Stromata Blog

A Christmas Miscellany

In this season, the Internet is filled with ruminations on the meaning and message of Christmas. I, too, made a feeble attempt at that genre when I was new to blogging. Though the post appeared on a site that has long since been deactivated and archived, it can be read here. Among the many reflections on the same theme appearing today, this one particularly impressed me.

The inimitable Mark Steyn, though convalescing from health problems, has again put together his annual Christmas Eve Lessons and Carols and Christmas Day with Mark and Friends. Both include a great deal of Christmas music.

Much of what we think of as “Christmas music” never mentions Christmas, yet songs like “Deck the Halls”, “Winter Wonderland”, “Let It Snow” and “Jingle Bells” are linked more subtly to the holiday. One may call them “winter songs”, but how many spring, summer and autumn songs can you name? Not zero, I suppose, but not hundreds either. In the light of the Son, flowers spring up in profusion. Even for those who do not comprehend that light, it is a source of good cheer and hope.

Hope in the worst of times. On Christmas Day 1944, American soldiers were defending the isolated outpost of Bastogne in Belgium against the German offensive that came to be known as the “Battle of the Bulge”. Surrounded by a force four times their size, the G.I.'s had little hope of relief. Yet when the German commander demanded surrender, General Anthony McAuliffe responded with one word: “Nuts!” Bastogne held, the Axis drive faltered, and four months later Adolf Hitler committed suicide in Berlin.

At the same time as Bastogne resisted daunting odds, other American soldiers, separated from their units, were lost in the winter landscape nearby. Three of them, one badly wounded, found their way to a remote cabin, where a German family had taken refuge from the fighting. What transpired there on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day is a tale that no fiction writer would dare to send to an editor, yet it is sober fact.

But a sober note isn’t the right one on which to finish a Christmas posting. Instead, let us start preparing for next Yule (only 365 shopping days left!) by perusing the Yelp reviews of Santa’s Home Delivery Service.

Merry Christmas to all!

Addendum: Seen too late for inclusion in the original post is another take on Christmas music, with the provocative thesis that the “definitive” versions of great Christmas songs do more to immortalize the singers that any quantity of other achievements.

What Difference, After All, Does Being Qualified Make?

In Affirmative Action Around the World: An Empirical Study, Thomas Sowell quotes a politician from the Indian state of Andhra Pradesh who, in the course of demanding preferences based on caste for his constituents, addressed the argument that it was unfair to prefer them over members of other castes with superior qualifications:

Yes it is true that they are also better qualified for many of the jobs than we are. Maybe they are better qualified but why is merit so important? We can have some inefficiency. That will be necessary if our people are to get jobs. Are we not entitled to jobs just because we are not as qualified?

At the time when Mr. Sowell wrote, just after the turn of the millennium, that wasn’t, as he shows, an uncommon opinion among affirmative action apostles in the countries that he surveyed outside the U.S. (India, Sri Lanka, Nigeria, Malaysia). In the United States, however, mainstream proponents like William Bowen and Derek Bok were arguing that the “beneficiaries” of affirmative action were just as qualified as the people they displaced.

The contemporary, “woke” version of affirmative action is more like the overseas version, or so it appears from nascent trends in the divergent areas of classical music and the U.S. Armed Forces.

For a long time (since the 1970’s, in fact), orchestras have commonly conducted “blind auditions” of performers whom they are considering hiring. That practice has led to a great increase in female and Asian musicians in major orchestras, but there hasn’t been much change in the black and Hispanic percentages. The predictable people regard the latter as “problematic”, so there is now a movement – so far only incipient but doubtless with a great future before it – for change. The New York Times’s music critic last year demanded, “To Make Orchestras More Diverse, End Blind Auditions.” The subhead was explicit about the reason: “If ensembles are to reflect the communities they serve, the audition process should take into account race, gender and other factors.” That still leaves a sliver of room for the quality of the performance, I suppose.

