How the Wealthy Grieve

"Horses for courses" is the pithy phrase the Brits use to underline the need to choose certain animals for certain races and not for others, and by extension, certain people for certain jobs etc. There are things that fit particular situations and circumstances and things that don't. It is accompanied by a sage nod and an acknowledgment that choosing the wrong contender can doom your chances of success.

The upcoming 10th anniversary of the 2001 September 11th attacks opens up a field of commemorative options, from a dry religious observation to a novelty clog dance invitational. From the Spartan to the flagrantly bizarre, here in multi-cultural anything-goes America who is to say what the course is and which horse is the most appropriate?

The San Francisco Opera has chosen as its stallion in the race to cash in on the event's audience-generating potential an opera based on James B. Stewart's book Heart of a Soldier. This raises at least three fundamental questions:

• is opera an appropriate medium for the tenth anniversary of this national day of mourning? 
• is San Francisco Opera the best company for that opera?
• is this particular novel appropriate subject matter?

In the 18th century Dr. Johnson called the opera of his day, largely spectacular affairs sung in Italian to a wealthy crowd who paid scant attention to what was going on onstage, an 'irrational and exotic entertainment', and conditions have hardly changed. Coverage of the San Francisco Opera 2010 Season opening gala left little doubt that it was the participants and their largesse that were being celebrated - 

" I wanted to feel like a princess," Dede Wilsey said in the box lounge, showing off her silvery Oscar de la Renta ball gown, and a scarab-size diamond pendant around her neck. The evenings offered meaningful escapes, from the lingering downturn, and patrons were ready to celebrate their contribution to the arts. (The San Francisco Chronicle.)

The opera itself is mentioned only as a footnote in the article's final sentence; by the way, all these bejeweled revelers sat through Aida. By Verdi.  This criticism, however, is to answer the second question first, that San Francisco's is not likely to be the audience to take the project the most seriously. We can only hope that the gravity of the occasion's subject matter will trump the patrons' thirst for recognition, otherwise a Twin Towers bustier may be the talk of the town in the traditional annual San Francisco Chronicle reader poll of the best opening night gown.

How does turning a national day of mourning into a secular fee-paying event ($35 to >$150 per seat) avoid becoming a public relations nightmare? The medium of opera apparently has the credentials to carry it off because it has an unassailable social cachet among the wealthy for expressing the profoundest of human emotions while spending a lot of money doing it.

Perhaps it is opera's expense that excuses or obscures its absurdity, as if the spectacle of a singing/dying firefighter is legitimized by the amount of cash it took to get him on to the stage. Imagine the outraged response to a substituted Twin Towers oboe recital, or a newly commissioned string quartet; these are insubstantial, unspectacular, and do not spend enough money expressing our grief. A smaller-scale musical item, such as Barber's Adagio for Strings, may have the emotional depth and hit the nail squarely on the head, but there is nothing like the tacky and wasteful opulence of grand opera to help the wealthy feel like they are participating in something truly artistically worthwhile.

Heart of a Soldier is a typical profile-in-courage beloved by the US Messiah industry. It stands in the mainstream of American mythology that venerates the testosterone Jesus, the cowboy, the pioneer, the soldier, the pilot, the president, who willingly and lovingly lays down his life for those in his care. This particular story's hero sacrifices himself to save 2,700 people at the World Trade Center on the morning of the attacks, and would make a great movie role for John Wayne, or any latter-day All-American swaggerista. Good luck with the stage role, Thomas Hampson, and mind you don't trip over any cliches on your way to the moral high ground.

According to the Baltimore Sun, the book '...has all the ingredients of an Indiana Jones movie.' Well, what it lacks in solemnity perhaps the opera will make up for in good ole rock 'em, sock 'em entertainment, with the good guys and the bad guys clearly and comfortingly identified. Who says life isn't like the movies? At least it will give me a chance to wear that new frock.

Boxed In

In 1840, so many boys at Eton wanted to play Fives that to accommodate the craze for the sport a new block of four courts was built, replicating the conditions at the foot of the chapel steps where the game was best played. Here, the ball would bounce mischievously around the angles of the pleasingly cramped nook to confound the sprightly players (a wider bay would ruin the game), who needed deft hand-eye coordination to stay ahead of the competition. 

