Dear Boychik - First 4951 Words

 Dear Boychik, 

I guess I'm supposed to be writing this for you but I know it's really for your tateh who's just making me to write all this down even though he knows every bisl of it and like he always does he's forcing me to do his work for him, but still, it's for you more than anybody else because it's important that you know our meicehs and your tateh always gets the details wrong so I guess he's right that it's better that I tell you myself. Nobody gets the details right but me. Still, he should have paid better attention. 

He should have paid better attention when I spoke to him in Yiddish too, but like every other responsibility your farshtunkeneh tateh and his briders dodged, they refused to speak back to me in Yiddish so now they don't know bupkes and Yiddish is gonna die out with me. So I guess I can't write this in Yiddish because I'm gonna die soon and if I don't live long enough to teach you deh mameloshen, you wouldn't be able to read this at all. But gott in himmel you're gonna learn some Yiddish even if those goyisheh kinder of mine take you out every Sunday for a ham!

Right now, your Mameh is in the hospital geboring you, and for your tateh it's probably a very geboring process just like it was for me. I told him to bring a camera with him to the hospital so he can film your birth just like I filmed his. We didn't need the footage, but it gave me something to do while your Bubbie got all the attention and accolades, and if your Bubbie ever buys too much crap, I can always threaten to accidentally email the birth video to her friends. 

So what your tateh wants is for me to tell you the story of your mishpocheh. I don't think that's the real reason. I think the real reason is to give me something to do while he's raising the baby so that I don't tell him all the things they're doing wrong with you. You haven't even been geboren yet and I already know every mistake they're going to make. They're gonna hold you wrong, they're gonna hit you too lightly to burp you, they're gonna set the temperature in your room too warm, they're gonna mix the formula wrong and feed you at the wrong times, they're gonna buy the brand soap and oil, they're gonna buy you baby food rather than just put their food in a blender, they're gonna want to buy new cribs and carseats when we've got perfectly good ones in the garage from when your tateh and uncles were young, they're gonna buy new outfits and try to get out of dressing you with old baby clothes every day, and just so you know, all that money they spend is coming out of your inheritance, but I've promised your Bubbie that I would keep myself busy so that you stay the person they want to murder rather than me. 

I don't know when you would read this, maybe your tateh wants to give this to you as a Bar Mitzvah present, or maybe when you go off to college, or maybe when you get married, but I don't know how he would even keep track of it until then. I know your tateh, he's kind of lazy. He doesn't misplace things nearly as often as I do, but I'm eber buttel, I have a lokhen kop that's only getting larger. That's why I have a system to keep track of everything. The most important thing you can have as you get older is a system to remember where everything is. He doesn't have a system, so he's probably going to lose this a couple days after I give it to him. But if I go completely eber buttel before you're old enough to remember me, the most important advice I can give to you is "Have a place where you put everything important." When you're old enough, always remind your tateh to remind you to have a place where you put everything. Always have a backup: make a duplicate key for your house and leave it with your parents, make a duplicate for the car and put it in a magnet on the back bumper, have a basket at home where you always put your wallet and keys, always write reminders before you go to bed of everything you have to do tomorrow, always write down every password on a piece of paper and put it in the basket, and always, all the time, alle mol, take care of everything right away and never put anything off until the last minute: putting toys away, doing homework, filling applications, making a shopping list, cleaning the house and the yard and the car, getting the oil changed, and especially paying bills. Your uncle is particularly shreklekh at that. 

The system is everything: it's how you survive, it's how we survive, it's how your mishpoche, your nation, survived a million tzuris. The whole emuneh of the people you were born into is based on this system, and if the velt is about to be something we have to survive again, it's because people stopped following the system. Nothing else matters: faith, love, kindness, intelligence, those are all nice, but sometimes they go away and sometimes they come back. If you want to survive, if you want your kinder to survive, having the system in place to follow is the only thing that matters.

Everybody hates it when I get ongeblozen about this drek, especially your uncle, but soon I'll be dead, and they can do whatever they want. Everybody also says that I'm exaggerating when I say I'm gonna die soon, and I always have the suspicion it can't come soon enough for them, sometimes I wonder if it can't come soon enough for me either. That's why I've left instructions with my lawyer that on the night after you become a Bar Mitzvah, your first responsibility as a man is to put a pillow over my face as I'm sleeping - that is, if your Bubbie hasn't done that to me already, since I'm pretty sure that's been her plan since our first date fifty years ago. 

So the place to start is to tell you about the town you come from. Not Baltimore, where you're going to live, or Pikesville, where you should be living if your Tateh understood how much easier he would have it if he lived closer to us, but Bransk, the shtetl you come from, the place your great-grandparents were born, the town where two hundred fifty years of Charlaps lived before you. 

Your last name, Charlap, is an acronym standing for 'Khiya, Rosh l'Galut Polin.' Which means one of three things. 

1. That we might be direct descendents of a Rabbi so important that he gets his own acronym, and all the best Rabbis get acronyms. 

2. One of your descendents was really smart for a Pollock - though your uncle tells me that slurs like Pollock are considered offensive now, but since this slur is about white people I think it's ok. 

3. One of your ancestors was a brilliant medieval Jewish merchant who realized that he could mark up his prices if he lied about his ancestry and exaggerated his Yikhes. 

As it happens, my cousin Yonatan recently emailed me and told me, with lots of exclamation points, that Charlap means 'Khiya, Rosh l'Galut l'Portugal,' not 'Polin', so apparently we're Portuguese and Sephardic Jews after all who came to Poland only after about two-hundred years in Salonica, which is a city in Greece, and Greece is just about the only major country where part of your family didn't live during my lifetime. But it would seem that most Jews arrived in Poland a little after 1500, just after they were expelled from Spain and Portugal, I don't think anybody knows how we ended up in Bransk, but some Jews left Salonica in the 1680s after a bunch of Jewish followers of a false messiah named Shabbetai Tzvi converted to Islam and moved to Salonica to establish their new community there - there goes the neighborhood....  

Bransk was a shtetl in Northeast Poland - 'shtetl' is a Yiddish word meaning "here we buy wholesale." There were about six-thousand inhabitants, half Jews, half Christians, mostly farmers, a town which never produced a single person of any note or distinction - here in America, we would call the inhabitants of a town like Bransk hicks. 

Jews aren't supposed to be hicks, though your cousin who hasn't had a job since he mooned his boss sure acts like one, but the truth is your whole family is Jewish hillbillies on every side, you, me, your tateh, your Bubbie, probably your mameh and her family too, though your Bubbie doesn't want me to ask your Sabba and Savta about their background because she thinks it'll start a fight about Trump. 

According to wikipedia, the key event in Bransk history seems to be in 1264, the same year as the Statute of Kalisz, which guaranteed Polish Jews protection against blood libels (we'll explain what that is later but for the moment, just think Jeffrey Epstein crossed with Hannibal Lecter), and forced baptisms (think Ernie in a bathtub with Mel Gibson). 1264 seems to be the year of the "famous" Battle of Bransk, which pitted the Yotvingians, a poorly armed tribe from whom the Lithuanians descend - more on them later too - against the mighty Krakovians, for whom the great city of Krakow was christened - a city later that was later the center of the Polish Renaissance, which is a bit like saying that Lakewood, New Jersey is where all the Jewish football players come from. But Krakow would find a lot of fame around the time your Tateh was born because it's the city that produced the first Polish Pope, who believe it or not, is involved with your family's history. 

It's tough to know what to say about our family before your alter Zaydie's parents were born. It's not like there are family stories handed down about your ancestor Yechiel who smoked opium in front of the Golden Calf, it's only right before my father was born that there's any historical documentation of our family at all. When your uncle Joel was born, your alter-zaydie wanted us to name him after his alter-zaydie, Velvl Daniil. I didn't even know he had a great-grandfather named Velvl Daniil. 

So by the time Joel was three and your father was seven, a West Highland Terrier started yelping outside our house for days. Day after day, the tiny bitch screaming outside my window every five seconds. I told your Bubbie not to give him any water and he would leave, but of course she gave him water when I wasn't watching. I told her not to feed him, but of course she gave him leftover dinner when I was in the bedroom. I absolutely, positively, would not let the dog in the house, but when I had almost ready to give him away, your uncle Abe started crying and screaming every day. I hate dogs so much, and I hated that hoont more than I hate Arafat, so eventually I had to keep him. By then, your alter-Zaydie couldn't even remember his own name, so instead of Joel, we named the dog Velvl. 

But the family lore does not begin with Velvl Daniil, it begins with a dream from my own Zaydie, who I never met. He might have been a hundred-fifteen years old by the time I was born. 

Rebbe Yaakov Kharlap: he was a small town rabbi who wasn't even the Rabbi for his town. Just a kheder instructor, where he taught Jewish boys only a few years older than you how to write Hebrew letters, how to daven, how to read, how to memorize pages of Torah and Talmud - and if he was to his students anything like he was to my tateh, he probably used a ruler on them for every mistake they made. 

