Last September, the Metropolitan Opera and Saudi Music Commission signed a memorandum of understanding towards a potential partnership. Under the terms, the Met would become the company-in-residence at Riyadh’s Royal Diriyah Opera House for three weeks each winter, a move that would add the company’s imprimatur to Saudi’s growing fund of cultural capital—and about $200 million into the Met’s coffers over eight years.

If there were any doubts as to the real motivations behind this deal, one need only look as far as the Met’s press release for this MoU, in which Saudi Music Commission CEO Paul Pacifico said:

“Music is a universal language that transcends borders, uniting people through creativity. At the Saudi Music Commission, we are committed to empowering talents, providing them with the skills, platforms, and global exposure they need to flourish. This collaboration is more than a cultural exchange; it is an opportunity to forge new connections, share our stories through music, and contribute to a vibrant global arts community.”

Anytime someone tells you that “music is a universal language,” it’s worth finding out what language the check is written in—and how many zeroes it takes to make everyone suddenly fluent.

Last month, however, the Met announced that Saudi Arabia had withdrawn from their agreement, citing the growing cost of regional instability—much of it shaped by the same military alliances Riyadh continues to quietly support. While this fallout leaves the Met in continually dire financial straits and facing an uncertain future, there is a silver lining: If I were in Peter Gelb’s shoes, I’d rather lose sleep over my company’s finances than over using that same company to launder the image of a regime stained by human rights abuses.

While last week began with the tail-end of the Met/Saudi fallout, it ended with similar news from the department of dirty money: Following the conclusion of an independent investigation into his ties with Jeffrey Epstein, Leon Botstein announced that he will step down as President of Bard College next month. My husband, an alum of Bard himself, received an email sent to alumni of the college (though not, it would appear, to alumni of Bard’s high-school program at Simon’s Rock).

A link to law firm WilmerHale’s evaluation was shared in that email, which made no other mention of the conclusions. Reading the summary, it’s clear why they chose to ignore the lede: “Nothing that President Botstein did in connection with his relationship with Jeffrey Epstein was illegal, but President Botstein made decisions in the course of that relationship that reflect on his leadership of Bard,” reads a memorandum attributed to WilmerHale partner Jamie Gorelick (who served as Deputy Attorney General under President Clinton). Gorelick adds a few paragraphs later:

“Against the background of Epstein’s conviction, President Botstein’s contacts with Epstein, over the period 2012 to 2019, could have alerted President Botstein to the possibility that he and Bard would be facilitating Epstein’s continued abuse of women, legitimizing Epstein, or exposing Bard students to a person like Epstein.”

Botstein’s insistence that his relationship with Epstein was purely business and his proclaimed disdain for the financier-slash-sex-offender reads as even more hollow now than it did when news of their relationship first broke in 2023. While he reportedly told WilmerHale, “I would take money from Satan if it permitted me to do God’s work,” he doesn’t mention what he would do if Satan tried to use him as his own reputation-launderer in order to groom a young Juilliard violinist.

“When you meet people like this, you think, Who am I to question [Jeffrey Epstein] and his behavior when people at that level shake his hand?” Svetlana Pozhidaeva, a former Russian model and “staffer” for Epstein, told The Guardian in March, referring directly to Botstein. Pozhidaeva also told The Guardian that she believed Botstein’s “reputation as a ‘sophisticated intellectual’ helped ‘legitimize’ Epstein.” Her parents even met Botstein after a concert he gave in Moscow, which she said “created more trust” in Epstein’s legitimacy. Botstein, she added, “made a really good impression.”

Botstein can claim ignorance, but for a conductor who has led performances of nearly every Faust work in the canon—including Liszt’s Faust Symphony in 2006, Schumann’s Scenes from Goethe’s Faust in 2010, and Berlioz’s La damnation de Faust in 2024—those claims invite skepticism.

On the other hand, it may be a question of what version of Faust Botstein finds most useful: One of the courses offered at Bard at the time that my husband attended was titled: “Goethe’s Faust: Sympathy for the Devil?”. The class examined “the dynamics of Faust’s striving for knowledge of the world and experience of life, and Mephistopheles’ [sic] advancement and subversion of this striving… [as] the basis for analysis of the play’s central themes of individuality, knowledge, and transcendence.”

This is a traditional, but in my view superficial read of Faust, one that Goethe himself subverts in his introduction of Mephistopheles as “part of that force who always wills evil and always brings about good.” Likewise, as Marshall Berman argues in All That Is Solid Melts into Air, Faust is no victim. He accepts that his goals require a destructive power such that Mephistopheles can offer. “Only if Faust works with and through these destructive powers will he be able to create anything in the world,” Berman writes. “In fact, it is only by working with the devil, and willing ‘nothing but evil’ that he can end up on God’s side and ‘create the good.’”

While not taught by Botstein (at least not when my husband took it in 2002), the Bard course’s framing of Faust suggests that Goethe’s antihero is able to achieve what he achieves in spite of Mephistopheles’s subversion, that Faust is merely a victim of his own ambition. How apt, then, that this would be the same cover Botstein later sought in his own defense for taking money from Satan in order to do God’s work. Gelb gave a similar defense of his willingness to do business with the Saudi Government last September, telling the New York Times, “It’s the right thing to do, because it will make the Met stronger as an institution, both financially and artistically,” adding that he believed the Met could help promote “human understanding and compassionate thinking” in the country.1

It’s fair to say that Botstein’s relationship with Epstein went far beyond even what the most dedicated fundraiser would consider proprietary, especially given that all that Bard ever got from the affair was $75,000 and 66 laptops. (Botstein said he donated the $150,000 he received from Epstein’s charity foundation to the college, although WilmerHale said it “cannot confirm…the contribution of those fees to Bard.”)

It’s also fair to say that Botstein is getting off relatively lightly for his conduct: As of this writing, he remains the music director and principal conductor of the American Symphony Orchestra, a position he has held since 1992. He will continue to live on campus, remain on the faculty, and continue his work with the Bard Music Festival, SummerScape, and the Conservatory. He was also allowed to rewrite the narrative of his “retirement,” noting in the email sent to Bard alumni on Friday:

“I previously informed the Board of Trustees that in view of the completion of the endowment campaign, my 51 years of service as president, and my upcoming eightieth birthday, it has been my intention to retire from the presidency and focus my energy as faculty member, teacher, and musician.” This is a sharp U-turn from just a few months ago, when Botstein refused to resign. This is a page directly out of Berman’s read of Faust:

“Mephisto’s message is not to blame oneself for the casualties of creation, for that is just the way life is. Accept destructiveness as part of your share of divine creativity, and you can throw off your guilt and act freely. No longer should you be inhibited by the moral question, ‘Should I do it?’ Out in the open road to self-development, the only vital question is ‘How to do it?’”

You can’t make an omelet without a bone saw and a private island.

For Berman, Faust is a “tragedy of development,” and an indictment of the modernity that was beginning to take shape at the end of Goethe’s life (around the time he finished this lifelong work). But in this read, Berman assumes that the bargains pay off, at least temporarily, for the would-be developers. The end may be tragic, but the deal still pans out. Even if his relationship to Epstein is the lede in his obituary, Botstein has, for the time being, emerged from the last few years of scrutiny relatively unscathed, materially speaking. He maintains his cultural fiefdom in the Hudson Valley, with a concert hall designed by no less than Frank Gehry. The paltry funds that Epstein donated were a drop in the bucket compared to the $1 billion endowment that had been Botstein’s goal for the college; he could likely have met $1 billion without ever having met Epstein.

Gelb’s legacy is still in question, and the Met is in a much different financial situation. The company has borrowed more than $120 million from its endowment since the 2020 lockdowns. Last year, it was also one of several institutions in the city that were promised significant donations from a fake millionaire donor that never materialized. The company has now reportedly begun to look for a buyer for its two Marc Chagall murals and is also considering naming rights for the opera house itself.

The Met has never existed without dirty money. At a certain scale, you could argue that no opera house or private university could. Needs must. But Berman’s tragedy of development was never about purity. It was about what it costs to build anything at all; the compromises, entanglements, and collateral damage that underpin even the most elevated cultural projects. What these two institutional crises suggest in complementary ways, however, is a shift within Berman’s tragedy: This means of development is no longer reliably effective. The Faustian bargains are ceasing to live up to their terms. The devil still collects, he just doesn’t deliver.

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One of the parts I love most about hosting an opera podcast is diving into the historical context of a work’s premiere.1 At a certain point, with a really good opera in a really good year, it starts to feel like a line from comedian Charlie Bardey: “Sometimes I don’t feel like writing because everything is connected and I can’t get into all that right now.”

That felt especially true for 1905, the year that not only saw the premiere of Richard Strauss’s Salome but also the First Russian Revolution, the founding of the City of Las Vegas, Mata Hari’s debut in Paris, James Hazen Hyde’s “greatest ball of the Gilded Age,” and a vaudeville number called “The Whole Damn Family.” If at some point I am ever faced with the task of explaining Salome using only contemporary cultural references, I’m set.

In this week’s episode of Decanonized (link to listen above), I talk about Salome with Perri DiChristina, better known by many as one half of Thrilled to Announce—a duo I’ve come to think of as the philosophical Fug Girls of opera, and one it now feels impossible we ever did without. Because Salome is never a complete discussion, I was speaking at 1.5x speed in normal time on our call. This led to some of the facts tripping over themselves in my brain in an effort to keep up, and I was in error when I said that I wasn’t sure that Edward Said had ever written specifically about Salome. He had, in fact, described the “shattering musical effect” of both Salome and Elektra, and has a lovely passage about his first interaction with the former:

“I discovered a recording of ‘Salomes Tanz’…and later that year, on a foggy late August afternoon while spending yet another dreary summer in a lonely Lebanese mountain village, I heard the BBC announcement of [Strauss’s] death with an enjoyably mournful regret that I can still capture.”

