What Is The Odyssey?

 

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The Odyssey is not the book you think it is. Most of the action you remember happens in Books 9-12, the whole back half of The Odyssey has far less action than those four books. Those four books are the part everybody loves. Everybody thinks this is a great action-adventure story, but the major plot point of The Odyssey is not the adventures of Odysseus. The major plot point of The Odyssey is that 'these douchebags are drinking Odysseus's wine!'.

Homer is far from my favorite author. I love the adventure parts of The Odyssey as much as anybody does.. But it's really only a tiny part part of a book that isn't that long to begin with. The Illiad is quite a bit longer than The Odyssey, and it is frankly much more exciting. The last third of The Iliad is one of the greatest stories ever told: heroic, sublime, terrifying, moving.

But Homer, at its core, is not about its action. Homer is about poetry, and epic poetry is about ritual, because rituals are what give order to life. What makes poetry epic is not the excitement, it's not even the scale or scope: it's the stakes. It's the sense that these events matter, that these people matter, that part of the reason for our very existence is to commemorate their deeds. The Rage of Achilles is not just about Achilles's rage, it is about the rage of every person who has ever mourned a murder victim, and its nothing short of a ritual enactment of what every person who's experienced that rage wants to do. The Trojan War is not just about the Trojan War, it's about every war and every fear we have that civilization-wide death is coming for our peoples just as it came for theirs.

We may think that in our biggest movies we have that kind of grandeur, but we look for that grandeur in the wrong places. There are only a very few artistic creators in all of human history who come close to that kind of sublime solemnity: maybe Wagner or Michelangelo, or Goya or Milton. But if you really want to understand what Homer is like: don't picture a Christopher Nolan movie, you'll only find that kind of grandeur in a very few places in American culture. Picture the Baptismal Massacre in The Godfather, or Colonel Kurtz's camp in Apocalypse Now. Picture the ape picking up a bone in 2001. Picture the oil fire in There Will Be Blood.

That's four moments in American film, there aren't many more, in which the limitations of what entertainment can do are so transcended that it takes on the properties of a religious ritual. Those moments are not just art, those are moments so transcendent that they put us in touch with the possibility that there are forces in the universe more grand than anything of which our imaginations can conceive. When you (I) see the massacre at the end of The Godfather, it is as though evil itself has emerged from hell and subverted Christianity's holiest sacraments. Many people watch that oil fire in There Will Be Blood, and instead of an oil fire they see the destructive forces of capitalism itself. And the monkey with the bone in 2001? I don't need to describe it, everyone who's seen it can tell you it is exactly what Kubrick says it is: the dawn of man.

Now take all those tableaux's and stretch them into a thirty hour movie whose tone is basically the same as all those scenes. Now you have an idea of what a Homeric epic is. We think of Homer beginning the Greek half of Western Civilization because he managed to take the most literally awesome five minutes of The Godfather or 2001 and stretch it to the length of a book.

That's Homer. He's is not about the adventure, he's about the transcendence. Every moment of his books is that ritual where every book in his epic seems to summon a new sublime force from the ether. Not every moment in his poems is sublime, but every one of his chapters has elements that feels connected to some subtextual element of the universe so much bigger than just itself. Every other page is a grand tableux or a feast or a retelling of events every member of society was expected to know, but they're not necessarily that exciting. If they are exciting, it's not because they feel eventful, it's because they feel important.

You can't find the equivalent in too much American art, you can only find it commonly in religion: in a Passover Seder, an Easter Passion Play, a Catholic holy sacrament. And just like those rituals, it's supposed to be a little repetitive, it's supposed to try your patience a little bit. That is what Homer does, the rituals he describes are meant to summon forces that transcend material limits, and like a giant Italian cathedral, he retells it in poetry so ornate, so viscerally exciting, so gorgeous, that even as you hear it, even as you're sometimes bored, you can still hear the creation of the earth.

I have no doubt that some people will see The Odyssey and come away feeling they had a spiritual experience just that awesome: maybe they did. But a large part of the point in Homer is the renewability. If you go back to The Odyssey in a week or a month, will you have the same experience of it? If you watch it on something less than an IMAX screen, will you have the same experience of it? If you watch it on a home entertainment system, will you have the same experience of it?

The point with Homer is that millions of people over three thousand years decided that his poetry has that level of transcendence. No matter who recited it, no matter who read it, no matter who translated it, millions of people decided that the essence of Homer came through.

