Tales From the Old New Land: Tale 1

To Whom it May Concern, I hope this letter comes to Haran, may he be blessed with bulls potent and cows fecund, and if not Haran then Bethuel, may he be blessed with dirt and not sand, and if not Bethuel then Lavan, whom I remember only as a little pischer but I’m sure has grown into a righteous and honest man - may he too be blessed with cows and dirt and slaves cooperative.

As Avraham’s healer, chamberlain, taskmaster, and scribe, tidings of the evil eye fall to me. I’m sorry to say that the cursed fate Abba Terakh predicted for Brider Avraham rose to the breath of life. You always knew his inclination to see invisible things, and perhaps wisely, you exiled Brider Avraham away to carry on his meshuggas in a far off land. I’ve done everything I can to lead him back to the better yetzers of our nature, but his vision of an invisible, silent god is long since more vivid to him than dwellers of his house. Year by year, the god gets less silent, and he’s conversed with it all day for fifty years.

We told ourselves it seemed benign, and as his faithful bondsmen pretended to believe everything he saw. We sacrificed three times a year to Avraham’s god whom we don’t believe in, we prayed to this god we can’t see every Saturday morning, we give money for some place Avraham screams about called the State of Israel, and send our children to Hebrew school every Sunday - where all they do is play sports.

It’s all well and good until last week when the invisible god commanded Avraham to kill little Yitzhak, burn him, and eat him. Such a shandeh! Everybody loved little “Tzakhi”, though he was 37 and almost four cubits tall so really he wasn’t so little anymore. And look, I know that this isn’t actually weird. Everybody sacrifices their children, but for Avraham, this is really weird because, as I’m sure you remember, he was the bokher who made enemies by screaming that nobody should sacrifice their children. And it’s one thing when you get rid of them when they’re two or three, but by the time they’re 37 they should probably be left alone. Anyway, everybody liked “Tzachi”, and even Avraham must have known we would stop him if we’d ever heard about what the voice commanded, but everybody saw that Avraham was peculiarly verklempt that week, even for our beloved meshuggener may he be blessed with a hole in the head that balances against the one which is already there.

I trust Haran and Bethuel you are as alright with my saying all this about Avraham as you were when we left, since Brider Nahor promised that it was imperative I speak my mind to Avraham to make him remember which world is the real world. For sixty-two years, I’ve been Avraham’s most faithful bondsman, exactly as I swore in blood to you both and Nahor Z’’L. I’ve taken every eruption from the god of anger, every attack from the god of fear, every fistblow and whiplash from that amoretz with smiles. Every time he heard the voice I pretended the voice was real as though he were still the 13 year old who broke Abba Terakh’s idol.

The problem though is that Tzachi’s mother really loved him. After we left Ur: An & Enlil and Enki be praised, she spent the next twenty-five years trying to have a child and had to watch as all those concubines Avraham geshtupped got pregnant - and in all fairness, most of them were the maidlakh you introduced him to before we left and his children are all still alive and have kinder and grandchildren of their own by now that Sarah watched every day. So Sarah knew that the problem was her rather than Avraham and understandably loved her only son. Well, when Sarah heard that Avraham killed their son, she died on the spot. Who can blame her? That son was a lot of work and not just for her!

It’s probably about thirty-eight years ago that you got that letter from Avraham, saying that three angels came to him to announce Sarah would have a child. Let me tell you, they were no angels. They were Canaanite healers that I sent for to examine Sarah. Sure enough, it was exactly what I thought it was. The problem was that special diet Avraham was always such a fanatic about where nobody eats shellfish or pork or most parts of the animal. The healers came for six weeks, I explained to them that Avraham was a little fertummelt and just go along with it. So Avraham almost immediately asked if they were angels. They looked at me and I just shrugged so they said yes, so they were angels! And when they wanted a little butter to go with their meat, would Avraham really say no?

Two of them would distract Avraham during the day and every day they made sure Avraham ate plenty of oranges and pomegranates, and they served him some tea from the East they called ‘ginseng.’ while the other one would cook Sarah a special meal. They didn’t know which meal would work but they promised me that one of them would. They fed her boiled octopus and fish eggs, they fed her pig liver and testicles, and at first, when Sarah got disgusted with the idea of eating testicles, they ground it into a powder and served it to her in a potion. And while Avraham ate the good cuts of the veal and lamb, they gave her the heart and the kidney. They sawed the bones of the animals to get the blood inside and and put that special blood into a stew, they even made a broth out of shellfish. Every night they told Sarah to go to Avraham so he could schtup her while wearing damp wool boiled in ass’s milk. I’m sure you remember, Sarah was always very pretty but for years and years she barely ate a thing. She told me she hadn’t eaten for years because she hated Avraham’s diet, but this was the best food she’d eaten in forty years! Suddenly she looked much healthier and wouldn’t you know it, she was pregnant.

Anyway, that was all almost forty years ago, and it’s been more than sixty years since Avraham was banished from Ur, An & Enlil and Enki be praised, and we his servants laid eyes upon our beloved mudbricks and tombs and cuneiform documents. We all long to return and eagerly await the day Brider Avraham comes back to his senses. ‘Next year in Ur’ we all chant in secret, and now more than ever await the second coming of Brider Avraham’s sanity, An & Enlil and Enki be praised.

But Brider Avraham’s good senses seem farther away than ever. After Sarah dropped dead, he too dropped to the ground, and we thought he was also dead. I’m slightly ashamed to say we secretly rejoiced as we believed the time of our deliverance was at hand, but Avraham came back to us, yet when he returned, he was even less Avraham. Divine Nergal seems to have taken from him use of an entire side of his body. He can’t walk or ride anymore, and he can only speak out of the side of his mouth. Avraham now barely speaks, believing that he misheard the invisible god and was justly punished by him for killing and eating his son.

Anyway, I’m sorry this letter is so long but the reason this letter is necessary is that I have an idea and an urgent plea to secure things for everybody. In addition to the physical maladies Nergal inflicted upon him, Nergal took from Avraham his short-term memory, and it is only a matter of time before all memory of the sacrifice is no more. In a few months, even were we to tell him that he killed Yitzhak, he would forget after ten minutes and ask ‘Where’s Tzachi?’

