Alex Ross
About
Music critic; CWT guest
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Claims by Alex Ross (20 of 28)
Modern opera training overemphasizes technique over expression
Contemporary opera voice training places too much emphasis on sheer technical quality and not enough on expression, the use of language, and the communication of drama, so although technical standards are higher than ever, the total expressive conviction found in 1950s-60s singers is harder to find.
Americanization smoothed out regional orchestral sound
Orchestral interpretation has become homogenized because the great 20th-century American orchestras smoothed out regional differences—where a French wind section once sounded distinct from a German one—and this 'Americanization of orchestral sound' then spread back to European orchestras, eroding their distinctive regional character.
The Magic Flute is more explicitly racist than any Wagner opera
Mozart's The Magic Flute is unambiguously racist through the atrocious stereotype of Monostatos in a way that no Wagner opera is, because Jews and Black people are never explicitly present in Wagner's operas—stereotypes are only theorized—so the framing of Mozart and Beethoven as pure humanist figures versus Wagner as uniquely evil is a mistake.
Professionalization trades expression for technical perfection
The intense professionalization, specialization, and self-consciousness of orchestral playing—reinforced by recording technology making orchestras eager to avoid mistakes—has raised technical standards to their highest ever level but at the cost of the looser, more expressive, slightly chaotic ensemble that conductors like Furtwängler prized, a tradeoff that deserves to be questioned.
Excerpting Wagner loses dramatic irony
Wagner was ambivalent about excerpting his works: extracting pieces like the 'Ride of the Valkyries' was brilliant marketing that spread his fame, but pulling out a passage such as the entry of the gods into Valhalla strips it of dramatic irony—what sounds grandiose and uplifting is actually an empty, hollow spectacle masking a catastrophe—so Wagner is richest experienced whole as theater.
Wagner's greatness and darkness are inseparable
Wagner had the combination of qualities to become a universal cultural figure on the scale of Aeschylus, Dante, or Shakespeare, but his anti-Semitism and extreme nationalism shadow his achievement, and rather than diminishing the work this inseparability of greatness and darkness makes him an exemplary human phenomenon, since the mixing of creative and destructive energies is who we are as a species.
Wagner poses no present danger and shouldn't be demonized
Wagner is not a clear and present danger in today's culture—he is not lurking behind contemporary racism, inequality, or political threats—whereas American popular culture, which we treat as innately pure and innocent, is actually deeply mixed up with American history and present-day politics; so demonizing Wagner while idealizing other composers goes too far.
Keilberth 1955 Ring excels by self-effacing conducting
The 1955 Bayreuth Ring conducted by Joseph Keilberth is Ross's favorite precisely because Keilberth had no grand interpretative scheme; he disappears into the music so it comes alive spontaneously, revealing the constant shifting of moods and psychological instability, combined with an incredible cast including Astrid Varnay's Brünnhilde and Hans Hotter's Wotan.
Solti Ring overbearing; matches Apocalypse Now's masculine aggression
Georg Solti's classic studio Ring hammers too hard with an unnecessarily brutal edge, and not coincidentally it is Solti's aggressively hard-hitting 'Ride of the Valkyries' that Coppola used in Apocalypse Now—an ironic choice since the film scene of male soldiers exalting in destruction inverts Die Walküre's actual celebration of unusually powerful women, who became feminist icons at the turn of the century.
Cultural habits, once broken, are hard to restore
Once people get out of the habit of going to concerts it can be very difficult to persuade them to come back, as happened to the Metropolitan Opera after 9/11 when some patrons who stopped attending never returned because they developed new cultural habits.
Pandemic could make classical music healthily more local
The pandemic could have a healthy effect if it makes classical music more local in focus, cutting back the wasteful jet-setting culture in which conductors guest-conduct in ten places per season for hefty fees, so that music directors instead concentrate their careers in one place and build ties to the surrounding community.
Institutions can convert audiences to new music over time
Although the stereotype is that classical audiences only want the tried and true, sustained institutional commitment to challenging repertoire can change audiences' minds, as happened with the Los Angeles Philharmonic under Esa-Pekka Salonen and to some extent in Berlin under Simon Rattle.
Many opera attendees go out of social obligation
A significant component of the American orchestral and opera audience attends out of social obligation rather than deep engagement—subscription holders going because 'the Joneses down the street are going'—yet such patrons are necessary to sustain orchestras as civic institutions supported across generations; Ross estimates at least 50 to 60 percent of a second-tier city opera crowd is genuinely enjoying it.
Concert silence rules should be case-by-case not dogmatic
Rules forbidding noise or applause between movements should not be dogmatic—some pieces, like the end of the Emperor Concerto's first movement, are built to provoke applause—yet there is good reason audiences are quiet because the dynamic extremes (the whispery opening of Beethoven's Ninth or the subliminal E-flat opening of the Ring) require silence, so the standard should be case-by-case across a thousand-year tradition of music with different social functions.
Bemoaning a lost golden age is a recurring opera syndrome
The complaint that all the great Wagner singers are in the past is a very familiar and recurring syndrome; people said the same thing in the 1950s and 60s, lamenting earlier singers, so claims of a lost golden age should be treated skeptically.
Music critics need command of neighboring cultural fields
Music critics must have command of neighboring cultural areas because music is not separate from the rest of culture—writing about opera means writing about literature, staging, and theater ideas—and breadth also serves the critic's role as an advocate and face of the art form, since readers who enjoy a critic's pieces on Dylan or Radiohead or nature may give a piece on Mozart a chance they otherwise wouldn't.
Feldman transformed atonal vocabulary into eerie distant beauty
Morton Feldman took the unearthly atonal vocabulary of Schoenberg, Berg, and Webern—harmonies that were prickly and alarming in their original context—and, by keeping everything quiet and spaced out, transformed them into distant, eerie objects of radical beauty that can be contemplated from a distance like Rothko's misty abstract paintings, an aesthetic of radical quietude especially appealing in moments of frenzy and chaos.
Joyce's Ulysses shaped Ross's taste for all-engulfing chaos
Reading Joyce's Ulysses at age 18, before fully knowing the classic 20th-century modernist works, gave Ross a taste for a sprawling, comprehensive, all-devouring modernism of all-engulfing chaos rather than strict, spare modernism, which prepared him for unexpected and irrational juxtapositions of styles in music such as the symphonies of Charles Ives.
Guilty pleasures buy into a false hierarchy of genius
The concept of guilty pleasures should be rejected because it buys into the idea that there is an exalted level of genius and an embarrassing realm down below, a hierarchy Ross dismisses even while admitting he likes certain Oasis songs.
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