Now, the truth is, nobody can live with that level of transcendence all the time. Parts of Homer can be kinda dreary. In terms of the ancients, I much prefer Ovid where you get lots of jokes and ordinary people and sex and spoofs of the great figures of mythology. There are stories from Ovid it's some of the most spellbinding reading on earth in a very modern way, and nobody knew that better than Shakespeare, who practically used Ovid as a cheat sheet.

But the dreariness is part of the reason we read Homer, a dreariness that if the new movie is as good as half its spectators say it is, the movie completely lacks. Many people read Homer and all his rituals and find themselves saying 'GET BACK TO THE PLOT!' But Homer tells us 'the rituals ARE the plot. The point in Homer is not the conflict, the point is the resolution, the bringing back of disturbed cosmic forces into cosmic order. Like so much of the greatest art, Homer is moral instruction: a kind of 'how to' manual for how to heal. That is something very few movies try to do, and save certain Spielbergs, the ones that do don't make much money.

Epics, real epics, are not meant to be action-packed, they're meant to show that action is just one small phase of a much larger life cycle. Excitement is just the beginning, what brings people back to Homer is just what brings people back to Shakespeare, and Mozart and Rembrandt, and maybe even The Beatles and Spielberg. What brings people back to Homer is the capacity and the hope that he helps to heal us. The real point of the back half of The Odyessey is everything Odysseus does to restore the order of his house. Homer doesn't just excite us, he doesn't just move us, he quiets us, and makes the difficulties of little people like us easier to go about.

Bastille Day: An Essay for Tisha B'Av - Part 3

 (please god let me finish this one...)

And here's the problem with unity in 2026, Israel or anywhere else: every consensus is falsely earned.

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In a world where humans are no longer the most intelligent species on earth and thinking is farmed out, division is the natural state of the world because we don't know who's done the thinking, and we can't even trust that our sources aren't programmed to lie.

Thinking as we've understood it since the late 18th century is over. The centuries of reason may have run their course, and if all that is true, so then are the circumstances that created and maintained democracy.

To all those who hate AI, to all those who complain endlessly about slop, I will aggravate you in a way you probably didn't see coming:

AI is the best thing that ever happened to humanity.

Provided it doesn't come to life and kill us all, it is exactly the worldwide blessing we need.

Its programmers are not exactly known for altruism, but for the moment, we are saved by the fact that AI's business model forces the content to be as factual. Compare that to social media: social media rewards engagement, and few things engage on social media like factual inaccuracy. During this moment in history when social media has ruined the abilities of whole societies to think critically and believe the truth, AI is a stunningly effective corrective to the conspiracy theories we all see on Facebook, Twitter/x and Sextpanther. People fault AI for getting thousands of facts wrong, and they're absolutely correct, but tell ChatGPT that vaccines cause autism or that Trump won the 2020 Presidential election and see what it says.

I don't use AI to write my essays (I can't believe I have to write that), but I have AI review it after I write virtually every paragraph. And even if I say AI didn't write my essays, the time may come that you never trust again, dear reader, that my content is self-generated. Human content becomes no different from the content we generate, and in 1000 years, can we even be sure that the Bible as we read it today will be the authentic one and an AI generated one becomes the generally accepted Bible in which Yahweh was a visible being and Jesus is a Jewish god? 

But the moment is coming, we know not when or how, when the business model changes, and AI can rewrite politics and history and philosophy in real time, even science: not one tweet at a time, but a worldwide wipe of the truth, and even those of us who remember the truth will begin doubting whatever truth we knew.

But even as AI can be used to correct democracy, it's too late. In the age of AI, I don't know how community trust is possible, precisely because people doubt the authenticity of everybody else's claims. In an age when all community trust can only be false, consent can only be manufactured by coercion. Truth probably can't run the world anymore, trust probably can't run the world anymore, not even AI can run the world. In such an era, only order can run the world, and however good a resource AI is, the very fact of its existence can eventually turn it into the worst version of itself that is programmed by its supervisors to tell lies and rewrite history on nearly every internet site in existence.

If we find a way to make people trust AI, the future is likely democracy. If societies find no way to broadly trust it, the future is likely dictatorship.

The 20th century belonged to democracies like America, the early 21st century belonged to Western Europe, the real 21st century probably belongs to dictatorships like China, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, quite possibly India and quite possibly Israel.

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So if AI isn't going to be used by people to clarify the truth, AI will be used to obscure it: maybe even erase it.

Chomsky wasn't wrong about manufactured consent, he was just wrong about which era.

