YouTube Library of Examples of Great Conducting Part 1 - Stand By For Added Commentary

Everybody born pre-1900, though I'm sure I've forgotten a few from the 1890's not listed in Arthur Bloomfield's very interesting "More Than The Notes." hopefully I'll get around to conductors born post-1900 as well and even have a similar series of posts for great pianists and violinists. Everything here is good, but the star system is for just how extraordinary it is. If something is given five stars, it means that even if you knew the work well, you couldn't even imagine a more characterful performance. I could explain why, each clip is what it is, but that would literally take weeks to write up. Instead I'll settle for making paragraph long synopses of each performer and what particularly makes them extraordinary. If any of the links don't work, let me know (yeah... like that'll happen...) and I'll substitute. Also, when listening to YouTube, always listen with headphones. Almost any computer speaker can't possibly take in the full dynamic range.

Artur Nikisch
** Beethoven Symphony no. 5

Robert Kajanus:
**** Sibelius Symphony no. 2,
**** Sibelius Symphony no. 1

* Karl Muck: Parsifal

** Gabriel Pierne: Giration

** Max Fiedler: Brahms Symphony no. 2

Felix Weingartner
*** Mendelssohn Symphony no. 3
**** Brahms Symphony no. 4,
** Beethoven Symphony no. 3

Richard Strauss
****  Beethoven Symphony no. 5,
*** Strauss: Till Eulenspiegel

Arturo Toscanini
**** Verdi Otello, 
*** Beethoven Symphony no. 5,
***** Respighi Pines of Rome

I've long suspected that the Toscanini we all know is nothing like the real Toscanini. Surely the Toscanini known to us from recordings is a caricature of a musician who could inflame imaginations across every corner of the earth. The Toscanini of his final twenty years is a vital but isolated old man who has forgotten what it's like to make music with others - much too often, his performances seem like the musical equivalent to military drills: clipped, metronomic, unyielding, inhuman. Certainly, the military discipline we associate with Toscanini has its own benefits. We hear the benefits in his Otello - for once in our lives, we hear opera singers reined in to project nothing but what's in the score - marking by marking, tempo by tempo, rhythm by rhythm. What unfolds is not an opera but a drama so precise and perfectly paced that it is closer to Sophecles than Shakespeare. Toscanini had meditated on this music his entire life, and when you were the composer's preferred interpreter, your dictations are better than anyone else's collaborations. But we hear the evidence of what must have been a greater of a conductor of much greater sensitivity in his Beethoven 5, which is very nearly as echt-German as it gets and only has the smallest hint of the military about it - put it on for someone who didn't know the performance, they would probably guess it was an old Bruno Walter or Klemperer performance. The elderly Toscanini, vital until the end, was perfect for the fascist pomposity of The Pines of Rome. The music is a piece of trash, and I love every second of it. Never has this most exciting piece been played with more excitement.

Lorenzo Molajoli
****  Verdi Il Trovatore

Carlo Sabajno:
** Verdi Aida

Henry Wood
***  Vaughan Williams Serenade to Music

Franz Schalk
** Schubert Symphony no. 8 "Unfinished"

*** Max von Schillings: Wagner The Entrance of the Gods into Valhalla

**** Leo Blech: Wagner Die Meistersinger Overture

Hans Pfitzner
*** Schumann Symphony no. 2

Oskar Fried
*** Beethoven Symphony no. 9 Finale

Willem Mengelberg:
***** Beethoven Symphony no. 5
**** Beethoven Symphony no. 7
***** Franck Symphony

No conductor is truly a free spirit - a free spirited conductor rides over the desires of 100 other musicians. But the best of the best, whether through persuasion or coercion or some unholy mix of the two, get their players to execute their wishes with an excitement that makes it seem as though they believe in their conductor's ideas as much as the conductor does. No conductor was ever more exciting than Mengelberg, even his weirdest ideas are brought off with such a surfeit of conviction that they work in practice when they absolutely shouldn't. For years, he has been dismissed unfairly as a bombastic virtuoso, the perfect conductor for Les Preludes - which he absolutely was by the way. He is, moreso even than Toscanini, responsible for the rise in the standard of playing in orchestras everywhere - a standard that was set by the Concertgebouw Orchestra of Amsterdam which he lead for fifty years. But whereas Toscanini would seem to have obtained his results at the expense of emotional expression, the emotions in Mengelberg's performances practically throbbed. The more I listen to his Beethoven, the more I wonder if in spite of their gaucheries, or perhaps in part because of them, they are sui generis, closer in spirit to the revelatory, revolutionary nature of Beethoven's inspiration than any other master's performances in the long and glorious history of these works.

** Siegmund von Hausegger: Bruckner Symphony no. 9

**** Alfred Hertz: Mendelssohn Midsummer Night's Dream Overture

Frederick Stock
** Tchaikovsky Symphony no. 5

Sergei Rachmaninov:
** Rachmaninov Isle of the Dead

Serge Koussevitzky
**** Tchaikovsky Symphony no. 5
**** Rimsky-Korsakov: Russian Easter Festival Overture
*** Copland: Appalachian Spring

Koussevitzky's reputation was eclipsed by his greatest achievement - Leonard Bernstein. From learning at the elderly Koussevitzky's feet during the older musician's quarter-century at the Boston Symphony, his star pupil learned that unnameable spark that transmutes music from a flat experience of playing notes on a page to a poly-dimensional experience that changes lives. He also championed all the best music which Koussevitzky did so much to birth from the greatest musical minds of his time - not just Appalachian Spring, but also Copland's Third Symphony, and Pictures at an Exhibition (the orchestral version we all know), and Stravinsky's Symphony of Psalms, and Bartok's Concerto for Orchestra, and Britten's Peter Grimes, and Messiaen's Turangalila Symphony... But Bernstein was a genius, and Koussevitzky was merely a great conductor and an even greater servant of music. At the heart of his archetypally Russian music-making is a heart of gold - that heart was sometimes molten, as in the most dramatic passages of Tchaikovsky, but anyone who's ever experienced the immediacy of Bernstein's performances will recognize the fearless risktaking - the extremities of tempo and dynamics, the slowing down to underline musical climaxes, the milking of beautiful phrases to get the maximum possible most emotional expression, the sheer humanity of it all. Many classical music lovers find such emotionally vulnerable musicmaking unseemly, others of us call it the reason we need music.

Pierre Monteux:
**** Elgar Enigma Variations
**** Schumann Symphony no. 4
*** Ravel La Valse

Monteux was too sane and practical a musician to aim all the way to stratosphere. Yet he came more consistently close to it than most conductors who shoot for the moon at every performance. There is no such thing as a bad Monteux performance, nor is there such a thing as a generic one. Everything he did was shot through with intelligence, imagination, passion, and just a little too much good taste. Even if he never aimed for absolute revelation, he was a revelation all too often. No one but a fiery musician could ever play Schumann 4 like this - as a worthy Beethoven successor rather than a wooden Beethoven 5 imitation. No one but a truly perceptive musician could play Elgar's Enigma Variations - practically the national anthem of the English Concert Hall - with more passion and imagination than any English conductor I've ever heard has. And as the conductor whom young Stravinsky and Ravel entrusted their most important premieres, he has the kind of effortless vim (perhaps a bit too effortless sometimes, finding this quite visceral La Valse took some time) it takes to make Ravel's carefully wrought constructions lift off and stay in the air.

Ettore Panizza:
***** Ponchielli Dance of the Hours
**** Verdi Otello

I have no idea if Panizza's ultra-dramatic, tempo-change-a-minute approach to opera was how it was practiced when it was first performed - I doubt 19th century Italy had orchestras capable of keeping up with interpretations like this - the 1930's Metropolitan Opera Orchestra barely could. But if they did, I can't imagine audiences feeling anything but on fire from the result. In comparison to the sort of anodyne opera performances we usually hear, Panizza's performances seem to come to us from another planet where opera is more like a sporting event - every performance is expected to be completely different from every other. The tempos are often slow as a snail, so that every musical nuance from singers can be savored and pondered in the moment for its full weight, and no matter how weird the phrasing of the singer, Panizza stays exactly in timing with it. But when there's an orchestral interlude, the music suddenly snaps to at maximum speed and excitement and volume. Perhaps musicmaking like this was only possible in a brief era when the entire 'educated' world knew these works backwards and forwards and the best singers of every country descended on New York to flee war. But short of war, what I would not give to hear musicmaking like this live.

Bruno Walter:
***** Mozart Don Giovanni (then click here) (then here)
**** Mahler Symphony no. 9
***** Beethoven Symphony no. 9

There's the Bruno Walter we and our parents hear on recordings today, and then there's the Bruno Walter which our grandparents and great-grandparents heard in the concert hall. The recordings we hear today, wonderful as many of them are, come from the last six years of his life when he was recovering from a heart attack in his 80's and his energy was severely depleted. A lifetime's worth of wisdom lies in that Brahms and Mozart, but wonderful as they are, they are not the Walter that matters most. The Bruno Walter who existed until he was roughly 80 was the Bruno Walter who was Mahler's star pupil, and probably the closest we'll ever get to approximating what Mahler's performances sounded like. This Bruno Walter was perhaps the greatest conductor of the German classics there has ever been - combining Furtwangler's omnipresent imagination with Toscanini's omnipresent fire without Furtwangler's sanctimonious solemnity or Toscanini's oppressive rigidity.