Other schools and private houses followed suit with purpose-built courts, and by 1900 the game was at its peak of popularity, fed by a network of organized competitions and active alumni. However, two world wars killed off interest, and nothing could generate enthusiasm for a sport whose associations were so negatively rooted in the Upper Class.

Eton Fives still exists as a minority interest among certain ex-pupils, who organize league tables and evangelize on the game’s behalf, but many more courts exist than are needed and the question of their future stands sphinx-like at the intersection of architectural preservation and cultural progress. The sport's remains now litter the landscape often unrecognized, unused and unusable, consigned to obsolescence and waiting for demolition.

When the march of history and class circumstance renders buildings obsolete, what options do we have for their rescue?

·         Should we step in and save them, used or unused, just to preserve the historical record?

·         Should we revive the practice that made them useful, to give the architecture a purpose again?

·         Should we find a new use for them?

·         Should we remove them to make way for the more relevant and useful?

On a smaller scale, architectural details also retain a unique place in cultural anthropological history. 

Family pews in churches, for example, paid for by subscription and allotted and occupied according to social position, were eventually abandoned as unbefitting the egalitarian vision of heaven as conceived by late 19^th Century Christianity. These intimate and cozy compounds provided all-round privacy and comfort, with padded seats and heating, the forward facing banquettes providing ample view of the liturgical action and access to distribution of communion elements, and the backward facing banquettes accommodating the servants; it was the closest thing to having the convenience of one’s own home chapel.

To design a building that includes this anachronistic feature today would be unthinkable because it would reinstate a class-based theology that the church has long outgrown. Likewise, no municipality would build a Fives court, for not only would it be underutilized, it would only be used by a very small minority of the educationally privileged.

Yet opera house designers routinely replicate historicist design features that reinforce a class-based architecture long since meaningless. It has been two centuries since tenure of a box at the opera had any fact-based cachet. Today, opera house architecture trades on design elements that would make other building types the objects of scorn and ridicule because they introduce class-based historicism that condemns the art form imprisoned within to an anti-American system of patronage based on snobbery and elitism.  

The first public opera house opened in Venice in 1637 to accommodate the merchant city’s passion for the new art form. Invented in 1600 in Florence with the support of a group of wealthy intellectuals concerned with reestablishing the supremacy of Greek dramatic models, opera had established itself among the super-wealthy as a supremely grand and self-congratulatory entertainment that combined drama, music and all the elements of elaborate and costly stagecraft. Not to be outdone by those with a personal fortune, the merchant city was able to sustain its own building by selling subscriptions to ‘boxes’ on a seasonal basis to its wealthiest citizens. Sales of individual seats on a nightly basis down in the flat section by the orchestra were a more risky proposition, but the box income guaranteed the building’s financial success. The ‘box’ itself was the visible balcony section of an elaborate apartment, each one complete with fireplace and drawing room for dining and entertaining. From this ‘box’ the family members could view the opera, or draw the curtains to maintain perfect privacy.

To emulate the grandeur of Venetian opera society, (for it was here that the city’s merchant families entertained one another during the opera season, arranging business deals and keeping abreast of the latest scandal,) other cities copied the building’s design, cementing the design relationship of opera with the box until the ‘opera box’ became a de rigueur feature. However, the boxes of many opera houses did not give access onto rented apartments, and were just elaborate enclosures of movable seats to create the illusion of wealth and exclusivity. Maintaining ‘a box at the opera’ became a symbol of societal position, inferring that one had either inherited it or had enough money to purchase it, even though it might only mean a seat or two in a certain position, and not the whole seating area. Opera and the illusion of wealth also became inseparable twins.

Boxes are today not sold as groups of seats, but as individual seats, and no architect in any opera house has ever dared take away the box design, even though they serve no purpose other than to remind other audience members that the occupants are direct descendants of the Patricians of old.

Bei der Uebersetzung Verloren

Everyday speech is full of poetry -
There's no-one here to take your call right now; please leave a message when you hear the tone.

Few people would recognize this as perfect Iambic Pentameter (di-DUM five times over) that would fit easily into a contemporary Shakespearean sit-com -



"There's no-one here to take your call right now; 
Please leave a message when you hear the tone."
"Hello? Hello? Girl, please pick up the phone.
I really need to hear your voice right now.
Can you believe she's going out with him?
Text me as soon you know what's going on."