The story goes that when he was fifty years old and his wife Miriam was forty-five, an angel appeared to him in a dream. They'd been married for thirty years, but in all that time, they'd never conceived a single child. The angel in the dream told Rebbe Yaakov that his wife would bear him twelve sons, all of whom would survive into adulthood, and Reb Yaakov must name the twelve after the twelve sons of Israel. 

Well personally, I think the story is completely meshuggeh. If Reb Yaakov and Miriam were that old, and there's no way to really know, then there's certainly no way the kids were entirely theirs. I think all his children were probably just cheder orphans he adopted and Miriam took care of, and Reb Yaakov was meshuggeh, so he changed all their names to be named after the twelve tribes of Israel. 

But anyway, that's the story. And there were definitely eleven boys and a girl: Reuven, Shimon, Levi, Yehuda, Dan, Naftali, Gad, Asher, Yissachar, Z'vulun, Dinah, and Yosef. And if there's still family resemblance between them all now? Well, it's the shtetl, we're all inbreds. 

Apparently Reb Yaakov had a rich twin brother, Ezra, who had a factory in Bialystok, the nearest city. Ezra sent Reb Yaakov money every week for his enormous family, but Ada was an 'enlightened' woman of the 'Haskalah' - never mind what the Haskalah means but depending on who you ask it's either the best or the worst thing that ever happened to us. Ada apparently couldn't stand Reb Yaakov, thinking he was just a nar from khandrikeville, and my father always referred to her 'die mechashayfeh' so I'm guessing the feeling was always mutual. 

Whatever the fights were about, they clearly centered on money. Ezra sent his brother enough money that for shtetl dwellers living on a cheder stipend, they could live pretty well. Your greicer-onkle Jake still has the silver menorah Tateh buried before the war and dug up to take with him on the boat over here - and of course who should get that menorah after he died could have been a huge fight, so I let him take it. We showed him though, we found the same design menorah on ebay for a hundred twenty-five! 

But whether or not Reb Yaakov was ever worried about money, he was terribly worried about his career. He was apparently thirteen years old when Rebbe Chaim Schkop came to Bransk, and Rabbi Schkop was always dying, but he never died. Apparently he could never even stand up and just issued rulings from a bed installed in his Bet-Din (think People's Court for frummies). 

But on the very day Rebbe Schkop gave up the neshawmeh, in his eighties, just a year before my Tateh was born, Rebbe Yaakov fainted in his kheder. He'd been functioning for years as basically the town Rebbe, school melamed, din-torah and tateh tsu tsvelf kinder and was already in his seventies. 

The town makhers wrote immediately to the Mirrer Yeshiva about a miraculous emergency in which the Rebbe and his Yursh dropped dead in the same hour (give or take a few...). Reb Yaakov had come to within an hour and was back to work the next day. But just a few days before his initial installation, the Mirer Rosh Yeshiva wrote back that after much discussion, the Rabbis at Mir had ruled that this was a sign that Bransk would require a Rabbi destined for great things, and one of their grayster yunge khkhams was already on his way to become the new Bransker Rebbe. 

Nobody told Rebbe Yaakov until the day of his installment. They didn't want to make him faint again. But just as his kinder were packing the house to move into the Rebbe's heus and he came over a little early to figure out with the carpenter how to move Rebbe Schkop's bed out of the Bet Din, he saw a young boy he'd never seen before next to a young girl holding a baby. The carpenter called this young boy Rebbe Zilbershteyn. 

But if Rebbe Yaakov's career went nowhere, his family life was clearly overpopulated. Still, he needed one more son to complete the set: a Charlap who'd complete the vision of his dream that he would name Binyamin. That Binyamin was your Tateh's Zaydie, Benjamin Charlap. 

The day of your alteh-Zaydie's birth was a pretty terrible one: Rosh Hashana 1899. Apparently a couple of deh briders used to hang out in the cemetery, they were apparently the 'cool' shtetlers known as 'Deh Kharlap Khaleriyas'; they'd smoke cigarettes, they'd probably pish on the tombstone of the Rebbe, and I'm sure they'd brag about all deh sheyneh Branskeh maydlach they felt up in the barns. But apparently one day your uncle Shimon, who was clearly a hot tempered type, got roughed up by a gang of Polish hoodlums who left him for dead after he told them that their priests and boyars were murderers. I mean.... he was probably right, but don't let anybody tell you Jews are smart, some Jews if they were twice as smart they'd be idiots. But apparently later that same day, your uncle Asher killed one of the Polish kids who roughed up Shimon so he already had to leave Bransk before the big news. 

What was the fight about? Well, this all was during the Dreyfus years, a story which nobody really cares about now except Jews and the truth is, maybe we shouldn't have cared about it even then. Being one of us is trouble enough, but we have this way of making trouble for ourselves whenever some shtik drek oysshteller thinks he can climb the goyisheh ladder and then has the kind of shlekhteh mazel every Yid has to expect when they think they can be a greyceh goy. 

Of course, boychik, Dreyfus wasn't any schtik drek. These na'ars had to know who Dreyfus was. There was no Jew who didn't know in 1899. And for five years, Reb Yaakov probably was the only Jew in Bransk with enough money and literacy for a newspaper subscription - he probably bludgeoned his kinder's oyers with every new detail of Dreyfus and his legal dybbuks. He probably brought new news of Dreyfus to the denizens of the Bransk shul, all of them his former talmids, who never much considered why they cared so much for the tzuris of a wealthy Jew in the French military who after after five years in prison would probably shpay on them in the street. They probably cared much more about Reb Yaakov's vissen and khokhma than they ever did when they were his students. Reb Yaakov probably told his kinder every day over breakfast after their mother would awaken them at four-thirty every morning to milkh deh kauz and plau de felds before they go to shul for Schacharis, and then tzu arbet. 

It probably wasn't until 1896 that Reb Dreyfus would come onto the mental radar of a shlemazel like Reb Yaakov, when it became known that Dreyfus's exile to a prison island was a framing to cover for a mer vikhtik officer with much greater Yuchus: Ferdinand Walsin Esterhazy. Why did they put a Dreyfus away and not an Esterhazy? Because the Esterhazy's were the Hungary in the Austro-Hungarian Empire (I'm not gonna explain the Austro-Hungarian Empire to you, because even though your farshtunkiner teachers probably never told you about Dreyfus, I'm sure they never told you about Austria-Hungary, and there are some gaps in education for which there's no hope that your generation will ever fill), and however rich the Dreyfus family might have been, Dreyfus is just the name of another German town Jews were expelled from in the Middle Ages. You do the math boychik.

But it wasn't until 1897, when the Dreyfus Affair was reopened and Esterhazy was acquitted after a two day trial that all the Reb Yaakov's went meshuggeh. This Yid who barely knew he was a Yid was suddenly the grayseter Yid of us all. Their shtures got even worse when Esterhazy fled to England, and doubled even again when Dreyfus was re-tried and found guilty, and reached its hits grad as the mob outside the courthouse changed 'Death to the Jews!'

You can even imagine the scenes the Dreyfus-khopteh caused in Bransk. You can imagine Rebbitzin Zilbershteyn's mother weeping loudly in the synagogue whenever she heard the name Dreyfus. Imagine how he probably got a special M'shebeirach every Shabbos from Khazzen Nudler, from which everybody in shul competes for who can shout 'AMEN' the loudest!

 But the reason we're starting here is because everybody in the family remembers it as the legendary day just before Rosh Hashana 1899 when everything was finally supposed to go right for the Kharlap family. Reb Yaakov made a huge speech to the kids that morning before arbet about how hard it's been for all the Jews before them for so many centuries. According to my uncle Z'vulun it was about the history of the Kharlaps, though your elteh-Zaydie Benyamin always told me Z'vulun was full of drek and they didn't speak to each other for almost twenty years about it. But according to Z'vulun the speech was about the whole history of the Kharlaps: Expulsion from Spain to Venice, where they were made to live in a ghetto, eventually making it up to Poland just in time for the Khmielnitsky massacres in 1648 that wiped out half the Jews in Eastern Europe, two-and-a-half centuries of mistreatment, discrimination and pogroms in Poland... but finally, 'it's different now', and no Kharlaps were ever born with the advantages you have. After this coming Shabbos, the shatkhan is coming with matches for all of you. Very soon you'll all be married and have kinder of your own, and it'll be a year of Simkheh. So the kinder went out to work. Apparently it was quite a day... Here's what Shimon wrote about what happened in the cemetary:

I think it was me, Asher, Naftali, and Z'vulun, maybe it was Reuven not Z'vulun but who gives a drek..., We were 'Deh Kharlap Khaleryehs' and we came to the cemetary to smoke papiros, trink vodka und zubrowka; literally tsu pisch und dreck away the tags, to shpring und shrey. We'd tzurikommt six times a week for more than five years to lean on the headstones of all the Bransker Rebbes. No macher ever saw us, Jew or shaygets. Who had time during arbet? Even if they did, no Yiddisher kop would ever go outside their own house to show they had gornisht besser tzu do during a weekday. 

