My Midlife Music Crisis

I love music. There are ways in which music is one of my favorite things, maybe my most favorite thing. And yet, at this point in my life, I seldom listen to music. So: WTF?

Part of the problem is pretty basic and really boils down to: what am I going to listen to? Like a lot of white Gen-Xers, I spent my youth listening to things like Iggy Pop, The Clash, The Velvet Underground, Nirvana, with doses of The Cure and Blondie for lighter side.

There's a sense in which I never stopped loving music like that. But it presents a problem, which is, how does it fit into my life? So much of a certain kind of popular music puts me in a certain mood -- a mood almost incompatible with the life I live now. At this point, when is the right moment for getting all wound up with aggressive, sexual, and possibly destructive behavior? Answer: never.

A lot of people my age transition into other things. They develop a new interest in Latin jazz, or classic R&B, or whatever. Abstractly this seems like the ideal solution. But for various reasons it's not happening for me.

One of those reasons has to do with something I think of as "music start-up costs" -- something that is huge for me but that I almost never hear people talking about. The idea of music start-up costs is that for me, listening to new music is hugely different from listening to familiar music. And it's not just different -- it's difficult.

Listening to new music, even when I like it, and actively want to listen to it, often feels to me really, really challenging. It's something I have to make a plan about, something I don't want to do at the end of long day doing other cognitively challenging things, something that uses up active willpower and is not at all a form of relaxation.

Is this something particular about me? That I can't enjoy music without entering into it, that I can't enter into it if I can't understand it, that I can't understand it on the first few listens? Or is this one of those things everyone experiences but just doesn't talk about because it doesn't seem cool?

Right now I have a ton of music on my iPhone that I want to listen to but haven't and maybe won't. Frank Ocean. Kendrick Lamar. The new MIA album Matangi. Watch the Throne. Zebra Katz. An album of old remastered Scott Joplin songs. People told me to listen to Formation -- I want to, but I haven't.

All of this music is probably great, and all of it is music that if I'd heard it a few times without realizing it -- so my subconscious could process it without me -- I'd probably be all into it. It's all music I want to listen to, but because of the start-up costs, it isn't happening.

In one sense, I expect that having this kind of midlife music crisis is a pretty common and universal sort of thing -- I mean, there's a reason that when we picture middle-aged people we picture people driving around playing whatever they danced to in high school.

In another sense, though, I feel like my experience tells us something interesting about life in 2016 North America. Because the obvious thing that's missing, the thing that would solve my problem, is just hearing music without having to go out of my way to listen to it.

And there is something about the modern media landscape, where you can pick and choose exactly what you want and everyone has their own micro-obsession, that seems to decrease this sense of things just being in the atmosphere. Don't get me wrong: I love the modern media landscape. I love the way if your thing is some tiny thing that no one else likes you can get all into it all by yourself. But -- still, I think it does have this negative effect. I mean, it's different from the old days where you'd turn your alarm clock to KROQ and you'd hear whatever everyone else was hearing.

Actually, one of the few music experiences I am still able to get really into is opera. One reason, I think, is that once you're at an opera, not only are you a captive audience, but the structure of the music itself is a clever mix of the familiar and the new. Each bit of music is new, but the underlying themes are always there.

After I saw Verdi's Rigoletto for the first time, I couldn't stop thinking about "La donna è mobile." (Yes, this literally translates as "women are fickle," but if you think that's what it means in context you're missing the whole point of the opera). When I looked it up, I learned that soon after the premier in 1851, "every gondolier in Venice was singing it."

How cool is that? I don't know what the 2016 equivalent of this would be, or even if there is one. For now, the closest I get is when I go to my exercise class, where the geniuses at Les Mills have picked out just the songs I didn't know I wanted to hear, and I fall in love without knowing it, and then I go home and listen to the songs -- songs that are already utterly familiar to me.

I don't love it that my music listening is so highly determined by fitness people. Something about that seems wrong. But what am I going to do?

Gutting The Social Commentary Of Opera: The Case Of The Marriage Of Figaro

From the COC production.

 Over the weekend, I went to see Mozart's Marriage of Figaro at the COC. It is an amazing opera, dealing with sex, love, and the fickle nature of the human heart. It's also about class, gender, power, and the relics of the feudal system in the eighteenth century -- but unfortunately you wouldn't know that from the staging of the COC production.