So it is only a matter of time before the Canaanites were to discover that Avraham is demented and Yitzhak is dead, and we’re now leaderless. We long to return to Ur, but we know that so long as Avraham is alive, we are banished; and therefore whether we stay or go, we are dead men, sitting and squabbling in the Judean Desert, unable to elect a leader for war or even organize for proper battle training.

It’s been roughly twenty-five years since Sarah entreated Brider Avraham to banish Yishmael and Hagar and we sent him to Ur to live as a servant in the House of Terah. But at the time Yishmael was near his thirteenth birthday, and a spitting image of his father, just as Yitzhak was until our divinely inspired nudnik put him to death. The seed of Avraham is obviously strong even if the brain is feeble, and if the physical resemblance continues, then Yishmael must still look exactly the image of both Avraham and Yitzhak.

Please. I ask, I beg, the House of Terah to send Yishmael and Hagar back to Hevron, where I believe Avraham will immediately recognize Yishmael not as Yishmael, whom he has not seen in a generation, but as Yitzhak. We then may marry Hagar to Avraham as perhaps she always should have been, and while everyone here will recognize Yishmael and Hagar, they will become known to people all around Canaan as Yitzhak and Brider Avraham’s second wife. She can even live under an assumed name and continue to take care of her son who will pass as Yitzhak, and our enemies shall be none the wiser.

Your most devoted servant who prays every day to the East for his return,

Eliezer

PS: The two servants with Avraham at the sacrifice, Paebel and Keret, ran away from the site the moment they bound “Tzachi” and told me everything. They are the ones coming to you with this letter, and they’re both as illiterate as a pillar of salt. They do not know its contents, but it is vitally important you kill them both as soon as you finish this letter. They’ll understand.

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Laban son of Bethuel son of Milcah, the wife of Nahor

House of Terah Global Partnerships

10 Gilgamesh Dr.

Ur, Sumeria, 324

9th of Eleventh Month, Iddin-Dagan Year 8

Eliezer Master Slave Representative

Cc. Avram son of Terah

House of Avraham

18 Noah Way

Hebron, Canaan, 613

Dear Eliezer,

It has been a long time since we have received any news about the House of Avraham, and while we regret the nature of the tidings we thank you for the update. We here at House Terah are a bit confused by your insistence on having Hagar and Yishmael back considering that you once were so eager for us to take them, but seeing the urgent necessity of the matter, we here at House Terah agree to this proposition and hereby grant you use of Yishmael and Hagar immediately. Nevertheless, for any further business ventures with House Avraham we require remuneration of ten camels, and a basket each’s worth of silver, gold, and raiment. Included here is an outstanding bill of payment, which we will send via Paebel and Keret. We regret that we cannot comply with your request to kill them, because were we to kill bondsmen of House Avraham, it would prove in Hammurabian court that we have knowledge of Avram’s whereabouts. You may of course do with your own bondsmen as you like, but we demand upon pain of further exile that you burn this message immediately upon receipt.

Though as it happens, we here at House Terah regret that due to the nature of Avram’s malady and recent actions, the matter of his bondsmen’s return to Ur and Sumer must be delayed for a further generation, because House Terah feels it imperative that we all establish plausibility that Yishmael is in face Yitzhak, birthrighted son of House Avraham and that the return of Avram’s bondsmen do not portend the return of Avram himself.

Regards,

Laban son of Bethuel son of Milcah, the wife of Nahor

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Dear Lavan,

Many thanks for the return of Yishmael and Hagar, they have been received by Avraham just as we’d hoped. Since Avraham’s god prohibits Saturday weddings, the wedding of Avraham to Hagar, whom we’ve renamed Keturah, began last Sunday and will, as usual, continue until the end of the month. It’s a Hittite neighborhood and half the guests will be our neighbors, all of whom RSVP’d yes. The Amorites on the other hand still haven’t responded and the Amalekites sent a very blunt response which I thought was rather rude. On the other hand the Jevusites sent a very nice note explaining why they couldn’t come and even included a present from Melkizedek their king. And if that weren’t enough, the Egyptian Pharaoh Nekho said he’d like make a trip to Avraham on his wedding, but I thought showing Avraham to a great king in his current state is a terrible idea. The Hittites know entirely of Avraham’s condition. There’s no way to hide it, but since we're currently allies with them, their leaders and bondsmen have all pledged on blood oath to keep our secret. No doubt some Hittite will eventually break it, but by then I trust Avraham will have passed on.

I should, however, mention that since you’ve simultaneously informed us that our return to Ur: An & Enlil and Enki be praised, is as we feared, postponed yet another generation, and that you not only mandated payment of ten camels for Yishmael and Hagar but also full baskets of gold, silver, and raiment, which I must regretfully journey with Paebel and Keret to deliver personally after the wedding. I’m sure you understand that no other bondsman can be trusted to supervise so large a payment, and this is surely sufficient reason to grant brief clemency to violation of the terms of exile.

Nevertheless, you must please forgive me for such chutzpah, but in spite of the righteous favor you’ve done, that is really too expensive. Our positions would never be reversed, but I’m sure you’d agree that in the impossible occurrence they were, you’d find that price an unacceptably high rate for a bondmistress and bastard; particularly if the mamser is about to be raised to legitimacy whom you can be assured will be an extremely solicitous and remunerative business partner for his former guardians.

We the House of Avraham realize that you have truly done us a mitzvah to which our very lives are in debt. However, I have another idea which may be to your liking and justify this purchase to our finances.

Your grandfather recalls, no doubt, that horrific moment in Avraham’s adolescence when he cut the foreskin from his own person. He has, in fact, long since performed this barbaric ‘ritual’ upon all his bondsmen which he claims to be a sign of commitment to god, and has even performed this ritual upon all our baby boys when they reach eight days of age. I suppose we would rather our children have this horror performed on them while they’re too young to remember, but the one person in the entirety of Avraham’s house who did not undergo the ritual is myself, who had deemed himself so essential and loyal to Avraham that Avraham did not feel the need to bond me through the ritual he calls a ‘covenant.’ Nevertheless, I prefer the more scientific, latinate term that implies the brutality of the procedure: ‘circumcision.’

Unfortunately, one of his last ‘visions’ before the sacrifice of Isaac was that I too must be ‘covenanted’ because he otherwise did not trust me when it came time to finally pick a wife for Yitzhak. Avraham made me swear on the pain of his bizarre and painful procedure that I would not procure a Canaanite bride for Yitzhak and only allow him a bride from Avraham’s own family. This matter was expedited by the fact that like his father, Yitzhak had a taste for concubines, many of whom, like Hagar, had ambitions to marry up.