Artur Bodanzky:
** Wagner Tannhauser

Only a Wagner skeptic such as I can offer up Bodanzky as the greatest of all Wagnerians. Through the antique sound lies a perfect image of Wagner as opera, not as Wagner. Never could Wagner have more commanding singers than the Met's roster of the late 30's - Lauritz Melchior and Kirsten Flagstad of course, but also Friedrich Schorr, Marjorie Lawrence, Elisabeth Rethberg, Emmanuel List, Helen Traubel, Kerstin Thorborg... The cast in itself was enough to overwhelm Wagner, and were a traditionally great conductor like Walter or Furtwangler or Klemperer or Kleiber in charge of the Met's Wagner performances during this period, there's no doubt that these voices would be put to the task of properly serving Wagnerian seriousness of purpose. Thank God, that was not to be the case. Bodanzky, an shallower-seeming musical personality, wanted nothing more than theatrical immediacy from his performances. To my knowledge, Bodanzky's performances are the only recorded Wagner which throbs with dramatic purpose for every minute of the performance. All the potentially dull meandering fat is excised form the score, and what emerges is a lean, unphilosophical dramatic genius that is completely alien to Wagner's intentions, and quite an improvement on them.

Tulio Serafin:
*** Verdi Requiem
* Bellini Norma
** Mascagni Cavalleria Rusticana



Thomas Beecham:
*** Bizet Carmen
*** Mozart Symphony no. 35
***** Brahms Symphony no 3

For what should be obvious reasons, there's no conductor I'd have rather played for than Thomas Beecham. Even if he weren't a great conductor, Beecham's witticisms can take up whole books (I own one) and websites. but his musicmaking speaks for itself. Beecham was a man of mostly sunny disposition whom, while many times more intelligent than most conductors (who are generally not the most intelligent or curious bunch of people), had very little use for anything in music that stank too much of metaphysics. To put it more finely, he had little tolerance for bullshit. He loved the plainspokenness of Viennese classicism and 19th century France, and performed their music masterly naturalness. But perhaps it's all a bit too natural - compare Beecham's Carmen to Andre Cluytens (more on him later...) and you'll see the clear as day difference - Beecham is enjoyable and the soul of pleasantry, Cluytens is ecstatic and revelatory. But then, there are performances like Brahms 3, in which Beecham, clearly not content with the customary German stolidity, takes the bull by the balls and squeezes. You can hear Beecham in the outer movements, exhorting the players with all manner of shouts. Beecham is on record in a radio broadcast having some reservations about Brahms, so perhaps Beecham was best in works whose quality he was unsure about. I have never heard performances of Beethoven 7 which I found more persuasive and moving than his live performance (sadly not available on youtube though part of his hardly worse studio performance is), but it was a work about which Beecham said of the first movement (not without basis) "What can you do with it? It's like a bunch of yaks jumping about?"

Desire Ingelbrecht:
* Debussy: La Mer
* Debussy Fetes

Carl Schuricht:
** Beethoven Symphony no. 5
*** Mahler Symphony no. 3
*** Brahms Piano Concerto no. 2

Albert Coates:
**** Tchaikovsky Francesca da Rimini
*** Beethoven Symphony no. 3 (first movement)
**** Tristan und Isolde Love Duet

Leopold Stokowski:
*** Debussy: Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun
** Bach: Toccata and Fugue
*** Sibelius Symphony no. 2

Hermann Abendroth:
*** Schumann Symphony no. 4
** Brahms Symphony no. 1 (Finale)
*** Beethoven Symphony no. 9 (In Russian) 

Ernest Ansermet:
** Debussy Nocturnes
*** Stravinsky: Song of the Nightingale
** Rimsky-Korsakov: Scheherezade

Nikolai Malko:
** Prokofiev: Symphony no. 7

Fritz Steidry:
Nicolai: * Merry Wives of Windsor Overture

Vaclav Talich:
**** Smetana: Ma Vlast
**** Dvorak Symphony no. 8

Samuil Samosud
** Tchaikovsky: The Queen of Spades

Vittorio Gui:
* Rossini: Barber of Seville

Otto Klemperer:
**** Mahler Symphony no. 2
**** Beethoven Symphony no. 3
** Brahms: German Requiem

The same problems that beset Bruno Walter beset his career-long rival. The two Berlin-trained Jewish students of Mahler represented two contrasting pictures of Germany - one supposedly the great humanist and conservative, friend to Thomas Mann, champion of the musical establishment - the other supposedly the great revolutionary and progressive, friend to Bertolt Brecht, champion of the new. And yet, in their dotage they inevitably resembled one another far more than they differed. Both were great but spent in their old age, and their musicmaking is the musicmaking of wise masters who must husband their energies. Perhaps even more than Walter, the manic-depressive Klemperer's music-making practically burst at the seams with fanatical vitality, as this Mahler 2 from Amsterdam can demonstrate all too well, as can this Eroica from Copenhagen. But Klemperer's musicmaking was never as flexible as Walter's. He had other virtues - a far wider musical curiosity and repertoire, and a Boulez-like concern about projecting form and detail. But while Walter, a larger star for longer, was captured far more in his prime, we have far more of Klemperer from his ubiquitous final years. The picture the world has of Klemperer is unfairly weighted toward the lethargic old giant he became. But even at Klemperer's most ponderous (and my God, listen to his Mahler 7 to hear how boring it could get, or better yet, don't...), Klemperer was clearly, as Furtwangler also did, misfiring as only a genius could. Good or bad, there was a zen-like, x-ray projection whose conviction carries the listener forward. I don't have the secret to how Klemperer managed to make such a cool style so expressive, hardly any other conductor ever has, but what's incontrovertible is that Klemperer did precisely that.

Wilhelm Furtwangler:
***** Bruckner Symphony no. 5
***** Brahms Symphony no. 1 (Finale) 
** Wagner: Ring

Today's cult of Furtwangler can be as nauseating as the cult of Toscanini was to previous generations. Even if Furtwangler did not consistently elicit shoddy execution from his forces, listening to his performances can still be as boring as watching paint dry. There is as little reason to to stretch Beethoven's 9th symphony to nearly eighty minutes as there is to try to compress it to under an hour. Whatever the occasional virtues of his Beethoven, the ponderous solemnity and absence of light-heartedness with which he conducts Beethoven and his rough contemporaries is unforgivable - as is the rhythmic slovenliness that accompanies his performances of later composers. Nevertheless, in Middle Romantic generation between Wagner and Brahms during which German music reigned supreme over all, Furtwangler is Holy Writ - never to be surpassed though none would claim to, and never to be duplicated though many have tried. Furtwangler rarely earns the claim of 'greatest of all conductors' to which many, perhaps most, critics would assign him, but in certain works of Wagner, Brahms, especially Bruckner, and yes, certain works (or at least passages) of Mozart, Beethoven, and Schubert, and Furtwangler's ecstatic will to music will reign supreme forever.

Paul Paray:
** Debussy Nocturnes
**** Rimsky-Korsakov: Spanish Caprice
** Gounod: Ballet Music from Faust

Piero Coppola:
*** Saint-Saens Organ Symphony

Hans Knappertsbusch
* Das Rheingold
* Parsifal

Fritz Reiner:
*** Strauss: Also Sprach Zarathustra
***** Bartok: Concerto for Orchestra
**** Rimsky-Korsakov: Scheherazade

Adrian Boult:
*** Vaughan Williams: A Sea Symphony
** Schubert Symphony no. 9

Fritz Busch:
*** Schumann Symphony no. 4
*** Brahms Symphony no. 4
** Mozart: Don Giovanni

Erich Kleiber:
**** Mozart Marriage of Figaro Act I
*** Beethoven Symphony no. 3 
***** Strauss: Till Eulenspiegel

Erich Kleiber was a martinet - he was also so much more. Look at clips of his conducting and contrast it with the conducting of his still more famous son - Carlos, and you see two diametrically opposed styles. Carlos was all imagination and psychology, but Erich was all discipline. He possessed the clearest beat anyone had ever seen, and looked like a military bandmaster rather than a conductor for the concert hall. In classic repertoire, he could be as metronomic as such an approach would lead you to believe. But even at his most disciplined, there was a poetic streak with incredibly beautiful balances and weighted chords and only a little of the Toscanini-like chopped attacks. One critic likened his approach to a mythical beast - Toscwangler, as close to the perfect synthesis of Toscanini's discipline and drama with Furtwangler's freedom and poetry. Perhaps that is a false ideal, but in their differing ways, the two Kleibers are as close to capturing that ideal as we will ever see. And like Carlos, he might have been best of all in light, sparkling, comic music which needs rhythmic panache more than flexible depth. Good as his Beethoven is, and masterly as he's known for being in Beethoven, the true master's hand is found in places like Mozart and Richard Strauss, where Kleiber's light touch is nearly unparalleled.