It was still early morning but we all were shikkured and either Reuven or Z'vulun was pisching on the headstone of the old Bransker Rebbe, Rabbi Khayim Schkop..... Asher was offended, "Don't fucking pisch on the Rebbe!" We knew we shouldn't have been surprised but we were stunned that Z'vulun broke off from crowding around the latest Yiddish paper which Tateh hasn't even seen yet, looking at this kadkokhes in France. We were all couldn't believe what we were seeing. I remember some of what we all said: "Look at the schmattes on this amoretz! This guy's as Jewish as the shtupping Pope!" "Look at the stripes on his fucking hoot! And what the shtup is that mustache? "How can a Yid who dresses like that not be guilty?" "And what's with all the fucking knepls on his shirt? What color is that even?" "It's, you won't believe this... Yosef told me.... The French uniform is red, white, and blue!" "Reyt, weiss, und bleu? How the fuck do the zelners go to the feld without the other soldiers knowing where to shoot them a hectare away?!" "Even a feinschmeker like this guy wouldn't walk into a barber and say 'MAKE THE MUSTACHE LOOK LIKE THE HAIR OVER MY PUTZ!" "Seriously, why the fuck do all these alte trombeniks give a dreck about some French faygaleh?" 

We didn't realize we were watched, it never seemed that way before: "And who's the faygaleh here?" "Tak, we know what that word means!" Less than twenty meters away, right next to the cemetery's wooden fence; it was six Polish boys, I remember all their names because we spent our lives trying to avoid them: three of the Kowalski brothers, whose father Yakub Kowalski was known through all the shtetls nearby as 'der Yid merderer', along with Franczisek Nowak, Filip Wiśniewski, and Aleksander Wojcik. The shortest of these schloggers was a foot hecher than any of us. "Look at these dupeks! Laughing sie na cemetery!" "Smoking papieros too!" "They probably think że sa special cuz they can read!" "Well even if they're smieching sie na cemetery they still look as stupid as every other Zhid." 

Jan Kowalski unzipped his fly and started to pisch on Rebbe Chaim Schkop's headstone. Asher got offended again and started "Oh don't siki..." but stopped himself. Every Yid knew fluent Polish in the old country.... "Don't siki on what?" asked Szimon Kowalski.... So Asher said "Never mind..." 

Jan shrekked "GIVE ME THE NEWSPAPER!" Jan dropped the newspaper and pished on the picture of Reb Dreyfus. "So what were you zhids reading about?" "They were probably learning more magic spells!" 

Shimon always had a schlekhter temper and shrayed "Nie don't know any magic spells." I warned him right away not to say any more. Kowalski said to him "Look at these letters!" and shoved the pisch-filled newspaper into Shimon's face. Szimon Kowalski piped up "This is probably the newspaper where you learn the magicznych spells that killed our baby sister." "Tak." Jan resumes. "We hear all about your family. A rodzina where all the kids live to być adults? That's fucking black magia!" The other Kowalski chimes in next "You're probably here so nobody can hear your plans to poison our blyading wells!" Shimon's meshuggeneh temper couldn't hold it any longer. "Well maybe if your kind cleaned their shtupping wells once in a while your kid siostra wouldn't get sick and die!" 

Everything went as silent as deh Rebbe. "What are you saying? That you fucking mordecas of Christ had the secret to not getting chory this whole time and you've been keeping it from us?" I shouted to him "Shimon zey shtil!" but he couldn't help himself: "Go back to your shtupping Boyars and Priests! They knew it this whole time and kept it from you to keep you stupid!" 

"Are you calling our Holy Fathers liars?" 

"They're fucking thieves and rapists and merderers!" At the same moment, Naftali and Zvulun bolted away. Nowak and Wiśniewski grabbed ahold of Shimon from either side and Shimon shouted "Asher, helf mikh!" But I hesitated for a few seconds. One of the Kowalskis said "Well Asher, are you going to help yo...?" I was over the fence and already run so far away I didn't even hear the end of the sentence, I. 

Five minutes later, Shimon told me the Polacks left him for dead. He had scars and cigarette burns on his face for the rest of his life. 

I spent the next couple of hours weeping, thinking I was responsible for Shimon's merder. Ikh hat tzu do something about it. Shimon dying might have been the start of other Yids getting killed, even andere Kharlaps, and I could have stopped it or at least shown them they have a reason to be scared. I was an idyot, I honestly getrakhed that if I avenged Shimon, it would  stop the violence not make it worse. So I went to our yard, got a meser, went to the Kowalski house and hid in the bushes. I waited all day. Nobody kummed aheym. I knew Mameh was in labor and we'd have a L'Chaim that night, but if Shimon was dead, it's not like it would be much of a Simcheh anyway. 

I was no match for Jan Kowalski and eventually it occurred to me that the Kowalski boys would probably come home together. Eventually, by fimf a-zeyger, Mameh Kowalski, Anna, came home. She was the only person in the house and soon other people would be home. She must have been drey-hunderd pounds and six feet hekh, she might have been pregnant for all I remember. I came up behind her, grabbed her mouth and neck, and I slit her throat and must have stabbed her in the stomach nine times. She never saw me or turned around but I heard tschooking noises and I could swear she said 'ZHID! ZHID! I ran out of the house, ran into the woods and cried some more. All my clothes had blut everywhere, my hents, my arms and legs, even my panim. I didn't even try to wash it off. I just went back to my mishpoche's house to tell them everything, but when I got back, half my briders had blood on them, the other half had bruises and scars. 

This story is so over the top boychik that I can't imagine it's even partially true. Your greycer-oncle Asher was barely a hundred pounds and as meshuggeh as meshuggeh gets (and in you haven't realized by now, so is most of your entire mishpocha except your Zaydie), so if the freu was six feet tall and three hundred pounds she could have tzubrokhen him in half. But whatever happened it was definitely a bad day for the Kharlaps. 

 

 

Underrated Classical Musicians - Markus Stenz (again)

I've talked about Markus Stenz before, my former 'hometown hero' who as Principal Guest Conductor in Baltimore made the orchestra sound the greatest it's ever been, greater even than David Zinman did. Here he is during the quarantined non-season, with a Kurt Masur beard, doing a chamber orchestra program with Florence's Orchestra della Toscana. The Hebrides Overture is clearly underrehearsed, but the quiet sections absolute magic. The bulk of the rehearsal time clearly went into Haydn's Surprise Symphony, which is as good as it gets - the equal of what Adam Fischer got in the same piece earlier in the pandemic; but like the Fischers, the level of detail Stenz continually manages to get from orchestras is a miracle only a master can elicit, with the spontaneity of folk music. It's not the only way to be a great conductor, but for fun, wit, and joy, nothing can compare.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J0PeGGQuGyY&fbclid=IwAR1LbtYMBFjSeEgwb26h7s8iRhSYgU0NoEAHs1X4DXyuq-JseXkq931nfjU

Here he is in Seoul doing a Beethoven 5 electrically.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g41JqyYQbfo

A Message to Classical Music Obsessives

I think it took me three hours last night to read 'The Loser' by Thomas Bernhard (Der Untergeher). It's not the greatest novel ever written, but it's the most necessary novel ever written to read among classical music obsessives.

At the heart of The Loser is a cautionary tale of narcissism: an aesthete's continual denunciation of mediocrity, vulgarity, cretinism, and philistinism. It is very difficult to separate what the narrator (or the writer himself) actually believes from what he merely claims to believe, because it is also a portrayal of this snobbery's terrible price. It is abundantly clear from the beginning of the book that two of the three main characters were completely undone in their early 50s by the intensity of their aesthetic commitments - Wertheimer driven to suicide, and "Glenn Gould" driven to isolation and obsession until an untimely stroke claimed him at 50. All three increasingly exist as they age in hermetically sealed tombs entirely of their own creation, where all they do is appreciate music without asking what the music is for. Love of music becomes a millstone around their neck, preventing at least two of them from experiencing any semblance of fulfillment, and even if the third, 'Glenn', is fulfilled, he is cut off from any human contact, and ultimately cannot even live long enough to become an old master.

It is a troika of narcissism and privilege, in which none of the three is even sure they like one another. They supposedly met in Salzburg in a class taught by Vladimir Horowitz (which never happened,... as though Horowitz and Gould would ever stand even a minute of each other's company....). Only Gould, the true genius among them, ever became a concert virtuoso. Wertheimer and the narrator, both excellent pianists who supposedly could, so the narrator alleges, have concert careers on par with 'worthless virtuosos who know nothing of music' (verbatim) like 'Gilels, Brendel, Gulda'... Were the other two pianists actually as good as this extremely conceited narrator alleges? Well, they likely were pretty darn good if they studied with even a fictional Horowitz, but who knows if a writer this egotistical is even telling the truth? Like so many classical people cut off from the music world's center, their story is very sad. Gould was a genius, and like Salieri, all the other two could do after encountering him was think thereon of the greatness they'd never attain. Both of them gave up the piano shortly thereafter.