By the second marriage of Avraham, this matter attains further significance, as there has already been much talk among the Hittites about how Yitzhak suddenly looks a bit aged prematurely from his 'former' appearance. My fellow bondsmen have heard it suspected that Yitzhak may be ill and yet has not been married nor produced an heir.

I told Avraham many times to forestall procurement of a wife for Yitzhak in the hope that either I could eventually convince Avraham to allow Yitzhak a Canaanite wife or that our financial portfolio would make Yitzhak a more attractive prospect to you. But now that Avraham is eber buttal, it doesn’t matter that much to whom he is married.

Nevertheless, if we are already sending you ten camels along with baskets of gold, silver, and raiment, I have an idea that may be to everyone's benefit. Yishmael told me that you have a daughter, Rivka, who is a rough contemporary of "Yitzhak Sr.", or was, may his memory be a blessing, and though she is forty still isn’t married. Now is not my business to know why she never married, but Yishmael, whom we privately call “Yitzhak Jr.”, is very eager to do whatever I tell him to prove himself a worthy heir to the House of Avraham, but it strikes me that after ten years living in House Terah together, she and Yishmael must know each other reasonably well. Since we are already paying well over the equivalent of a marriage dowry between financial houses, surely it would not be too much to ask that we include a marriage between our houses. As Rivka would come live with us, it would in no way violate the terms of the stipulated exile.

Please just think the matter over before I arrive in six months’ time and no matter what your decision I hope you will forgive me to mention the matter at our meeting for further discussion.

Looking forward to our visit to sacred Ur with the greatest possible anticipation: An & Enlil and Enki be praised,

Eliezer

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Dear Lavan,

So many thanks, all due gratitude, and no praise high enough unto you and the House of Terah for the most wonderful visit to Ur: An & Enlil and Enki be praised. There is no higher happiness than to lay eyes once again upon our beloved hieroglyphics, wheels, calendars, and soap, and I can only wish my fellow bondsmen in the House of Avraham can derive the same naches.

We are so grateful to you for every service rendered, and in sending this letter, we want to repay the debt by doing you a small favor. When meeting Rivka for the first time at your well, we knew her character was sterling when Rivka generously gave her daily water allotment for us and also for our camels, but Paebel and Keret could not help but notice that there were a number of holes in your well that allow the water to leak out into the sand. I hope you forgive us for meddling but all it took was a little bit of mud, grass, and reeds to apply some caulk to the holes and they finished the job in less than an hour. They did such a good job on it that you should find your water retention rate much higher in the future and it is therefore all the more regretful that I had to put them to death at the end of our trip to Ur: An & Enlil and Enki be praised.

Your most devoted servant who will give thanks every day to the East for his return to Ur: An & Enlil and Enki be praised,

Eliezer

The Future

It’s almost terribly sad. On November 9th 2016, we faced a moment when we feared literally anything our imaginations could envision. Now it’s January 6th, 2020, and after more than our years, the pandemic is the only thing exactly as bad as we feared it would be. Everything else was a disaster, but not a cataclysm, much less an apocalypse. 

 So at least if Trump was as bad as we feared he was, the wait would be over. We would know what it was like to experience unlimited tragedy rather than the dread of it, and having experienced it, we would have faced some of the unthinkable and know what it’s like for the next horrible time we have to face it, and we could grimly keep buggering on through all heroic terrors. But now, it’s put off, again and again, longer and longer, that sword above our heads, probably for at least another four years, maybe for another forty, while the last politician in America who remembers what America’s brief functionality was like has just enough time in his Presidency to dangle the possibility of its restoration, potentially the kind of president we’ve been waiting for since the Nixon administration, and before today, before the moment when the Republican party unmasked itself from being merely extremely corrupt to pure dictatorship, there might have been at least a 50% chance. But now it is no longer a test between integrity and corruption, but between democracy and dictatorship, and the lure of the new always trumps the comfort of the old. 

 But for better or worse, we are not that heroic generation, that will likely be our children and grandchildren who have to endure the tragedy of the unfinished work of our grandparents, whom they likely will never remember, while their own grandparents fell asleep at the wheel, a whole country of Clintons, Bushes, and Trumps engorged on their own pleasures, and our generation, rather than grow the stomach for the wheels and deals that let societies survive from generation to generation, our generation of AOC’s gave into nihilism which we convinced ourself was idealism, and sufficiently scared that unknown X generation between their parents and grandparents that the threat is ‘us,’ rather than ‘them.’ 

 Aside from 300,000 sick people, all this country has lost that it didn’t already lose was the sense we’ve always had, that whatever the problem, institutions and routine and time will work everything out. We’ve lost that sense because the safeties have been taken off, and that sense we have that nothing is right is exactly right. And so we wait, and work, and wait, and work, and we know exactly for what, but what we don’t know is what it feels like yet, and that terror makes everyone crazier, and only ensures that the eventual tragedy gets still worse. 

 Postscript: 

 It is what it is. To anyone who didn't see this coming already by The Great Recession, I don't know what to say. The time bomb was always going to go off. People said that Bush was the worst it could get, then were stunned that Trump was worse, and then they were stunned that when more than 50 million people dispute the election results, at least a couple thousand of them completely mean what they say. 

 The truth is, authoritarianism is just one more step on the green mile, and hardly the last step. For most people, life doesn't change that much. People who were already oppressed get a little more oppressed, people who weren't oppressed become as oppressed as those who were already oppressed in a democracy. What really terrifies me is war, famine, mass terror, not dictatorship, and those yet may come even if not for a while. 

 Life is a struggle, life is a battle with death, and like any other complex organism, the society grows old, and the tumors eventually find their way through the societal immune system and strike us exactly where we're weakest. Almost the entirety of human history has been exactly this or worse, what we were living in before was the exception, and contra what a certain married couple I know say so often, Steven Pinker is absolutely so wrong about that - no differently than Fukuyama or Norman Angell before him. The sense of security that life is good is the exception that every prosperous nation feels, and so many nations have felt before us, even while living in circumstances that we would call squalor but they would call prosperity. 