Do you know the story? It's the eighteenth century,  and the Count's loyal servant Figaro is about to marry the lovely Susanna, the Countess's maid. The Count is bored with his wife the Countess, whom he once loved passionately. He not only flirts with his more attractive female underlings, he also abuses his position of power to badger and coerce them into reciprocating his sexual attentions.

Even though the Count says he is all about abolishing "feudal privilege," in fact he is plotting and scheming to prevent the marriage so he can have Susanna all to himself. Through plotting and scheming of their own, Susanna, the Countess, and Figaro subvert his plans, and make a fool out of him.

Like so many works of artistic genius, the opera works along multiple dimensions. It's a comedy, with ridiculous disguises, mistaken identities, people hiding behind curtains, that sort of thing. It's also a love story, with all the modern rom-com conventions. And, on top of all that, it's a social commentary.

One of the more interesting social commentary aspects is reflection on the "sexual double standard." Why does the Count get to fool around with impunity, while his wife's briefest admiring glance brings censure and rage? Yes -- it turns out that people have actually been thinking about this problem for over two hundred years.

But the main social commentary has to do with power. The Count gets to do whatever he wants, because -- well, because he's the Count. If this includes sex with Susanna -- well, what are Figaro and Susanna going to do? They're servants. They're under his orders and under his protection. It's not like they can up and leave, wander the countryside for other options.

The opera takes you to the brink of horror -- is the Count really going to rape Susanna and prevent Figaro from marrying her, thus ruining both of their lives? -- before bringing you back to a happy ending through antics and absurd plot devices (literally "OMG, that's actually Figaro's long lost mom!").

Of course the Director chose to showcase how relevant a story of class, power, and sex is to our modern era -- Oh, just kidding! In fact the staging was such as to undercut the social justice commentary and to "psychologize" the whole thing.

Infuriatingly, the physical direction showed Susanna sort of willingly going along, as if it's a kind of half-hearted flirtation on her part and not a case of control of the weak from the strong. The Count is presented not as a menace, but just as a kind of bossy and irritable guy. There's a scene where in the story, the Count is going to kill someone out of jealous rage. The way it was in this production, you find yourself thinking, "Well, he'll just shout a lot and then he'll get over it." It changes the whole point of the story.

In the program notes, the Director says that in his interpretation, the characters are "completely torn between morality, desire, and impulse," and that this was why he wanted to "follow the characters into their darkest psychological depths, but at the same time leave space for exploring the utopian moments in Mozart's music."

Could any artistic statement be more of its time? I mean, for all the ridiculous hand-wringing about political correctness, so much art has become de-politicized. Or -- you can make political statements these days, but you can't put politics and entertainment together. Somehow it's like people think the Venn diagram of "entertainment" and that of "thinking about society" should be empty.

There's a trend of focusing on individuals, and what's in their hearts and minds, instead of the social structures and context around them. The forces of of individualism have become so deep and pervasive, it's like people find it hard to even conceptualize the idea of "social justice" as "social." The director thus sees only individual characters, torn between their own sense of morality, dignity and obligation, and their own desire, eros, and impulse.

As longtime readers know, this keeps happening to me with opera. I thought it might be something to do with the COC, but many of the productions with the same problem were created in other places and then brought here. So it's some kind of widespread phenomenon.

With all these productions, you'd think we were all living in a post-class and post-gender paradise, where everyone is equal and no one can exert absurd control over one another, where the idea of coercion and sexual assault through power dynamics was somehow past us.

As if you'd say to yourself, "Well, this opera is partly about power, gender, and class. But we don't have those problems in our society, so ... Wait, I know, I'll make it about the characters' 'darkest psychological depths!'"

When Updating Opera Means Blandifying It; Or, Why I Hated The COC's Don Giovanni

From the COC production.

Let me start by saying right up front that I have nothing against updating opera productions. Sure -- put your characters in a modern board room. Make it be about the Iraq War. Use business suits. I love it.

However, a lot of updating I've seen lately I have hated. And the reason I've hated it is that, contrary to what is often thought, the effect of some updating is not to make opera more disturbing, relevant, thought-provoking, or edgy, but rather to make it more bland, more mushy, and more irrelevant. 

When someone complains about an updated opera production, the standard line is that they're some kind of traditionalists, who want to be lulled by opera's beauty and tradition, and that presenting them with disturbing contemporary commentary is too jarring for them.

Let me just say: for me that is the opposite of the problem. What I see in some updating is, instead, a kind of gutting of the themes of the opera. (#notallupdating).