The world of classical music is populated by an endless series of people who swear they 'almost had a big break,' 'could at least have a career just as good as the mediocrities who make up the concert circuit,' and the world of classical music listeners is packed wall to wall with people who believe that classical music is art whose divine perfection other art-forms are incapable of reaching, let alone different kinds of music.

A lot about classical music is really that wonderful, but having immersed myself all my life thus far within it, I think it's generally safe to draw a few conclusions about it, the most important conclusion is that the very 'divine' qualities of classical music are the most destructive element in its' character. Classical music makes all sorts of grandiose claims for its quality, and these claims are never more destructive than when they are true. Never mind the idea that classical music is somehow this exquisite form of art to which no other musical form can reach, the problem is precisely WHEN classical music is at its most exquisite and transcendent. As a solitary pursuit, a pursuit of perfection for its own sake, there are few less rewarding activities on earth. It really is true, music is sound given meaning on a level so deep that it reaches the human unconscious at a level deeper than any other artform - and therefore short of religion (to which music is so often an incorporeal sacristian), no force on earth has greater power to bring people together, and therefore equally, no force on earth has greater power to drive people apart. One certainly cannot ban music that drives people apart, but whether the music is Wagner, Boulez, Sun Ra, Marilyn Manson, Kanye, or The Clash, one has to take any musician with a grain of salt who can only invite love from their devotees if the devotees worship them first.

I do think classical music is entitled to just a little bit of jingoism against other forms of Western music (though no more than a little). We can give you windows into the headspace and worldviews of people a thousand years ago, we spend decades learning the craft, to learn the history of classical music is also to learn history itself not to mention the last millenium of history of the other arts and humanities. Our music theory is a field of relatively high level math, high literacy in music notation is no less complicated than speaking a new language fluently. Even in today's world when accusations of white supremacy have knocked at the innermost citadels of classical music, I think classical music is entitled to think itself an unparalleled tradition. Other traditions may soon overtake it, and people who are passionate about music should be thrilled by all those new developments, but thus far, it really is true, nobody has yet.

Unfortunately, it's also true that great achievements can't love anyone back, and it is this kind of hermetically sealed perfection we worship which held back the entire 20th century public from what should have been its musical inheritance. So regardless of whether classical music is in fact 'better' than other music, the world of classical music is rarely a way to live a satisfying life. Whether as a practitioner or a listener, classical music is music literally designed to cut you off from the human wellspring, requiring decades of practice, decades of listening, decades of mental preparation, decades of professional rejection, and decades of social rejection. The majority of obsessive music lovers and music professionals must spend their time completely alone. It is the perfect music to turn to when you're already lonely (and many people are lonely much of the time), but if the world has rebelled against it, it's because the craft of classical music has long since become a decadent fetish. There is no reason to listen to an exquisitely crafted piece of music requiring hours of concentration to properly appreciate when a three minute song written last year can speak far more directly to what people's emotional welfare desperately needs.

Don't misunderstand. Classical music is not itself decadent in the sense that one might call certain aesthetic movements decadent. What is decadent about classical music, or any art form, is when it takes the presence of the listener/audience for granted. On the one hand you cannot treat the audience as though the audience doesn't exist nor can you maintain that aesthetic quality exists independently of an ear's appreciation, but on the other hand, you can't treat the audience like idiots - the former attitude creates a cult of elite art, the latter creates unreflective entertainment that gives the audience nothing more than what they want, and often the audience doesn't even know what it wants until it's right in front of them. The middle spot between the two is why we are artists. Artists are there to challenge people's assumptions, we are there to provoke new thoughts in the audience, great art lifts them up after it knocks them down and knocks them down after it lifts them up. The greatest art is a poem unlimited, simultaneously grand and intimate, simultaneously high, middle, and low brow, tragical-comical-historical-pastoral, containing within it the ability to apply meanings from the work in question to every walk of life, able to be read as an argument to support any side of the political spectrum, simultaneously inspiring compassion for the world and equal contempt for it.

And in that sense, the arts are an endeavor like any other human endeavor. The arts are value neutral, it happens entirely within the mind of its audience, and the audience member takes whatever they will from it - what makes a work of art great is that audiences continually find meanings in it, those meanings are often different meanings from person to person, new meanings from milieu to milieu. Can involvement in the arts make us better people? Of course it can, but it can also make us worse: more destructive, more mistaken, less reflective. Great artistry can just as easily drive people insane as make them more balanced and thoughtful. As I said above, there is lots of art out there, great art in many ways, which is meant to be worshipped rather than loved. Whenever I get that sense, I get turned off.

And the truth is, the majority of star classical performers are in it for the worship. The performers who make it to the top are generally not the most insightful musicians, they're the performers with the thickest skin, the strongest stomachs, performers with egos so large that they believe themselves above criticism, and so unlike normal humans that they think nothing of perfecting their technique for eight to ten hours every day. These are the exact performers whose innate lack of sensitivity to the vicissitudes of life make them the least likely musicians to create an experience that's moving rather than merely impressive, and therefore precisely the musicians we should not seek out in our listening. The vulnerable human being within them is always kept hidden and replaced by automatons of fast fingers and sculpted hair who spend their few free moments in the fanciest restaurants of this week's locale. People who give thousands of performances over the course of a lifetime cannot give extraordinarily of themselves every time they perform. There is no reason to listen to a mass-produced recording by Karajan or Reiner or Maazel or Solti or Böhm or Ormandy or Dutoit or Previn, but there is every reason to listen to the soul bearing commitment of certain other names, because what they give us is the musicmaking of people who lived lives just as deeply troubled as so many of the composers they play, beaten by life into instruments forced to articulate little but the deepest truths, and whose pain is scrawled around their music.

There is a movement growing in America claiming that the commonly held trope about the 'suffering artist,' the 'tormented genius,' is a purely destructive cliché, both a justification to keep artists from making a comfortable living and also a means to justify the abuse of powerful artists. It's not a new argument, it's as old as the arts themselves. And in a sense, these social justice motivated artists are quite correct, this cliche is constantly bandied in bad faith to justify everything from pay cuts to the casting couch. But it is nevertheless true. There is suffering in the world, the only other place people in impossible situations can go to feel completely understood is either a church or an extreme political ideology, and both of those forces demand the complete surrender of their individual will to be replaced by a series of unbreakable rules. Where else beside a therapist paid to be sympathetic can the imperiled go to feel both understood and fortunate to be unique?

The world is full of suffering, the world will always be full of suffering, and in the surrender to ideologies that preach of a world where suffering ends, the surrendered only create more suffering for themselves and untold others. Where else can the world process the holocaust, mental illness, the gulags, abuse, imperialism, disease, slavery, old age, death and countless other tragedies without creating movements for extreme actions that inevitably seem to backfire?

The problem is not that we in the arts and classical music need to be more ambitious, the problem is that we've long needed to be less. The best thing the arts can do for the world is to lower people's emotional temperature, be satisfied with being small and intimate, creating interpersonal connections that mean so much to people that they know their lives are more fortunate for the presence of the arts in their lives.

When I think of the most moving performances I've ever heard, many of them were in the concert hall, but many of them were just a singer playing a guitar at a campfire, or a local singer/songwriter in somebody's basement, or hearing Abdullah Ibrahim play the piano at a downtown Baltimore jazz club, or playing second violin in a string quartet of sightreaders playing through Death and the Maiden, or the first time I played in an orchestra and heard from within that explosion of sound when I was twelve. In the supposed 'Golden Age' of classical music, the bond which created Beethoven and Berlioz was not established through hearing the Berlin Philharmonic on CDs, it was established in intimate social gatherings among friends and family, where people established contact with the music by playing it themselves or hearing loved ones play it. Doubtless, we'd find most of those performances astonishingly mediocre next to what we can hear at the click of a button, but what made music so important to the 19th century was not the quality of the musicmaking, but that the greatness of great music was discovered through the bonds of love. Truly great musical experiences come not through adulation or infatuation, but through being part and parcel of people's intimate life.

This is why, at this point in my life, I ask myself only three criteria to establish artistic greatness:

1. Is there a way I find this funny?

2. Is there a way in which I'm moved?

3. Am I still interested?

If I have yes's to all three, I'm know I'm encountering a transcendent work. That obviously means Mozart and Beethoven, Schumann, Mahler, Shostakovich, Dvorak, Janacek, Ives, Monteverdi, Mussorgsky, Golijov... it also means Pushkin and Chekhov, Dickens and George Eliot, Cervantes and Flaubert, not to mention Goya & Michelangelo and Rembrandt & Courbet, and of course Shakespeare. But it also means The Beatles, and The Simpsons, and Stephen Sondheim, and Mad Men & The Sopranos, and Randy Newman (seriously) & Tom Waits, and a long long list of movies - no glory of any artform in the 20th century equals the endless proliferation and sublimity of great movies by great artists of the moving camera. And yet movies were dismissed by many as an inferior, ephemeral artform even a generation or two ago - imagine people coming away from a Renoir or Ozu or Almodovar movie thinking they'd just been through an inferior experience... Just a few centuries back, secular music was deemed a popular art inferior to church music, music itself was deemed aural wallpaper vastly inferior to poetry and theater, even the novel was derided throughout the 19th century as a popular entertainment inferior to poetry.