Charles Munch:
***** Berlioz Symphonie Fantastique
***** Honegger Symphony no. 2
***** Schubert Symphony no. 9

While Beecham is the one Golden Age conductor I wish I could have sat in on a rehearsal, Charles Munch is the Golden Age conductor I would have most wanted to hear live. A few years ago, I made a list of the conductors I thought were the greatest of all time - Munch ranked fourth. Today, I wonder if I would not rank him first. He is the one conductor whom in my experience has never given a performance that disappointed me. Even the most viscerally exciting conductors - Mengelberg, De Sabata, Mitropoulos, have performances when their passion seems to leave them and the phone in a generic performance. But there is not a single generic performance in Munch's discography. Every work I've ever heard of his has his elan, his imagination, his passion, operating at full blast. I have no idea whom the greatest conductor of all time is, but at this point in my life, I can tell you my favorite without a doubt.

Victor De Sabata:
**** Verdi Aida
***** The Salzburg Concert
*** Beethoven Symphony no. 8

When I came to make my ranking of the world's greatest conductors, I somehow forgot Victor De Sabata - a hugely regretful omission, as he would have ranked at very least #7 - not as high as Bernstein or Munch, or Kubelik and Mitropoulos, but higher than Stokowski, Koussevitzky, Mengelberg, Monteux, Mackerras, Klemperer, Barbirolli, Fricsay, Jochum, and other more famous conductors I esteem slightly less... What I'm sure about De Sabata is that he was the very greatest conductor who is not a personal favorite of mine. Whatever that means... it is nevertheless impossible to hear Victor De Sabata and not immediately be bowled over by the sheer animalistic intensity of the playing he elicits. Even among the most physically exciting conductors - Mengelberg, Mitropoulos, Munch - there can't possibly be anything like this in the annals of orchestral precision. It's all a bit high-strung, I could only wish for a bit more repose, but to have wound an orchestra so tightly also gives it incredible freedom and flexibility of the kind that, unlike Toscanini, De Sabata exploits to explore every possible musical nuance.

Nikolai Golovanov:
***** Mussorgsky Boris Godunov
*** Rimsky-Korsakov Scheherazade

Hermann Scherchen:
**** Beethoven Symphony no. 3
*** Schoenberg Moses und Aron
** Bach St. Matthew Passion

Clemens Krauss:
**** Wagner: Siegfried
*** Strauss Salome
***** Johann Strauss: Voices of Spring

Artur Rodzinski:
*** Tchaikovsky: Romeo and Juliet
** Brahms: Symphony no. 1
*** Shostakovich: Symphony no. 1

Karl Bohm:
* Mozart: Symphony no. 36
*** Schubert: Symphony no. 2
*** Wagner: Tristan und Isolde

Dmitri Mitropoulos:
**** Mahler Symphony no. 3
**** Shostakovich Symphony no. 10
*** Strauss Elektra

George Szell:
**** Beethoven Symphony no. 9
**** Mendelssohn Midsummer Night's Dream
**** Sibelius Symphony no. 2

John Barbirolli:
**** Sibelius Symphony no. 2
*** Mahler Symphony no. 9
*** Nielsen Symphony no. 4

Eugene Ormandy:
* Rachmaninov Symphony no. 2
* Tchaikovsky Romeo and Juliet
** Tchaikovsky Violin Concerto

A Library of Youtube Music Recommendations for Your Personal Listening - An Ongoing List

Performances I Love, In No Real Order - though the top rec always comes first. I will add to this list as time goes on, both in number of pieces and in performance recommendations. I'll repost this link to facebook every time I feel like updating it - though I have no idea when that will be. But I'm lazy, so this is extremely incomplete. No doubt, this documentation is very sloppy and confusing. One thing though, always wear headphones if you can on youtube, there's much more dynamic contrast:

1. Furtwangler/Berlin: Bruckner 5 (1942)
2. Berlioz Symphonie Fantastique: Munch/Paris (1967), Munch/Boston (1954), Munch/Chicago (1966), Munch/New York (1948), (there's a theme here, nevertheless...) Bernstein/Paris (1976), Gardiner/Romantic and Revolutionary Orchestra (London) (1993), Dudamel/Combined Orchestras (2009)
3. Mahler Symphony no. 2: Bernstein/New York (1987), Mehta/Israel (1994),  Klemperer/Philharmonia (1962) Solti/London (1966), Bruno Walter/Vienna (1948), Scherchen/Vienna (1958),
4. Beethoven Symphony no. 5: Mengelberg/Concertgebouw (Amsterdam) (1940), Szell/Dresden (1961), Karajan/Berlin (1977), Carlos Kleiber/Vienna (1975)
5. Mravinsky/Leningrad: Tchaikovsky Francesca da Rimini (1972)
6. Sibelius Symphony no. 2 Barbirolli/New York (1939), Szell/Cleveland (1970), Philadelphia/Stokowski (1962)
7. Victor De Sabata - the final Vienna Philharmonic Concert (1953)
8. Smetana Ma Vlast: Kubelik/Prague (1990), Talich/Prague (1939),
9. Beethoven Symphony no. 9: Szell/Philharmonia (London) (1969), Amsterdam/Mengelberg (1938), Wand/Hamburg (1987), Schuricht/Paris (1965), Bruno Walter/London (1948), Celibidache/Turin (1958), Kubelik/Copenhagen (1959),  Bernstein/Vienna (1979)
10. Brahms Symphony no. 3: Beecham/NBC (New York): Brahms 3 (1956), Bruno Walter/Los Angeles (1959), Furtwangler/Berlin (1949)
11. Brahms Symphony no. 2: Jochum/Berlin (1955), Walter/New York (1950), Weingartner/London (1939), Carlos Kleiber/Vienna (1991)
12. Strauss: Till Eulenspiegel's Merry Pranks: Furtwangler/Berlin (1950), Solti/Chicago (early 70's),
13. Franck Symphony: Bernstein/New York (1959), Monteux/Chicago (1960), Mengelberg/Concertgebouw (1937), Furtwangler/Vienna (1945), Munch/Boston (late 50's), Bernstein/Paris (1981), De Sabata/New York (1950), Cantelli/New York (1954), Muti/Philadelphia (1980's)
14. Stravinsky Les Noces: Pokrovsky Ensemble (1994), Gergiev/Mariinsky (St. Petersburg) (2008)
15. Brahms Symphony no. 1: Furtwangler, Furtwangler, Furtwangler, and especially Furtwangler. ... also Bernstein/Vienna (1983)
16. Stravinsky: Petrushka Bolshoi (Moscow) (1997), Gergiev/London (2008), Temirkanov/Leningrad (1975), Monteux/Boston (1951),
17. Stravinsky: Rite of Spring Gergiev/London (2008?), Salonen/Los Angeles (2003), Boulez/Paris (2002), Monteux/Boston (1951), Dorati/Minneapolis (1959), , Zander/Boston (1990s) Tilson Thomas/San Francisco (2000), Ormandy/Philadelphia (1954),
18. Beethoven Eroica Symphony: Scherchen/Vienna(1958), Karajan/Berlin (1977), Klemperer/Copenhagen (1957), Kleiber/Amsterdam (1950), Gielen/Freiburg (1990's)
19. Mozart Last Three Symphonies: Harnoncourt/CMW (Vienna) (2014), Bruno Walter/Los Angeles (late 50's), Fricsay/Vienna (1958), Harnoncourt/Vienna (1991)
20. Mozart: Gran Partita Furtwangler/Vienna (1950), Schonwandt/Copenhagen (?)
21. Verdi: Aida Toscanini/NBC/Nelli/Tucker (New York) (1949), Chailly/La Scala (Milan)/Urmana/Alagna (2006)
22. Verdi: Otello Toscanini/NBC/Vinay/Valdengo (New York (1947), Panizza/Met/Martinelli/Tibbett (New York): Verdi/Otello 1938, Levine/Domingo/London (1978), Kleiber/Domingo/Milan (1976)
23. Berlioz: Les Troyens Colin Davis/London (2000), Pappano/Royal Opera (London), 2012, Beecham/London (1947), Kubelik/Milan (1960)
24. Verdi: La Traviata Kleiber/Munich/Contrubas/Domingo (1977),
25. Verdi: Falstaff Bernstein/Vienna/Fischer-Dieskau: (1966), Molajoli/Rimini (1930ish),  Toscanini/New York/Valdengo (1950), Karajan/Taddei/Vienna (1980), Karajan/Gobbi/London (1955), Cillario/Gobbi/Paris (1975),
26. Muti/La Scala (Milan)/Licitra: Verdi - Il Trovatore (2004)
27-32.  Mozart: The Marriage of Figaro: Bohm/Vienna/Prey/Freni/DFD/Te Kanawa -(1976), the Giulini/Taddei recording set to the Salzburg Marionette Theater , Jacobs live in 2004ish,  Fricsay/Schoffler live in German/just heard (1951), and in the absence of Fricsay's studio recording, best of them all, here is the full Giulini
33. Mozart: Don Giovanni - Sanderling/Bolshoi live in Russian/just heard (1948) and the Commendatore Scene set by the Prague Marionette Theater, Abbado/Ferrara/Keenlyside/Terfel (1997), absenting Bruno Walter's all-time desert island 1944 Met performance with Pinza and Kipnis, here is Leinsdorf/Met (New York)/Siepi/Corena (1961), nearly as great.
34. Wagner: Die Meistersinger - Jochum/Bayreuth/Hotter (1949), Furtwangler/Berlin/Nazis Die Meistersinger Overture
35. Jochum/Munich - Bruckner 9
36. Tennstedt/Berlin - Bruckner 8
37. Jochum/Berlin - Bruckner Te Deum
38. Bruckner - Os Justi - Gardiner/Monteverdi Choir
39. Bruckner - Ave Maria - unknown
40. Mahler Symphony no. 1 (finale) - Mitropoulos/Minneapolis Symphony (1941)
41. Mahler Symphony no. 4 (opening) Kegel/Leipzig (1970's)
42. Mahler Symphony no. 5: Kubelik/Concertgebouw (Amsterdam) (start here) 
43. Mahler Symphony no. 6: Szell/Cleveland (1967)
44. Mahler Symphony no. 8: Rattle/National Youth Orchestra (London, 2002) 
45. Mahler Symphony no. 9: Bruno Walter/Vienna (1938), Abbado/Berlin (1999), Barbirolli/Berlin (1964)
46. Mahler Das Lied von der Erde: Bruno Walter/Ferrier/Patsak/Vienna (1952), Concertgebouw/Schuricht (1939), Klemperer/London/Wunderlich/Ludwig (1965) , Kleiber/Vienna/Ludwig/Kmentt
47. Mozart: The Magic Flute - Klemperer/Everybody/London (1967), The Bergman Movie (1975), The Ustinov Production (1971), Royal Opera (London)/Colin Davis (2000ish),
48: Mozart Operas: The Ostman Recordings (Sweden) - Take Them As A Whole
49. Golovanov/Prigorov/Bolshoi (Moscow): Mussorgsky Boris Godunov (1947)
50.  Mahler 3:Haitink/Concertgebouw (Amsterdam) (mid 80's), Martinon/Chicago (1967) (start there),
51. Verdi: Rigoletto/Chailly/Pavarotti/Wixell/Vienna (1982)
52. Leoncavallo: Pagliacci/Pretre/Domingo/Stratas/Pons/La Scala (Milan) (1990's)


