The Cast of West Side Story: How They Died

Riff - Stabbed by Bernardo in the rumble underneath the highway.

Bernardo - Stabbed by Tony in the rumble underneath the highway.

Tony - Shot by Chino on a basketball court.

Chino - Beaten to death by prison guards twenty-eight years into his life without parole sentence at Sing-Sing.

Anita - Still alive, happily married to Pepe, having an affair with her grandson’s best friend.

Ice - Became a multi-millionaire by masterminding a 1980’s Wall Street Ponzi Scheme called 'Play It Cool Securities LLC.' Pushed out of his 50th floor office by his executive vice-president Bernie Madoff.

Baby John - Married Maria. Eventually killed because of a hit put out by Chino from prison due to his divorcing Maria to marry Natalie Wood, whom he subsequently drowned on a boat.

Maria - Married Baby John to cover up that she was having Tony's baby, became a multi-millionaire by selling the rights to her life to United Artists - Baby John met Natalie Wood on the set and left her. She then used her money to fund the Cuban revolution and moved to Bolivia to be near her one true love, Che Guevara. Whereabouts still unknown and #4 on the CIA most wanted list.

A-rab - Still alive. Stand-up comic trained for the borschtbelt but arrived just in time for the borschtbelt to disappear. Now makes his living playing to summer camps in Upstate New York and teaches a community college course called the 'Great Comedians and Gang Violence - from Shecky Green to Kanye West.'

Graziella - Broadway chorus girl who became a waitress. Shot at an audition by the director for singing a song from Rent.

Glad Hand - Shot in the late eighties at the inner city school after he quoted Perry Como lyrics to his students to give them inspiration. Student who was arrested called it a mercy killing.

Lieutenant Schrank - Demoted to traffic cop, became a private consultant and expert on Red Lining. Impaled on a gated community.

Anybody’s - Slipped on a Birkenstock.

Action - Still alive, Trump White House aide.

Officer Krupke - Choked on donut during the 1968 riots.

The Essential Mahler Sixes

 The Goldschmidt Mahler 6 got me thinking: What are the 'essential' Mahler Sixes:

Goldschmidt/BBC Symphony 1962: Mahler 6 the complete rough draft, sounding as though it came straight from Mahler's head and the violent sophistication of fin-de-siecle Vienna. There are some dangerously slow tempi at times, but fundamentally it's presented in the conception we all recognize as an archetypal Mahler 6. So many later recordings present the work in the same parameters that Goldschmidt outlines here, but they only present us with the exoskeleton and do not capture the inner meaning. Here, we have how it must have seemed to Mahler's true believing early followers, and from this model, later conductors can reinvent it into something even more meaningful. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8CnpuvQoeas

Mitropoulos/New York 1955: Mitropoulos was so ahead of his time and seemed to understand modernist works so long before anybody else did. Mitropoulos was American critics favorite bete noire because he didn't give traditional performances of Toscanini/Szell stability. Every performance risked everything, lurched with rubato, went for the most extreme dynamics, and if notes were dropped along the way, nobody should have cared... He was telling truths America did not care to hear. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3MXYv2xx4Bc

Much as I love many of their other achievements, no Barbirolli, Horenstein, Kubelik, Karajan, Kondrashin, early Bernstein, Haitink, Boulez, Jansons, Chailly, or Abbado. You can understand Mahler 6 without hearing them.

Bernstein/Vienna 1988: This is the first of the recordings presenting us with the complete, final draft. The orchestra is completely up to the challenge, and however un-classically, Bernstein unleashes the full power of a generation which lived with the results of the world Mahler's contemporaries both predicted and unleashed. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=giPhPdztm_Y

Tennstedt/London Philharmonic 1991: If you hear just one, you have to hear Tennstedt. This is the whole story, both the prediction you hear in Goldschmidt, and the fruition of its terrible forebodding. Has there ever been a more apocalyptic performance of anything? It's a shame we don't have a Klemperer performance of Mahler 6 - his approach to 7 probably would have worked better in 6, but Tennstedt was the true heir to Klemperer - an artist who'd experienced true dark nights of the soul both politically and personally, and whose pain you feel in every bar of his musicmaking. There hasn't been a conductor like him ever since. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DrhsSYhuoUQ

Dohnanyi/Cleveland 1992: This recording has been savaged for being cold, for providing just the notes, for doing everything in a single tempo. Bullshit. First of all, the tempo often slows down in ways you can't tell whether it's Dohnanyi's plan or just insecure ensemble, but given the emotional commitment on display here, it doesn't matter even slightly, and you just get caught up in the sweep. Dohnanyi could do anything except be a great Mahler conductor, and yet here he is, giving a Mahler 6 for the ages that I missed until I revisited today. Dohnanyi, son and nephew of men who tried to assassinate Hitler, gives a performance for the ages at all dynamics, coloristic shades, and, if the tempo lurches are always intentional, rubato of all kinds. This is expressionism at its finest, connecting Mahler simultaneously to Brahms and Berg, Hartmann and Schumann. A conductor as great as Dohnanyi has to get it right in Mahler occasionally, and Mahler 6's classical cohesion and modernist harmonies and sounds land squarely in the two things Dohnanyi does better than nearly anybody else. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ego-EgKWeZ4