 I would imagine probability would state that 25% of the time, life is basically secure, 50% of the time, life and death are in mortal combat, and the other 25% of the time, there's no question because death is the winner, and eventually everybody's number is called. That does not mean that life is worth being pessimistic or nihilistic about, but it does mean that the meaning in life is gained through our battles against death.

Underrated Classical Musicians: Zoltan Kodaly

Choral music has not had a great three hundred years. For all the talk about how the voice is the most expressive instrument, there are so many more things that are obvious to do with any ensemble more abetted by technology. There's a reason why the greatest choral works since Bach have almost all been works with instrumental/orchestral accompaniment, and that's because there is so much more interest a composer can generate with more instruments. Not just in volume and contrast but in the diversity of sounds available to the ensembles. 

 So while there are great composers of the common practice era who have made inestimable contributions to unaccompanied choral repertoire, particularly among British and British-based composers, the number of great 20th century composers for whom the choir was the basis of their achievement is extremely small, maybe only two, and both of them writing their music in languages non-natives find it nearly impossible to sing. I've already written a bit on Veljo Tormis, who is not just a great choral composer but quite possibly #3 on my list of the greatest composer of the 20th century's second half (Shostakovich and Schnittke...). But the other is Zoltan Kodaly, better known as 'Bartok's Sidekick' or 'That guy who made the hand-signs in Close Encounters.' 

 A fiercely committed socialist whose every deed was toward future justice, Kodaly has become far more influential for his educational work than his music. But his music, for the most part, was didactic. Unlike Bartok, whose idea of music for the underclass was clearly very very different, Kodaly's music was a kind of proto-social realism. It was, by and large, meant to be accessible to the layman, and playable by the layman. 

 But two things make Kodaly's music so different from most social realism. One is that, unlike many Soviet composers, he had intimate first-hand knowledge of the music of the people - having accompanied Bartok on many trips to gather new folk melodies from rural peasants. The other is that, being a Hungarian, the whole wellspring of Hungarian culture, Hungarian language, and Hungarian arts, is practically made for Social Realism. 

 It's a twenty-hour drive from the Hungarian border to Estonia, but Estonia and Finland are the closest countries who share any common linguistic root to the Hungarians. Hungary was virtually cut off from all foreign influence. While next door, the Austrians evolved into high imperial culture along with the German-speaking peoples, and the Czechs evolved similarly along with Slavs around Eastern Europe who looked to Russia, Hungary stood alone; brined in a proudly pre-modern folk culture that is all the more beguiling for how it is cut off from all modern influences. What need was there in the 19th century for modern composers, novelists, artists, when their folk arts had always been more interesting than their next-door neighbors, and perhaps continued to be. 

 A higher Hungarian culture only arrived in the modern era, when modernity finally caught up with developments in Hungarian musical rhythm, the surreality of their folk tales, the intricacy and free use of color in their embroidery. Only then could a Bartok or a Ligeti reveal himself. 

Kodaly was not a pure genius of music like Bartok who could bend the curvature of the earth to his musical vision. He was a genius of a music teacher whose passion came through in his music - perhaps more like Leonard Bernstein. But whatever the faults of either Kodaly or Bernstein, his music packs with personality wall to wall, and innovative passages, while more subtle than Bartok's blinding light, are always there. While the center of Bartok's achievement was the string ensemble, which Bartok completely remade with every conceivable folk development brought into art music, the center of Kodaly's was the more limited palatte and well-trodden path of the vocal ensemble, whose orientation he basically directed away from God toward both nationalism and people of the world - no small achievement, that. If Kodaly's music is social realism then social realism could have no better apostle. 

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3hdeX9z-U2o. .

Johann Strauss Recording Recommendations

 I know there's plenty I left out, but there's only so much Johann Strauss you can listen to at once. I particularly regret that there isn't more Josef Strauss on this list, because honestly, good as Johann Strauss was, and he was very good, Josef was a better composer. Furthermore, two days in the company of Johann Strauss is time much better spent than in the company of Richard. Like the best pop music, Johann knows how to take a formula and knows how to fashion it with the most amount of originality (except for the Quadrilles, those are usually kind of tiresome no matter how many other works he quotes. ). It's not art, but to listen to a couple days a year, it's positively delightful. For whomever cares, here are my Johann Strauss family recommendations:

Waltzes:

Sphärenklange: Krauss or Kempe or Karajan

Rosen aus dem Süden: Krauss or Maag or Schuricht

Dorfschwalben aus Osterreich: Harnoncourt,

Paris, Walzer: Pretre

Morgenblätter: Keilberth or Horenstein

Wiener Blüt: Keilberth or Karajan (early)

Wienerwald: Krauss or Fricsay or Kempe

Frühlingstimmen: Karajan/Battle, Jansons for w/o voice

Delirien: Karajan or Jansons

Freuet Euch Liebens: Jansons

Libelle: Krauss, C. Kleiber for modern sound

Künstlerleben: C. Kleiber or E. Kleiber

Aquarellen: Ozawa

Seid Umschlungen Millionen: Harnoncourt

Kaiser: Harnoncourt or Karajan (early, not 1987!)

Dynamiden: Nelsons

Accelarationen: C. Kleiber

Blau Donau: E. Kleiber, Fricsay, Pretre for modern sound

Fledermaus Overture: Maag, Honeck for modern sound

Zigeunerbaron Overture: Barbirolli, C. Kleiber for modern sound

Lustigen Weiben: Beecham, C. Kleiber for modern sound

Polkas:

Tritsch-Tratsch: Fricsay, C. Kleiber for modern sound

Eljen a Magyar: Jansons or C. Kleiber

Ritter Pasman: Krauss or C. Kleiber or Welser-Möst/Cleveland

Blitz und Donner: C. Kleiber

Jokey: C. Kleiber

Telephon: Jansons

Tik-Tak: Fricsay, Jansons for modern sound

Bauern: Harnoncourt

Furioso: Abbado

Banditen: Jansons

Auf der Jagd: Muti

Harlekin: Harononcourt

Annen: Fricsay or Krauss, Welser-Möst/Cleveland

Elektro-magnetische: Harnoncourt

Pizzicato: Maag or Karajan (early) or Celibidache (seriously)

Neue Pizzicato: C. Kleiber

Sport: Pretre

Auf Ferinreisen: Abbado

Piefke und Püfke: Abbado

Die Bajadere: Pretre

Leichtes Blut: Karajan (early)

Other:

Chineser Galopp: Pretre

Russicher Marsch: Maazel

Feuerfest: Jansons (with chorus) or Maazel

Banditen Galopp: Maazel

Perpetuum Mobile: Karajan (early), Muti for modern sound

Persicher Marsch: Keilberth

Egyptische Marsch: Krauss, Barenboim for modern sound

Vergnügungszug: Karajan

Im Krapfenwaldl: Pretre

Sturmisch und Lieb: Abbado

Ohne Sorgen: Harnoncourt

Die Soubrette: Welser-Möst

Orpheus Quadrille: Pretre

Radetzky March: Who cares it's a stupid piece of music.