The worst updating involves seemingly disconnected "cool" aesthetic choices, minimalist staging, and "interesting" effects like "Oh, the whole thing is happening inside a play inside a nineteenth-century garden!"

Often, I find the effect to be one of distancing the audience from the themes of the opera -- themes that, given opera, are often profoundly disturbing in themselves when the production is straightforward.

For example, I recently saw the COC's production of Don Giovanni. I kind of love Wikipedia's quick synopsis of the opera itself: "Don Giovanni, a young, arrogant, and sexually promiscuous nobleman, abuses and outrages everyone else in the cast, until he encounters something he cannot kill, beat up, dodge, or outwit."

In the recent COC production, several elements of the story were re-imagined. It was set in the 20th century, and the characters' relationships were changed so that everyone in the story who is not part of Don Giovanni's family is part of the same extended family. Don Giovanni is dressed like an ordinary schlump, usually in a ratty overcoat. About his re-imagining, the director says that it's not really about Don G. being a "bad person." Instead:

"The main clash here is between two radically different ideas about how to live a good life ... Don Giovanni here is not a seducer or a playboy; he is an older man, somebody who has experienced heartbreak and disappointment. He comes in with something of the messiah complex, but his utopia of a new kind of community unsettles everybody in the family."

I thought this approach destroyed the opera by undercutting its most interesting and important themes, without being bold enough to suggest other ones. Here are just three examples.

1. Power, money, and coercion.

In the traditional story, Don Giovanni uses his status and money as a nobleman to get what he wants at huge costs to everyone else. Because marriage to a nobleman would transform most people's lives beyond belief, young women -- such as the servant Zerlina -- will go along with him whatever he proposes. By falsely suggesting marriage will result, Don Giovanni is able to coerce and deceive women into having sex with them, even though in the traditional cultural setting, this could ruin their lives.

But in this production, any reflection on how massive wealth inequality impacts social relations is completely lost, since Don G. is just some guy, the family is presented as well to do, and Zerlina isn't a servant at all but rather the daughter of one of the family members.

Disturbing commentary on money, class, and society? Gone.

2. Love, Sex, and the Seductiveness of Evil.

Even if you gut the social commentary, you still have the extremely interesting possibility of presenting the theme related to the drives of lust and affection and how those can point in the opposite direction from the drives of good sense, love, and other nice things. It is utterly bizarre to me how in the massive suburbanization of modern life there's this party line that lust and sex are nice parts of love and go along naturally with it, while meanwhile there's this whole other thing happening with rape and sexual assaults and people in public life being completely undone by their non-monogamy.

In the traditional story, Don Giovanni is a bad guy. But he's an attractive guy. Part of that is his money, sure, but it's also because sometimes, evil is attractive -- that's one of those universal and universally interesting things about the human existence.

But in this production, Don G. isn't "evil," he's just some guy with some other ideas about living, and his charismatic effects are a total mystery. Was I the only person watching and thinking, "Who on earth would be sexually attracted to this slouching, arrogant asshole in a dirty coat?"

If you can't show why he's attractive, you can't even start with themes, because the story doesn't make sense. Plus, if Don G. is just a person with other ideas about "the good life," that suggests the update would present the opera as a reflection on the problems of modern monogamy and the possibility of something else.

You know what? That would have been AMAZING. It would have been an opera about something different, but something actually interesting, relevant, and possibly destabilizing to the audience. But I didn't see anything like that.

3. Unrepentance and Fate.

Everyone who talks about Don Giovanni seems to mention the fact that at the end ghosts appear and give him a chance to repent, and he refuses, and then goes to hell. I love that the opera traditionally has been seen as having comic elements, melodramatic elements, and supernatural elements.

But once you've gotten rid of Don Giovanni being a bad guy, the whole thing with the ghosts and supernatural elements doesn't really make sense. Is he psychologically persecuting himself? If he just has other ideas about "the good life," why would he do that? If the forces against him are that he's being ganged up on, that whole punishment and refusal to repent thing just doesn't make any sense.

Weirdly, with respect to the whole re-imagining the story idea, this Toronto Star review suggests that somehow, as traditionally told, the themes of Don Giovanni wouldn't make sense in our modern world:

"If you come to Don Giovanni to see a swaggering specimen of macho humanity break the hearts of numerous women without impunity, you will be disappointed. In this post-Ghomeshi, post-Cosby, post-Dalhousie Dentistry era, it’s hard to see how an old-school reading of this opera would fly any more."

