May 11, 2023 On Music Americans Abroad By Andrew Martin Richard and Pat Nixon in China, 1972. Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons. By the time I saw Nixon in China during its 2011 run at the Metropolitan Opera, it had become a classic, if not an entirely undisputed one. It had made it to the Met, at least, with its composer, John Adams, conducting, and James Maddalena, who originated the role of Nixon in the 1987 premiere at the Houston Grand Opera, back at it, now nearly the age Nixon was when he made the trip. A friend of mine, with theatrical élan, bought out a box for a group of us and encouraged formal dress, as if we were in a nineteenth-century novel. He showed up in a tux. I don’t remember my outfit, but I’d be surprised, knowing myself, if I managed anything more presentable than a mildly rumpled off-the-rack suit. At the time, I was working as an assistant to a magazine editor who regularly attended the opera, in full formal dress, with a pair of its major donors, fitting in an elaborate meal on the Grand Tier during intermission. My handling of his invitations gave me a surprising proprietary sense about the place. I didn’t feel that I belonged, of course, but at least I had a narrow help’s-eye-view of its workings. In the upper deck, and even in our box, my friends and I had the sense of superiority that comes from being broke and artistic among the rich and, presumably, untalented. Not that I had any major insight into the opera at the time, this one specifically or the art form more generally. I’d sat in the cheap seats on a few occasions, trying to rouse myself awake for the end of Tristan und Isolde, once, with a Wagner-loving girlfriend. I’d even stood in the back row of the orchestra for Leoš Janáček’s From the House of the Dead, feeling obligated as a Dostoyevsky loyalist to bear witness. (All I remember is a general brownness and a grim, monochromatic score. It was, after all, a Czech opera about a Russian prison camp.) I did, however, have an abiding interest, bordering on mania, in the pathos of conservative politics, and only a person who has lost interest in the world could fail to be interested in Richard Nixon. The friend who had arranged this outing was, among other things, a news junkie and former Republican, and his relationship to the former president was characterized, like the opera’s relationship to its subject, by a complicated mix of irony and enthusiasm. Dramatic renderings of Nixon tend toward the sweaty and profane (as in Robert Altman’s Secret Honor) or the broadly comic (Philip Roth’s novel Our Gang, or the 1999 film Dick, starring a young Kirsten Dunst and Michelle Williams, an overlooked gem surely due for reappraisal). But Adams’s monumental, hypnotically Glassian score and Alice Goodman’s dense postmodern libretto invest Nixon with a weird if inarticulate dignity that he rarely displayed in life. The striving and paranoia are tamped down, replaced with yearning naïveté and statesmanship. Read More
May 10, 2023 On Music Musical Hallucinations By Nancy Lemann Sheet music of Don Giovanni. Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under CCO 3.0. Don Giovanni keeps playing in my head, as if of its own accord. I wonder if I could be having musical hallucinations. I read an article about a woman who had musical hallucinations. She heard someone playing a piano outside the front door of her house. She went outside to look but nothing was there. The music played on, always vaguely nearby. Pretty soon the music was playing constantly—long passages from Rachmaninoff and Mozart. She went to a doctor. Was she complaining? I wondered. I was already praying: Please let me have that disease where you hear a piano playing Mozart nonstop. Read More
May 9, 2023 On Music Dear Mother By Colm Tóibín The Gran Teatre del Liceu in Barcelona, ca. 1880. Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons. In the second half of the seventies, when I was in my twenties, I wrote letters home to Ireland from Barcelona. Early in 1976, for example, from my pension on the corner of Carrer de la Portaferrissa and Carrer del Pi, I described my first visit to the Liceu opera house. Dear Mother, The walls in this small, cheap hotel are thin. The man in the next room listens to opera on the radio. He looks like someone who has seen little daylight, but instead he has seen many operas, as he tried to explain to me in broken versions of several languages. Two days ago, he was waiting for me in the corridor. At first, I thought a fire had broken out or the police had, once more, attacked the people. He was saying something that clearly would require quick action on my part. Having calmed him down and got a dictionary, I realized that he had seen a production at the Liceu that was special, and he believed that I, as a matter of urgency, should see it too. It was Puccini’s La Boheme, and it starred Montserrat Caballé. It was hard to know what to do when I went to the box office. Some of the prices for individual tickets would also buy you a studio apartment in the city. I bought the second cheapest type of ticket. When I showed it to my opera-crazed neighbor, he peered at it for some time, turned it around to check the back, and then shook his head. But this made no sense. It was the precise opera he had recommended, in the very venue he had suggested. What could be wrong with this ticket? Read More