The genre or form of any work is nothing more than the skeleton, it tells you very little about the work's inherent qualities. Whatever the form, a great artist will show you what can be done to put greatness within it. Classical music only loses quality when its most passionate proponents seal ourselves within it, and cut ourselves off from the storehouse of other art and culture, popular art and culture, and life itself. Music is here for us to improve our quality of our lives, life is not here for us to improve the quality of our music.

Underrated Classical Music: Milhaud's Petites Symphonies

 Darius Milhaud wrote so much that he did his posthumous reputation serious damage simply by writing too much music that was too good. There is no way to cover him in one post because there is so much that's magnificent. Here is an artist who wrote something like 2500 compositions in every possible genre and form, was amenable to incorporating every possible new development in modern and popular music + every development in modern art and literature, was a sterling human being who seemed to have infinite time and patience to devote to his students, and all while suffering from debilitating arthritis that confined him to a wheelchair for the last 25 years of his life. And yet he's rarely ever played. Why? Because too much of his music is too good, and nobody knows where to start. Mahler's symphonies may be over an hour long, but there are only ten of them plus a few song cycles and a cantata, it's pretty easy to cull through the whole thing. But like Villa-Lobos, to figure out how to best champion Milhaud takes literally months of listening.

So I guess the place to start is with the Petites Symphonies - or Chamber Symphonies. Symphonies that take five minutes and require only a few instruments each; every one of them three movements and every movement little more than a minute long. In the socially distanced era, is there any better music to play? It's cliché to talk this way, but every one of them is a perfectly cut diamond (as Stravinsky said of Webern), not a wasted note (a cliché even more commonly used), and each is over just as you're warmed up. They're like amuse bouches or apéritifs, each just long enough to whet your appetite for more pieces of music - thousands of which can be provided by Milhaud. Stravinsky's experiments in bitonality and polyrhythm and folk song are put through a particle accelerator, then added are elements of jazz, bossa-nova, cabaret, French chanson, and Mussorgsky. Just listen. It's not like any other music on earth.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7yiRh8I1R_U

Texas Pride

It was the most beautiful weekend any of us who were there had ever experienced, and it was in Texas. I hadn't left the DC-Baltimore corridor in 15 months, four months of which I was nearly homeless. But there I was, with a number of my closest DC friends, 20 minutes from any paved road near the Piney Woods Region, 70 degrees and pure sun in March - big country, big sky, big property, big hikes, big trees, big sunsets, big campfires, big tents and sleeping bags where the Texans slept, big cabins for the non-Texans who didn't have all the gear, big trucks to rent for the drive there and back, and I deliberately arrived standing on the back of a pickup truck my friend rented dressed as the Marlboro Man. It was 40 minute drive into 'town' for a town supermarket whose deli counter served only barbecue, a combined gun and liquor store called 'Dual Shots' whose logo was a rifle crossed with a handle of vodka and the moniker: 'shoot'em up, slam'em down.' I came back to the 40 degree grey rain of DC and started laughing hysterically apropos of nothing but how comically ugly reality was next to that brief glimpse of heaven.

Why is it that the most beautiful places are so often the most troubled. Whether Jerusalem or the Sea of Gallilee, every inch of Israel is just the same way - go to Israel and you immediately understand why three religions spend millenia driving themselves crazy to possess it. Once upon a time so were the South of France and the North of Italy, and so, not that long ago, were Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Dresden, Warsaw, Tokyo, St. Petersburg and Novogrod, Nanking, Normandy, the Somme river, Sarajevo, Lisbon and Cordoba, the Carpathian Mountains, Istanbul and the Gallipoli Peninsula, Damascus and Beirut, Aleppo and Palmyra, Charleston and Richmond, the Yangtzee River, and arguably the entirety of Africa. And long before them, it was always the same in Classical Greece, and Rome, and Agra, and the Forbidden City, Tenochtitlan and Yucatan, and Babylon, and Persepolis, and Troy.... It's almost as though the world demands a horrible price for living amid such idyllic beauty - you get all your joy and pleasure upfront, and eventually you're made to pay for your happiness all at once.

The USA is a beautiful country, and I have or had close friends who live in so many different beautiful areas (occasionally they moved elsewhere, we didn't fight...), be it Central Texas, or the Bay Area, or the Rockies, or the Cascade Range, or the Carolinas, or the Great Smoky Mountains, or the Sonoran desert, or even Upstate New York and Western Mass, this country has so many sights in it that are ravishingly gorgeous; comically and ludicrously stunning. Just living and breathing in those idyllic surroundings can convince you of the absurd notion that life is supposed to be pleasant.

Beauty makes us all feel insignificant. When all but the most arrogant among us encounter people we find beautiful, our natural personality can be wiped as clean as an untaught slate, such is the power they have over our attention. So how much more then does beauty rob us of our personalities when we live within it every day?

If you've never been, go to the Palouse, or Crater Lake, or the Grand Prismatic Spring, or Multoma Falls, or the Antelope Valley, or Angel Oak, or the Maroon Bells, or Lake Tahoe, or the Berkshires, or Acadia National Park. When looking at any of them at all, it shouldn't take you more than a second to figure out why millions of people have been willing to die and kill to defend their portions of it. Living amid that kind of beauty drives people insane, they develop a desperate attachment to everything about it - not just the sights and the climate, but the way the landscape allows them to live. The very makeup of their personality becomes everything they associate with the lifestyle their region provides. They often feel as though they're Texans or Southerners before they are people, they are not just proud of living among such beauty, they feel, in some ways, that they ARE that beauty. No matter how horrible their life circumstances, at least they get to feel pride in where they come from. And to remain part of something so beautiful, they would be willing to perform some of the ugliest acts on Earth. For such a lifestyle, they're willing to kill millions, enslave millions, rape millions, kill millions more by rejecting progress and science, and what seems on the surface like such an idyllic place to live is often a nightmare - a nightmare all the worse because most people can't compromise themselves socially or professionally by admitting that their lives are anything but a benevolent dream.

But if their lives are nightmares, all that remains to take pride in is the land to which they were born and the lifestyle which it affords - if they can make that way of life seem better than others, so billions of humans reason, perhaps they can convince themselves too that their lives are wonderful.

It's probably an accident of evolution, but pride matters more to people than survival. There are some humiliations so great that the vast majority of humanity would much rather die than experience them, and would much rather kill than experience them. How many people in the 20th century West committed suicide to avoid exposure as what society then termed a 'sexual deviant.' How many people in the Soviet sphere committed suicide rather than face political charges that were usually false and almost always justifiable? How many people kill themselves every year to avoid financial ruin? Americans did not fight Vietnam for eleven years because our existence was threatened, we fought Vietnam for so long because we didn't want to lose a war for the first time. The US didn't go into Iraq to install democracy, and we didn't do it for oil money either, we did it because we felt humiliated after 9/11 and wanted to smash something. And whether they're Proud Boys invading the capital or al-Qaeda recruits with bombs strapped to their chests or 1924 Nazis marching in Munich, it's usually not the people with nothing who become terrorists; people with nothing are too busy trying to survive. It's usually people who have at least some means, but less than they used to, and whose means therefore bring them no satisfaction because all they can think of is their loss. They are tasting uncertainty for the first time and feel as though the floor of their life expectations crumbles beneath them.

At least the dead stop suffering, at least the lifelong oppressed have no idea what they're missing out on, but the humiliated feel the pain of their loss every day for decades. There is no more dangerous person on earth than a person who feels as though their reasons for living have been taken from them. Then they look askance at these Westerners, or Northerners, or liberals, or neoliberals, or capitalists, or social democrats, or white people, or people of color, these people whom they've always looked at as weak, immoral, lazy, undeserving, and see that these others have the privileges and amenities they dream of having every day. Self-esteem and self-actualization is not achieved in a fight for survival, it's achieved in a fight for pride, and pride goeth before the fall, pride depends on exclusion, on watching the humiliation of others. Some people call this fight for pride 'supremacy, others call it 'justice.' But either way, the real motive is a collective retribution. It's not enough to succeed, others must fail, others must feel humiliated, preferably feel humiliation of which you yourself are the cause

For those of you readers who are American and white, imagine for a moment the first generation of your family who came to our country and how they saw this country when they left Europe: land of opportunity, land of dreams, land of wide open space, 'beautiful' land, 'virgin' land, land with no inhabitants to come between them and ownership, no dictator to whom they answer, no persecutor against their religion, land of choice, land, finally, of pride.