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A Word on Gilbert and Sullivan

I've had Gilbert and Sullivan in my head the last few days. Something bothers me...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MYVO7UEoNBM

I was at this performance fourteen years ago, and due to circumstances in my own life I cried at the end watching Jack Point, whom I related to from the moment he came on stage. Most of Gilbert and Sullivan is supposed to be frivolous, but Yeoman of the Guard is something else entirely. Like Tales of Hoffman, it is their attempt to show that they are made of more serious stuff. This is, in some ways, an extraordinarily profound opera. It was a sad state of affairs last year to see Yeoman of the Guard murdered by an amateur troupe (which did quite well by Iolanthe this year...).

I will not go nearly so far as Tam-Tam von Klassikheute in promulgating Arthur Sullivan as the greatest composer of the British Isles, but I absolutely understand the argument. In that same week, I was utterly absorbed at the Proms by Vladimir Jurowski bringing the darkness of the Manfred Symphony to pitch, but Manfred did not make me weep. Gilbert and Sullivan made me weep.

I'm not going to make my argument about comedy and tragedy. That strikes me as a symptom of the issue, not the root. However, I maintain that entertainment, at least good entertainment, is harder to do than art. Art requires humanity, entertainment requires perfection. If you successfully communicate what's in your heart, and what's in your heart is more complicated than a simple sentiment, you've achieved some level of artistic quality: it's very hard, but you have enormous freedom to create any form you like.

But good entertainment requires a skill so genuine that there's no ambiguity about what it is. There's plenty of bad entertainment out there, and those who like it can go suck a lemon, but the really good stuff can only be done by people who acquire the most colossal skill that one has to work at for a lifetime. Compare a true artist of acting like Leonardo di Caprio to an entertainer like Jim Carrey. I have no doubt di Caprio works very hard at what he does, but part of that work is the freedom of self-indulgence. I think what Carrey does is harder, requires more work, more discipline, and more exhaustion. What do you think Robin Williams worked harder at? His Oscar-winning roles or his standup?

I believe there is an alternate universe where Haydn, Mozart, Schubert, Dvorak, Mendelssohn, Richard Strauss, they all wrote operettas, and they did it just as well as Johann Strauss and Offenbach. What operetta composers do, if they do it magnificently, requires genius of a level to which only the greatest composers ascend. Are they as great composers as the great composers? Of course not. Profundity is profundity. Entertainment can certainly be profound, but it usually isn't.

The Yeoman of the Guard is where Gilbert and Sullivan step out of the world of entertainment and prove what entertainers have been proving since the beginning of recorded time. Going from great entertainment to great art is a lot easier than going from great art to entertainment. Gilbert and Sullivan could write a great opera. Do you really think Wagner could write a great operetta?

Note from the next morning: I take it back. Gilbert and Sullivan sucks.

Bastille Day: An Essay for Tisha B'Av - Part 2

On the one hand, I praise family: not exactly praise it, but praise the optimism of it.

On the other hand, the institution in no way deserves to be let off the hook. It's a prison from which there is no release but one's attitude toward it. For most of us, family is as much a burden as a bond: hopefully 49% burden/51% bond, but there's no guarantee of that. In dealing with them you feel hope for your life and dreams slipping away year by as they demand ever more of your autonomy until your will is just an extension of theirs and your hopes for your own life are utterly crushed and there is no getting back the lost decades: by that time, you're so demoralized that we don't have the mental presence of mind to lift ourselves to what we want out of life even an inch, and pretty soon thereafter, many of us become the oppressor rather than the oppressed.

Do they manipulate consciously? I don't know. Does it matter?

What's ultimately unfair about this is that for the vast majority of humanity, we know this from the time we're small children. By 7 or 8, you know exactly who the narcissists are. They're the people you're desperate to hang out with in spite of feeling miserable in their company, and they fundamentally dictate the terms of our lives from cradle to grave, even by running away from them, they still dictate our lives; and by the time we have the opportunity to live a life for ourselves, we don't have the morale to do better.

The ones who do have morale to do better are lucky enough to be born to circumstances that let them stretch their wings as far as they go: be it through a supportive environment or merciful heredity. But the most unfair part of existence is simply that success breeds success, failure breeds failure.

And what does it take to go from failure to success? Ironically, it takes an engine of utter selfishness, a family catalyst who is an utterly diagnosable narcissist and often wears their Selflessness with a capital S, cares not a bit for human feeling, and deliberately poisons the wells of immediate close relatives autonomy so that he or she may maintain their dominion over them: because so unsatisfied are they with their lives that if they have no one to dominate, they would collapse into a black hole. They love, but their love is a love of possessions.

Not all narcissists are terribly ambitious people, but I'd venture any amount of money that a VASTLY disproportionate number of ambitious people are narcissists.

