Tristan och Isolde, Tristan und Isolde, Tristan and Isolde: American viewing German opera in Swedish (Part 2)

I want to say a bit more about text in opera and its importance for the listener/spectator. First and foremost, opera is complex and takes practice. The untrained eye can't follow everything afoot at a football match, so why should we expect a four-hour opera to be any different? And I'm actually really bad at opera. I've sat through at least a dozen operas wondering why I was there and what I was looking for, accessing close to nothing that was occurring on stage. I've at least once gotten angry at a production (Carmen, 2001 in New Orleans) while sitting in the audience and cursed opera's ridiculousness as having nothing to offer me. As a kid my mother would take me to the New Orleans Opera company's productions and I usually relished it, but still was very much an outsider looking in. It wasn't rapturous. Those Thomas Mann salad days spent listening to Lohengrin in Lübeck? Weren't happening.

Still, the disadvantage of opera to a lay person -- it's so complex! -- is an advantage too. Just focus on what you can, because there's so much there. If the story is your entry point, focus on the story. Or focus on the singing. Or get lost in the music. But lots of people (most of my friends, say) really don't get it. The stories in operas are ridiculous! And singing criticism is for experts. And getting lost in music is precisely the problem -- twenty minutes into a performance they're left grasping at things to focus on. Never mind that our modern age makes focusing on anything for more than twenty minutes nigh impossible. Kleiner Mann, was tun? 

Tristan och Isolde, Tristan und Isolde, Tristan and Isolde: American viewing German opera in Swedish (Part 1)

I'm an American who teaches South Koreans German in Vietnam. I'm also an American who, from time to time, goes to German operas in Sweden. This leads to a number of delights in life, and a number of concomitant linguistic puzzles. I attended Parsifal in Stockholm last year, was taken aback by the quality of the performances and intensity of the music, and was a bit sullen at the number of things I couldn't parse (if all of the text had been in English, it still takes practice and wit to focus on music where the music is foremost, and text and story where they're necessary, to say nothing of the meaning and philosophy). Today's puzzle: how do I get the most out of Tristan und Isolde when I haven't read the German libretto and can only glancingly follow the Swedish supertitles?

Now, I'm of two minds about working through the text in opera. A friend of mine doesn't pay much attention to the words when he listens to opera, doesn't even see the need to attend operas live. The music is sacrosanct, the staging a distraction. His way sounds noble, but I can't manage it. I need the text to thread the music together, I need the story to access the sound. I agree that stagings are a distraction from accessing the highest spheres of music -- I find it hard to get excited about Regietheater -- but then again, nearly everything is a distraction from accessing the highest spheres of music. If I can't 'feel' Wagner, if I can't hear something mystical at all times throughout all four hours, then at least I have the story and the words to focus on. With a little luck, the words will be familiar enough that I will have mind to spare to devote to feelings and philosophising. Even if those words are Swedish.

Reading Sebald in English, and English vs. German syntax

In response to a friend of mine who asked whether reading W.G. Sebald in German was very different from reading him in English, and whether I thought something important was lost in translation:

Sebald in English is magnificent because the writing is magnificent. Sebald is a very at-the-surface writer because he wants you to look at things you already see. So he used a style that sort of coaxes you into a sense of "I already mostly know what this is all about." Then he gives you clues that what is at the surface is misleading, that what you can see means something else and that you are missing what's essential. And so he gives you another version, and another angle, and another clue, and another and another (making it a good bet to read the book again). He does this in a way that is not showy; it is humble and disarming and then finally all the more forceful for it. So, yeah, you can get most of that in English without worrying too much about what's missing. 

Book Review, Snark by David Denby

Best way to kill a blog: not write, even when you're inclined to, and then wait until you're no longer inclined to.

Best way to kill a blog 2: publish a too-long review of a book you're certain no one you know has read.

Here goes anyway:

David Denby, one of two film critics for the New Yorker, recently published a book called Snark. I saw him on C-SPAN discussing his tract and was immediately delighted: someone was taking on the anti-everything aspects of popular intellectual culture. So I bought his book, read it, and was left somewhat upset. I should have expected it from a typical New Yorker writer -- an extremely intelligent, well polished analysis of something just un-mainstream enough to make me feel like I was being a cultured badass, with attacks on the American neo- and theo-cons ranging from peripheral to vociferous, but with no real attack at what's at the heart of the matter. I made my way through his at times exasperating and at times spot-on book, and I don't think that he's entirely correct in his ideas about why and how we talk to (or more importantly, about) each other in this vast internet realm of links and tagging and occasionally text.