In July 2020, the Secretary of Defense issued an order “prohibiting the use of photographs for promotion boards and selection processes pertaining to assignment, training, education and command”. This action came, the calendrically literate will observe, during the “white supremacist” Trump Administration. Nonetheless, Secretary Esper sounded pretty woke (not that you’re ever woke enough):

In a series of Twitter posts, Esper said that all commands should work to eliminate “unconscious bias” among service members through frank and open discussions.

Prejudice and bias in the ranks are not always transparent, he said in urging commands to increase the frequency of workplace and equal opportunity surveys to identify areas for improvement.

Now we have a new, “anti-racist” Administration, and the Chief of Naval Personnel isn’t happy with keeping race out of account in promotion decisions. From Stars & Stripes last week:

The Navy could include service photos in promotion packages again after data suggested minorities are less likely to be selected blindly in some situations by promotion review boards, the service’s chief of personnel said Tuesday.

Diversity among leadership dropped after photos were removed last year from Navy promotion packages, Vice Adm. John Nowell said during a panel discussion on diversity and inclusion at the Navy League’s Sea-Air-Space conference.

“I think we should consider reinstating photos in selection boards,” he said. “We look at, for instance, the one-star board over the last five years, and we can show you where, as you look at diversity, it went down with photos removed.”

Admiral Nowell has an “interesting” definition of “meritocracy”, too:

“It's a meritocracy, we're only going to pick the best of the best, but we're very clear with our language to boards that we want them to consider diversity across all areas,” he said. “Therefore ... I think having a clear picture just makes it easier.”

Are want-to-be opera singers and naval officers not entitled to jobs just because they are not as qualified?

Further reading: Heather Mac Donald, “Classical Music’s Suicide Pact” (Part 1) (Part 2)”
Heather Mac Donald, “Can opera survive the culture wars?”

Home from the Ring

On leaving the final performance of the Lyric Opera of Chicago’s Ring Cycle last night, I felt as I imagine Marathon runners do after they cross the finish line: light-headed, exhilarated and tired. I’m playing show tunes today to recover.

This was my third viewing of the complete Ring. The first two were over 20 years ago in the Seattle Opera’s traditionalist production, with faux-Teutonic sets and costumes, along with attempted adherence to Wagner’s impossibly ambitious stage directions. When Seattle switched to a more “innovative” version, I saw its Walküre and decided that I was too old-fashioned for Wotan as an insane 19th Century composer squabbling with Fricka his shrewish hausfrau. As for the televised Chereau Ring, I changed channels in horror as soon as the Rhinemaidens emerged from under their hydroelectric dam.

The Lyric Opera’s production is non-traditionalist, though not in the flippant Chereau fashion. There are many anachronisms. A few of them are pointless and odd, such as Hunding’s brandishing a rifle. (He doesn’t think to fire it at Siegmund.) Most, however, fit the abstract, stylized stagecraft.

Suggesting, rather than trying to literally portray, the operas’ spectacular events works well most of the time. Especially striking were the opening tableau of Das Rheingold, where the Rhinemaidens “swam” on wires behind a gauzy blue curtain, and the huge, metallic Fafner (worked by 20 extras). Less happy was the entrance of Brünnhilde and her sisters bouncing on trampolines, which evoked laughter from the audience. The Ring has its funny moments, I know, but the Ride of the Valkyries is not supposed to be one of them.

The great virtue of the production is that, unlike the other modernist ones that I’ve seen, it didn’t distract from the music; yet that virtue exposes a problem. Wagner didn’t intend for music to dominate the Ring. It was to be a complete work of musical theater, where words, staging and acting were also essential to the overall experience. If that ambition was ever realized, it isn’t, so far as I can discern (and I confess to being no true aficionado, so I may be wrong), even attempted any more.

This deemphasis of all elements except the singers and the orchestra reflects, I suppose, what stage managers and performers want to do, and what opera goers will pay for. Still, it doesn’t seem necessary. Stage technology has advanced to the point where the effects envisioned in Wagner’s stage directions could be largely realized, and the operas could be sung in English, using Andrew Porter’s scrupulous, highly singable translation, to enable the audience to follow the story in greater detail. (Super-titles help with that, but the Lyric’s omitted, I would estimate, a third or more of the lines.)