And yes, I keep files on my favorite recordings, so this is just a supplemented version.

Underrated Classical Music: Opera Itself

 Opera itself.

Not until recently, but I learned the hard way in my early twenties, watching opera with most other people my age is torture. We tend to think of our age as an age of irony, and yet there are all sorts of societal conventions we don't see through at all, and while we've been conditioned to see through the cliches of opera, we don't understand that so many artforms people value more today are just as cliche-laden and people have no trouble suspending their disbelief in other populist artforms. Show the average intelligent person of my generation an opera, and they will constantly ask 'why do the characters always keep singing the same words over and over again?', not realizing that most of the pop music they love is packed through and through with exactly the same cliched practices. They bristle and chortle at the archetypal two-dimensionality of the characters, conveniently forgetting that it's no more two-dimensional and cliche-and-trope laden than all the genre fiction they so value. Opera is genre fiction: fantasy and legend, action, romantic comedy, opera has it all, and if this were 1920 or 1820, the same educated people who so loathe opera today would probably be far more passionate about it than I am.

Is opera great art? Well, no artform is great art unless animated by a great artist. There is plenty of opera that wears on the listener like a ill-fitting shoe, but when it comes to life, but I would stake everything I am on the conceit that it is the risk and complexity and rarity of great opera-making that, next to great cinema, makes great opera the most enthralling, most moving, most transcendent experience in all of art, and is all the more rewarding because it happens so rarely, and one has to endure annoyance after annoyance on the path to a great operatic experience.

Speaking personally, I seem to be undergoing an 'Italian Opera' phase right now, coming back to Verdi and Puccini as I have not in years. I'm generally much too cynical to find opera as rewarding a daily experience as I do instrumental music. Unless the composer has the same amount of 'knowing irony' as I do (like Mozart or Janacek), I usually find it incredibly difficult to suspend disbelief, and find myself shutting off Verdi and Wagner in those bleeding chunks that make opera into an incomplete entertainment rather than a true work of art.

But in this despairing clearly 'late' age of a civilization, one can be forgiving finding oneself relishing the comfort of the very cliches that once drove one crazy. One misses the very fact that one could take these cliches for granted, becuase these are the consensus cliches that animate societies, and create composers like Verdi, Rossini, Donizetti, Bellini, Gluck, Puccini, Dvorak, Weber, Bizet, Massenet, Handel, Vivaldi, Scarlatti, Rimsky-Korsakov, Smetana, Mascagni, Cilea, Ponchielli, Meyerbeer, Charpentier and Charpentier, and of course, Mozart, and many more, create toweringly sublime experiences that require nothing more to appreciate them than an appreciation of the human heart and a good tune.

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Underrated Classical Music: Rossini's William Tell

 So let's show some underrated operas. Start with William Tell. You know the most famous opera overture in existence, now listen to the rest of the opera.

William Tell is one of the glories of the repertoire, and should be produced on every third or fourth year by all the major companies. It would be if all the performances were like this. But it has one small problem. Rossini knew that this would be his last opera before his long retirement, to which he had to bring his A-game and create the extravaganza of extravaganzas. So however glorious, William Tell uncut is 5 and a half hours long. Nobody's going to put on an opera that is longer than any single Wagner opera, even if it's by Rossini, hit maker among hit makers.

But like all long operas, William Tell was written with the expectation that it would be cut, and even a prudent scissors will cut a good third to forty-percent of the opera, and no one will be any the wiser. So here it is, two-thirds of William Tell, in an absolutely magnificent production which may or may not have been Riccardo Muti's debut as La Scala's director, and includes Giorgio Zancarro, Cheryl Studer, and Baltimore's own Chris Merritt.

https://youtu.be/PIL0N8H5i7I?t=843

Underrated Classical Music: Rimsky-Korsakov's Sadko

 Another underrated opera by a not particularly underrated composer....

Rimsky-Korsakov's Sadko is just one of a dozen magnificent operas by the composer Richard Taruskin calls the most underrated composer in music history. And this is one of the greatest opera recordings ever made. The postwar Bolshoi at its absolute height, conducted by the great and alost forgotten Nikolai Golovanov, whom Stalin would soon ban from the opera house. Every singer on this recording, every orchestral player, every chorus member, every engineer, had a dozen stories of unbearable loss and grief, and as with so many mid-20th century recordings, you feel desperation of their lives in the visceral relish with which they tear into every bar, even in this relatively light opera.

There are some operas that, when you hear them on record, you cannot for the life of you understand their lack of popularity. Rimsky-Korsakov is one of the most beloved composers in the world, but the love he generates is almost entirely for three pieces: Scheherazade, Capriccio Espagnol, and the Flight of the Bumblebee. Why is that? Almost all the music Rimsky wrote is as beautifully magnificent as those three famous pieces, and yet it's almost never played outside of Russia.

Rimsky wrote fifteen operas, most of which contain music as consistently beautiful and exciting as that of Verdi and Puccini. Why are they never played? It's not because the Russian language barrier, opera companies put on Eugene Onegin and Boris Godunov all the time. No, that's not the reason....

The reason is because the plots are incredibly stupid. Eastern archetypes about Islamic and Indian kingdoms with captured princesses and princely suitors. I won't even try to explain it. Is anything in Rimsky any stupider than the plots of Il Trovatore or Turandot or Salome? Well, no. But even if one thinks, as I do, that the current mania for seeing orientalism in every Western artistic representation is a colossally dangerous conceit that could lead us right back to book banning and burning, one is left with the fact that when you try to perceive the world through people you do not understand as well as the people you know best, your representations of them will be far more simplistic, and the results can be pretty dumb.

Nevertheless, we're already in an artform in which we have to suspend disbelief for a world where everything is sung, and where people not only sing simultaneously to each other, but sing with each other in perfect harmony. If you're already looking for veracity in opera, you'll find no more here than you will in superhero movies or singing cats.