There are many, many more, I could recommend. But this is really all I feel like doing today. Hopefully, I'll come back at some point.

800 Words: Sense of Place

Biddeford, Maine: I have just gone on the first solo road trip of my life - up the East Coast, the one part of the world, save Israel which is really a small sliver of a part of the world, that I know with anything more than passing familiarity. After days spent on the couches and spare rooms of different friends and their spouses, I arrived yesterday morning at the house of my college best friend, whom after three years in Baltimore may still be my closest friend.

Even now, one-third of the way through my thirties, my mind still sees the years 21 and 22 as a very brief golden era. I was probably as miserable (or at least barely less) than I ever was. But there was something about the group in which I felt at home - a shared ethos, common values, a weirdly earnest cynicism, and a determination to have funny things to say about serious matters and serious things to say about funny ones. I probably didn't even know many of the friends I associate with those two years yet particularly well, and yet those two years set the stage for any consolation that came in later years that offset the misery that returned nearly unabated until I came to Baltimore. Inevitably, such groups can't last long, and much to my dismay, everybody dispersed to where life had to carry them. The loss was inevitable, it was also painful for a guy who direly needed a better period.

I love, truly love, my good friends in Baltimore. But I do not share many of their values, and I disapprove as strenuously of their values as I don't doubt they do of mine. I've written so many times about the differences that they require no revaluation here, but for the record, the values of Smalltimore are every bit as rotten and corrupt as the places from which we all had to so direly wish to escape in order to find ourselves amongst each other.

Even so, I worry that if my life yet again takes a sharp downward turn, I may yet view these first few years in Baltimore with the exact same halo, and I want it on the record here that if I start viewing those first few years in Baltimore surrounded by a gold plate, it wasn't at all like that, just as the last two years at AU weren't at all like that. A set of circumstances conspired to make those years only slightly less miserable than the years surrounding them. The anxiety attacks with their hand tremors and hyperventilation, the omnipresent facial tics, the helpless addiction to food, the physical pains and ailments, the compulsive going through money like water, the total inability to create the person you wanted to be, was exactly the same as it ever was. It only seemed, for a brief moment, like the fog was lifting, and you were finally, if ever so briefly, on the path to being that delusional image of a person you wanted to be.

In retrospect, there was one thing which all the people from those AU days shared: a shared devotion to, or at least an inability to escape, a certain place - a place different for each of us, but startlingly similar in particulars as all places are to the people who grew up in them. We all loved those places, even as we often hated everything about them. The roots haunted us all, the places from which we hailed gave us the wings they chose for us even as they tore asunder any wings we might have wanted to obtain on our own.

Over the years, I've traveled plenty of times to my friends' towns of origin. I've travelled so often to Biddeford Maine, or Toms River New Jersey, or St. Mary's Pennsylvania, that hometown friends of my friends have become friends of mine. I'll probably never have opportunity to visit other such hometowns of old friends like Watertown, New York or Homestead, Florida. But what I inevitably return to is that each these places are true places, with genuine senses of place within them, whereas my hometown is just a makeshift place that Jews settled because they were not from anywhere else.

When you go to Biddeford, Maine, you see a place worth preserving exactly as it is. You see the still waters of the coastline running against rocky cliffs of every color, both of which rub up against beaches that seem to stretch into infinity. Turn your head slightly away from the shores and you see land too pristinely green for a kid who grew up going the Delaware beaches to believe could exist within the same sightline. Life is calm and peaceful, surrounded by natural beauty at every turn, and every day as relaxing as a vacation. Everything about this place seems as quiet and untroubled as the landscape. A Jewish kid from Northwest Baltimore can't help wonder how a person could ever be so lucky to grow up in a place so beautiful.

When you go to Toms River, New Jersey, you see a similarly seaside town - far more ethnically diverse than Biddeford, but not nearly so attractive aesthetically. And yet the diversity gives every possible amenity, and makes life into a never-ending soiree. If you want to go to a beach, everybody seems to know someone who has their own piece of private beach where you can lie and swim, practically undisturbed. If you want a good meal, you visit the restaurant of your friend who became a chef. If you want entertainment or culture, you take a simple drive to Philadelphia or New York. If you want to hang out, you call the friends you've grown up and gone to the same gatherings with since you were in high school.

Provincial though these places may seem to people who've never been there, being born to places like them is better than living any big city, and worth the lifelong fight it takes to preserve everything that's worthwhile about them. Hopefully, your children can soon enjoy all the things that enliven your time upon this Earth just as you do now.

But for a Jew who wants to truly be a Jew, there is no such truly defined place from which to hail. For all Pikesville's Jewish concentration (and it's the largest concentration outside of Israel), it's just a makeshift Jewish community that people come to because Jews live there, and leave without a second thought when better opportunities arise. It's not particularly attractive, nor is it a place where people are particularly nice to each other, it's simply a place where some Jews feel free to be Jewish without judgement. Such a place is the long-cherished dream of those who might fancy themselves "Jewish separatists", and for those who dreamed of it, it is very much a place worth defending. But for those of us who look at the fanaticism which such a dream engenders, for those of us who disapprove of the right-wing paranoia and religious fanaticism such a place can't help but breed, it is a place we can't help longing to escape, even as we feel gratitude for everything with which it provided us.

Being a Jew, by definition, means that there is no place where you should feel truly at home. There is no place on this planet where a true Jew feels accepted, and I doubt there ever will be. Many Jews thought that America, not Israel, is the true Promised Land where we can be integrated among the American population, but for many Jews integration turned out to be the same as assimilation - once you're fully American, you're no longer fully Jewish. And for all New York's Jewish heritage, it will always be a scattered, multicultural place. According to Lenny Bruce, if you live in New York, you're automatically Jewish. But if your primary attachment is to New York, then your religion is New York and there's no room for a second primary affiliation. If you live in Israel, your right to existence is questioned on a daily basis by the world, and living among other Israelis, your existence is a life permanently in conflict. Even if Israelis weren't known for being of an extremely abrasive and confrontational temperament, the challenge of creating and sustaining a productive, dynamic country in the desert, among people who wish us dead and a world that expects us to accept that wish without objection, would make any Jew who lives in Israel feel extreme rancor.

There is nothing comfortable or harmonious about a Jewish existence. I don't know the origin of the term 'People of the Book', but being a Jew is the definition of being at home nowhere but in your own thoughts, and a properly applied mind is an extremely turbulent place to live. Whether among themselves or among non-Jews, Jews thrive best in an atmosphere of conflict, defiance, opposition. Wherever we're from, our sense of place will always be filled with tension, and tension is the lifelong burden which every Jew takes on himself. There is no inner harmony to Judaism, and no sense that life should be fun. There is only constant debate and argument. The hightened state in which argument exists produces many crucial things that improve the quality of life, but it is not a life to be enjoyed.

800 Words: 50 Creative Works that Got Into My Soul - The First 20

A lot of this is repetition of stuff I’ve written about. But I’m going to get in touch with many people very soon to contribute 10 of their own to this. As for me, some of these are very familiar from other posts, others I’ve never written about. But here, should anybody care, is a personal canon:

Mahler Symphony no. 3: This piece of music is my highest article of faith - it is everything in this world - nothing human or inhuman is alien to it. Period.

Singer - Collected Stories: My second article of faith. The world of my grandparents and great-grandparents, populated as they saw the world - full of superstitions, demons, and imps, where God’s arbitrary salvation is by no means guaranteed. The lost six million cry out from their lost world in these pages. Singer is not a writer of our time, he is a teller of folk tales with no more style than the peasants and immigrants he depicts. His art is his artlessness, and that makes his writing mean more to me than anything in Shakespeare.

