Why not make excuses for Le Nozze di Figaro?

Listening recently to a beautifully performed broadcast recording [1] of Luigi Dallapiccola's Il Prigioniero I kept thinking that stubbornly conservative audiences and lack of public funding are not the worst enemies of modern music in America.  That distinction belongs to patronizing, condescending, and (as we shall see shortly) largely incompetent music critics who think that discussions of important non-tonal compositions must begin with (a) veiled excuses for the work's idiom, and (b) smarmy assurances that despite its idiom the music has much to offer to lovers of Chopin and Verdi.
     
One American music critic, who attended the very production of Il Prigioniero I've been enjoying so much, described this opera as

... a bleak, 12-tone, boldly modernistic work from the mid-20th century ... [whose] 12-tone musical style ... is certainly complex - tremulous with astringent harmonies and fraught with skittish thematic lines.

Then, to assure his readers that the music does not call for doubling their usual doses of Zoloft and Ritalin, he added that Dallapiccola

...used the 12-tone language in a sensually lyrical way ... [with] intervals that produce plaintively consoling sustained harmonies. [2]

(How the poor reader is to make sense of an incoherent description of the music's  harmonic language as being both "astringent" and "plaintively consoling" was left unexplained.)

This kind of writing makes me feel as if I'm being set up for a blind date with a woman of stern looks and uncompromisingly difficult personality, yet whose acquaintance I'm promised to find rewarding once I get to know her well enough.  Such attitude would be annoying even in the case of genuinely challenging music (e.g., Helmut Lachenmann's Das Mädchen mit den Schwefelhölzern), but with works like Il Prigioniero - and even in the context of a newspaper review for non-specialist readers - it is simply unintelligible.

First, as far as the standard operatic repertoire goes, there is  nothing peculiar to Il Prigioniero to motivate its description as bleak - unless the point was to link this adjective in the reader's mind with the immediately following 12-tone.  Is "Don Giovanni" cheerful?  Is "Otello" heart-warming?  Is "Boris Godunov" optimistic?  Are "Salome" and "Elektra" uplifting?
     Second, because Il Prigioniero was finished nearly four decades after Schoenberg's Erwartung, a quarter of a century after Berg's Wozzeck, and 15 - 20 years after such 12-tone operas as Schoneberg's Von Heute auf Morgen, Krenek's Karl V and Berg's Lulu, there was nothing "boldly modernistic" about Dallapiccola's opera even at the time of its premiere (1950).
     Finally, and ignoring the earlier noted incoherence, to describe a piece of music as being "certainly complex" because of its "astringent harmonies" and "skittish thematic lines" is to promote a sadly dimwitted (or deliberately misleading) notion of musical complexity.  Assuming there is an adequate measure of musical complexity in the first place, it seems to depend entirely on what the composer does with the musical 'raw material' of intervals, motifs, harmonies, rhythms, etc., and not at all on the specific (and listener-relative) characteristics of the raw materials themselves, such as harmonic astringency or thematic skittishness.  It takes only a few minutes of listening to such composers as Galina Ustvolskaya to know that simple, even simplistic music can offer ample amounts of dissonance more "astringent" than anything to be found in Dallapiccola's oeuvre.

The point of all this, however, is not to bemoan the combination of incompetence and arrogance frequently exhibited by mainstream media music critics.  I've already done that in a couple of earlier posts (1, 2).   Here I am simply frustrated by what seems to be a hopeless addiction among music critics to making excuses for music whose aesthetic riches are accessible only as dividends on an initial investment of time (repeated listening), mental effort (background reading), and patience (suspending one's infantile expectations of instant gratification).  Having taken some mathematics courses in the past, I don't recall ever hearing excuses for the difficulty of the (allegedly very beautiful) subject matter.  The attitude was that if you want to know how (and how beautifully) the world really works, you need to learn how to make sense of differential equations, groups, probability distributions, and other mathematical constructs.  If you're too lazy or too stupid for that, then you always will be a Neanderthal-with-an-iPod; and a degree in folklore or philosophy will not change that one bit.
      I don't see why a similar attitude should not be taken toward a Wall Street broker who expects any music he pays to hear at Avery Fischer Hall to give him an instant "Bruckner high", just because his time and energy are too precious to invest in becoming an experienced listener who is rewarded by the music of such acknowledged post-war masters as Carter, Maderna, and Boulez.  As I see it, the task for music critics is not to make excuses for important modern music, but to make the Wall Street broker feel like a fucking retard for demanding instant gratification in the concert hall.  That's how art critics would make him feel if he expected an instant 'Rembrandt high' from every exhibition he pays to attend at a major museum.  That's how wine critics would make him feel if he complained that a highly regarded wine he bought did not taste like Manischewitz.  That's how an intelligent woman would make him feel if he demanded a blowjob under the restaurant table on the first date.  Yet when it comes to music criticism, the critic is eager to comfort all those doofuses with season subscriptions to the Philharmonic by assuring them that it is not because they are lazy or stupid that they feel antagonistic toward non-tonal music (even when such music is as passionate and lyrical as in Dallapiccola's operas, or as meltingly lovely as in Krenek's works for string orchestra).  It is because the music is "difficult"... [3]

Of course addictions are hard to break, so I don't expect changes anytime soon.  But so long as the critics are bent on apologizing for important music,  how about making excuses for important works that really need them, such as Le Nozze di Figaro?  It only seems fair to apologize for the relentlessly diatonic and numbingly major key character of the music (only one brief aria is in a minor key); to admit that the music's tonal centers attract harmonic motion with the force of black holes, so that no harmonic progression ventures far from the center of tonal gravity before collapsing back to the tonic; to warn that the opera's more than three hours worth of themes tightly wrapped around major triads may induce sonic claustrophobia of the kind one gets from prolonged exposure to an ice cream truck jingle.  And while we are at it, how about also making excuses for Parisfal?  Music lovers surely deserve to be assured that enduring endless stretches of rhythmically monotonous declamatory recitative-like singing - in which every character's contribution ends with the same fucking cadence based on a major or minor triad - will be amply rewarded by thirty or so minutes of music that changed the world forever.

Well, maybe I am being a bit too harsh on Figaro and Parsifal.  Still, my first exposure to opera was with Wozzeck; and although I did not understand its music the way I do now, the opera's sound world was so intoxicating, so interesting that I left the opera house that night craving more operatic experiences of that kind.  Alas, while still living in the second largest city in America, the closest I could ever get to that kind of operatic experience in actual performances were Salome and Elektra.  This deprivation of my youth explains my contempt for credentialed imbeciles who, after all these years, continue to make excuses for the kind of music that can save opera from becoming a form of entertainment aimed exclusively at culturally pretentious but hopelessly inbred musical mongoloids.

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 1.  Rosalind Plowright (mother), Evgeny Nikitin (prisoner), Chris Merritt (Grand Inquisitor), Paris National Opera Orchestra and Chorus, Lothar Zagorsek (conductor), April 8, 2008, Paris. 
2.  'Il Prigioniero' is Staged in Paris, Anthony Tommasini, New York Times, April 23, 2008.   

3.  I don't mean this as a rehash of Milton Babbitt's extremist who-cares-if-you-listen attitude.  I think composers should care if we listen to their music, if only because the formal properties of musical compositions, when completely divorced from the psychological effects of their physical realizations on experienced listeners, are nothing but embarrassingly trivial exercises in applied mathematics.