Got to disagree... and this is the best example of a powerful and influentail body of work.
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Got to disagree... and this is the best example of a powerful and influentail body of work.
I am not denying Hamilton's influence, but it does nothing for me; and I have seen it enough times. If anything, it pre-figures post-modernism's decentering of the subject and in doing says: everything is of equal value, which is why nothing is important. It also integrates branded products into a frame of reference that cannot decide if it is public or private, further promoting the chaos of post-modernism. Avant-garde indeed!
Maybe i'm a Philistine but that looks like pretentious, bourgeois garbage.......work done by someone with too much time on their hands........time no doubt spent trying to come up with something 'radical'.Quote:
Originally Posted by Prospero
Changing tack briefly, has anyone else been watching Mark Cousins' new series on More4 Saturday evenings, about the Story of Cinema?
Once you get over his curious and I'm afraid highly mannered slow northern Irish commentary, I must say I'm finding the whole thing quite mesmerising in the positive sense of that word. It's beautifully written, with marvellous and rarely seen clips (he's coming up to episode 4 and we're still in the 20s) and I find I'm learning a great deal too, especially about masters from all across the world during the silent era.
15 weeks of 75 minute episodes, each with a link to a film that exemplifies the period and style of the previous Saturday's programme on the following Monday on Film 4. We've already had Griffith's glorious silent masterpiece of the French Revolution, Orphans of the Storm, Carl Dreyer's Ordet, and next Monday we'll get Eisenstein's Battleship Potemkin.
Thank you Channel 4.
The Cousins series is brilliant as is his book on the history of cinema which came out a few years back. But by - I nearly switched it off during the first episode because of his weird sophorific delivery. Get past that - or get used to it - and its terrific.
Re Emin et all - I tend to think that they're paler and paler spins on Duchamp rather than in the lineage of Warhol, Hamilton, Lichtenstein etc.
And if anyone is in London and likes dance go see Grupo Corpo, Brazilian contemporary company at Sadlers Wells this week. The beet ciontemporary dance I've seen since I saw them at last year's Edinburgh Festival. A glass of wine beforehand enabled me to push the intellect aside and revel in the sheer physicality and mesmerising spectacle f wonderful human forms offered in the two pieces they're performing.
Also saw a terrific new film not yet released here - Habemus Papem (We Have A Pope) - an Italian film all about a crisis in the Vatican when a newly elected pope decides he cannot do the job. Very funny, original and ultimately quite moving.
Story of Cinema sounds interesting, does it cover Japan and India or is it mostly Europe and America? I can't get much on tv now so I assume it will make it to C4 sometime in the future. Potemkin is so over-rated; Ivan the Terrible is Eisenstein's masterpiece. Vertov's The Man with a Movie Camera must be one of the best silent films ever made -? Did anyone see the restored version of Abel Gance's Napoleon?
If I think about it, I don't like clutter in paintings, not detail, but unnecessary stuff thrown in to fill the canvas: there is a famous Poussin in the Wallace Collection, A Dance to the Music of Time which would look better if the top third was cut off and thrown away; also in the Wallace Collection there are two paintings by Rembdrandt or his pupils which show a father and son and a mother and daughter where there is gorgeous detailing of their clothes and enough small items to give symbolic meaning to the paintings (parents giving their children moral lessons) but no unncessary frills; and there was the Genius of Rome exhibition at the Royal Academy in the 90s where hideous Caracci paintings festooned with sickening cherubs were shown alongside the dramas of Caravaggio whose plain sometimes menacing/haunting backgrounds made so much more sense. Hence my dislike of Hamilton, but Prospero's point about Emin is well made; except maybe Duchamp and Miro are at least amusing at times, Emin is so depressing.
Another question on films, or more accurately film festivals: there seems to be a rich crop of interesting films at Toronto this year; it makes me wonder if Toronto is emerging to match Sundance and the TriBEca as the most interesting festivals in the calendar -I haven't been to the London Film Festival for years, but it always seemed to me to be a cull from others rather than a showcase for new material; and Cannes is more a market than a festival -?? Any ideas on this?