Okay, it’s not a full deconstruction of the opera, but it’s one that led me to think more about the idea that Perri and I did discuss in this week’s episode: that Salome is more about the decapitation of an empire than it is about the decapitation of John the Baptist.

I must have had some inkling of this in college. As I note on the podcast, I had my first experience with Strauss’s Salome while concurrently working on a design concept for Oscar Wilde’s source text, the semester-long project for a production design class I was taking as a freshman at Fordham. I still remember many of the concepts presented in the final weeks of that semester: one was a seedy hotel in Vegas. Another was at a Fourth of July barbecue in a Far From Heaven-esque world of 1950s suburban conformity. Despite the two professors leading the class cautioning us at the beginning of the project that they had seen enough prison-set Salomes to last a lifetime, one of my classmates made a play for that.

I also had a strong memory of our class of theater majors reading the play out loud at the beginning of the semester, including Kelley Curran as a delightfully throaty Herodias. How apt, all things considered, that my own production idea placed Wilde’s drama in a Gilded Age Newport Mansion (an idea borne out of my growing up in Rhode Island and serving as the flower girl in my mother’s second wedding at Astors’ Beechwood).

How apt that the second season of The Gilded Age culminates in the opening of the Metropolitan Opera with regards to Salome in particular. Oscar Wilde has a cameo in the season. J. P. Morgan, who was responsible for a nearly 30-year ban on the opera at the Met, gets a slightly more significant arc. And George Russell, a template for real-life Met cofounder Cornelius Vanderbilt, is played by Morgan Spector, whose real-life mother-in-law is one of the defining Salomes in the work’s history: Maria Ewing.

By many accounts, the Gilded Age ended by the turn of the 20th Century, with the rise of labor unions and the progressive presidency of Teddy Roosevelt. Even if it had already given up the ghost, it was at least resurrected for James Hazen Hyde’s 1905 ball, which transformed a Fifth Avenue society restaurant into the gardens of Versailles for some 600 guests.

The handsome heir to the Equitable Life Insurance Company, Hyde was destined to become its president when he turned 30 in 1906, but the decadence of his blow-out party was enough to turn Equitable’s board against him. Amid never-substantiated allegations of using company funds to bankroll his $7.1 million party, Hyde resigned from Equitable and spent the next 36 years in France. Salome’s premiere 10 months later could well be seen as the final nail in the coffin of the Gilded Age.

This dovetails with Alex Ross’s description of a 1906 performance of Salome in Graz, conducted by Strauss himself. It’s the set-piece that opens The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century, and in the attendees alone we see a microcosm of the century to come: Puccini, Gustav and Alma Mahler, Alban Berg, Arnold Schoenberg, the fictional Adrian Leverkühn from Thomas Mann’s Doctor Faustus, and, allegedly, a teenaged Hitler.

The Rest Is Noise sets up Salome as the inciting event that lays out the musical development of the remaining 95 years of the Twentieth Century. As Ross later writes in 2019, “When the clarinet slithers up a disjointed scale at the outset of the piece, the curtain effectively goes up on twentieth-century music.” But I would argue that Salome is also a precursor to the Twentieth Century on the whole. It’s the same dreadful premonition that permeates through the opera’s characters, beginning with Herodias’s Page (who warns Narraboth that “terrible things can happen” if he continues to stare at Salome) and ending with Herod (who nearly sings the same phrase, with critical shift: “terrible things will happen”).

For the Page, this prophecy plays out: Narraboth kills himself as Salome lusts after Jochanaan (a suicide that barely registers with the other characters, save the Page). Onstage, we don’t see whether Herod is also right, but we do know that, nine years after John the Baptist was beheaded, he would lose his kingdom and his wealth after being accused of a conspiracy against Caligula. He died, in exile and infamy, and is generally regarded as one of history’s great tyrants, having both John the Baptist and Jesus’s blood on his hands.

In that same 2019 essay, Ross adds: “Whether Salome lives or dies, she has shattered her stepfather’s corrupt and hypocritical regime. As an angel of destruction, she is worthy of respect.”

When has there not been a period in history without a corrupt and hypocritical regime?

“A world where consuming and sex and stimulation is so over-the-top that it’s destroyed everything else,” director Lydia Steier says of her 2023 production of Strauss’s Salome for the Opéra National de Paris, likening her vision to a dystopia where the air is polluted and grass won’t grow. “It’s maybe us in 30 years,” she adds.

I was greatly persuaded by Steier’s vision for Salome, particularly her insistence that the heroine is not “a little girl who’s been abused and who’s weak,” a move that Steier describes as “spectacularly uninteresting.

“She does all of this very much on purpose,” Steier adds. “She has no other way to take down her father’s court, her mother’s court, the corruption, the decadence, the abhorrent, morally-bankrupt choices they’re making all the time. The only way she sees to destroy it is by essentially planting the bomb, and that bomb is the head of Jochanaan.”

(I’ve tried to not read too much into the fact that Steier’s production uses fashions from circa 1993 for Herod and Herodias’s court as my mother’s fateful Newport wedding took place at the end of 1992. It likewise did not make it through the decade.)

The idea, too, that Salome is about many things but it’s not a teenage girl driven solely by sex is an intention that goes back to Wilde. He did see her as an embodiment of sensuality, making her more than the “mute instrument” for her mother’s hatred of John the Baptist (which is how she’s originally portrayed in the Flaubert story that became the basis for Wilde’s play). “Her lust must needs be infinite, and her perversity without limits. Her pearls must expire on her flesh,” Wilde writes.

But he also saw Salome as the embodiment of chastity, with “nothing sensual in her beauty” and her pupils blazing with “the flames of faith.”

This is where Greta Thunberg (whose own mother is opera singer Malena Ernman) came into the conversation with Perri. At the time of our recording, Ernman’s name was mistakenly linked in the metadata to a 2008 English-language recording of Salome, and the idea of Thunberg herself as a regime-shattering Salome came to mind at the time. We were recording just a few weeks before Thunberg set off on the Global Sumud Flotilla (the second flotilla sent that year).

A few weeks after that, I watched as Thunberg and an acquaintance of mine from Berlin’s activism scene were both detained by the IDF and, a week after that, released—arriving in Athens in matching Ktzi’ot uniforms. Both women’s eyes showed flickers of the flames of faith.

Perhaps the most transgressive thing for Salome to suggest is how easily empires can fall. Kaiser Wilhelm, around the time of the work’s premiere, said that the work would do Strauss a lot of damage. Strauss would later quip that the “damage” allowed him to build his estate in Garmisch Partenkirchen. Construction on the Strauss Villa began in 1907. Just over a decade later, after spending World War I as a “shadow Kaiser” (in the words of one historian), Wilhelm II would abdicate the throne and accept exile in the Netherlands (though he momentarily held out hope that the rise of the Nazi Party would lead to a restoration of his dynastic line).

Strauss, too, was not spared the damages of the Twentieth Century. He initially cooperated with the Nazi regime, likely flattered by Hitler’s early admiration of his work, and also with a combination of professional and personal interest. His connections saved his Jewish daughter-in-law and grandchildren, although he was less successful with other members of her family.

He also watched as his friend and librettist for Der schweigsame Frau, Stefan Zweig, opted for exile, traveling from Britain to the United States to Brazil, where he ultimately ended his life in 1942 (Zweig’s own villa in Salzburg is now owned by the scion of the Nazi-coddling Porsche family). When American troops reached the Strauss Villa, he had the good fortune of introducing himself as “the composer of Rosenkavalier and Salome,” a reference that was recognized by one of the officers, who was also a musician.

Despite these strokes of luck, Strauss remained bleak. “The most terrible period of human history is at an end,” he wrote in his diary at the end of the War, “the twelve-year reign of bestiality, ignorance and anti-culture under the greatest criminals, during which Germany’s 2000 years of cultural evolution met its doom.”

Picturing Strauss writing those words in his Alpine village, I’m reminded of Edward Said a few years later, in a similar mountain town in Lebanon at the end of the summer of 1949. The dreariness. The mournful regret. The inevitability and repeatability of collapse.

The dread that runs through Salome isn’t tied to any one empire, or even any one century. It’s the recurring epiphany, usually realized too late, that collapse doesn’t announce itself as rupture. It comes disguised as excess. As spectacle. As something people attend in evening dress.

Full synopsis of Salome with a playlist and recommended reading at decanonized.com.

Follow Perri via Thrilled to Announce (also on Substack and Instagram as @thilledtoannounceee), and on Instagram at @pricklyper.

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Additional topics include: tenors who @ Elon Musk, the Oscar Mayer Wienermobile, Kierkegaard, and the Bardo.

Full show notes, including a synopsis of Don Giovanni, playlist, and recommended reading, at Decanonized.com.

Follow Sylvia on Twitter at @cowboyverismo. Follow their alter ego, People Mad at Opera, at @operacomments. Read their reviews on Parterre.

Read friend of the pod Ben Miller’s piece on the Komische Oper’s Don Giovanni (which incorporated the 20 minutes of Mozart’s Requiem that he had written).

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In last week’s episode of my new podcast, Decanonized (available wherever you get your podcasts, and now also available on Substack!), I discussed Bellini’s I Puritani with my friend and fellow critic, Aksel Tollåli.

