Fanciulla

Puccini's La Fanciulla del West is celebrating its 100th anniversary next month, with the Met, home of the opera's prima, reviving its 1991 Giancarlo del Monaco production. There is an excellent website devoted to the anniversary (hat tip to Marion Lignana Rosenberg for introducing me to it) which includes a "virtual museum" of photos from Met productions, posters, and other memorabilia.

Among the contents of the virtual museum are the covers and title pages of two books on Native American lore and music that Puccini owned. If you're curious about these works, you can read them on Google Books: The Indians' Book, edited by Natalie Curtis Burlin; and Indian Story and Song by Alice Cunningham Fletcher. I haven't gotten deep enough in these to discover which melodies, if any, wound up in the score, but these are rich sources for amateur musical detectives.

(The novelization of the play can also be found on Google Books, although I can't find a public-domain edition of the play itself.)

Verdi Duecento

I want to commend Marion Lignana Rosenberg, whom I had admired from afar and now is a friend, for her splendid new Verdi blog, Verdi Duecento. As we close in on the Verdi bicentennial in 2013--one reason to look forward to the future--this blog will be an essential guide. Marion's scholarship and insights are superb, and she never posts unless she has something genuinely shrewd or new to impart. The three-segment interview with Philip Gossett, who is editing the Verdi critical edition, is a particular highlight.

Kansas

The Times ran a cute article today about an enterprising green-energy group that got some towns in Kansas to adopt more environmentally friendly practices by appealing to local values and steering clear of mentioning global warming (link to the story appears below).

The group, the Climate and Energy Project, deserve mad props for having achieved real success and, more importantly, for listening to the actual concerns of real people, rather than imposing solutions from on high.

Still ... no matter how important it is to honor the worldview of those who may not share your own, there are facts that really cannot be put in dispute, and there are times when, quite simply, some people--even if they are a bunch of atheistic eggheads--are right, and other people are wrong.

The article quotes a farmer who "discounts" global warming but whose "ears pricked up when project workers came to town to talk about harnessing wind power. 'There is no sense in our dependency on foreign oil,' he said, 'especially since we have got this resource here.'"

I don't want to rain on the fine work of the Climate and Energy Project, but someone needs to break it to this guy that unless we start strapping sails to our cars, producing cleaner electricity through wind power (which doesn't add carbon to the atmosphere the way a coal-fired electric plant does and thus does not contribute to ... global warming) really has little to do with ending our dependency on foreign oil.

In Kansas, Climate Skeptics Embrace Green Energy - Series - NYTimes.com

Bérénice

Loyal readers of this blog will remember that I think the music of the French composer Albéric Magnard is more estimable than his obscurity warrants. Leon Botstein and the American Symphony Orchestra, who have done so much for the cause of French music of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, will be performing Magnard's third, and final, opera, Bérénice, in concert on Sunday, January 30, at Carnegie Hall, and I will be there! (More details here.) I do not believe that this opera has been performed in North America--I am not even sure if it has been performed anywhere since its premiere at the Opéra-Comique in 1911.

If you're interested in boning up before the concert, the score can be found at the IMSLP. Gaston Carraud's biography of Magnard can be downloaded from the collection of the University of Ottawa via archive.org.

Knowing his music only from scores and recordings, I am looking forward to what will be the first time that I will have the opportunity to hear it performed live.

The Best American Science Writing 2010

I'm excited to announce that the latest edition of the annual science anthology that I edit, The Best American Science Writing 2010, is now available at your favorite bookstore. Not, however, available for Kindles yet.

The Kids are All Darwinian

I felt the way a lot people did about "The Kids are All Right"--that it presented characters who can be both likable and awful, that it caught some moments of genuine and natural feeling, and that when it trusted itself it achieved both real comedy and real insight. But I also wonder if anyone noticed, as I did, that the heart of the story was a kind of natural-world allegory of a struggle by two alphas over a troop or herd (in this case, a family). Mark Ruffalo's and Annette Benning's characters are the alphas, and the tension between the two of them is about competition and domination; Julianne Moore's character and the "kids" of the title are the subordinates who are long for and resent these powerful presences in their lives. Will Ruffalo topple Benning, or will she maintain her hold on power?

I'm not sure if I've seen a film that has had this kind of evolutionary-psychology approach woven into its story. This isn't a simplistic, social-Darwinist-type of thing. It's more subtle. I even wonder if the filmmakers intended it, or whether it's just a quality inherent in the story, or so ingrained in the filmmakers' worldview as to be unconscious.