This is mystifying to me. You're saying the themes of rich and powerful people using their influence to get other people to have sex with them -- sex that ends up being destructive or damaging -- are irrelevant to the modern world? That the stories alluded to show that that theme is passe? If anything it's the opposite. The traditional story is too relevant. It's presenting it straight that would really disturbing, destabilizing, and edgy.

It's not the traditional opera that's somehow a safe bet, a mushy, comfortable, inert bit of aesthetic fun. It's the update.

Is Culture Snobbery The New Resistance?

When I was a young person in the 80s I remember people talking about how "capitalism consumes everything" and how I was like "Oh, yeah I guess," but I was also sort of like "no it doesn't: what about punk rock? what about me and my friends with our thrift store clothes and bizarre hairstyles? what about protests? what about hanging out, not doing anything?"

Now, I feel like if you wanted to do a school project diorama showcasing the concept "CAPITALISM CONSUMES EVERYTHING," all you'd have to do is slap a giant glass dome over some part of the modern world and you'd be good to go.

Tbh, I didn't really see it coming. But more than ever it feels like resistance is futile. No matter what you do trying to challenge the status quo, the status quo has a way of eating that shit up and spitting it back out as a commodity.

Punk sensibility is now "personal style & branding." Protests feel like the symbol of resistance necessary to buttress the true power of the entrenched. And anything you do on the internet is valuable to someone in the form of data about you -- turning your quietest mood, your nostalgic thought, or your sexy imagining into someone else's dollars.

Plus somehow the internet, which started as the experience of connecting with a handful of other weirdos talking about something no one cares about with no one else paying attention, has become the opposite: a place where nothing really counts unless it's seen, and liked, and favorited, and making good stats.

The "hanging out" of the slacker generation, Gen-X, which was at least nominally anti-establishment and involved actual cafes and actual reading and actual talking to people, seems to have given way to social networking and watching stuff.

I don't know what the answer is but I will say that a quality in myself that I used to think of as conformist I now think of as resistance and it is this: I am a culture snob.

Yeah, that's right. I'm a culture snob. And I'm not ashamed to say it. I don't have a TV. I don't watch any "shows" or do Netflix. I occasionally go to the movies but it's usually high-brow shit like 8 1/2 or other international films. I don't read general interest or fashion magazines and I don't read the Huffington Post and I don't look at TMZ.

I read a lot. I like The New Yorker. I like to go to the opera.

When I was young I was inclined to see these things in the light of establishment activities and I was inclined to be a bit embarrassed by them.

I used to fall all over myself explaining -- and this is true, too -- that one reason I didn't have a TV was that I was a channel flipper, and I would flip channels endlessly, couldn't really stop flipping channels, even as it felt like my life was wasting away.

I used to fall all over myself explaining that I didn't have anything against trashy movies and stupid things -- it was just that I was easily bored and needed a high level of intellectual stimulation all the time not to fall into pits of ennui. Like I had a personality problem.

Well, no more apologizing.

Because while I'm obviously not naive enough to think that actual artistic things and actual literature are somehow outside the capitalism and commodification machine, I do think they offer something "entertainment" often doesn't, and that is the capacity to challenge and disturb you in ways you didn't expect or foresee or maybe didn't think possible.

My reflections on lifehacking last week got me thinking about the opposite of lifehacking, and I thought about that whole "slow food" movement and how there might be a "slow life" movement and that reminded me how many of my activities are, relative to most people, pretty damn slow.

This led me to check out the Wikipedia page on the "Slow Movement." Interestingly, while there's a "slow art" (which looks interesting) and a "slow media," there isn't really a "slow culture" in the sense of what it means to read and listen and look and think about things in general in the old receptive and open-ended way, where you might spend an afternoon reading a novel, or listen to a whole album, all the songs in a row, or whatever.

The Slow Movement seems to take as one of its antagonists things like Twitter, on grounds that OMG 140 characters? But I think that is a mistake. There's nothing wrong with Twitter as long as it doesn't take over your whole life. It's the way these things take over your life, so you can't do anything slow, that's the problem.

I now regard my own ability to sit down and read quietly like a rare and treasured thing that has to be nurtured and kept alive. I'm certainly not going to risk damaging it by, say, allowing push notifications on my phone.