Aksel and I spoke about Puritani last summer, sadly long before the Met premiered its new production with Lisette Oropesa, although her wonderful recording of the work is referenced plenty.

One thing I forgot to bring up on our call was a review of the work from none less than Edward Said. I thought about re-recording that part of the episode, but the more I thought about the Said quote, the more I thought about how it fit with a larger reading of a Puritani we might have gotten, had its composer and librettist been closer to the same page.

I.

In his 2020 special, Alive from New York, Pete Davidson recalls the reaction his friends had to “Thank U, Next” — Ariana Grande’s pop anthem that referenced her breakup with the comedian: “That song came out and my friends were like, Bro, I love you. I love you, right?… Shit is catchy. Shit is very catchy.”

I feel the same way listening to I Puritani given what Edward Said wrote of the work in an 1987 column for The Nation:

“What an odd, even kinky spectacle this opera presents, with its interminable vocal acrobatics, its vacant plot, its pointless allusions to seventeenth-century England. At its center stands a fluttery teenager who has gone ‘mad’ in her love for a man she thinks has betrayed her; the lovers’ music is based upon an inhumanely elongated treble melody set above an unabatedly monotonous and minimal bass, punctuated by militaristically concerted brasses. Exhibitionist display, an utterly precious and exhausting idiom, endlessly forestalled climaxes, men’s and women’s voices rising and falling indiscriminately in constant imitation of each other: This surely adds up to a vision of sexuality that requires some skeptical attention, not least for its enduring capacity to captivate large audiences of men and women.”

I love Edward Said. But… the shit is indeed very catchy.

One of the major issues in Puritani’s vacant plot owes to the adaptation process. “I am about to lose my mind over the plot of the opera for Paris, as it has been impossible to find a suitable subject for my purpose and adaptable to the company,” Bellini wrote to friend and fellow composer Francesco Florimo in the spring of 1834. A month later, on April 11, he and librettist Carlo Pepoli had settled on adapting a play that had shown the previous season in Paris: Jacques-François Ancelot and Joseph Xavier Boniface’s Têtes Rondes et Cavaliers (“Roundheads and Cavaliers”).

Bellini was likely attracted to the work for the mad scene potential with its heroine. But librettist Carlo Pepoli was less interested in the mad scene as he was with the other surrounding circumstances, many of which don’t make it into the libretto for I Puritani.

One of the major shifts is in what would become the character of Riccardo, known in Têtes Rondes as Mulgrave. Mulgrave is far more adamant about marrying Lucy (who becomes Elvira in Bellini’s world). He argues this point directly with Lucy’s father, who says he doesn’t wish to force his daughter into a marriage against her will. The union between Lucy and Arthur, however, has political dimensions that are made explicit in Têtes Rondes, along with the political actions of Lucy’s father, who happens to be governor of their local fortress.

Despite his own identity as a Presbyterian, Mulgrave has a powerful ally in another character excised from Têtes Rondes for I Puritani, Puritan soldier Pembroke (who at the beginning of the play changes his name, improbably, to Jeroboam Habakkuk).

The story is also much less about religious factions and more about political alliances. Mulgrave is a Presbyterian (Lucy is also seemingly not puritanical), and finds a powerful ally in the uber-Puritan Pembroke (who changes his name at the beginning of the play to Jeroboam Habakkuk in honor of the two prophets—and yet they never give him a mad scene). After Arthur escapes with Queen Henriette, Mulgrave is able to leverage this into Lucy’s father falling from political grace. He becomes governor and maintains hope that Lucy will marry him, even if she remains out of her mind.

Lucy and Arthur are reconciled in the second act, and much of the third act involves a more cogent Lucy working the levers of politics to have her fiancé exonerated so that they can be together. This succeeds, but Mulgrave has his revenge: Arthur is forcibly exiled from England. Lucy goes with him; they are together, but separated from their home.

It’s easy to understand why Pepoli was attracted to this plot: The son of a wealthy Bolognese dynasty, Pepoli was involved with the political revolutions that occurred in northern Italy just before the Risorgimento came together. He was serving in a provisional government in Romagna after the 1831 uprising and for that he was imprisoned in the infamous Spielberg.

It wasn’t until France intervened that Pepoli was able to flee to Paris, where he fell in with his fellow Italian exiles. He met Bellini through the salon of Cristina Trivulzio Belgiojoso, another unwilling exile whom Mary Ann Smart describes as “by far the most overtly political of the salonnières.” The parallels between Cromwell’s England and the Italy Pepoli had been forced to flee in 1831 were clear: the societies were both marked by political repression, the constant threat of arrest or exile, and private lives shaped—and often destroyed—by ideological conflict.

Bellini, however, wasn’t an exile, and was planning on bringing I Puritani to Naples after Paris, which would require the approval of one of the more tough censors in Italy at the time. In Smart’s words, he “responded with alarm to the hot-headed patriotism of Pepoli’s poetry,” complaining of “a liberal bent that terrifies me.” His constant pushbacks against Pepoli led to one of his most enduring lines about opera: “Carve it in your head in adamantine letters: Opera must make people weep, feel horrified, must kill through singing.”

Despite this level of micromanagement, Pepoli was able to get in a plea for “libertà,” and it lives in one of the opera’s most popular moments: “Suoni la tromba e intrepdio.” In this, Riccardo and Giorgio (an invention on Pepoli’s part to replace the excised role of Lucy/Elvira’s father) sing: “Bello è affrontar la morte, gridando: ‘Libertà!’” How beautiful to greet death by shouting “freedom!”

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II.

To go back to Edward Said, I wonder how he would have felt about a Puritani that was more driven by Pepoli’s agenda than Bellini’s. Given his general ambivalence towards bel canto (except for Rossini), my guess is his opinion wouldn’t have changed much, even with the revolution and exile. But Pepoli’s read on Têtes Rondes is very much in line with Said’s assertion that “appeals to the past are among the commonest of strategies in interpretations of the present.”

It’s also in line with Said’s argument that the battle of imperialism is not only over land, but also over narrative—who gets to narrate, which narratives are permitted—to the point that narrative itself is a weapon in this battle. “Most important,” he adds, “the grand narratives of emancipation and enlightenment mobilized people in the colonial world to rise up and throw off imperial subjection.”

Pepoli would have agreed. “If music and poetry work in concert, they can vanquish any listener,” he told a group of students in 1830 at Bologna’s Liceo Musicale. “The proof lies in the Marseillaise. Without the music, the poetry is not beautiful; without the poetry, the music is not complete. When the poetry and music are joined, it becomes a superb composition. For that, the people fought, vanquished, triumphed. Europe and the world shouted, ‘Liberty!’ This is the most important event that can be narrated in the modern history of music.” As Smart notes, in its original Italian, Pepoli’s line, “shouted ‘Liberty’!” presages his line in “Suoni la tromba”: gridano “Libertà.”

This isn’t the Puritani we have. Was it the Puritani we deserved? I’m not sure. It’s certainly one that would have been a revolution in Naples had Pepoli gotten his way. And perhaps “Suoni la tromba” was enough for Giuseppe Verdi to write Nabucco and the even more Risorgimento-coded opera, La battaglia di Legnano. Of course, Verdi would then support an empire by writing Aida for Khedive Ismail Pasha of Egypt. Shortly thereafter, Italy itself would become an empire, joining in the late-19th-century land grab for Africa.

Funny, too, is the reaction that Said’s criticism of Puritani has received. The essay it’s taken from, about music and feminism, is included in Music at the Limits, a posthumous collection of Said’s music criticism that was published in 2009. A few years later, a review of the German edition by Jens Rosteck cites this almost parenthetical line as part of Said’s “slur[ring of] the entirety of Italian opera as second-rate,” and labeling him “a sworn enemy of the bel canto repertory in general.”1

Can the subaltern have an opinion?

III.

I Puritani’s most famous cultural reference (apart, perhaps, from the time that Lee Pace played Bellini off-Broadway) is found in the likely-unlikely source of Werner Herzog. How apt, then, that 1982 Pauline Kael’s review of Fitzcarraldo presages Edward Said’s later writings on Puritani:

“After a visually promising beginning, Herzog seems to lose interest in the external world (and no one in this movie has much of an internal world, either). The shots are repetitive and are held too long, and though they’re lovely, they don’t have the ghostly, kinky expressiveness of the great images that sustain one through the dragginess of Aguirre.”

What an odd, even kinky spectacle it is to watch Fitzcarraldo today. Klaus Kinski plays the titular conquistador, an Irish immigrant in the Peruvian city of Iquitos during the Amazon rubber boom, intent on building an opera house in his new adoptive city. Kinski’s failed attempts to realize this Xanadu play out over nearly two maddening hours, most of which I spent wishing that Herzog had taken the indigenous Matsigenkan extras up on their offer to kill Kinski during production. I then had to remind myself that the real Fitzcarraldo here was Herzog himself.

In the end, Kinski’s attempts to build his own version of Valhalla are dashed in the Urubamba River, but he receives one bit of redemption: An opera troupe in Manaus is without a house. The film ends with the company performing I Puritani on the old steamship Kinski had purchased as a means of financing his opera house. The barge glides downriver as Arturo sings “A te o cara,” hand-in-hand with a swooning Elvira. People gather along the riverbanks to watch the spectacle as Kinski enjoys a prime seat towards the stern. Rather than be swept up in the performance he had longed to hear, he’s caught in the spectacle of the event, constantly looking out at the audience and scenery and wielding an absurdly long cigar.

