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Music

Pages that are music to the eyes

New books that spotlight a composer and two writers on music will be welcome reading to those who savor great music and sprightly writing.

By JOHN FLEMING
Published August 27, 2006

Michael Steinberg made a prescient observation in the liner notes he wrote for the CD of John Adams' opera The Death of Klinghoffer, which brought to the musical stage the 1985 highjacking of the Italian cruise liner Achille Lauro by Palestinian terrorists. The terrorists shot and killed Leon Klinghoffer, a Jewish American, and threw his body overboard.

"Guaranteed," Steinberg wrote, "on whichever day you read these words, there will be some new installment in the morning paper."

Sure enough, when I read Steinberg's words recently, the Israeli war against Hezbollah was adding another chapter to the history of violence and hatred in the region.

Steinberg's notes on the opera appear in a useful new book, The John Adams Reader: Essential Writings on an American Composer, edited by Thomas May. It includes a wealth of material on Adams, from magazine profiles to daily newspaper reviews, musicological think pieces to program notes to interviews that May did with the composer and some of his collaborators, such as director Peter Sellars, soprano Dawn Upshaw, pianist Emanuel Ax and conductor Robert Spano.

The Death of Klinghoffer, completed during the first Gulf War, was Adams' second opera, coming in the wake of Nixon in China, another work on current events that gave rise to the vogue for "CNN operas." The Adams reader does an especially good job of chronicling the ongoing controversy over Klinghoffer, beginning with John Rockwell's mixed review in the New York Times of the 1991 premiere in Brussels and extending to debate over how the opera has been treated since the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

Response to Klinghoffer has always been heated because the libretto by Alice Goodman allows "the terrorists to speak for themselves," in the words of New Yorker critic Alex Ross, and portrays them not as evil stereotypes but as complex, even sensitive, characters. The U.S. premiere at the Brooklyn Academy of Music was picketed by Jewish protesters, and Los Angeles Opera, one of the companies that commissioned the work, dropped plans to perform it.

Probably the most valuable - and provocative - article included in the Adams survey is "Music's Dangers and the Case for Control," a piece in the New York Times by University of California professor Richard Taruskin that defended the Boston Symphony Orchestra for canceling a performance of three choruses from the opera just a few weeks after the attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon. The husband of a member of the orchestra's chorus had been aboard American Airlines Flight 11, which flew into the north tower.

Swimming against the critical tide, which generally slammed the Boston Symphony decision as censorship, Taruskin decried the opera for trading "in the tritest undergraduate fantasies" and romanticizing terrorism. In a pungently expressed but subtle argument, he said that the cancellation was a judicious recognition of the power of art and concluded, "Censorship is always deplorable, but the exercise of forbearance can be noble."

The reader includes other articles on the opera, pro and con, by Ross, Edward Rothstein and Bernd Feuchtner. Mark Swed of the Los Angeles Times eloquently presented the case for the defense of Adams.

"As a profoundly disturbing meditation on the tragic death of an innocent man, Klinghoffer hardly supports or apologizes for terrorism," Swed wrote. "But it does require, in the way that only opera can, that we identify with the emotions that drive actions we despise."

Taruskin's call for forbearance - or timidity, in Swed's view - seems to have carried the day. During the past five years, U.S. opera companies have avoided Klinghoffer like the plague. According to the Web site of Adams' publisher, Boosey & Hawkes, the only performances have been concert versions by the Curtis Symphony Orchestra and the Brooklyn Philharmonic and choruses from the opera by the Fort Wayne Philharmonic. European opera companies have mounted numerous productions.

An excellent British film was made from the opera, directed by Penny Woolcock, but PBS declined to broadcast it. The DVD represents state-of-the-art opera on film, and is a gritty, compelling evocation of the agony of the Middle East.

Of course, divisions over Klinghoffer have not hindered the elevation of Adams to the status of something like America's composer laureate. His memorial to victims of the 2001 attacks, On the Transmigration of Souls, was premiered by the New York Philharmonic and awarded the Pulitzer Prize for music. His latest opera, Doctor Atomic, garnered strong notices last fall in San Francisco and is headed to the Lyric Opera of Chicago and New York's Metropolitan Opera.

The collection of writings on Adams provides a good overview of his career, though the profiles can get tediously repetitive in their recounting of oft-told anecdotes, such as the composer's brief post-Harvard job as a forklift operator in Oakland, Calif., or his description of himself about the time of Harmonium premiered in 1981 as "a minimalist bored with minimalism." Most of Adams' major works are covered in program notes or reviews. Some are refreshingly unpredictable, like Sarah Cahill's knowing essay on the underappreciated rock opera, I Was Looking at the Ceiling and Then I Saw the Sky, set in the 1994 Los Angeles earthquake. May's interview with Adams is engrossing, as is the interview with Ingram Marshall, an innovative composer himself and longtime friend of Adams, on their days in early 1970s San Francisco.

This has been a good season for books of music journalism. Along with the Adams reader, there is a collection of articles by the venerable Los Angeles critic Alan Rich, So I've Heard: Notes of a Migratory Music Critic, and another one by Steinberg and his fellow program annotator for the San Francisco Symphony, Larry Rothe, For the Love of Music: Invitations to Listening. Rich and Steinberg are also well-represented in the Adams book, reflecting their preeminence in the analysis of modern music.

The Rich volume is particularly welcome, since his writing of late has been rather a well-kept secret to readers outside Southern California, mostly appearing in the alternative LA Weekly since 1992. He turned 82 in June and has been writing about music for more than 60 years - his book includes reviews from the long-gone New York Herald-Tribune, at which he was chief music critic. But, as Tim Page writes in the foreword, Rich's prose "reads like the work of an iconoclastic, hyper-brilliant 25-year-old who has tapped into the memory and experience of an octogenarian professor emeritus."

Indeed, few writers have been able to bring music to life on the page with such color and clarity. Rich's offhand descriptions of passages in standard works of Bach, Mozart and Beethoven are often revelatory, and he has been an indefatigable champion of the new music scene of Los Angeles, where giants like Stravinsky and Schoenberg and Slonimsky once held sway. The book is liberally sprinkled with reviews, which sometimes don't age well past their deadlines, but there also are plenty of old pieces that hold up as if they were written yesterday, such as a brilliant 1982 California magazine story about conductor Carlo Maria Giulini rehearsing the Los Angeles Philharmonic in Beethoven's Fifth Symphony.

In some ways, Steinberg is the dean of American music journalists, having made his mark as a critic for the Boston Globe and going on to write program notes for the Boston Symphony, San Francisco Symphony and New York Philharmonic, among other tasks. His guides to symphonies, concertos and choral works are indispensable books.

For the Love of Music features Steinberg in a discursive mode, musing on such subjects as "How I Fell in Love with Music" or "Schoenberg, Brahms and the Great Tradition" or "Remembering Rachmaninoff." His elegant articles, as well as those by Rothe, appeared in the San Francisco Symphony program book, setting a high literary standard for American orchestras, whose program notes are often unreadable.

John Fleming can be reached at (727) 893-8716 or fleming@sptimes.com

MUSIC BOOKS

Books discussed in this article:

* The John Adams Reader: Essential Writings on an American Composer, edited by Thomas May; Amadeus Press; $27.95; 455 pages

* So I've Heard: Notes of a Migratory Music Critic, by Alan Rich; Amadeus Press; $24.95; 338 pages

* For the Love of Music: Invitations to Listening, by Michael Steinberg and Larry Rothe; Oxford University Press; $28; 251 pages

[Last modified August 25, 2006, 09:27:43]