A word on the hammerblows: the power of the hammerschlags are not a way of recommending the performance on its own. They have to be seen in the context of the performance. In Dohnanyi's case, they barely even register more than a bass drum hit, but it's apiece with Dohnanyi's conception, which places the work in both a classical and modern framework rather than romantic (this is Dohnanyi after all...). By de-emphasizing the 'blows of fate', Dohnanyi lays more emphasis on the harmonic scheme. Two of the three hammerschlags happen on deceptive cadences, and are extremely important to hear within the formal structure of the work. Mahler clearly wants the hammerblows to be an 'event' and creates atmosphere that leads up to them, but if the blow is so forceful that it obliterates the orchestra, the total effect is also compromised.

Herbig/Saarbrucken 1999: Herbig is one of the most underrated conductors of all time - Klemperer literally wrote him a letter of recommendation saying that Herbig was destined to be a great conductor in the same glowing terms that Mahler wrote for him. A pupil of both Karajan and Abendroth, it's the Abendroth influence which comes out here, with a mercurial tempestuousness that heightens the romanticism to a passionate boil without burning the soup. The Saarkbrucken Radio Symphony struggles at times in the live circumstances, and there's a truly spectacular two-measures-early cymbal crash, but the visceral passion on display is nothing short of electric. Like Abendroth, there is copious rubato everywhere, though surely Abendroth's would have been more extreme than this... Herbig's rubato is always subtle when the music demands subtlety - for all the CAPITAL LETTERS in this performance, everything is natural, breathing, and connected to the work's harmonic tensions and releases. This is Mahler the Wagnerian romantic, creating in a Tristan-like frenzy. It is an absolutely essential performance that belongs with all the great masters listed here.

Incidentally, a word about the lack of importance of orchestral finish... What's important is not getting every note right, what's important is understanding the soundworld, and understanding the structure. The difference in idiomaticity between Herbig and a pioneer with a second-tier orchestra like Horenstein and Rosbaud is that while they share Herbig's copious understanding Mahler's soundworld, Horenstein and Rosbaud never struck me as understanding Mahlerian structure. Contrary to popular opinion, Mahler can certainly be over-romanticized, but neither can he be shoehorned either into uniform tempi. Herbig never shoehorns the structure into a single tempo. On the other hand, while a slicker virtuoso with a great orchestra like Karajan or Ozawa could be admirably flexible and tie the rubato to the music's breath, they never struck me as understanding Mahler's soundworld - dramatic and menacing moments are much too smooth, rustic moments are much too civilized.

MTT/San Francisco 2001: A 'brighter' orchestra, captured just the day after 9/11. Capturing the first forebodding America might have a century like Europe's 20th. It's still lighter and more 'manic', like a black comedy, or Charles Munch's Berlioz, but it still paints on the huge fresco canvas of Bernstein and Tennstedt where every character is drawn with Bruegel grotesquerie. Everything is noise and confusion. I don't know what it would sound like to Europeans, but for us here, it paints a very familiar picture... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A806HLB8jRM

I. Fischer/Budapest 2005: Taking Mahler back to his Central European roots. This is a much more human scaled, lyric vision, with lots more care in soft dynamics far more patience in getting to the climaxes. But few performers are in a better position to understand Mahler's inner world and capture its many, many details. I don't know whether it's the oral tradition or the simply fact of proximity, but Fischer's musicians just feel right in the details in ways that are inexplicable. Kubelik often has that same quality in Mahler, and would have it in 6 if he occasionally slowed down a little bit. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XWfXJ8lFDEQ

Flor/Malaysia 2011: Mahler from the new world of classical music, with the energico virtuosity and confidence of a peoplehood who know that the 21st century will probably be kinder to them than to us and mean to make their mark upon the world stage. Another of the world's most underrated conductors, Flor dares every possible extreme, and in the process he captures every strange Mahlerian effect, angularity, strangeness, and opportunity for black humor. It's Mahler by way of Prokofiev, there are much more lyrical conceptions than this, but give or take a few small details - the Malaysians outplay most of the world's greatest orchestras. There are more moving Mahler 6s, but few if any this vivid and gripping. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GXrdpse4LLY