And so Puritani itself becomes a tool of empire; the narrative of western culture that overrides the narratives indigenous to this patch of South America at a time when many robber barons saw resources to exploit. For Kinski’s Fitzcarraldo, the aesthetic ideals legitimize the disruption they’ve caused. While Herzog’s film could easily be read as a commentary on this very disruption, he also wound up doing the same during production.

Perhaps Puritani in this case of empire is irrelevant. And that’s fair: Nothing bad ever came from a bunch of English Puritans arriving in the Americas.

Musicologist and critic Aksel Tollåli joins us to discuss a lovely opera about a lovely soprano and her lovely mental breakdown. Topics include Risorgimento chauvinism, opera's girlhood era, Lee Pace as Vincenzo Bellini, and operas whose entire plots would be resolved if the characters had just one (1) conversation.

Follow Aksel on Instagram and Bluesky.

Full playlist, reading list, and synopsis of I Puritani.

Back in February (which gives you a sense of how behind on 2026 I currently am), I published my first article in Harper’s, an Annotation on Muyassar Kurdi’s “Migration” that traces not only this wonderful work by a composer-performer I greatly admire, but also the broader history of graphic notation over the last 80-ish years. It was also a personal work for me as well. Like Kurdi, the who was born in the United States to a Palestinian father and a French-Swiss mother, I was born in the US to a Syrian mother an an Italian father. The inheritances and lineages are complex. Much in the same way Kurdi traced her Arab lineage through “Migration” (in the broader work A Daughter of Isis), I felt I was tracing a similar series of fractals and fractures in writing this Annotation.

My central argument in the piece is that graphic scores are increasingly turned to in times of political turbulence and social upheaval, beginning with the revival of the form in the paranoid Red Scare years following World War II. Difficult times breed furious art. I’m hugely grateful to the Harper’s team, which were a dream to work with, especially Megan Evershed who helped me refine this idea from pitch to publication.

We’re already a few issues ahead of February, but we’re at no shortage of turbulence or upheaval. We’re also at no shortage of politically-hued graphic notation — just recently I saw a graphically-notated version of Willie Nelson’s “Red Headed Stranger” from another excellent musician and thinker, Clarice Jensen. While “Red Headed Stranger” itself isn’t a directly political work, it’s also a song with a history — and can any Willie Nelson song be extricated from his gospel of progressivism?

For those who want to claim that there is an apolitical dimension of absolute music, it’s harder to make that argument with graphic works. Ethan Philbrick, whom I also spoke with for this piece, helped put this into words, linking the move to graphic notation throughout the last century as a reaction to “the impossibility of working with things as they are, because the things as they are have become unbearably clear in their brutality.” In such times, when artists try to address reality in their work, Philbrick adds, “they’re pushed to the limits of the [musical] sign system. And so graphic notation reemerges at these different moments.”

That was something I wish I’d had more room to explore in the Annotation: the historical throughline in this new era of graphic notation (a form of music that dates back centuries and, one could argue, was even the original form of notation).

Most experts credit Henry Cowell as the forefather of the contemporary graphic score thanks to his own frustrations with the systems of standard notation. Born in 1897 to an immigrant poet and an anarcha-feminist (who divorced soon after), Cowell was 17 when began to study music under Charles Seeger — Pete’s father and a political activist in his own right. His influence is felt across New Musical Resources, which Cowell eventually published in 1930 but wrote while studying under Seeger. It’s this text that many cite as proof that the roots of modern graphic notation are at least in part from Cowell.

During World War I, Cowell served in the Army stateside, and Seeger lost his job at UC Berkeley due to his politics and opposition to the war. He moved to the East Coast, first to New York and later to DC, shifting his focus from composition to musicology and, during the Great Depression, taking several government jobs under FDR’s New Deal (including administrator with the WPA’s Federal Music Project).

Musicologist Malik Sharif argues that Seeger’s activism and New Deal work were inextricably linked with his own idea of musicology, “namely the increasing conceptualization of musicology as a socially-responsible and even applied or politicized discipline… [A] musicology that is socially-relevant in a tangible way, that tackles the questions of people outside of musical academia regarding contemporary musical life, and that actively engages in matters of national and international cultural and educational policy, instead of being a passive bystander.”

“He knows that if he irritates his subject enough, the idea will be remembered, and passed on,” Cowell wrote of his mentor. “And this is actually what happens.”

In his introduction to the collection Essential Cowell, Dick Higgins notes that Cowell’s writings often skirted the same Marxist sentiments that Seeger espoused, but that he was “not, however, a highly politicized figure.” He points to the 1953 essay “Music Is My Weapon,” where Cowell denies being a communist or having ever been a member of the party. However, Higgins adds that this was at the height of the McCarthy crisis and Cowell’s statements were likely calibrated towards that. Having spent four years in San Quentin prison on a trumped-up “morals” charge related to his sexuality, it’s likely that he had no intention of enduring a second persecution.1

Despite these challenges, as musicologist Richard French wrote in 1960, he “never recovered from the excitement of finding himself a composer.” I like to think of Cowell as a Willie Nelson-esque figure, with the same drive that has kept Nelson still performing at nearly 93: the belief that music could be a means of unlocking a more perfect union. It was one that Cowell grew up with himself, having lived as a child in San Francisco’s Chinatown at the turn of the 20th Century (ironically, he seemed in pursuit of this idea of unity while trying to find the most acute ways of dividing a musical note).

Cowell composed until his death in 1965, and taught the next generation of experimentalists, including John Cage. It was in Cage’s Lower East Side apartment that fellow composer Morton Feldman doodled a literal graph one evening in 1950 while Cage was cooking wild rice. That graph, with high, middle, and low planes, would become the basis for what many consider to be the first “real” graphic score of the era, Projection I. Along the spectrum of difficult times/furious art, I’m fascinated by Feldman being the one credited with (as Marcia Gay Harden’s Lee Miller tells Ed Harris’s Jackson Pollock) “cracking it wide open” when it comes to modern graphic notation. Feldman’s teacher was Stefan Wolpe, a Marxist who often locked horns with his young student over works that he deemed too esoteric.2

“I cannot make a relationship between music and society,” Feldman said in a later interview. However, Feldman — whose centennial also happens to be this year — was born in Queens to immigrant parents from Kyiv who worked in the garment business. He bristled at the suggestion (from a German music critic in 1972) that the moorland landscapes of his music were a response to the horrors of the Holocaust, which would have played out in Feldman’s impressionable teenage years and early adulthood. At the same time, he didn’t fully downplay history in his works, either — The King of Denmark, a graphic score from 1965, was inspired by King Christian X, who was on the throne when Germany invaded Denmark in 1940 and who, according to popular legend, wore a yellow star in solidarity with Danish Jews.

“Because I’m Jewish, I do not identify with, say, Western civilization music,” Feldman would later say. “What are our morals in music? Our moral in music is nineteenth-century German music, isn’t it?”

Cage, too, was not so easy to pin down politically which, in his own centenary year of 2010, Ina Bloom acknowledged was a “disappointment” to many. “Throughout his life, he performed an explicit Zen-style detachment from social and political ‘issues’ that served to deflect attention away from all questions of power relations, including those that would pertain to his own role and position, not to mention his compositions.”

At the same time, it’s hard to imagine a Cage composition that wasn’t influenced by the material circumstances in which it was created. This comes through in his 1969 book, Notations, a collection of scores (many graphic or abstract) by nearly 270 composers, accompanied by short texts, quotes, and aphorisms. Dozens of these scores carry a political valence; how else to read a work like Joseph Byrd’s The Defense of the American Continent from the Viet-Cong Invasion? In his part of the text, Cage even situates graphic notation in a period of global flux that demanded a blowback against convention: “Where there is no choice, everything follows conventions.”

Interestingly, Cage was the one rattled by a break with convention in 1975 in a performance from his own work, Song Books. At SUNY Buffalo’s Baird Recital Hall, a young Julius Eastman took the stage to perform Solo for Voice No. 8. The instructions left plenty to choice: “In a situation provided with maximum amplification (no feedback), perform a disciplined action, with any interruptions, fulfilling in whole, or in part, an obligation to others.”

As John R. Killacky put it, “Eastman played his own queerness as an instrument in the performance.” He took on the posture of an academic, announcing: “My name is Professor Padu, and I’m here to show you a new system of love” while a Black woman and white man stripped and demonstrated a “sideways” system of making love that ran contra to the convention of “in and out.” Everyone in the audience, it seemed, was on board — except for Cage, who took Eastman to task immediately after the performance.

Of the works I wanted to mention in Harper’s and was unable to, the greatest loss was Eastman’s Buddha, an egg-shaped score of indeterminate length or order of notes. Two recent recordings, one from guitarist Sean Shibe and another from the ensemble Wild Up, show how vastly different the score can be interpreted (Wild Up’s members had such varying ideas that they actually released two different versions, subtitled “Path” and “Field”). Unfortunately, Buddha doesn’t fit in as neatly as some other examples of graphic notation that can’t help but be political (including elements of George Crumb’s Vietnam-era Black Angels and Penderecki’s Threnody to the Victims of Hiroshima).

And yet Buddha is a work that implicitly questions the ideas of self and no-self at a time when Eastman — who described his life’s mission mission as being “Black to the fullest, a musician to the fullest, and a homosexual to the fullest” — was living through the AIDS crisis, challenges to the Civil Rights Act, and overall Reagan-era indifference to anyone who wasn’t white, Christian, and nationalist.

