NAIS - Reading Room: Books to Complement Virtual Arts Experiences

Reading is one of the pleasures that we’ve held onto during the pandemic—an escape from isolation and a way to connect. Interestingly, I have found that many of the once-live but now virtual programs that have been proliferating since the pandemic started have enhanced the page, some in surprising ways.

For many, live music performances are among the greatest casualties of the pandemic. Missing Broadway musicals such as Hamilton or operas like Tosca, performances of Beethoven’s Ninth or the Holiday Pops—and wondering if they will ever return—is an almost physical ache. Yet they are not lost, only transformed. As Paul Elie puts it in Reinventing Bach: “From the beginning of time till the beginning of the 20th century, the making of music and the hearing of it were two aspects of a single experience. Audio recordings changed the situation profoundly. Through them sound was unmoored from space and time.” Video may have changed the experience as much. Exceptional recorded performances are now abundant. All winter long I watched historic performances or current concerts from empty halls and found them as riveting as a cinematic close-up.

The Berlin Philharmonic offers 90 conductors and 500 soloists across decades. See Simon Rattle making eye contact with his musicians, or Herbert von Karajan losing himself in a trancelike state seemingly forcing the music from his own mind. The Metropolitan Opera has recorded decades of performances. See José Carreras and Luciano Pavarotti interpret La Bohème or 40 years of Aida. Take weeks for Richard Wagner’s The Ring Cycle, with all the timeouts needed. Choose free weekly opera performances, or buy a yearly subscription to either the orchestra or the opera company for the price of a single orchestra ticket.

Alex Ross’ Wagnerism: Art and Politics in the Shadow of Music considers the Wagnerian reception, from his early work and his relationship with Friedrich Nietzsche, through the French Symbolistes, then Nazism, socialism, communism, modernism, and pretty much every -ism in politics and performances as well as cinema, from D.W. Griffith to Francis Ford Coppola via Bugs Bunny and The Blues Brothers. I have skipped sections of this 650-page tome, and I expect others will as well. On the other hand, it’s many pages shorter than Moby Dick, The Magic Mountain, The Man Without Qualities, A La Recherche du Temps Perdu, and Ulysses, all contemporary with Wagner or Wagnerism. It’s not surprising that a chapter is devoted to Wagner and Thomas Mann, who observed that “only the exhaustive can be truly interesting.”

A Different Tune

One of the most interesting multimedia experiences available moves seamlessly from printed word to online performance. Conductor Rob Kapilow, known for live concerts titled “What Makes It Great?” in which he and a classical orchestra explain how a work like the “Jupiter” symphony captures audiences, last year published Listening for America: Inside the Great American Songbook.

At the heart of the book are 16 chapters featuring expositions of songs from “Summertime” through “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” to “Send in the Clowns.” Each is broken into key elements, which are recorded in links on YouTube (making an ebook the best version to buy). Kapilow even offers paired snippets of weaker and true versions, showing exactly how the composer’s choices rendered the ordinary extraordinary.

Although the book examines Broadway music, Kapilow’s authorial range goes back to the beginnings of American popular music in the minstrel show, vaudeville (which he explains was a corruption of voix de ville, or “voice of the city”), musical revues, and finally the musical we know. Throughout, he consistently notes the debts, acknowledged and unacknowledged, owed to underpaid and ostracized Black composers and performers, quoting composer Antonín Dvořák who, during his three years in the U.S., declared: “The future music of this country must be founded upon what are called the Negro melodies. This must be the real foundation of any serious and original school of composition to be developed in the United States.”

Of all the books I share here, Kapilow’s is the most suited to the long days of quarantine, as each chapter takes double the time of simple reading, as you go back over the musical quotations to grasp the subtleties that indeed make the music great.

