Circle Thursday, March 26, in your calendar now, and plan to Uber it to Steinway Hall in New York at 1133 Sixth Avenue for Morton Feldman at 100: “Triadic Memories,”Marilyn Nonken‘s performance of Feldman’s epic 90-minute piano solo, which she originally recorded for Mode Records in 2005. According to the web page for the event:
Feldman’s Triadic Memories is a 90-minute elegy to what the composer saw as music’s departing landscape, where the sound exists in our hearing — leaving us rather than coming towards us. Part ritual, part meditation, Triadic Memories offers the opportunity to explore issues of perception, memory, and imagination. “Any pianist wanting to play Feldman needs the most exquisite touch, and also great stamina,” writes the London Times, “and Marilyn Nonken clearly has both in abundance.”
A reception and pre-concert talk will precede the performance. RSVP and prepare to perceive.
Meagan Miller and Roger Honeywell in Die Liebe der Danae at the Bard SummerScape festival in 2011. Photo: Cory Weaver.
A little opera tip for the weekend: On Saturday at 1:00 pm Eastern time you can hear that old warhorse Carmen from the Metropolitan Opera, but if you wait an hour, until 2:00 pm, tune in to radio klassik Stephansdom’s Opernabend for a true curiosity: Richard Strauss’s Die Liebe der Danae, in a 1999 performance from the Garsington Opera.
Completed in 1940 but denied a public premiere until 1952 at the Salzburg Festival, the opera is vaguely based on the story of Danae, Midas, and Jupiter. In her review of the Garsington Opera production in The Guardian, Fiona Maddocks said, “Despite its dark undertones, [Strauss] dubbed the work a ‘light mythology,’ made Midas his benign hero and entangled him with the delicious story of Danae, whom Jupiter seduced in a shower of gold, making it all a Freudian bubble bath of the psycho-erotic.” She went on to provide this brief synopsis of the plot:
Joseph Gregor’s libretto, based on an outline by Strauss’s great collaborator Hugo von Hofmannsthal, lacks the latter’s wit or elegance, making Strauss’s transformation of the leaden plot through music all the more remarkable. The bankrupt Pollux’s daughter Danae has gone off men but remains partial to gold, about which she fantasises freely. Fortunately, Midas falls for her and she for him. Unfortunately, Jupiter does likewise, in a jealous rage turning Danae into gold and depriving Midas of his gift.
In the powerful third act, Jupiter returns as a humble old man (looking remarkably like the ageing Strauss in this production), with a reflective monologue depicting the impotence of age. Still she rejects him. With her final word, ‘Midas’, the opera ends.
Rarely performed (most recently here in America at the Bard SummerScape festival in 2011), Strauss’s score nonetheless is said to feature some of his finest music. His biographer Michael Kennedy says, “The treatment of the many themes and motifs is amazingly inventive, the orchestral colours glow and shine – with Greek gold and mediterranean sunlight … Die Liebe der Danae does not deserve its neglect. Its third act alone lifts it into the category of first-rank Strauss.” And Leon Botstein, who conducted the SummerScape production, told The New York Times that the opera was newly relevant in an interview with Peter G. Davis: “Not only is the score a marvel of technical ingenuity and lyrical generosity, but the subject is also completely up to date. What could be more modern in these days of financial crises and deficit spending than a morality tale about Midas’s fabulous golden touch and Danae’s obsession with his riches? There’s a valuable lesson in Danae’s eventual rejection of Jupiter’s tempting offer of divinity and her willing embrace of poverty with Midas, when he loses everything and is reduced to the life of a humble donkey driver.”
The latest issue — #47 — of what Drew Friedman calls “by far the best magazine being published on planet Earth” is arriving in mailboxes now. Mineshaft 47 is as always chock-full of visual and literary work that would be cutting-edge if you could locate the edge; as it is, the Mineshaft world is a world in itself. This issue features R. Crumb’s debate with Chat GPT about vaccines, great new comics from the fine Simone Baumann and Christoph Mueller (who also designed the striking cover image), two new portraits by Mr. Friedman, photography by John Haynes, and contributions from the likes of Bill Griffith, Robert Armstrong, and Sophie Crumb. “It’s such a gift to see new work by the giants of my generation (Fleener, Collier, Head, Friedman, etc.) alongside our heroic forebears (Crumb, Aline, Armstrong, Griffy, Deitch) and heirs (Harkham, Van Sciver, etc.) alike,” Daniel Clowes says. “I don’t take it for granted — one of a dwindling number of good things in this world.”