That’s a bit harder to spell out in the spatial constraints of an Annotation, but of all the scores I studied to write this piece, Buddha was one that reminded me most of Muyassar Kurdi’s own work (the two are also connected via Meredith Monk: Kurdi was a student of Monk’s, Eastman was the first male member of her ensemble). Both pieces balance the self and no-self of their creators against an incredibly capacious environment for performers to bring their own selves to the sandbox. And it’s this balance of both being in the world surrounding art but not so much within it that we veer into agit-pro that what makes these works so effective.

After the jump, as a paid subscriber bonus (THANK YOU!), some of my other favorite quotes from Notations, which also has a somewhat-modern counterpart in Theresa Sauer’s 2009 book, Notations 21.

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Topics include: whether Rosenkavalier is a comedy or tragedy, the Viennese aristocracy, opera queens and mezzosexuals, the “German she-devil” who sued the Met (and won), and one of opera’s most problematic characters.

Show page (including a playlist, recommended reading, opera synopsis and more): https://www.decanonized.com/episodes/strauss-der-rosenkavalier
More info: https://www.decanonized.com
Follow Decanonized on Instagram at @decanonized

Follow Ben at: https://benwritesthings.com, on Instagram at @benwritesthings and on Bluesky at benwritesthings.bsky.social

Related

For this episode, we saw Carmen live in Berlin via an organ trafficking-coded production by Ole Anders Tandberg at the Deutsche Oper, so bonus digressions on kidney harvesting and bull testicles!

Show page (including a playlist, recommended reading, opera synopsis and more): https://www.decanonized.com/episodes/bizet-carmen
More info: https://www.decanonized.com
Follow Decanonized on Instagram at @decanonized

Follow Nikola at: https://www.nikolaprintz.com and on Instagram at @itisnika

Naturally, she won gold with a buoyant program set to Donna Summer’s “MacArthur Park Suite.”

Amid so many programs in recent games that have been set to lackluster film scores the music choice in and of itself was a breath of fresh. But Liu, who only recently returned to figure skating after a two-year break, was equally buoyant. Her goal wasn’t to win, it was to skate on her own terms after burning out on a system that is more built on the performance of gender than the performance of anything else. One tweet I saw making the rounds after her victory summed it up: “Alysa Liu really just IDGAF’d her way to an Olympic medal. An inspiration.” Patricia Wallinga, Bluesky’s favorite opera composer, drove the nail further into the head when she wrote that Liu did each of the required technical components as “a little flourish tossed in while she rollerskates along the lake with a boombox nearby.”

This, in and of itself, feels like a rebuke to what Ellyn Kestnbaum describes in Culture on Ice as “presenting the abstract beauty of the skater’s body line and musical expression as a means of demonstrating artistry”—and the end-goal of this approach being the emphasis on figure skating as a “feminine” art. (This is precisely why so many skaters have used Bizet’s Carmen for their programs, and why so many of those programs have failed.) For her comeback, Liu—whose previous programs have followed this framework—didn’t take the bait. Rather than playing to body lines, shapes, and abstract beauty, her programs in Milan emphasized effortless athletic execution, underscored by a singular style that refused to comport to skating’s classical definitions or standards.

“What is it like to hold a blade in your hand, knowing it could cut you or propel you forward, and trust yourself to wield it wisely? What is it like to say you’re living from a place of joy and mean it?” asks Meredith Constant in a recent Substack post, titled “Alysa Liu’s Free Skate Radicalized Me.” Liu, Constant adds, “didn’t just throw out the playbook on how to build a champion female figure skater; she redefined girlhood. Womanhood.”

At the risk of dropping into youth pastor voice, the links between Liu and our current, slightly-transgressive notions of girlhood made me think of another figure who was equally radical in her approach to getting what she wanted. Her victory in the end was described by conductor Norman Del Mar as “a horrible display of hysterical triumph,” which could very well have been the same words used on Fox News in response to Liu’s (iconic and delightful) statement as she was leaving the ice.

Subversion is baked into Strauss’s opera, stretching into its source text from Oscar Wilde (and Wilde’s own inspiration from Gustave Flaubert’s “Herodias”). A colleague remarked recently that Salome, for all of the characters who remark on the heroine’s looks, is really an opera about the female gaze. Her descriptions of Jochanaan—his body as a column of ivory, a garden of doves and lilies, and a tower of silver—are likely the same things millions of teenage girls have written about their high-school crushes in marbled composition books and on old LiveJournal blogs.

I’m likewise very much persuaded by director Lydia Steier, who describes visions of Salome as a little girl, helpless and abused, as “spectacularly uninteresting,” adding: “She is strong, she is decisive, and she does all of this very much on purpose.” For Steier, Salome’s dance and her requested payment therefor are her means of bringing down the corruption of her mother’s and stepfather’s dynasty. Depending on who you believe, the same could come to pass in the wake of Liu’s win.

Writing about Salome’s final, female gaze-y monologue, Craig Ayrey parallels Steier’s argument by dismissing the argument that Strauss’s work on the whole is a “study in obsession” or that the heroine is the apex of the opera’s perverse undertones. That may be how Herod, and even Jochanaan, view her. But, Ayrey points out, “Salome is the only character in the drama who attempts to fully engage with Jochanaan,” ready to accept him first as a man and then possibly even as a prophet. Jochanaan dismisses her for her relationship to Herodias, but “unconventionally, even existentially, Salome demands to be known for herself.” It’s not hard to imagine her singing to Jochanaan’s severed head: “Right from the start, you tore me apart. You took the best part of my heart.”

The choreography of Liu’s “MacArthur Park” mirrors the fluidity of that final scene, one where Strauss abandons traditional beauty for organic expression. It didn’t take me long to cut the two pieces of media together in a way that worked musically while also underscoring the full spectrum of girlhood on display: youthful IDGAF-isms tempered with singular obsession, a tension between societal performance and self-expression, and the familiar balancing act between sacred and profane.

The final line of Salome comes when Herod says: “Kill that woman!” The stage directions tell us that this order is taken out, but what if we never get to that part onstage? What if we just end with Salome triple-lutzing again and again into the mystery of love before tipping over in to the mystery of death?

That’s what I’m fucking talking about.

Update (11. February 2026): A newly-discovered email would suggest that Jeffrey Epstein originally introduced Simon Ghraichy to Leon Botstein in June, 2014.

Pianist Simon Ghraichy’s last project with Deutsche Grammophon was a standalone single of Philip Glass’s “The Fog of War,” released on March 11, 2022. It was one of many conflict-connected recordings that came in the weeks following Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, and Ghraichy drew that connection in an Instagram post announcing the release:

“‘The Fog of War’… has been composed for a documentary with the same name tracing the life of an American officer from WWII until [the] Vietnam war. Today, names change, locations too, but the fact is we still live in a world torn apart with war, power and conquest: WWII, Cuba, Vietnam, Lebanon, Israel, the Gulf and today Ukraine… there has always been an assaulter and an assaulted, and particularly millions of innocent souls perishing - collateral damages. Today, I dedicate this music to them.”

Ten years earlier, the French pianist (of Mexican-Lebanese heritage) was a relative unknown. A major breakthrough had come in 2010, according to some versions of his biography, “after an enthusiastic review by journalist Robert Hughes in the Wall Street Journal.”1 The following year, he released his first album, Always in Motion: Opera Transcriptions and Paraphrases by Franz Liszt.

And in 2013, he met Jeffrey Epstein. The introduction apparently came via a mutual friend, French politician Jack Lang (who, on Saturday night, resigned as president of Paris’s Institut du Monde Arabe). “I hope we will be meeting in the USA in the coming year,” Ghraichy wrote to Epstein at the beginning of 2014.

In fact, Epstein appears to have become something of a professional mentor to Ghraichy beginning in that year, particularly after a meeting that the two had on September 14. That same day, Epstein sent a flurry of emails regarding the pianist, including several to conductor Leon Botstein: “I think Simon needs a local manager, ideas? He’s here for ten more days?”2 reads one. Another, sent 20 minutes earlier: “When will you decide the Simon Graichy [sic] piece.”

In response to the second email, Botstein replied: “Will decide in a month or so but he will be asked to reserve time on the two weekends in August.” In August of 2015, Ghraichy performed on both weekend programs for “Carlos Chávez and His World” at the Bard Music Festival—which runs under Botstein’s co-directorship. “Your protégé, Simon Ghraichy, participated during both weekends and it seems to have gone very well,” Botstein reported back to Epstein on August 17.

“Protégé” was a word that Botstein used more than once to describe Ghraichy in relation to Epstein and, at least in the professional sense, it’s apt. Also following his September 14 meeting with the young pianist, Epstein began to reach out to his network of contacts to help Ghraichy find “a local manager.” Botstein in turn wrote to his executive director at the American Symphony Orchestra, Lynne Meloccaro.

“It is really hard to get good representation these days,” Meloccaro wrote back to Botstein that month, but compiled a list of “mostly veterans in NY and Europe who might be willing to talk with Simon and point him in a helpful direction.” Epstein also asked an unnamed associate to “ask Josh Bell who manages him.” That contact reached out to Joshua Bell’s assistant via a mutual friend, ultimately asking for an introduction to IMG Artists. (This lead also seemed to have gone cold very quickly, according to the available files from Epstein’s emails.)

Finally, that September, Epstein also seemed to suggest that Ghraichy fix a cosmetic flaw with his front tooth out of consideration for his image. Ghraichy followed up on this with Epstein’s assistant, Lesley Groff, later that month, saying: “I don’t even notice it anymore, and people around me [think] of it as a sign of ‘identity’ (like a scar on the cheek or whatever…), but if [Jeffrey] thinks it should be better fixed for my image and career, then…who knows!” The following year, Epstein introduced Ghraichy to his own dentist in New York and agreed to pay $4,200 for dental work.

