Yet Another Post about Authenticity in Bach

 There are three topics you never mention in polite conversation:

1. Religion

2. Politics

3. Which instruments to play Bach?

Short of atonality and woke questions, there is absolutely nothing that gets music people in a snit faster than issues of authentic performance practice.

On the one hand, there is no question in my mind that when it comes to Bach, the HIP movement has gone badly off the rails. There is no need for, as more than one person put it here, 'sowing machine tempi' that were clearly beyond the competence of what most instrumentalists were said to be capable of in Bach's day. There is no point for virtuoso runs to go by at light speed when you can't hear what the notes are. I can understand lots of improvisatory ostentation and bravado in Handel or Vivaldi, but in Bach? Bach would have thrown the singers out of the organ loft. The idea of doing an 'authentic' Mass or a Passion with one-per-a-part is so completely outrageous - even if the singer can be heard over the trumpets (doubtful), all it would take in a polyphonic movement is the mistake of one singer, and the entire ensemble could go off the rails.

Bach is meant to be austere, his knowledge of musical trends in Italy and France was entirely abstract, and anything which smacked of decadence was antithetical to his puritanical worldview. Bach is a cathedral, every note matters as much as an architectural brick. He is a 17th century celestial machine, like a grandfather clock. The miracle of Bach is that his music is pure mechanics, and yet every musical gear has infinite emotion.

BUT! Here's the thing about HIP, it arrived in response to obvious problems. There's a reason that Bach and Handel were considered just an occasional sideshow in a performance season: the reason is that the instruments and techniques were designed for music written 150 years later. For all our fond memories of Karl Richter and company, most choruses couldn't sing baroque music very well, most orchestras sounded badly balanced, and there was no way for 2-3 hour performances of unvarying solemnity not to try the attention span.

So in retrospect, the Harnoncourts and Leonhardts were the side of right, it's the Gardiners and Koopmans who were not. With the potential exceptions of Herreweghe and van Veldhoven, the next generation put the HIP forces on the same sort of excess and addictions. But rather than bloat in the name of profundity, we got virtuosity in the name of passion, and there is a direct line of descent from Gardiner and Koopman to the anomie of McCreesh and Minkowski. However excellent all four can be in other music, they're no Bachians. We won't even get started with how strange Bach has gotten in recent years....

There are exceptions in both directions, there are always exceptions. If you can't hear the appeal of Jochum in Bach, I feel sorry for you, but if you don't get the appeal of Bach when done by Mazaaki Suzuki, I feel equally sorry. Both approaches may fall definitively on one side of the HIP debate, but they find ways around it to capture Bach in both his grandeur and his intimacy.

But like with Mozart, there seemed to arrive a 'golden generation' for Bach born around the 1920s and 30s that synthezied the best of old and new, and they were on either side of the HIP ledger: Harnoncourt, Rilling, Leonhardt, Ericson, Bruggen, Corboz, Peter Schreier when he conducted... what made them mostly unique in the strange cult of Bach performance was that they were not encumbered by questions of style. They realized the value of both approaches, and consequently could probe for content as few have before or since. It is impossible to capture the meanings of this music unless you're willing to both have the warmth which a genuine string section allows for, and also the clarity which you can only get from keeping the orchestra smaller than one you use for later music.

But then, there's the Thomanerchor, year in year out, beholden to the unbroken tradition of sound that goes back half-a-millenium before Bach himself. Whatever the stylistic preferences of its cantor, there is that sound, the only true ring of authenticity in Bach, from which you can hear a sound that plausibly fits Bach's counterpoint like a glove.

Here they are under their former cantor, Georg Christoph Biller not too long before his sad retirement and passing due to a neurological disease. There are two B-Minor Masses (sic) on youtube. One from the beginning of his tenure, one from near the end. The first with the Leipzig Gewandhaus, the second Freiburger Barockorchester. The first is very good, but this is greatness. By this time he'd been working with them for sixteen years, and it has that incisive authority of a director who'd long shaped his ensemble and get exactly what he wants.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NCWMUt0KmY4

This is Bach.