And when they arrived, was it any better than Europe? Well, probably a little, but not enough to matter to their self-esteem. For those who didn't immediately go to the country, this land of open space was a land of claustrophobia. Few people were trying to kill them, but they had no choice but twelve-hour-or-more factory shifts, where hands were continually scalded and fingers cut off, after which they came home to tenement housing of worse sanitation and much less privacy than they ever had in the old country. Many saw little choice but to go west, where opportunity was present for anyone willing to die for opportunity or kill for it.

Every gain of prosperity is a deal with the devil, a real life Milgram experiment; your suffering stops, and in exchange, someone else suffers on your behalf. Here it used to be slaves of African origin, and unfortunately with every move to create greater prosperity for their descendents, that suffering seems more and more outsourced, to Bangladesh, India, China, Vietnam, Indonesia, Ethiopia, Sri Lanka, and the Philippines, gorgeous countries every one of them, where cut-rate products are mass produced for cut-rate wages by the billions every year. And insofar as industry has stopped human suffering, we have now transferred that suffering to the million species on Earth we are driving extinct. Life is not meant to be harmonious, it's a story that gains meaning through our struggle to succeed. Struggles to succeed are as bound to eventual failure as life is bound to death. We only create success out of failure by editing the way we view our failures to make them into successes. What makes life worthwhile is not pride, but meaning, finding meaning in our struggles and realizing that in spite of all terrors, they are worth fighting to the end. That is the source of real self-esteem, not that we succeeded, but that we know tried our best in a fight within a rigged system.

So think furthermore of how the American south seemed to the whites who came there. Whether Spanish or English or Irish or German, they were presented with the chance to own some of the most beautiful places on earth, so beautiful that they were completely distracted from the morality of the enslavement, occupation, defilement, ethnic cleansing, of the land it cost them so little to own because it cost others so much.

So now, in the very beautiful places which gave so many generations of white southerners and westerners so much pride for so long: heatwave after heatwave, hurricane after hurricane, wildfire after wildfire, tornado after tornado, oil spill after oil spill; and now even a blizzard in the South causing more damage than any hurricane. Millions without power, freezing in the below zero cold, with their own personal floods in every basement.

The places in world history that suffer the most are always the places where joy is most easily obtained, where pride is most easily obtained, places where millions of people view their self-respect as a god given right, usually obtained at someone else's expense with little conscience to bother them. The world seems to have some seizmic way of locating them and making them pay for their joy in blood.

Beauty is transitory, or so Mr. Spock told us. All unique things of this world are fragile. These environmental disasters are getting more and more frequent, and they're occurring in all the places where beauty is so common that you can ignore it: wildfires in California, floods in the Carolinas, hurricanes everywhere, a pandemic where we seem to be the deadliest country on earth, and now cold spells in the hottest state in the Union worthy of Minnesota or Michigan. Within a generation of getting so proud that they took the regulations off mass industry again, during a period when we should have known so much better, the world remands us for our pride; for viewing our control over the world as our destiny rather than something it rents out to us.

Be it environmental or warfare, some kind of reckoning is coming, and I believe it will particularly be on these faultlines of beauty in America, where so many cultures now have lived together for so long, accumulated so much history, so much tension, so much oppression, and so much meaning. The American chapter of history is now more written than waiting to be written, history will remember the modern era as 'American' in just the way they remember the Imperial Era as British, Romanticism as German, the Enlightenment as French, the Baroque as Spanish, and the Renaissance as Italian. There is not much more to write in the American chapter than how it ends. It will probably end as every chapter does, with the humiliated counting themselves the lucky among us. The America we know will still be there in some form, but it will be very different, perhaps not even a united states as we understand it today, and our country will become just another history lesson about what happens when we take pride in our accomplishment in inheriting pieces of the earth that other people paid for.

Some version of these beautiful American areas will always be there, but they will be very, very changed, and rather than being that part of America people from abroad try to avoid, will be another stop on the bucket list, and what seems to us like the obscenities Pompei probably seemed to many Romans may be the great ruins of the year 4000. "Come see the ruins of the Astrodome and Dirty Sixth Street!... Archeologists think this used to be a drive-thru liquor store... This is a belt buckle, it is thought that men used to wear it to conceal their genital size... This used to be called a 'taco truck' where educated Americans of European extraction would eat something called 'breakfast burritos'.... This is a house designed took look like what people in the 1900s thought spaceships looked like... We believe this fossilized slab was something called a 'steak' but some archeologists are unsure human beings can ingest something of that size..... These forty-foot statues are thought to be of a group of 20th century musicians known as 'The Beatles'... We believe this giant village was what was called a Renaissance Fair but evidence shows that its inhabitants were primitives because everything of which they partook was from the Middle Ages.... It is believed that these two giant bodiless calves with sports socks were connected to a body larger than the Empire State Building.... For two thousand years this has been a museum of antiquated toilet seats...."

Underrated Classical Musicians - Leif Segerstam

 Some 'weird' conductors are weird in a bad way that clearly means to highlight themselves, others are weird in a way that clearly means to draw out the spirit of the music. Segerstam has been the better kind of weird for fifty years. Here's a nearly 50 minute Sibelius 1 where the energy never lets up. The playing has so much intensity in every bar, you hear every detail of the orchestration pellucidly, and the way he blends the orchestra is magic unlike anything one ever hears in Sibelius (just listen to how gorgeously he phrases and balances the beginning of the Andante). There are plenty of conductors who do 'all the right things', but it takes a special kind of genius to stretch out the tempi like this and make it all the more compelling: this is the kind of stuff you expect from Bernstein, Celibidache, Furtwangler, Horenstein, Sanderling, and especially Klemperer. One occasionally also hears murmurs that Segerstam is weird enough to resemble Klemperer in more ways than musically, but regardless of that, it's nice that occasionally the real eccentrics still get their chance - had Paita or Shipway or Cleve been Finnish, perhaps they'd have been able to find consistent work their whole careers.

More on Segerstam some other time.

Underrated Classical Musicians: Domenico Scarlatti

Today, the Iberian peninsula's greatest composer, who happens to be a Southern Italian. Domenico Scarlatti spent his last thirty years at various royal Spanish courts, and there never has been so influential or universal beloved music written on Spanish soil - even if he's regarded as only the #4 composer of his generation.

Some art is perfect, perhaps there is a level of artistic communion past perfection; perhaps you need to muss up a work in order to reach for infinity, but who can begrudge composers their perfection when their compositions are as extraordinary as Schubert songs, Tallis motets, Dvorak Slavonic Dances, Gabrieli brass canons, Bach fugues, Byrd pavans and galliards, Debussy preludes, Monteverdi madrigals, Ligeti etudes, Faure salon pieces, Bartok violin duets, Chopin.... everything? etc. etc. etc.

But then you run into Scarlatti's keyboard music, and you realize that you've never dealt with anything quite as perfect in the world. We all may sometimes prefer the longer form, the music which takes its time to warm up rather than have to be on alert from the first moment. Something about perfection is inherently unlovable and demanding. Life is not perfect, why should art be?

Is Scarlatti better than perfect? Well,... yes and no. Scarlatti, much like the royal Baroque society which patronized him, is incredibly ostentatious, more interested perhaps in show than substance. But in order to express the spirit of his time and place, he had to plume his society's extravagance on high display. Within all that electricity and sensuality is rage, joy, pleasure, sadness, heartbreak.... One does necessarily find similar sincerity within many of the most flashy composers (Liszt... there I said it...).

One can be forgiven, as I must be, for thinking that Bach is generally better when played with the piano's singing legato. Bach is profundity, even when he expects to be played on the harpsichord, he's clearly writing with an instrument like the organ in mind that can sing, and no Bachian was ever more persuasive than Wanda Landowska, who played Bach on a harpsichord the size of a Cadillac, complete with pedals and organ registers. Surely this is far closer to the singing, spiritual instrument Bach meant. But if Bach sings, Scarlatti dances, if Bach moves the spirit, Scarlatti electrifies the body. Great Scarlatti requires the percussive effect that only a grungy harpsichord can give. Piano Scarlatti can be magnificent when played by a magnificent pianist: when you have great music played by Horowitz, Gould, Gilels, Pogorelich, Michelangeli, Lipatti, Pletnev, Schiff, Argerich, Ciccolini, Tipo, Grinberg, why the hell would you quibble about the instrument? There are even recordings of Bartok playing Scarlatti! But when you listen to great harpsichord players: players like Wanda Landowska, Ralph Kirkpatrick, Gustav Leonhardt, Zuzana Ruzickova, Igor Kipnis, Ton Koopman, Trevor Pinnock, Anthony Newman, Pierre Hantai, Jean Rondeau, Mahan Esfahani, you realize that the harpsichord operates on a level of 'punk rock' to which a piano just can't ascend.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZF3p4pGd838

Underrated Classical Musicians: Michael Tippett

Speaking of disappearing British reputations, let's talk about Michael Tippett...