Stavros - It's on More4 - odd programming decision suggesting C4 don't exect much of an audince. (They are too full of reality TV these days). Yes it ill be covering india, china etc... has already featured the best japanese silent movie (in Cousins' estimation). he is passionate about world cinema - not just the west.
So if you don't like clutter you don't care for Breughel?
Gance - yes. I was there he was alive and was telephoned in France so he could hear the applause for the restored print. A shame they won't be showing that.
And I concur with your judgement on Eisenstein. Potemkin is darn good for all that, though.
I would not edit any of the dance to the music of time - painting or book sequence. Both are masterpieces IMHO
Venice film festival is a biggie.
It's all-embracing, Stavros, every culture and influence you can think of. And one of the things I'm finding most interesting is that he's charted the first time that a particular technique was used. Taken for granted now, but so innovative - the reverse-angle shot, shifting scenes to ramp up a narrative, the tracking shot etc. Utterly enchanting.Quote:
Originally Posted by Stavros
But oh, that vocal delivery. Given the subject, maybe they should have gone for onscreen titles and a pianist instead.
So if you don't like clutter you don't care for Breughel?
It may sound like a contradiction, but I don't see clutter in Breughel or Vermeer for that matter, I see details that inform and which are integral to the scenes being painted. LS Lowry I cannot connect to at all, by comparison. Clutter to me is stuff that could easily be taken out and not be noticed as an omission; I can understand the importance of Poussin but rarely connect to his work. There is a lot of detail in some Goya and Velasquez but again it makes sense, well it does to me.
Has anyone seen that legendary Japanese film with a transexual/transvestite, I think its called The Black Lizard -?
The Guardian reports that McCartney's Ballet Ocean Kingdom has been slated heavily by the critics; apparently the choreography is poor, but is trying to make sense of this scenario, quoted from the paper (link below)
"Princess Honorata and her single parent King Ocean are living a happy sub-aqua life when they're invaded by King Terra and the Terra Punks. King Terra lusts after Honorata, but she prefers his brother Prince Stone. Aided by the wicked Scala, a mole in Honorata's camp, Terra kidnaps Honorata. But Scala, who turns out to be not so wicked after all, whips up a catastrophe in which many Terrans die, herself included, allowing the lovers to live happily ever after beneath the waves."
http://www.guardian.co.uk/stage/thea...cean-s-kingdom
The Liverpool Oratorio and Standing Stones, Macca's previous attempts to gain credibility beyond the pop music universe, were both derivative, mildly melodic (he always did have the knack of writing a good tune) but immediately forgettable.Quote:
Originally Posted by Stavros
While I don't buy the view that he has stagnated completely since 1970, and I do applaud his enterprise in trying his hand at other art forms, the best advice to Sir Paul would be to stick to what he knows best.
What are your thoughts of Lisa Gasteen? I just came across her 2005 BBC PROMS preformance. Good stuff.
I am a big Wagner:geek: lol
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7z08s...eature=related
McCartney: "Stick to what he knows best?" Trouble is that is silly ditties with banal words and la la choruses - to judge by his output over the past 30 years. His attempts at orchestral or oratorio are derivative and banal. Sorry. i used to love the group he was in before... what was their name now?
At last, an art exhibition which doesn't involve a schlep into London, queues and an exorbitant fee.
The Fitzwilliam in Cambridge is putting on an exhibition of Dutch portraiture and interiors from the 17th and 18th centuries, with a heavy emphasis on Vermeer and his contemporaries. Runs from tomorrow to mid-January.
If anyone fancies a visit, drop me a pm and we can do lunch at Browns across the road as well!
http://www.fitzmuseum.cam.ac.uk/what...icle.html?2793
I would have expected you to walk further up Trumpington St to Loch Fyne to enjoy your Scottish heritage...