Gielen/SWR Symphony 2013: I think this is Gielen's last performance. After Tennstedt, the most essential performance - the performance Klemperer might have given and the performance Barbirolli aimed for and connected at a deep psychic link to Goldschmidt's vision. This is like a final recall of the 20th century and all its brutalities. There is little rubato, even less sentimentality, but huge vision and detail nobody else finds, capturing the almost sickly Viennese psychological mindframe, like a hospital on which Freud makes his rounds. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MpV5-FkLe-4

Rattle/Berlin 2018 (not on youtube): Rattle ended his Berlin tenure on Mahler 6, and it's also a statement of forebodding, a pessimism for the future of Europe, for the future of modernization, and that we might repeat the mistakes of the past. The Berlin Philharmonic is wrong for Mahler, and yet Rattle pushes them beyond Karajan and Abbado's plush Straussisms. This is a Mahler that has assimilated all the lessons of the 20th century, and Rattle uses the Berlin Philharmonic's virtuosity to find colors not out of place in Debussy and Messiaen, with extreme rubato worthy of Hermann Scherchen.

Rattle, btw, gave the greatest Mahler performnace I've ever heard when he performed the 6th at Carnegie Hall with the Philadelphia Orchestra. By the end it felt like a terrible ghost had been raised, and considering where Carnegie Hall is in proximity to the Trump Tower, it was genuinely terrifying.

That was October 2016 - the rest is history...

(Note from 2026: This list is clearly unsatisfactory. while I don't feel like putting myself through a lot of Mahler sixes again for some time yet, I wonder if I would have the same reactions now or if I was too beholden to my dogmatic 'Tucker's law of musical performance' (search for it on this blog...). I only discovered Beinum had a Mahler Six two years ago. Barbirolli and Horenstein had so many Mahler 6's, should I really dismiss them all out of hand? I do love Karajan's live Salzburg 6 from 1977, and while I have never been a huge Rosbaud fan: his Mahler sounds so hard nosed to me it's like Prokofiev, but was I really listening hard enough? I dismissed Kondrashin almost out of hand because he was so shockingly quick (like Kubelik), if I listened all the way through, would I really dismiss it like that? And as for later performances, to not have Thomas Sanderling's on the list? I literally grew up on that version! I still have never heard Hans Zender in this work! Jansons both in London and Amsterdam. And not a single performnace by Haitink? Are all these really unnecessary while I said that a recording from CvD, a notoriously bad Mahler conductor, is great in spite of the tempo getting slower and slower?)

Underrated Classical Musicians: Antonello Manacorda

 I don't believe it. A soloist who knows how to conduct....

Antonello Manacorda was Abbado's handpicked concertmaster for the Gustav Mahler Chamber Orchestra (fancy naming a chamber orchestra after the world's best composer for large orchestras....). Manacorda has made one of the all time great Schubert symphony cycles with the Potsdam Chamber Academy (note from 2025: all-time great is serious hyperbole. I can think of at very least half a dozen more distinguished cycles...), a Mendelssohn cycle I have yet to hear (because I don't find the Mendelssohn symphonies all that interesting...), a Mozart cycle, a Beethoven cycle, and one of the all-time great recordings of Ravel's Mother Goose.

The Gran Partita for Winds on this concert is absolutely wonderful. But this fully 34 minute Verklarte Nacht is once in a 'blue moon' greatness. It is not the most dramatic or the most perfectly played, but it 'tells a story' and grows organically, note to note, and perfectly sustains tension and continuity from first bar to last in a work that notoriously rambles even in faster performances than this. It's a miracle of understanding whose diaphanous colors illumine the night sky.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LoLljFv9eHE&t=815s

Underrated Classical Musicians: Juraj Valcuha

This group is becoming entirely too conductor-centric again, but I think I have a new favorite conductor among the young set - possibly even moreso than Roth or Petrenko....

Over and over again, Juraj Valcuha has come to DC, Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, and I've ignored his concerts for flashier names. Valcuha's generally slow tempos and austere manner seemed duller than a number of others. How wrong I was....

In musicmaking like this we hear the holistic, humanistic ideal of what music should always be, in which passion, intelligence, precision, and sincerity come together in every note. That is what true music is, when every note by every musician has the right to be heard and every note supports every other note. The first time I heard Mariss Jansons live when I was 14, I experienced that sense of what music could be - even if I didn't have a sense of what it was yet, and in this imperfect world, have sought that ideally deep spiritual experience as often as I can in both my listening and the music I write. With Valcuha, you hear literally everything with both the space to let the details be heard and the structure to show how every detail interrelates to each other. This is perhaps musicmaking at its very deepest level. It causes music to sound as though lit from the beyond. There are other, more purposive, ways of approaching music that connect it more to life, and it is not to neglect the more frenetic ideal of Kirill Petrenko or the gentler ideal of Ivan Fischer, or the virtuosity of Markus Stenz, the dramatic characterization of Manfred Honeck.

But here's the difference with Valcuha: Petrenko and Stenz cause elation. Fischer causes tears. Honeck causes awe.