Golijov - La Pasion Segun San Marcos: The work that showed me I could be a composer. Golijov is the only musician whom I know speaks the same language as me - deeply Jewish, but highly colloquial and secular, classically erudite but also immersed in popular genres. He is the first, and one of the only, composers to bridge the gap between classical and popular music without making you conscious of him doing that. He is, for me, nothing less than the resurrection of music.

The Rules of the Game/The Marriage of Figaro/Uncle Vanya/Children of Paradise: Four of the saddest comedies in existence, in which everybody has their reasons. Nobody is to blame, but nobody is above blame. Each work is like its own little democracy in which everybody gets their say, gives vent to the frustrations of their lives, and is forced to understand the frustrations of others. Every character is a different person at the end than they are at the beginning, by the end, some kind of stability returns and nobody’s happier than they were at the beginning, but hopefully we’re a little wiser for watching.

The Simpsons: Talk about it’s own little democracy… The Simpsons, at least the first eight or nine years, will live forever (and seemingly will be on forever too). But it would seem that there’s a divide between people my age and people even people five years younger than me. Friends roughly my age can recite whole episodes nearly by heart. But kids Jordan and Ethan’s age, exposed to cynicism at an earlier age, more comfortable with vulgarity, never had a period where their whole view of the world revolved around The Simpsons - they seemingly reserved that for South Park, great in its own way, but not coming up to their model’s ankles. The Simpsons, thought of as vulgarity itself when it was first on, now seems a relic from a more innocent age. It is the complete show - with every human emotion and sentiment underlying the comedy in a way every one of its successors can only dream of. South Park is satire, The Simpsons is everything.

Louis CK: Comedy is the only thing that ever truly tested my loyalty to music as the most important creative consolation in this world. It’s also the only thing that ever brought me back from heavy doses of overserious music, and Louis CK has got to be something approaching the greatest who ever picked up a mic. Still not 50, it would surprise me if in 10 years he’s not viewed as the single greatest. Not only is his material funnier than everybody else’s, it’s also more serious. No comedian ever felt so human, and when you consider that he also is the single author of one of the half-dozen greatest TV shows ever made during a period when great TV grows on trees, he becomes the creator who defines the period of my early adulthood.

The Unbearable Lightness of Being: The first so far on this list I’ve never written about. I have no idea what impact this slight and somewhat pretentious novel would have made on me on any period but the one when I first read it. But languishing at 21, ‘trapped’ in Prague, emotionally battered from a battle-scarred adolescence, feeling far too lonely for someone spending his 21st birthday in one of the world’s most beautiful cities; this book, with its advocacy of stoicism, its almost nihilist view of the helplessness of individuals to control their lives, and its savage inveighing against kitsch and its resemblance to totalitarianism, was like Manna from Heaven, and precisely what I needed to hear to truly begin mending in the years after I lived in a kind of authoritarian regime.

Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man: Thus far in my life, I have no patience for the stylistic headgames of Ulysses, and I won’t even try a page of Finnegan’s Wake. But Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is an important book for reasons completely apart from the usual stylistic points that make people talk about Joyce. For any smart, sensitive kid stuck in a narrow place of origin which he wished was absolutely anywhere else, Portrait is an absolutely necessary read. Even if you leave, you can never truly leave it behind.

Kafka: At 33, there are three writers that stand in my soul above all others - Singer, Chekhov, Kafka - Singer, bard of the supernatural, Chekhov, bard of everyday banality, and Kafka, bard of the systems and absurdities that keep us from being the people we want to be - all three are short storytellers, and all three have no patience for art in their storytelling. All that’s left on the page is what’s relevant, which burns like fire. It wasn’t until Kafka that we see how powerless we are against forces much too powerful to be reckoned with. There’s no need for a God to blame in Kafka’s world, we’re doing fine keeping ourselves in prison without Him, and long as we stay in prison, there isn’t much need for human individuality either.

Mad Men: But what can be more individualistic than Mad Men? Leave aside the immaculate decor and focus on that central mystery: Who is Don Draper? Really? A good man or a bad man? A self-made man or an imposter? A genius or a lucky sonofabitch? Is he even anybody at all? Is he America as we once were, or is he the nightmare we all don’t want to admit we still are? This is what it means to depict human personality and individuality - a part of ourselves we can neither know nor understand, so don’t give us answers as to who a person is, just ask the question.

Janacek Cunning Little Vixen - Or are we just animals, beholden to the same nature, life cycle, milestones, needs and desires to which every animal is beholden? The only great opera ever made from a comic strip, this anthropomorphic view of the world is what both music and theater exist to show us. It tells us that we’re all doomed and foolhardy with misspent priorities, but because life always carries on with all its tragic stupidity intact, it is a magnificent thing.

Les Noces: I’ve fallen back in love with Stravinsky this year. For all his misspent later years where his music dried up into something emotionally arid, was there ever a composer, in any period, who began with so much vitality pouring from his very seams? The stuff of life, in all its teeming, disorderly vitality, is perhaps more consistently beating within the young Stravinsky’s music than in any period of Mozart’s or Bach’s, or even Beethoven’s.

Haydn Creation: And here is a piece that is about the origin of life itself. Short of Mahler 3 and Cunning Little Vixen, there is no music in all the world I love like this. Haydn’s retelling of the Old Testament’s Creation myth is life itself as it first begins.

Tokyo Story: But what comes after? Here is a small, oh so small, Japanese fable full of universal reverberations about precisely that question. Elderly parents in a small town go to visit their children in a big city, and find that their busy children have no time for them. They go home disappointed, and shortly later, one of them dies, and the children cry because they never truly got to know the person they should have known best. So simple, so artless, but so infinite.

L’Enfant et les Sortileges: What is being a child really like? This very brief opera by Ravel attempts to answer that question. A child is sent to his room for misbehaving, throws a temper tantrum, and all the objects in his room come to life. The boy stretches his imagination to its fullest height, and the more imaginative he becomes, the more he understands why he should be nicer.

Fanny and Alexander: What is being a child really like when adults don’t offer you the privilege of imagination? Fanny and Alexander seem blissfully happy in a loving though hardly perfect family where the vitality of life roams at its fullest. But when the father dies, the mother remarries soon thereafter to an ascetic, abusive, priest. Everything that was once rich and full about their childhoods is taken from them in the cruellest possible way. But life, as always, finds the most improbable of ways to assert itself. Watch the three-hour version, even Bergman himself admitted that the five-hour version was inferior.

Woody Allen: It’s a shame whenever a kid spends his formative years imbibing an artist who turns out to be such a slimeball - especially because Woody, unlike Roman Polanski, seemed obsessed by precisely the sort of moral questions that one might think his behavior would preclude. I know we’re supposed to separate the art from the artist, but I just can’t in Woody’s case. I can understand how a moral gargoyle can make Chinatown, or The Cosby Show, or Psycho, or The Ring Cycle, but for all the weakness for young women that’s scrawled around his movies, I don’t know how a man, even a very intelligent one with a capacity for deception, can make Radio Days or Hannah and Her Sisters - so suffused with warmth and human decency, so compassionate when people can’t live up to decency even as their failures are not excused - and act the way Woody has almost clearly acted. It’s just beyond my understanding.

800 Words: What Should I Do?

I have so many projects to work on right now that I'm blocked on all of them. The last two movements of a 4-cello piece (and a revision of the second), a non-fiction book of history I haven't written any of since last summer, perhaps a piano piece too, a fiction book that's marinated in my head since 2010 with not many stabs at getting it done, a play I seem to have given up on after the 3rd scene, a long series of pieces of choral music I've wanted to write since 2009. The mere act of writing this litany down is depressing as hell, and those are only the projects I've actively wanted to work on right now, I have literally fifty more I've cooked up with some notes on them and I can't even begin to fathom how I would get them done. The one project I've been somewhat successful is on losing the weight I gained fifteen years ago in college, and I've only started buckling down for a long haul of resisting every food that used to make me feel like bliss to eat, and now makes me feel like death.

Hell, I'm even blocked on this blog. I've been trying to summon up the willpower to write this post for the last two weeks, and I always find a reason not to.

As my life becomes relatively well-settled, I find my ceaseless and ever unsatiated ambition beginning to dry up. At 33, I'm beginning to find that I don't have quite so many things to prove, at least to myself, as I did when I was 17, or 25, or even 31. Why rock the boat? Why take on the inevitable misery and drudgery of trying to make 'Great Art' when it might rock the boat of a relatively decent situation? Why should the aged eagle stretch its wings?

I know myself too well to not assume that this too shall pass, and fairly soon I don't doubt I'll go back to being the world's laziest ADD workaholism that has defined so much of my life thus far. One project, then the next, then the next, never finishing any of them, never getting anybody much interested in them but myself, never showing that I can fulfill the responsibilities to which I've entrusted myself, let alone those to which others have entrusted me.

There was an interesting article about Baltimore in the New York Times last week. The article was absolutely right, there is something about living in Baltimore that kills ambition. And for a person who was always so ambitious as I, nothing has ever been so direly needed as this kind of hipster paradise where nothing gets done, every day is like every other, drama is minimal, every aesthetic catastrophe by every would be artist is found interesting by somebody, and every person strives at all costs to be positive toward one another, because to be anything but uncritical would be to remind ourselves of the ever-present failure to create a better city that goes on in every other corner of this perennial sick man of East Coast cities. Who would have ever thought that a tropical paradise could be found in Baltimore? It's like permanently living in the Virgin Islands or St. Maarten.