ONL - Tales of Classical Perversion: The First Aristobulus and Antigonus - rewrite

 Fall 129 BC, 625 Ab Urbe Conditia, 3633

1. The death of Antiochus VII Sidetes was followed by precisely what Antiochus the Pious predicted to Hyrcanus. Antiochus's two sons, also named Antiochus, plunged Sellucid Greece into civil war, which quickly became civil massacre, as two rival brothers claimed the throne in quick succession, each alleging the other a Pretender.

 

129-109 BC, 625-645 Ab Urbe Conditia, 3433-3453

 

2. Upon reaching the throne, each son encountered further insurrection from their supporters. Many of the Greek Court, having supported Antiochus's older son, Antiochus VIII Grypus, rebelled quickly against him after installation so they might support a claim of Grypus's own son, Sellucus VI Epiphanes. Grypus's younger brother, Antiochus IX Cyzicenus, encountered insurrection from his mother and lover, Cleopatra Thea, previously wife to both Antiochus VII Sidetes and his predecessor, Dmitrius II Nicator. During ten years that followed, each would overthrow the other multiple times every year and occasionally two would attempt to lead as co-rulers, only for collaboration to collapse immediately.

 

3. Hyrcanus, seeing the Greek territory that formerly belonged to Israel, set about reconquering parts of Syria, including the entire Madaba region across the Jordan River, the city of Shechem - sometimes referred to as Nablus, and the Mountain of Gerizim. He made war further against the Idumeans, Samaritans, and Cuthians - a tribe of Babylonian colonists settled upon the Jordan River's West Bank. His greatest achievement is widely regarded as the 'Sack of Sebastia', the Idumean capital, which Hyrcanus's army laid to cinder.

 

108 BC, 646 Ab Urbe Conditia, 3454

 

4. The true achievement at Sebastia belongs however to the generalship of Hyrcanus's two eldest sons: Judas, nom-de-guerre Aristobulus, and Matthias, nom-de-guerre Antigonus - hereafter known by their war names, who so incinerated the city that starving survivors were said to feast upon deceased flesh for twenty years thereafter. Without consultation of Hyrcanus, the sons insisted upon forcing the conversion of all Idumeans with all consequent circumcisions. When Hyrcanus heard of their action, he admonished them to 'beware the leaven of conversion.'

 

5. We must pause to mention a story, possibly apocryphal, of an Idumean boy who came upon the desert convoy of Aristobulus and Antigonus to beg. The boy explained that for three weeks he'd lived only upon his own leavings. Aristobulus and Antigonus explained they would give food if he pledged himself to the Jewish faith and seal his covenant with a circumcision. The boy replied 'I will do first, understand later.' This boy's name was Antipater, who later became Antipater the Idumean, founder of the Herodian Dynasty, Governor of Idumea, valued advisor and minister to a pendulum of Hasmonean Liberators, all the while positioning his issue to inherit a Judean client state controlled by Rome rather than Greece.

 

104-103 BC, 650-651 Ab Urbe Conditia, 3458

 

6. Aristobulus, elder of Hyrcanus's two favored sons, became Fifth Liberator upon his father's death. Immediately he ordered imprisonment of his mother and three other brothers in the darkest cells of Kishle, the still infamous prison of Jerusalem. Two of the other brothers were never seen again and within a fortnight his mother, Alexandra Jannea, died of starvation. The historian Eusebius Polymocretes of Aleppo writes that Aristobulus burned his father's will because Hyrcanus left the office of Liberator to his wife, their mother.  According to Eusebius Polymocrates, Hyrcanus was greatly distressed with Idumea's forced conversion, for it brought into Judea an enemy swearing revenge from within; and fearing the ruthless stupidity of his sons he secretly machinated to pass them over.