We all know some versions of these people: come on. As I said, some statistics show that 7% of the world population is narcissists: and I utterly believe it. Some of us have known dozens upon dozens of them. Hopefully, some of them are kept up at night with the fear that this person is us. I suppose there's a small chance that exonerates some of us, but if there is no difference in actions between a person incapable of empathy and a person who acts out of emotional desperation, does it matter?

We all know them. And, ultimately, we all know who they are. Whether it's your parent, your child, your sibling, your spouse your friend or your lover, these people poison happiness because they have a compulsive need to dominate. And the domination does not stop when their objects of derision aren't there, these are the people who try to poison the people they dominate in the minds of others.

And yet, here is the paradox. So many of these people of toxicity and arrogance are the engine which lifts families out of failure to success. And the satisfied lives that their grandchildren often have are made possible because of the chronic campaigns of shame to which they subject their spouses and children. Ironically, it often DOES lead to better lives, but it does not lead to better lives for their children. What profit it a man to gain the world if he lose his soul? But these children, having lived lives of outward prosperity and interpersonal misery, swear on their lives to do better for the closest people in their lives, and they do it. So ultimately, there is some dimension in which these narcissists are a kind of hero.

In the Bible, this is the trajectory of the story from Abraham to Joseph, and this may ultimately be the trajectory of the Israeli people.

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I lived in Israel for a year, and if naricissism is endemic in 7% of the world population, it must be at least twice as high in Israel: 14%? 40%? 140%?

Just as the success of New York and LA is powered by tornadoes of ambition, so then is Israel.

Israel is a bonded family of people who make each other utterly miserable.

And yet the new generation is the 2nd happiest people on Earth!

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As happens from lifetime to lifetime, there is always a new founder's generation during which the world completely resets in a hail of instability: in the 1780s absolute monarchy was deposed, in the 1860s slavery was ended, in the 1940s a new middle class was made, and in the 2030s? Well, there's a whole world looking to interconnect, looking to lift themselves into Western prosperity, and far more united in their goals than we are.

And as World War II departs from living memory, so then does the entire ethos it set for the world. In America, the frugality of the depression, the passion for stability and norms, the belief in democracy, and the belief in individual rights, and, paradoxically, the simultaneous belief in the importance of community.

The truth exists out there, but we are so infinitesimally far from knowing it. Until then, the truth is not discovered but made :: built :: a peaceful order constructed from the chaos of conflict. What matters is not the ethos itself, but that the ethos is shared: that there are shared norms of how to determine the truth, what etiquette is, what is comforting and what is hurtful. Over the course of a lifetime, some countries gain that ability, and some countries lose it.

America was once polite because we had that shared consensus. In the Ages of Jackson and Grant, we were a deeply rude and vulgar people, but by the Ages of Roosevelt and Eisenhower, we were the nicest people on earth. Hypocrites? Perhaps; but we managed to convince ourselves we were happy. but over 80 years we have lost that consenseus and it will take at least a lifetime to get it back. In the meantime, we have become rude again.

Israel has always been the rudest country on earth in precisely the way people are that when they're desperately unhappy, but suddenly, everybody's happy! The elderly in Israel are (irony alert) #18 in happiness: that may seem high but it's a mildly low total relative to its per-capita prosperity. But now, young people are #2?

What changed?

What changed was the variable that creates the deepest unity of all. More Israeli Jews are now people of color than white: more than 50% of Israel is now Jews of Middle Eastern/Northern African descent, not European. The secular revolution came barely more to them than it came to other Middle Eastern countries. Among Israelis over 65, 15% of Israelis are religious. Among Israelis under 30, 62% are religious!

These are easily verifiable claims and that total will only grow in the next few generations.

Even as Israel reaches a height of international contempt, a mixture of prosperity and religion puts it on a trajectory to be the most satisfied nation on earth.

But just as Pharaohs come who know not Joseph, the world's contempt is likely to eventually erode Israeli prosperity, and eventually erode Israeli happiness. In tough circumstances, the Jews of Israel are likely to turn ever more to God, and as their opportunities dwindle, what then would make them different than the Palestinians they subjugate?

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What of Israel's neighbors? The World Happiness Index lists Palestine as the 103rd happiest country on earth. If you think that's low, Jordan: 125, Egypt: 127, Lebanon: 145, and Syria has no place in the index due to its long civil war.

What makes these countries so unhappy? Is it Israel? Maybe a little: there is, of course, that theory that the Middle East is the one part of the world that does not progress in political functionality because Israel snuffs out progress in its infancy by supporting sympathetic absolutist rulers and parties.

But before I hand the fanatics among you yet another bad theory about the Middle East you've never heard of, consider the damage they did on their own.

