Music, and the Good Old Days..

Oh for the days when we just enjoyed music for the joy it generated...

One of the great joys about living in this seemingly remote paradise island in Canada is that, while it may be paradise, it is anything but remote. We have enjoyed more music and theater here in just a short time than we have in any other place we have lived, including major cities. Just yesterday we enjoyed a concert by a great New Brunswick songwriter, David Myles. One of his songs, When it Comes My Turn, has become kind of an anthem here, and I have heard it numerous times on the Island this summer, and saw the first line of the chorus of the song, on a T-shirt someone was wearing at the concert. That chorus goes as follows,

Well, I'm getting old, but I'm not old yet
I'm already worried that I might forget
How to laugh, how to love
How to live, how to learn
I wanna die with a smile when it comes my turn

A few weeks earlier we attended a musical review called Inside American Pie, which did a fantastic deep dive inside Don Maclean’s famous commotion of the crash that killed Buddy Holly, Richie Valens and The Big Bopper, and which has references to much music of that era.

These joyous events caused me to reflect on the state of music and culture in current times. By nature I tend to look forward rather than backwards, and I have always felt, and hopefully also acted, as if the best is yet to come. Yet, these past few weeks I found myself yearning for ‘the good old days”, which sounds like something my mother might have said when I was listening to rock music in the 60’s and 70’s.

Does that mean I am getting old?

Well, I’m not old yet!

I get joy from all sorts of music, film, books, theater, and comedy, and I expect that helps keep me young. So, it is not necessarily the music of current times that makes me yearn for the past, but rather the culture in which this music is appearing.

Up until a less than a decade ago, it was a good thing that music could stir emotions, whether the music was about about sex, love, history, or culture. It didn’t matter if the music was ribald or the musicians themselves seemed chauvinistic. It didn’t matter if the history didn’t mesh with someone’s expectations, or even if the culture being memorialized wasn’t that of the writer or singer. Similarly, telling jokes was fun, and not a constant source of second guessing. If you didn’t like a joke, you groaned. That was it. And you could enjoy the content of books or movies or theater without first deciding if you approved of the personal lives of the authors, actors, directors or producers.

I am so tired of hearing the new requirements of political correctness, and the associated need to erase history. One cannot completely escape that, even here. Shortly after I arrived I was no longer able to sit on a park bench next to a statue of Sir John A MacDonald, the first Prime Minister of Canada. Why? Because his administration, by the standards of today, was no longer acceptable.

At the very least, music, art, and literature aren’t supposed to be politically correct. They are supposed to lift us out of our own cocoons, to view the world with different glasses. To do so they should be free to borrow from all cultural heritages, and imagination should not be stifled by the requirement that one can only write, paint, film, or sing about what you have directly experienced.

If we completely sanitize music, art, or literature, ensuring that each piece conforms to some standards that are guaranteed not to offend or provoke, we sterilize it, and along with that, the fun disappears. The ‘good old days’ may not have been good for many reasons, but even as we work to correct previous ills, we should take care not to stifle our culture in the process.

There are so many ridiculous examples that I need not enumerate them all. I’ll pick one. I learned that Tom Hanks, an actor whose performances I have admired, has said he wouldn’t have agreed to play a gay man in the film Philadelphia, today. Rather, he felt a gay actor should have been chosen for the role. There are so many things wrong with this statement. Does that mean that gay actors shouldn’t play straight characters? Hanks has played many different roles, most recently as the Dutch immigrant promoter of Elvis Presley. There are a lot of good Dutch actors who speak English. Why Hanks? Because he is a great actor! It is called acting for a reason.

These musings, prompted by my recent musical experiences, were reinforced when, the other day, a colleague reminding me of some compelling writing by a former podcast guest, Heather MacDonald, about recent attacks on classical music culture. Being largely detached historically from current political trends, one might imagine that classical music would be immune from the current requirements imposed by political correctness. But, as Heather describes it, this could not be further from the truth.

I asked Heather for permission to reprint her piece Making Beethoven Woke from City Journal here. She kindly agreed. It is an eye opening account reflecting the extremes that bringing political correctness to culture can produce.

