Off-Topic: Shanny is a Mensch

Brendan Shanahan has brought class and leadership to the Rangers since he arrived last season. In an interview with a Czech reporter, Shanny talks about his relationship with Jaromir Jagr as one of mutual support and complementary styles--in both how they play and how they lead. There is no resentment, animosity or envy. Most touching of all are Shanny's comments about his collision, in a game last year, with Philadelphia's Mike Knuble:

"Whether it’s speaking for Jagr in public or standing up for him on the ice, that’s just the way things are supposed to work for Shanahan. 'That’s how it works on the best teams,' he explained. 'Everyone cares for each other. It’s beautiful when I achieve something and I see that my teammates are happy for it. I score, take a look at the bench, and see Jaromir, a huge NHL superstar, smiling happily with his hands up. Or another example: Last season, I was knocked out after a collision in the Philadelphia game and I was taken out on a stretcher. I watched the replay and I saw Jaromir standing above me the whole time. He even came to visit me in the hospital. This gets people closer.'" (via BlueShirt Bulletin)

My son, then six, and I were at that horrible game. Seeing Shanny lying motionless was terrifying. You can watch the video yourself: Jagr did keep a vigil over Shanny. You can see Jagr, on at least two occasions by my count, bending over to try to communicate something to his fallen teammate; at another point he helps to secure the stretcher on the ice. I guess I'm just sentimental, but watching this video brought a tear to my eye. Hockey players are really something.

Beckett's Opera

According to Le Monde, the French National Library has unearthed a little-performed opera based on Samuel Beckett's Krapp's Last Tape. Alas, the music, by Beckett's friend Marcel Mihalovici (1898-1985), is, according to Le Monde's critic, "entirely mediocre," a rather uninspired example of 1960s modern atonality, and a bitch (vacherie) to play.

The Met: Can They Institute a Dress Code?

I was at the Met last night (Tuesday, December 18) to see the powerful, grimly effective production of War and Peace. I can't add to what the reviews have recorded. But I do want to channel my inner curmudgeon and say something about the dress of some people in the house. At my earlier two visits to the Met this season, I saw a lot of well dressed people--capped off last week not only by Netrebko, but by a beautiful woman with a seat in the orchestra level who was wearing a stunning black strapless gown. She looked absolutely radiant.

Now I do not expect that people wear black- or white tie (though they might want to think about it), but I do think it is important to dress for the opera, at least for the Met. An evening at the Met is a festive occasion, a special event, and should be celebrated as such.

Last night I saw several people in jeans and sneakers. A young woman in what I am sure was a very expensive hoodie. And one fellow who was wearing some kind of Klingon-style vest.

Can the Met institute a dress code? Not let people in who are wearing jeans or sneakers? Can't we have one place where the relentless casualness of dress is prohibited?

Happy Beethoven's Birthday!

Not just Schroeder, but no less than Anton Webern believed that Beethoven's birthday should be a day of national celebration. And I concur! What a good, non-denominational way to have a winter-solstice festival. My (very indulgent) wife and I exchange gifts and then listen to a Beethoven masterwork.

Happy Beethoven's Birthday everyone!

Top Five Items I'm Not Going To Blog About

1. New York Philharmonic Going to North Korea. Can they leave Maazel there?

2. New York City Opera Not Having a 2008-2009 Season While Renovation Takes Place at the State Theater. The problem isn't a "dark season." The San Francisco Opera managed to live through one.

3. Rumors that Anna Netrebko is Gay. The woman I saw her with the other night was not Lucy Diakovska.

4. MP3 vs. Hi Fi Audio. I'm still trying to get my Victrola to work.

5. The Gramophone and Typewriter Company's Unique Visitors Up for Third Straight Month!

Who's a Better Communist?

In The New Statesman, Andrew Hussey has an entertaining take on the memoir, just published, by France's leading post-structuralist novelist and intellectual, Philippe Sollers. One sentence amused me, when Hussey says that Sollers is "a vain, gossipy but undoubtedly talented novelist who is the epitome of snobbish, bourgeois, mondain Paris (Sollers's Maoist youth is only further proof of this pedigree)."