Meanwhile the bookies have slashed Bob Dylan's odds of winning the Nobel Prize for Literature from 100/1 to 10/1. I have never rated literary prizes, plenty of the best writers in history never won a prize, and winning a prize doesn't suddenly make a poem or a novel better than it was before. But, I mean, Dylan...!
The Loch Fyne's in Elton just outside Peterborough and in Woburn are favourite haunts - and you don't have to deal with Cambridge's traffic either!Quote:
Originally Posted by Stavros
Dylan? Ye Gods. As a songwriter, peerless. His poetry, well, execrable. Chronicles was a fun read, but how on earth does his prose oeuvre compare with the so far unrecognised giants of global literature? If the Nobel jury goes with this one, then celebrity culture has won and we can all pack up. Presumably it will go to Katie Price next year.....
I should have added that the exhibition features Vermeer's Lacemaker, one of his most delicate portraits, worth going to see that alone.
Anne Sofie von Otter :geek:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0tJbJ...eature=related
I somehow thought you might be, Erika. Sorry, it's a cheap one, but I couldn't resist. Genuinely, no offence intended.Quote:
Originally Posted by Erika1487
Wagner is the toughest test for the listener, unless you can completely divorce the music from the man, who was an anti-semite of the most vocal and virulent kind. It was that anti-semitism, coupled with the subject matter of his operas which harked back to a mythic and heroic German past and chimed perfectly with the Nazis' preferred basis of German culture, that elevated him to the pinnacle of composer worship under their regime.
The music has sublime moments, and it's also important to remember that he was very much an innovator, but I find it difficult to listen to without the reminders.
My favourite Wagner anecdote concerns the Prague Conservatoire during the war, during which the Nazis took their hatred of all things Jewish to the absurd extent of removing and destroying statues of Jewish artists, writers and composers. The staff were ordered to remove the statue of Mendelssohn from the array of figures which lined the roof, but refused to risk their lives, so the Gestapo undertook the task. The statues weren't labelled, so the commanding officer simply took down and destroyed the one with the biggest nose.
It was, of course, a statue of Wagner.
Tristan and Isolde sweeps me up into its endless despairing crescendo of passion every time I listen to it. I love how Wagner's harmony floats adrift within a chromatic sea of sevenths and ninths and eleventh chords. After Wagner there was nothing left to do but break with the rules of harmony altogether.
If I allowed myself to be burdened by extra-musical meaning I could never listen to a Mozart mass or a passion by Bach, or the liturgical music of Messiaen. Music transcends the little narratives that were once the scaffolds of its composition.
Quote:
Originally Posted by trish
I know, Trish. But I genuinely find it difficult to listen to Wagner without the negative associations, although some of it is heart-stoppingly beautiful.
In terms of the break with traditional romantic boundaries, yes, but there was a glorious interim period during which Mahler and Sibelius, so utterly different in their views of symphonic scale and purpose, took the last threads of the romantic and fused them with the beginnings of modernism to provide stunning contributions to the symphonic canon.
I know what you mean. the majesterial tone of the music is hard to resist. In a sense something of the impulse which made the torchlit rallies in Nuremberg so magnetic (and with knowledge of all they represented utterly cvhilling) is there in that music. Resist it perhaps but it has an arousing quality which is also deeply disturbing. I think Wagner reaches past the conscious to stir certain archetypal impulses.
But I have a greater love for Mahler personally. The wonder of the second was never surpassed but the sadness of the final movement of the 9th really does embody a profound Weltschmerz
Music seems to generate some odd responses in people -first, Lisa Gasteen is a good but not a great singer, I wouldn't make an extra effort to go and see her. Second, the final movement of Mahler's 9th is not weltschmerz, a juvenile emotion, but the deeply felt reflection on a life about to end, by a mature adult who was aware of his imminent death.
