Roman theatrical masks
Reflections on Opera
What Opera Means: Categories and Case-Studies, Christopher Wintle, edited by Kate Hopkins, Boydell & Brewer, 2018, 288 pp, pb., £15.99, reviewed by STODDARD MARTIN
Books on opera abound. Books on Wagner, alone, are said to be as numerous as those on Napoleon, perhaps more so. Those on Mozart rank not far behind. Verdi joined Wagner in celebration of a bicentenary in 2013, and a plethora of publications to mark that occasion included the piquant Verdi and/or Wagner by Peter Conrad, reviewed on these pages. Both figures stride like colossi through Christopher Wintle’s What Opera Means, a collection of reviews, programme essays and lectures from his distinguished career as commentator on the genre, notably at The TLS, where for a period in the early 1980s this writer was his predecessor.
Recurrent appearance of the 2013 bi-centenarians in Wintle’s book reflects their ubiquity on the boards over subsequent decades. At Covent Garden, several cycles of The Ring of the Nibelungen have been mounted, as well as a ‘festival’ to stage all of Verdi. Wintle came to write programme notes in this epoch, and the programme note – a genre of its own – is key to his style: descriptive, informative, learned. Critic gives way to guide for most of his book, conducting audiences towards a work rather than rating or slating its execution. The approach is charming, veering toward the judgemental rarely, such as when flagging admonitions about Wagner made de rigueur after World War II by the likes of Auden and Adorno. Wintle’s accommodative tone shifts in an extended last section formed of critical pieces. Several reveal a caustic awareness of the contemporary problem of ‘dogmatic’ directors or, to a lesser degree, recent composers.
For a house such as the Royal Opera, programme notes are neither as superficial as in Los Angeles nor as academic as at Bayreuth. (I mean both of these adjectives in their positive sense, denoting attentions to surface or to depth characteristic of these respective venues.) Writing for the ROH, Wintle eschews neither and generally attempts to achieve something like a golden mean. He gives histories of conception, execution and reception alongside analyses of textual structure and musical forms. We plumb the minds of composers and the psychology of their works but never venture far from the requirements of taste in a time and place, costs of production, capacity of singers and audiences and/or practical demands for revision or more extensive reformulation – Tannhäuser at Paris, Don Carlo in Italy, the Boito-revised Simon Boccanegra etc.
Opera is theatre and theatre a collective enterprise, given to constant updating. The occasional origins of Wintle’s pieces convey a lively sense of this. Where they go beyond the twinned icons of the latter half of the 19th century, they illuminate mainly moderns – Strauss and Britten prominently, but also en passant Brecht & Weill as well as less household names such as Goehr, Adès, Benjamin, Birtwhistle and Weir. Those interested in earlier epochs must satisfy themselves with small turns devoted to Handel, Rameau and Mozart. There is no Gluck, though he is referred to, likewise none of the Italian precursors to whom Verdi owed so much– Rossini, Bellini and Donizetti. Pre-Wagnerian Germans – Weber, Spohr, Marschner – are also no-shows.
This is not criticism, except perhaps of the book’s title, which may evoke expectations of a more comprehensive view. Apart from those noted, the post Verdi/Wagner era is represented by equally small sections devoted to Massenet, Debussy, Messiaen, Janàček and Stravinsky. No other Russians or Czechs feature, let alone figures further flung. Among those near to Wintle’s great pair, Berlioz might have made an entry; and Puccini seems a lamentable absence – no modern Italians. But let’s not cavil. Wintle’s book is what his career has enabled him to focus on, and its focus has a geniality un-compromised by an overt show of genius, making it a comfortable companion. You can pick it up and read a chapter at leisure or pursue the path set out at a deliberative jog.
Organization is key in a gallimaufry of this kind, and both author and editor have managed to slot what might seem random into a simulacrum of order. Each provides a preface; Wintle adds an introduction. The first sets out the book’s pattern, the second defines its operative word. Thence proceed sections entitled Sources, Genre, Style, Revision, Beginning & End, Invention, Psychology and Performance. Each category is loose enough to accommodate a number of chapters, around five per section except for that extended last one. Juxtapositions are rarely strained; at best, chapters counterpoint one other or constitute variations on given theme. The book need not have been shaped in this way – a chronological approach based on period of subject or time of writing might have worked too, and Wintle reverts to the former for his concluding potpourri. But the choice facilitates the author’s chief innovation: adding introductory glosses to each inclusion which, being ex post facto to its original writing, indicate its significance to the subject overall.