Obama on Roth, Roth on Obama

Funny what you find on a French web site: Le Magazine-Litteraire has an item that quotes from an interview that Barack Obama gave to Jerry Goldberg--an interview that I can't find on the web--in which he is quoted as saying (translating back into English from the French): "I often say in jest that my intellectual development came about, without my knowing it, through reading Jewish writers and scholars. From theologians to Philip Roth, they have helped me forge my sensibility." ("Je dis souvent en plaisantant que ma formation intellectuelle s’est faite à mon insu, à travers la lecture d’écrivains et d’universitaires juifs. Des théologiens à Philip Roth, ils m’ont aidé à forger ma sensibilité.")

The item then goes on to quote from an interview Roth gave Der Spiegel in which he says kind things about Obama before adding (translating back from the French, itself a translation of the German): "But don't write that I'm going to vote for him [Obama]! This is the kiss of death. I rarely vote for the winner." ("Mais n’écrivez surtout pas que je vais voter pour lui ! Ce serait le baiser de la mort : je vote rarement pour le gagnant.")

Five-Minute Record Review

Donizetti's Roberto Devereux is so well known as a sopranos' opera--thanks in no small part to Beverly Sills's traversal of the so-called "Three Queens," a ridiculous piece of marketing that would have baffled Donizetti--that it's easy to forget that the title role belongs to a tenor. Naxos's recording of a live performance from the Bergamo music festival makes a good case for the centrality of the tenor part. Massimiliano Pisapia's Roberto is beautifully sung, if a touch veristic. His voice may need some ripening--the upper register sometimes seems poorly blended with the rest of the voice--but the intonation is good and the overall tone is virile and lyric.

The rest of the cast is quite good, too. Dmitra Theodossiu's Elisabetta may not hurl thunderbolts like Gencer, and perhaps she doesn't pull off the floating pianissimi that some other singers perfected, but she has the notes and the temperament. Federica Bragaglia's lyric soprano hardens a little in the high notes but overall fits the role's character ably. The conductor Marcello Rota paces the performance intelligently. Worth checking out.

Bad Signage

I saw this ad for the French Toast line of clothes on the side of the M104 bus ... in "Manhatten." Doesn't anyone proofread anymore?

Upcoming Issue of Opera News

The September issue of Opera News is hitting newstands now, and it's really worth seeking out. (Its content is not yet up on the Opera News web site.) Just to point out a few highlights:

• Renee Fleming on current singers: "I just sang a gala last night in Montreal. ... It was Matthew Polenzani, Diana Damrau, Joyce DiDonato and me. And they were just spectacular. Spectacular. Those three artists have it all. Stage presence and beauty and charm and unbelievable virtuosity and charisma. There are probably fifteen singers about whom that could be said right now, and ten years ago, there ... three, maybe. The bar is very high right now." (from her cover-story interview with F. Paul Driscoll)
• A profile of the likeable, up-and-coming American tenor Lawrence Brownlee.
• Some perceptive comments on Leonard Bernstein's much-maligned Mass, from Nico Muhly. One sample: "I have always liked to think about Mass as a Christian appropriation of the pagan holiday that is West Side Story."
• And, in the fulfillment of a lifelong dream, yours truly has a signed article in the august pages of the world's pre-eminent opera magazine: a book review of a memoir by Michael Kaiser, who runs the Kennedy Center in Washington.

And, yes, I do work for the Metropolitan Opera Guild, publisher of Opera News, but I'm writing this of my own volition.

A Scorecard Might Help

Those of us who are fond of the music of France during the fin-de-siècle have our hands full keeping names straight. It’s not just about knowing your Chabrier from your Chausson. The great composer Gabriel Fauré had a dear friend named Gabriel Faure—no accent. Weirder still, Faure wrote a biography of Fauré—one that can presumably be shelved with equal usefulness by author or by subject.

But if that isn’t confusing enough, just think of the confusion that the Erlangers caused their local post offices. There’s Camille Erlanger, a Parisian, whose operas include Aphrodite, Saint Julien l’Hopitalier, and Le fils d’étoile, perhaps the only opera about Simon Bar-Kokhba. There’s Frédéric Erlanger, who was part German, part American, who held the title of Baron, lived in England, worked primarily as a banker, and wrote an opera called Tess, based on Hardy’s novel, to an Italian text by Puccini’s librettist Luigi Illica.

And then there’s Rodolphe Erlanger, also a Baron, resident of Tunisia, famous for his ethno-musicological investigations of the Arab world.

Camille was born in 1863; Frédéric in 1868; and Rodolphe in 1872. Three musical Erlangers born within nine years of each other, and none related!

