“Your silence will be considered your consent.”
— Laurie Anderson, "Another Day in America"
Wagnerism
Nightafternight playlist
New and recent releases of interest.
Schoenberg, String Quartets Nos. 1–4; Webern Quartet, with Yui Futaeda (Etcetera)
Corelli, Concerto Grossi Op. 6; Georg Kallweit and Mayumi Hirasaki leading the Akademie für Alte Musik Berlin (Pentatone)
Tania León, Horizons, Raíces (Origins), Stride, Pasajes; Karina Canellakis, Edward Gardner, and Dmitri Slobodeniouk conducting the London Philharmonic Orchestra (LPO)
Ginastera, String Quartets; Miro Quartet (Pentatone)
Liza Lim, A Sutured World, Annunciation Triptych II: Mary / Transcendence After Trauma, The Compass; Edward Gardner, Franck Ollu, and Christoph Poppen conducting the Bavarian Radio Symphony, with Nicholas Altstaedt, Carin Levine, William Barton (BR Klassik, out July 25)
Jürg Frey, Out of Chorales, Polyphonie der Wörter, Shadow and Echo and Jade, Landscape of Echoes, Blue Bird’s Tune, Because I could not stop for Death; EXAUDI Vocal Ensemble (Neu)
Hannah Kendall, Tuxedo: Diving Bell 2, shouting forever into the receiver, Where is the chariot of fire?, Tuxedo: Crown; Sun King, when flesh is pressed against the dark, Tuxedo: Hot Summer No Water, Even sweetness can catch the throat; Vimbayi Kaziboni conducting the Ensemble Modern, Wavefield Ensemble, loadbang, Jonathan Bloxham conducting the Hallé Orchestra, Anne Denholm-Blair, Jonathan Morton, Louise McMonagle (NMC)
Koechlin, Symphony No. 1, Au loin, 3 Mélodies; Patricia Petibon, Ariane Matiakh conducting the Württembergische Philharmonie Reutlingen (Capriccio)
The Scheyer House reborn
Photo: Justin Reinhardt, Max Reinhardt's great-grandson.
In April of last year, I sent a note to Benno Herz, the program director of the Thomas Mann House in Los Angeles, asking if he knew that the Galka Scheyer House had come on the market. This is the hilltop gallery-home that Richard Neutra built in 1934 for Scheyer, a crucial figure in the propagation of modernism on the West Coast. I'd visited the house the previous year, at the invitation of its then owner, the late Frank M. Devine, and registered its significance. It is not only a major work in Neutra's output — part of his turn from modernist severity to a more open, mellow, landscape-oriented aesthetic — but also a landmark of Los Angeles cultural history, suggestive of Scheyer's spirited embrace of trends across the arts. Her primary calling was to advocate for the group she called the Blue Four —Kandinsky, Klee, Jawlensky, Feininger. Hence the name of her street in the Hollywood Hills: Blue Heights Drive. But she also supported younger talents such as John Cage and Maya Deren and threw herself into children's arts education. She was an astonishing and unclassifiable person who will have a chapter to herself in my forthcoming history of the German-speaking emigration in Los Angeles.
In 2016, another monument of that era, the Mann House, was in danger of being torn down when a minor miracle occurred: the German government purchased the house and converted it into a residency for writers, scholars, and thinkers. I idly wondered: could something similar happen to the Scheyer House? If anyone could work such a wonder, I knew it would be Benno. Amazingly, he did. He wrote an article for the Frankfurter Allgemeine, which caught the attention of a German art-lover, who proceeded to buy the house with the idea of turning it into an artists' residency. EscherGuneWardena Architecture will begin a restoration process later this summer. At the moment, as KCRW reports, the house is being occupied by the artist Beatriz Cortez, who lost her home in the Altadena Fire. On a rainy day last winter, I met Raymond Neutra, the architect's youngest and only surviving son, for a conversation at the Scheyer House; a short film of our talk, augmented by rich documentation of Scheyer's life, is soon to be released.
Thomas Mann at 150
The arch-magus of ambivalence is being celebrated all over Germany today, most spectacularly in his home town of Lübeck, where the Lübeck Philharmonic will give a celebratory concert, the program beginning with the Prelude to Act I of Lohengrin, which had a transformative effect on Mann when he first heard it in his youth. Doctor Faustus had that effect on me when I first read it at age eighteen; my own writing career stems in some way from the experience of that novel. I wrote about Mann for The New Yorker in 1996, 2016, 2020, and 2022. In the current issue of Studia Philosophica I have an essay titled "Thomas Mann, Richard Wagner, and the Inescapability of the Political." Alles Gute! In a certain sense.