 

7. Both Flavius Josephus and the Book of Maccabees refer to the 'tender passion' of Aristobulus for Antigonus, and tell also of Aristobulus's cerebral hemorrhages, after which Aristobulus required Antigonus to be conquering general in his stead; from which Antigonus's wife planted the seed of a labyrinthine plot to assassinate Antigonus. However, Eusebius Polymocrates states that Aristobulus was not married, and that such tender passion was not only consummated, but that Aristobulus was no general at all but rather a poet/musician in the manner of Nero, and divided the Liberator's job between that of civil governance and High Priest so that Antigonus might be simultaneously named High Priest, General, and the Liberator's consort; and therefore the Pharisees were scandalized by their Liberator's Hellene licentiousness and corruption. According to Eusebius Polymocrates's Chronicle of Antique Infamies, Antigonus returned to Jerusalem to a parade of triumph, and immediately afterward was stabbed by incensed Pharisee conspirators in the Temple. When Antigonus saw what became of his brother and consort, he stabbed himself next to Antigonus's body so that their blood might mingle in death.

Zinman's Nutcracker

 Sleeping Beauty and Swan Lake belong to Russia, but The Nutcracker belongs to America. There's no country where The Nutcracker means more than the US, where every parent has to go watch their daughter dance the part of 'little snot #3' in their local production of The Nutcracker, and for some reason, every girl takes ballet here from the time they're four years old until they're nine, then never have anything to do with ballet again until they take their own kids.

The Nutcracker was even considered marginal Tchaikovsky until George Balanchine's New York City Ballet production of the Nutcracker in 1954. Sure, people knew about it, but probably under the name "Shchelkunchik." It was no more important than, say, the Mozartiana Suite. It was only when the New York City Ballet played it every Christmas that it became the ballet among all ballets.

I doubt either Bolshoi or Mariinsky has accumulated the yearly number of performances done by the New York City Ballet in the years since. Here's their orchestra's recording, done for a movie version they did in the early nineties that starred, believe it or not, Macaulay Culkin (the brat in Home Alone). It was conducted by David Zinman, who in the nineties was one of the greatest conductors in the world. If the NYCB orchestra was at all lacking in comparison to major orchestras before facing Zinman, there's no way you can tell here. If you didn't know any better you'd think it was Cleveland under Dohnanyi.

I don't know what the greatest recording is of The Nutcracker, but this is my favorite. You hear everything, you get closer to Tchaikovsky's tempo markings than most any other, you completely feel the rhythmic spring of the dance without tempi so fast that the notes feel scrambled, and there is no lack of passion in the climaxes. It is Tchaikovsky close to the world of his idols: Mozart and Schumann, and shows that at his greatest, Tchaikovsky was fully their equal.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q3K7k2slTSs&list=PLUtjANhAH1uEfi05xkGKfvc6KHaUs5LGi&index=1&fbclid=IwAR3HAnsw-0GuA1lQxt2spQrwy-WUgNiGZqIdeIfDPQKnP1_Gf7-z5KQzT3Q

Adolphus Hailstork and the problem of 'White Choral Music'

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1ZX_t_r2z4g

So far as I know, I think Adolphus Hailstork is our greatest African-American musical master. Still is an absolute master too, I love Florence Price's chamber music even if I don't hear the appeal in her symphonies, but as a personal preference, I click on Hailstork a lot more often.

Just listen to this ten minutes of choral music. I obviously have more complex thoughts about viewing art through identity's prism than most people allow for in 2022; but if you want to understand why lived identity is genuinely of paramount importance in the arts, compare Hailstork's bold and beautiful originality to the shitty ninth-chord white bread we get from so many American composers who dine out on making the choral music equivalent of Kenny G.

Black choral composers and arrangers have provided a glory of this country for literal hundreds of years. But every Christmas classical scenesters have to hear this 'smooth-chorus' shite somewhere that only a WASP could love, and the amount of money Whitacre and Lauridsen make should be considered a war crime.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qdvnp6GGuMM

Abbado's Misdeeds

 https://forbiddenmusic.org/2018/08/01/a-quarter-century-since-the-death-of-berthold-goldschmidt/?fbclid=IwAR0SkyM-Ml9moBcci4Bib3RfBy1HLJdayH6wlX7-xQl41MdhzGZTfzslZ0I

No way I'm putting a link to this on twitter....

This blogpost, buried in the internet's neither region, is absolutely essential reading, and not just for the reason it seems.

We're gonna talk abundantly about Berthold Goldschmidt here before long, one of the great figures of 20th century music, but more importantly, we have to talk about what this says about Claudio Abbado, buried long into the post's second half, and what it says of his treatment of women and gay people, which is both surprising and unsurprising.

