Latest Articles and Blog Posts

Herbert von Karajan: Maestro for the Screen

March 2010  •  Opera News

As the story is told in Georg Wübbolt's sweeping yet strangely lightweight documentary Herbert von Karajan: Maestro for the Screen, it was on tour in Japan that Karajan saw the light. Before, the eminent conductor had looked down his nose at television: neither as sound nor as image could the medium do justice to his live performances. But with a series of twelve live broadcasts beginning in Tokyo, he was reaching 18 to 20 million viewers per concert, instead of just the 3,000 listeners in the hall. From then on, Karajan lavished his energies on creating a cinematic legacy the world could never forget. In time he became his own director, and in the end he cofounded his own production company, Telemondial. "Exegi monumentum aere perennius," the Roman poet Horace proclaimed, speaking of his collected odes: I have raised a memorial more lasting than brass — and such was Karajan's aspiration. No statue in a city square, thanks! Just keep spinning those videos.

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Honored in the Breach
Shakespeare through the Prism of French Grand Opera

March 2010  •  Opera News

In his dressing room after bringing down the house as Hamlet in the opera by Ambroise Thomas, a renowned baritone brushed off a shaken visitor's praise with this rejoinder: "There's not one minute in this piece that moves me." On a different occasion, another veteran of the role had this to say: "When Nadia Boulanger was asked to name the quintessential French grand opera, her reply was Hamlet. Playing the prince allows me to go deeper inside myself than I can with almost any other role."

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As Plain as the Nose on His Stage

February 24, 2010  •  The New York Times

Managing pandemonium is not easy, especially when you must create it first. The South African artist William Kentridge has set himself this task with the very young Dmitri Shostakovich's first opera, "The Nose." Based on the story by Nikolai Gogol, the absurdist tour de force tells of Platon Kuzmich Kovalev, a civil official of the eighth rank who wakes up one morning in status-mad St. Petersburg short one nose. To his mounting dismay, the missing body part is eventually discovered gallivanting through the capital in the guise of a snooty official of the fifth rank.

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Operatic Style Designed to Suit Your Living Room

February 4, 2010  •  The New York Times

AT the end of "La Bohème," as Puccini envisioned the opera, the frail seamstress Mimi dies in bed in a garret overlooking the rooftops of Paris, attended by only her five bohemian cronies. As seen live on Swiss television in September, she boarded an empty bus from a curb outside a shopping mall, leaving not only her friends but an indeterminate number of onlookers. Then the bus pulled away, pursued for a time by her stricken lover Rodolfo until he collapsed on the pavement.

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Lost and Found: Call Me Siegfried

February 1, 2010 at 9:50 pm

News is not everything. Recently, a correspondent contacted me about an article of mine on the phenomenon of the heldentenor. Her particular interest was in a specimen of the breed named Siegfried Jerusalem, whom—unbeknownst to her—I had profiled years ago for the New York Times. Hoping to forward the article, I looked it up in the newspaper's electronic archive only to discover that it does not appear there. As a reality check, I fished out a hard copy dated March 8, 1992. The title as it appeared in the Times was "A Siegfried, Not In Name Only."Otherwise, what follows is a verbatim transcript.

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Books by Matthew Gurewitsch