I'm reading a PhD dissertation for tomorrow's defense (okay, those are my American terms for it – for you Brits: a thesis for tomorrow's viva) on Busoni (not Bussotti – I work on Bussotti, and am in fact one of the few people writing in English to do so – and incidentally people often seem to think I mean Busoni by mistake... oh well; and I assume that's not why I was asked to examine this particular topic).
All about time, complexity, form – all big problems with Busoni, as everybody always seems confused about the structure of his major works; but one thing we all do know is that he was one smart cookie, so it can't be that the form is confusing because it's simply a mess (as is often the case with the lazier Liszt or the sensualist Wagner).
So I'm listening to My Favorite Busoni, which remains, always, the first act of Doktor Faust. The weirdness of Mephistopheles, the bizarre voices of the spirits – but most of all, always, the electric and haunting Easter music, the rising Credo that has so many traditional sacred elements, but which is so ecstatically transformed by all those unexpected harmonic changes into something that really feels, well, transcendental; and is even more poignant because of the contrast of that voyage upwards with the malevolent argument in the foreground, between Faust and Mephistopheles.
Which brings up my problem in relation to other favorite modern operas: Wagner's Das Rheingold, Schoenberg's Moses und Aron, and Doktor Faust – the problem is, I always like the first scenes, the bizarrely experimental parts, best; and then I have trouble staying awake after they evaporate and the main body of the opera gets under way. Morning on the Rhine, anvils in Nibelheim, the Voice from the Burning Bush, Aron's coloratura with flutes, and of course Busoni's Credo – I always seem to like the gimmicks, the unexpected tours de force that makes you smile at their wit, even when they appear in the midst of doom-laden expositions.
Of course it's not always the first acts, though it often seems that it is. When I arrived in Washington two weeks ago, the final scene of Poulenc's Dialogues des Carmélites was on the radio when my sister picked me up at the airport. I managed to impress her by immediately knowing what was playing, but then blew it by admitting the truth – that it was the only scene I really knew, and that the rest of the opera (long, rhetorical scenes apparently made entirely out of French theological recitative) dazed me with boredom; something I can definitely attest to, since I've seen it on stage at least twice, and was practically unable to keep my eyes open until the end. Again: it's the gimmicky ending that brings me to the edge of my seat – the thumping bass under the shifting, unstable sacred fragments, all cut to pieces by chops of the guillotine.
Frankly, my limitation worries me: real, respectable Wagnerites generally like Die Walküre best, but I can never stay awake through the whole thing – it just seems like endless competitive love duets (not to mention the fact that it's so utterly, unavoidably, heterosexual). When I say I love the Ring cycle, I mean the weird, cartoony bits – Erda, the forest bird, Norns and dwarves and dragons, and horses leaping onto pyres. The 'normal' musical passages just leave me cold – as cold as does, to be even more dangerously honest, most Haydn, most Beethoven (aside from the symphonies) and most Schubert.
If you want my attention, give me gimmicky composers: give me Gesualdo, Biber, Berg, any day. Scelsi! Nilsson! Sorabji!
The ultimate question is, I guess: can my taste be rescued? Or even justified?
Ah well: I guess I'm just your typical postmodernist, restlessly sifting through the detritus of the past, looking among the wreckage for amusing baubles that are still unbroken....
[Photo from the Berlin Staatsoper production of Doktor Faust, which will be repeated next May... it might be fun to go.]
Comments