Dear Editor
DEAR EDITOR SOVIET JEWS In his letter to The New Leader of April 13, Max Geltman quotes Trotsky as having replied to a delegation of Jews who called on him during the early days of the...
...the symbolism dees not suggest so much Falstaff's "tun of flesh" as it does the steady, triumphant tramp implied by the word "Go...
...I merely wished to underscore the contrast in Soviet priorities which, mutatis mutandis, is so reminiscent of Stalin's days (e.g., the Moscow skyscrapers...
...Among the characteristics of Khrushchev's reign, I mentioned "the production of Sputniks and the purchase of wheat to avoid bread-rationing...
...For, insensitive to the subtly inflected vocal melody, Goldman looks in vain for musical interest to the accompaniment, which is an imitation of the lumbering movement of Falstaff's tun of flesh, and taken for what it is—quite amusing...
...Clearing away all this ideological underbrush, we get down to the hard ground of concrete instances and individual values...
...whether his later manner is merely a refinement of his earlier procedure fan argument that in Clark's hands is reminiscent of the notion that men are descended from apes...
...Finally, and contrary to what Gelt man's quotation implies, Trotsky never denied his Jewish origin...
...The orchestral introduction is one of the most brilliant things in the whole opera, as many scholars and critics have attested...
...Would Geltman be good enough to provide the source of his quotation...
...Such a listener will discover that, contrary to Goldman's statement, most of the musical ideas are not in the orchestra but in the vocal part—the first-act exchanges between Falstaff...
...Bardolph and Pistol, the letter-reading scene, the meeting of Falstaff and Ford, and many more, not to mention the obvious examples such as Quickly's "Reverenza" and Dalle due alle tre" motives, Falstaff's monologs, Ford's aria, the Fenton-Nannetta music...
...On the contrary, these writings demonstrate Trotsky's abhorrence of anti-Semitism and numerous expressions of sympathy for the lot of the persecuted Jews...
...He cites as instances of "ideas" such silly little jingles as the pair of triplets in "Dalle due alletre" and the flourish on the salutation...
...really valid test of success: it illuminates, intensifies, and muses upon the action of the operatic text...
...If this jumble reflects Clark's usual mental processes, I cannot see why I should take him seriously...
...when it ends, and the dumpy writing for Falstaff begins, there is a comic effect all right, but it is unintentional and its name is bathos...
...If I fail to share in the common modern enthusiasm for Verdi's final opera, it is not because my mind is full of Teutonic preconceptions about what opera should be, but because I do not find Falstaff a consistently successful work by any standard—Teutonic, Slavonic, Gallic, Italic or Transylvanian...
...KHRUSHCHEV ERA I should like to enter two rectifications with regard to my article...
...Verdi's solution to the setting of a text to continuous music is equally as valid as Wagner's, even if it lacks the intellectual gravity the Bayreuth sage so industriously cultivated to surround his musical products...
...And it is no defense of the banal oom-pah accompaniment figure in this passage that it "means" something...
...And in order to make Verdi's wrong headedness appear even more baffling to us, Goldman misrepresents him by describing his technique as follows: "Verdi adopted the method, first employed by Wagner, of confining his vocal invention to a straight declamation of the text, while throwing most of his musical ideas into the orchestra...
...I have been unable to find anything resembling this incident in Trotsky's own writings...
...In Falstaff, the arias and scenes are still there, but so refined, so distilled to an essence, so subtly married to the progression of Boito's text, that they are almost indistinguishable from the recitative, which is extended before and after into a continuous musical environment for them...
...Second, I am afraid one of my formulations may be open to misinterpretation...
...Washington, D.C...
...I would only add that if Katel thinks there is some contradiction in Trotsky's saying "I am not a Jew" and at the same time not denying his Jewish origin, then he just doesn't grasp the subtler refinements of the Marxian dialectic...
...As for the frustrated audiences at Falstaff, the Metropolitan audience (that included myself) this year seemed unencumbered in its enjoyment by "hearing beautiful melodies and interesting motifs tossed up and then snatched away...
...A less prejudiced or more intelligent reader would have seen from the appreciative remarks in my review that the standard 1 naturally employ is that of Verdi's earlier— and in my opinion, more satisfying—operas...
...DEAR EDITOR SOVIET JEWS In his letter to The New Leader of April 13, Max Geltman quotes Trotsky as having replied to a delegation of Jews who called on him during the early days of the Revolution: "Go you home to your Jews and tell them I am not a Jew and I care nothing for the Jews and their fate...
...Falstaff's music admirably meets the single The New Leader welcomes comment and criticism on any of its features, but letters should not exceed 300 words...
