In April (the cruelest month) I referred to a piece in the St Louis Dispatch (briefly offline, but perhaps back here) by their classical music critic Sarah Bryan Miller. She wants to rescue the word "elitist" and reserve it to describe someone who takes the time and makes the effort to knowledgeably sample the best that has been thought and created. In the process she demonstrates exactly the sort of intellectual laziness she decries through, on the one hand, her profound and deep ignorance of pop music.
" On the other hand ", Ms Miller says, as she attempts to provide an example of what one can gain from being an elitist, but instead offering a disingenuous comparison of apples and oranges, secure in the knowledge that to her readers all classical music is alike,
" a few hours invested in understanding what one is to see or hear at a performance can yield rewarding results. ... An understanding of what was in Mozart's mind when he wrote 'Die Zauberflote' - and why it is better than Marschner's 'Der Vampyr' - might begin to dawn. "
Why revisit this brief nothing? Scrolling around the net, I stumbled on a discussion of Ms Miller's article. It included a quote from her in response to some of the comments in the discussion:
" I don't enjoy misogyny, obscenity and invitations to violence all wrapped up with a simplistic, mind-rotting rhythm beat. "
So, she's saying doesn't enjoy Marschner's "Der Vampyr" at all?
What pleasure, from beautiful eyes On flowering bosom In blissful quiver To suck new life with a kiss! Ha! What pleasure, With loving caress, With lascivious courage The sweetest blood Like sap of the roses, From red-purple lips Adulatingly to sip! - And when the burning thirst is quenched, And when the blood oozes from the heart, And when they groan full of terror, Haha! What delight! Ha, what pleasure!
Is Marschner's misogyny and violence the reason Mozart is better? Ms Miller never enlightens us on that issue. In fact, she does her level best to avoid any demonstration of the expertise that she hopes to fold into the word "elitist".
. . .
Though I confess to, at the time, not remembering the music of "Der Vampyr" at all (though I am sure I did listen to it during my vampire phase; I am no sort of fool if I am not a complete fool), I was pretty sure that I remembered it was much later than "Die Zauberflote". So I looked it up. While Mozart's last opera was completed in 1791, the year that he died, Marschner's was finished in 1828, one year after Beethoven died.
It might be enough to simply point out that after Beethoven, concert hall music (including opera) was not at all the same animal it was when Mozart was composing. But that probably doesn't mean much to people for whom "classical music" ranges from Bach to Berg, an unfortunate collapsing of several wildly different strains into a single, droning song. To offer comparisons from other musical genres, that span reaches from the Hot Six to Ornette Coleman, from Hank Williams, Sr to Garth Brooks, from "Heartbreak Hotel" to "Smells Like Teen Spirit", from "Rapper's Delight" to whatever jam is tearing it up in 2006 (the first juxtaposition offered is probably the most apropos, as jazz is almost as fantastically disparate as classical, and its giants and geniuses have never felt constrained by the limits placed upon their genre being "pop").
Ms Miller is, I am sure, aware of this distance in time. But to use the phrase "why it is better" is to skip very lightly over the fact that Marschner was not writing music in Mozart's vein and that part of what formed the backdrop for whatever was in the minds of the two composers were Europes on either side of Napoleon. Comparing Mozart and Marschner, as she does, without context strikes me as an avoidance, rather than a reaping, of the rewards of investing those few precious hours Miller recommends to us for our edification.
Her point would have been far better made if she had compared Mozart's operas to those of his contemporary, Salieri, or of his predecessor, Gluck - except that in those cases Mozart's superiority is not beyond dispute. She would have had to invest some of those precious hours in actually formulating a complex response, a response that addressed the mutual influence of these composers on one another and the influence on them of audience expectation, expectations fueled through familiarity with and passion about other contemporary works. In the process her readers might have in fact learned something, might have had the spark of desire for further knowledge fanned into flame, might have developed a mad curiosity for music that has almost completely escaped recording.
If the good stuff is important, then inspire people to demand the performance and recording of, for example, Salieri's operas (only five of forty-five have ever been recorded). The world would be a far richer and more beautiful place with that music in it.
. . .
N.B. I'd have offered quotes from "The Magic Flute" as well, but that is one seriously messed up piece of work and any attempt to derive my larger point from it would have failed under the weight of the surrealism.
And I think Mozart is better than Marschner too.
Posted by Martial