What passes for Everyday Speech is often full of poetry and we are only sometimes aware of it. Poetry on the other hand is never full of Prose, unless it is a deliberate gesture. Poetry contains the element of sculpture and design that Prose has only by accident. Poetry is literary sculpture, and although its medium is the word, its message is made more sophisticated by the form that has been imposed upon those words -  These are the times that try men's souls expresses with gravitas what Soulwise, these are trying times trips over in clumsiness. Artful architecture confers more than the words alone.

Connecting with poetry from a foreign language is therefore extremely difficult, because to reproduce the elements beyond simply the meaning with any accuracy makes the translator's job an almost impossible one. Here are some sample renderings of Hamlet's existential musing To be, or not to be: that is the question -

Être, ou ne pas être, telle est la question
Sein oder Nichtsein; das ist hier die Frage
Essere o non essere, questo è il problema 
¿Ser o no Ser esa es la cuestión?

Each may convey the meaning to each new audience, but the rhythm of the poet's monosyllables has been destroyed, and their profound semantic simplicity has of necessity been sacrificed. As Robert Frost observed, Poetry is what gets lost in translation.  

To set a poem to music is to do it further damage; compositional treatment is itself a form of translation, since it forces spoken or thought text into the language of music, solidifying an interpretation of the text that remained ambiguous while it was still unspoken. 

Consider the following -
Shall I compare thee to a Summer's day? 
I can imply at least six different meanings in the musical phrases I use to set the text -

1. Shall I (and not someone else) compare thee to a Summer's day? 
2. Shall I (or shan't I?) compare thee to a Summer's day? 
3. Shall I compare thee (or shall I contrast thee?) to a Summer's day?
4. Shall I compare thee (or shall I compare thy sister?) to a Summer's day? 
5. Shall I compare thee to a Summer's (or a Winter's) day?
6. Shall I compare thee to a Summer's day (or a Summer's morning)?

Some of these are clearly incorrect, and some are more incorrect than others, and some should get me laughed off the stage. Then there is the issue of sensitivity to tempo, tone, volume, etc. Yell any one of them at speed and you will get my meaning.


A composer who ignores the rhythm of the language, misunderstands the text, or is not interested in the 'whole truth' of the poem does great violence to the original.
If someone ground your homemade gingerbread cookies into the crust for a cheesecake and presented that entirely new dish as 'the dessert you had brought to share' you too would be as horrified, because you have clearly lost control of your brand; the 'meaning' of those cookies has been hijacked. You had intended their shape and dryness to be a comment on the bland aridity of the guests, but the host felt they needed tarting up lest dinner end in disaster.  

Pity the poor poets whose work is hijacked, repackaged and sold as their own. Shall I compare thee to a Summer's day? SHALL I?

Dr. Johnson's Dog is Alive and Well and Living in California.

If members of the general public applaud the antics of an animal being paraded on its hind legs, any indulgence on their part is an acknowledgment of effort rather than quality, and is also tinged with sympathy for the poor brute who has been reduced to such circumstances. In the 18th Century, Dr.Samuel Johnson misogynistically likened such a circus act to female preaching, expressing surprise not that either could do it well but that they could do it at all.

Consider, then, Rufus Wainwright, songsmith royalty of the Wainwright-McGarrigle bloodline, commissioned by the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra to write and perform settings of Five Shakespeare Sonnets. Mr. Wainwright is a popular musician with substantial sexual magnetism but of little orchestral savvy; his celebrity alone is the hindquarters upon which he is expected to balance.

Happily the San Francisco Chronicle reviewer did not mistake Mr. Wainwright's staggerings for Art. His natural gift for melody and the pianism of the singer-songwriter do not of necessity translate to the orchestral medium. The makings of a good sandwich are different from the ingredients of a great souffle; a novel doesn't always make a great movie, and although the material was of a certain quality, the orchestra's presence was wasted.

But with California's vacuous love of celebrity, perhaps the greater San Francisco public might not have been so discerning. In Arnold Schwarzenegger California mistook a body-builder for a Governor.In Ronald Reagan they and indeed the nation as a whole mistook an actor for a President. Yesterday, Bristol Palin's celebrity allowed her to be mistaken for a dancer in Dancing with the Stars, and so the preposterous celebritocracy is in its full ascendant.