The English simply knew what they were doing in string music. It shows up again and again: Elgar, Vaughan Williams, Britten, Holst, Arnold, Tippett, all wrote string masterpieces. I'm sure there are a a few I'm forgetting, and frankly also a few more besides which many British music lovers swear are masterpieces that aren't....

It's not too hard to figure out why the British are so good at string orchestras. There's something about the sound of a mass choir is lodged in the collective limbic system of British citizens. Whether in the stalls of a parish church or a giant middle class choral society or tavern folk songs or working class coal miners or at sporting events in Wales, the mythos of British part-singing is literally everywhere and the homophony of mass string texture is the closest thing one gets in instrumental music to a choir.

I doubt Michael Tippett is the equal of geniuses like Vaughan Williams and Britten, I'm not sure he's even equal to slower developers like Elgar or Holst. Whenever I hear his music, I think of that line from Mendelssohn about Berlioz that 'Berlioz has genius but lacks talent.' Tippett's reach clearly exceeded his grasp, and while that's is a commendable quality in any artist, it also means that there is inconsistency in their output. Most composers are brilliant musicians, Tippett seemed, rather, like a brilliant mind who happened upon music.

Tippett had the slightly unfortunate luck of belonging to a generation of unquestionable geniuses like Shostakovich, Britten, and Messiaen (to say nothing of Gershwin and Ellington and Weill...), against whom he obviously comes up wanting. He had artistic ambition just as enormous, but he clearly did not have their easy fluency that would have allowed him to hear musical possibilities in his head. He clearly worked like a dog, no one could have written the Corelli Fantasia or the Little Music for Strings without a thorough understanding of counterpoint. But the string orchestra was the perfect size for his abilities. The operas are... well.... listen to them. It's not that they're bad, but they suffer, as so many ambitious artists do, from 'importantitis.' Importantitis is the idea artists get into their head that their work has to make a major statement, and that by making major statements they will lodge their claims into history and their work will even be of some good to the world.

Every artist must beware of importantitis: a surfeit of ambition so great that even the most titanic gifts cannot reach summits imagined for itself. Importantitis suffuses everything it touches with creative block and permeates everything which finds its way through the creative block with pomposity. The artist writing this post has suffered from a twenty-year case of importantitis, and even composers far greater than he like Britten and Messiaen suffered from importantitis so debilitating that it ruined decades' worth of their music. The only musician of that generation who reached the entirety of his grasp was Shostakovich, and Shostakovich could only do it with the barrel of a gun pointed at his head for his whole life. Meanwhile, popular musicians of genius like Gershwin and Ellington created music that was no more ambitious than what their gifts and the economy's invisible hand gave them room to create, and the result was that they both were more crucial musicians to their era than any musician save Shostakovich.

Tippett is one of the worst 'importantitis' sufferers in the 20th century. He almost always wrote his own texts, and the result is of a pomposity not to be believed. So many of his opera and choral works have gorgeous and moving passages where an obviously generous human being peaks through those grandiose clouds (the moment when Tippett sets 'Go Down Moses' in A Child of Our Time is literally tear-inducing), but in between lies acres of pretentious text set with such an absence of humor or irony that you can tell the composer means this absolutely seriously and expects that you will take it the same way.

The 20th century is littered with the corpses of literally tens of thousands of talented artists of every genre who had creative freedom well past what any forbearer could dream, and yet could never cross a threshold to get a general public interested in what they created because they believed that as artists, it is the audience's job to appreciate them and not their job to reciprocate.

But listen to the voluptuous beauty of the Corelli Fantasia and try telling me that this is a composer well-suited to epic statements. Tippett is at his best in intimate forms - piano music, string music, concertos written for soloists who were friends, this is the scale at which Tippett excels. This is not a giant capable of Peter Grimes or the London Symphony or even The Planets and Enigma Variations. This is music written by a composer of human-sized talent who worked sufficiently hard that he could create humane masterpieces on an entirely human scale. This composer created the Corelli Fantasia, the Little Music for Strings, the Piano Concerto, the Double Concerto for String Orchestra, the Fantasia on a Theme of Handel, the Divertimento on Selliger's Round. This is the Tippett worth listening to - perhaps not the most brilliant musician, but a brilliant listener to music through whom passes the English and Italian Renaissance and Baroque, tavern folk song and dance, jazz and blues and spirituals, Stravinsky and Bach, an array of influences so diverse that his music can only sound like himself so long as he does not try to make music more important than it is.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SNqTeQa7MDQ

Underrated Classical Musicians: Colin Davis (really...)

 Oy, now we're doing Colin Davis? This page has really departed from its stated purpose at this point....

Colin Davis has suddenly been forgotten, hasn't he? Simon Rattle's been such a ubiquitous presence in musical life that we forget that until very recently Colin Davis was known as the great living British conductor and a constant presence in our lives until just eight years ago.

He was never to everybody's taste. He was a bit like Giulini, the fire obviously went out as he aged, but it was replaced by something very spiritual and luminous. He was regarded in his early career as a bit of a jerk, but he was clearly a very unhappy man in his first marriage, but as he got older and married Shamsi (his children's au pair), he seemed to become universally beloved (as a person, not a musician), and always spoke, when he spoke, with great wisdom. I once heard him talk about Sibelius 5 on the radio and it was one of the most inspiring things I'd ever heard a conductor say. Many people I've spoken to 'in the business' talk about the elderly Davis with reverence, claiming he is one of the most inspiring people they've ever met.

He had his enthusiasms: Mozart, Berlioz, Sibelius, Stravinsky.... but all that opera in the 70s and 80s is basically a washout, you can tell he just didn't care for a lot of it. But then you hear his Mozart and Haydn, and all throughout his career it had pure joy: Messiah, Haydn 99 and 102, The Seasons, Mozart 36 & 39, 41, and particularly 40, the Haffner Serenade, Zauberflöte, Figaro, Cosi, and certain later pieces: the Missa Solemnis, Eroica, Schubert 9, Falstaff, Variations on a Theme by Haydn, Dvorak 6 and 7, Sibelius 3 and 5 (nobody ever did 3 better), Benvenuto Cellini, Damnation de Faust, Harold in Italy, Oedipus Rex, Symphony in Three Movements, and of course, Les Troyens. There are certain late recordings that have the old fire: Nielsen 4, Elgar 2, Otello, Dvorak 6, but the real Davis is generally to be found making his home in the balance of the classical period, to which he brought a very 19th century conception in the very best sense, and in his own way was just as compelling in it as Harnoncourt or Mackerras. He was also magnificent in the great choral works which brought people together for spiritual uplift rather than the romantic overstimulation of opera. So it's perhaps not a surprise that, to me at least, the single greatest recording of his career is his final go at Mozart's Requiem.

I tend to think of Davis as I do many conductors of his generation, only moreso, emissaries from a more stable era, who arrived at musical truth by a mysterious self-effacement and serenity that perhaps is not possible today in our more unstable, narcissistic world. The old Davis at his best is pure spirituality, like a gentler Klemperer or the conductor Celibidache would have been were he a more generous soul. Go back to his recordings, this is the music making of a great spirit and humanist. Conductors are not generally known for their humanity, which makes the ones who truly radiate it all the more valuable.

Underrated Classical Musicians: Han-Na Chang and Joanna Mallwitz

So, let's tackle a difficult subject... We may delete it later.

There will soon be two superstar woman conductors who are also great conductors.

Mirga, or MGT, or more properly, the unpronounceably Lithuanian Mirga Gražinyté-Tyla, is already a superstar known to the entire classical music world (all ten of us), but is she truly great? Well.... no. Obviously not because she's untalented, but because conducting is fucking hard, conductors only start practicing in their 20s, and it's damn near impossible to get great at it when you have the entire music world breathing down your neck before you're 30. You can almost hear the weight of the expectations bearing down on her in how careful she is - nary a rubato to be found, and every dynamic shading is absolutely intentional. There's sadly nothing spontaneous in her music making, and the reason is obviously not her fault. Whether classical or anywhere else, PR has killed so many great talents who froze up because their every move was considered too important to get wrong. You sadly hear that same carefulness in so many of the new stars, and it's the fault of a music world that ignored women musicians, especially conductors and composers, for far too long, and now that they have a proper chance to get all the rewards, if they put a foot wrong, they stand to lose their chance. We heard the same carefulness in Marin Alsop and Simone Young and Emanuelle Haim, even the great Joanne Faletta sounds as though she has some of those inhibitions. A post on Faletta is well-overdue, I tried and the internet swallowed it. It's not that she generally inspires orchestras to transcendence, but there's barely been a single conductor with greater musical curiosity in our time, who has taken chance after chance on rare repertoire and moved heaven and earth to get it recorded. She is a musical hero, and it's hard to wonder if her career has not paid a price: Marin Alsop plays new music but not quite as adventurously, and the result is that she gets appointments with a major orchestra like Baltimore and guest conducts major orchestras around the world, while Faletta has to stay in Buffalo and Richmond, and seems to be on the guest roster in for the orchestra of every small city in Europe. The only female conductor I can think of who didn't have that inhibition and seemed to inspire orchestras to that level of transcendence was the once-famous American opera conductor Sarah Caldwell, who was from a generation when conducting was such a novelty for women that the same expectations were never placed, and yet she was always dismissed as a better theater director than conductor (not true). You can hear that same carefulness in Dalia Stasevska or Oksana Lviv or Eun Sun Kim, and Alondra de la Parra is just not very good. There are so many all-flash male conductors that we can forgive an all-flash female conductor rising to the top. But a female Gergiev or Barenboim, so over-confident that she wouldn't care if the performance seems on the verge of flying apart, is still an absurdity in today's music world. Better thus far than all but Caldwell and Faletta is the American Karina Canellakis. She has that same inhibition, but there is also an incredibly intensity and excitement to her performances - like Georg Solti. It's not deep, even in the music's moments of repose her musicmaking is incredibly tense and thick (just like her onetime mentor, Jaap van Zweden), and like Zweden, she doesn't strike me as knocking on transcendence's door any time soon, but she's damn skilled all the same. There is also the Finn, Susanna Malkki, who clearly seems much more comfortable among the cooler, more mechanical environs of contemporary music, where she can be devastatingly, than the repertoire's more expressive and archaic rooms, where she seems distinctly wooden.

