Get Bach

I went to a talk at the main branch of the Louisville Free Public Library last night. The subject was the upcoming opera, Enemies: A Love Story, and present to discuss it were the composer Ben Moore, the librettist Nahma Sandrow, the conductor David Stern, and the stage manager Mary Birnbaum. I almost didn't go. It had been a rough day and I was lying on my couch reading Neal Stephenson's Quicksilver and thinking about how much I didn't want to drive downtown during rush hour...and then I just got up and got into the car and started driving. I often talk myself out of going to things. It's not always easy for me to go out unaccompanied, and company is pretty sparse these days. But I'm glad I did, because it was a really lovely talk. All four of the participants were interesting people. I felt myself most drawn to the conductor, David Stern--which surprised me, as I thought that I'd be homing in on Mr. Moore. But David Stern was a really fascinating fellow. I found myself wishing that I had brought a notebook along so that I could write some of the things he said down, and I even got out my phone and took a couple of brief notes on it...even though I strive to be a person who doesn't take out his phone on such occasions.

One of the things Mr. Stern talked about was Johann Sebastian Bach's Mass in B Minor...which I don't think I knew at all. (It's playing as I type, though, so if anything pokes me in the ribs I'll holler.) Everyone was talking about revision, and how it was such a big part of the music and libretto of Enemies (I kind of hate the post-colon bit of the title, so henceforth...), and Mr. Stern mentioned that Bach started working on his Mass in B Minor in 1714 (when he was 29 years old) and didn't complete it until 1749 (when he was 64 years old...just a year before his death). 35 years is a long time to work on a piece. It also made me think of Bach in a deeper way. Not that I know shit about him...though I do have a "complete" cd set of his music (155 discs). Might be time to start working my way through that. Let's see, at 15 minutes a day, that would probably take about...maybe average 50 minutes per disc...less than 517 days. Well, sheesh. Let's get to it, then. Details as they happen.

Mr. Stern also talked about how he hated it when people talked about the "accessibility" of a work of art. He made reference to reading James Joyce, and said, "The difficulty of getting through it makes us better people." I thought that that was a pretty awesome thing to say. In fact, this is what prompted me to overcome my dislike of people who fondle their phones in public and to take out my Samsung Galaxy S4 (I am very posh and up to date, as you can tell...they're getting ready to release the Galaxy S10; my "ancient" phone came out in April of 2013, when dinosaurs still walked the earth). It also made me wonder: which Joyce work was Mr. Stern referring to? I have actually read of all Joyce's novels (except Stephen Hero, which (1) I don't think actually counts and (2) I will probably get to eventually), and while I can make a good case for what Mr. Stern said about Dubliners, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and Ulysses, I don't think I could say it of Finnegans Wake. Maybe it's just me...but I thought that was kind of a bit of a bullshit. But, of course, being me my next thought was / is, "Maybe I should read it again." But there are so many other books to read.... What Mr. Stern said also made me think of Marcel Proust's Remembrance of Things Past. I really did feel that reading that book made me smarter, and I have thought about reading it again. Maybe even going back to the old C. K. Scott Moncrieff translation, just to see if it makes a difference (since I read the new Penguin translations by Lydia Davis, James Grieve, Christopher Prendergast, John Sturrock, Carol Clark, Peter Collier, and Ian Patterson 1). 

Mr. Stern also made reference to Monteverdi--a name I new but not enough to even answer a Jeopardy! question about. Mr. Stern said something like, "I wish people would listen to Monteverdi again...he's not performed anymore." So I looked him up and found some stuffs on the You Tub, and yes, I would like to get me some of that as well. 

At several points in the talk, Mr. Moore and Ms. Sandrow were reflecting on how they were drawn to write from a Jew-centric perspective, and that made me think about how when I looked up Mr. Moore prior to my visit (before I started thinking that I wasn't going to go) how so many of his works were based on literature that I loved...Joyce and Keats and Virginia Woolf and lots of others...and I wondered why (or if, as my "research" was perfunctory) he had not done anything based on Kafka, since he could get two big fat birds with one stone there. And then I started thinking about how I would like to write an opera based on Kafka's works, and a horn and drum motif occurred to me. I kept repeating it to myself, hoping that I could burn it into my memory, but I realized that that wouldn't work, so I tried to do some primitive annotation, and I typed this on my phone:

B b bbBb B b bbBb

B b bbB b bb

And when I got home I immediately looked at my phone to see if I could transfer those notes into Garage Band...and it was gone. 

And I only am escaped alone to tell thee.

Oh, yeah, I need to re-read Moby Dick soon, too, don't I?

I don't think I'm going to live long enough to get all of this stuff done.

ANYway...looking forward to Enemies, which will be performed Friday, November 9 at 8 PM and Sunday, November 11 at 2 PM at the lovely Brown Theater. There are still quite a few seats open for both shows...opera audiences tend not to flock to see anything that's less than 200 years old. In fact, if you go on Sunday you can sit right next to me! What a thrill for you.

Oh...I got a bit more than 2/3rds of the way (1:20 of 1:50) through Bach's Mass in B Minor, and it is, indeed, lovely stuff. I will go back and give it my full attention asap.


1  Speaking of which...how the fuck is it possible that Penguin USA is just now about to publish the 5th book, yet it was published FIFTEEN YEARS AGO in the UK? Seriously.