Hearteningly, the recent mid-term elections proved that inexperience can be a handicap in CA politics, if not in Art.The virgin billionairess Meg Whitman failed in her bid for the Governorship, and the similarly  outrageously under-qualified Carly Fiorina was unsuccessful in her attempt to unseat Senator Barbara Boxer. Had these two lamentable pretenders had higher-octane glamor star-power behind them and not mere chutzpah and the contemptible likes of John McCain, the outcome might have been very different.

Celebrity has become the new Education. A degree in political science is trumped by an appearance on the Today show. Being qualified to talk about your subject because you have studied it for nigh on a decade matters less than the hastily-formed opinion of someone more photogenic than you. The hiring team at San Diego opera told one of the candidates at a recent round of auditions, "We love your voice, but we won't hire you until you are more of a star." Clearly, it's not about Quality.

Humpty Dumpty famously described a world in which the meanings of words were not fixed by dictionary definition. 'When I use a word,' Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, 'it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.' He would be comfortable with someone who makes up words like 'refudiate', or who fires someone for using the word 'niggardly' correctly. We are in a time when semantic territories need to be defended; daughters of political pundits are not professional dancers, billionairesses are not governors, actors are not presidents, architects are not set designers, singer-songwriters are not the next Mahler. They are entitled to try, but their celebrity alone does not entitle them to succeed.

Celebrity has become the dominant word of the American landscape, consuming all other words in its path. It makes a mockery of education and tramples on the knowledge-establishment with its empty but trump card braggadocio. In 21st Century America fear of the Pinheads has morphed into adulation of the Airheads; we have handed over the microphone to the people least able to speak in complete sentences, which is the one thing that a spokesperson is expected to be able to do. It is scandalous in an enlightened democracy that celebrity should be encouraged to wield such power.

Before you know it, Sarah Palin will be running for office and the sun will be orbiting the earth again.

'The question is,' said Alice, 'whether you CAN make words mean so many different things.'

The answer is they can, if YOU let them.

Art, Place, Identity.

Sometimes it is a simple case of cash that lies at the heart of an ownership contest. A recent row between the town of Florence and the Tuscan State, in which both the city and the state each contends that the sculpture is uniquely its own, highlights what is at stake when you go up against a beloved artifact in its home environment to challenge to whom the work actually belongs. This tussle is about the division of the spoils generated by the millions of international tourists and their wallets, and there is no push to relocate the actual artifact itself, just its residuals. When Art generates significant income through tourism, Nationalism and Capitalism are its twin shadows, but it is an uneasy brotherhood of mutual distrust.

At other times the circumstances of ownership are layered with more than just cash value. Did Adele Bloch-Bauer ever expect one of her portraits to be the most expensive painting in the history of the world? After a protracted legal battle between her niece Maria Altmann and the Republic of Austria. five pictures that had been relinquished to the Belvedere Museum in Vienna after their illegal seizure by the Nazis were in 2006 put into the hands of their rightful owners. The surviving niece, who had fled to Los Angeles to escape the oncoming Holocaust, exhibited the pictures briefly at the LA County Museum, and then sold them by auction at Christie's, where the most famous among them (above) fetched an astonishing $135 Million. It now hangs in the Neue Galerie on the Upper East Side of Manhattan.

What was a jewel in Austria's multi-faceted crown - a portrait by a Viennese artist of one of the city's beguiling patronesses voluptuously enveloped in her spectacular wealth like an Egyptian queen - has recently and vulgarly been called the American Mona Lisa. It is, of course, only American insofar as America was where coincidence or fate led it; it was American lawyers that wrestled the paintings from the Republic of Austria, it was American Dollars that purchased them and it is America that will give them permanent residence. Although some Austrians think the wounds of the loss particularly egregious, having been inflicted by a legal team headed up by their native son Arnold Schoenberg's grandson, they should not quibble over whose treachery is the greatest; Schoenberg's for leaving Austria for the safety of the Capitalist West Coast, his grandson for outsmarting the Austrian authorities, those authorities for lying about the ownership of the pictures, or the Nazis for looting the art in the first place.

