Opera's End Times (Preview)

On Substack, an essay on György Ligeti’s opera Le Grand Macabre and its (semi-)staging at this year’s Musikfest Berlin. The link is here.

Also in the essay (among others), an operatic cast of: Boulez, Berio, Ghelderode, Henze, Schönberg, Oliveros, Nono, Monk, Pousseur, Zimmermann.

Subscribers of all kinds—but especially paying!—are welcomed. Here’s a quick preview:

---

If love, even in its triumph, is sad rather than happy, what of the laughter that—far more than love—characterises this opera? Does it express joy, relief, release, or in itself a reaction to and of fear? Laughter, this escape valve and this trap, escapes easy definition. A reviewer at a website named ‘Wagner, Heavy Metal’ writes: “People laugh, but are not happy. People tell a joke, but are not funny. Here, irony strips satire of its various layers”. The opera’s absurdity is, Ligeti suggested, “more demonic than humorous”. Such humour celebrates misfortune and death, the satisfaction of individual appetite, the destruction of weaker others. It’s an affect familiar today. And yet Ligeti’s music itself has something generous about it. It inhabits these forces of the negative but is not subsumed by them. And while it refuses to counterweight them with a sincere hope or sentimentality, its laughter is not only that of the cynic or the sadist. In this, it leaves something open, something that cannot quite be pinned down: a laughter neither full nor empty, a laughter that echoes enigmatically; not—quite—the last laugh.

"If we can say 'this is the worst'": The Sturm und Drang of Aribert Reiman’s Lear (Preview)

 

A couple of nights ago, I went to see the opening night of the new Komische Oper production of Aribert Reimann’s opera Lear, directed by Barrie Kosky and staged in the Oper’s temporary location in a hangar at Tempelhof Airport. I reviewed it for Bachtrack, and you can find that review at this link. On Substack are some s further reflections on the opera and its staging, along with storms, tone-rows, Romanticism, bombardment, and howling. An excerpt here:

Reimann’s is “music that admonishes”, wrote the critic Stefan Amzol of the composer’s settings of Paul Celan, who had requested him in the 1950s to set his work. “Forces are suddenly released you never even knew existed”, Reimann remarked of his experience of wartime bombardment as a six-year old child. Last night in a bar, I overheard someone declare himself a “Nazi” to awkward silence. It was, it seemed, an act of provocation, a kind of empty gesture, but one backed up with real consequences: the man also declared his intention to vote for the AfD at the weekend’s elections.

The Nazi-era violence that was a kind of primal scene of Reimann’s creativity is, too, the legacy of the years of Fascism as they raise their head once more today. Such violence, and everything that led to and from it, is not necessarily the overt “subject” of Lear, but, perhaps, Reimann’s opera still has something to tell us about it: a warning, a haunting. For if there’s one thing we’ve learned of late, it’s to say, with Shakespeare’s Edgar: “the worst is not / So long as we can say ‘this is the worst’”.