But the end of this kind of performance is just catharsis, a simple soul purging. It's so inevitable that you don't know why you're drawn in, and yet every measure hypnotizes you deeper and deeper in, as though an ethical force binds and surrounds you. At every minute, you experience the total effect as though the music is gently guiding you from note to note. Live, I've only experienced this sense from two conductors: Mariss Jansons and Christoph von Dohnanyi, and three pianists: Alfred Brendel, Leon Fleisher, and Andras Schiff. On record you can get it from a few more, but they're all gone.

Valcuha has just signed to be the next director of the Houston Symphony. He's replacing Andres Orozco-Estrada, no slouch. But AOE (sorry) is a much more frenetic type. He makes music with virtuoso enthusiasm and lightness. There is nothing light about Valcuha, but nor is there heaviness. There is just... music, and beauty, and compassion, emanating from a place we don't know where.

Here he is in one of my favorite pieces of music. You'd think a performance this straight ahead wouldn't catch the humor and pathos, but you'd be completely wrong. I long to hear the whole thing now. As with Jansons or Klemperer or Erich Kleiber, you will hear that musical equanimity of purpose, in which every note has context, every chord has essence, and every musical moment tolls like a church bell.

You had better believe I will try to be down in Houston once a year. This... is... MUSIC! 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ym2QvHQNyPU

RENT Hating

 (note: Please just try as best one can to consider the generalizations in the first segment some unresolved psychological baggage. Of course, not all actors are the way I describe, but my god, every time I've gone in to be an actor, director, non-rockband singer, it's turned into a humiliating hell in a handbasket.

I refuse to believe the problem is just me.)

Actors hate me, they always have, and I've always hated them back. It's a lifelong enmity, and much too much trouble to get into specifics, but secure people know better than to choose acting as a profession. The vast majority of actors think they're weird, but they're so unbelievably normal. When they encounter a person who is truly weird, they turn into teenagers, which in turn turns the object of their scorn into the terrified, angry teen he doubtless once was. I always get along much better with techies in spite of having no mechanical ability at all, and certainly got along much better with the other musicians in the pit.

Just the very idea of ever going back on-stage to act or sing provokes something akin to trauma, and the idea of ever directing a show again provokes something akin to a Vietnam flashback complete with helicopters, slow motion deaths, and The Doors or Barber's Adagio playing in the background.

Theater is wasted on actors. It's the greatest place in the world where all the artistic glories of the world can be synthesized into a supersublimity - not rendered on a 2-D screen by rich stoners in California but by people right in front of you. But there's something about the extroversion required for stage fortitude that precludes introspection. To be a really good stage performer, you need to be so present in the moment that your temperament requires a constant state of overstimulation. It shouldn't be a secret why actors and singers are so drawn to sex and drugs... The very idea of the patience required for introspection is anathema to a real stage temperament.

Growing up, I always thought I was a stage guy, but I'm the opposite. A library with a stereo is what I was put on earth to live in, a place where no one can break your heart, nobody can talk shit about each other, and the only socialization you need can be done online where the real life consequences are minimal. The mind becomes free to wander away from anxieties of social interaction which are somehow both trivial and overwhelming, and can at least steal small bits of peace away from the world of other people too impatient to understand you.

And that's not even getting into the organizational shit or deadlines. Theater, for me, is nothing but a series of panic attacks.

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RENT is, without a doubt, one of my least favorite things in the world. Every minute of it sounds like fingernails on a chalkboard to me. It's not even something that's fun to hatelisten to like singing cats.... Everything about it is acute queasiness. It's an amalgam of rock, showtunes, R&B, and opera that strips every one of them of everything interesting about them. Its recited narration makes no sense and stops momentum in its tracks;, and the overall earnestness can induce diabetes. There's nothing inventive about the lyrics, rhythms, harmonies, melodies, characters, scenes, structure or ideas. It is a black hole of false joy. It's a hymn to Bohemianism by a Jewish kid from White Plains who became a Bohemian because any Jewish kid from a Jewish area who had a slight artistic bent was written off as a rebel just for being themselves. RENT is... everything I hate... and maybe because it's exactly the kind of show I might have seen myself writing if my life had broken a very different way. (And if that seems like self-grandiosity, just remember, I think RENT sucks and a couple hundred people could have written it.)

I know Tick, Tick... BOOM is supposed to be a story of hardship. But I look at this and can't help thinking 'Man, this guy had it great. And his music is the perfect reflection of that.' A guy able to organize his own shows in New York with performers at his beckon call, sympathetic and loyal friends who live near him, a glowingly gorgeous girlfriend with another one lining up to take her place the moment she vacates... And he's tall!

And that's the great lie of biopics like this: the martyred 'glamor-saint' has just enough hardship to make his hagiography inspirational, but we don't relate to him by saying 'he's just like me.' We relate to it by saying about him 'I wish I were like him.'