The money from the sale of the pictures has yet to surface. (Presumably Maria got the new kitchen she had promised herself in Adele's Wish, one of the movies covering the story.) There is no Altmann or Bloch-Bauer or Klimt Foundation in any of the databases, and no major bequests yet by any of the families involved. At 94, Maria must at least have made plans for its charitable dispersal to avoid or to reduce the current 55% Estate Tax that will fall due at her death, otherwise one of the greatest beneficiaries of the Rape of Europe will be the American government.

Rendered simplistically, Austria abandoned the Bloch-Bauers and so the Bloch-Bauers abandoned Austria. Despite their wounded pride, Austria was unable to depict Adele as an impoverished hostage sold obscenely into American slavery because Austrian reserves of moral authority had been emptied; the Nazis had confiscated the chattels of the Jewish Bloch-Bauer household and the authorities did not intervene. They then accepted the looted art and appropriated it as their own. Ex-private citizen Maria Altmann delivered a blow of devastating impact to the State by attacking its patrimonial identity. Taking away the nation's art made a fundamental mythology disappear along with it, and the blow to the nation's pride was immense.

Happily, Ronald Lauder's Mona Lisa is surrounded exclusively by other Austrian artifacts in the Neue Galerie on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, in a typically American home-from-home recreation of The Old Country. But the plundering begins again; her image is now available as a 1,000 piece jigsaw puzzle, a 2,000 piece jigsaw puzzle, a mug, a vase, a bangle, a t-shirt, and a waste-paper basket.

Pope Joan

Driving home a nail into the door of the Schlosskirche in Wittenberg in 1517 on which to hang a list of 95 clerical abuses was Martin Luther's act of whistle-blowing, unequivocally calling the Catholic Church to account for its intermingling of theology and capitalism that he found so reprehensible. This was the primary catalyst of the movement that we call The Reformation, officially blowing the whistle on the church's immoral tactics and practices, and legitimizing the opposing forces that had been amassing on its flanks.

Chief on his list of grievances had become the selling of indulgences, by which, for a price, the hapless could purchase future heavenly release from the consequence of their misdeeds on earth. This would not sound quite so benighted to our 21st century ears if the church had not recently reintroduced the practice. Of all the barriers that the church had erected for its own financial gain between God and the believer, Luther considered this the most egregious.

Chaucer satirizes the Pardoning profession in The Canterbury Tales, deriding the man who shamelessly ble$$es the gullible with his bag of 'holy relic' meat bones to support his bawdy alcoholism. His appearance and demeanor are of a piece with his insalubrious attitude to the rest of the party, and the tale that he contributes to the set of stories, of three louts keen to out-swindle each other, is humorlessly nihilistic.  

Luther's goal was twofold; to attack the corruption within the clergy that was taking advantage of the general populace, and to attack the church's gaudy trappings that had become such a lucrative sideline even though they littered and impeded the believer's path to the divine. The regalia of the church had actually become a barrier to the thing to which the organization was claiming to provide access, and instead of making God more approachable, the path to God had become strewn with more and greater obstacles that were removable only by the application of cash, or by the exchange of some useful worldly influence.

Which brings us to the world of grand opera. The death last week at the age of 83 of Joan Sutherland, La Superba, unofficial pope of the church of bel canto opera, rings the knell on an age of interest in the specifically grand operas of Donizetti, Bellini and Verdi, similarly high artifacts on the scale of the Gaudy Trappings Quotient. They too draw attention to their own tawdry magnificence by introducing yet more layers between the worshiper and the deity. The church has thuribles, thurifers and reredoses, grand opera has cavatinas, recitatives and turbe dramatice. The church is presided over by the pontiff, the opera is presided over by the prima donna.   

Credibility in grand opera is not of prime concern; you can hardly throw a brick in a work by Donizetti without hitting a beautiful village maiden who is in love with a penniless painter who turns out to be a Viscount, and who later goes insane. Verdi's Il Trovatore is so famously opaque that "to have an chance at all of understanding it, you first have to learn a background story that's even more complex and unlikely. Then, when it all shakes out in the end, it's hard to know who betrayed whom, who threw which baby into the fire — and whether we've just seen a bitter old man unwittingly execute his own brother or a vengeful old woman plotting to get her beloved son beheaded. Or both." (NPR)

Rather than a road to the divine, which I take to be the amplification of drama by music even to the point of danger, the road itself has become a diversion from the divine, and the objects along the road have assumed falsely divine significance. The magnificence of the display, the costume drama dress-up of it all has replaced the initial relationship of the seeker to the goal, the very thing that Luther was wishing to reestablish. When the audience forgives the dramatic ludicrousness of a corpse singing from inside a sack because she sings so beautifully and the high notes are so stratospherically gorgeous, there may as well be pig bones in that sack because the mission of sustaining and intensifying a narrative by musical means has been derailed, it has indeed been undermined, and who cares any more if the relics are real or not.

