Conversations with Tyler - Alex Ross on Music, Culture, and Criticism

Episode Date: September 22, 2020

To Alex Ross, good music critics must be well-rounded and have command of neighboring cultural areas. "When you're writing about opera, you're writing about literature as well as music, you're writing about staging, theater ideas, as well as music," says the veteran music journalist and staff writer for The New Yorker. His most recent book, Wagnerism: Art and Politics in the Shadow of Music, explores the complicated legacy of Wagner, as well as how music shapes and is shaped by its cultural context. Alex joined Tyler to discuss the book, what gets lost in the training of modern opera singers, the effect of recording technology on orchestras, why he doesn't have "guilty pleasures," how we should approach Wagner today, the irony behind most uses of "Ride of the Valkyries" in cinema, his favorite Orson Welles film, his predictions for concert attendance after COVID-19, why artistic life in Europe will likely recover faster than in America, Rothko's influence on composer Morton Feldman, his contender for the greatest pop album ever made, how his Harvard dissertation on James Joyce prepared him for a career writing about music, and more. Read a full transcript enhanced with helpful links, or watch the full video. Recorded August 20th, 2020 Other ways to connect Follow us on Twitter and Instagram Follow Tyler on Twitter  Email us: [e-mail] Subscribe at our newsletter page to have the latest Conversations with Tyler news sent straight to your inbox. 

Conversations with Tyler is produced by the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, bridging the gap between academic ideas and real-world problems. Learn more at Mercadis.org. And for more conversations, including videos, transcripts, and upcoming dates, visit Conversationswithtyler.com. Hello, everyone. Today I am here with Alex Ross, who is music critic for the New Yorker, author of The Best Selling, The Rest is Noise,

but most importantly, he has a new book out, fascinating work called Wagnerism, Art and Politics and the Shadow of Music. Alex, welcome. Thank you so much. Wonderful to be here. I have so many questions about Wagner. Let me start with one. Why is it I have the perception that the truly great Wagner recordings come from the 1950s or the 1960s? If I think even of the talk you gave for the New Yorker, well, you talk about Kyle Barrett and Schulte and Fertfengler. Those are ancient recordings, Clement Krauss. That was what, 1993. What has happened to the recording quality of Wagner? That's an interesting question. There are

great many wonderful Wagner voices today. And, you know, there's always a little bit of a dearth in one category or another. We never seem to be at the moment where, you know, there are sort of a surfeit of outstanding voices for every role. But there's no lack of work. But there's no lack of wonderful about your singers. But it is true that there was this extraordinary outpouring of recordings in the 50s and the 60s. And I think it had something to do with all of these singers. It was just an extraordinary generation of singers to begin with Hans Hauter and Austrian Varnai and then Björgneielsen a little later, Wolfgang Vindgassen. But I think because of the Second World War created this kind of Césiura.

And a bunch of singers went into exile and others were remained in Nazi Germany and collaborated or didn't collaborate to whatever extent. And then after the war, they all came back together and Byreuth, Reuters resumed with what seemed to be a really new philosophy and a new approach under the Wagner grandson. And so suddenly there was this explosion, or so there was this pent-up kind of energy. But, you know, it isn't just about the singing quality. There is an expressive power to those voices. And it's sort of a question, I think this comes up throughout opera, not just in Wagner. A high technical quality of voices today, but it's not so easy to find this total expressive conviction, whether in Wagner or Verdi or Mozart.

art. And so I think in terms of the training of opera voices today, there might be a little too much emphasis on sheer technique and less on expression and the use of language and the communication of drama through the voice. And why is this different for Wagner, if we think about Beethoven piano sonatas, which also blossomed after the end of the Second World War? Just in the last two years, you have cycles by Igor Levitt, Jonathan Biss, Martino Terimo, Daniel bin Piano, Stephen Massey, no insertive Stefan Massey. He doesn't even have his own Wikipedia page, and they're tremendous, right? Fanfare says, this is as good as Solomon or Pellini or Kempth. Nothing like that for Wagner. They're both German composers. Why hasn't the meaningfulness been drained out of Beethoven pianism the same way? Well, again, I wouldn't say that the meaningfulness has been drained out of Wagner singing. I mean, you have some tremendous singers right now. I mean, Lisa Davidson, the young Swedish soprano, I think, has incredible potential to become possibly a singer almost at the level of Nielsen in terms of sheer technique.

You know, we've had this great run of performances from Renee Pop, and there are younger singers in that category who, I think, could easily carry that on, Guntgen Gross book, and some others. And the tenor's maybe a little less so. I'm not as much a fan of Jonas Kaufman as some others are in terms of his Wagner's thinking. It seems a little contained to me. But yes, I wouldn't put it quite as starkly as that. But definitely I don't feel this sort of overall sense of dramatic immersion. And I think just because this opera is just so much more complicated, you know, in terms of putting all these ingredients together and making an effective

fusion in terms of having the right singers, the right conductor, the right stage director. It's, you know, a pianist, you know, on his or her own can just, you know, make a great Beethoven recording without meeting all of these sort of, you know, cogs and wheels and sort of working pieces to depend on. So just, you know, Wagner, it's always tricky. And people are always saying that all the great Wagner singers are the past. People said that in 50s and 60s. They said, oh, you should have heard so and so. And so this bemoaning of the lost golden age is a very familiar syndrome in the conversation about opera. But it seems also the conductors are an issue.