You Read It Here First

The Times has noticed the kerfuffle involving Siné, blogged about below.

Siné: Quoi? Non!

Last year Tom Reiss wrote in The New Yorker about a French "comedian" named Dieudonné whose humor, if that's what it can be called, is unabashedly anti-semitic. It was sobering reading.
Earlier this month another one-named French humorist, Siné, made an anti-semitic crack in the pages of the satirical journal Charlie Hebdo, and an interesting and rather sorry brouhaha has ensued, according to Bernard-Henri Lévy's more-in-sorrow-than-in-anger essay about the controversy.

Siné, no doubt infected with that crazed anti-Sarkozy hysteria that I alluded to in an earlier post, was complaining that, to translate Lévy's paraphrase, "in Sarko's France, converting to Judaism is a form of upward mobility" ("la conversion au judaïsme est, dans la France de Sarkozy, un moyen de réussite sociale"). This led M. Siné to declare "that he prefers a Muslim woman in a chador to a shaved Jewess" ("qu'il préfère 'une musulmane en tchador' à 'une juive rasée'").

These kinds of words are so spiteful and irrational it's hard to know how to react. You'd really have to dig deep into the diseased literature of anti-semitism to find this kind of ordure.

Interestingly, as Lévy points out, the controversy that has ensued is less about Siné's remarks and more about the demand of Charlie Hebdo's editor, Philippe Val, that Siné retract and apologize for his statement or never write for the magazine again. The argument seems to be that Val's ultimatum is not in keeping with the magazine's championing of free speech, even if it is offensive: an enemy of cant and empty-headedness is falling prey to "political correctness."

Lévy's intriguing point is this: there's nothing particularly "free" or courageous or non-conformist or even original about humor that appeals to racism and anti-semitism. If anything, it's conforming to a rather old, and tired, rhetoric, "the same eternal return to the same humor of the cabaret that not even you, Siné, find funny" ("le même éternel retour du même humour de cabaret qui ne te fait, j'en suis sûr, plus rire toi-même").

Obviously there are echoes of debates here, but I am most fascinated by the anti-semitism that no doubt propels much of the extreme reaction to Sarko.

Bittersweet Off-Topic

My wife enjoys watching reruns of "Will and Grace," and once called me into the living room to show me a scene in which Will, at his first hockey game, starts chanting "Here we go Strangers, here we go!"

These days the team looks a lot more like Strangers than Rangers. I'm brokenhearted that Jagr is leaving, especially as the team is opening its season in Prague. To say he was my favorite player on the Rangers is something of an understatement. He was my favorite hockey player before he came to the Rangers.

Losing Avery is really hard to accept. This guy won hockey games, plain and simple. The future hall-of-famer and all around great guy Brendan Shanahan most likely will not return. Marty Straka, one of the few short-handed threats the Rangers had, is gone. Tyutin played hard all season long and was a great linemate with Girardi. Hollweg added a lot of heart and soul to the team, even if he took some knuckle-headed penalties.

Hard to figure out some of the new acquisitions; it seems like Redden's and Naslund's best years are behind them, and some of the younger guys they've traded for are unproven. A lot is riding on their big pick-ups from last season, Drury and Gomez.

And an oddity: the Rangers are only playing only one afternoon home game all next season! I don't get it. My soon-to-be eight-year-old son is going to be disappointed that with so many late games his chance to see them play at the Garden will be severely limited.

What Ethics Should Writers Have?

Speaking of my reviews, I didn't post when, back in May, I reviewed Julie Salamon's Hospital. I was troubled by this book, and I have been wanting for some time to expand a little on what I touched on in my review.

Julie Salamon is a talented writer, one of those reporters whose powers of observation are nearly Holmes-ian. (Perhaps now we would say House-ian.) But I feel that she crossed a line in this book by bringing her megawatt powers of exposure to people whose lives could be harmed by this kind of attention. Although the director of the Maimonides Hospital in Brooklyn gave Salamon full access and encouraged the staff to co-operate with her, it still does not seem fair for hard-working doctors to have details of their lives, or scraps of conversation and gossip, thrown into the open for no purpose other than Salamon's needing something to write about. Yes, it is interesting to know how a big-city hospital copes with its many challenges. Ultimtaely, though, the approach Salamon takes seems more appropriate for a scandalous subject, or truly bad-hearted people.

How can it possibly help the morale of the hospital or the giving of care for details about doctors' feuds over money to be published? How does it help matters to look for dirt on these skilled professionals? Of course there's always dirt: all human beings are bound to have failings--greed and egotism among them in the medical world.