Against all evidence, I still believe that somewhere within me and outside of this blog, I have a real creative voice that people want to hear. Somewhere in me, it is there. A typical DC person would read those two sentences and laugh behind my back at its stupefying pretension, even as they all believe the same thing about themselves. A typical Baltimore person would read it and be heartened and roused, resolving to do everything within their power to help my voice become a reality - even if they can't do much, because nothing wilts amidst all this positivity as quickly as real creativity. But I have not found a voice yet that compels me, or compels others, enough for me to stick with the idea for more than a few days at a time without becoming distracted. Is it even worth pursuing?

Baltimore is a creative paradise where every artist does everything he or she can to help each other. But when you have no life experience outside this bubble of positive thinking, what can you possibly express that would be of interest to anyone who doesn't share your prejudices? I hope against hope that what I say isn't true, and amidst all this creative support and help, somebody will rise up to create something of true and lasting quality. But what would it be?

800 Words: Something...

American Literature and I don't mix. I used to be absolutely militant on the idea that literary quality is  literary quality, regardless of whether a dead white male wrote it or anybody else. Quality is quality regardless of its source, and with enough eons, other people will ascend to the pantheon. Then I realized I had the same problem as every other minority group. Just as so many minorities have trouble in literature with Dead White Males, I have trouble with dead goyim. It's not so much that I can't read non-Jewish authors (even writing that quid-pro-quo makes me cringe), it's simply that when they come from a society that has either complete ignorance of Jews, or complete contempt for them, I simply find that their worldview is so far from my own that I can't get into it. I don't mind reading antisemitic authors, or even antisemitic books, I just find, very often, that their worldview doesn't jive with mine - which is perhaps a clue as to why these authors have so much antipathy toward Jews.

I've written about this problem reasonably often. I was reminded of it recently as I tried to read The Great Gatsby again, or at least listen to it on audiobook. I know, I know, Gatsby is amazing. You know it, I know it, the American people certainly know it. I've read Great Gatsby at least two or three times before, and it really is as great as people say - or at least I thought so the last few times. This time through, or this failure, I just couldn't get into it.

In so many ways, it's an ideal book. Every word means something, every sentence has direction, every piece of narration is part of a whole. There is not a single empty moment in the book - all that's left of it is a narrative voice who is guiding you securely from one paragraph to the next - secure in the knowledge that every place you go is ventured with a purpose.

But there's just something about it that doesn't jive. We see Gatsby's vitality and pit it against the buttoned up West Egg snobbery of the old money set, and while we see that their lives are full of decadent contempt for anything that stands out, Gatsby's nouveau riche vitality, gauche as it is, is something real and pure. And yet, this time, though I only read a small part of it, the novel simply seems like the myopia of a country club snob who sees the barbarian knocking down the gates while he congratulates himself on fitting in. Trivialities on that level are no way to spend a full novel, you'll get bored by quarter of the way in (as I was...). I don't doubt I'll fall back in love with Gatsby before too long, but it was disappointing to come to it with that feeling so close by. The last time I read it, a few months after I graduated college, it seemed like the best kind of irony, as though he were holding these supposedly attractive people up to contempt. But contempt only gets us so far in this crazy world, and why should anyone have to read about decadence like this? It's like the preacher who inveighs against pornography by showing the congregants a picture of it.  No wonder you're/I'm bored!

I can't doubt that it's the Jew in me that's howling in protest. This, no doubt too censorious, voice is shouting at me that this kind of dessicated boredom is the kind of thing which you get from never having encountered poverty and not seeing a world past your spoiled social set.

"Oh really? Says the guy who grew up in Pikesville among Jewish guys who spent tens of thousands on alabaster staircases and vanity plates on their Porsches?" This voice, 'liberal internationalist Evan,' never ceases to make Evan self-critical about Jewish Evan's monstrously Prophet-like urge to denounce everything as an abomination in the sight of the God Evan's brain tells him can't possibly exist.

I had a similar experience a few days earlier trying to read Herman Melville - small excerpts from Moby Dick, the entirety of The Encantatas, and The Bell Tower. Melville, pointedly unlike Fitzgerald, was a philosemite - though I can't imagine that a mid-19th century New Yorker who spent most of his life either at sea or at a writer's desk knew many Jews.

Melville is, how shall we say?.... a little boring. Like Fitzgerald, his prose is absolutely beyond reproach; he writes in the kind of linguistic tapestry you can't possibly recapture in an era when our brains are more shaped by moving images than language - Dickens has that kind of linguistic tapestry too, so does Victor Hugo at his best. Today, the great over-writers go to the avant-garde and make (subject?) us to linguistic experiments. If any writer reached for their particular kind of linguistic feast (or feat) today, we'd just think of that writer as florid.

But to my view, Melville's problem, a common one among the earlier American writers, or perhaps simply artists the mid-19th century, is that he's so interested in the metaphysical striving that he neglects to note whether we're interested too. Wagner certainly has the same problem, so does Dostoevsky, so does Tennyson.

But I have a particular bone to pick with Melville, something to my personal experience that makes his flaws unforgivable in a manner that I can much more easily forgive Tennyson. I had to read the entirety of Moby Dick in the last trimester of high school. My English teacher, the recently deceased and mostly otherwise lamented Mr. Spaeth, made us keep a journal of each chapter to make sure we read the entire fucking thing. And I did, every goddamn page. If you think Moby Dick is agony, try having to read every page of it with the knowledge that if you don't, an abusive high school might mete out one last punishment for you.

But as a novel, Moby Dick's kind of  sacrificing everything to distribute vengeance and some sort of perverse justice upon the earth seems, to say the least, futile. It reminds me of a description a great music critic once gave of Bruckner's Fifth Symphony - referring to its 'visionary dreariness.' No doubt, there is something sublime about chasing after the infinite, whether it's in the form of a great landscape, or a White Whale, or building a robot that will serve humankind. But since it's a given that those who wade too far and deep into the water will eventually drown, why are we going in at all unless there's a chance that we'll enjoy ourselves along the way?

What's missing in Melville is that thing that offsets the unremitting bleakness. Any artwork, any city or country, any human being, that ignores comedy at the expense of tragedy (or vice versa) is unhealthy. I may be the only person to believe this, but I believe that there is probably a finite amount of suffering in the universe. For every pleasure we experience, there is someone else who doesn't - whether that someone is the butt of a joke, or whether that someone is a slave-wage worker in Malaysia, or a chicken in North Dakota awaiting its slaughter among millions of other chickens, someone has to pay the price for our privilege and happiness. In a balanced society, the suffering is evenly distributed, with tragedy and triumph being roughly equal in its inevitability. And when that happens, the life cycle can continue uninterrupted. But the more one side profits from another, the greater their comeuppance will be. Nature always finds a way to correct.

(Note from 2025: Good god, Evan screwed up again. No comedy in Moby Dick? Did you not read every page of this book, some chapters over and over again?)

...To everything there is a season... A righteous man falls seven times and gets up... Kleig, Kleig, Kleig - du bist a Naar (smart, smart, smart - you're an idiot)... If I am not for myself who will be for me, and if I'm only for myself, what am I...

The duality of Judaism... that idea is what makes it an attractive religion to me. Not the usual 'God is this, God is that...' which you can get in any other religion. No God will ever get my unconditional praise. I don't doubt that in actuality, Judaism is very different from my personal interpretation of it, and probably a lot more boring. But it's my personal interpretation that makes it interesting to me. The tragicomic nature of life, the idea that everything and anything can happen, that the mysteries are there for us to probe, but at the same time, those mysteries are merely to be enjoyed as best we can.

Mad Men vs. Game of Thrones (part II of) Part 2

Life is a state of Mad Men, with Game of Thrones always creeping in. Mad Men, recreating an era of ersatz American perfection which turned out to be a prison from which America had to escape, and doing so with its own claustrophobic perfection.

Endings are tricky, they're much easier to do well when the show was flawed, because the show can then be about the ending itself. Was there any truly great TV show, or great novel, that landed its ending on a level as estimable as the rest of it? Any story longer than the story itself is not about capturing the story, but the passing of life itself. The passing of life and time can't simply end (unless it's The Sopranos), it has to wind down and show that life still goes on even if we don't see it. 

Mad Men was a victim of its own achievements. It was, in my firm opinion, the greatest TV Drama that ever there was, or ever there could be. But subjecting that level of examination to life as it happens, to 'lifeness', can never be sustained forever. Just as life seems to, the story can go on forever, even if we're not around for it. But in the real world, every story has to end, and it's almost a given that a story that so deeply questions what pure life experience is made of will have no idea how to correctly land its ending, because no person has seen their end and lived to tell us what it's like. There was only one appropriate ending for Mad Men, and it was already used by The Sopranos. 

The final half-season of Mad Men was perhaps its weakest. It did not end with a bang, it simply wound down to an ending that is completely in keeping with the tone of the show itself, yet it felt completely wrong at the same time. To see the shock of Don Draper becoming a fervent follower of an Ashram is so banal, so petty in comparison to the mythic man he once was, that it diminishes this larger-than-life figure to smallness. It leaves a horrible taste in our mouths that we've been following ten years in the life of a man we thought was of mythic dimension, only for him to confess his sins and in his first moment of true vulnerability, show that he's just a human as gullible as the next person. And yet, in keeping with history, in keeping with the tone of the show, it's still absolutely perfect. 

