It begins with Timothée Chalamet’s recent offhand remark about opera, because of course it does. Things have moved quickly since I began my journalism career in 2020. That was a time of near-instant internet news. Since then, Buzzfeed died a death, news brands have pivoted to video, Google AI has allowed users to sidestep news […]
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Posted inEssay
The Art of the Ideal
Can music change the world? That it can and does functions as a truism across many spheres of U.S. culture. Attali canonically argued that music, an element of what Marxists call the “superstructure,” can actually influence or foreshadow world-historical changes in the “base” of economic relations and production. The belief that music can change the […]
Posted inReport
Stand By Your Man
“If you want to be an opinionated columnist or a partisan campaigner on social media,” the BBC’s director general Tim Davie wrote in October 2020, “then that is a valid choice, but you should not be working at the BBC.” When Davie took over from Tony Hall as director general in 2020 (and in the […]
Posted inOpinion
Is Post-Piece Silence a Recession Indicator?
The motivic development winds down. The harmony modulates into the home key. The final chord rings out. The conductor’s hands are poised at shoulder height, holding the room. The audience sits in hushed silence. And sits. And sits and sits and sits and sits and sits. I’ve lost count of the times in recent years […]
Posted inReport
Inside the UK’s Amateur University Opera Societies
The supporting pillars, ornate in red and gold, glimmer dully in the dark. Icons of the Church Fathers line the walls. An elaborate altar, framed by stained-glass windows, is upstaged metaphorically and downstaged literally by a gaudy Christmas tree, every decoration glittering in the light from a small rig. Several young people stand at the […]
Posted inBarTálk
Sin City Drifting
Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill’s “Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny” is a work of relentless cynicism, where three runaway convicts build a Sin City that peaks then crashes. The opera also charts the gradual souring of a philosophy through liberal ideals, to the libertarian pursuit of freedom at all cost, to an […]
Posted inRankings & Roundups
(Almost) Every Piece by Darius Milhaud, Ranked
“The complete Milhaud? Won’t you be holed up in a bunker for six months?” said a friend when I mentioned this project. If people know one thing about Darius Milhaud, it is that he was one of the most prolific composers of the 20th century. His catalogue includes 443 opus numbers, composed between 1910 and 1973. […]
Posted inBreaking
“All you had to do was go on Google”
Before conductor Frédéric Chaslin asked her if she would be interested in meeting Jeffrey Epstein, the former French philosophy student, who was 21 at the time, had only exchanged a handful of messages on Facebook with him. One day in 2013, Chaslin asked the student, who requested anonymity, if she would like to interpret for […]
Posted inBarTálk
Optimistic Nihilism
On Sunday, Olga Neuwirth and Elfriede Jelinek’s new opera, “Monster’s Paradise,” premiered at the Staatsoper Hamburg, staged by the house’s artistic director Tobias Kratzer. The work is a dark satire that involves a King-President obsessed with shit and modeled on Donald Trump; he battles a monster named Gorgonzilla, as vampires based on Neuwirth and Jelinek […]
Posted inEssay
A View from Emptiness
I. It opens mid-motion, as if caught unraveling. A noise, brisk and grained, emerges from the second violin, bow hairs pressed against string. Col legno: The cello draws the wooden back of the bow upward and then down—a rustle makes itself heard and is gone. Now the second violin traces light, oblique arcs, upward, then […]