So there are maybe more wonderful conductors today than ever before. But there's not a single one doing Wagner that I really should care about, it feels to me. Is that wrong? Is it overly homogenized? And is that part of the bargain with modernity, higher quality, more uniformity and interpretation? I do agree with that. I mean, that's absolutely a general issue in musical interpretation these days. You just don't have these geographical distinctions among orchestras in different countries that you used to, where just a French wind section sounded quite different from a German one. And it's been called the Americanization of orchestral sound, because the great American orchestras of the 20th century... tended to smooth out those regional differences, even as they incorporated players from so many different traditions. They tended to smooth out those differences. And then I think that

attitude has spread backward back to Europe in terms of European orchestras just don't have as much of that distinction. But what's the production function behind that? So it seems the musical world would love to have additional excitement. Someone like Doudamel comes along, but everyone thinks of him. It's certainly been good for his career, right? Why doesn't some orchestra, some opera company, deviate from the homogenization norm? What stops that from happening? What is it people can't do anymore? It's just such a highly professionalized field, you know, in terms of how players are chosen and this lengthy, lengthy process of the audition process and before the audition process,

the conservatory training process. And, you know, people, take the sheer question of technique very, very seriously and take pride in it, you know, as they should, because the technical level of orchestra players today is higher than it's ever been. And if you just go back to classic recordings, you might hear more expression, you might hear more sense of musical understanding. The playing is not going to be as good as it is today, just in sheer technical terms. That's a trade-off that deserves to be questioned, you know, because when you go back to those old recordings, sometimes you just don't care if there are a few more horn flubs or a slightly sour wind sound wind.

You're getting this wonderful sense of expression. So I think it's that professionalization, the specialization, the self-consciousness. Scholars have written about how the advent of recording itself made orchestras much more self-conscious about their sound, more eager to avoid mistakes, getting away from that kind of looser, slightly more chaotic understanding of orchestral ensemble that Fert Fingler, for example, prized. He just never liked it when everyone was absolutely sort of smacked together in this precise way, and he criticized Toscanini on those grounds. So it's sort of shifting aesthetics, shifting standards.

of taste, I would love to see certain orchestras, certain conductors, really shake things up and sort of step away from that extreme concentration on the technical, pure technical standard. But who's going to be the first to do it? Because the first person to do it will be questioned and criticized, you know, what's happened to, you know, the perfection of our sound. So it's a tricky move to make. You see it in early music. You see this much looser, more impromptuery, more flavorful kind of approach in early music. And I wish we could bring some of that spontaneity into 19th century orchestral,

the sort of playing of the romantic repertoire as well. Maybe it'll happen, we'll see. What would Wagner himself think if he showed up at Beiroit and heard some of the playing? What would surprise him the most? I think it would be very pleased by the technical standard. It's just very hard to say. When you go back to the 19th century, I mean, the singing style was so different. If you listen to those recordings right from the turn of the century, the very early cylinder recordings,

it's a very different kind of vocal delivery. It's less finished, less burnished in terms of the tone quality. It has a kind of more, I think what we consider to be a fulkish kind of sounds or slightly rougher, in terms of timbre, almost more conversational in terms of the delivery, the voices weren't as big also. So I think he'd be surprised, and he might not be altogether pleased by this kind of finished ringing power of the sound. He might well say, oh, that sounds great, but I can't hear the words. You know, I want to hear more of the words at every moment. I don't care if the, you know, C-sharp is perfectly sustained in the soprano,

if I'm sort of losing the meaning of the words, because he was always a dramatist as well as a composer, and the words battered a great deal to him. And this general sensibility that we have now of voices always in danger of getting swamped by the orchestra, I don't think would have pleased him at all. As an outsider, let me ask you a very naive question. Now, I have a single CD version of Wagner's Duss Rheingold by Rudolf Kemper. You probably know this recording. It's beautiful. It's like a wonderful mini opera.

Just the highlights. I can listen to the one disc. Why should I ever listen to the Hall Opera? I enjoy the one disc more. Kemp, it did pick out the highlights. Yeah, that's perfectly valid. And the orchestral syntheses that were devised by Stikovsky and many other conductors are very entertaining to listen to. And it's an interesting question about excerpts and Wagner.

He always had a kind of ambivalent attitude toward the extraction of excerpts from his works. On the one hand, it was a great marketing device. He was a brilliant marketer. He was a master of publicity and branding and sort of all these modern techniques, and he knew that pulling the music of the ride at the Valkyries out of De Valkyria would spread his fame

because that piece had an electrifying effect on audiences and Morrowist, heard, same with all the other excerpts of the ring and the other operas. But at the same time, he always thought that something was lost and that the dramatic purpose of these excerpts tended to disappear when they just became orchestral showpieces. Take, for example, the end of Reinholds, the entry of the gods into Valhalla. It's a grandiose, splendid kind of not quite uplifting, but it's just very energizing. It sort of makes you feel grand and important listening to it. It's just the sheer pleasure and the power of massed orchestral sound. But in the

context, and I talk about this in the book, it's absolutely ironic. This is a catastrophe unfolding. The gods entering Vahala, ignoring the pleas of the Rhinem maid maid to return the ring to the Rine, Voton has struck this evil bargain to pay off the giants for the building of O'Halla. And it's always funny to remember that the ring is a story of contractors not being paid for their work. And so it is supposed to be, it is dramatically ironic. It's an empty spectacle. It's a hollow spectacle. And I compare it to the end of Ecculus's Agamemnon.

and Khalid Mnestra and Agisthus entering the palace at the end of Agamemnon. And so when you pull out the excerpt, you lose those levels of irony, those levels of dramatic richness. But, you know, it's impossible to resist. I mean, you know, you can't listen to, you know, the entire operas end from end every time you, you know, want to experience the highlights as the feeling moves you. But I do feel that Wagner is always at his richest when you take the entire conception in the theater when you experience it as theater. That's when it really comes alive and reveals its full power. Should we think less of Wagner because there's so little humor in it? Or do you think there's more humor in it than is commonly realized?