If the Israeli government is as practical as it seems, it has no interest in provoking and prolonging civil wars on their borders. It's the easiest thing in the world for civil conflict to spread. Lebanon: a 15 year civil war on Israel's northern border from '75 to '90 of which Israel had minimal interference until year 7: generally agreed upon death toll: about 150,000. Syria: a civil war on Israel's northwestern border from 2008 to 2023: generally agreed upon death toll: 625,000.

Egypt? 90% observant Muslim, but ruled for 80 years by a series of secularist Muslim dictators. Modern Egypt's had no civil war, but if the Arab Spring proved one thing, it is that relax the dictator's hold on Egypt, and Civil War would be as likely there as in Syria. Liberals thought it was a new day for Egypt, but polls show that only 5% of Egyptians want democracy. One third of Egyptian citizens support the Muslim Brotherhood--a banned political party agitating for an Islamic dictatorship. When Egypt had its one basically free election (who knows), 47% of legislative seats went to the Muslim brotherhood, and another 25% went to the still more fundamentalist al-Noor Islamic party. Meanwhile, 40% of Egyptians claim to support the dictatorship.

Some of these countries are unhappy because they mourn their lost loved ones, others are unhappy because they fear losing their loved ones, but the presence of civil conflict, either through loss or fear, is as poison for happiness as family conflict.

So it is my theory (for now, at least) that what ultimately causes unhappiness is division: the constant sense that you have to fight every day for what you believe and that every day is a constant struggle. Our lives attain purpose and meaning through struggle, but don't trust any leader who tells you you attain happiness through struggle.

Palestine? You may think the struggle unites them, but in their one election, Hamas attained power with barely more seats than the other party Fatah. Even after three years of Hamas leading a struggle, Hamas can only get 35% of people to say they approve of the job they're doing even as it could be death to criticize Hamas, and only 41% of Palestinians say they prefer Hamas to any alternative. 24% of Palestinians still go for Fatah, and 32% seem to hold both in contempt.

Even as the world hates Israel, the new generation of Israelis is more united than ever before. One killed person on October 7th didn't have anyone to mourn them, when that was broadcast, 20,000 Israelis came to the funeral. At the funeral of the Bibas kids, deliberately killed in captivity, so many tens of thousands showed up for the procession that the figure was literally uncountable.

On the Israeli rememberance day for soldiers who die in Israeli service, the entire country stops for as sirens blast like shofars. One minute the day of, two minutes after. It is a custom that Israelis in their cars literally stop in the middle of the road, open their doors and stand at attention.

This is a country where people literally speed up when encountering pedestrians and yell at you that you shouldn't be walking in the road.

Some Shostakovich 5 Thoughts...

 One more... one of the reasons for my Shostakovich 5 obsession: my famed Bubbie, it was her favorite piece. She claims she heard the premiere on the radio, though I'm pretty sure what she heard was Toscanini's premiere of Shostakovich 7.

But what saddens me about Shostakovich 5 is how domesticated it's become. Everybody talks about how the ending used to be played too quickly, but as I've complained before, it's not just the ending, it's basically the whole thing. This piece is played much too often, and it's usually played like a 'normal symphony.' It basically his only symphony with the appearance of a four-movement classical symphony, and it's usually played with tempos that cram it into the format of Beethoven and Brahms, which is plenty exciting, but makes everybody forget that it's a massively tragic work. Not just terrifying, which it absolutely is and should be, but sad. It bears witness, and it's usually played for fireworks.

I'm sure all of you are thinking that Bernstein started this tradition. He didn't. Outside his famous quick ending, he's often slower than average. Mravinsky did. Mravinsky, Kondrashin, Dmitrev, Gauk, Jansons pere, even young Jansons, they simply breeze through the thing as though it's Beethoven's 5th. You can't call something as terrifying as how they play it superficial, but it gave the sanction for later conductors to basically play it as a virtuoso exercise. Do we really need to hear it take barely forty minutes?

Take the opening, the first half of the opening is, I'm pretty sure, a depiction of depression, the kind of depression you'd feel if Stalin just pronounced a near-death sentence on you in public. It's the inability to get out of bed in the morning, the sighs, the moans, the attempts at revving up self-confidence, the slowness at completing chores, the inability to do anything, and, of course, the erotic daydreaming, the weird sexy dance in the middle which quotes Carmen.