At the same time, Ghraichy’s career began to reach the next level. He made his debuts with the Festival d’Aix-en-Provence and Carnegie Hall in the second half of 2015, and both his Kennedy Center and Berliner Philharmonie debuts in 2016. He also signed an exclusive recording contract with Deutsche Grammophon that year, telling the Huffington Post: “After I’ve put my autograph on that contract, here we are celebrating my signature with the staff at Universal Music [DG’s parent company]. It feels so good to be surrounded by professionals from the most prestigious music industry. And yet, they’re all young and bright and sexy!”

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Update (6. February 2026): Further emails relating to Leon Botstein confirm that he did travel to Jeffrey Epstein’s private island in December 2012. Additional context about this trip is covered by Vimal Patel in the New York Times.

“I don’t know what’s more unforgivable: that conductor and long-serving Bard president Leon Botstein accepted money from Jeffrey Epstein, or that he put me in the position of agreeing with American conservative outrage-monger Dinesh D’Souza.”

I wrote those words in 2023 for VAN Magazine, shortly after news broke about Botstein’s meetings with Epstein after the financier and convicted sex offender’s first stint in jail for having sex with a minor. The meetings came after Botstein accepted two donations from Epstein for Bard College, where Botstein also oversees the annual Bard Music Festival and SummerScape programming. The donations had been relitigated in the press some years earlier, shortly before Epstein’s death in 2019, but the news of the multiple meetings came out only after a wider report by the Wall Street Journal on Epstein’s datebook.

The Dinesh D’Souza bit was from my own research, quoted in a Times profile on Botstein from 1992: “He is ideologically unpredictable, even eccentric. That’s partly a function of intellectual suppleness and partly a function, I suppose, of incoherence.”

In 2023, that ideological eccentricity and coherence was on display in a Times follow-up that interrogated Botstein’s meetings with Epstein. “People don’t understand what this job is,” Botstein said at the time. You cannot pick and choose, because among the very rich is a higher percentage of unpleasant and not very attractive people. Capitalism is a rough system.” A few paragraphs later, Botstein was quoted as saying: “A guy sent us money, and we followed up. It’s a simple story.”

Yet newly-released documents in the Epstein Library seem to further the incoherence. Botstein’s follow-ups cover a period from July 2012 to July 2018 (one year before Epstein’s final arrest). As of this writing, their correspondence is linked to 2,558 documents.

Many of them are the sort of emails you’d expect to see from the head of an organization that relies on donations to a lead they’re trying to cultivate. A string of messages from Botstein to Epstein between 2015 and 2016 request phone calls and in-person meetings or offer invitations to performance at Bard and Carnegie Hall. At times, the back-and-forths with Epstein and Botstein’s assistants seem like a massive dick-swinging contest to see who has the more packed, less yielding schedule. I’m not interested in speculating on the size of Botstein’s right superior parietal lobe (as Robert Lawrence Kuhn once did with Epstein), but I wouldn’t mind having the chance to observe his reactions to Epstein’s culturally capitalistic bloviating.

You can understand why Botstein called his acquaintance with Epstein “a humiliating experience to go back over and over and over” in the 2023 Times piece, adding: “We’re completely at the mercy of the very wealthy.” There’s also the fact that over the course of six years Epstein never seemed to figure out how to spell Botstein’s last name correctly — a last name that is 71% identical to Epstein’s own.

Perhaps even more humiliating is how much Leon Botstein’s previous statements struggle to bear weight with these newly-released documents. In 2023, the Wall Street Journal reported that Epstein had visited Bard in the summer of 2013 to see its production of Sergei Taneyev’s Oresteia, traveling to Annandale-on-Hudson by helicopter with his female assistants.

In his subsequent interview with the Times, Botstein said he “never witnessed young female assistants around Mr. Epstein…and that he did not remember whether he had met Mr. Epstein during those visits.” An email sent to Epstein from his assistant, Lesley Groff, dated July 25, 2013, reads: “Reminder Leon Botstein wants to feed you and the girls on Sunday before the 1pm opera talk. Would you like brunch?” That would have aligned with the performance schedule for Oresteia. (You have to wonder what Epstein made of the three-hour work about abuses of power and the transmutation of private crimes into public justice.)

About a week later, Botstein wrote Epstein to invite himself to Zorro Ranch: “How about my getting to Santa Fe on Friday and leaving on Sunday morning?” This visit was seemingly delayed or repeated, according to an email sent from Groff to Epstein on August 8: “Reminder Leon Botstein wanted to go to the ranch Aug 23/24 … did we need to start working on his trip?”

Other documents suggest that Botstein visited Little Saint James, Epstein’s private residence in the Virgin Islands. An email from Groff to Epstein on December 17, 2012 looks at flight options JFK to San Juan, Puerto Rico for Botstein. In another email sent on the same day, Epstein tells an unnamed recipient: “i am on the island, amazing, you are missed, .bottstein [sic] coming to visit, musk, many , come.”

Indeed, for someone who feels humiliated at the prospect of “going back over and over” his ties to Epstein, Botstein seems to have gone back over and over to Epstein himself. His was on a list of names that Epstein suggested for some sort of meeting with Bill Gates — alongside Woody Allen, Ban Ki-moon, the Prime Minister of Qatar, and “Victoria Secret Models” (this last suggestion is followed by a question mark). In 2015, Botstein programmed pianist Simon Ghraichy, whom he describes as a “protegé” of Epstein’s, in the 2015 Bard Music Festival.1 He appears to have met with Epstein and violinist Justina Auškelytė, whom Epstein supported during her studies at Juilliard with both cash and career opportunities.

Botstein also served as a paid consultant to Gratitude America Ltd., a nonprofit that Epstein established in 2012, allegedly as a money and image-laundering operation. (He told the New York Times that he donated the $150,000 consulting fee to Bard.) Epstein declined to renew Botstein’s contract with Gratitude America for 2017, however later that year he purchased a Patek watch that presumably went to Botstein: Emails sent the following year confirm a $10,000 deposit sent from Botstein to Epstein for a watch valued at $51,615, as well as a payment plan that would cover quarterly installments through 2020.

At Bard, Botstein saw second chances as “part of our educational mission,” in his defense of accepting Epstein’s donations. “You wouldn’t criticize a priest for giving communion to a convicted felon.” This may be true, but I don’t know what I would make of a priest accepting a luxury watch from a convicted felon.

There again, there are no priests in this equation. Whether or not Botstein shared Epstein’s beliefs or approved of his behavior is beside the point given the broader context. As I wrote in 2023, Botstein’s history as a college president was tied to his long-articulated views on sex, power, and elite exception, all of which functioned in practice to normalize conditions that Epstein would later exploit (while also creating at Bard an ecosystem of unpleasant money rationalized as intellectual pluralism). In 1990, responding to a group of student protests against allegations of sexual harassment and rape at both Simon’s Rock and Bard, he said: “There is always going to be some libidinal component if we achieve the close teaching and mentoring to which we aspire — particularly using the so-called Socratic method.”2

The following year, he told the New York Times that there should be rules in place to prevent abuses of power, but that regulating or outright banning relationships between students and professors went against the role of colleges to “protect diversity, dissent, and an implicit critique of bourgeois morality.” He also spoke wistfully of the film Chariots of Fire, and its scenes of Oxford professors socializing with their undergraduates over sherry. “That’s against the law today. Not possible. Forbidden. A certain sensibility has driven out conviviality.”

And in 2015, during an “open house” discussion about sexual assault on campus and in between his own visits with Epstein, he told Bard students: “You have to use common sense. A girl drinking a bottle of vodka and then going to a party is as wise as me walking into a Nuremberg Rally while wearing the yellow badge.”

This rhetoric is familiar, sensibility as repression, accountability as bourgeois morality, power as misunderstood virtue. Botstein deployed it against students and critics long before Epstein entered the picture, and by the time he did enter, it was into a system that had a new level of fluency in minimizing power imbalances and defending eccentric exception. One of the arguments often thrown around now is the inability to hold two truths at the same time, and I’ll happily bite: It is true that Botstein told the Wall Street Journal in a 2023 interview that he found Epstein “odd and arrogant.” It is also true that he sent Epstein an email in 2013 thanking him for his “candor and [his] friendship.”

That email came after another failed attempt at fundraising — this time for the American Symphony Orchestra, where Botstein has served as music director since 1991. Epstein had apparently considered donating to the ensemble but, based on Botstein’s response, hesitated over three major concerns: the orchestra’s repertoire, its concert formats, and the generally critical reviews of Botstein as a conductor.

“The truth is that I have been such a thorn of the side of critics, conductors and managers that I am not surprised at what you found,” Botstein writes in response to the third point. “But you will find support and real support within the profession. Pardon the expression but I have not gotten medals and awards for anything but my work in music.3 I just got the Bruckner Medal this month (the other recipients have been Toscanini and Walter, among others). And I got the same Austrian Cross for contributions to music as Sir Simon Rattle--the same year. I hate that stuff, but there it is.”

It’s by far his longest publicly-available email to Epstein, and the least decorous — invoking a Grammy nomination (for a recording made with an entirely different orchestra), suggesting that if, even with a gift from Epstein, “there can be no measured improvement on the execution front” he would take some decisive action about his future with the ASO, and leaning on Wittgenstein for rhetorical support.