He was not a great humorist by any means, but there is a heavy kind of wit. I mean, there's always this question about de Meisterzinger, and this is supposedly his great comedy. I don't find it to be a particularly hilarious piece, and of all the Wagner operas, it's the one I've always had the most difficulty with for various reasons that we could maybe get into. But there is, the ring certainly has irony. It has, there's a sense of detachment from the characters. the characters are being observed from various angles. And so if not quite laugh out loud humor,

there are alienation effects in Wagner. There are moments of rupture where you're breaking out of the character's own delusional ideas about what's going on and sort of seeing it from another angle and there's a kind of darker kind of wit in that. Even in Tristan, there are moments in Chustan. that make you smile a little bit.

I always love this moment at the end of the first act when King Mark is mentioned and interest on size, which king? He's so completely lost in this potion-infused bliss of the love with Isolda that he's forgotten who the king is, who's his uncle. And the whole idea is he's bringing Isolda to his uncle. that he can marry her and he's just so out of it that he asks which which king it's it's a it's a it's a moment of borderline humor in Wagner but but no he's not the composer you go to for laughs and

and light moments by any means who in popular music or rock and roll today would count as a valid successor to the Wagnerian ethos it wouldn't be taylor swift right who or what would it be I don't know, again, because Wagner is a theater composer. So we would have to be someone from the theater world. It's not about songwriters. So I would sort of look to, I don't know if there's anyone on Broadway in the Broadway musical world who is working in this fashion. But that's the world where you would expect a kind of Wagnerian effect. I mean, it's not a musical, but I always think of Angels in America.

as a very Vognarian enterprise because of its scope and its interweaving of realistic and mythic elements and the layers to it. So in terms of, yeah, people talk about the Vognarian in rock. This is a very, very loose kind of understanding of what it means to be Vognarian. It just means grand and heavy and pounding and enormous. And of course, that's only one side of Wagner's aesthetic, but it's a very well-known side. The right of the Valkyrie is the entry of the gods, Stigfried's funeral music, these just very powerful heavy-hitting moments in Wagner. So there's always been a kind of this rumor, this kind of just a hint of the Vognary in heavy metal,

and I think going back to Led Zeppelin and their fascination with the Lord of the Rings and Tolkien kind of brings them into the zone of the Wagnerian, the hammer of the gods, and so on. So maybe that's one area where you can talk about the Wagnerian and popular music. Now, one theme of your book, as I understand it, is that Wagnerism historically is more diverse than many people realize. There was a branch of Zionism that loved Wagner. There's an African-American tradition that's quite interested in Wagner. but maybe you can talk me out of some of the worries I have when I listen to Wagner. So when I listen, I feel better if I'm listening to von Klemperer,

who is Jewish and he was a refugee and he left Europe to come to America. I feel I'm offsetting something in Wagner that disturbs me. And if you think about what Wagner has become, it seems the problematic element in Wagner, it does somehow match, to the music in a way which is hard to escape. So no one listens to Wagner and comes away saying, well, dull bourgeois life, as you find under Democratic capitalism, is underrated.

No one comes away from Wagner saying, I now have a greater appreciation for methodological individualism, right? There is something ominous about the music. And how should we, as listeners, come to terms with that? Should we feel guilty when listening to Wagner, given the association with anti-Semitism, Nazis, and much more. I think you should always be wary listening to Wagner. And my whole history with Wagner was actually,

I started out really averse to the entire sound world. I mean, when I was a kid growing up with classical music, I tried listening to Lowengrind. I checked records of Lowengrind out of the public library, and I put them on and just I only could stand it for 10 minutes or so. Of course, I knew nothing about anti-Semitism and Nazism in the connection with Hitler. It was just purely a question of the sound. They found the sound disturbing and just kind of this sort of seasick feeling of bobbing from one chord to another without sort of clear demarcations.

I just had this kind of instinctual revulsion to it. And then when I started revisiting Wagner in college, it was always in the point of view of the intellectual problem of Wagner. I was by that time very conscious of Wagner's anti-Semitism and the chain of influences that lead to Hitler. And I just saw him as this problem of intellectual history, this problem of cultural history. I spent a lot of time studying the period of the Fandesieckla, the culture and history of that period, especially in Europe. And Wagner was just this shadow, was this lurking presence. And it wasn't until later. It wasn't until I was in my 20s that I began really.

seriously listening to Wagner as music, experiencing him as theater, and beginning to have a less negative and eventually a much more enthusiastic or sort of deeper engagement with the music, but always with wariness, always with a consciousness of how this extraordinary figure who really had it in him, I think, to become a cultural figure on the scale of Esculis, Dante, Shakespeare, there's a universalism. There is this profound

psychological understanding, coupled with this flair for painting on the huge canvas and manipulating mythic motifs. She had this extraordinary combination of creative qualities, the ability to compose, to create the texts for his operas. his skills as a theater designer.