Golden ages were never particularly golden, but whatever music theater was in its 'golden age', the false ebullience of modern music theater is something I just find a cold-blooded lie. For decades before Occupy Wall Street or metoo was a blip on anybody's radar, I've watched the joyful enthusiasm of these kids and could only think 'what amazing lives must you all have to be so happy?' Anybody who's been in the arts for two minutes knows the humiliations that come with the job - the endless begging for money and the endless appeasing of people who have complete control over your future. And yet... you never saw that in the work. It was as though there was a conspiracy of silence about what life was really like. Rodgers and Hammerstein? It's better, but still, so many lies.... Andrew Lloyd Webber? Not even aware of the truth. Jonathan Larson? Everybody is dying of AIDS and addicted to heroin, but it's a wonderful life anyway! You should try it too!

The most inventive song I've ever heard from Jonathan Larson was the comic song in Tick, Tick... Boom (I have no idea if it's in the show...) about his breaking up relationship, and it is... so incredibly annoying that it ate through my ear like a predatory silverfish.

What made it so annoying?... Y'know... aside from that it was probably designed to be annoying.... It's the emotional manipulation of it. He hid the pain under a comic mask that almost deliberately doesn't seem funny. Depending on your point of view, he's let us have a good time at his expense, which is of course his right, but it minimizes not just his pain but his girlfriend's, and also sets an impossible standard for the rest of us. Don't worry, you can work through your problems because with a little distance, emotional pain is adorable!

-------------------------

Why can't I be more forgiving?....

It's 1990 New York. Most of us don't remember what agony it was because half the people who lived through it are dead. Half an entire generation of American artists and their most reliable audiences were gone in the span of fifteen years - the world's most reliable communities of artists come from gay people and people who use recreational drugs - and AIDS killed off them both. AIDS was a plague from which neither New York nor the world of the arts could ever truly recover. The whole continuity of New York was interrupted, its theater, its music, its art, its dance, its civic activism,... no wonder prices went up around New York because the only people who'd move to Manhattan in droves were working for Wall Street and advertising. And no wonder artists who listen to their own drumbeat have that much less of a chance now than they did.

Purely by bad luck of the genetic draw, Jonathan Larson became the ultimate voice of that generation - silenced as they all were. In the process, he created a musical about Bohemianism and individuality so mainstream that a movie can be made of it directed by the same guy who oversaw the Harry Potter franchise.

It's unfair, it's unjust, that era deserved so much better.

-------------------------------

So yes, the problem is obviously as much me as RENT. RENT is everything I hate about theater. When I listen to it, so many failures of my life have a name and an address. RENT is everything people want that I can't provide. To me it sounds like music and theater defanged and lobotomized. It was created to be a hymn of praise to individualism, non-conformity, chasing dreams - and everything in it sounds to me as though it embodies the opposite.

What I Listen For in Music - (This is gonna be dense...)

 Great art thinks with its heart and feels with its brains.

That's an old cliche, precisely the sort that great art avoids, but the point is that art is not unlike any other human necessity. You have to simultaneously use your heart to guard against the dangers of charlatanism and use your brain to guard against the dangers of emotional entanglements from which escape is impossible. But more elementally, there is no difference between thinking and feeling - you feel your thoughts, you think your feelings, and so the least advisable thing you can do - whether it's an intellectual decision or an emotional one, is to believe too deeply that you're right.

Being human is more than thoughts or emotions, it's, quite literally, the cross-section between the two. The idea that intellect and emotions exist independently is a pernicious myth. The thoughts we're aware of are only a speck of what's going on in our brains at any given moment, which themselves are connected directly to the nervous and circulatory systems and all the activity beneath. 'Thinking' is just a part of 'being' and 'being' only comes in one package. Entire civilizations have killed each other over whether the ultimate package is the body or the soul, but whatever we are, whatever is out there that we become, we're just a grain of dust within a much, much larger package.

What all that intellectual bullshitry means is that music is not an end in itself. Good music isn't an intellectual exercise, but it's not a direct emotional release either. Great music is, quite literally, a process. There's no such thing as music unless its heard by human ears who send the sounds to the brain for processing into some sub-linguistic meaning. Music is, perhaps literally, the process of how our instincts direct energy through our body before we can articulate what our instincts are telling us to do.

And so music is not intellect or emotion, it is, at least as best I can explain it, the intellectual process of how emotions transition from one state to another. And so when you hear music, a meaningful experience is not particularly meaningful when you perceive just one or two flat primary emotions, even if those emotions are rendered in a state of one basic emotion at a time (opera lovers take note). A really meaningful musical experience will take you through every imaginable emotional state and navigate the transitions between them.

