Tír Na HiFi

In a recent interview, I was asked how I have coped with the fallout of career statistics... 72 years on the podium, 200 orchestras, 7,000 concerts and the like. I replied '...living from day to day, from program to program, from concert to concert...".

Not the true story.

I've always been a reader.
Novels.
Plays.

It has been the reading that has kept me from derailing, from going under in our world of stress and invidiousness.
Reading fashioned my goals, attitudes, perceptions that kept me anchored..

Here's a short short list:
Plato - The Republic
Dostoevsky - The Brothers
Karamazov Stendahl - The Red and the Black
Chekhov - The Cherry Orchard
Anatole France - The Gods are Athirst
Shakespeare - Macbeth, King Lear
Cervantes - Don Quixote
Steinbeck - Of Mice and Men
Pirandello - Henry the Fourth
O'Neill - Long Day's Journey into Night

...and hundreds more.

All these tales have in common the resolve of the Author
to rip off the veil of hypocrisy and self-delusion that we all wear every moment of our lives. It is salutary to learn who we really are.

And now new in my life: a book by Erich Maria Remarque entitled "The Black Obelisk" For those who missed reading it along the way...as I did,
READ IT...if you do not fear to know the Awful Truth about you and me!

And the music I have interacted with for those many decades? All we yearn to be, could have been, might have been, is in Music, True Music. I shall be conducting Puccini's Butterfly this summer at the Castleton Festival...and will weep again.

No composer has ever succeeded in entering into a human soul, an undefiled, pure soul...as did Puccini in his opera. He reveals the beauty within us all before its inevitable corruption in the banality of our daily lives. Butterfly...fifteen years old, a believer in the Good and the True. Moralizing Mr.and Mrs. Pinkerton cheerfully drive her to harakiri.

Reading...and the Sacred Muse have been my bulwark, Mr. Interviewer. Has there ever been anyone more fortunate?

MORE ABOUT COPING

In my last blog, I referred to a reply to an interviewer's question regarding how I have coped with 72 years on the conductor's podium and what it has entailed. I mentioned the stabilizing influence of the plays and books I have read.
I referred to the magic of the music itself.

Omitted was a buttress that shored up many a wobbly day; the Figurative Arts.

How many golden hours I have spent wandering through the stunning collections of the world's museums: the Boijmans Van Beuningen in Rotterdam, the Hermitage in St. Petersburg, The Met in New York, the Louvre, the National Gallery in London...and the entire country of Italy!

A short short list of painters whose artworks have given me solace, joy and inspiration:
- Filippo Lippi
- Titian
- Giorgione
- Ostade
- Goya
- Renoir
- Soutine
- Rembrandt
- Koakoschka
...and dozens more. (How many a happy sighs evoked by Giorgione's "The Sleeping Venus".)


If the blog readers have also missed Richard Artschwager along the way, check him out. I now have (belatedly) come upon his work at the Haus der Kunst in Munich.


Indelible images, more shed-light in the dark corners of the human psyche.