Finally, I'd like to say that as a person who seldom consumes mainstream entertainment media, I'm frankly a little shocked by the scene out there. Isn't there so much sexist crap? Isn't there ridiculous racial stereotyping? Isn't there a lot of nationalism and violence and absurd Good Guys Fight Bad Guys And You're With Us Or Against Us?

Kids? Just say no. Slow it down! Culture snobbery FTW!

When It Comes To The Moral Problem, You Can Run, But You Can't Hide

Fricka and Wotan during a crucial negotiation, Die Valkyrie, Paris 2013

Warning:  This post discusses moral theory, economics, and Wagner. If your brain has been softened by Mad Men binge watching, wake up! Sharpen your pencils!

I start this train of thought with the seemingly simple question, why ought people to play by the rules they've agreed to? Like, why should you keep your agreements and contracts if you could get away with fraud? Why should you put a stamp on a letter if you knew it would slip through the cracks?

I was prompted to think about this first by the question in The Ethicist about the guy who wanted to hand in one paper for credit in two different college classes. Chuck Klosterman, who seems like a nice guy but who definitely does not deserve to be called even "An Ethicist," never mind "The Ethicist," said there was no problem handing in one paper for more than one course.

This led to the predictable controversy and hand-wringing. OMG won't somebody think of the children?! At one point someone brought up the possibility that doing this was against university policy. And Klosterman said that was irrelevant: if there was a policy against gay sex, that would obviously not make gay sex immoral.

This did not, and does not, strike me as a suitable analogy. What kind of sex you're having is irrelevant to your education. But if the exam policy says "no talking to your fellow students about the questions," then of course talking to your fellow students about the questions is cheating, and wrong. It doesn't matter that talking to your fellow students about the questions is not wrong in itself.

So this got me thinking, what about all the ways you can get away with not playing by the rules? What about in commerce, trade, business? 

It seems to me there are two possible answers to the question of why people ought to play by the rules, and I'm going to say that both of them require reflection on the deep and puzzling question of what is right and wrong.

If that's true, I think it's a pretty dramatic conclusion. Because it seems to entail, among other things, that you can't set up any economic system that doesn't ultimately rest on values  - values which, of course, might be contentious. You can't just legislate order out of chaos.

Before we get to the two answers, we have to set aside an attempt to avoid the question by saying that not playing by the rules is in your own simple self-interest, because if you don't, you'll get caught and you won't be able to reap the benefits of cooperation and exchange. So the answer would be: don't play by the rules, you'll suffer for it, because the rest of us won't let you play.

But this rests on beliefs that seem empirically false. People get away with stuff all the time. I bet that kid got away with handing in one paper for two courses. I remember reading somewhere -- I thought it was the Freakonomics blog, but I can't find it -- about an economist who discovers that he can get away without stamping a letter, who then thinks, well, indeed, if I can do this, why am I buying stamps at all? Often it will be in your self-interest to break the rules.

So this, I set aside.

The first real answer answer is that you could say that since an agreement to play by the rules is like a promise, it's immoral to cheat, just as it's immoral to break a promise.

That's fine as far as it goes, but it doesn't go very far in the absence of moral theory. Economic reasoning uses rational choice theory, and rational choice theory says that people, insofar as they are rational, make choices based on fulfilling their own preferences at the least cost to themselves. So how could something's "being moral" be a good reason to do it?

One thing you hear about this is that because of our feeling and psychology, we get a "ping" of pleasure from doing the right thing. More formally, you might say that our moral feelings are there to shape our preferences toward doing the right thing.

But in the absence of a moral theory, this is question-begging, since the issue isn't whether we have those feelings, it's whether we ought to have to those feelings.

Feelings and preference are things you can act to foster or act to eliminate. For example, suppose you were born in a strict religious home, and you were taught that dancing was a sin, and you grew up to think that was stupid, and that dancing was great. You might have a leftover "feeling" against dancing. But clearly the right thing to do would be to "de-bias" yourself: try to get the feeling to go away.

Now, how would you know whether your inclination or preference for keeping your agreements and playing by the rules is one to foster and keep or one to get rid of? It's not obvious. The idea that morality is just for chumps is thousands of years old. If it is, you'd be better off seeking psychological treatment, drugs, or hypnotism to rid yourself of these irrational feelings of integrity.

Doc! I can't cheat! You gotta help me, doc!

The second answer -- well, it's not an answer so much as a way of thinking about the problem -- is that it's in the nature of rules that there have to be consequences for breaking them, and although such a system might not be perfect, it'll dissuade enough of the people enough of the time.

