole Jewish people. They don't speak for the Jewish people and in the long term will cause yet another chapter in the long history of our destruction. I don't pretend I have two legs to mount this high horse as there are many moments and periods of my life that provoke terrible shame in me. Nevertheless, after ten years here I can't pretend anymore that I don't find the whole ethos of North Baltimore hipster loathsome - gentile, Jewish, and every supposed variation within that allegedly diverse bloc. I know they judge me on an individual level for disagreeing with them loudly, and it would be fruitless to fight anymore against the urge to do the same.

I don't condone the Netanyahu government, but it wouldn't matter to most of them whether the Prime Minister is Netanyahu or Rabin, the existence of Israel is their problem, their problem's the idea that Jews can defend themselves at all against yet another regime who wishes to blot us from the planet. You all seem quite comfortable with Jews so long as we're already dead.

If I have any strength of character at all, I won't be coming to parties anymore, I won't be at bars or shows except at classical concerts where I know I won't see many people. I'm sure I won't be missed very much, and even if I obviously wish for your results to have no progress, may you all find the meaning in life you seek.

Management

Conductor Comments: Riccardo Muti

 

Riccardo Muti is having a roller coaster of a year. Doubtless Muti has a very generous side too, but he demonstrated yet again this week what a hothead he can be. I almost feel sorry for him, almost... To be honest, he's a charter member of my 'pantheon of the overrated.' His virtuosity is beyond doubt, the tales of his musicianship are a mile long, but in my opinion the general narcissism of his character comes out in his musicmaking, which is usually either maniacally tense and high strung or pompous and boring (ducks). Sometimes, the high drama was appropriate, and when it was, it was absolutely thrilling, but there were moments in Mozart when he achieved the singular distinction of brutalizing the music while barely being able to hear anything but the strings... and moments when his pompous conception of Beethoven can put us to sleep.

For all that one can strike at Muti about, he does have extraordinary virtues. He clearly understands the operatic tradition in a manner that even Milanese like Abbado and Chailly don't. His temperament is obviously operatic down to the very fibers of his soul, and it's a shame he never learned to work as a collaborator with singers, because he obviously has the most incredible sense of drama. A conductor like Ettore Panizza shows that it is possible to simultaneously follow singers and simultaneously surround their voices with inflammatory drama.

Muti is to the orchestra what Cziffra was to the keyboard - at his best in music that can be played as showpieces: Berlioz, Liszt, Prokofiev, Tchaikovsky, Scriabin, Ravel, Pictures at an Exhibition, Scheherazade, early Stravinsky. And yet, like a true archetypal Italian, against all that sensual virtuosity there are all kinds o sacred works in which he really understands the existential stakes: an amazing Vivaldi Gloria, a Mozart Requiem that works in spite of the extreme luxury of the sound he gets, and of course, his 5234524324 Verdi Requiems...

So then there's the Italian opera... It is both great and terrible. The sense of drama is unmatched until you go back as far as de Sabata and Panizza. And yet, it's all Muti, Muti, MUTI. Muti consistently got the world's best singers, but what singer can possibly give their best amid that cyclone? When you recall a Muti opera recording, you recall hundreds of orchestral details, but it's almost impossible to remember which singers are on them. He permits them no interpolations, no characterization, yet allows himself unlimited liberties with tempo, rubato, and dynamics. Most of them are essential recordings to hear, so dramatic it's as though Furtwangler or Mengelberg is on the podium, but they're *essential with an asterisk, because Muti never really seems to understand that opera, particularly Italian opera, is about singing. Perhaps he's at his very best in Verdi's earlier works, like Atilla, when Verdi's drama is consistently at its boiling point and he can simultaenously bring out the musical virtues which singer interventions doubtlessly did their part to cover up.

But then there are those few pieces in which Muti truly seems like a master among masters who can go deep: Mendelssohn's Italian, Brahms 2, Mozart Linz and Prague, Dvorak 5. On special occasions, there are symphonic works Muti really understands all the way down. And above all, there's Schumann. There is something bipolar about Muti's musicmaking, so full of highs and lows, that makes me wonder if he understands Schumann on a level we don't even know about. I sometimes wonder why such an ultradramatic conductor like Muti ignores Mahler, perhaps it's because the highs and lows of Mahler's neurosis strike a little too close to home.

One of the odd features of his recent performances was that as he mellowed, the high strung temperament which made him compelling was gone. His music making is now so low-key that it seems almost Giulini-like, but whereas Giulini's or Colin Davis could leaven their slowness with humanity and spirituality, it just sounds with Muti like padded luxury. I'm almost gladdened to see that Muti still has some fight left in him. Perhaps he can get some of the old fiamma back.

So here is one of Muti's finest achievements: Schumann in Vienna, one of great Schumann cycles ever set down (his Philharmonia cycle is also up there). Would that Muti always conducted with this taste, understanding, and emotional generosity. This is great musicianship. It's not too late for Muti to exhibit more achievements like this. He still looks barely 65, my hunch is we'll have him around for at least another 15 years. Hopefully, like Blomstedt, he will have a 'late late style' which can still put him near the very top of the pantheon where his gifts so obviously deserve to put him.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=szDVw4CbcGE