Pudelfrage

This sentence from Faust leaps out to me as something which should be the subject of a painting:

Faust mit dem Pudel hereintretend

Any takers? Or, better yet, has anyone painted Faust with a dog?

Goethe's Faust

I am trying to read it.

In German.

There are some strong reasons for this, some of which will emerge around here in the near future, barring unforeseen circumstances. However, letting you, that guy in Pennsylvania who keeps looking for more Doderer entries, know about that little bit of information will only serve to highlight the absurdity of my current predicament, which is:

Taking into account my current comprehension of the German language, I have roughly calculated (linearly, as I do not know the curve at which my learning German through reading Faust will quicken my reading of Faust) that it will take me 77 hours to read the entire first part of Faust.

So there.

Right now, I’m into the Prolog im Himmel, in other words, barely on my way to hell and back again. And in order to get back to the Demons, I must make a trip with Mephistopheles!

Reviewing the Reviewer

I am reluctant to admit this, but I listen to classical music as a teenager listens to pop. When something grips me, I listen to it over and over again until there is nothing left to enjoy, until it is drained of meaning to me. I then slip the corpse back into its jewel case and look for my next fix, and, god bless the enormity of the classical music recording industry, there's always a next fix!

The music I'm stuck fast to right now is the recording of Claudio Monteverdi’s Il Combattimento di Tancredi e Clorinda by Le Concert d’Astrée and Emmanuelle Haïm. Forsaking the light clear voices of an early-music specialist, she gambles on little-known Mexican tenor Rolando Villazón to sing the role as narrator. Villazón, I am told, is a singer of 19th Century opera, and occasionally appears with other little-known opera performers to, I am told, no small acclaim.

In all seriousness, signing Villazón was indeed a gamble, but not because his glorious caramel tenor isn't up to the task of singing the music, but that his voice isn't meant to be used to sing this music, an opinion derived largely from the performance practice movement. And so here is where the title of this post appears relevant, and I dust off my Foucault doll and do a bit of, uh, discourse analysis.

There's a review of this recording that so completely reflects this state of affairs that it almost seems as though he'd written it just so that I could use it as an example in a blog post. Anyway, here's the review. Go read it and come back here.

Back? OK. It's a good review, I will now offer the disclaimer that I am not really here to criticize the reviewer, the composer Robert Hugill. I am really and truly interested in what he says and trying to suss out why he says it, the logical space he's operating in, because Haïm's decision to use opera singers who sing 19th Century opera to sing 16th Century music is a trangressive act in our musical culture

Hugill sets this very fact out right at the start. He writes:

Emmanuelle Haim seems to have a penchant for working with singers who are not necessarily known for their work in the period performance field. The title role in her recording of Monteverdi’s Orfeo was Ian Bostridge, who is not a singer primarily associated with Monteverdi.

So, like any good writer, Hugill is using a bit of foreshadowing to lay out his main concern with Villazón's singing. He writes:

Villazon is known for his expertise in 19th and early 20th century Italian opera, but his beautiful voice is obviously responsive to other styles and genres. But only to a certain extent... he is only following what are probably the core elements of his grounding in 19th century performance practice. When his voice rises to its upper levels he opens it out in a manner which is entirely foreign to 17th century music. (my italics)

So the concern here is that Villazón's singing is out of joint with the time the music was written. My question is - who cares? As Hugill himself writes, "He has taken on board elements of the style and ornamentation required and his performance is, in some ways, astonishing."

Indeed, the recording is astonishing, and the one place where I really take issue with his review is his criticism of Villazón's word painting. Villazón, at least to my ear, very much brings out Monteverdi's subtle shifts in mood throughout the piece. Indeed, it is Villazón's range, a range of colour and expressiveness that exceeds that of many early music specialists, which makes this recording a triumph.

The tension in Hugill's review is there - the basis upon which he criticizes the performance is not on musical grounds for the most part, but for its failure to adhere to the historical limits placed upon music of this time by the performance practice movement. Hugill himself sums his review thusly:

You get to hear how one of the 21st century’s loveliest voices sounds in this music, providing you can get beyond the vexed issue of performance style.

He knows that this is a major issue, and like any good reviewer, he addresses it, he pays homage to the space our talk about this kind of music works in, even though I bet that he himself really enjoyed the recording, nearly despite the critical infrastructure one is laden with when it comes to music of this period.

My point? That this recording is precisely why the performance practice movement fails to address some of the more basic aesthetic issues surrounding music, by placing historical authenticity, or the archaeological work on our recent culture, the letters and scores and original instruments, the material of history, on a higher pedestal than the quality and emotional immediacy of a work in performance. Or, things before people.

And I must admit here that I've done the same thing as they, just in the opposite direction.

Reviews Well Past the Deadline: Have You Ever Been In Love With A 39 Pound Midget?

When one has nothing recent to talk about, there's always the past...

Last summer, I had an opportunity to catch Soulpepper's production of William Saroyan's The Time of Your Life.

Set in a honky tonk bar on the eve of American involvement in the Second World War, the play meditates on that wonderfully sophisticated popular culture that emerged between the two world wars.

The main character Joe, appears wealthy, and drinks champagne all day, but he doesn't really do much, except guide others along in their lives. A Socratic figure, he espouses a philosophy of not having a philosophy, beyond being kind to others, but in that kindness he attempts to help others recover things they've lost. He is the midwife to the dreams of the many characters who populate the play.

There is an elegaic quality to the work, not merely because of the coming war, but because, the popular culture it depicts and celebrates is, for the most part, snuffed out by the war.

You could see all these strains of American self-consciousness in it – the exuberance, the sad reality of the capitalist dream. However, what made it great was what popular culture was in the play, a attitude towards culture which I do not believe exists in America anymore, or Canada for that matter. But I'm not going to get into that because it will just get me in trouble!

For example, one of the background characters is a poor man who happens to play the piano really well, and he does so for nearly the entire play. There's also a comedian who is not at all funny, but who happens to be able to dance very well.

You see in these characters the inheritance of the whole Vaudeville tradition, as well as a sign of the importance of jazz in American culture at the time. You see it here, just before the war, as it's about to die as the major popular art form in America, where sophistication was still valued over sentimentality, or if nothing else, they could co-exist. After the war, with the rise of rock and roll, this kind of co-existence pretty much disappeared, as popular music came to define itself increasingly against "serious" classical music or jazz.

Saroyan's play unselfconciously captures a slice of history that seems very foreign to us these days in those interwar years of cultural ecumenism and political extremism. That alone made the play well worth seeing.

Sadly, when I went to see this gem, there were tons of seats still available, which was too bad, as I I suspect one of the reasons for the lacklustre attendance was that there were no well known Canadian TV personalities performing. Ah well.