This is why the overseriousness and grandiosity of much classical music can be deeply unsatisfying and land people in an emotional rut of which they're not even aware they're in until years have passed.... it's not entirely unlike addiction... It's also why the frivolity of so much popular music is equally unsatisfying. If life is complicated, what's the point of music that lies to you about that? There are, of course, hundreds if not thousands of exceptions on both sides of the ledger, but while I could be wrong, I have to imagine it's a lot easier to be frivolous from a base of seriousness than it is to be serious from a base of frivolity.

Now this leads to a further complication, because, god knows, and a lot of popular music is meant to be serious, and a lot of classical music is frivolous - some of it's even meant to be....

The point is not to stereotype any form of music, or to disregard any great artist working in any less prestigious medium who can elevate what used to be garbage into unmistakable sublimity. The point is merely to prefer the artforms that best let artists capture whatever it is that allows them to express what it means to be fully human. That's fundamentally why I particularly love orchestral music and symphonies - because they require the composer to incorporate an almost infinite diversity of expressive modes in a way that opera generally does not.

But there are a lot of crappy symphonies too, many of which come from great composers, and some are even well regarded.... And there are certainly rock and R&B albums which rise to the level of great art, some of which come from some really crappy artists - 'crappy' meaning artists who don't think deeply about what they do and basically make art in a way that exploits their public to maximize their financial gain; but making art is very very hard, and no matter how hard you work, so much of it is luck.

The best thing music can give us is deeper than what we generally think of as either intellect or emotion - we need to literally hear human connection. We need music that tells us what it's like to be native to every emotional state, and navigates us securely in a journey between them all. That is what will fortify us best for whatever life throws at us.

Half a dozen Mediocre Symphonies thought Great:

Mahler Symphony of a Thousand

Saint-Saens Organ Symphony

Bruckner 3

Liszt Faust Symphony

Rachmaninov 2 (I said it)

Mendelssohn's Italian Symphony (I said what I said)

Vanja Ljubibratic finally blocked me

 I feel cheated out of a rematch. Maybe I should fly to Finland and heckle his concerts in person.

Good Books #4: The Mahabharata (abridged)

Some books really are so magnificent that you put off finishing them for fear their delights will end. When that end comes, your two-sided relationship with the book ceases, and all you can do is re-experience your encounters with the same situations. Re-reading a book is like a friend long gone. Reliving it can be a wonderful experience, but the accompanying ruefulness can be crippling.

The Mahabharata attempts to solve this problem - it's a book to which you almost literally can't get to the end. The Mahabharata took roughly 1400 years to write, it is ten times longer than the Iliad and the Odyssey combined. It is a poem of 18 books, 200,000 lines, 1.8 million words. Its central story is perhaps the most exciting epic ever composed, and it has enough time left over for six side stories, countless folk tales and parables recounted from the oral tradition, and an endless profusion of debates over morality and theology.

This is the real multiculturalism. If you want to understand other cultures, you can't just read a couple writers your own age who make political points you conveniently agree with. You have to understand these cultures at their root and read the documents which formed them and all the generations before them. So if we need to place a text as central to World Literature as Shakespeare to Western lit and the Gospels to Christianity, there The Mahabharata sits as its shelves buckle under the weight of content so inexhaustible that only Hindu scholar or a Vedic priest can reach its end.

Like Shakespeare and The Bible, The Mahabharata is just that good because it always stays ahead of us - it's so universal that it seems to anticipate every new development around the world. The Mahabharata's central epic has scenes as dramatic as Shakespeare, battles as visceral as Homer, moral debates as nuanced as anything in Plato, and its own terrifyingly vast cosmos as spiritually charged as anything in Dante or The Bible.

And yet... the second half of The Mahabharata is basically a multi-player video game. The Mahabharata's main characters comb the Earth in search of spirits with unworldly powers, special weapons forged in unknown realms, special boons and blessings that allow them to fight with more ostentatious skill, and meanwhile, they kill literal millions of nameless soldiers who seem to come at them in packs of thousands only so its dozen-odd protagonists can mow them down.

And yet amid its distinct currency for the 'RPG'-era, it speaks to morality in a way that cuts through every potential thought we have that this book is only a game. It is a tale of Dharma, contrasting one potential king who follows the path of righteousness to a perhaps ridiculous extreme against his cousin, a potential king who completely disregards the Path of Dharma.

I have to imagine that it is impossible for any American to read those many many chapters of the good prince/demigod Yudhishtira who leads his followers through vulnerability, undergoing yet another episode of his crippling depression and anxiety, and not see in him the image of Abraham Lincoln. Yudhishtira is a man of good faith who lead his civilization into its bloodiest war - and like Lincoln, perhaps his very virtue is the force which drained so much life out of an old, corrupt era. In the wake of virtuous leaders like Lincoln and Yudhishtira, better new worlds are formed, but the price for the old world is so spectacular that one might be forgiven for thinking that maybe there would have been a little less pain if a little corruption remained. One of the many facets of The Mahabharata's genius is the fact that it so easily lets you say to yourself 'no virtue is worth this amount of pain.' The moral implications of this book are meant to be struggled with, and The Mahabharata trusts that eventually your life experience will bear out the view that the world is only livable through the path of maximum virtue.

