If you stick around and pay attention, what you’re disposed to say will eventually get said better by someone else. (Accepting this is another of the pleasures of aging.) This is Leon Wieseltier, talking about how Marxism once appealed to him.
The intellectual sophistication of the tradition seemed incontrovertible; and I was not yet familiar with the stylistic cunning of apologetics and polemics, modern or medieval, which can spin into existence a vast and intoxicating literature without ever examining its own foundations. I was a liberal, but an infirm one–infirm liberalism being the liberalism that fails to engage its enemies on the left as ferociously as its enemies on the right. It is hard for a young man to walk away from the satisfactions of radicalism, in the way that it is hard for a young man, say, to understand Middlemarch. So I read widely in the Marxist tradition, despite my belief in the inadequacy of a materialist view of life and the absurdity of the idea that justice may be established by means of a dictatorship. I half-wanted to fall under its spell, to find a small place in its saga.
That captures exactly a few years in which I tried to understand Brecht and the Brecht-cult in theatre studies. The more I read of Brecht, the more I came to hate the man and to understand that, like any commissar, he would say or do anything, licensed by the belief that what was good for Brecht was good for the down-trodden. ( My views of the work are more nuanced, but don’t belong here.)
The lure of a ‘humane’ Marxism operated strongly on my generation, anti-capitalist, anti-liberal as we were – and ignorant of both. When I eventually came across Leszek Kolakowski, the great critic of Marxism, whose recent death is the occasion of Wieseltier’s piece, I had already come to my senses. I wonder if Kolakowski is read by those in our English Departments – both in schools and universities – who peddle ‘Marxist’ approaches to literature? Or are they too busy spinning ‘into existence a vast and intoxicating literature without ever examining its own foundations’?
Maria Cebotari
No, not that long between these two pictures of the great soprano. They knew how to glam ‘em up at the Vienna State Opera in 1937. (The role is Sophie in Der Rosenkavalier.) At Andrea Suhm-Binder’s valuable site on singers of the past there are a number of other photos of her in various roles. She clearly had a face made for the camera as well as a marvellous voice and great versatility.
I liked this comment from Medicine and Opera:
Her high notes are characteristic of the German style soprano who sings a lot of Mozart and Strauss. There’s sometimes a charming ambiguity of pitch and support to them similar to the high notes of Schwartzkopf and Della Casa.
What happens to these poor ladies when they turn 40, I wonder? ‘Twas ever thus in the world of opera. I’ll post another strip to decorate that point – this one is big enough already. What’s new is the increasing tendency to market all classical music with good ol’ sex.
And perhaps this is the way to attract young people. In teaching opera, I learnt that, at first, no sound whatsoever is as compelling as a glamorous clip. Show them something like Franco Rossi’s Carmen movie – the scene in which Carmen seduces Don José. Keep away from fat ladies. Even fully mature female voices (Fleming, Callas) tend to remind them of their mothers.
The marketing is of a piece with the re-location of classical music to a genre within a mass marketing world, as if a ‘taste’ for it were the equivalent of (say) a taste for Cajun. The few specialist shops that remain are places that check your postcode at the door; you will be attended to, if at all, by scented and disdainful young men.
The upside, for old hands, is the undreamt of availability of a vastly expanded catalogue at vastly cheaper prices. This morning on the ABC, Andy Ford interviewed David Patmore, author of a 900 page booklet on orchestral conductors which comes bundled with four Naxos CDs and (I find) can be bought for the sum of A$43 – that includes postage. Oh, and access to a website with 2oo more samples of historic recordings.
If you want it, don’t try Discurio, Naxos’s preferred Australian retailer. Now that HMV as such has been folded into the mix, you can buy the set, with its examples of Furtwangler, Stokowski, Beecham, et hoc omnes at Sanity.com.
Help yourself. These are from the only shop I know whose name is a philosophical joke.
Jonson loved thieves’ cant, market slang and any other mini-lects he could pick up by walking around London. The Web would fry his circuits.
For the past month my nearfield desktop system has been rather simple by audiophile standards. All AC power goes through the PS Audio Quintet power device, which I’ll write about in detail later in the column. Input sources include an EAD 8000 Pro CD/DVD player, Pioneer MJ-D707 minidisk player, and i-Tunes via my Intel MacPro quad computer. The EAD and Pioneer digital signals go through a Monarchy Audio DIP box so that I can switch between the Pioneer’s Toslink and EAD’s coaxial feeds and convert them to an AES/EBU digital output. The Mac’s USB feed goes into a Trends USB audio dac UD-10 that converts the USB feed to a Toslink output. The Trends also supplies an analog output for my Stax headphone system. The AES/EBU and Toslink digital feeds then go into a Meridian 518 which upsamples the 16-bit digital signal to 20 bits and feeds a Meridian 561 via digital coaxial. The Meridian’s main single-ended analog output is split via a Monster L-connector into two single ended outputs which go to both the Bel Canto S-300 amplifier and Earthquake Supernova Mark IV 10″ subwoofer. The Bel Canto drives a pair of ATC SCM-7 loudspeakers. As I said, it’s simple by audiophile standards.
The product under review is a class T amp retailing for around US$150.