Beethoven may seem to have little in common with Buddy Holly, but my reflections inspired by the latter apply equally well to the former. In particular, a performance of Ode to Joy in his Ninth Symphony can stir one’s passions every bit as much as a good rendition of ‘That’ll be the Day”.

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Making Beethoven Woke

Revisionist performances of classic works deconstruct our precious links to the past

For decades, opera directors in Europe and the United States have felt licensed to revise operas to conform to their political agendas. They do so through wildly incongruous stagings that update the action to modern times and introduce progressive totems that would have been unfathomable to an opera’s original creators. Such directorial interventions left the libretto intact, however. Now even that cordon sanitaire between the structure of a work and an interpreter’s political preferences has been breached.

Beethoven has been a particular target for textual revision. In February, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City hosted a production of Fidelio, an Enlightenment paean to freedom and to marital love. In Beethoven’s version of the opera, a wife disguises herself as a male prison guard to free her husband from a Spanish fortress; at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Fidelio became a Black Lives Matter critique of mass incarceration. A BLM activist is writing a doctoral dissertation on the Thirteenth Amendment and investigating corrupt “fascists” in the criminal-justice system. In retaliation, racist cops shoot him, and a racist warden of a supermax prison throws him into solitary confinement. The activist’s wife, unable to persuade any lawyers to take up her husband’s case pro bono, goes undercover as a female correctional officer in her husband’s prison. This change from a male to a female disguise allows for a pleasingly homoerotic revision to the plot. In the original opera, a prison guard’s daughter falls in love with the new “male” employee, echoing Lady Olivia’s fruitless infatuation for the disguised Viola in Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night. In the Met Museum’s Fidelio, produced by Heartbeat Opera, the prison guard’s daughter is a lesbian; her black father encourages his daughter to court the new black female assistant. Of all the production’s revisions, this paternal matchmaking is the most counterfactual, given black working-class attitudes toward homosexuality.

In the current political and artistic environment, Fidelio was a Black Lives Matter manifesto waiting to happen. What made the Met Museum’s production noteworthy was that the revision did not occur exclusively through the staging; Heartbeat Opera rewrote the spoken dialogue as well. (That dialogue was delivered in English, while the arias and ensembles remained in their original German.) The activist’s wife complains that the “real conspiracy” was not the one for which her husband was detained but rather the “suppression of immigrants and people of color” in the U.S. The supermax prison contains people “whose only mistake was being poor and black.” The imprisoned activist rails against his black jailer: “You are complicit in a corrupt system that oppresses our people. I see in you a field Negro.” The white prison warden reveals the depths of his racism by announcing that if the activist really “wanted to help his community he would tell them to stop burning down their neighborhoods and to pull up their bootstraps.” Such an invocation of personal responsibility is—in the revisionist’s mind—a surefire sign of white supremacy. None of these lines is related to the original libretto.

The only reason the Metropolitan Museum of Art mounted Fidelio was the Black Lives Matter gloss. Without it, the museum’s leadership would have had no interest in the work. The production provided the museum with a racial-justice twofer, however, since opening night featured a post-performance discussion between five “social justice advocates” on how to dismantle “current systems of incarceration through the abolitionist movement.” The Eric H. Holder Jr. Initiative for Civil and Political Rights at Columbia University sponsored the discussion. Such a panel may have once seemed tangential to the mission of an art museum; in the post-George Floyd era, such racial-justice advocacy has become central to curating and programming.

Heartbeat Opera did preserve one aspect of the original Fidelio: the arias and ensembles were, by and large, textually intact, if sometimes compressed or cut to shorten the running time. The sublime quartet “Mir ist so wunderbar” was reduced to a trio, due to the elimination of a character who would have complicated the lesbian subplot. The overture (Beethoven ultimately wrote four) and early arias were also cut, replaced by a dumb show of a black male being gunned down to a backdrop of mechanical noise.

On April 7, the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra, led by Marin Alsop, will take textual intervention one step further. A poem by Baltimore-based rapper Wordsmith will replace Friedrich Schiller’s “Ode to Joy” in a performance of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. Wordsmith has explained his goals in the rewriting: to use “present-day social issues to highlight the need for positive reinforcement. Encouraging gender equality, cultural acceptance, and living a purpose-driven life are worldly topics I sought to shine a light on during the writing process.”