Mad Men is a study in the glories, and the limitations, of perfection. It is as flawless a work of art as has ever been created, but its flawlessness is its flaw. It's a prison from which the only escape is to ignore it. By Season 5, their best in my humble opinion, the world no longer cared about Mad Men. It had moved on to Game of Thrones. Mad Men is about trying to grasp the mysteries of human personality, Game of Thrones is about showing us how cheap human life is. Mad Men is a work whose creator is a single authority who allowed no compromise to his vision and no telegraph as to what was in store. Game of Thrones is a work defined by collaboration, whose plot is developed in concert with the original novelist whose work half the audience already knew from the books before it's shown on TV, and whose work may further be developed by suggestions from the audience. Mad Men is meant as a work of Art with a capital A, Game of Thrones is a work of awful magnificence, but like so many works of great art, it is primarily intended as entertainment. Mad Men is a micro snapshot of our world and history, Game of Thrones is a macro panoramic view of an historical world that isn't even our own. Mad Men deals in perfection, Game of Thrones deals in the infinite. 

Perfection is a prison from which the life force which is nature has to escape. The classical age of TV is over. Mad Men is our Mozart, our Leonardo, our young Shakespeare, our Tolstoy, our Jean Renoir. The elegance, the naturalism, the formal perfection, is so finely honed that the only way forward is to smash the rules it sets out into a million pieces. In the control which the showrunner has, Mad Men recalls the Hollywood's Golden Age of the Director, when Coppola and Scorsese and Altman could fulfil a genuine artistic vision. But in its achievement, perhaps Mad Men goes even past Coppola and Scorsese, with their concessions to potboilerdom, and is an achievement to rival great figures from the Golden Age of World Cinema - Renoir, Ozu, Ray, DeSica, Bergman and others of similarly gilded eminence to the World of Great Art. Except perhaps for Altman and Bogdanovich, no director from America's Golden Age mined the problems of real people so deeply.  

But maybe great art needs that potboiler aspect to it. We are as much dust as divinity, and without the ability to be entertained, who will pay attention? Even I can admit that Mad Men had its dull, even wooden moments that didn't ring true at all. Perfection is an enclosed space from which by definition, you can't reach higher than its limitations. But when the White Walkers come spilling into Hardhome like latter day devils making their first inroads into Elysium, when Ned Stark is senselessly beheaded in front of his family, when Daenerys Targaryen emerges alive like a goddess from the fire - completely nude with baby dragons on her shoulders, when a condemned Tyrion Lannister curses the entire audience of the showtrial his father convened to have him killed, when Oberyn Martell's head smashes like a falling melon, when half the remaining Starks are butchered when they finally recover from the loss of their patriarch, when Stannis Baratheon - TV's Macbeth, or King Saul - literally sacrifices his daughter to fire as a last desperate attempt to fulfill his ambition, you realize that you're dealing with a different, wholly more potent and terrible, kind of sublimity. Mad Men merely hints at this horrific, warnographic sublimity in its 2nd to last episode when an Oklahoma WWII veteran alludes to his brief dalliance with cannibalism on the Western Front. Game of Thrones stands, perhaps lesserly, but still very much present, in the tradition of Beethoven, Michelangelo, older Shakespeare, Dostoevsky, or Orson Welles. It grasps at the infinite, and goes higher and further into the sublime than Mad Men ever could. It's strong evidence, like Dostoevsky and Shakespeare at his worst, that only works that sink so low can rise so high. No amount of absurd, bad, or trashy scenes can take away the horrific and disgusting greatness Game of Thrones has achieved. 

Mad Men vs. Game of Thrones (Part 1 of) Part II

There was a few weeks when I thought I'd made my peace with Game of Thrones. No matter how much sadism is served to us, no matter how many rapes, how much torture, how many grisly ways to mutilate bodies, how much undeserved death, it is still true to itself, and true to what we as the audience require from it. Here is a TV show, a work of art, of operatic, epic, Shakespearean, near-Biblical ambition; with more characters, more plotting, more set pieces, more sheer scope, than anything ever seen on a screen, either large or small; served to us in brilliantly disturbing bits, but with a surfeit of wit and panache to help us through the grimmest of passages. Last week, the White Walkers appeared, in a battle scene (or a massacre) whose filmmaking stands with the most extraordinary passages in Spielberg.

Then Stannis Baratheon sacrificed his daughter to the Lord of Light by burning her on a pyre, and we the audience are compelled to listen to this sweet little girl, more intelligent than anyone around her and who never got anything but suffering from this show, as she screams in agony while her mother is held back by soldiers after she tries to rescue her. There has never yet been horror quite like this so graphically rendered on a screen. And make no mistake, this is horror rendered as it is. It's the kind that haunts our nightmares for years because we're made to care about these characters in a way that slasher movies throwing fake blood at a camera never could. With slasher movies, taking their cue as they do from Alfred Hitchcock, there is almost always a wink that tells us this is all in good fun - you can disengage from your nightmares being exploited at any moment. But Game of Thrones never gives us that wink. We're carried along, horror after horror, with our critical faculties long since obliterated. The sensory assault continues week after week, battering us into craving ever greater levels of gruesomeness. What horror can possibly be in store after this?

I predicted that this would happen weeks ago, my mother can attest to it. And yet I honestly thought they would spare us the horror, just this once, because it's just too horrible. Perhaps she'd be led into a room with Melisandre, and it would tastefully happen offscreen. But no, it happens in real time, in front of a cast of thousands. Fortunately, we're spared watching the burning girl, but we hear everything, and short of actually seeing something like that, what could possibly be more horrifying?

Game of Thrones is in a terrible bind. In order to keep us watching, they have to create ever more horrifying levels of violence. Yes, war is war, today as much as in the Middle Ages, and people far more real than anybody on Game of Thrones get raped, tortured, mutilated, and murdered; but to show it so often makes violence the entire point of the show. At this point, Game of Thrones belongs to that unholy class of art that's both great art and horrific exploitation. 

Yes, I can hear the protests of the half-dozen of you who've read this far. It's the same protest my mother pointed out to me. There are so many other things in Game of Thrones - complex characters portrayed by great actors, amazing filmmaking of stupefyingly complex plots, and intrigue on a level The Wire can only dream of. But that's ultimately the problem with the fantasy genre. It can literally do anything, and because it can, it must do everything in order to be compelling. Reality may have moved past magic and medieval superstition, but our minds have not. Our psyches still boil with reptile fascination for the ability to destroy, and the more we gaze into the that power to destroy, the more likely society is to embrace destruction.  

Art is a societal seismograph, and when millions of people are reading and watching scenes of horrific violence, with every taboo broken of what society once held sacred, history stands to reason that horrific violence is none too far away. Like the Ring Cycle before it, like The Brothers Karamazov, like even Candide, Game of Thrones exists in the world of the psyche and its archetypes. It speaks to its society because it gives voice to all the unmentionables that are already in the air. 

Westeros is America. The phenomenon of Game of Thrones was created by a country with 350 million privately held guns, with nearly 20 trillion dollars in government debt and nearly another 40 trillion in personal debt (household, small business, unfunded liabilities) , with temperatures and sea levels rising (summer is coming...), thousands of nuclear weapons not protected, 1 in 10-20 people controlling half the country's wealth, and a threat from a country known for its dragons just beyond the horizon. Game of Thrones speaks, very loudly, to the unmentionable, almost unconscious, fears of what lies in a future all too close at hand. Some works of art exist to console us, others exist to drive us mad. 

The world has always relied on fantasy to give us the most stupendous bursts of sublimity. Religion is impossible without fantasy literature, so is all the human progress that comes in the wake of epic tales that awoke parts of our imagination we never knew existed. How many worlds of thought were opened by the Bible? By Homer? By Shakespeare? All of them traffic in a mental world where even the most miraculous things are possible. But the sublimity that makes them possible also drives men crazy with the idea that all things are possible so long as we make them happen. 

There is not a shred of verifiable evidence to show that art makes us better people, but it is a mark of civilization that we can recognize our baser selves through art, but great art puts us in touch with the fundamental truths of what lies within our natures, almost like a 'warning and reassurance' system to our psyches as to what we're capable of. We shouldn't necessarily like what we see, and we shouldn't necessarily believe what great art tells us - nowhere moreso these days than on Game of Thrones. 

Game of Thrones was an inevitable show. If it weren't Game of Thrones which shows us the deep darkness of human nature, it might have been a still more violent show. But while we grew incredibly accustomed to violence long before Game of Thrones appeared, it's beyond debate that Game of Thrones has desensitized us to the idea of that those we are close to will be murdered.

800 Words: In Praise of Betty Draper

The Golden Age of TV was not kind to women. We hate ourselves for loving Tony Soprano, Walter White, Jimmy McNulty, Don Draper, and yet, to a man, we love to hate their spouses.