But so what? The real question is whether the airing of those faults is useful information for the public. And in the case of Hospital, the answer is no. I very much doubt people will be able to make better choices about their care by reading her book, and I am certain that the reputations of some of the doctors she writes about will suffer.

Freelance writers do not need to subscribe to a code of ethics, but the same scruples that an honest journalist would take should apply: don't needlessly savage subjects' reputations; respect their privacy; understand the boundaries of their co-operation.

And speaking of ethics: I was at first delighted to see that another reviewer shared my point of view about this book. But when I read a little further, I found that the similarities went deeper. The Austin American-Statesman's review, which ran about a month after mine, uses some phrases that curiously echo my own. Whereas I say:

"Despite the fact that Brier is the successful leader of a competitive New York City hospital, where she contends with easily bruised egos, community tensions, runaway expenses and local politics (and with the aftereffects of injuries she sustained in an auto accident shortly before taking the job), Salamon wants us to see her as a bit of a nut case."

... the Statesman reviewer says:

"Salamon's intent, clearly, is to portray Brier as something of a freak."

"something of a freak" seems like a word-for-word substitution for "a bit of a nut case."

Or how about this. First, me:

"In meetings, Brier 'would get up while someone was talking, walk to a cabinet, pull out a bag of popcorn, and pour it into bowls.' Is that such a heinous offense? How about this one: 'During a telephone call with a fellow hospital president, she might make a truly odd pronouncement, like, "I want you to know I’m considered one of the great constipation experts in the borough of Brooklyn." ' Never mind that 200 pages later Salamon provides the context that makes this statement less an 'odd pronouncement' than a caring, if tongue-in-cheek, admonition to a hospitalized colleague."

Now, the Statesman reviewer:

"We also get physical descriptions and personality tics, especially the 'odd behaviors' of Maimonides President and CEO Pamela Brier, whom Salamon dings — unfairly, I think — for the unremarkable habit of rising during meetings to straighten curtains and pour popcorn into bowls while others are talking. Early in the book, Salamon offers, without context, this seemingly bizarre quote from Brier: 'I want you to know I'm considered one of the greatest constipation experts in the borough of Brooklyn.' [snip] Near the end of 'Hospital,' we're finally given the context for the offending quote: Brier is speaking to a doctor who is recovering from surgery and may, indeed, be in need of a constipation expert."

Coincidence? I wonder.

Me, Me, Me

For those who may want to catch up on all the reviews that I've written for the Los Angeles Times, the Times web site has handily created a page listing them all.

Black Holes

I'm proud to say that my review in last Sunday's Los Angeles Times of Leonard Susskind's brilliant new book, The Black Hole War, was the front-page review in the print version. That's a first for me!

Alberic Magnard

Today is the birthday of the great, underappreciated French composer Alberic Magnard (1865-1914). A good deal of his music has been recorded--there are no fewer than four complete sets of his four symphonies--and is available through the various online music retailers. It is well worth seeking out. Magnard's music has the reputation for being somewhat "learned," as he took a highly intellectual approach to composition; he was a champion of absolute music in a time when programmatic music was all the rage.

For all that, his music isn’t as bloodless as it may seem; it seems to come out of a deep and sincere font of emotion. An astute critic in the Figaro, writing of Magnard’s Fourth Symphony, said that, despite what the composer may have expressed in his pronouncements, the music was highly dramatic, and in some ways not unlike Bruckner’s Eighth. I’m not sure if I see the comparison, but I think the point is there is more of a human, and humane, element to the music than some may want to credit.

Bon anniversaire, Magnard!

Words of Wisdom

I grokked Lucy Ellmann's review of Chuck Palahniuk's new novel:

"What the hell is going on? The country that produced Melville, Twain and James now venerates King, Crichton, Grisham, Sebold and Palahniuk. Their subjects? Porn, crime, pop culture and an endless parade of out-of-body experiences. Their methods? Cliché, caricature and proto-Christian morality. Props? Corn chips, corpses, crucifixes. The agenda? Deceit: a dishonest throwing of the reader to the wolves. And the result? Readymade Hollywood scripts."

Well said, although, as she knows, Melville and James, at least, were not much "venerated" in their day. Still, the sentiment creates sympathetic vibrations chez moi.

Sad, but True

Maxim Vengerov is hanging up his fiddle, according to the Times of London, to focus on conducting. Actually, the decision isn't irreversible, thank goodness. I can well understand how a master such as Vengerov would want to get out of the rut of playing the same pieces again and again, and recharge his creativity. I'm sure when he returns to the violin, as no doubt he will, he will bring new insights and freshness to his playing.