And at the same time, it's impossible for any American to read of the bad prince, Duryodhana: venal, narcissistic, a collector of resentment who always operates in bad faith, and not think of Trump. Duryodhana is the very embodiment of a decadent society due for collapse. From birth, it's made clear that Duryodhana is every bit the demi-demon that Yudhishtira is the demigod. But everything about him is not only spoiled, but a complete embodiment of corruption in every manifestation - political, financial, sexual, human... He is, maybe, the best incarnation of villainy in literature, or certainly up there among the best I've read... He isn't just a bad guy or an evil guy, he shows us exactly how evil operates; Duryodhana and his blind father, Dhritarashta (maybe that symbolism's a little heavy-handed...), are the perfect incarnations of how evil is eternally able to seem like virtue. No matter how awful their motivations, their arguments are always sensible and show how easy it is for even the most comically obvious evildoers to convince people that theirs is the path of righteousness.

It's the Prophet Isaiah who says 'woe unto them that call good evil and evil good,' but nothing in the Bible or even Shakespeare has The Mahabharata's uncanny ability to show how people reason themselves to a conclusion in bad faith. There are always two sides to every story, but even so, in every disagreement, the odds that both sides are '50% right' are as slim as the chance that one side is 100% right and one is 100% wrong. The 'bad side' may be mostly wrong, but they always have a legitimate point. There is always a justification to act badly and double down on the original sin - and none of us are Yudhishtira. There is a little bit of Duryodhana in us all, and the fact that we can recognize small parts of ourselves in him makes him all the more more sinister. The difference, and the didactic purpose the Mahabharata serves, is to show that we in the real world should have the sense to turn back from our greatest sins before we lose everything. And yet civilization after civilization creates its Duryodhana figure, who causes the country to double down on mistake upon mistake until everything is truly lost. Let no one say that Great Man History as Europe traditionally taught it has no precedent in the East...

We have not even mentioned the other five Pandavas yet. We haven't told of Arjuna and his bow or Bheema and his mace, we haven't told of the absolutely Shakespearean casus belli involving the Pandava wife, Dhraupadi, or the truly awesome scenes involving Krishna, whose presence occasionally seems more majestic and uncanny than Yahweh himself. And most tragically, as in the story, we have forgotten about Kama.

Even more than Yudhishtira, Kama is The Mahabharata's truest hero, and the one I'd imagine inspires the most devotion in believing Hindus, because unlike Yudhishtira and his Pandava brothers, Kama has lived a cursed life. The Mahabharata, like every ancient epic, is a story of the highest born people, who once were considered the only people worth singing about. But while born high, Kama was cast into the lowest classes from right after birth, and he is every person who has born their humiliations with nobility. Kama was offered multiple times the chance to be King of the World in Yudhishtira's place, but he refused every time. Why? Because the only person who recognized his nobility and gifts when he had nothing at all was Duryodhana, and even if Duryodhana is the evilest man on the planet, his loyalty is more important to him than the Empire. Perhaps that description makes him sound stuffy and wooden, but there are a number of moments in Kama's story that easily reduce a reader to tears.

Like all ancient tragedies, The Mahabharata is really about the overwhelming cost of pride. But epics are not only tragic, they are also celebrational, epic are supposed to take in all of life in its many seasons. The story of the Mahabharata is as much about how to navigate life to minimize tragedy as it is about the tragedy itself. It's partially a sacred text, and therefore supposed to have practical application, and it's also a joyful celebration of virtue - some of those virtues are warlike, yes, but also patience, generosity, sincerity, vulnerability, and emotional resilience.

On the one hand, The Mahabharata is a legend of the sort that I would imagine will soon be scrawled all over fantasy literature. All the tropes of medieval European epics were contained in The Mahabharata, and there's no way the original bards of Beowulf and Roland and King Arthur happened upon some versions of various tales from The Mahabharata's pages. But now that the world of Kings and Swords and Gods is so definitively back, I would imagine we're about to see an epic profusion of such tales taking place Asia and Africa before the West came to allegedly spoil it.

And yet, The Mahabharata is inexhaustibly more than just a sword and sandal epic. It just might be the foundational document in the literature of the entire earth, and once people around the world come to appreciate as Indians have for nearly 2000 years, it will perhaps light a path that will make the greatest writers of human history still ahead of us.