Third, I thought we had already done the Music and the Nazi's in another thread -Beethoven was (and still is) considered the pinnacle of German music, not Wagner -see Beethoven in German Politics 1870-1989 by David Dennis. Beethoven himself was at one time a supporter of the megalomaniac Napoleon, and by today's standards a German nationalist too -it is assumed he would not have welcomed Hitler, but on what basis? In Wagner, Race and Revolution, Paul Lawrence Rose compares the 'deep humanity' of the funeral march in Beethoven's 3rd, to Siegfried's death march in Gotterdammerung, saturated with violence and of course a premonition of the violence yet to come...no mention of the wars and violence Beethoven was thinking of when he wrote the 3rd (he only withdrew the dedication to Napoleon after writing it, not during its composition). This precise attempt to locate anti-semitism in the music, was taken to absurd lengths by Marc Weiner in Richard Wagner and the Anti-Semitic Imagination, where he correlates the sound of Sixtus Beckmesser in Meistersinger to the caricature of a 'whining Jew' even though Beckmesser was modelled on Eduard Hanslick, the notorious and acid-tongued music critic in Vienna who was not a Jew. Nevertheless by casting a figure of ridicule as a high baritone was the key, it was musical code, and it goes on throughout the works, ignoring all the pre-existing issues: why are heroines in opera usually sopranos, and why are heroes tenors? Why are villains basses and why are scheming harridans mezzo-sopranos or contraltos? And so on.
Chopin's anti-Jewish feeling was as strong as Wagner's whereas Wagner actually employed Jews as musicians and conductors and as someone convinced of his own global importance would probably have seen Hitler as rival -but taken any money that was offered, ultimately, it was money that mattered most to Wagner for most of his life.
Puccini was so disgusted with the inefficiency of the Italian republic that he welcomed Mussolini on the basis that his affinity with the German variety of fascism would introduce German style efficiency to Italy, but I don't know people are suddenly going to find La Boheme, Tosca or Turandot polluted by Puccini's retrogade politics and Mussolini's catastrophic fascist experiment and its treatment of Italian Jews. Carl Orff joined the Nazi party, was he a Nazi or did he do it because he wanted to promote himself? At least one conductor (Charles Groves) has said he couldn't conduct Carmina Burana because the episode with the roasted goose made him think of the 1930s and made him shudder with fear.
Same with Karajan, same with Schwarzkopf although she didn't join. Furtwangler is filmed conducting Beethoven's 9th while wearing a Nazi armband, there is a file on him in the National Archive which was generated when Furtwangler was about to do a concert tour of the UK in the late 1940s and some protested. A well-known tenor of the day wrote to the Foreign Office with the emphatic statement He is a Nazi through and through, yet we now know Furtwangler helped many Jewish musicians escape.
Richard Strauss was appointed director of the Reich Musikammer in 1933 by Goebbels, and used it to get a law on copyright published which guaranteed composers would get royalities for music performed. When the Nazi's insisted that Stefan Zweig's name be removed from the libretto of Die Schweigsame Frau at its premiere in Dresden in 1935, Strauss wrote a sarcastic letter that was by intercepted by Goebbels office, and he was sacked. He fled Garmisch at the end of the war and was subsequently arrested by the Americans, but never actually put before the de-Nazification court (I have tried to find records of this and failed). His daughter-in-law, Alice, who lived in the family house in Garmisch, and who is still alive, is Jewish -so in fact according to Nazi law, the Nazi's could have arrested him for harbouring a Jew. His Olympic Hymn (1936) is rubbish, but so is a lot of Strauss's music. Webern's son was in the SS, what about him? He was shot dead by someone who thought they were shooting his son.
Sometimes it seems clear, at other times it becomes ambiguous, or not proven, or false. One should be wary of retrospective judgements, and as far as Wagner and the earlier composers go, it is an interesting but a pointless historical exercise that does no justice to the composer or his music. We haven't even got started on the painters and the writers....