The result is a radical change of register. Instead of Schiller’s opening stanza:

Freude, schöner Götterfunken,
Tochter aus Elysium,
Wir betreten feuertrunken,
Himmlische, dein Heiligtum!

[Joy, bright spark of divinity,
Daughter of Elysium,
Drunk with fire we tread
Thy sanctuary!]

We get:

Live and love with open mind let our cultures intertwine.
Dig deep down, show what you’re made of, set the tone it’s time to shine.
We must fight for equal rights and share some common courtesy.
While pursuing all your dreams spread your joy from sea to sea.

Wordsmith intermixes self-help and progressive bromides, not always grammatically:

Family, friends share your opinion, push for gender equality.
Be yourself don’t judge too quick receive one another with open arms.
Oh this is our chance to unite, spread some genuine joy and charm.

We are admonished not to “hate,” which has a very particular referent in the circles in which Wordsmith and his institutional patrons travel:

Brothers, sisters equally say:
“Together we can make hate history!”

In Beethoven’s excerpt for the Ninth Symphony, Schiller’s poem moves ecstatically in its final strophe into the heavens:

Ahnest du den Schöpfer, Welt?
Such’ ihn über’m Sternenzelt!
Über Sternen muß er wohnen.

[World, do you know your Creator?
Seek Him in the starry canopy!
Above the stars must He dwell.]

Wordsmith concludes his “Ode to Joy” with a leaden admonition—a Hallmark card version of a diversity training session:

Positive vibes for an ode to joy!
Rise, oh rise, be the voice of change,
We must show more empathy.

Wordsmith’s word setting is as clumsy as his content is banal. He regularly pits the natural stress of a line against the musical meter (see, for example, “Oh this is our chance to unite,” at measures 281 and 282 of the revised score).

Leonard Bernstein conducted Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony in Berlin on Christmas Day, 1989. The Berlin Wall had come down the previous month. To mark the liberation, Bernstein changed one word of Schiller’s text: “Freude” became “Freiheit.” This substitution was regarded as so momentous as to put Bernstein momentarily on the defensive: “I feel this is a heaven-sent moment to sing “Freiheit” wherever the score indicates the word ‘Freude,’” he explained. “If ever there was a historic time to take an academic risk in the name of human joy, this is it, and I am sure we have Beethoven’s blessing.” Bernstein’s one-word interpolation was still being talked about long after the 1989 concert. The New York Times observed in 1998 that “Bernstein, who in life got away with nothing and everything, boldly changed Freude, the joy in Schiller’s ‘Ode to Joy,’ to Freiheit.”

But now, the wholesale elimination of Schiller’s ode, so integral to Beethoven’s score, requires no justification at all. In fact, Wordsmith’s replacement poem is just one of several commissioned by conductor Marin Alsop for what Alsop hoped would be an attention-getting tour of “six continents with 10 renowned partner orchestras” in 2020. (Alsop’s so-called “All Together” tour, to mark the 250th anniversary of Beethoven’s birth, was ultimately cancelled due to Covid lockdowns.) In London, the poem “O Human” by British poet Anthony Anaxagorou was to have been slotted into the Schiller slot. Where Wordsmith was clear, if trite, Anaxagorou was mannered and opaque. Listeners were urged to “Speak up those who’ve held the tremble.” The poet asked rhetorically: “Can you see us hurtling forward/Tying bells like vows to skin?” To which the answer can only be: “No, we can’t!”

The most technically adept of the Schiller substitutes came from former U.S. poet laureate Tracy K. Smith for an abortive Carnegie Hall performance. Smith concluded her ode with a plug for sustainability:

Battered planet, home of billions,
Our long shadow stalks your face.
All we’ve fractured, all we’ve stolen,
All we’ve sought blind to your grace.

The rewritings go beyond Beethoven. On November 5, 2022, the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra will perform Igor Stravinsky’s The Soldier’s Tale, with another new text by Wordsmith. Stravinsky’s 1918 work pairs a seven-member instrumental ensemble with three non-singing actors. The actors narrate the story of a soldier persuaded by the devil to exchange his modest but beloved possessions for a deceptive promise of wealth. The score is a concentrated gem of modernism, with protean time signatures and rhythms, acid harmonies, and an eclectic range of musical influences, including klezmer music and ragtime. Wordsmith will retell the story from the “perspective of a Black American soldier during the Vietnam War,” the publicity materials explain.