The way great opera is made is almost the exact opposite of the way great movies are made, and is perhaps therefore the only artform that can match movies in their universality. Movies point the camera in a direction, and the viewer can register every emotional nuance as they happen. The greatest movie makers (make your own list....) generally do not let their characters rage as though this is a theater where they have to emote to the back row. They simply let the camera happen to their actors and sets, and we, the viewers, let the nuances of behavior and story register to us as they will. Think of how little happens in so many of the greatest movies of all time: Vertigo, Tokyo Story, Rules of the Game, Persona, Sunrise, 2001, Breathless, Late Spring, In the Mood for Love, Andrei Rublev, Shoah, Bicycle Thieves, Pather Panchali, Playtime, La Jetee, The Leopard, Barry Lyndon, Sherlock Jr, Children of Paradise, Nashville, Aguirre, Madame de... etc. etc. etc. Nothing happens in so many of these movies, and yet most of us don't notice because we adjust so easily to the timetable of the camera.

But since we live in a cinematic age, we are not well disposed to understand the world of opera, which is precisely the opposite. Singers of the greatest possible projection project primary emotions at us, one emotion at a time, from a great distance. In an age of therapy and the freest expression the world has ever seen, it's very difficult for people to see the necessity of expressing in that manner. We, the Westerners among us circa 2020, can give voice to our primary emotions all too well and have very little to no trouble externalizing them. Freedom is not our problem, we have nearly all the free expression we could possibly need and then some. What we lack understanding of is the context of emotions, why one emotion gradually gives way to another, and why all of our freedom has not made us fulfilled. So therefore, it's much easier for movies to provide the catharsis we need than it is for opera to provide the catharsis it once did (and does) for so many more buttoned up societies.

In every writing class any of us has ever taken, we're endlessly told that the more specific the situation and the character, the more universally the reader shares in the experiences. It's incredibly counterintuitive, but the more specific a situation becomes, the more points of reference the reader can find to the situations of their personal experience. In the same way, the ridiculousness of opera is part of its specificity.

In a relatively repressive society, which most 19th century countries were in comparison to those we've experienced, it's very difficult to create scenarios that did not have potentially subversive implications in the plot, and so many operas had to be cast afar in distant situations that in no way resemble the conflicts of their day.

Paradoxically, it's their very distance that make so many operas universal in their appeal. When all these characters have in common with us is the same human heart, it's very easy to understand their emotions. We've all been in love, we've all felt rage, we've all experienced tragedy, we've all felt heartbreak, and everyone in that period knew what it was like at times to experience a tyrannical society.

No matter how far removed opera was from contemporary situations, audiences picked up potentially subversive implications. When Verdi's Nabucco spoke of the suffering of Hebrews under Babylonian reign, everyone picked up on the implication of Italians captive under Austrian rule. When Wagner's Ring spoke of ancient German heroism, everyone picked up the implication of the necessity to reunite Germans in a single country. When Mozart wrote about the abuses of the Spanish nobility, everyone knew he was really speaking of the French ancien regime where a revolution would soon explode.

This is opera's power, and short of cinema, there is no artform in all the world that can move people with such seizmic, tectonic internal explosion. This is why the world forgets its operatic heritage at its peril, and why a new incarnation of opera may return opera to us, with audiences unfamiliar with its power and unable to take it with a grain of salt, and yet again, it may help turn the world upside down.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AMq87z_ZkPc&

Letter From the Old New Land

 To Whom it May Concern, I hope this letter comes to Nahor, may he be blessed with bulls potent and cows fecund, and if not Nahor then Bethuel, may he be blessed with dirt and not sand, and if not Bethuel then Laban, whom I remember only as a little pischer but I’m sure has grown into a righteous and honest man - may he too be blessed with cows and dirt and slaves cooperative. 

As Avraham’s healer, chamberlain, taskmaster, and scribe, tidings of the evil eye fall to me. I’m sorry to say that the cursed fate Abba Terakh predicted for Brider Avraham rose to the breath of life. You always knew his yetzer to see invisible things, and perhaps wisely, you sent Brider Avraham away to carry on with his meshuggas somewhere else. I’ve done everything I can to lead him back to the better yetzers of our nature, but his vision of an invisible, silent god is long since more vivid to him than the dwellers of his house. Every year, the god gets less silent, and he’s conversed with it all day every day for fifty years. 

It all seemed so benign, we told ourselves, and as his faithful bondsmen we pretended to believe everything he saw. We sacrificed three times a year to Avraham’s god in whom we don’t really believe, we prayed to this god we can’t see for a couple hours every Saturday, we gave money to plant trees in some place Avraham keeps talking about called the State of Israel, and sent our children to Hebrew school every Sunday - where for all we know all they did was play sports. 

It’s all been well and good until last week when the invisible god commanded Avraham to kill little Yitzhak, burn him, and eat him. What a shandeh! Everybody loved little ‘Tzakhi, though he was 37 and almost four cubits tall so really he wasn’t so little anymore. And look, I know that this isn’t actually weird behavior. Everybody sacrifices their children, but for Avraham, this is really weird because, as I’m sure you remember, he was the bokher who made enemies by yelling at everybody that nobody should sacrifice their children. And it’s one thing when you get rid of them when they’re two or three, but by the time they’re 37, they should probably be left alone. Anyway, Tzachi was friendly, he was nice, he never raised his voice or his hand, he always wanted to help, he always stood up for the slaves even when they were weak or lazy. Everybody liked him, and even Avraham must have known we would stop him if we’d ever heard about what the voice told him, but everybody saw that week that Avraham was peculiarly verklempt even for our beloved meshuggener, may he be blessed with a hole in the head that balances against the one which is already there.  

I trust Nahor and Bethuel you are as alright with my saying all this about Avraham as you were when we left, since Nahor you promised that it was imperative I speak my mind to Avraham to make him remember which world is the real world. For sixty-two years, I’ve been Avraham’s most faithful bondsman, exactly as I swore in blood to Nahor and Haran. I’ve taken every eruption from the god of anger, every attack from the god of fear, every fistblow and whiplash from that amoretz with smiles. Every time he heard the voice I pretended the voice was real as though he were still the boy who broke Abba Terakh’s idol. 