May 8, 2023 On Music Mozart in Motion By Patrick Mackie Young Mozart performing for Louis François de Bourbon in Paris in 1766. Gustave Boulanger, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. Opening nights of new operas may be the most fraught of all. So many things have to go right. The paint must have dried on the backdrops, the soprano’s throat must be clear of infections and the tenor of overly distracting fits of pique. The orchestral players must be confident that their strings or reeds will behave themselves. Enough copies of the score must have gone out, and everyone needs to know which big aria has been cut at the last minute. Large amounts of money hinge on the airy stuff that musical performance comprises. An eerie tension awaits anyone without enough to do—but everyone generally has far too much to do. No one can control how the audience will react, though sometimes in the eighteenth-century sections would be paid to get their reactions right. Mozart’s era often left it unclear who was meant to be in charge of this broadly purposeful chaos; the role of the conductor had, for one thing, not yet attained its later clarity. As the first notes got closer, an entire social world was readying itself to be funneled into drama and music. Read More
February 17, 2023 On Music Love Songs: “Estoy Aquí” By Ana Karina Zatarain Shakira. Wikimedia Commons, Licensed Under CCO 2.0 This week, the Review is publishing a series of short reflections on love songs, broadly defined. Romance and heartbreak are promised before they are experienced. As a child I was filled with a sort of yearning that preceded any actual object of desire. It was a desire for desire itself, one that, like many girls who grew up speaking Spanish in the late nineties and early aughts, I conjured by listening to Shakira’s 1995 album, Pies Descalzos. The first song was my favorite. “Estoy Aquí” begins with a teenage Shakira’s lilting voice over an acoustic guitar: “I know you won’t return,” she sings with quavering melancholy, and then the song explodes into a saccharine tempo unbefitting of a lovelorn person. But how would I have known that? I sang along in my room, imagining that one day I would love someone but also one day I would lose them, and that was even more thrilling. To be alive! And drowning amid “photos and notebooks and things and memories.” I could hardly wait. Read More
February 17, 2023 On Music Love Songs: “Slow Show” By Nathan Goldman Matt Berninger. Wikimedia Commons, Licensed under CCO 2.0. This week, the Review is publishing a series of short reflections on love songs, broadly defined. In her 1993 memoir Exteriors, drawn from seven years of journal entries, Annie Ernaux describes overhearing a familiar pop song at the supermarket. She is struck by the pleasure she experiences—and by a “feeling of panic that the song will end.” This prompts her to consider the relative emotional effects of books and music. While certain novels have left a “violent impression” on her being, the impact hardly compares to the “intense, almost painful” feeling produced by the song. “A book offers more deliverance, more escape, more fulfillment of desire,” she writes. “In songs one remains locked in desire.” The structure of pop music is inherently erotic; the repetitions of rhythm and melody continually summon and satisfy aching anticipation. Love songs bring this otherwise sublimated longing to the surface: some through grand, theatrical gestures, others by drawing out the dialectic of desire embedded in everyday life—say, the feeling of being alone at a party, sad and self-conscious, desperately missing someone. This is the premise of “Slow Show,” a somber but rousing midtempo track from The National’s 2007 album Boxer. The narrator spends the verses separated from his lover, surrounded by people but unable to reach them, confined to the claustrophobic quarters of his own mind. Guitars flutter frenetically over foreboding squalls of feedback, while Matt Berninger’s mumbling baritone evokes the narrator’s recursive, dead-end thoughts: “Standing at the punch table, swallowing punch”; “I leaned on the wall, the wall leaned away”; “I better get my shit together, better gather my shit in.” In the choruses, an atmospheric sweetness swells as he briefly spans the distance, if only in his imagination: “I want to hurry home to you,” Berninger croons, “put on a slow, dumb show for you and crack you up / so you can put a blue ribbon on my brain.” His halting syntax smooths out into the simple, fluid choreography of a fantasized intimacy, which disrupts his anxious solitude. Read More