These modern bastardizations have eighteenth- and nineteenth-century precedent. Singers notoriously inserted their preferred arias into opera scores, however unrelated to the opera at hand. Publishers and conductors routinely “corrected” Beethoven’s symphonies, which violated academic rules of harmony. In Paris, Mozart’s operas were rewritten to match French tastes in musical theater. The composer and critic Hector Berlioz described how a German composer “fixed” The Magic Flute for a Parisian performance:

He tacked a few bars on to the end of the overture (the overture to The Magic Flute!), made a bass aria out of the soprano line of one of the choruses, likewise adding a few bars of his own composition; removed the wind instruments from one scene and put them into another, altered the vocal line and the whole character of the accompaniment in Sarastro’s sublime aria; manufactured a song out of the Slaves Chorus “O cara armonia”; converted a duet into a trio; and, as if The Magic Flute were not enough to sate his harpy’s appetite, gorged himself on Titus and Don Giovanni. . . . After that, need one add that in the hands of this master the famous “Fin ch’han del vino”—that explosion of licentious energy in which the whole character of the Don is summed up—duly reappeared as a trio for two sopranos and bass, singing, among other sweet nothings, the following lines:

Joy past all telling!
My heart is swelling!
How my lot is different from his!”

Berlioz lay down his rule of artistic respect:

No, no, no, a million times no! You musicians, you poets, prose-writers, actors, pianists, conductors whether of third or second or even first rank, you do not have the right to meddle with a Shakespeare or a Beethoven, in order to bestow on them the blessings of your knowledge and taste.

It took a century, but Berlioz’s lonely crusade for fidelity to a composer’s intentions was eventually victorious—at least with regard to the notes and words on the page, if not, in recent years, in regard to staging. It is not a cultural advance to return to artistic revisionism. (To be sure, topical jokes and references are sometimes inserted into operettas today, but those works occupy a different place in our culture.) Beethoven chose Schiller’s “Ode,” not Wordsmith’s, for what would prove his final symphony. That is sufficient reason to keep the original pairing. But there is a more self-interested reason as well. In revising works to match contemporary sensibilities, we diminish, not expand, our human possibilities. No one would write Schiller’s “Ode to Joy” today. That is precisely why it should be performed intact. Its elevated rhetoric belongs to a lost aesthetic universe of romantic idealism, classical allusion, and exacting formal craft. It speaks to a now-alien way of being in the world that we can nevertheless dimly sense through close engagement with its language. Likewise, the original text of The Soldier’s Tale hearkens back to the unsettling world of Russian folk tales, with their mysterious strangers, impenetrable forests, and diabolical traps. That folk literature expresses what it was like to be human before Enlightenment science and the conquest of nature; it captures primal fears that even now we may not have transcended.

We are awash in opportunities to hear rappers and to condemn alleged police brutality. Our means for entering the past, however, are finite and available only through works of art that have survived into the present. It is narcissism to demand that these precious vehicles of bygone form and feeling be dragooned into speaking in our language, about our contemporary concerns. And it is delusional to think that junking Schiller for Wordsmith or Beethoven for Black Lives Matter will increase the “diversity” of the classical music audience. Such substitutions may please institutional funders, but the only thing that will bring blacks regularly into the concert hall is prolonged engagement, starting in school or at home, with classical music.

An advocate of rewritings like the All Together project might respond that no lasting damage has been done to the host works. The next performance can revert to the work’s original structure; many future performances undoubtedly will do so. But each rewriting legitimates the idea that understanding a foreign idiom, especially a rarified one, asks too much of an audience. Such revisions imply that we should not try to stretch beyond the boundaries of our petty, circumscribed lives into a radically different aesthetic milieu. Many current revisions are animated by the hermeneutics of suspicion, seeing in past works of art only oppression and illegitimate privilege. Such deconstructive readings provide an excuse for ignorance and a pretext for prejudice. Even without that deconstructive agenda, however, rewriters and revisionists destroy the precious link between present and past that is the primary means of transmitting civilization and of keeping our minds open to beauty.

Heather MacDonald.