I mean, he essentially designed the space of Byroy, which was revolutionary in the late 19th century, as a director, a director of theater, as a theorist, just a very singular, almost unprecedented, unsurpassed collection of qualities, fusion of qualities. But it all went wrong. He had the potential to become that kind of universal figure, And he did not, because of his anti-semitism, because of his extreme nationalism.

And so it shadows his achievements. There will always be this asterisk next to Wagner. And you're always aware of that issue. But I think that in a weird way enriches the experience for me. To be conscious of all this darkness, it takes this body of work out of the realm of the ideal. This idea that music just lifts us up and takes us into this other world for a little while. and we're entertained or we're sort of led into this sort of sublime sphere. And then we come back to reality.

Wagner, you never leave reality. And everything sublime and magnificent and moving in Wagner is inseparable from this corruption, this darkness, this evil. And I think that makes him a very human, a kind of unfortunately exemplary human phenomenon where the greatness and the darkness are all mixed together because that's who we are as a species. And Wagner really exemplifies our species in some ways in terms of this mixing together of creative and destructive energies

all at once and you can never separate them. But isn't it our enthusiasm itself for Wagner that we should worry about? So in your book you mention, of course, Apocalypse Now, Francis Ford Coppola's use of the music from DeValcaries, when the helicopters are bombing the countryside, side, and there's some combination of terror and beauty in the music that does make that a thrilling scene.

And shouldn't we be repulsed by our very attraction to Wagner? And thus, we're always wanting to keep it at a distance. Maybe we listen to it two or three times a year just to remind ourselves of why we don't treat it as we would, Beethoven or Mozart, who were classical liberals, very human, very vulnerable figures, had a strong sense of humor. and just the whole tradition of what Wagner's descendants then, how they connected with Hitler and the Nazis, I mean, shouldn't we keep it at a very real distance from ourselves, but periodically pull it out of the drawer to remind ourselves why we're attracted and then run away as fast as we can?

I don't think so. I don't feel there's a present, clear and present danger with Wagner in today's culture. If you look at what's going on in the world, if you look at the threats that we face, if you look at racism in contemporary America, if you look at inequality across the globe, you can't, you know, Wagner is not lurking behind really any of this that this is happening today. What is at work in ways that I don't think we're fully conscious of or we haven't analyzed enough is all of this American popular culture

that we think of as innately good and pure and innocent. It's our music. It's music from the people. And yet, it is unquestionably mixed up with American history and present-day American politics. So Wagner isn't to blame for any of this. And just because classical music no longer has anything like a role that it once had on the world stage and in culture today, I just don't think you're going to see some kind of new Hitler arising enthused by Wagner and unleashing terror on the world. So I think we can go too far in demonizing Wagner.

I think it's a mistake to say that Beethoven and Mozart and Bach were all these sort of wonderful, pure liberal humanist figures, and Wagner was this evil, irrational, proto-fascist nationalist anti-Semite. I mean, the magic flute by Mozart is unambiguously racist in a way that no work by Wagner is because Jews are not present explicitly in any of Wagner's operas. It's theorized that there are stereotypes at work, but there's no one labeled a Jew in Wagner. There are no black people in Wagner. There is this atrocious stereotype of monostados in the magic flute.

And so, you know, that is, I think that is a problem to be conscious of. A beta of him was a misogynist. So many of these composers were misogynist. So Wagner had a lot of bad qualities, but he was not the most evil person who ever lived. And so I think, again, to create this black and white, where these composers, in the one hand, are pure and innocent. And Wagner is infused with evil, I think, is a mistake. I mean, Wagner teaches us not to idealize Wagner in that way. Talk us through your favorite recording of the ring cycle and why you find it so valuable

and interesting. Which would it be? You have to pick one. I would pick the 195 ring cycle from Byroy, conducted by Yusuf Kyle Burt, who's not one of the most celebrated conductors. His name is not instantly recognizable as Sir Fingler is, and Toscanini and so many others, but it's, I think, maybe precisely because he didn't seem to have some great interpretive scheme to bring to bear, he just sort of disappears into the music and the sort of music itself comes alive. It feels very spontaneous. You just hear more of the constant shifting of moods, the constant kind of psychological instability. But above all, it's just an incredible cast. I mean, Asfried Varnai is my favorite Roon Hilda, and she just sings splendidly in that recording.

Hans Hauter sang Voton magnificently, any number of recordings. Somehow there, he's at least as good as the upper was, if not better. And it just feels so of a piece. And it was recorded for release, so then this recording never came out. So it sounds very good for its time. But you could really go to, I mean, there's also 1953, pretty much the same cast, with Clemens Krause conducting. Krauss is probably a greater conductor, sort of maybe makes more out of certain expressive moments.

And so that has, you know, much to recommend it as well. But one recording that I don't like is Gerich Schulte. And this is the classic. This is the first complete studio ring. It was a great feat of recording for its studio. time in terms of the use of stereo, but Schulte hammers too hard. It's always overbearing. It's a kind of a sort of unnecessarily brutal edge. And it's not coincidentally, it's the Schulte recording of the Brite of the Boceries that you hear in Apocalypse now. It's, you know, because that's just

the most aggressively hard-hitting one, and it goes with this sort of spectacle of masculine aggression. The great irony of that scene, of course, and there's so many other usages of the Writers, is it's all men, it's male soldiers exulting in their kind of lust for destruction. The scene in D'Valcaria is all about women. It's all about these unusually powerful women. And at the turn of the last century, as I talk about in the book, Runehilda and the other Valkyries became feminist icons to some extent. And culture of those days didn't offer so many strong female archetypes.

