When Opera Was Pop
Also: How politics ruined the Lincoln Center, why PEN America canceled its awards ceremony, how losing a child affected Shakespeare, and more.
Only the so-called “elite” are interested in opera and classical music today, or so it seems, and going to a performance is something of an oddity. This wasn’t always the case, Mark Swed argues in The Los Angeles Times:
Opera has been popular entertainment through much of its early history. Castrati were the pop stars of the Baroque era. At the time Verdi wrote “La Traviata,” he was so popular that his latest tunes were as closely guarded before a premiere as a Beyoncé track.
There were peanut galleries in all the great 19th century European opera houses, and there have been cheap seats ever since. As a student, I often attended San Francisco Opera several times a week, standing room being no more than the price of a movie. Tickets for L.A. Opera mainstage productions start around $35 or less, and they go fast.
Alexandra Wilson makes the same point in The Critic and attempts to explain how opera and classical music became associated with the “elite”:
Implausible as it might sound today, in 1975 the Daily Mirror chose Monteverdi’s Homeric opera Il ritorno d’Ulisse in patria as its pick of the week for the August bank holiday and billed a Christmas broadcast of Puccini’s La bohème as “not to be missed”. Classical music remained part of the mainstream British conversation, so much so that the conductor André Previn could appear for some gentle ribbing on the Morecambe and Wise Christmas special.
So it continued, to a large extent, throughout the 1980s, when it was possible for a teenager like me, with no family background in classical music, to discover it via schoolfriends and to teach myself the piano at a friend’s house . . . Never “cool” exactly — and indeed why should it be? — classical music enjoyed a wider surge of popularity during the 1980s. Opera companies reported full-capacity houses such as had never been seen before; rock promoter Harvey Goldsmith started putting on large-scale productions at venues such as the Earls Court arena.
Today, however, “things are different”:
Since 2000, classical music has disappeared from most people’s daily lives. It is far less visible in the media. What are the chances of even one or two operas being screened on the BBC at peak time now, let alone 18 or 19 like in the Seventies? The idea of an opera being broadcast on Channel 4 (a regular occurrence in the Eighties) seems like a joke.
How did this happen? Wilson argues the cuts in arts coverage haven’t helped. Music, she writes, has also “been sidelined in schools to a drastic extent, and for those who still have an opportunity to study it, classical music occupies only a small part of the remaining curriculum.”
In other news, James Panero looks at how identity politics have led the Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts astray: “With the blood-and-soil essentialism of today’s identity politics, the commitment to ‘confront[ing] the racism from which our institution has benefited’ and ‘telling the story of Lincoln Center from our beginning, in its truth’ fell in line with the new progressive rhetoric of land acknowledgments, colonialist dispossession, and supposedly unearthed legacies of systemic oppression. The diagnosis also presented an opportunity for Lincoln Center’s younger leadership, remote-working members of a new generation of the managerial class, to treat their organization’s ‘abhorrent’ injustices against ‘Indigenous, Black, and Latinx families’ with their own patent mixture of tinctures, elixirs, and balms. How much of this ‘truth’ is in fact true was beside the point. By design, their cure would be worse than the disease.”
Lincoln’s liberalism: Michael M. Rosen reviews Allen Guelzo’s new book Our Ancient Faith: Lincoln, Democracy, and the American Experiment:
A Princeton professor and the author of 15 books on Lincoln, Guelzo scours his subject’s speeches, correspondence, and other writings, along with numerous contemporaneous third-party accounts, to discern a cohesive approach to individual rights, civic virtue, and governance. The book traces Lincoln’s views on liberty, reason, political economics, democratic culture, civil liberties, race, and the shortcomings of liberalism and allows his words to penetrate the discourse of his day and ours.
Guelzo sensibly contends that democracy revolves around three central elements. They are the consent of the governed, majority rule, and submission to law. Weakening any of these three legs wobbles the democratic stool. In addition, a properly functioning liberal democratic polity requires three tools: citizens possessing equal rights and responsibilities, regular elections, and forums for discussion and association.
In Guelzo’s telling, these tenets and tools have come under attack both from “woke progressives” who insist that “the promises of American democracy are falsehoods, maintained by the powerful in order to oppress the marginalized” and by “religious integralists and national conservatives” who “welcome the bureaucratic state as the most dependable provider of security, health, and safety.”