The risk is that those who attend closely to Wagner’s words will find the philosophy of the Ring distasteful. Indeed, one reason why the music has been given precedence may be a feeling that the work is proto-Nazi, a celebration of the amoral superman in his struggle against aristocracy and capitalism. That certainly may have been the composer’s intention, but, each time that I see or hear the cycle, I am struck by a very different moral that emerges from the tale, regardless of what Wagner consciously meant.

Siegfried, “free” by virtue of being cut off from law and tradition, does not do anything with his freedom. Instead, he is directed or manipulated successively by Mime, the Forest Bird, Brünnhilde, Gutrune, Gunther and Hagen. The one decision that he perhaps makes on his own – to refuse to return the Ring to the Rhinemaidens – is disastrous, though it, too, may be another’s, reflecting the will immanent in the Ring. (Like Tolkien’s, it is hard to give up.) Unsupported by the archaic civilization that he despises, the “superman” has no basis for action and therefore is steered by external forces. His desire to do “good” without knowing morality leads only to destruction. The last stage direction of Götterdämmerung reads (in Porter’s translation):

From the ruins of the fallen hall, men and women, in great agitation, watch the growing firelight in the heavens. When this reaches its greatest brightness, the hall of Walhall is seen, in which gods and heroes sit assembled . . . . Bright flames seize on the hall of the gods. When the gods are entirely hidden by the flames, the curtain falls.

The Old Order dies, but no New Order is born. There could hardly be a better parable of the futility of rejecting the accumulated wisdom of the ages for the sake of a revolutionary future.

Episcopal Dementia

A mad English bishop, the Daily Telegraph reports, has condemned as “racist” the hymn that Princess Diana requested for her wedding, “I Vow to Thee, My Country”. Here are its dastardly words:

I vow to thee, my country—all earthly things above—
Entire and whole and perfect, the service of my love;
The love that asks no question, the love that stands the test,
That lays upon the altar the dearest and the best;
The love that never falters, the love that pays the price,
The love that makes undaunted the final sacrifice.

And there’s another country, I’ve heard of long ago—
Most dear to them that love her, most great to them that know;
We may not count her armies, we may not see her King;
Her fortress is a faithful heart, her pride is suffering;
And soul by soul and silently her shining bounds increase,
And her ways are ways of gentleness, and all her paths are peace.

The Bishop of Hulme, the Rt Rev Stephen Lowe, said the hymn’s popularity was a symptom of a “dangerous” increase in English nationalism which had parallels with the rise of Nazism. . . .

The bishop said the words, written by Sir Cecil Spring-Rice in 1918, were “totally heretical” because they suggested that people should pledge their allegiance to their country before God. . . .

To a modernist bishop, God is, it seems, one of the “earthly things”.

He had no objection to the second verse but would not allow the first to be sung at any of his services and urged clergy to think “long and hard” before permitting it.

I wonder where he thinks the “other country” is. Cuba? North Korea? Iraq under the rule of the blessed Saddam?

Bishop Lowe criticised the hymn in Crux, the Manchester diocesan newsletter.

“I quoted it as one example of my concerns about growing nationalism,” he told the Telegraph. “While I am proud to be English, it is dangerous for a nation to suggest that our culture is somehow superior to others.”

The bishop said the emergence of nationalism had been evident during the Euro 2004 football tournament and recent military anniversaries such as D-Day.

D-Day: just a celebration of national chauvinism. After all, nobody ever found any weapons of mass destruction in Nazi Germany.

“It is like American culture where there is this view that America is the land of the free when we know it is not. But there are those in America who want to maintain that it is and want to impose their understanding, their culture, their way of doing things on everybody else. That is dangerous.”

Isn’t it a pity that Americans don’t practice a Religion of Peace? Perhaps they should take lessons from a non-interfering idealist like Osama bin Laden.

Further Reading: Christopher S. Johnson “Slam Dunk”