So how do we usually hear it? We usually hear it played as though they just have to get through it to get to the fireworks in the second half of the movement. Conductors don't have to play it completely in tempo, it's basically one long recitative, and you can do all kinds of tempo variations in it. Temirkanov was an absolute master at that (not his CD, later performances like the St. Petersburg broadcast and the live version I heard from him in 2006). Sanderling played it completely metrically, but it was just as good. The Russians who should be custodians of the tradition on the other hand? It was just six minutes of vamping.

Then comes the second half, which everybody waits for. It's supposed to be a gradual acceleration. Does it have to be? Of course not: a guest conductor would spend all rehearsal coordinating it when he otherwise can concentrate on actual details. But it does have to give the sense that the protagonist is getting up and beginning to go about the day out of sheer terror. We of course know about the march at the end of that passage (redolent of Mahler 3's two colliding marches), but shouldn't there at least be parts of it at march tempo rather than the roller coaster ride we often hear? The presence of death or murder has to be there in this music.

As for the Largo, I think it's the first in Shostakovich's many depictions of sleepless nights. His children are in bed, at times he imagines their terror, at times he remembers friends who are gone, at times he remembers lost loves, at times he watches nature itself: wind, cold, birds, and of course, there is that B-Flat minor to D-minor panic attack.

As for the finale, well, we know about the ending... but before that. I have always thought it was a depiction of a riot at an official demonstration. Again, in a normal rehearsal period, it is too much to ask for a conductor (at least a guest) to coordinate that when so much else needs coordination, but it's absolutely necessary to get the true feeling of this movement. It's not just shock and adrenaline (though of course it's both), it's the bombast of a May Day parade, followed by rage, maybe dissident speeches, and all the while the music gets faster and faster as though you feel the rage rising in the spectators. Finally you get to the moment they take action, and as it keeps getting faster, it inevitably sounds like running, confusion, followed by the passionate singing of a revolutionary anthem in A-Major, followed by machine gun fire.

When the protagonist is captured, we hear something that sounds like the same revolutionary song, but it sounds almost like officials reading the song as an accusation, followed by beating and torture, until we get to that ending...

Who gives the appearance of all of it? Well... absolutely nobody. Mark Wigglesworth comes close, he seems to follow the score marking for marking until the very last minute when he shocks you by taking the ending at a near-Bernstein clip. Temirkanov's video broadcast is truly wonderful in many parts, but the Largo is entirely too fast to bring out tears and terror. It takes a level of chutzpah and demands to do all this the way the score specifies and very few people are willing to do anything even close to it. Fireworks are so much easier in this noisy piece that can always be counted on to get audiences to their feet.

Shostakovich 5, like most Shostakovich, is better than it can be performed, and it's absolutely inexhaustible. Even the always lauded greats in this piece: Mravinsky, Bernstein, Haitink, Sanderling, Maxim perhaps, don't get even close to the real truth of the work. Wigglesworth came so close, but however good, it's not like he had an orchestra worthy of Shostakovich in Cardiff. We're still waiting: maybe KP or VJ can do it, but the true nature of the piece still eludes us.

Note from a week later: There are pretty darn good versions though: Bernstein at the end of his life in Boston, Maxim in London, Sanderling in Berlin, Temirkanov's video, recently Constantin Carydis did a pretty good version with the WDR. Haitink, Andrey Boreyko, it's possible to hear this as a wrenchingly sad work as well as an exciting, scary one.

My favorite B-Minor Mass Recordings:

My favorite B-Minor Mass Recordings:

1: Thomanerchor/Freiburg Baroque/Georg Christoph Biller 2013: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NCWMUt0KmY4

2. Wiener Singerknaben/Concentus Musicus Wien/Nikolaus Harnoncourt 1968 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K5jIVFDp8lc&list=PLOvDSA4hBTlMIQMhEVorMh6CHbE15_TeY

3. Thomas Hengelbrock/Balthasar Neumann Ensemble https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kvExf77nRs4&list=RDkvExf77nRs4&start_radio=1

4. Mazaaki Suzuki/Bach Collegium Japan https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O1jV2EMLiSo&list=RDO1jV2EMLiSo&start_radio=1

5. Rundfunk Chor Leipzig/Neuisches Baches Collegium musicum/Peter Schreier

6. Capella Amsterdam/Frans Bruggen https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-gw318qPDhk&list=RD-gw318qPDhk&start_radio=1

7. Netherlands Bach Society/Jos van Veldhoven https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3FLbiDrn8IE&list=RD3FLbiDrn8IE&start_radio=1

8. Arcangelo/Joshua Cohen https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dF2p_nO0pVI&list=PLmOSt1fomrMWP9LGxZEbbgoaQj2W-J7pz&index=1

9. Gachinger Cantorei/Bach Collegium Stuttgart/Helmuth Rilling https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-gw318qPDhk&list=RD-gw318qPDhk&start_radio=1

10. Bavarian Radio Symphony Chorus and Orchestra/Eugen Jochum https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ZDBAWLSbMo&list=RD6ZDBAWLSbMo&start_radio=1

Runners Up: Gustav Leonhardt, Jordi Savall

What do all these performances have in common?