The problem though is that Tzachi’s mother really loved him. After we left Ur she spent the next twenty-five years trying to have a child and had to watch as all those concubines Avraham geshtupped got pregnant - and in all fairness, most of them were the maidlakh you introduced him to before we left and his children are all still alive and have kinder and grandchildren of their own by now that Sarah has to watch every day. So Sarah knew that the problem was her rather than Avraham and understandably loved her only son. Well, when Sarah heard that Avraham killed their son, she died on the spot. Who can blame her? That son was a lot of work and not just for her! 

It’s probably about thirty-eight years ago that you got that letter from Avraham, saying that three angels came to him to announce to him he was going to have a child. Let me tell you, they were no angels. They were Canaanite healers that I sent for to examine Sarah. Sure enough, it was exactly what I thought it was. The problem was that special diet Avraham was always such a fanatic about where nobody eats shellfish or pork or most parts of the animal. The healers came for six weeks, I explained to them that Avraham was a little fertummelt and to just go along with it. So Avraham almost immediately asked if they were angels. They looked at me and I just shrugged so they said yes, so then they were angels! And when they wanted a little butter to go with their meat, would Avraham really say no?

Two of them would distract Avraham during the day and every day they made sure Avraham ate plenty of oranges and pomegranates, and they served him some tea from the East they called ‘ginseng.’ while the other one would cook Sarah a special meal. They didn’t know which meal would work but they promised me that one of them would. They fed her boiled octopus and fish eggs, they fed her pig liver and testicles, and at first, when Sarah got disgusted with the idea of eating testicles, they ground it into a powder and served it to her in a potion! And while Avraham ate the good cuts of the veal and lamb, they gave her the heart and the kidney. They sawed the bones of the animals to get the blood inside and and put that special blood into a stew, they even made a broth out of shellfish. Every night they told Sarah to go to Avraham so he could schtup her while wearing damp wool boiled in ass’s milk. I’m sure you remember, Sarah was always very pretty but for years and years she barely ate a thing. She told me she hadn’t eaten for years because she hated Avraham’s diet, but this was the best food she’d eaten in forty years! Suddenly she looked much healthier and wouldn’t you know it, she was pregnant. 

Anyway, that was all almost forty years ago, and it’s been more than sixty years since Avraham was banished rom Ur and we his servants laid eyes upon our beloved mudbricks and tombs and cuneiform documents, An & Enlil and Enki be praised. We all long to return and eagerly await the day Brider Avraham comes back to his senses. ‘Next year in Ur’ we all chant in secret, and now more than ever await the second coming of Brider Avraham’s sanity. 

But Brider Avraham’s good senses seem farther away than ever. After Sarah dropped dead, he too dropped to the ground, and we thought he was also dead. I’m slightly ashamed to say we secretly rejoiced as we believed the time of our deliverance was at hand, but Avraham came back to us, yet when he returned, he was even less Avraham. Divine Nergal seems to have taken from him use of an entire side of his body. He no longer can walk nor ride, and he can only speak out of the side of his mouth. Avraham now barely speaks, believing that he misheard the invisible god and was justly punished by him for killing and eating his son. 

Anyway, I’m sorry this letter is so long but the reason I write you is because I have an idea and an urgent plea to make things right. In addition to the physical maladies Nergal inflicted upon him, Nergal took from Avraham his short-term memory, and it is only a matter of time before all memory of the sacrifice is no more. In a few months, even were we to tell him that he killed Yitzhak, he would forget after ten minutes and ask ‘Where’s Yitzhak?’

So it is only a matter of time before the Canaanites were to discover that Avraham is demented and Yitzhak is dead, and we are therefore leaderless. We long to return to Ur, but we know that so long as Avraham is alive, we are banished; and therefore dead men, sitting and squabbling in the Judean Desert, unable to elect a leader for war or even organize for proper training. 

It’s been roughly twenty-five years since Sarah entreated Brider Avraham to banish Yishmael and Hagar and we sent him to Ur to live as a servant in the House of Nahor. But at the time Yishmael was near his thirteenth birthday, and a spitting image of his father, just as Yitzhak was until our divinely inspired nudnik put him to death. The seed of Avraham is obviously strong even if the brain is feeble, and if the physical resemblance continues, then Yishmael must look exactly the spitting image of both Avraham and Yitzhak.

Please. I ask, I beg, that the House of Nahor send Yishmael and Hagar back to Hevron, where I believe Avraham will immediately recognize Yishmael not as Yishmael, whom he has not seen in a generation, but as Yitzhak. We then may marry Hagar to Avraham as perhaps she always should have been, and while everyone will recognize her as Hagar, she can live under an assumed name as Brider Avraham’s second wife and continue to take care of her son who will pass as Yitzhak, and our enemies shall be none the wiser. 

Your most devoted servant who prays every day to the East for his return, 

Eliezer

PS: The two servants with Avraham at the sacriice, Paebel and Keret, ran away from the site the moment they bound Tzachi and told me everything. They are the ones coming to you with this letter, and they’re both as illiterate as a pillar of salt. They do not know its contents, but it is vitally important you kill them both as soon as you finish this letter. They’ll understand.

Tales from the Old New Land - Tale 1 - A Start

 What is the Old New Land? Where is the Old New Land? We have no idea what it is or where to look or where we'll find it, but the material who, the how and the whither, the warp and weft, the length width depth and time, the dwelling foundations splendor and even eternity, are mere surface on the face of the deep. The Old New Land is the space between space, where exists possibility, plane, history, law, condition, and infinity; glory, law, lovingkindness, the sources of wisdom, and the crown of creation itself. If it exists at all, and of that existence there shall always be doubt, then it abides in that apogee of maximal cosmic tension to which we all arrive in the instant before the great celestial snap, a place of the world of no end that by wrestling to realize, we seem to bring tiny emanations down to our own, if only for a specific and small indeed finite time, if only in a specific and small indeed definite place. It is that land that within all actions seem motivated by greatness, and much in that brief instant even by goodness, for from that unboundedness of spheres above, we carry those best selves which comprise our share of the divine creation. Once we see it, we work, and we work, and we work, and we wait, and we wait, and we wait, but we're always thrown out of the Old New Land. 

…………………………………………………………………………………

And it came to pass after these things, God did tempt Abraham, and said unto him, Abraham, and he said, Behold, here I am. 