True enough. But notice how deeply morality is implicated in this answer. Is the punishment only for motivation? Can the punishment be unfair? What makes it unfair?

Worse, how do you make a system with an effective punishment system that isn't also a surveillance state with an all powerful person or institution at the top -- something to impose the order the system relies on?

I was pondering these questions as I went to see the four operas of Wagner's Ring cycle recently. Amazing, incredible; if you think Wagner is about metal breast plates please look again at the picture at the top of this post, depicting a crucial negotiation scene among the gods at Valhalla.

Anyway, in reading around about the operas, I came upon this excellent book review by philosopher Jerry Fodor, who brings up related thoughts about law and contracts. In particular, he argues that the Ring is largely about "a paradox" of law and order: "laws and contracts are obeyed when the cost of breaking them isn’t reckoned to be worth the benefits." It's in moments of passion that laws and contracts are needed, to preserve order. But when passions are intense -- when desire is in ascendance, when passion would "give anything to have its way," law and order must break down, precisely because the costs of compliance are now reckoned as astronomical.

So just when you need law and contracts to keep order, they cannot help but fail. It's related to the morality problem: the full version of the "why" can never be simply the rationality of agreements. 

Fodor puts the conclusion beautifully:  "So if it’s not law and it’s not love, what then, according to the Ring, is the solution of the problem of order? The Ring doesn’t offer one."

There just isn't any answer.

And by the way -- of course it would be unethical to hand in one paper for more than one class without permission. Duh!

Artistic Interpretation And The Fear Of Human Nature

I went to see Rigoletto at the Canadian Opera Company a couple of days ago.  Maybe you know the set up?  Rigoletto is the court jester for the Duke.  The Duke is a big time seducer, who sets his sights on Rigoletto's pure and virginal daughter, Gilda.  The Duke follows Gilda home, and tells her he is a poor student; she falls for it and falls madly in love with him.  Rigoletto tries to have the Duke killed, and in her passion for the Duke, Gilda substitutes herself for him.  She is killed instead.

David Lomeli as The Duke

The opera itself is an amazing piece of art, and musically the performance was great.  So I couldn't help but enjoy myself.  But it wasn't because of the staging, which drove me nuts.

The staging was complicated, metaphorical, and weird just where it should have been simple, literal, and normal.   When it comes to opera, you should often just play it straight.  Because if you play it straight, it knocks you over.  That's what opera is like.  If it's complicated, metaphorical, and weird, that gets in the way of what is going on.

Worse, it distances the audience from the narrative.  It says, "Hey, it's OPERA.  You're at a PERFORMANCE.  We went through special efforts to STAGE it so it would be THOUGHT-PROVOKING.  Are we awseome?" 

In this particular staging, the Duke woos Gilda while they're standing and sitting on the dining room table.  There's a scene in which the Duke and Gilda are clearly having sex, and this is depicted as happening on a sofa in a living room with the courtiers all gathered around.  Gilda spends half the time in a white bit of underclothing.  And all this in ninetheenth-century costumes and scenery.  A nineteenth century in which obviously Gilda would be in her clothes in public; sex happens in private; and wooing happens on sofas.

It might seem that these techniques would involve the audience, through indirect allusion.  Maybe that can work, but it didn't in this case, and I think with opera, it often doesn't.  Because the emotion of the stories is made most vivid by their seeming real:  when you can really believe that you're watching the Duke promise the world to this young girl and then throw her away.  And the effect of these complex weird things is really the opposite.

I have a dark theory about why this happens so often here (I don't notice it in Europe, but I have before at the COC).  It has to do with the fear people have of actually presenting the story itself.  So often in opera when there is something horrifying or extreme or outrageous, it gets this treatment, and I think the reason is that people are scared to play it straight.

They're scared to say something about how horrible people really are, how evil and corrupt they can be.  Making it into a "show" makes those things seem less real -- like, Oh, look, the nineteenth century, oh, a virgin, oh oh oh.

As opposed to having the story remind you of things that happened in your own life and that of your loved ones.

Which of course is a scam.  As if that crazed thirst for vengeance, the using of the poor by the rich, and the possible loss of all you value in life was all, somehow, behind us.

The Modern Sad Castration Of Operatic Comedies

I didn't see it at the Met, I just thought this poster by Chagall was too cool not to use.

I went to the opera, and I saw The Magic Flute.  Of course it was great.  It's a Mozart comedy.  What's not to like? 