“I am not Moses, and if there were a God, he would not be on my side. (Another reason to help),” the email concludes. “I greatly cherish this new friendship and I have real admiration for how you go about doing things — tough as it is often I truly enjoy the argument. But this time I and not your preliminary findings and researchers — am right. Given the firestorm I created 20 years ago I am even surprised I did as well in your research, whatever grade you put on the result. It is not the final exam, only a badly constructed mid-term, I am a bit proud not to have gotten a top grade. True controversy rarely leads to praise in this business. Nabokov became famous and admired only at the end.”

Despite even this seemingly pointed reference to the author of Lolita, Epstein is unmoved and his reply is curt yet oblique:

“When treasures are ‘rediscovered’ (not sure the ‘re’ is appropriate), it needs to be evaluated (here you can use ‘re’). It requires close examination to ascertain its new value. The auction house is a nice way of [determining] it, and a long way on its path to recognition.”4

Botstein concedes some of this point, but argues against the metaphor of the auction house, adding that “treasures are not the only purpose of the endeavor.” Epstein is even more direct in his follow-up: “There is a reason you are still struggling and it is not your talent.”

“I have the sense of fighting my worst enemies in a a [sic] shadow way, not openly, and I surely have them. I am not struggling — I am struggling for the primary source of survival in music history for large ensembles — patronage,” Botstein writes back. “And you once asked a question of me. The answer is that I wish to work on the podium, to perform and [to] continue to fight — if one [does] not work one dies inside.”

This type of donor-groveling isn’t new for anyone who has had the burden of fundraising on their job description, and Epstein certainly isn’t the first semi-interested donor who would prefer to see the performing arts treated as a for-profit endeavor. But the exchange takes on a new light given the senders involved and what came next. Botstein stuck it out with Epstein for another five years, even after he denied not his talent, but his inherent value. The equal footing between two men in power loses its balance after reading this, and while I’m not inclined to give Botstein any pity in exchange for his humiliation narrative, I do wonder about his own sense of self-worth — and what happened to his final watch repayments after the summer of 2019.

The third act of Taneyev’s Oresteia is based on The Libation Bearers, and opens with Orestes — having killed his mother in revenge for her having killed his father — hounded by the Furies. “They follow me everywhere like shadows, hounding my steps, malevolent threats oozing from their lips like pus,” Orestes sings. “I’m at the ends of the earth but there’s nowhere to hide.” In a lecture on the work, recorded in 2020, Botstein describes these Furies as representative of a “raw justice”; the idea that Orestes must die for killing his mother. By the finale, Botstein adds, this raw justice will lose to more a reasoned, deliberate justice as embodied onstage by Athena.

“The cycle of violence in human society has to come to an end,” he explains. “The restraint of the desire for revenge through violence is a rite of passage from a society that’s based on violence to a society that’s based on the rule of law.” Yet that argument assumes a clean break between violence and the law. Epstein’s world depended on the opposite: Violence could persist, so long as it learned to speak calmly.

There’s a line from an Elif Batuman interview that ran during my time at Time Out New York that has stuck with me for the last 15 years. Discussing Dostoevsky with Parul Sehgal, Batuman says the Russian author’s work is “not meant to be realistic — you know, like Oedipus Rex isn’t about killing your father and sleeping with your mother — it’s a play that depicts certain universal dramas and tensions through the bizarre and hyperbolic example of a king who kills his father and sleeps with his mother.”

Oedipus Rex isn’t realistic, but it also shows us the shortcomings of what happens when we trust illusions over reality. The Greek god of the theatre, Dionysus, is also, as E. R. Dodds put it, “the god of illusion.” What is real in Oedipus — the fact of the title character’s parentage — remains elusive (illusive?) to him until the fateful reveal. In response, he gouges his eyes out and begs for exile, “far from sight.” In this way, Aristotle would later argue, Sophocles’s play is the perfect tragedy, combining a flawed hero, a gut-punch of a recognition and reversal, and the catharsis that comes from seeing the ancient car wreck play out in real time. If it’s not realistic, it’s at least real. Centuries later, in Renaissance Florence, Vincenzo Galilei would also cite catharsis as a key goal for a new form of musical drama that would later become known as opera. Music was, like tragedy, a purifying source that could stoke “virtue among those who were born to achieve and perfect human bliss — in other words, the purpose of the state.” One wonders what Vincenzo Galilei (or Dostoevsky, for that matter) would have to say about the current state of the Kennedy Center.

I thought of the cathartic realism of Oedipus Rex once again last month while reading an essay titled “The Death of the Author’s Decency.” In it, writer R. Wang contrasts the politics of essayist Jia Tolentino and novelist Sally Rooney, painting them as a sort of Goofus and Gallant for a literary culture that vociferously rewards political fluency while quietly disincentivizing actual political risk. Although Rooney and Tolentino have both spoken out on the genocide in Gaza, Rooney has backed up that speech with material support for the organization Palestine Action (following the group’s highly-contested proscription in the United Kingdom). Tolentino, after writing about bringing her children to protests for Gaza in a New Yorker essay, announced a partnership with Airbnb Experiences — a contradiction both to Tolentino’s years of criticizing capitalism and influencer culture and to the specific political situation in Palestine.1 Tolentino quietly deleted her Instagram post announcing this partnership, but her Airbnb Experience (a shopping trip at McNally Jackson Books followed by the chance to have drinks and “gossip with the cultural force”) is still listed on the site.

In her same essay for the New Yorker, Tolentino writes that, in our age of anxiety, “it’s easier to retreat from the concept of reality than to acknowledge that the things in the news are real.… The words blur and the images blur and a permission structure is erected for us to detach from reality — first for a moment, then a day, a week, an election season, maybe a lifetime.” This impulse (which Tolentino is aware enough to label “craven”) is, as Wang points out, in the same zip code as what my colleague Neil Fisher describes as “the messy intersection of culture and politics.

“Artists have been castigated for jumping on bandwagons,” Fisher continues in a video short for The Times. “But also sometimes attacked for not speaking out on hot-button issues.” I saw the post, which accompanied Fisher’s review of Anna Netrebko in Turandot at the Royal Opera, just a few hours after reading Wang’s essay and couldn’t shake the latter’s framework.

Netrebko is not one to jump on bandwagons. In 2022, she was seemingly dragged, kicking and screaming, into the discourse surrounding Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Her initial statement attempted to bothsides its way out of controversy, and came with a coda: “Forcing artists, or any public figure, to voice their political opinions in public and to denounce their homeland is not right,” Netrebko said. “This should be a free choice. Like many of my colleagues, I am not a political person. I am not an expert in politics. I am an artist and my purpose is to unite people across political divides.” (The same statement was copied, word-for-word, by her then-husband, tenor Yusif Eyvazov.)

When Netrebko eventually and expressly condemned the invasion, it was for many too little and too late. It was also hard to reconcile even a conclusive anti-war post with Netrebko’s robust internet archive of posts, former interviews, and images that included comments in support of Putin and a photo-op with pro-Russian separatists in Donetsk. I don’t envy Fisher having to give a line read of her 2011 comment about Putin’s “strong male energy.” While Netrebko has begun to make returns to high-profile houses that initially paused their working relationships with her, her performances are still met with small but dedicated protests — including her earlier return to Covent Garden this season as Puccini’s Tosca.

I agree with Fisher that Netrebko’s glamor and high profile make her “a useful target for those wanting to marginalize Russia’s cultural impact on the world,” even if she is not the most culpable artist. Her statement may not undo years of support for Putin, but it was still more than many other Russian musicians have done — and earned her attacks in the Russian media. Unlike many of her colleagues, Netrebko has also not returned to Russia since the escalation of the war. Others, including non-Russian nationals, have continued to perform in the country at venues and festivals that receive government funds and are often invoked in the not-so-soft power of cultural supremacy. Bass Ildar Abdrazakov is now head of the Sevastopol State Opera and Ballet Theatre in occupied Crimea.2

In theory, I would also like to agree with Fisher when he concludes: “I go to the opera to enjoy great musicians. It would be a bonus if they were fine, upstanding citizens, but I’d rather listen to campaigning slogans from politicians.” It is the nature of our current reality, however, that rejects easy compartmentalization. “I still consider Tolentino a fantastic writer,” Wang writes. “But when it turns out you’ve…accepted a sponcon from a company with views contradictory to what you’ve previously claimed, I’m going to feel angry, to feel like these writers are predatorial and hypocrites. And it has nothing to do with the quality of their work.”

That anger is real and righteous for audiences, for whom going to a live performance can be as vulnerable an experience as it is for the performer. In some ways, reality is more distorted now than it has ever been thanks to the swift advance of generative-AI, a media cycle that runs on rage, and the trickle-down effects of leaders who treat truth as a strategic variable rather than a shared obligation. Whether we go to see a live performance as a respite from reality or a response to it, we can’t Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind ourselves out of knowing where many artists now stand in relation to the rest of the world.

It’s not that they owe us campaigning slogans. In fact, many of them are already doing that to excess. “I am neither a politician nor an activist,” wrote Venezuelan conductor Gustavo Dudamel in a 2015 op-ed for the Los Angeles Times. “Although I am aware that even something as benign as conducting an orchestra may have deep political ramifications, I will not publicly take a political position or align myself with one point of view or one party in Venezuela or in the United States.”

At the time, amid growing unrest in Venezuela, many had become critical of Dudamel for his silence on Nicolás Maduro, a significant sponsor for El Sistema and the Simón Bolivar Symphony Orchestra. Two years later, an El Sistema violist was among those killed by Maduro’s troops at a demonstration in Caracas. Another violinist had his instrument broken by the National Guard and was subsequently arrested and tortured. If you aren’t interested in politics, it’s far more likely to become interested in you. Dudamel spoke out against the violent repression of civic life in his home country, and hasn’t been back since. Yet, as he indicated to The Telegraph last year, he still hasn’t fully absorbed that lesson: “Everything is over-politicized in the world right now. I believe we can only do the right thing with the tools we have and the tool that I have is music.”