Operatic reality is when the actors on stage are so full of their characters that it comes out of them in the form of song; they are not singing about being angry, they are so full of angry that the only way to express it is to sing it out. Try to say, "Let there be Light!" as if you were ordering lunch and you'll understand; things take on their own natural weight and intensity. Intensity of emotion is the root of song.

However, what what is important is not the altarcloth, the crozier or the chasuble. Sung drama is by definition drama that is sung. Take away the narrative, and all you have is pompous singers playing with make-up. Take away God from the church and all you have is an old man in purple Prada slippers and a hat like a tea-cozy. And why would you want to take that away?

Strike Tactics

When the cabin crew of British Airways announced a twelve-day strike to impact its customers flying around the world in late December 2009, thousands of vacations were disrupted, weddings were ruined, and the currency of the airline plummeted from the unreliable to the worthless. Who would buy a ticket for a plane that might not fly? Who would want to be served by a bunch of surly and (according to the newspaper reports) overpaid and (according to them) under-appreciated space waitrons?

Calling a strike is an adult tantrum of limited worth whose success is far from guaranteed. If your service is essential and your cause a good one, then the public might be on your side, eventually. But throwing a wobbler in public is a risky and often humiliating tactic that can easily backfire; I for one have torn up my British Airways credit card, I will never fly on British Airways again, and I will never miss an opportunity to steer away from them any business that I can by sharing my story of the European family reunion vacation that almost never was.

For an American symphony orchestra like Detroit's to go on strike in 2010 presumes that the members consider their services vital to the smooth running of city services, which is of course as quaintly misguided as it is chronically out of date. Whether the majority of citizens will notice this ceasing of operations is anyone's guess, but I would hazard that with the median house price in Detroit currently at about $7,500 (seven thousand five hundred dollars) I doubt that the survival of the local symphony is at the top of most people's list of essentials; that list would more likely comprise utility bills and groceries and less a weekly helping of live Mendelssohn.

The striking musicians are trying to raise awareness of the necessity of art to the community, but their argument is incomplete. The issue they are focusing on here is the usefulness of live art, and whether a city of Detroit's miserable economic predicament can afford the luxury (for luxury it is, without a doubt) of a band of professional musicians trotting out the classics of yesteryear for the benefit of fewer than 1% of the population. How about everyone assemble as usual, and they listen to the music as planned, but what would be lost if instead of a live orchestra, the evenings' concerts were given over to playback of recordings, available on CD and much more inexpensively licensable for public broadcast?

Sure, the pageantry and thrill of the concert experience would be lost, but the product would be the same. The audience would still get its piano concerto, the hall would still get its box office receipts. You live within your budget; you eat frozen pizza when you can't get to Naples, you drive yourself when you can't afford a chauffeur, you cut your coat to suit your cloth. Nobody died from recorded Mendelssohn. (Anyone?.....) Cities benefit from the pat on the back that they get from displaying their wealth, and a concert by a symphony orchestra is a significant method for communicating to the city's occupants that all is well in Musicville. But all is not well in Detroit, as any casual tour around the city will reveal; these players must really not get out much.

Demanding to be seen as essential is its own irony. Placards like "HELP US SAVE YOUR ORCHESTRA" scream disingenuous propaganda (suddenly it's 'my' orchestra?) at an uninterested public who have better and more worthwhile things to do than encourage adolescent hissy fits about cutbacks at the office. We all have to pack a lunch sometimes, so get used to it. Not every family can afford a European vacation every year, not every city can afford a professional symphony orchestra, and parading in public your scorn for other people's hardships brings the industry into disrepute. Shame on the musicians of the Detroit Symphony Orchestra for giving in to their sense of entitlement and yelling at their fellow citizens that they owe them a living, because they don't.