The book that Stanley Kubrick attempted to suppress will finally be published: “The Magic Eye: The Cinema of Stanley Kubrick by Neil Hornick now has three prefaces reflecting its subject’s ruthlessness in trying to block publication and control his image. Hornick, now 84, from London, said Kubrick’s legal threats had come as a shock: ‘I regard it as a painful episode.’”
PEN America cancels its awards ceremony: “Facing widespread unhappiness over its response to the Israel-Hamas war, the writers’ group PEN America has called off its annual awards ceremony. Dozens of nominees had dropped out of the event, which was to have taken place next week.”
David Bannon writes about how the loss of a child and the loss of siblings influenced Shakespeare:
In 1596 the provinces suffered their greatest mortality, among them Shakespeare’s eleven-year-old son, Hamnet. The younger twin had always been prone to sickness. He fell ill in early August 1596 and died within days. Shakespeare would never be the same . . . Shakespeare was no stranger to sorrow. His parents lost two children before he was born. Shakespeare’s younger sister, Anne, died at the age of seven in 1579. He was to see his parents and four younger siblings pass: at the time of the playwright’s death in 1616, only his sister Joan survived.
Then as now, the death of a younger sibling receives scant social acknowledgement despite having marked similarities to losing a child. It casts a long shadow, as in Richard II, which uses the word grief more than any of his other works. Shakespeare wrote Richard II in 1595, two years after the epidemic had cost the lives of many Londoners and remained an active fear in the provinces.
Speaking of Shakespeare, Rebecca Burgess reviews a new book on what his plays teach us about statecraft: “Kings, presidents, and corporate titans may not undergo Shakespeare’s seven parts in their careers. But all rise to power, exercise it, and fall from it. That basic and perennial fact about leaders is Eliot Cohen’s first lesson in The Hollow Crown: Shakespeare on How Leaders Rise, Rule, and Fall. This arc of power, argues Cohen, a professor at the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies and former State Department counselor, offers many lessons about power and those who wield it.”
Freya Johnston reviews Philip Smallwood’s The Literary Criticism of Samuel Johnson: Forms of Artistry and Thought: “Criticism, for Samuel Johnson, was female, her votaries for the most part malicious, ineffectual men. In an early issue of the Rambler from 1750, Criticism is presented as ‘the eldest daughter of Labour and of Truth’, charged by the Muses with distinguishing good from bad writing and duty-bound to confer immortality or oblivion. Eventually, worn out, she gives up trying to judge the mixed performances submitted to her inspection and retires, leaving her duties to Time, who ‘passes his sentence at leisure’.”
Matthew Gasda reviews Byung-Chul Han’s The Crisis of Narration:
My friend J, a computer programmer, once convinced his former roommate—also a programmer—to watch the Japanese art film Asako I & II, about a woman who falls in love with two identical-looking but different men. J’s roommate sat patiently through this intricate, two-hour meditation on identity before complaining that the film could have been much shorter: say, five to ten minutes. He could have saved even more time by reading a plot summary in bullet-point form. That would have been far more efficient.
This story, which J told me over lunch when I said I was writing this review, is also a parable. We are either J, the humanist programmer, or we are the ex-roommate, the rationalist who doesn’t see the point in J’s humanism—in his engagement with gradual, digressive, and lyrical unfoldings. The roommate just wanted information, conveyed in useful packets.
This split—and perhaps existential choice—between information and narrative animates the philosopher Byung-Chul Han’s new book-length essay The Crisis of Narration.
No one buys or reads serious books. This is the conclusion Elle Griffin came to after reading the testimony the Big Five publishers gave during the anti-trust case against Penguin Random House’s proposed acquisition of Simon & Schuster: “All of the transcripts from the trial were compiled into a book called The Trial. It took me a year to read, but I’ve finally summarized my findings and pulled out all the compelling highlights. I think I can sum up what I’ve learned like this: The Big Five publishing houses spend most of their money on book advances for big celebrities like Brittany Spears and franchise authors like James Patterson and this is the bulk of their business. They also sell a lot of Bibles, repeat best sellers like Lord of the Rings, and children’s books like The Very Hungry Caterpillar. These two market categories (celebrity books and repeat bestsellers from the backlist) make up the entirety of the publishing industry and even fund their vanity project: publishing all the rest of the books we think about when we think about book publishing (which make no money at all and typically sell less than 1,000 copies).”