In memoriam: the first act quintet from Ingmar Bergman’s 1975 version of Die Zauberflöte:
(Tamino: Josef Köstlinger; Papageno: Håkan Hagegård; the ladies: Britt Marie Aruhn, Kirsten Vaupel, and Birgitta Smiding.) A safe vote for the best movie version of an opera ever—although I think the Powell-Pressburger Tales of Hoffmann should also be a contender—what’s most fun about Bergman’s rendition is that he is more true to Mozart and Schikaneder than most productions, while, at the same time, transforming the material into an almost stereotypical Bergman film. (Kind of like Bernard Shaw and Wagner, in a way.) This entire scene is done with nothing but lighting (except for those great Seventh Seal-prop-reject skulls), but the close-ups and editing make it completely surreal in spite of the self-conscious stage artifice. The ladies’ deep-focus entrance alone—eerie, funny, and so casually understated in its legerdemain—is still one of my favorite celluloid moments.

More Soviet animation: a portion of Mikhail Tsekhanovsky’s “Bazaar,” the only extant scene from his unfinished Pushkin adaptation The Tale of the Priest and His Worker Balda, dating from 1933 and scored by none other than Dmitri Shostakovich.

Shostakovich abandoned work on the feature-length film after the infamous 1936 Pravda article denouncing him. The majority of the footage was destroyed in a fire during World War II. (More details here.)

The truth is, laws, religions, creeds, and systems of ethics, instead of making society better than its best unit, make it worse than its average unit, because they are never up to date. You will ask me: “Why have them at all?” I will tell you. They are made necessary, though we all secretly detest them, by the fact that the number of people who can think out a line of conduct for themselves even on one point is very small, and the number who can afford the time for it still smaller. Nobody can afford the time to do it on all points. The professional thinker may on occasion make his own morality and philosophy as the cobbler may make his own boots; but the ordinary man of business must buy at the shop, so to speak, and put up with what he finds on sale there, whether it exactly suits him or not, because he can neither make a morality for himself nor do without one. This typewriter with which I am writing is the best I can get; but it is by no means a perfect instrument; and I have not the smallest doubt that in fifty years’ time authors will wonder how men could have put up with so clumsy a contrivance. When a better one is invented I shall buy it: until then, not being myself an inventor, I must make the best of it, just as my Protestant and Roman Catholic and Agnostic friends make the best of their imperfect creeds and systems.

—George Bernard Shaw, The Sanity of Art, 1895/1908

Kubrick and Jagger are pretty cool, but sharing a birthday with GBS? That makes getting older worthwhile.

Caricature by James Dexter Havens, 1935. Trivia: Havens was also the first American patient to receive insulin therapy for diabetes.

As for Periander, the man who gave information about the oracle to Thrasybulos, he was the son of Kypselos, and despot of Corinth. In his life, say the Corinthians, (and with them agree the Lesbians), there happened to him a very great marvel, namely that Arion of Methymna was carried ashore at Tainaron upon a dolphin’s back. This man was a harper second to none of those who then lived, and the first, so far as we know, who composed a dithyramb, naming it so and teaching it to a chorus at Corinth.

This Arion, they say, who for the most part of his time stayed with Periander, conceived a desire to sail to Italy and Sicily; and after he had there acquired large sums of money, he wished to return again to Corinth. He set forth therefore from Taras, and as he had faith in Corinthians more than in other men, he hired a ship with a crew of Corinthians. These, the story says, when out in open sea, formed a plot to cast Arion overboard and so possess his wealth; and he having obtained knowledge of this made entreaties to them, offering them his wealth and asking them to grant him his life. With this however he did not prevail upon them, but the men who were conveying him bade him either slay himself there, that he might receive burial on the land, or leap straightway into the sea. So Arion being driven to a strait entreated them that, since they were so minded, they would allow him to take his stand in full minstrel’s garb upon the deck of the ship and sing; and he promised to put himself to death after he had sung.

They then, well pleased to think that they should hear the best of all minstrels upon earth, drew back from the stern towards the middle of the ship; and he put on the full minstrel’s garb and took his lyre, and standing on the deck performed the Orthian measure. Then as the measure ended, he threw himself into the sea just as he was, in his full minstrel’s garb; and they went on sailing away to Corinth, but him, they say, a dolphin supported on its back and brought him to shore at Tainaron: and when he had come to land he proceeded to Corinth with his minstrel’s garb.

Thither having arrived he related all that had been done; and Periander doubting of his story kept Arion in guard and would let him go nowhere, while he kept careful watch for those who had conveyed him. When these came, he called them and inquired of them if they had any report to make of Arion; and when they said that he was safe in Italy and that they had left him at Taras faring well, Arion suddenly appeared before them in the same guise as when he made his leap from the ship; and they being struck with amazement were no longer able to deny when they were questioned.

—Herodotus, The Histories, 1.23-24
(trans. G.C. Macaulay)

This might just be the best beach book ever. The Arion story, by the way, was made into an opera by Alec Roth and Vikram Seth in 1994.

I wasn’t going to come back to the Jerry Hadley story, but at ArtsJournal, Terry Teachout and CultureGrrl are not letting go of it in interesting fashion. And you’ll find, at the end, that a suitable moral lies there.

Rosenbaum was of the opinion that bad reviews played a part in Hadley’s suicide (more here, here, and here):

Critics have to call it as they see it. But perhaps this singer’s suicide suggests that journalistic discussion of the shortcomings of artists needs to be done in a different spirit, with more sensitivity, than exposés of professional malfeasance. When we criticize how people perform their jobs, we’re attacking what they do. If they’re unethical, incompetent or merely wrongheaded, that’s fair game for a hard-hitting appraisal. But when we disparage an artist, we’re attacking who they are. Whenever they perform or create, they’re completely exposed and putting their entire beings on the line.