It's left somewhat ambiguous, but clearly Abbado, like so many conductors, was a terrible womanizer. Whatever happened behind closed doors, it leaves in no uncertain terms that something about it was abusive. It goes without saying that he abused his position to get sexual favor, but in the world pre-2017, there generally had to be something more for people to take special note. Was part of it that they were ghosted without warning or gratitude? Quite likely given Abbado's penchant for passive aggression. Was it that he was physically abusive? I frankly can't see that happening. Obviously anything is possible, but Abbado had, by so many accounts, no real temper. Abbado's producer calls him 'misogynist', I think it likely that he means Abbado was sexually abusive. 'Misogynist' was the label often bandied about for President Kennedy, and what we soon found out was the implication that JFK forced them to endure deeply humiliating and painful acts with the barest hint of consent.

In addition, Abbado apparently did not want this writer as his recording producer because the producer was gay. Given Abbado's reputation as a real humanist, I obviously find this rather hypocritical. One expects such behavior from notorious jerks like Dutoit and Maazel, even Barenboim, but you don't expect it from Abbado.

There's another source in a comment section that links to this article which states that as Abbado aged and underwent terrible illness, he made some acts of repentance, I believe that too, though I have no idea what they were, nor do I know if they were sufficient to his actions.

I'm going to play Devil's Advocate. There's a term on the internet for people who excuse the behavior of the powerful called 'himpathy', which excoriates anybody who would try to explain away men who abuse their positions. That term is... no nice way to say it... it's stupid. It's counterproductive. It's turned everything it touches into disaster. Even when people stand to lose everything, pathologically abusive acts proliferate until the sources of the pathology are located. There is no misdeed in exposing abusive behavior, but to attempt the rewrite people's histories, both personal and political, as simple stories of abuse without examining the abuse's causes is the behavior of emerging totalitarian movements: Marxism, Jacobinism, Lutheranism, it happens in history once every hundred and change years, it is encoded in the world's DNA that revolutionaries demand too much of people, and in turn provoke the deadliest possible counterrevolutionaries, who then revolutionize soft social justice movements into movements of the most hardened murderers. The result is always so much more devastating than 'mere' abuse.

We are not going to stop the bad behavior of celebrities until there is no longer such a thing as a celebrity. It's encoded in the DNA of power, and the powerful will always find new ways to abuse people and keep their abuses secret. What is the advance of the Trump wing of the Republican party but traditional notions of celebrity fighting back? The most hated celebrity in America was elected President, and two years after he left the job, he still isn't even indicted for his highest or lowest crimes.

Abbado? I'm not going to explain it by saying he's Italian or of the 60's/70's generation. Just as with Bernstein, there was always something about his persona that seemed 'off' from what was presented. No authority figure is that meek and gentle. Power corrupts, and I do not trust any person whose life seems too well put together, let alone leaders. Abbado was the founder of something like half-a-dozen apprentice orchestras for recent graduates beginning their careers. 90% of celebrities do not give back on that level of generosity without indulging themselves some exploitative recompense for it, however good their intentions at the outset.

As for any homophobia, well... that strikes me as ugly but just a little bit more complicated than it seems. It strikes me as less a gut instinct than a double standard. The world of the arts is always a complicated place. In the period Abbado came up, Benjamin Britten broke off relations and torpedoed careers as a matter of course, the US was recovering from Virgil Thomson's and Howard Taubman's consistent vindictiveness in print that set back hundreds of musicians, Italy was just acclimating itself to how Franco Zefferelli and other directors expected sexual quid pro quos for favors in the opera world, and Herbert von Karajan - almost unquestionably bisexual and surrounded by gay sycophants - deliberately sabotaged the careers of performers who refused his offers and orders, to say nothing of the actions perpetrated by the other most powerful opera conductor of Abbado's generation.... But there is no question that their vituperation was partially brought on by the discrimination and humiliations these men endured, and it ignores how many powerful straight artists did exactly the same thing - probably many more.