And Wagner certainly did. So there's a number of novels that you find, plays, other works, paintings, works, and visual arts, where that female power of the Vakraries is celebrated. And it was inspiring for some women of the period. So that's maybe an irony that Coppola was conscious as he put together that scene. Would Loris von Trie Eris Ring have been any good? I expect not. I'm not a fan of his work.

I don't, I don't, I'm not a fan of his use of the Tristan Prelude in Melancholia. You know, his apocalyptic, the end of the world movie, another planet is about to collide with Earth. And you hear this, the prelude over and over again until it just seems to sort of wear itself out and become this kitsch. object. And so, yeah, who knows? I mean, maybe he would have done it brilliantly, but I'm just not the biggest enthusiast of his work in general. And there's all kinds of problems with Lars von Trier in terms of his attitudes on various subjects. So it probably wouldn't have been the ideal

choice for Byroyd in the moment. What's the best Orson-Wales movie and why? My favorite is Touch of Evil. I don't know if I necessarily call it the best. I mean, in terms of sheer technical accomplishment, Citizen Kane will always be remarkable because that's the movie where he just had always hear the most resources and most control. But I just absolutely love Touch of Evil.

I think taking this rather seedy, sleazy, genre picture and investing so much weirdness and darkness and slyness and menace into it is just, I think it's an astonishing achievement. I just get such this kind of visceral pleasure out of watching it every moment. It's just wildly entertaining and also, I think, rather deep in terms of how it talks about power. and his character, the policeman who frames the guilty man. It's a wonderfully sort of complex problem that it poses for the audience. What is the best Franz Liszt piano transcription for capturing the essence of an opera?

He was amazing at that, yes? Yeah, yeah. And there's so many. Yeah, I mean, I immediately think of some of the Wagner transcriptions. There's an incredible transcription that he made of the first transformation sequence in Parcifal, the ringing of the bells. It departs somewhat from the opera, from Wagner's score, but it feels as though it's very much still with Parcifal's world.

And Liss had every right to kind of do what he wanted with Wagner, because Wagner took from him. and List also took from Wagner. They had a sort of very complex relationship. There was a great deal of mutual borrowing that went on. So when he arranges Parsifal, he is to some degree arranging a couple of his own ideas as Wagner appropriated them and sort of taking them back. So that's a kind of wonderfully rich relationship there.

I think I would say reminiscences of Norma from Bellini. It's a kind of excerpts where I would rather listen to the transcripts, than the Hall Opera itself. Now, the classical music world, what will be the long-term effects of lockdown and having had a pandemic? Assume there's a vaccine, we've recovered, older people are still scared,

five to seven years from now. What will the concert world look like in New York City? I don't know. I mean, on certain days, I feel as though the classical world may not recover or sort of go back to anything like what it was before because the damage has been, very severe. And once people get out of the habit of going to concerts, it can be very difficult to

persuade them to come back. I mean, this is what happened to the Metropolitan Opera after 9-11. For a little while, people were just very reluctant to come into the city. And some of them just never came back. And they just developed new sort of cultural habits. So it's a very, some days, I'm very worried. Other days, I feel as though there could be a sort of more or less total recovery. And perhaps five to seven years from now, it will just be this strange nightmare that we all kind of went through before bringing back to normal. But classical music is, you know, it's just going to be the very last to come back along with sort of really the other performing arts forums. It's just an art form that subsists on crowding people into an indoor space.

and then sort of having a crowded people on stage for a certain period of time. And even if the medical question is resolved, even if there is a vaccine, there'll still be a psychological block against people coming back. There'll be a fear of crowding into spaces. So I am fearful of what's going to happen, especially to the bigger institutions. I think the smaller ones can be more resourceful and more spontaneous in terms of how they react. and so they might recover more quickly in terms of chamber music and solo recitalists. And that end of the business should be okay.

But you know, it's also the artists. I mean, there's thousands of artists who aren't being paid. And some other are going to just give up and get other jobs, even extremely talented ones. And that will certainly be a tragedy. And just when you look at the difference of the situation in Europe where artists who are out of work have nothing to work. worry about, you know, they're being taken care of financially. They have health plans. They can afford, they're able to wait it out. Here, people aren't going to be able to wait it out and they're just going to give up and do something different. And so it'll be a dark period.

I just don't know exactly what form it'll take, but things will be very different. There could be ways in which there will be a healthy effect in the end. If classical music becomes more local in focus. Just for decades, we've had this culture of constant jet-setting, conductors zipping around from continent to continent, singers zipping around, orchestras touring, probably unnecessarily, just because of the fear of travel at this moment and just other questions about the sort of wastefulness of this kind of travel. That may be cut back, and I think it would actually be a very healthy thing if conductors

just spent more of their time with their orchestra that they are the music director of instead of feeling the need to guest conduct in, you know, 10 other places during a given season because they're being paid, you know, usually pretty hefty sums of money, $800,000 or a million or more. And just why not really concentrate your career at one place, work on building ties to the community immediately around you and just forget about this, this, global marketplace, which that end of the business would just be much more difficult to negotiate. Should we maintain the norm in distinction where at popular music concerts, you're actually encouraged to make noise. At so-called classical concerts, you're forbidden from making noise.