Quite a bit of allusion to Aristotelean, Freudian and other compositional theory is involved here, as in a never-before-published piece on ‘repression’ in Rigoletto, deriving from a talk to the British Psychoanalytical Society and citing the late Jungian writer on opera, Robert Donington. More typically, as said, Wintle wears his scholarship informally enough that one feels enlightened rather than weighed down. The same goes for the gentle touch by which he sprinkles his texts with terminology – cavatina, concertato, cabaletta, stretta, scena and the like, so essential when dissecting the conventions and later anti-conventions of Verdi. Snatches of scores are used rarely but with brilliance, such as in a piece on the finale of Götterdämmerung where Wintle shows how contrasting musical figures associated with Wotan and with Siegfried are harmonised by Brünnhilde as she incites the pyre of the latter to ignite the haven of the former. Tempi, key change and orchestral colouration here may suggest meanings embedded deep in the music which more strictly literary admirers from Baudelaire to this writer have been inclined to miss as they swirl down into what Thomas Mann once described as ‘our earliest picture dreamings’.
The mythic, legendary and religious undercurrents of what is arguably the greatest art-form mankind has as yet produced are not neglected by Wintle, but he writes for the age he lives in and fails to afflate with what a present-day reader might regard as the pretension of great-grandfather’s generation. His pieces characteristically tend to a positive final flourish – one does not read a programme to be put off by what the curtain is about to rise on – but what precedes is usually as more memorable to it as Don Giovanni’s descent into Hell is to the wittering of those who survive. Opera involves conventions even when they are being flouted. So does writing about it.
Lviv Theatre of Opera and Ballet
Critic and publisher Stoddard Martin’s first book was Wagner to The Waste Land, Macmillan, 1982. He has written extensively on this and related subjects in the intervening years
Trashing Populism
Yascha Mounk
Trashing Populism
by Ilana Mercer
To say that academic elites don’t like ordinary folks is to state the obvious.
To them, Lanford, Illinois—the fictional, archetypal, working-class town, made famous by Roseanne and Dan Conner—is not to be listened to, but tamed.
A well-functioning democracy depends on it.
Taming Fishtown—Charles Murray’s version of Landford—is the thread that seems to run through a new book, “The People vs. Democracy,” by one Yascha Mounk.
You guessed it. Mr. Mounk is not an American from the prairies; he’s a German academic, ensconced at Harvard, and sitting in judgment on American and European populism.
If only he were capable of advancing a decent argument.
“The number of countries that can plausibly be described as democracies is shrinking,” laments Mounk (“Populism and the Elites,” The Economist, March 17, 2018):
“Strongmen are in power in several countries that once looked as if they were democratizing … The United States—the engine room of democratization for most of the post-war period—has a president who taunted his opponent with chants of ‘lock her up’ and refused to say if he would accept the result of the election if it went against him.”
Elites ensconced in the academy are likely selected into these mummified institutions for a certain kind of ignorance about political theory or philosophy.
Plainly put, a chant, “lock her up,” is speech, nothing more. This Trump-rally chant might be impolite and impolitic, but on the facts, it’s not evidence of a “strongman.”
Notice how, deconstructed, nearly every utterance emitted by the technocratic and academic elites turns out to be empty assertion?
Even the subtitle of the book under discussion is sloppy political theory: “Why Our Freedom is in Danger and How to Save It” implies that democracy is the be-all and end-all of liberty. Quite the opposite.
America’s Constitution-makers did everything in their power (except, sadly, heed the Anti-Federalists) to thwart a dispensation wherein everything is up for grabs by government, in the name of the people.
Today,” claims our author, “the popular will is increasingly coming into conflict with individual rights.” To this end, “liberal elites are willing to exclude the people from important decisions, most notably about immigration in the case of the European Union.”
He has excluded Americans from the immigration, decision-making equation. But they, too, have been eliminated from decision-making on these matters. Perhaps the anti-populism tinkerer, for Mounk is no thinker, views the levels of “exclusion” in the US, on this front, as acceptable.
Perhaps he thinks that the flow of up to two million into the US every year—changing it by the day—is done with the right degree of democratic inclusion. (How about a federal referendum on immigration, to test that?)
The popular will is fine—provided it restores the obligations of government to its constituents, not to the world, protects nation-state sovereignty, respects the founding people of Europe and the West; and defends their traditions, safety and identity. For example, by eliminating the weaponization of political concepts against The People. In the context of immigration, constructs that have been weaponized are multiculturalism and diversity.
