Posted 4:17 PM by Gene

DOW 36,000 takes a numerical approach to opera: "Roughly as many Americans attend live opera performances as attend NFL football games!!!!!" Opera productions are "up by one-third in just four years!!!!!" The bad news is, "Mounting a production is expensive, and, even with triple-digit ticket prices, all operas lose money", but the good news is, "'Aggregated, all government subsidies only come to 5 or 6 percent of the U.S. companies’ funding!!!!!'" FREE EN-TER-PRISE AT WORK!

This is the simplemindedness of a man who knows nothing of culture but everything about getting his name in op-ed pages. We take a more sober view. The other day Mr. Teachout commented on the ghastly suicide of the tenor Jerry Hadley, and he quoted from his own review of some now-forgotten free-enterprise-financed adaptation of The Great Gatsby, which we requote in full:

The score is strictly mainline modernist yard goods, while the libretto is a filet of Fitzgerald containing all of the action, most of the famous lines ("Her voice is full of money") and none of the elegiac, bittersweet tone that is the novel's essence. Gatsby is given a pair of clumsily confessional arias, a fatal mistake; the great mystery man of American fiction would never have revealed himself in that way, not even to himself. It doesn't help that Jerry Hadley's voice is frayed and throaty, or that he is stocky and unglamorous--hardly the gorgeous, gold-hatted charmer of Fitzgerald's imagination....Harbison has turned Fitzgerald's quicksilver masterpiece into a slow-moving opera that is stolidly competent and totally superfluous.

And in another entry on the sizzling new leader of the New York Philharmonic (tellingly titled, "Er, who's Alan Gilbert?") he wrote as an aside, "I've also seen a lot of walkers at Paper Mill Playhouse's weekend matinees, which presumably is a big part of the reason why they got themselves into such dire financial straits this past season." These two observations, I fear, are clearer to the reality of high art in America, and they have nothing to do with the NFL.