So here's the thing... I just read a 1450 page version, and I've got a little less than 100 pages to go. I know how it ends: all the Pandavas die. I'm so not ready to kill them off yet. So in a little while, I'm going to try to read a slightly longer, perhaps more inclusive version that gives us some of the detail I didn't get the first time, and my relationship to these characters will not die for as long as I need them to live.

https://archive.org/details/MenonRameshTHEMAHABHARATAAModernRenderingVol1

Underrated Classical Music: Malcolm Arnold Symphony no 5

 

One of the problems the Arnold symphonies have is that works this dense need really perceptive performers who perform with conviction, integrity, and intelligence. Arnold's own performances of the symphonies were perhaps a little beyond his orchestras - they played precisely, but they didn't 'get' the music. The same goes for a lot of early performances under full-time conductors, a number of whom were extraordinarily skilled and gifted.

Richard Hickox 'got' this music. He is perhaps the greatest orchestral conductor to start as a choral conductor. It's such a shame he couldn't get his health together and passed away at 60, because he would have a major appointment by now and be acknowledged by now as a true international master.

And so does the modern LSO. However good British orchestras were fifty years ago, they're better now. It's difficult to explain, but the old British orchestras didn't understand what Arnold was trying to convey in his music. They probably heard music which was neither modern nor romantic, and they became tentative and confused. However accomplished technically, the old recordings lack direction and assurance. But few orchestras have played more styles of music at this point than modern full-time London orchestras, and they probably understand the idiom of any underrated British composer on sight.

Hickox guides the LSO to play the romantic passages romantically and the modern passages modernly. The romanticism sings with over the top passion, the modernism crunches with confrontational abrasion.

The 5th has gotten more attention than virtually any Arnold symphony, and this will not be the last we feature. It's a memorial of four friends who died young, and it is a truly moving work when the musicians can explain it to us - full of all kinds of emotional pain, but also nostalgia and good humor. There was no expressive mode Arnold could not reach, we just need to understand what he's expressing.

Sadly, the Hickox recordings are only on youtube in piecemeal form, so I will share them link by link in the comments.

Sondheim's Greatest Song

"On the page it looked... nothing... almost comic... 80's synth piano... finger cymbals... trembling strings... pallindrome motifs... like an 8-bit Atari game... and suddenly... a melody from beneath emerges from the beyond... and the lyrics make no sense in the least...... and yet the whole thing levitates in a state of grace..."

The lyrics of Sunday don't make any sense until you've seen the show three times, and it doesn't matter at all. When I saw Sunday in the Park with George in the summer of 2002, the performance of Sunday was one of those few numinous moments in my cultural life when I broke down in tears, only to turn to see if anyone caught me and realize half the people in my row were weeping too.

A lot of people think Sunday in the Park with George is Sondheim's greatest musical. It's much too inside baseball for that - a musical for the faithful rather than the public, but Sunday is his greatest song. With just a couple phrases, Sondheim does what most of the very greatest theater composers and playwrights can't do operating at their very best for two-and-a-half hours.

Nothing can prepare you for seeing the painting on which the musical is based at the Chicago Museum of Art. Sunday on La Grande Jatte is one of the world's greatest paintings, not because of the obvious technical magnificence and the herculean effort it took to create, but because of what all that technique and effort is for. It's not for some hallucinatory religious image or yet another landscape, it's to create life as people live it - tragic situations, comic situations, and people simply going about their business. Nobody in the painting looks at each other - perhaps that's an indication of loneliness, but it also means that every person in the painting has to be regarded uniquely. Every story this painting tells is of individuals, not groups. You watch these figures think their own thoughts, and if their life story proceeded alongside the figures with whom they're grouped, each figure clearly has a very different perspective on the same events.

Sondheim's musical is about the composition of that masterpiece, how it's assembled, and the deep human cost of getting it right. Every person involved in the arts knows that pain - nobody really wants what we do, and if you're really putting everything you have into it, nobody even sticks around for long to appreciate you, No matter how intense your connections to certain people at various chapters of your life, they all eventually leave, and it's back to the loneliness again, where your only real connection is to what you create. The characters you form and the ideal audience you imagine is your only real company.

And so for the first time, these characters, so reflective of their artist's loneliness, sing together and feel their connection to one another; they give thanks to their creator for their existence as we sometimes sing to gods in places of worship.

And even if it's on an intuitive level, every audience member seems to feel that grateful connection to whatever force created us in the deepest chambers of our hearts. 'Sunday' is one of those rare moments in art, in life, when there's a possibility of spiritual transcendence that needs no god. We are literally hearing the miracle of transubstantiation, done not for God, but for ourselves.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JR-SWx5PboE&list=PLPmO34k5jrC9InA72RDOcN7vyMda8ivbL&index=10&fbclid=IwAR1iKe6XdcG5TJJ1TpcY1PhY6KrfX5oWI92XuoWRrYN8Y_JSB25-vUpYVdI