Personally, when I watch any person whose life seems well put together try to chastise misdeeds too flagrantly, I just assume they're hiding something themselves. Whatever their agenda, there are inevitably reasons which draw people to invective like moths to flame - some of which are deeply selfish. I have met so many people who are deliberately unforgiving about issues of justice - people of the left and right, and inevitably, there are deep personal holes and hypocrisies in their behaviors. Some are merely hypocrites, some misdeeds are vastly more serious.

But as all these movements from intersectionality to even metoo and Black Lives Matter continue to run their course, these movements are looking increasingly ugly, and I grow increasingly impatient about holding my tongue just to keep my personal relations running smoothly.

In my own life, career and romantic prospects be damned, I refuse to pretend that beneath my invectivized facade of dysfunction is not more dysfunction and still more dysfunction even underneath that - it's dysfunction all the way down. What does it matter to say so out loud? Nobody but friends and acquaintances know who I am, and likely won't for a long time. Some may think differently, but I don't think my life story is worse than a person with deep problems doing what people with deep problems do. I believe that one day, all the writing and music people ignored from me at my time of doing it will get at least some exposure and understanding, and in the meantime, trying to posture in a way that has a 1% chance of advance any career prospects just gets in the way of creating meaningful things. I believe that however long and violent the results of internet panic, it will eventually have no choice but to subside, and the world will have to become somewhat be more forgiving. Anyone with a shred of decency tries to be worthy of people's love and trust, and anybody with a shred of humanity consistently fails.

Claudio Abbado was arguably the most powerful conductor in the entire history of the profession. He was, fundamentally, a decent guy somewhat spoiled by fame, and he did what people spoiled by power do. None of this should surprise anybody. The powerful will always find ways to 'inflict their power' without thought as to what they're doing. It's part of the human story, it will always be part of the human story, and the human story will always be told from new angles. There is not a single action in the world without consequences unintended. Those who try to control the narrative of 'what happened' - be they the establishment or people trying to overthrow the establishment, will inevitably fail, and their failures are, quite literally, human history.

An Irrational Complaint

 I'm too much of a coward to put this in my feed, but I need to vent my rage somewhere about the Sight and Sound movie list. It's the only critical event I ever look forward to. Nothing surprises me anymore, and yet this did. The idea that Jeanne Dielman can be acclaimed as the greatest movie of all time by the world's greatest experts: I don't know what to call it but a disgrace... Why was it chosen? Well, look up the director...

On the one hand, I find most arguments against more diverse representation to be absolutely loathesome things. I want no part in them, I want nothing to do with people who advance them, I see the people on my side of this argument, and it fills me with hatred and misery. It is a conscienceless maintenance of a status quo that keeps billions of people crushed under history's wheel until they repay what's done to them, defended by reactionaries too stupid to see that they by defending things as they are they're only signing their own death warrants.

And they have so provoked the revolutionary class that the past has now been rewritten as nothing more than a wholesale oppression by white men of the rest of the world. The rewriting of the past to suit the intersectional values of the present is a totalitarian impulse that could kill literal billions - values most people hadn't even heard of ten years ago! It has lead my country to the brink of civil cataclysm - and not a single person of influence on my side of the political spectrum has been brave or introspective enough to examine our own role in it. And now, we have to lock step with any and all politicizing of art - which is inevitably politicized to fit only one rubric.

The way out of all this is the humanities. It has always been the humanities. It will always be the humanities. Science is value neutral, but the contemplation of life is what got us out from underneath nature, from underneath god, and god willing will one day get us out from underneath social pseudo-science. There is literally no space for art anymore without the interference of the most unsubtle, blatant version of politics. Art is the best tool we have to help us understand politics, but a thousand times in history, politics proved to us its extreme unfitness to help us understand art.

This lock step is going to create such a backlash for the very people it's supposed to help. Take it from this unknown Jew who's trying to write a very long and overly ambitious novel of Jewish oppression: if the price of greater respect for Jews from the mainstream world was the Shoah, I don't think it's been worth it for us. If immediate greater approbation for minorities means that white males put mass numbers of them to death, how can that possibly be worth its price to the very people trying hardest to advance this cause? What good is it to prove yourselves right about how terrible white males are if the only people left are white males?