Obviously, it was not that way in the early 19th century. Is that going to change? And does that distinction still make sense? Why not let everyone make noise and play cards and talk and have a beer in the front row. Right. Well, there have been experiments in that direction. I think my attitude toward it is there should never be hard and fast rules. So I object to this absolutely dogmatic kind of sensibility that one must not ever make the slightest noise during a performance. One must never applaud after, you know, the first movement of a concerto or a symphony. That kind of thing is nonsense to me because just certain of these pieces, they cry out for, for, you know, the emperor concerto, the end of the first moment of the emperor concerto,

it just sounds weird not to have applause because Beethoven is working very hard to make the audience burst into applause, even more with Tchaikovsky first piano concerto. So I think these rules could be loosened. But at the same time, there's very good reason for why audiences generally are quieter classical performances because of the dynamic extremes. if people are making noise at the beginning of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, you're not going to hear this whispery, this ethereal tremolo. Of course, same thing with the beginning of Wagner's ring cycle,

which begins almost subliminally, this deep E-flat in the double bases. And the tradition of Biroid is to become completely silent before that happens. For a full minute or so, there's this total silence in the opera house, which is a, it's a wonderful effect to be able to really experience music emerging out of nothing,

emerging out of silence. It's very powerful. So there's good reason for some of these rules, and I think just ultimately, it should be on a case-to-case basis. You know, we have a thousand-year tradition in classical music with very different kinds of music, with very different social intentions and functions.

And so there should never be a hard and fast rule. Where in the world are classical music audiences the most appreciative and adventurous? Those are not necessarily the same thing. You can choose two places. Just in terms of just being whisper quiet and concentrating at every moment, it's a cliche, it's a stereotype. But in the German-speaking world, that's where you find this kind of audience where it just seems as though everyone is concentrating, especially if you go to a chamber music concert in Germany or Austria. This music is just so steeped in countries, traditions, and so many people of different social

classes and backgrounds have grown up with it, and it just feels so natural to them. So you get that appreciation now. In terms of adventurousness, that's a slightly different thing. Those same Austrian and German audiences may be quite resistant to 20th century music and contemporary music. Because they love and know Brahms so well, that doesn't prepare them so well for something different and new. One of the most adventurous audiences have ever encountered is at the Ohio Festival in Southern California, northwest of Los Angeles. That's a festival that goes back decades in terms of its commitment to new music, quite adventurous, often avant-garde music.

Stievinsky was there. Boulas went many times. And so the attitude there is almost just the complete opposite of what you normally encounter with the classical music audience where the more complex and the more difficult it is, the more excited people seem to get. And I just had this wonderful experience of sitting in the audience once and a few years ago at Ohio. And there was a piece that was quite tonal and repetitive and, minimalist and, you know, I think an average audience would have found it quite pleasant to listen to.

It was in no way dissonant or modernistic. And afterwards, the older couple sitting next to me said, oh, that was, oh, no, and then there was a piece by Pierre Boulez right after that. And what the older couple said was, oh, finally some real music. They didn't like the tonal, easy music. They were waiting for the Boulez. And so that's, so it just, it varies very much from place to place. And, you know, the stereotype of the classical audiences that they're not going to be adventurous. They always want the trident two.

But over time, I think when an institution, a festival really shows commitment to this repertoire, they can change the audience's mind. And that's also what happened with the Los Angeles Pellmanic under Assepeka Salomon. It happened to some extent in Berlin with Simon Ratt. and various other places. And so it's not a lost cause in terms of converting audiences to the new and different. If you go to a second-tier American city, say Washington, D.C., which is by no means uneducated, and you go to the opera, what percentage of the crowd there is actually enjoying it in the sense

that they are wishing it would last longer than it will? I grew up in D.C., so I have some experience with this. And I don't know. It's going to be a mix. I would know if I could put a percentage on it. But there are certainly quite a few people who go out of a sense of obligation. You know, this is just something that they have their subscription tickets. And the Joneses down the street are going.

So, you know, we might as well go. So that's always been a component of the American orchestral audience or the opera audience, but especially the orchestral audience in terms of these orchestras that have become real civic institutions and certain families, wealthier families in the city, have supported them for generations, and it's just there. It's a fixture, and people show up without necessarily being deeply involved in it. But you need those people. But what's your percentage number on how many are having fun?

And they want an extra hour of Verdi or whatever they're hearing? I would say at least 50%. 50%. I'd be optimistic. 60. You never know. I have a question about the time profile of creative achievement. So to be a top conductor, it's physically very demanding, of course, right? And it's also very demanding on the memory, even if you're using a score. Yet there are so many figures in the history of classical music

who are doing truly first-rate conducting maybe at the age of 80 or at least the late 70s. Stikowski, I think, kept on going until 95. that was not his peak, but just that he was able to do it. So what is it about conducting that appears to defy the laws of nature, that you just keep on going and you're amazing, when you would think, well, these individuals would peak at age 62. Right. No, it is an amazing phenomenon.

I mean, it's not anecdotal. I think it could be statistically verified that conductors live longer and keep working longer than most professions, perhaps, you know, almost any professions. When you have, you know, Toscanini active well into his 80s, Clemperer, active to quite advanced age. And, you know, past the point of, you know, he was really physically quite decrepit.