At the same time, I gotta say that staging-wise, I got issues.  My complaint is this.  Going to modern productions of operatic comedies, you'd think that somehow irrationality, sex, sexism, and sexual inappropriateness were, like, so over that the audience would be mystified by their appearance.  Everything weird and difficult and touchy about sex gets staged in a way to make it completely ... completely foreign.  Like silly.  Like, not comico-serious, as these things were clearly intended, but just comical.

In The Magic Flute, the comico-serious elements include:  the idea that trusting women gets you into trouble, because women are irrational and lie; the idea that learning to become a full male adult means learning how to be cold and cruel to your girlfriend, the idea that some people are unlucky enough to never have love and sex and that's just the way it is, and the possibility that some of those unlucky people will, like the "lustful slave" Monostato, force others to have sex with them.

Can we all agree that these are all difficult and troubling things?  Can we also agree that they're not at all irrelevant to modern life? 

Like all great works of art, The Magic Flute doesn't tell you what to think about any of these things; it just puts them into a certain kind of context so you see them and have to think about them in a certain way. 

But the production I saw just short-circuited all of that by making it unreal.  In this case the unreality effect was achieved by staging the action of the opera as if it were a play-within-a-play, a cute play at an eighteenth century garden party.  We're not watching Monostato; we're watching some nice young man play at being Monostato.

This way, the troubling things aren't real at all; they're rendered completely distanced from us and harmless.  Now the story isn't, "Yikes, Love And Sex Make People Crazy," instead, as my friend said, the story is more like "Oh, Those Eighteenth Century People Were So Weird, Isn't It Cute And Funny?"

Right.  Because now that we've had feminism and the sexual revolution everything's like hunky dory and men and women just come together with perfect understanding and part with perfect peace and nobody feels left out of the sexual lottery. Uh-huh. 

Obviously I know that the distancing isn't really because people think that but probably has to do with things like "Oh, people going to the opera want a Nice Evening Out and for most people nowadays A Nice Evening Out is incompatible with thinking about things like the rape of a young beautiful woman by an ugly, unloved, and unwanted man. 

Sure.  But that can't be the whole story, because the operatic tragedies don't seem to run into this problem, only the comedies do.  We have no problem, it seems, with the other big themes in opera. I went to see Aida last fall and it was staged in such a way as to heighten the tension about war and enslavement.  

Violence is OK; it's sex we seem to be upset about.  It's funny, here we are, willing to post our sex lives and love lives on Facebook and share the most intimate details, but we can't manage a post-adolescent engagement on the operatic stage.

I guess it just means in three hundred years people will be saying "Oh Those Twentyfirst Century People Were So Weird, Isn't It Cute and Funny?"  Plus ça change and all that, I guess, but it seems a little sad.

Dreaming of Valhalla

 Even though I'm obsessed with the problem of being mortal, I never really found the idea of heaven convincing as a solution. 

Obviously, as an atheist I don't believe that heaven exists.  But my difficulty has always gone deeper than that:  even if it did exist, I thought, it wouldn't address the problem. I mean, it's supposed to be so great, heaven, but what's so great about placidity, lustlessness, nothing to do, and endless perfect weather?  Sounds really boring.  Even pretending to myself that I would go to a heaven-like place never made me feel any less bad about the fact that I am going to die.

But of course, heaven's not the only game in town.  There's also Valhalla. 

Over the summer I went to see the second opera in Wagner's Ring, The Valkyrie, at the Paris Opera.  The plot of the Ring is mindbogglingly complex, but the main thing about it is that it concerns, as the last opera is titled, the Twilight of the Gods -- a time in which the power of the gods is fading and the humans are taking over.  Wotan, the patriarch of the gods of the story, sets the events of the story in motion through his willingness to do anything -- even sacrifice his sister-in-law, Freia -- in order to build Valhalla. 

Valhalla is a kind of mix between a palace, a military fort, and a paradise.  It is there that Wotan learns that his half-human offspring, Siegmund, has fallen in love with a woman who is already married and is also his sister.  It is there that he argues with his wife about how, and whether, Siegmund should be punished.  It is there that the Valkyries bring the bodies of fallen heroes.

The gods have eternal youth, guaranteed for them by the apples that Freia provides.  In the staging I saw, when the curtain opens on Valhalla we see a group of beautiful young persons, all dressed in white, throwing golden apples around and at each other and laughing.  The physical surroundings are perfect, and somehow really oversized.  After all, it is a palace.  So it is blissful, not in the quiet way of heaven, but in the rambunctious way of sex and showing off and gluttony and the struggle for power. 

