A question I have been asking for many years was addressed tonight by my colleague Evan, who has a doctorate in voice from Peabody. He’s one of those fun, light, bel canto tenors (the guy who played Walter last night would squash him like a bug, in the eternal words of Sonia Gomez) and he went to see the Staatsoper production of Rossini’s The Italian Girl in Algiers twice. He also saw Rigoletto on Sunday and said it was great. I am getting pretty psyched up for tomorrow, let me tell you.
Anyway, I was telling Evan about Schopenhauer’s philosophy of music as an alternate representation of the Will, which is the sort of basic underlying principle of everything in the entire world for Schopenhauer. His great work, The World as Will and Representation says that underneath everything there is this “Will” which is endlessly striving, striving, and everything material like bugs and plants and people are somehow manifestations of higher or lower forms of the Will. Of course, the only way to be happy is to somehow deny or transcend this Will, in a sort of Buddhist way.
Wagner loved Schopenhauer and dedicated the words of the Ring to him. Schopenhauer, on the other hand, thought Wagner was a rotten composer who didn’t know what music was. Wagner’s attempt to represent the material world as well as the human mind in music with his little leitmotifs, as well as his attempt to get across some message of renunciation or self-sacrifice and transcendence in his operas, was called “worthless” by Schopenhauer. His favorite composer was, in fact, Rossini. I had always thought this was strange, since Schopenhauer is some big German curmudgeon and Rossini, I had always thought, was a skipping along “Figaro, Figaro, Figaro” sort of guy. When I think of Rossini I think of that scene in the Bugs Bunny where he’s massaging Elmer Fudd’s head and then flowers grow. Do you remember that?
But Evan told me that the most important thing in Rossini is the “Rossini crescendo,” which always has a sense of urgency, or striving. I guess Rossini was THE most popular composer in Vienna in the 1820s, eclipsing even Beethoven. But then he got syphilis and stopped writing music.
This fall, Seattle Opera is doing The Italian Girl in Algiers and I am taking my 12th grade students to see it as part of the unit on comedy. I asked Evan what the comedy is based on and he said a lot of it in this production was about making fun of the “Mustafa” Sultan character, and the clash of the Italian with the Algerian culture. He reminded me that comedy is based on shared values (you can’t really laugh at something unless you understand the person’s preconceptions, right? Which is why some people find certain things funny and others don’t) and often humor has been found in collisions of two sets of these systems. Arthur Koestler (yes, I know he also wrote Darkness at Noon, and did you know he also endowed a chair of parapsychology at Edinburgh University? We used to call it the ‘ghostbusters’ chair) came up with a theory of creativity which he called “bisociation” that I am going to teach my 12th graders next year, and which he uses to explain comedy. That Rossini opera fits right in with Koestler’s theory, too. It will be a great opportunity to talk about “demeaning” humor as well, humor at other people’s expense, “black” comedy, and all that. It’s great to have these colleagues who all have different areas of expertise and just pick their brains.
I started outlining my Don Giovanni project today; my colleague Karen, who teaches up in Edmonds (and sometimes bikes to work from Wallingford, where she lives) and is a fabulous cellist (one guess as to who her beloved cello teacher was…) is going to team up with me on the unit. We hope to do a joint Don Giovanni project, and even visit one another’s schools. She’ll focus more on the music and I’ll focus more on the humanities-type issues, like gender, psychology, archetypal themes and characters, and so forth. But that’s after the comedy unit.
Tomorrow before standing in line for Rigoletto we are going on a tour of the instrument museum where they have some of the actual instruments Mozart played, and also Leopold’s violin. The guy who is giving us the tour has made some recordings using those instruments, so I’ll see if I can get a CD to bring back.
Anyway, I was telling Evan about Schopenhauer’s philosophy of music as an alternate representation of the Will, which is the sort of basic underlying principle of everything in the entire world for Schopenhauer. His great work, The World as Will and Representation says that underneath everything there is this “Will” which is endlessly striving, striving, and everything material like bugs and plants and people are somehow manifestations of higher or lower forms of the Will. Of course, the only way to be happy is to somehow deny or transcend this Will, in a sort of Buddhist way.
Wagner loved Schopenhauer and dedicated the words of the Ring to him. Schopenhauer, on the other hand, thought Wagner was a rotten composer who didn’t know what music was. Wagner’s attempt to represent the material world as well as the human mind in music with his little leitmotifs, as well as his attempt to get across some message of renunciation or self-sacrifice and transcendence in his operas, was called “worthless” by Schopenhauer. His favorite composer was, in fact, Rossini. I had always thought this was strange, since Schopenhauer is some big German curmudgeon and Rossini, I had always thought, was a skipping along “Figaro, Figaro, Figaro” sort of guy. When I think of Rossini I think of that scene in the Bugs Bunny where he’s massaging Elmer Fudd’s head and then flowers grow. Do you remember that?
But Evan told me that the most important thing in Rossini is the “Rossini crescendo,” which always has a sense of urgency, or striving. I guess Rossini was THE most popular composer in Vienna in the 1820s, eclipsing even Beethoven. But then he got syphilis and stopped writing music.
This fall, Seattle Opera is doing The Italian Girl in Algiers and I am taking my 12th grade students to see it as part of the unit on comedy. I asked Evan what the comedy is based on and he said a lot of it in this production was about making fun of the “Mustafa” Sultan character, and the clash of the Italian with the Algerian culture. He reminded me that comedy is based on shared values (you can’t really laugh at something unless you understand the person’s preconceptions, right? Which is why some people find certain things funny and others don’t) and often humor has been found in collisions of two sets of these systems. Arthur Koestler (yes, I know he also wrote Darkness at Noon, and did you know he also endowed a chair of parapsychology at Edinburgh University? We used to call it the ‘ghostbusters’ chair) came up with a theory of creativity which he called “bisociation” that I am going to teach my 12th graders next year, and which he uses to explain comedy. That Rossini opera fits right in with Koestler’s theory, too. It will be a great opportunity to talk about “demeaning” humor as well, humor at other people’s expense, “black” comedy, and all that. It’s great to have these colleagues who all have different areas of expertise and just pick their brains.
I started outlining my Don Giovanni project today; my colleague Karen, who teaches up in Edmonds (and sometimes bikes to work from Wallingford, where she lives) and is a fabulous cellist (one guess as to who her beloved cello teacher was…) is going to team up with me on the unit. We hope to do a joint Don Giovanni project, and even visit one another’s schools. She’ll focus more on the music and I’ll focus more on the humanities-type issues, like gender, psychology, archetypal themes and characters, and so forth. But that’s after the comedy unit.
Tomorrow before standing in line for Rigoletto we are going on a tour of the instrument museum where they have some of the actual instruments Mozart played, and also Leopold’s violin. The guy who is giving us the tour has made some recordings using those instruments, so I’ll see if I can get a CD to bring back.
posted by Adina Meyer @ 1:51 PM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home