A Terry Teachout Reader, my self-anthology, came out sixteen years ago. I’ve published hundreds of pieces on various subjects since then, and I have no plans to put together a sequel to the Teachout Reader, so I’ve launched a series of occasional posts drawn from my fugitive essays, articles, and reviews. I hope you like this one, which came from a 2002 Commentary essay about Beethoven.
* * *
Late in his own life, Igor Stravinsky paid this extraordinary tribute to Beethoven’s late quartets:
These quartets are my highest articles of musical belief (which is a longer word for love, whatever else), as indispensable to the ways and meanings of art, as a musician of my era thinks of art and has tried to learn it, as temperature is to life.
It is startling that the giant of modernism who declared that music “is, by its very nature, essentially powerless to express anything at all” should have written so passionately about the greatest works of a composer whose music is so palpably expressive of the deepest human concerns. But, then, Stravinsky’s best music, whatever he may have thought or wrote about it, is in fact as expressive of those same concerns as is Beethoven’s. The composer of Symphony of Psalms and the composer of the Ninth Symphony were in some fundamental sense speaking the same language.
This spiritual continuity—this unswerving faith in the universal power of beauty to relieve and transcend the earthly woes of mankind—is Beethoven’s message. Small wonder that its unabashed idealism should make postmodernists so uncomfortable. Disbelieving as they do in the possibility of truth and beauty, they therefore have no choice but to seek to explain away the Ninth Symphony, a universal masterpiece whose very existence is a definitive refutation of the nihilism that informs their view of the world.
The abolition of the Ninth Symphony is, to say the least, an ambitious critical project, and one may take leave to doubt that it will be completed any time soon. As Scott Burnham writes, “Perhaps when that happens, the Western world will truly have passed into another age.” But until that nightmare should come to pass, it seems far more likely that Beethoven will remain, as the New Grove still proclaims him to be, the most admired composer in the history of Western music—past, present and future.
If you can write like Mencken or Shaw or Thomson, and if you have a personality as interesting as theirs, you don’t have to be “right” in order to be taken seriously as a critic. You are, in fact, an artist–a personal essayist whose subject matter is art.
O sleep, O gentle sleep,
Nature’s soft nurse, how have I frighted thee,
That thou no more wilt weigh my eyelids down
And steep my senses in forgetfulness?
Constant Lambert leads the London Philharmonic in an excerpt from Tchaikovsky’s Romeo and Juliet. This is a clip from Battle for Music, a 1943 documentary about the orchestra:
(This is the latest in a series of arts- and history-related videos that appear in this space each Monday, Wednesday, and Friday)
In today’s Wall Street Journal I review West Coast webcasts of Art and Same Time, Next Year. Here’s an excerpt.
* * *
How effective can a stage comedy be when performed without an audience? Having now seen two such webcasts, both of them taped in empty theaters, I still don’t know for sure.
San Francisco Playhouse, a company new to me, is currently testing the efficaciousness of online comedy with Yasmina Reza’s “Art.” Like Ms. Reza’s “God of Carnage,” it’s a serious small-cast comedy (three characters) of bad middle-class manners that hit big on Broadway, where it opened in 1998 and ran for 600 performances. Directed by Bill English, the company’s artistic director, on a simple but elegant set of his own design, it tells the tale of Serge (Johnny Moreno), an art snob who spends $200,000 on a minimalist painting that his old friend Marc (Jomar Tagatac) curtly dismisses as “a piece of white shit.”…
While this production is a trifle rough around the edges, the cast is well chosen and Mr. English’s staging serves the play equally well. Not so the absence of an audience, which is a problem, if never a serious one….
Bernard Slade’s “Same Time, Next Year” was an even bigger hit than “Art”: It opened on Broadway in 1975, ran for 1,453 performances, then was turned into a popular movie. It is now a regional-theater staple, and North Coast Repertory Theatre, a very fine troupe whose headquarters is a suburban shopping center not far from San Diego, is presenting it as a fully-staged webcast taped on its main stage.
Directed by David Ellenstein, the company’s artistic director, “Same Time, Next Year” is a lightweight romcom about George and Doris (Bruce Turk and Katie MacNichol), who are married—but not to one another—and who meet once a year for an adulterous tryst without informing their spouses….
“Same Time, Next Year” has long since become a period piece. Even its best laugh lines smack of Neil Simon’s old-fashioned one-two-get-ready-for-the-joke style: “I have a friend who says that life is saying ‘yes.’ The most I’ve ever been able to manage is ‘maybe.’” Such jokes land much harder when there are people present to laugh at them….
A Terry Teachout Reader, my self-anthology, came out sixteen years ago. I’ve published hundreds of pieces on various subjects since then, and I have no plans to put together a sequel to the Teachout Reader, so I’ve launched a series of occasional posts drawn from my fugitive essays, articles, and reviews. I hope you like this one, which came from a 2006 Wall Street Journal “Sightings” column called “Unrisky Business.”
* * *
One of the occupational hazards of being a drama critic is that strangers are forever asking you what shows they should see. Experience has taught me that what most of them really want to know is which Broadway musical they should see. A friend of mine whose sister lives in New Jersey once put it even more bluntly. “My sister and her husband want to go to a Broadway show,” she asked me. “What would you recommend?”
“What kind of show do they have in mind?”
“Oh, you know. Something safe.”
I knew what she meant, but I decided to probe more deeply. “What do you mean by safe?” I asked.
“Nothing too serious,” she replied. “A musical, maybe. Nothing that’ll make her cry.”
I know plenty of snobs whose response would have been to roll their eyes. Not me. I’m a firm believer in what Arnold Bennett called “the great cause of cheering us all up.” What’s more, I don’t have much patience with intellectuals who sneer reflexively at “safe” art. Ask them what they mean by “safe” and you’ll find that they have in mind everything from “Spamalot” to Shakespeare. To such folk the only art worth seeing is that which has the power to shock—and then only if it does so in a way that suits their own preconceptions. I’m especially amused by their insistence that the classics are too “safe” to bother with nowadays. What could be more shocking than “Hamlet,” in which, as Howard Dietz so neatly put it, “a ghost and a prince meet/And everyone ends in mincemeat”? As for “Oedipus Rex,” let’s not even go there.
The American Symphony Orchestra League just issued a list of the pieces of classical music most frequently played by North American orchestras during the 2005-06 season. The top five, in descending order: Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony, Mozart’s “Jupiter,” Tchaikovsky’s Fifth, Beethoven’s Ninth and Brahms’ First. Need I point out that all five are as deadly serious as it gets? Or that each one can still reduce a receptive listener to tears?
Of course I don’t think all art should play it safe. Much of the greatest art, after all, is challenging, even shocking. As Clement Greenberg, the critic who put Jackson Pollock on the map, so wisely pointed out, “All profoundly original art looks ugly at first.” It’s important not to be scared away by art that doesn’t look the way you expect, or tell you what you want to hear. But it’s no less important to appreciate the permanent value of realistically painted landscapes and comedies with happy endings. If you think you’re too good for “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” I suggest you consider the alternative possibility that it might be too good for you.