Synthesis and diversity.

They do not banish the old, they do not fully trust the new. They do not make everything fully grand, they do not make everything nothing but intimacy. They look at a two hour work and realize that every new moment needs a variety of expression to hold audience attention.

There are all sorts of ways to do it. The Biller has the Thomanerchor, a sound that Bach surely would recognize 300 years later as his own choir. There is something about that sound that is simply perfect, more authentic than any authentic instrument. It fits Bach as well as the Vienna Philharmonic fits Strauss waltzes. But the reason I love Biller best is that he paces it like a mountain climb. From moment to moment, we aren't just conscious of the immediate moment but of everything which came before and everything which may yet come. It is an act of supreme architecture. If a great objectivist like Toscanini or Klemperer lived today, this may well be how they'd have done this extremely objective spiritual music. But it's more than just objectivity, it's a dialogue, or a compromise, between two sides of a fraught discourse, both of which have important points to make.

On the one hand, there is the old world of Bach: soporific tempi and too large choruses who can't sing it even so. And yet, amid all that boredom are 20 minute segments of absolute transcendence, transcendence which often vanishes from more recent performances. What makes Bach so loved is his harmonies, his part writing, his counterpoint. Why would anyone ever want to breeze through it at a speed at which it can't be appreciated?

So surely there has to be some compromise: surely great musicians can intuit a place where we can still be sent to heaven, yet not fall asleep for the rest.

I believe the way to do it is though the form. In Bach's greatest 'summa' works, to approach it movement by movement for cumulative impact, where you can feel precisely how one movement leads to the next, how every moment before leads to the moment after. These are works greater than they can ever be performed, but they don't just exist to move us or excite us, they exist to quiet us, and more than any other composer, the 'quietus' of Bach is the point.

On the other hand, Joshua Cohen does the opposite of Biller: he creates an opera of contrasts. In every movement he seems to be saying which approach works better, the old or the new? In the outer movements of the Gloria, he goes full Gardiner and creates an outright Dies Irae of noise, but in the more reverent choruses on the Gloria's inside, he plays them with broadly paced reverence. The solo movements are not dances, nor are they meditations, they're conversations, and set at the conversational speeds where you can best hear the text and understand how one movement moves into the next. Is it architecturally coherent? Maybe not, but then again, neither usually are cathedrals.

But Harnoncourt does it very differently. I don't think we imagine how revolutionary that first recording of the B-Minor Mass sounded. For some people it was rage inducing, for others it must have been like seeing the stars for the first time. But now that the revolutionary effect has worn off, it seems like one of the most traditional recordings ever made. Most of the tempi are so much more sensible than we generally hear today. The strings are so much more polished. The boys choir sounds downright normal compared to one voice per part stuff. More importantly, this is perhaps the first attempt to present the B-Minor Mass as a truly alive work of art in which contrast and development exist in dialogue: instead of spiritual valium.

And then there's Hengelbrock. In some ways it's even more my favorite than Biller. I disagree intellectually with a lot of how he paces it, but the music breathes so naturally that it's almost impossible to notice the tempos. So many Bachians care so much about precision, making their forces stamp every bar precisely on the beat: Hengelbrock, like so many of my favorite standard instrument conductors, couldn't care less about getting a crisp rhythm. Like the world's most natural podium musicians, he seems to want more that every musician take ownership of their playing and express themselves freely. If the attacks are constantly spread out, some ahead of the beat, some on, some behind, he doesn't care at all. The sincerity of expression, the commitment of every player, matters more than the ensemble.

But one way I completely agree with Hengelbrock and don't with so many others is in how much he gives to the soloists vs. the choir. There is a much more nuanced perspective to the One Voice Per Part debate: the choruses probably couldn't do a lot of the things Bach asks them to do, and if they did it, they had to rehearse with great dedication, and surely there's no way that hard-working Lutherans had enough time in their schedule to get to the whole thing. On the one hand, I find the OVPP one of the dumbest ideas in a movement full of dumb ideas. On the other, I think there were a lot more solos than we generally suppose. I think Bach reserved them for the climactic moments and had a few key virtuoso runs that he worked them on like dogs and let his temper scare them into practicing at home. The rest was probably soloists.

That's what synthesis means.