Follow that? Being a Maoist is merely "proof" that you're bourgeois. Get it? Because I don't.

My Take on "Happy Holidays"

I don't get this consternation over the use of the term "Happy Holidays." First off, it's not a slighting of Christmas. It's an acknowledgment that two holidays fall within a week of each other: Christmas and New Year's. It's faster than saying, "Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year" each time you greet someone.

Second, I'm a Jew, and we Jews say to each other "Good Yumtif" on our holidays. What does "Good Yumtif" mean? Well, yumtif is a Yiddishization of the Hebrew yom tov, which means "good day." So, yes, we're saying "Good Good Day," but in this case "good day" = "holiday." We're basically saying "Happy Holiday" to each other, whether it's the sacred and solemn fast of Yom Kippur or the minor festival of Hannukah. And I don't think I've ever encountered an offended co-religionist when I have greeted him or her with a "Good Yumtif." No one says, "How dare you say that! This is a war against Tisha B'av!"

Atonal Prose

Until this interview is translated from Hungarian, we'll have to suffice with the pullquote on Sign and Sight: Imre Kertesz, the Nobel Prize winner, on modern writing. I think he has a persuasive argument:

"Back then writing was unproblematic, because all of existence didn't hang in the balance and the stories literally gushed from these writers' pens. Mozart, too, was a well-spring of wondrous, joyful abundance. Today a contemporary composer can be happy if he makes it to his second symphony. Something has happened in the world that has made art unnatural. It's as if our natural powers were blocked at the source. Perhaps our linguistic reserves are depleted. We have been confronted with the fact that humans are capable of something unimaginable. That's how atonal prose came about. Atonal music appeared after World War I, when composers were confronted by the emptiness of the language they had used until then. I call the new prose atonal because it has to deal with the fact that the fundamental ethical and moral consensus – the keynote – is lacking. Today words mean something different in every mouth. Prose must also reflect this, but in doing so it loses its natural purpose: that I tell a story, while the audience listens in amazement. If you fail to express the essence of this turn of events, you're no longer a writer, and miss out on your own life and times."

He does not mention the other stylistic choice, irony, which also explodes the multivalence of language. Still, I think he is very much on to something here, but this is the kind of point of view that prevails more in continental Europe. We in the United States tend to look upon the 20th century as more of a triumphal story, and so I don't think we have much patience for this worldview. The fact that we Americans value "narrative" so much in both fiction and non- reflects this ideological gulf.

Another New Brunswick (Mezzo-)Soprano

The dea ex machina who descends from the rafters on tethers at the end of the Met's Iphigenie was sung by Michele Losier, who, like Measha Brueggergosman, hails from New Brunswick. She sounded good in the small role, but she really should be given a prize for intestinal fortitude--she was easily thirty feet above the stage as her descent began.

Netrebko

I haven't blogged on Anna Netrebko because I haven't wanted to enter the controversy--quite passionate, over at Opera-L--that has swirled around her. Opera fanatics being known for their extreme positions, you can well imagine that she has excited ardent devotion and animosity in equal measure. Is she a good singer? Is she a good actress? It seems to depend on whom you ask. She is either the reincarnation of Geraldine Farrar or the worst thing to hit opera since Andrea Bocelli.

Still, I can't deny the immeasurable thrill of seeing her in the audience at last night's Iphigenie--at one point she ran past me with a female companion and I was momentarily stunned. My feeling about her, as one who has seen her recently as well as way back when the Kirov came to New York to present Betrothal in a Monastery, is that in the right role she is about as good as it gets--she can sing beautifully when the part fits her, she is a game actress, and, yes, she is a ravishingly gorgeous woman. (As an example, check out her Susanna in the Salzburg Nozze di Figaro now on DVD.) She is bringing glamor back to opera, and that is only a good thing, and beyond that I will hold my peace.