I agree with your analysis of Mahler's 9th, Stavros. The entire symphony is a musical reflection on the approach of imminent death, foreshadowed by the loss of his children in the 6th. With Mahler, I always get the impression of a teeming mind unwilling to leave anything out and striving in the opposite direction to ensure, as he said, that the whole world should be in the symphony. Given the virulent nature of both music criticism and anti-semitism in fin de siecle Vienna, and the extravagant nature of his music, it's not surprising that he was under hideous pressures from all sides during his career in the capital.
And as for Sibelius, he is often regarded as the dark master of Scandinavian bleakness, but that ignores his separateness as a Finn, his immense personal contribution and commitment to the cause of Finnish independence, and the warmth that underlies the symphonies, invariably in the third movement.
If I had to choose just one work to take to the mythical desert island, it would be the Sibelius 5th in the 1993 recording by the CBSO under Rattle. The tension created by the final hammer blows of that symphony in live performance is a tour de force unmatched in the canon.
I don't know what to make of Vienna, it has been a focal point in the classical tradition and yet there is a consistent tug of war between traditionalists and radicals: Mozart and Beethoven and later Brahms left their petty-bourgeois enclaves to hit the high life but also the financial and artistic opportunities the city had: the arch-conservative Vienna of Metternich hid an underground of sexual experimentation (Schubert and the Peacocks of Benvenuto Cellini). And yet after the death of Schubert, all Austria could produce was the relentless froth of the Strauss family, the emotionally wrought cathedrals of sound through Bruckner, and ultimately the death of tonal music in Schoenberg. Superb musicians, however, seem to grow on the trees. It seems that Mahler was admired as a musician, but provoked the traditionalists who hated his experiments with Beethoven, the tempi he chose (too fast) and his determination to both break the star system at the Opera to create an ensemble, and his use of avant-garde producers for stagings. It becomes part of that extaordinary cultural battleground with Freud, Mahler, Karl Kraus, the Secession, Schnitzler on one side and the starched imperialist-catholics on the other. Fischer-Diskau once said that is the 'Jewishness' of Mahler's music that upsets people, even though he blithely signed it all away to convert -I don't think it meant anything to him in religious terms, he was some sort of pantheist, he did it to get a plum job. Cosima Wagner, more anti-Jewish than her dead husband, hated him. Hitler rather enjoyed a performance of Tristan Mahler conducted, but he was a teenager at the time, and we don't take Hitler's views on music seriously...
I don't rate Sibelius as highly as you do, but it raises the question again, does it make any difference to the music who the man was and what his biography means -in terms of world history, Finnish history, music history?
re weltschmerz - I stand corrected. I know that it was his reflective farewell to life so i guess i used the wrong word. i don't speak german.
Stavros - your question about does it make any difference is a complex one. Is music value free in the sense that the political ideas of the creator are seperate wholly from the fabric of his or her work? Certainly can't be said to be true of great works of literature. Prably nor of visual arts. Certainly the uses to which art is put change it and also one has to judge the entire corpus of work by someone like Leni Riefenstahl by her work glorifying Nazi ideology
I agree, the problem with music is that when critics discuss it politically, they are not actually talking about the music qua music, which is the flaw in the arguments proposed by Rose and Weiner on Wagner, for example. If Wagner's music is anti-semitic because he was, then it must be the notes, because they are the music: but if C sharp minor or C Major are part of an anti-semitic expression, does it mean that C sharp minor and C Major always are? In other words, it is the reception of those notes that informs not the notes themselves, the extreme reactions to the Rite of Spring being another example. But if music becomes part of a ritual, such as the Horst Wessel Lied, it becomes discredited when its ideology is discredited, but that is a special case -the Nazis adopting/co-opting/enslaving Beethoven and Wagner has not damaged the reception of Beethoven and Wagner since 1945 with the obvious exception of Wagner in Israel -I was writing an article on this topic around the time of Rose's book and discovered that in its early years, Israel had a phobia about the German language -in addition to Wagner, Richard Strauss's music was banned (a ban that was eventually lifted through the efforts of the late Igor Markevich); a singer who included songs by Schubert in a recital had to remove them (in the 1950s). And yet many Israeli immigrants, particularly survivors from Central Europe, had German as a substitute language to Hebrew or could only speak English or French in addition to German. Its one of those issues that has fascinated me for years, but although I recall an essay by Tovey on Beethoven that rejects a link between personal biography and music, I can't recall why or where it is.