Another approach, one I greatly appreciate without loving is the Veldhoven. Veldhoven is pretty magnificent at pacing, and he has a lot of lovely singers (the Mass is more than its conductor after all...), but he doesn't have enough of them. Like Hengelbrock, he reserves a lot of singing for soloists, but my occasional question is why? I know it's often thought Bach didn't have more than, say 10 or 15 singers, but how can there be such a thing as a composer who writes on the grandest possible scale for compromised forces? If Bach had the chance for 50 or 60 professional singers and a fully complemented orchestra to boot, would he ever have refused it?

There are objectivists like Gardiner, so full of drama that I feel my nerves frying. There are objectivists like Herreweghe, so full of beauty that I fall asleep. In lieu of Herreweghe, allow me to recommend Veldhoven. In lieu of Gardiner, let me recommend Suzuki as many people do.

He has all of Gardiner's instrumental virtuosity and most of the singing virtuosity, but he has one element Gardiner never has: joy. Long before Gardiner was widely known as the Nelson Muntz of music, his performances struck me as rage given sonorous air. They have many, many virtues, including humor, including even fun, but they are without joy. You cannot look at Suzuki's Petrenko-like manner on the podium and conclude that he is anything but a joyful human being. Even without visuals, Suzuki's rhythms are absolutely infectious. Every time I hear someone say about Bach 'it's supposed to be a dance' I throw up in my mouth a little, but under Suzuki these not just lace-and-powder dances at Rococo court, they're the dances of musicians who are genuinely enjoying themselves. Certain movements I find too quick, and surely the B-Minor Mass is supposed to be a little more solemn than this, but in every case, Suzuki's decisions make sense on their own terms. I find his Domine Deus much too fast, but it's an enthusiastic dance, and it turns the Qui Tollis into a shock: one moment ago we were dancing at a tavern with a comely girl at church, now we are in her funeral cortege.

But then there's one that comes from a place even beyond personality. I'm not a huge fan of Frans Bruggen: the Mozart and Beethoven and Schubert that sends everyone else into ecstasy just seems non-descript to me and occasionally borderline incompetent (listen to the beginning of his final Mozart 39 and how the already slow tempo gets slower and slower...). When you watch Bruggen, he rarely seems to actually conduct: he's just keeping time with one hand, and it shows. So many of his performances are uninflected, unaffected, and simply bland. I don't know what other people see in this guy except a musician who carries good taste into vulgarity. But Bruggen was a baroque flautist long before he was a conductor, and here he's on home turf. I'm never convinced he understands a single composer after Haydn, but Bach he gets. Bach doesn't require a shader, just a guiding hand and the players do the rest. This is Bach playing so natural I feel like I'm listening to Schubert. How does one even speak of interpretation in a recording like this? It's just a stone perfectly polished by the sea.

The one thing I wish we had is more recordings of trad-instrument Bach in concert halls with musicians of impeccable taste and spirituality. Rilling is great, and god knows there are enough recordings from him of the B-Minor Mass, but Rilling never quite hit the sweet spot. All his recordings oscilate between a vocal line beautifully sustained and runs with staccatos so emphatic they seem etched by bullets. With regard to speed, his first recordings were too traditional and pastoral, then he began to sound like he was taking cocaine in the organ loft.

Peter Schreier, however, is one of the great musicians of our lifetimes, and whenever he took up the baton for choral works, the results were excellent; rarely moreso than here. Schereier even recorded this twice, and unfortunately, of the preferable one I can only find highlights on Spotify. The highlights seem to give us the outline of a performance of absolutely impeccable pacing and architecture, along with some of the most beautiful singing and playing you've ever heard. Occasionally you get some weird mannerisms, like a piccolo trumpet playing the horn part in the Quoniam, or weird decrescendos in Crucifixus, but they stand out because so much is so right, including a gradual realization that the Crucifixus is poco a poco ritarding from nearly the halfway point. It's magnificent! Those East German musicians behind the curtain were some of the greatest on earth: with all the impeccable training of the west but isolated from the luxury padding of the Karajan era.

If this music truly belongs to everybody, then we need this master 'bach' on the symphony subscription schedule. We need the whole world of 'Baroche' music on the schedule. Symphony orchestras are unfortunate creatures that play the same 100 hits over and over and over again.

There is a parallel universe out there where we don't listen to the same B-Minor Mass over and over again for a week, but rather use our time to investigate a massive world of potential lost treasures. Some of it's crap, but there are a lot more jewels out there than we think there are. There are great musicians out there: both composers and performers, and there would be still more if ideology didn't corrupt us all into dismissing what should be entertained.