And he said, Take now thy son, thine only son Isaac, whom thou lovest, and get thee into the land of Moriah; and offer him there for a burnt offering upon one of the mountains which I will tell thee of. 

And Abraham rose up early in the morning, and saddled his ass, and took two of his young men with him, and Isaac his son, and clave the wood for a burnt offering, and rose up, and went unto the place God had told him. 

Then on the third day Abraham lifted up his eyes, and saw the place afar off. 

And Abraham took the wood of the burnt offering, and laid it upon Isaac his son; and he took the fire in his hand, and a knife; and they went both of them together. 

And Isaac spake unto Abraham his father, and said, My father; and he said, Here am I, my son. And he said, Behold the fire and the wood: but where is a lamb for burnt offering?

And Abraham said, my son, God will provide himself a lamb for a burnt offering: so they went both of them together. 

And they came to the place which God had told them of; and Abraham built an altar there, and laid the wood in order, and bound Isaac his son, and laid him on the altar upon the wood. 

And Abraham stretched his hand, and took the knife to slay his son. 

And there was no angel of the LORD to call unto him out of heaven. 

And behold, Abraham laid his hand upon the lad, for verily we know that he feared God, seeing he had not withheld his son, his only son, from the LORD. 

And Abraham burnt his only son upon the pyre, and ate his blood and body in remembrance of him. 

For the wicked says, in his heart, there is no God.

…………………………………………………………..

To Whom it May Concern, I hope this letter comes to Nahor, may he be blessed with bulls potent and cows fecund, and if not Nahor then Bethuel, may he be blessed with dirt and not sand, and if not Bethuel then Laban, whom I remember only as a little pischer but I’m sure has grown into a righteous and honest man - may he too be blessed with cows and dirt and slaves cooperative. 

As Avraham’s healer, chamberlain, taskmaster, and scribe, tidings of the evil eye fall to me. I’m sorry to say that the cursed fate Abba Terakh predicted for Brider Avraham rose to the breath of life. You always knew his yetzer to see invisible things, and perhaps wisely, you sent Brider Avraham away to carry on with his meshuggas somewhere else. I’ve done everything I can to lead him back to the better yetzers of our nature, but his vision of an invisible, silent god is long since more vivid to him than the dwellers of his house. The god’s no longer silent but speaks back to him, and he converses with it all day every day for years. 

It all seemed so benign, we told ourselves, and as his faithful bondsmen we pretended to believe everything he saw. We sacrificed three times a year to Avraham’s god in whom we don’t really believe, we prayed to this god we can’t see for a couple hours every Saturday, we gave money to plant trees in some place Avraham keeps talking about called the State of Israel, and sent our children to Hebrew school every Sunday - where for all we know all they did was play sports. 

It’s all been well and good until last week when the invisible god commanded Avraham to kill little Yitzhak and eat him. Everybody loved little ‘Tzakhi, though he was 37 and almost four cubits tall so actually he wasn’t so little anymore. And look, I know that this isn’t actually weird behavior. Everybody sacrifices their children, but for Avraham, this is really weird because, as I’m sure you remember, he was the bokher who made enemies by yelling at everybody that nobody should sacrifice their children. And it’s one thing when you get rid of them when they’re two or three, but by the time they’re 37, they should probably be left alone. Anyway, Tzachi was friendly, he was nice, he never raised his voice or his hand, he always wanted to help, he always stood up for the slaves even when they were weak or lazy. Everybody liked him, and even Avraham must have known we would stop him if we’d ever heard about what the voice told him, but everybody saw that week that Avraham was peculiarly troubled even for our beloved meshuggener, may he be blessed with a hole in the head that balances against the one which is already there.  

I trust Nahor and Bethuel you are as alright with my saying all this about Avraham as you were when we left, since Nahor you promised that it was imperative I speak my mind to Avraham to make him remember which world is the real world. For forty years, I’ve been Avraham’s most faithful bondsman, exactly as I swore in blood to Nahor and Haran. I’ve taken every eruption from the god of anger, every attack from the god of fear, every fistblow and whiplash from that amoretz with smiles. Every time he heard the voice I pretended the voice was real as though he were still the boy who broke Abba Terakh’s idol. 

The problem though is that Tzachi’s mother really loved him. She spent twenty-five years trying to have a child and had to watch as all those concubines Avraham geshtupped got pregnant - and in all fairness, most of them were the maidlakh you introduced him to before we left. The problem was that Sarah knew that the problem was her rather than Avraham and was understandably rather attached to her only son. Well, when Sarah heard that Avraham had sacrificed their son, she had a stroke and died on the spot. Who can blame her? That son was a lot of work and not just for her! 

It’s probably about thirty-eight years ago that you got that letter from Avraham, saying that three angels came to him to announce to him he was going to have a child. Let me tell you, they were no angels. They were healers from the Canaanite healers’ union that I called over to Hevron to examine Sarah. Sure enough, it was exactly what I thought it was. The problem was that special diet Avraham was always such a fanatic about where nobody eats shellfish or pork or most parts of the animal. The healers came for six weeks, I explained to them that Avraham was a little fertummelt and to just go along with it. So Avraham almost immediately asked if they were angels. They looked at me and I just motioned for them to go along with it so they said yes, so then they were angels! 

Two of them would distract Avraham during the day and every day they made sure Avraham ate plenty of oranges and pomegranates, and they served him some tea from the East they called ‘ginseng.’ while the other one would cook Sarah a special meal. They didn’t know which meal would work but they promised me that one of them would : they fed her pig liver and testicles, which they told me they ground into a powder and served to her in a potion, they fed her boiled octopus and fish eggs, and while Avraham ate the good cuts of the veal and lamb, they gave her the heart and kidney. They sawed the bones of the animals to get the blood inside and and put that special blood into a stew, they even made a broth out shellfish. Every night they told Sarah to go to Avraham so he could schtup her while wearing damp wool boiled in ass’s milk. I’m sure you remember, Sarah was always very pretty but for years and years she barely ate a thing. She told me she always hated Avraham’s diet but this was the best food she’d eaten in forty years. Suddenly she looked much healthier and wouldn’t you know it, she was pregnant! 

The two servants with Avraham, Paebel and Keret, ran away from the site the moment they bound Tzachi and told me everything. They are the ones coming to you with this letter, and they’re both as illiterate as a pillar of salt, after they tell you the information, it is vitally important that you kill them both. They’ll understand.