If I'm being hard on the current new women conductors on the concert circuit, the reason is obviously not because of any inherent lack of talent, it's because the pool to choose from is so much smaller than the pool of men, and once there are more women in a field, which one can hope will be quite soon, there self-evidently will be more women of extraordinary talent who can rise to the top.

But there are two who do strike me as extraordinary, and neither yet has the regard they should. If classical music wants to survive in the 21st century, it's going to have to radically change how it thinks about representation. In a world that needs great women conductors, the necessary to pay attention to the ones already there is dire.

What it takes to be a great musician is a combination of imagination and discipline. Whatever the artistic endeavor, your ability to achieve in one side of that equation is directly proportional to how well you achieve on the other. One thinks of Beethoven and Michelangelo with overwhelming passion, but without superhuman intellectual acumen and work ethic, they never could have expressed their full emotional volcanoes. The closest we have to a more 'excessive' type is the Chinese Xian Zhang, who is sufficiently expressive and bold in her ideas that she can cover up the music's natural inward expression, but it cannot be denied, the power of her performances is overwhelming. Her excesses are nowhere to the extent of many male peers, but they are quite noticeable, and to have a woman that confident in the music scene can only be a welcome development.

On the other hand, perhaps there is something even closer to mastery in Nathalie Stutzmann, one of the world's great concert singers: a contralto (how many opera roles are there for a contralto?) who has gradually transitioned to the podium. She just landed an enormous 'gig' as Principal Guest Conductor of the Philadelphia Orchestra. Is she truly as great as a post like that would seem to announce? Well, probably not quite, her way is relaxed, understated, an unforced, perfectly natural musicality. Everything from the inner voices to the dynamics to the balances sounds perfectly guided, always with enough room to breathe, with soft playing that is often breathtaking. Her's is not the type to give earth-shaking revelations in Beethoven's 9th, but few in this larger-than-life profession of enormous egos can make music so intimate and humane. Philly should consider itself lucky.

But then there are the two of whom I speak. One of them is Mirga's exact contemporary, the German Joanna Mallwitz. All it takes is one Schubert 9 on youtube to convince, you know it when you hear it. Schubert 9 is just about the hardest piece in the repertoire to conduct - technically it can fly apart, emotionally it's nearly the subtlest piece of music ever written, musically its so repetitive that it can get boring in a matter of minutes. Mallwitz conducts it differently than I would, she plays it fast and leans into the Rossini comic/'buffa' elements of the piece, but unlike so many martinets who lay railroad tracks over Schubert's delicate 9th and turn it into a gruff bulldog, Mallwitz is so free within her discipline that she never loses the poetry. The music sings, it dances, and it does so freely - always kept interesting with a dynamic change here, a shading there, an unexpected phrasing, this is an ensemble that, within an incredibly disciplined framework, which this work always must have, is playing incredibly freely.

And then there's the Korean Han-Na Chang, formerly a famous cellist, now making the 'switch' which stymied so many famous soloists. What can I say? This is greatness. Tchaikovsky's Pathetique is the hardest piece to screw up, but it is nearly the most overplayed piece in the entire repertoire. It is almost impossible to newly mint it with something different that simultaneously doesn't feel like the conductor putting a personal stamp that obscures the composer. Every second there's an unexpected phrasing, a new color discovered, a new balance. In the scherzo, she exhibits a bit of that overconfident recklessness that launches into a tempo so fast the orchestra can't keep up, but otherwise, this is Pierre Monteux, this is Ferenc Fricsay, this is Charles Munch, this is Rafael Kubelik. It's almost shelf-knockingly exuberant, but it never conceals Tchaikovsky's inward spirit. This... is... MUSIC! This is freedom! If Han Na-Chang is really this good, it's not long before she heads to the very top of the pantheon.

Note from 2025: There is now one who exceeds even these two and has been noticed in short order. The French Marie Jacquot seems to have appeared on the international scene out of nowhere, and in short order was made director of the WDR Symphony and the Royal Danish Opera while being principal guest conductor of the Vienna Symphony. Go online doing La Mer, Bruckner 7, Weill 2, or the Tristan Prelude and Liebestod, particularly the Bruckner 7 with the WDR. The unbelievable soft dynamics, the beauty of the blend, the nuance of the phrasing, the gigantic passion and enormity of dynamic contrasts. This is mastery that happens maybe... among ten podium musicians in every generation if we're lucky? This is the very highest level of musicianship.

There is another thing I've begun to notice in today's preeminent female maestros. The care of their earlier years has turned into rage. I've long welcomed that so many conductors today have scaled back from the deafening, pulverizing orchestral performances of 40 or 50 years ago. Solti and Karajan spawned caricatures of their originals: Maazel, Dutoit, Mehta, Ozawa, Muti, who turned performances into ear splitting decibel fests as a means to electrify their audiences. One could almost call it 'toxic masculinity in orchestral performance.' But many of today's most aggressive interpreters of orchestral music are female: Karina Canellakis, Dalia

Stasevska, Xian Zhang, Oksana Lyniv, Kristiina Poska, even Marin Alsop. These conductors completely bely the stereotype of female musicians. In many ways their musicmaking is ultramasculine. Loud, aggressive, pulverizing brass and percussion. It's undeniably exciting, and it's a perfectly legitimate musical choice. Personally though, I think mastery comes from detail in the phrasing and balance, from hearing the harmonies and contrapuntal lines clearly along with having physical impact. There will be more and more female conductors who get there, and there's always a chance that the ones I mention above will: I'd bet Lyniv before the others, who has demonstrated live and on video real heart and vulnerability. In any event, it's a superb thing to see so many female conductors get the experience they need on the international circuit. But like any instrument, it often takes twenty years just to know what you're doing as a conductor. If we overpraise the results so far, there will be a backlash.

Note from 2026: I have just listened to Delyana Lazarova for the first time. My god... Jacquot has all the musical sense in the world, but she seems the flowing, lyric kind in the line of Monteux and Kubelik. Lazarova has just about all that musical sense, plus massive excitement. She is in the line of Ferenc Friscay (pre-illness) and Carlos Kleiber, who creates all the space in the world for imagination and color within a rigidly disciplined framework.

Underrated Classical Music: Oiseaux Exotiques

Messiaen is one of the great musical geniuses of the 20th century and beyond, and we have yet to catch up to him. But once you get past the dissonance, which really isn't as dissonant as all that, his music has one big problem. Most of his scores are TOO F---ING LONG!!! Maybe future generations will be more forgiving just as our generation is to Mahler, but Mahler is operating out of the long Austro-German tradition of symphonic form, a form designed to sustain long-term interest, and his symphonies manage to be more interesting over 70 minutes than composers as great as Schumann or Mendelssohn often are over 30 minutes (let alone Bruckner....).

Messiaen greatness is beyond disute, but however mathematically complex and precise his music is in conception, the thematic blips and bloops can sound so random that there is no way there is 2 hours of sustained interest in so many of those extravagant long form works of his, however beguiling individual movements can be.

On the other hand, Oiseaux Exotiques is just about the perfect length for its ideas' quantity, and its 13 1/2 minutes are packed with invention by the riot. It is easily one of the great 20th century scores. The first four minutes and forty seconds are just enough to make set up what, for lack of a better term, sounds like an 'aviary explosion.' It is, quite simply, one of the most fascinating passages in 20th century music, and there has never been a better recording than Riccardo Chailly conducting the Royal Concertgebouw with Jean-Yves Thibaudet on the piano. If From the Canyon to the Stars or Colors of the Celestial City were even twice this length rather than 100 minutes, they might be programmed in every orchestral season.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lmjETPAkF70