...New York City Jacques Katel Max Geltman replies: The quotations I have used in my letters are taken from unimpeachable sources, and they will all soon (I hope) be properly pinpointed in a book I am now preparing for publication which deals with the general problem of the subject under discussion...
...New York City Robert S. Clark Associate Editor HiFi/Stereo Review A tbert Goldman replies: As Robert S. Clark's letter—which, incidentally, is longer than the relèvent portion of my review—was inspired only by the righteous desire to protect my readers from the dangers of ideology, it seems a pity to disillusion such a conscientious public defender...
...In fact, in so well-known a passage as "Va, vecchio John," the accompaniment to which Goldman—his sense of humor a slave to his doctrinal compulsion—disparages, the primary musical interest is in the vocal part...
...First, while your typesetter spelled the name of the Italian painter, Renatto Guttuso, correctly in Anatole Shub's article, he altered it in my article (Guttuson...
...I argued, rather, that he might have found a method better suited to both his subject and his intention than the makeshift procedure he did adopt...
...Goldman's misfortune is that he does not hear the musical ideas in the vocal line because he is conditioned to listen, in an opera with continuous music, for one kind of musical idea only...
...Perhaps Verdi was wise to reject Wagnerian solutions to the putative problems: Ring and Meistersinger audiences, I have observed, often react with boredom to the constant nagging of the leitmotifs, and Debussy was sufficiently unimpressed with their transformation and development in "the rich thematic weave" to have dubbed them "an endless procession of calling cards...
...That this is the case, and Goldman's assertion is patently not the case, will be apparent to anyone who listens carefully to Falstaff...
...But Goldman rates an answer because he seems to be one of that species so numerous and troublesome these days—a musical ideologist, in the habit of issuing ukases so that the unenlightened shall know the one true way to compose a music drama, a concerto, or whatever, Goldman finds his musical canon law in the theory and practice of Wagner, and implies that he deems it curious that Verdi, faced with "the breakdown of the traditional forms of Italian opera" (whatever that means), did not "avail himself of Wagner's solution" and embrace the leitmotifs and all the rest of the Teuton's musical baggage...
...The fact is...
...In the same breath, he adds a whole monologue in Verdi's late declamatory style and the one conventional aria in the opera...
...and whether or not Verdi's ideas are articulated primarily by orchestral or vocal means (a vain dispute when the basic term has not been defined...
...And here, frankly, I can make no sense of Clark's arguments...
...It is strange that Clark should seize upon just this passage to cap his argument about the primacy of vocal thinking in Falstaff, when the passage with its orchestral introduction demonstrates exactly the very opposite...
...VERDI'S FALSTAFF No one who knows and admires Verdi's Falstaff will have the pleasure he takes in the opera diminished by Albert Goldman's misguided observations in your April 13 issue...
...however, that I am not now nor have Ï ever been a doctrinaire Wagnerian, and I very much resent having the plain pragmatic features of my critical physiognomy pinched into the mask of an absurd and unreal intellectual stereotype...
...Abraham Brumberg...
...Reverenza...
...Incidentally, Verdi "threw" many musical ideas to the orchestra for their sole treatment in these earlier works, too...
...Remembrance of Things Past," in the series on "The Khrushchev Era" (NL, May 25...
...Though Goldman would like to think he did, Verdi probably never confronted "the problem of music drama" in the self-conscious manner of Wagner, and his method in Falstaff is only an extension of the method of many of the scenes, preceded and followed by nominal recitativo accompagnato, in Aida (the Nile Scene), Don Carlo (Act 4, Scene 1), and other of his works...
...Similarly, even admitting that the vocal line is the primary source of interest in the Va, vecchio John passage, it seems absurd to characterize such ungainly grunts as "subtly inflected vocal melody...
...Since I wish to be brief, I shall pass over such inessential questions as whether Verdi confronted deliberately the problem of music drama (there is evidence that he did...
...Anyone who listens to it without preconceived notions about "symphonic developments" and "evolved designs" will find that this is so...
...Nor did I suggest that Verdi should have composed in the manner of Wagner (a preposterous notion for which the reader can thank Clark...
...No criticism of Khrushchev's providing the Soviet citizens with bread was intended, of course...
...If Verdi possessed at 80 the ripe powers of invention and vivacious wit with which he is erroneously credited by Clark and others, a passage like this would offer something really meaningful, really musical and really funny...
...The point Goldman so obviously misses is that Verdi, his inventive power still ripe and his comic sense wonderfully vivacious, had no need for the Wagnerian "symphonic developments" of musical ideas and "the rich thematic weave of . . . orchestral polyphony" —that is, for the method of the composer as defined by himself...
Vol. 47 • June 1964 • No. 12