On the Bard

Then there’s a chance to rethink the teaching of Shakespeare through James Shapiro’s Shakespeare in a Divided America: What His Plays Tell Us About Our Past and Future, which offers both eras when some aspect of a Shakespeare play illuminates a national concern and times when the play itself becomes central to a historical moment. His second chapter includes the startling fact that a youthful Ulysses S. Grant once rehearsed the part of Desdemona for a barracks Othello on the cusp of the Mexican War. Shakespeare is also there during debates over American masculinity, Manifest Destiny, and the oncoming Civil War. The chapter on Lincoln’s assassination digs deeply into the politics and acting careers of John Wilkes Booth and his brothers and topics of slavery, tyranny, and republicanism.

While three-fourths of Shapiro’s chapters are fodder for historians, the last two, covering the 1998 film Shakespeare in Love and the 2017 staging of Julius Caesar in New York’s Central Park, are part of contemporary lore. The first depicts a lengthy give-and-take between playwright Tom Stoppard and the infamous Harvey Weinstein over “a young actor groomed for stardom by Miramax, Gwyneth Paltrow.” Sexual innuendo, gender-bending, and adultery failed to derail the $280 million grossing, seven-Oscar film. The New York festival featured an orange-haired Caesar, whose assassination elicited conflicting reactions. The controversy over “Caesar’s” assassination, inflammatory distortions, and extreme threats against the production, and the actual aplomb with which New York, having seen far worse, rode out the storm, make for engrossing reading. The funniest moment is when one outraged Trump supporter shouted, “You’re all Goebbels.” “Like many of those who heard him,” writes Shapiro, “I was confused, because it sounded like he was saying, ‘You are all gerbils.’ ”

If this makes you long for live Shakespeare, download the New York Shakespeare Exchange’s Sonnet Project, for which actors and directors have created mini-dramatic performances of nearly all 154 sonnets, each set in a notable New York location. In No. 2 (“When forty winters”), for example, an older woman shows her unseen hearer a baby and mother sitting on a park bench, and urges the young man to have a child and “see thy blood warm, when thou feel’st it cold.” In No. 130 (“My mistress’ eyes”), a bawdy old man freely admits his love is no beauty, but sweetly asserts his idiosyncratic affection. This series may well inspire students to make their own films, even for a virtual class.

The Virtual Arts

As I was writing, Boston’s museums were ordered to close again, voiding my timed-ticket visit to our Museum of Fine Arts. Most museums are in a separate category from the other arts: We have become so used to watching the performing arts at home that the pandemic only marginally diminishes our experience, but the essence of museum-going is to stand before the unique object. I have often written about exceptional volumes by the art historian Neil MacGregor, such as the British Museum’s A History of the World in 100 Objects, Germany: Memories of a Nation, and Shakespeare’s Restless World: A Portrait of an Era in Twenty Objects, but reading these volumes only increases the desire to see the works in situ.

Yet even here, we live in the only age that offers something often more granular than the real thing: the virtual museum tour. From only four “Top 10” lists, I read about 23 museums in 19 cities and 14 countries, covering every continent but Australia. To touch on only a few, the Mauritshuis in The Hague is the first museum in the world to be fully digitized in gigapixel format and possesses a Vermeer of which Proust wrote, “From the moment that I saw View of Delft in the museum in The Hague, I knew that I had seen the most beautiful painting in the world.” The Uffizi Gallery in Florence, Italy, specializes in what it calls “Hypervisions,” trips through its collection on such themes as “Angels,” “Healing,” and the remarkable “On Being Present,” which takes its cue from a contemporary theme: “There is no healing presence when the wounded past is erased from our cultural memory and archive.” The exhibit shows works that include Black people, whether among the Magi or at the court of the Medici.

The only museum to appear on all four lists is the Getty in Los Angeles, from its inception the most aggressively technological museum yet seen, as signaled by the ".edu" in its URL. The Getty is determined to offer all that can be captured online—these video experiences will make you agree with James Cuno, president of the Getty Trust, that museums matter, the title of his slim apologia.

So, sit back, don’t give away your shot, and until you’ve rolled up your sleeve, stay home and let the worlds of music, drama, and visual arts come to you.