No spouse was more hated than Skyler White, and the actress who played her: Anna Gunn, was rewarded for how faithfully she executed Vince Gilligan's requests to be the shrewish counterpart to Walter's evil with death threats. But at least Breaking Bad granted Skyler her own personhood. Betty Draper/Francis spent Mad Men longing for a liberation from her husbands Don and Henry. In Breaking Bad, it was Walter who longed for liberation, and Breaking Bad granted him more liberation than Walter could ever imagine. But the whole point of Betty's character was that her liberation would never happen. To their dying days, women like Betty Draper are  designed to stuff their humanity into a two-dimensional beauty that is clearly less than human casing.

Nobody ever likes Betty Draper - whatever small bits of personality she exhibited was as shockingly unattractive as the figure from which it issued was beautiful. It is a mirror opposite of Shakespeare's Richard III, whose ugliness has turned his soul ugly. Betty's beauty has, in a sense, wilted her soul. She is personally unattractive because being disliked is the only way that her human qualities could even be noticed.

I vividly remember a G-chat status by a friend of mine - a guy of course - who was a few seasons behind on Mad Men from me. He wrote in all caps: "BETTY DRAPER IS HITLER!!!" I knew exactly which episode of Season 2 he'd just watched. But assuming Betty Draper is Hitler assumes that she has personality enough to have an unattractive personality. Unlike the male fantasies which exist in so many works of art, not merely a person, like Vertigo's Judy Barton, she is barely more than a chimera, a person designed to capture men's imaginations. But, if anything, Matthew Weiner's rendering if this beauty myth is at very least a degree more artful than Hitchcock's. Whereas Judy Barton (or Madeleine Ferguson) is coached to ensnare men to so that a movie plot can be set into motion, Betty Draper is coached by an invisible society of time and place which only exists in our imaginations and the social mores of people who soon will be deceased.

Rewatching the early episodes of Mad Men is always instructive when you realize just how important Betty Draper used to be in the show, and equally instructive when you realize that January Jones's acting has been grotesquely maligned. No one will confuse January Jones for a master thespian, but no one was confusing Kim Novak or Janet Leigh either. These were movie stars, not actresses, who had a very specific part to play and were cast at least as much for how they looked on camera as how they acted. The only difference between Betty Draper and Marion Crane was that in the intervening half-century between their creations, the plight of women like them gained sympathy, and therefore a voice.

But did Marilyn Monroe ever seem more at ease with her onscreen role? Did your elderly but well dressed female cousin who got a divorce in the days when divorce was a scandal? Betty Draper is, in many ways, the truest to life, fully realized, character in the entire Mad Men universe because there is so little life to realize in her. She is barely human because that is all she is allowed from her life. And when the show ends, she will disappear into memory, as so many women have, because the memories of men is all to which they were allowed to appeal.

800 Words: Should I Stay or Should I Go?

I.

Monday Night.

The plane back from Chicago.

There were a number of times when we thought we could see fires from the riot on the streets below. I have no idea if what we were seeing was fire just bright city lights, or the factory smokestacks, or a giant ladybug. There was no way of knowing what we were seeing, except that we were reading ourselves into the Baltimore skyline, and the city we saw was weirdly transformed from the dozens of times we've seen it. Somehow, the view of Baltimore looked different, as though we left a city we knew and returned to one completely different.

As usually happens in my family, it doesn't take much for political arguments to break out. For at least a century, fighting about politics has always been a useful surrogate in our family for fighting with each other, and it would seem that our generation will be no different in that regard. We spent that day talking about Baltimore, about the country, about the hopelessness of a country that is built upon hope, and of course, insulting each other. It got heated, it always does. It's frankly amazing it wasn't more heated, and in the future, there will no doubt be many times when the heat will increase.

I was, as always, the 'liberal' (and allegedly the flaming leftist) facing off during a traffic jam in a mostly centrist car against one libertarian whose views might be considered on the far right in most countries. And of course, any real leftist firebrand would consider me at best a heretic, at worst, a liberal in name only who is a conservative wolf posing in liberal sheep's wool. I've heatedly argued with the entire political spectrum for hours at a time, so I've heard it all...

But the discussion continued, at least in wound-down form, once we got on the plane. On the flight to Chicago, the plane was so overbooked that my brother Ethan was told he had to wait for the next flight. On the way back, we thought about taking a cellphone picture to show how empty the flight was. No more than thirty of us on a plane that could easily hold more than a hundred.

I was being more conciliatory, trying to grant some points, being more sympathetic to family who  determined that they had to drive back to Federal Hill when none of us knew where the rioting would spread. The moment we got up from the plane, I realized that half the plane was comprised of white families like ours, each loudly complaining about how the riots inconvenienced them, loudly speaking about black people as one gigantic mass, and scared (probably unnecessarily) about driving home. The other half of the plane was black people, all of whom were alone, and all of whom had facial expressions that looked like they were simmering. One girl in her twenties had clearly turned her headphones up all the way so as to do her best to drown us out. Another guy in his mid-to-late thirties was still planted firmly in his seat as everyone else got up, staring straight ahead with the kind of poker face which is the look of a man trying to dissociate himself to anywhere but where he was at that particular moment.

When was the last time I felt like such a cretin?

II.

What the hell did these protestors expect?

Of course they have every right to protest for grievances that could not be more legitimate, but when you lend your voice to a protest called 'Shut Down the City', how are some people not going to take this as an incitement to riot? The protest encouraged people to break the law in a city where rule of law is always tenuous. Did Iraq teach us all nothing? Once you throw off a despotic rule, you had better be ready for the ensuing mayhem.

Of course the protestors are not responsible for the actions of rioters. Who knows? Maybe the protests briefly delayed riots that would have been inevitable. But once you assist in taking the lid off society's order, you cannot return to the box what you've released. You better damned well be sure that all the potential violence, all the suffering, all the chaos which you've helped to unleash is not only worth your end goal, but also that your end goal is at all attainable.

Of course the lives lost matter more than the property destroyed in retaliation. But what about the lives ruined by the property lost? What about the people living near CVS and Keystone who can no longer get medication? What about the elderly living in the senior center that burned down to the ground (I know, we're not certain if it's related, but... come on...)? What about the small businesses and homes destroyed that were created over decades? What about the investments in these areas that will now be removed and lost for yet another generation? What about the people who have lost their jobs to the fires, and the untold thousands who will have worse jobs or no jobs because of businesses that will never be established? I've read someone justify CVS's looting by saying that CVS and places like it are too evil to be supported. They're corporations that put Mom-and-Pop pharmacies out of business - as though Mom and Pop can get a loan to build a store to replace CVS so easily in today's economy. It takes one night to destroy what has been built in twenty years. What hope can these protests possibly give but a cruel false one? If there is no police reform, the fascist dictatorship of West Baltimore will grow still more despotic. Baltimore will probably never be like it was in 1993 again. It's more likely that White Baltimore will grow still more prosperous, while the police will make it happen by squeezing their boots onto the necks of Black Baltimore that much tighter.

Of course the police have a vested interest in maximizing the riot's size. The more property is burned and looted, the more they can justify their brutality. The logic the police uses becomes circular in the eyes of the public: "If they're using so much riot gear, the riots have to be horrible! Don't they?" But when the riots began, lots of apologists minimized them by comparing them to sports riots, as though any sports fan but an animalistic one wouldn't be mortified that people would do something so horrible in their name. When it became clear that the riots were more destructive than any sports riot, the apologists changed their tactic to saying that the rioters had every good reason to riot. Well, maybe they do, but even the most flagrant apologist knows as well as I that the riots are only making it easier for the police to crush them with impunity.

III.

And yet...

Maybe I've got this all wrong

The riots of 1968 heralded the conservative resurgence. Demographics of that era showed the 'Emerging Conservative Majority' of Christians, Conservatives, and racists. And the riots were the kindling needed for Richard Nixon to set liberal America on fire.

Let's get real. The chances that Baltimore will be the only city with rioting are infinitesimally small. In Ferguson, the protests were almost all peaceful, and accompanying violence was just a small part of the main story. In Baltimore, the protests were mostly peaceful, but the riot almost completely subsumed the story of the peaceful protests. There are 461,000 police officers in America, and there are 327 million mobile phones. More murders, probably many more, are going to be captured, and the justified rage at this problem will only increase with every new harassment,  every new beating, every new murder captured on camera. This can't not be the issue of 2016. If President Hillary Clinton ever finds herself with a Democratic congress, she very well might be able to push through effective police reform. And even if she doesn't...

Just as 1968 heralded an emerging conservative majority, 2008 heralded an emerging liberal majority. Congress has been redistricted so devastatingly by Republicans that their hold on it is increasingly ironclad. But the new coalition of blacks, hispanics, and white liberals (mostly women) should be enough to hold the Presidency from any but the most devious Karl Rove like Republican maneuverer. And as implausible as it sounds, maybe the next generation of Republicans will tire of the constant social conservatism and race baiting. White America no longer has the country in a complete stranglehold. Perhaps the next generation of whites, unlikely as it sounds, can learn to live with it.

And if they do, the country might have some moments of clarity, and all 30 of the problems that could kill America have a chance of getting resolved. Justice will finally be done, and the white-maned lion will lie with the black-wooled lamb. And if that 1-in-1000 chance for progress we dream about happens, then I will spend the rest of my life remembering this week as a time that I stood in its way. Surely, that 1-in-1000 chance is worth the 999 other voices which tell me I would be an idiot for believing it possible.

If I go to the protests, I'll immediately feel guilty.

If I continue to stay away, I'll continue to feel guilty.