If you’re a professional, exposure of your malfeasance is the critic’s job. Personal attacks? Right out. But I didn’t see any personal attacks in critical reaction to Hadley’s 1999 Gatsby performance, however harsh the assessment. I’ll say this—I never write a criticism without asking myself if I would consider it unfair if I was the performer. Is that enough? It has to be.

Teachout took the opposite tack, soberly shaking his head at the spectacle of a career gone down in flames. After some angry feedback, he had this follow up:

The world is a hard place, and the opera business is, or can be, one of its toughest neighborhoods. Those who think otherwise know nothing about it. Those who pretend otherwise are kidding themselves.

Now, the opera world as a Chandleresque Darwinian dystopia seems a little overblown for an industry that puts people in funny costumes and sends them out on stage to sing, even if supply does vastly outstrip demand. Still, tough-guy prose can be fun to write. But Teachout also quotes detective novelist Rex Stout saying that refusing to speak ill of the dead reflects a fear of death. Here’s the point: I think all that terse this-is-the-way-it-is realism reflects another fear, the fear of failure. And the thing is, Rosenbaum implies it, too. She advocates a kindler, gentler criticism out of hope that, when failure comes, we can all get a soft landing. Teachout disdains failure, keeping fear at bay with the bravado of the survivor. (Have “Spade and Archer” taken off the doors and windows.) We all fall somewhere on this continuum, I guess. But it’s the combination of that fear with something Rosenbaum says that’s really pernicious: [W]hen we disparage an artist, we’re attacking who they are. Whenever they perform or create, they’re completely exposed and putting their entire beings on the line.

Coming up is the best lesson I ever learned. I’ll even put it in boldface, I think it’s so important. There may be a lot of things I miss, a lot of things I don’t know—but I do know this:

What you do is not who you are.

This is a hard concept for a lot of people to bend their mind around, particularly in America, with its Protestant work ethic and rampant capitalism. But again: the mere fact of success or failure at a particular activity says nothing—nothing—about one’s worth as a human being. If you’re pursuing an evil activity, sure, that probably makes you evil. But if you fail to achieve a worthy goal, all that says is that you failed. And failure is probably the most common human condition there is.

Teachout writes, “I wish my last memory of Hadley were a happier one.” Memory is a recreative process—if you want your last memory of someone to be happy, just pick a happy memory. The number of operas with dramatically ridiculous final scenes well exhausts my fingers and toes. But good operas aren’t invalidated by bad endings.

In case you hadn’t noticed, we’re into summer programming around here—photos, food, video links, etc. But since we’re well on our way to that eight-billion-channels-all-the-time world the Internet keeps teasing us with, I at long last did an update on the increasingly unwieldy blogroll over there. Some were long-overdue lacunae (ANABlog, The Standing Room, etc.), while some are relative newcomers: countercritic covers the coverage, with sassy prose and the proper space devoted to dance, the red-headed stepchild of the fine arts (I’m half-afraid and half-eager for him to start reading the Globe); The Omniscient Mussel is but four posts old at this writing, but between one and fifty million cricket-loving Donald Tovey fans can’t be wrong; and Ear Trumpet is the new electronic outpost of Boston critic Richard Buell, who has also taken over the Globe‘s radio listings, turning them into a mouth-watering smorgasbord of Web-streamed delicacies.

Opera is still vastly underrepresented; until the day I expiate that sin, the blogroll over at Sieglinde’s Diaries will keep you plugged in. And The Rambler’s link page is still one of the universe’s great procrastination aids.

Anyway, I swear there’s substantial stuff in the works. I promise within the next two weeks I’ll be tackling economics again—that’s always good for a laugh.

Tanglewood, 7/20/07.

Over at Do the Math, Ethan Iverson strikes gold: the gorgeous 1969 Alfred Schnittke-scored animated short Ballerina on a Boat, from director Lev Atamanov. Here’s a couple more Schnittke animation scores—Andrei Khrzhanovskiy’s very weird, very creepy 1968 Glass Harmonica (part 1, part 2), and Khrzhanovskiy’s 1970 Armoire, which features some Schnittke baroque deconstruction.

As the new art form of the 20th century, cinema has had an effect on opera. The audience for opera has shrunk, like the audience for all classical music. But don’t blame that on the movies. It’s because of a breakdown in education that is scandalous and disgraceful. And it’s because America’s leaders take orders from corporations that believe culture need play only a small role, just enough to give their workers something to do.

—Tobias Picker, 2005

La Cieca passes on the news that Jerry Hadley has been taken off life support following his suicide attempt last week, so now it’s just a matter of time. I have nothing intelligent to say about this sad, sad story, but I do believe that deaths should be opportunities to celebrate lives—so I’d just like to mention two Hadley albums that have given me much joy over the years. His duet album with Thomas Hampson has long held honored status in various official Soho the Dog automobiles; their rendition of “Venti scudi” from Donizetti’s L’elisir d’amore never fails to have me laughing out loud. Also hunt around for Hadley’s apparently-out-of-print 1994 Broadway album In the Real World, which might just be the only “crossover” album I’ve ever liked; a collection of distinctly moody songs sung with direct emotion rather than surface stylisms. It was the record that introduced me to the hilarious Kander and Ebb song “I Don’t Remember Christmas,” and Hadley’s delicately melancholic version of Irving Berlin’s “What’ll I Do” as well as his full-out operatic rendition of Billy Strayhorn’s “Lush Life” are singularly memorable. Condolences to all his family and friends.