and perhaps even transcends the baseness of its creator..........Quote:
Originally Posted by trish
Trish wrote: Tristan and Isolde sweeps me up into its endless despairing crescendo of passion every time I listen to it. I love how Wagner's harmony floats adrift within a chromatic sea of sevenths and ninths and eleventh chords. After Wagner there was nothing left to do but break with the rules of harmony altogether.
If I allowed myself to be burdened by extra-musical meaning I could never listen to a Mozart mass or a passion by Bach, or the liturgical music of Messiaen. Music transcends the little narratives that were once the scaffolds of its composition."
Hugely eloquent Trish. And with regard to the direction music took after Wagner I'd agree.
But i think the narratives that inspired Bach and Mozart were a little more than scaffolds. Without those encompassing narratives this music and much of the rest of the great creations of Western civilisation would not exist. Without similar narratves much of the great architecture and art of Eastern civlisation would not exist. All this is cut through and throughl entangled. Maybe great art inspired by our modern scientific understanding of the universe may emerge, but there has been recious little to riva the great religiously informed art yet.
Althogh it is easy to have a strong distain for Wagner, politically and personally, his music stands almost alone in operatic history.
To me personally nothing stands head and sholders above than the second act of Parsifal.
The crowning scene of this Second Act perhaps of the whole work is the duet between Parsifal and Kundry. Herein; the entire gamut of passion, maternal, exquisite, voluptuous, is traversed by a master’s hand. It is with the same passion Wagner wrote the wonderful choral scene for sopranos, sung with such soothing pitch that it only fits in the lovely magic garden of Kilngsor’s castle.
This is written in as many as eighteen separate groups, and frequently in twelve real parts. Its sweet, plaintive melody and graceful rhythm cannot escape notice. Kundry’s tender recital of the woes and sufferings of Parsifal’s mother, an aria sung in minor with low pitch. Later the glissando passage of the harps (through two octaves) to express the act of hurling the spear at Parsifal’s head. It is often cited as the most astonishingly unvocal specimen in all Wagner’s musical writings.
I would never for a moment question Wagner's genius, Erika, nor his wonderful facility for innovation. We forget that in the absence of mass communication, recorded music, or anything other than the folk music of countries that has survived separately, composers were the rock stars of their day. It isn't a facile comparison by any means. Wagner's music washes over you in a wave of sensual and emotional power. At that level, only Beethoven and Bach also do that for me - such moments are rare in Mozart, I'm afraid.Quote:
Originally Posted by Erika1487
Hey, I was wondering if anyone had recommendations for poetry/spoken word albums/audiobooks.
Alec Guinness's version of The Waste Land is well worth a listen.Quote:
Originally Posted by Jackal
The crowning scene of this Second Act perhaps of the whole work is the duet between Parsifal and Kundry
Erika, there are no duets in Parsifal, only conversations; and while you are entitled to your opinion some would suggest other works and other parts of Parsifal are Wagner at his best, although many people have said that Act II is the only time Parsifal gets interesting dramatically, because Klingsor is wicked and Kundry is a voluptuous deceiver -musically, the resurrection surely cannot be surpassed, but as I say, its a matter of personal taste -the Liebestod? Siegfied's funeral march? The quintet in Meistersinger? Why choose when you can have them all?
That sounds great, I'll have to search for it. Have you heard Richard Burton's "The Days of Wilfred Owen"? It is an amazing performance.Quote:
Originally Posted by robertlouis
I'd also recommend Richard Burton reading Under Milkwood by Dylan Thomas.