Now that as an afterlife would be beyond suitable.  If Valhalla where I was going, I would have no regrets about mortality.  You can sign me up for that any time. 

Of course, one of the main points of the opera is that you can't have it, Valhalla, and in the few weeks after seeing it I became a little obsessed with the question of what, exactly, Wagner was trying to tell us with this story.  It's not easy to find out about what people think about this question:  most of the google hits for "philosophy" "Wagner" and so on get you pages about Wagner's stated philosophical ideas about art and so on, which aren't what I'm looking for.

In the opera, two significant things about humans is that they are free, and that they love.  Siegmund is free, and his love for Sieglinde is so powerful that forced to choose between Valhalla and her, he doesn't hesitate.  It is partly this choice that moves Brunnehilda to disobedience and then Wotan to a resulting murderous rage.

I came up with three possible interpretations -- which I'm sure others have thought of, and some of which are probably more common than others.

First, that it's a comment on historical change and the rise of the individual.  Society used to require that people play their social roles without misbehavior and despite their inclinations; the humans in The Ring represent persons of modern life, who have a new kind of autonomy and individually.

Second, that it's a thought about the inevitability of the very worst things.  The gods are gods, but they behave terribly, and in a sense, it is greed that causes their downfall.  This would be a kind of universal statement about the impossibility of real goodness. 

Third, that it's about human nature and its better qualities.  The humans are powerful, not because they have Valhalla or because of their mad fighting skills but rather because they have the possibility of caring for one another so much.

On none of these interpretations are you supposed to want to go to Valhalla.  It's the site of rigidity, of terrible hubris, of military power run amok and unleavened with human kindness.

Nonetheless, it continues to exert a powerful hold on my imagination.  In the production in Paris, Valhalla had in its foreground gigantic letters that spelled out GERMANIA, bringing together, perhaps, some of these ideas.  You can say it's unsubtle, but it was truly spectacular.  This is how the letters looked in the mirror that hung over the entire stage, as they were being carried up to their places:

Even if it's terrible, how could you not want to go?

Some Things Are Better Than Funny

I recently finished reading Jincy Willett's Winner of the National Book Award. I selected this book at the store with trepidation, because almost all the comments on the back of the book were things like "A wonderful dark comedy! Hilarious!" "Very dark and very funny! Excellent book!" and "This black comedy will have you rocking in your chair with laughter!"

It's never good when the best thing you can say about something is that it's a "dark comedy." Fortunately, Jincy Willett's book is much better than all this suggests, mostly because it's not really a dark comedy at all. It's just a light-hearted and humorous treatment of some troubling and real life things.

I think people like to say "dark comedy" when they encounter something that is clearly troubling that is presented in anything less than a tragic way. It's like they think that to praise a work of art that treated a subject like rape or murder in anything but tragic terms would somehow make them into moral cretins or something. So they weasel out by saying "dark comedy."

I see this at the opera all the time and it drives me crazy. You know, a lot of those comic operas, like Così fan Tutte and Don Giovanni have a lot of serious parts in with the wise-cracking, flirting, and general swaggering around. Così fan Tutte is about the fleetingness of love. Don Giovanni is about a seducer, manipulator, and rapist who refuses to repent and goes to hell. So it's weird to have the audience guffawing like they're at a showing of the movie Dodgeball.

The genius of these operas is that they interweave the funny and the tragic together. But the audience—and even the directors—treat them as "dark comedies," and it just isn't right. At a recent performance of Don Giovanni I attended, the director staged the performance so that it seems like that Don Giovanni's first victim, Donna Anna, is complicit; then it seems kind of funny later when she is in an angry rage about what happened. But actually, he's had his way with her, against her wishes. And this is back when a sex act was a sex act, people! The servant Leporello, who tries to tell his master that what is is doing is wrong, is treated as a buffoon, making his complaints seem like whines.

The audience thought it all a laugh riot. Look at that Donna Anna, so upset! Leporello, so distraught! Donna Elvira's going to spend the rest of her life in a convent? Ha ha ha! Hilarious!

As I said, Jincy Willett's novel is better than a dark comedy. It's a light and occasionally amusing treatment of the age old human tragedies: life, death, love, sex, jealousy, manipulation, murder. It's not a laugh-riot. Thank heaven.