He just had an enormous physical challenges. And yet he kept conducting. And even with minimal movements on his part, he elicited these extraordinary performances. I think there are two sides to this. On the one side, just in terms of conducting and its physical demands and its mental demands, you know, hard to verify, but there seems to be something in terms of the intensity of this mental activity, of memorizing scores, of being sort of this particular mode of

sort of upper body exercise, it does seem to encourage longevity and it does seem to keep people sharp in some way. I'm completely out beyond my realm of knowledge in terms of the medical side of this, but just from, I think anecdotally, it looks as though something like that is happening. So there's that. But at the same time, there's also, you know, just conducting is so mysterious in terms of what is actually happening between the conductor and the orchestra. There are explicit messages being sent. There is a, you know, there are instructions being given, but there's also this slightly mystical side to it, where sort of once you get to, you know, a figure like Clemper or today Bernard Heitink, who just retired, or Herberg-Lomstedt,

who is incredibly vital and active in his 90s. Coming back at age 93 in Switzerland. Even before they say anything, just the mere fact when they sort of arrive at the podium, there is a level of respect. There is a level of attentiveness and readiness in the orchestra. They don't have to be won over when Herbert Blomstedt is in front of them. his reputation.

And so Blumstet, someone like this, can just skip all the preliminaries and, you know, just go for sort of fine-tuning these points. And just everyone plays better because they're in the presence of the celebrated, legendary older musician. It's almost as if they don't even need to do anything anymore. They do, of course. They are working very hard. and Womstedt is delivering very particular instructions to the orchestra.

But there's this, that psychological dimension. And I think that adds some people, the musicians are excited to be having this opportunity. And they think this might be the last time. And so they give something more. And so that's the mystery of conducting. And I always think of that anecdote about Furtmengler. And I think it was Walter Legg who told this story. was watching the orchestra rehearse

with a different conductor. And they were playing, all right. You know, nothing too inspired. And he's sort of looking straight ahead and looking at the orchestra. And suddenly something changes. Suddenly the playing is electrified, transformed. And the conductor seems to have done nothing different.

And he's sitting there, what is going on? How did that change take place? And then he happens to look over his shoulder. Fertfengler is standing by the door, watching. And in the few minutes, that he's entered the hall and has been standing at the back, the orchestra noticed him there,

and their playing changed completely. So that's the weird, the sort of slightly occult power that conductors can have. Just their mere presence transforms the playing. Is Morton Feldman, the great post-war American composer? He's one of them.

I mean, I love Feldman's music, and Feldman did something really remarkable where he took this modernist vocabulary, the vocabulary of Shermberg, the second V&E school, Atenality, and then John Cage, the student of Shermberg, brought that vocabulary into the world of he sort of created the post-war American avant-garde movements,

and Feldman was a figure, of course, a very important pioneer himself alongside Cage. But it goes back to these unearthly, otherworldly, atonal chords of Schernerberg, Bergen, Vagrand. That's the fundamental vocabulary of Feldman's music. But it's totally different in terms of its emotional temperature. The dynamic level in Feldman is always quiet. Everything is spaced out. And these harmonies that can be prickly and alarming.

unnerving in Schoenberg Bergen-Veber and so much other modernist music of the 20th century. In Feldman, they become distant and they acquire this eerie beauty. And it's as if you can step way back from them and contemplate them as art objects. And they become like, of course, he loved Rothko's paintings. He knew Rothko very well. He knew so many of these early abstract expressionist painters. But especially with Rothko, it has that misty, distant, unearthly quality, not at all assaultive, not at all aggressive, and it becomes this totally new world of radical beauty. And so from the moment I first heard his music, he just had an extraordinary effect on him.

I still find it one of the great originals in musical history, extraordinary composer. Who or what would even be a rival to Feldman? So much of Cage now sounds gimmicky, even though it was important. You could say the early Philip Glass operas, like Feldman, they're recognizably who thereby the moment you hear them. What else in American music post-war stacks up to early Philip Glass and Morton Feldman? In terms of music today? No, post-war.

Not 2020. Music of that era. There are a lot of wonderful composers from that era. It isn't just a hand. I think Feldman, Feldman actually has a lot of followers in late 20th and early 21st century music. A lot of people have been intensely attracted to that aesthetic. Some of them are just mere imitators, but others have managed to come up with a very individual reaction to his sound.

So I think there's a group of composers called Vandalvisor. They live in different countries, and they specialize in a very quiet, very spaced out, kind of aesthetic and this obvious, very strong influence from Feldman. York Fry is a Swiss composer who just writes on the most incredibly beautiful music around today, his string quartets, and he more or less worships Feldman. But Michael Pizarro is an American composer who is also of that school. So I think it's a, this aesthetic of radical quietude and separateness, I think, is. is a very powerful one,

and I think particularly at this moment of frenzy and chaos, this music is quite appealing to go back to. What's your favorite Beatles song? Beetle song? Not the best one, your favorite. My favorite Beatles song. I've never been a sort of Beatles person, a more Dylan person.

For some reason, I'm tempted to say helter-skelter right at the moment, but I don't think that's actually weird, the Beatles song. If that's what comes to mind. The White Album, I love the White Album, especially, I think. The day in the life is one of their most extraordinary achievements, certainly I go back to the lot. What's the best Dylan album? Is it bringing it all back home?