If anything, populist leaders who want to denuclearize constructs which have been weaponized by the state are authentic leaders. The opposing elites are the interlopers.
Your common, garden-variety academic is selected and elevated in academia precisely because of a pre-existing condition: a globalist, deracinated disposition.
For that matter, humanity does not have a right to immigrate en masse to the United States or to Europe. There is no natural right to venture wherever, whenever—unless, perhaps, migrants can be confined to homesteading frontier territory.
Regrettably, the developed world is running out of frontier territory to homestead. Besides, the only potential immigrants who still have that frontier spirit are South-African farmers. But American and European elites are uninterested in refugees who are ACTUALLY and actively being killed-off.
That would be too much like preserving “white privilege,” which is certainly not what Mounk’s about. He moans, instead, about dangerous populists, and how they’re “willing to dispense with constitutional niceties in the name of ‘the people.’”
Which “constitutional niceties” have populists dispensed with? Repealing, statutory, man-made law the Left, invariably, depicts as fascism, when in fact repealing positive law is often liberating; strengthening the natural rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
“Politics,” our author continues, “is defined by a growing battle between illiberal democracy, or democracy without rights, on the one hand, and undemocratic liberalism, or rights without democracy, on the other”.
It’s hard to know what to make of such bafflegab, only that the author’s political theory has been through the progressive smelter. Democracy unfettered—social democracy, Third Wayism—adopted by all “free” nations, the US as well, in antithetical to the liberty envisioned by the American Founding Fathers.
Why so? Because in this fetid democracy, every aspect of individual life is up for government control. The very idea that a few hundred clowns in two chambers could represent hundreds of millions of individuals is quintessentially illiberal. And impossible.
The kind of “undemocratic liberalism” the author sneers at is likely the classical liberalism of the 19thcentury, where the claims the mass of humanity could levy against individuals in a particular territory were severely curtailed, if not non-existent.
Finally, what would an academic be without a brand of demeaning, economic reductionism? The lumpenproletariat are economically distressed. That’s Yascha Mounk’s final diagnosis. That’s why populism is surging.
Tossed in their direction, Chinese-made trinkets will do wonders to improve the mood of this seething, racist, mass of Deplorables. Then Mounk and his friends can move in to make the right decisions for us.
Harvard’s Chosen’s One chalks populism up to “the laws of globalization.” Deal with it or die.
Or, as advocated by Kevin D. Williamson, a Never Trumper, formerly of National Review:
“The truth about these dysfunctional, downscale communities is that they deserve to die. Economically, they are negative assets … The white American underclass is in thrall to a vicious, selfish culture whose main products are misery and used heroin needles. Donald Trump’s speeches make them feel good. So does OxyContin. What they need isn’t analgesics, literal or political. They need real opportunity, which means that they need real change, which means that they need U-Haul.” (“The Father-Führer,” March 28, 2016.)
You see, working-class “losers” are being labelled illiberal fascists for—wait for it!—wanting a local economy around which to center flesh-and-blood communities.
A real Heil-Hitler moment!
This populism-detesting academic Yascha Mounk is a theoretical utilitarian and bad one at that. He refuses to “grapple with the nuances” of the issues that make for misery or mirth among ordinary men and women. Instead, he grumbles that his gang of “technocratic elites” needs to moderate its ambitions, given that they’re not working with much (dumb Deplorables).
Here’s the truth about the nationalism against which the political and pedagogic elites rail:
“[It] has often been cast by the historically triumphant Left as fascistic. Yet historically, this Right rising has represented broad social strata: It has represented the bourgeoisie—middle-class, liberal and illiberal, standing for professional and commercial interests. It has stood for the working class, the landed aristocracy, the (Catholic) clergy, the military, labor unions, standing as one against the radical Communist or anarchist Left, which promised—and eventually delivered—bloody revolution that destroyed organic, if imperfect, institutions.” (“The Trump Revolution: The Donald’s Creative Destruction Deconstructed,” p. 234)
Ilana Mercer has been writing a weekly, paleolibertarian column since 1999. She is the author of “Into the Cannibal’s Pot: Lessons for America From Post-Apartheid South Africa” (2011) & “The Trump Revolution: The Donald’s Creative Destruction Deconstructed” (June, 2016). She’s on Twitter, Facebook, Gab & YouTube
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