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Record companies, artists and publicists are invited to submit CDs to be considered for review. Send to: Jerry Bowles, Editor, Sequenza 21, 340 W. 57th Street, 12B, New York, NY 10019

Wednesday, March 23, 2005
Artists or Schmucks?

While the lads are busy over in the Composers Forum beating the endless, if engaging, dead horse of moribund musical styles, perhaps we should consider the weighty matter of �artistic freedom� or�from the alternative perspective--�why are composers (and other artistic types) so damned self-destructive?� The question is prompted by this report from Russia about �Rosenthal�s Children,� the first new opera commissioned by the Bolshoi in more than 30 years. The opera has drawn heavy fire from Putin�s rightwing stormtroopers in the Duma for being �pornographic, vulgar and unsuitable,� which students of musical history will recall pretty much sums up Stalin�s distaste for Shostokovitch�s Lady Macbeth of Minsk.

"Rosenthal's Children" is about a scientist who clones five great classical composers -- Tchaikovsky, Mozart, Wagner, Mussorgsky and Verdi. The scientist then dies, and the cloned musicians -- unprepared for life on their own in the 1990s -- end up on the street. Mozart, the youngest of them, falls in love with a prostitute whose pimp is always interfering. In the end, the pimp poisons all five geniuses.

One Russian lawmaker�apparently unfamiliar with the nocturnal habits of current leading members of the British avant garde�said: "It is immoral to depict the world's greatest composers ... as bums who drink vodka and rub shoulders with prostitutes that play music in a train station and beg for money.�

Leonid Desyantnikov wrote the music and Vladimir Sorokin, whose books have previously been burned by Putin�s goons (a fairly reliable clue to their reaction to his operatic endeavor), was commissioned to write the libretto.

Now �artistic freedom� is a wonderful thing and nobody except people like Putin and George Bush and Dick Cheney likes censorship. But, if you were the director of the Bolshoi and you got your first public funding in 30 years for a new opera, would you spend it on something you knew was going to make a lot of trouble and maybe kill funding for another 30 years? Or, for that matter, if you were Scottish Opera and had just survived a near-death experience, would you choose �Klinghoffer� as your comback vehicle? At what point does principle become self-defeating?
posted by Jerry Bowles 3/23/2005



 
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