Blood on the tracks. The much later work? Blood on the tracks. No question. Blood on the tracks, yeah. But the original version, not the Minnesota remix, the original New York sessions without the big band. That's the greatest pop album ever made, in my opinion. What is it in music that you are embarrassed by liking?

People ask me that, and I don't. I don't have guilty pleasures. I feel that, you know, it sort of buys into sort of this idea that, you know, there's some exalted kind of level of genius and then sort of this embarrassing realm down below. But to honestly answer your question, I do like certain Oasis songs. That's so embarrassing. Champagne Supernovae. That's great.

The final segment of our chat is what I call the Alex Ross production function, and this has to do with you. A few questions about your history. Did writing a thesis about James Joyce at Harvard at all influence your music writing and how you approach music? Oh, sure, yeah. I mean, Joyce was one of the most musical writers who ever lived, a fine singer, a very acute listener, very comprehensive knowledge of different eras of repertory going back to the Renaissance. And I think Joyce cultivated a taste for me. You know, I fell in love with Joyce and Ulysses in particular before I really got to know the classic works of the 20th century.

So I read Ulysses at age 18. At that stage, I was still just kind of struggling to come to terms with Schenberg and Stavinsky in the early 20th century. So Ulysses gave me a taste for a kind of sprawling, comprehensive, all-devouring kind of, you know, it's the modernism of it's not strict and spare and discipline modernism. It's the modernism of all-engulping chaos.

And in music, that happens to be a mode that I'm quite fond of, whether it's the symphonies or Charles Ives or Ferenst Alas, Zimmerman, or a certain later 20th century composers. So that, yeah, Ulysses, I think, influenced my listening and prepared me for unexpected and perhaps irrational juxtapositions of different styles. How did Leon Weaselteer, discover you as a potential music critic. What is it you think he saw on you?

He read my fanfare reviews, some of my fanfare reviews, and not much else. I forget what I originally sent him to look at. But he absolutely started my journalistic career. He gave me my first journalistic assignment, and then it was through him at the New York Times became interested in hiring me as their fifth string critic. and when that opportunity came my way, I was reluctant to do it, and Leon talked me into

moving to New York and taking the job. So he had a huge effect on my early career. But what he saw in this 23-year-old kid, I don't know. You'd have to ask him. If someone wants to be, quote-unquote, the next Alex Ross, what else do they need to know besides music? So if one looks at your writings, you could write about my writing. minor works by Heinrich Mann, much less Thomas Mann, without too much effort. Is that important to you being the music critic that you are, or is that a kind of accident? I think music critics need to have command of neighboring cultural areas, because music is just not separate from the rest of culture, from sort of the rest of our world. And, you know, when you're writing about opera,

you're writing about literature as well as music, you're writing about staging, theater ideas, as well as music. And so I think every music critic can't be a pure specialist. And most of my colleagues, I think they all have side interests, and they've all had a well-rounded cultural education. So I think it's essential. I feel very lucky in that I have been able to pursue a lot of writing at The New Yorker, which is not strictly musical,

and I've been allowed to pursue this range of interest. which includes some natural sciences-type travelogue pieces in the last few years on Death Valley and the Bristol-Gone Pine Forest, as well as pieces on literature and history. And that is, I think it makes my musical writing better. I think it also makes a case for Claustna Music. If someone has read what I write about Dylan or Radiohead or the Bristol-Cone Pines and sees my name at the top of a piece about Mozart or Salieri or whoever, they might give me a chance having read those other pieces.

This is the guy who wrote that interesting piece. I don't care about classical music, but I'll give us a try anyway. And so I think that helps me in an inevitable aspect of my role as a critic, which is not merely to be this objective, cold, detached comment. but to some extent, an advocate, a face of the art form itself and expanding its audience in my own little way. And so I think that helps with that mission. The last question. What music will you listen to today and why? Well, it's going to be Wagner today. Which Wagner? Well, I'm getting ready for the publication of the book. I'm building pages in my website, which are kind of guide to

to Wagner's works beyond what I do in the book. And so I'm going to be recommending recordings as well as giving the synopsis and the plot of the operas and sort of pointing out crucial musical moments. So I'm actually working on Rheingold right now. I'm listening to Carion's Ring Cycle, which has never been one of my favorites, but I'm revisiting it. And actually, his first, his live Rheingold in 1951 from Baywright is, is amazing. It's a great recording. He conducted that one year at Byroyd and then never came back

because of he was carry on and there were problems. But it's a really vigorous and and spiky and lively reading of Rangel, which is always considered the scherzo of the ring. And he really brings out that quality and quite different from the later recordings, which are rather more polished and kind of slightly sort of over burnished in terms of the texture. It's all incredibly beautiful, but not necessarily that dramatic. This springold is really fiery and alive. I've never really listened to it before, and I was quite pleased to discover it. So anyway, just, yeah, more Wagner today. Alex Ross, thank you very much. And again, everyone, I'm very happy to recommend Alex's wonderful new book, Wagnerism, art and politics, and the Shacken,

of music. Thank you, Alex. Thank you. That was wonderful. Thanks for listening to Conversations with Tyler. You can subscribe to the podcast in iTunes, Stitcher, or your favorite podcast app. And if you like this podcast, please consider rating it on iTunes and leaving a review. This helps other people find the show.