I don’t expect Dudamel or Netrebko to become politicians any more than I expect there to be an actual King of Thebes who killed his father and slept with his mother. But as Wang points out, “the reality holds true that greater access to institutional power means you possess more responsibility to resist derealization.” To be two of the most famous classical musicians working today and saying you “only” have music and art is a form of moral gerrymandering, a compartmentalization that ignores the fact of your profile and platform. In Sophocles, pleading detachment is the first step towards an inevitable recognition and reversal. Eventually, even Oedipus had to look.

This year, on Monday evening, I made it to the end of the Die Walküre section, weaving between couples hopped up on glühwein and pheromones, the lower halves of their bodies making sculptural tangles under the water. It was like something out of the Venusberg. At certain points, the lights in the pool turn yellow. I feel like this would normally read as piss in everyday circumstances, but with Wagner the Rheingold allusion is unmistakeable.

In The Ring without Words, Maazel devotes a decent chunk of the symphonic suite to these first two chapters of the Ring Cycle, and the combination of Walküre’s opening scenes, the phonetic clarity of the pheromones in the water, and the holiday cheer all reminded me of that 2009 Folgers commercial, the official title for which is “Coming Home.” Of course, collective society has chosen to remember it as the incest commercial: a brother coming home from “Africa,” and finding only his sister awake on an early Christmas morning. Because there is no coffee in Africa, he is almost orgasmically delighted to find a drip pot of Folgers that has been brewing for God-knows-how-long. He turns that sexual energy towards his younger sister, whom he hands a present wrapped in a black-and-white mudcloth print paper (“do they know it’s Christmas,” indeed) topped with a red bow. She slaps the bow on his chest, informing him that he’s her present this year. They look like they’re about to tear each other’s clothes off before his parents come downstairs, woken up either by the scent of cheap filtered coffee or by the seismic disturbance of impending incest.

In this light, it’s hard to write “Coming Home” off as misfired capitalistic sentimentality, because Wagner was cooking with a similar recipe in the first act of Die Walküre. After Siegmund draws Sieglinde close to him, declaring that “the bride and sister is freed by the brother, against the ruins of what held them apart,” Sieglinde delivers her own version of “You’re my present this year” when she sings: “Du bist der Lenz nach dem ich verlangte in frostigen Winters Frist.” You are the spring that I have so longed for throughout this frosty grip of winter.” You could, especially through the Above Average Productions parody, then read the parents as Fricka and Wotan, left to clean up their kids’ mess.

While I had originally intended to write more about this for the end of the year, time caught up with me. Morning took over and I watched the sun rise over Copenhagen, through the mists of the water, as the Rhine rose up to swallow the burning ruins of Valhalla. So my gift to you, dear reader, is a short bit of comparative literature in video format. How apt that it features Jonas Kaufmann’s Siegmund both given Jonas’s contributions to the legitimate Christmas canon and his recent interview in which, as my colleague Hugh Morris wrote, he discovered the world’s tiniest violin.

It’s a season primed for miracles.

Rejoice.

At this point there may be more gift guides than gifts themselves. And yet history lurches forward in spite of our better judgment. So here I am, writing either one more bit of grist to power the seasonal churn or a field-manual for navigating the liminal spaces between the Ghosts of Messiahs Past, Present, and Yet-to-Come.

Personally I’d like to think of each of these items — carefully-curated and tailored to each Jungian archetype on your Xmas List — less as sparkers of joy than interrogators of the material conditions of their own existence. But the holidays always get me sentimental.

xo

1. The Mahlerian Seasonal Depression Starter Pack™

Perfect for: The friend who romanticizes pain like a White House interior decorator with Home Depot moulding.

Contents include:

• A Mahler hammer made out of SAD lamps

• Box of tissues imprinted with “Ich bin der Welt abhanden gekommen, babe.”

• Coupon for one (1) emotional support contralto

Pair it with a vinyl box set of the “Resurrection” Symphony that weighs more than your Weltschmerz.

2. A set of noise-cancelling headphones tuned to block out all tenors named Brandon

Perfect for: The mezzo-soprano who deserves peace but chooses violence.

Because there’s always a tenor named Brandon, even if their legal name is not actually Brandon. He’s always “finding himself vocally.” He’s “really into crypto.” He’s made at least one “Nessun dorma” gym reel. He’s always singing “Recondita armonia” at 10am.

These headphones block only Brandon so that peace may return to your home.

3. Subscription to “Composer of the Month, But Problematic”

Perfect for: The sister who’s dated at least two men with PhDs in something useless like the ethnomusicology of moss and has a kink for disappointment.

Every month, they’ll receive one score by a composer whose biography they really shouldn’t read too closely, an accompanying themed beverage (Berlioz’s Absinthe Frozé, Puccini’s Girlboss Chianti), and a small card that simply reads: “We regret to inform you he was a man.”

4. The “I Survived a New Opera Workshop” merit badge set

Perfect for: The roommate who has heard “we’ll fix it in tech” one too many times.

Badges include: “Composer Sang It Wrong in the Demo,” “Navigated Five Rewrites of the Ending,” “Feedback Panel Survivor,” “Learned a Cut that Got Immediately Un-Cut.”

5. This Year, I Will Be a Better Person: A Handel’s Messiah Coloring Book

Perfect for: That one spiritually-unstable soprano.

Color in the melismas while whisper-crying “EV’RY VALLEY SHALL BE EXALTED” through gritted teeth.

Therapeutic? No.

Holy? Yes.

Ordained by forces operating far beyond our union-mandated break schedule? Also yes.

6. A tiny desk gong for whenever someone misuses the word “crescendo”

Perfect for: The cousin who is on one too many AMS subcommittees and has a day-job.

Bong.

“Incorrect.”

Bong.

“Still no.”

Bong.

“You can’t reach a crescendo, Brenda.”

7. Maria Callas Was Right About Everything shadow work journal

Perfect for: The spouse who has a list of wrongs to avenge by spring.

Maria Callas didn’t need a shadow work journal. She was the shadow — everyone around her just tried to hide it under one too many stage lights. This journal helps you tap into your own inner Divina with prompts like: “Name the ways you have given yourself an emotional tapeworm in order to fit someone else’s alter ego.”

8. “Conductors Aren’t Real” Jellycat set

Perfect for: The niece who’s just started conservatory.

Models include:

• The Tyrant: Yells about downbeats; refuses to make eye contact with you.

• The Cryptid: Appears only at rehearsals you skip.

• The Thirst Trap: Everyone drools over their Instagram but they smell like rice cakes and fear.

• The DFA Candidate: Just waves their arms and hopes for the best.

Collect them all. Snuggle with your trauma.

9. The Britten Seaside Trauma snow globe

Perfect for: The ex who is permanently an uncanny child protagonist in his own memory.

Give it a shake to watch as the snow (a tasteful blend of mica flakes and unresolved childhood anxieties) swirls around a tiny, windswept Suffolk beach where it is permanently 4:37pm and the tide is always “coming in strangely.”

Not included: Therapy.

Included: The sudden urge to pace the shoreline and contemplate the albatross of existence.

10. The Tchaikovsky anxiety candle

Perfect for: The coworker who emotionally lives in Act II of Eugene Onegin.

Smells like a nervous breakdown, velvet, snow, and that moment in Nutcracker where you realize the Prince has the emotional depth of a breadstick.

11. Lush’s “Shostakovich Panic Attack” bath bomb

Perfect for: You — because your cortisol levels have leitmotifs.

Bathe in both terror and transcendence in a single soak. Top notes of papirosa cigarettes, sweaty jazz, and existential dread. Heart notes of Pravda back issues, Stalin’s boot, and the Leningrad subway line in the middle of winter. Base notes of poisoned mushrooms and rhythmic delusion.

12. Performative Male Musicologist Starter Pack

Perfect for: The brother who insists that he means Fanny when he says “Mendelssohn” and Clara when he says “Schumann.”

Includes:

• Extra-large copy of Feminine Endings

• Vulva Voce tote bag

• “Ask me about tonal repression” reusable coffee mug

• Florence Price score-correcting supplies

• Wired headphones permanently tuned to 432hz

• A breathing pattern that he learned from Meredith Monk

• T-shirt that says “Viriditas & Matcha”

13. “Opera Productions That Never Should Have Happened” 2026 Calendar

Perfect for: The manager who needs to keep track of your bookings and be reminded of what they put you through in previous seasons.

With 12 new photos for 2026, including Tristan und Isolde set in a WeWork, an all-Roomba production of Carmen, and Aida performed entirely by deepfake AI (oops…).

14. Bruckner devotional weighted blanket

Perfect for: The mom who is craving monastic despair after one too many Hallmark Christmas movies.

So heavy you cannot move. So reverent you cannot sleep.

15. La clemenza di Tito friendship bracelet kit

Perfect for: The best frenemy.

Each bead represents an act of forgiveness you should not be giving. Practice mercy, magnanimity, and enlightenment — but make it capitalism by trading them all like it’s the Eras Tour but for people who read Kierkegaard recreationally.

16. Sibelius 6.6.6

Perfect for: The composer who needs therapy, but will settle for notating their anxiety.

Sibelius 6.6.6 is not a notation platform. It’s a portal; a shrieking, haunted, liminal corridor inside your laptop, built to mirror the interior landscape of anyone who has ever said “I think I’ll just orchestrate for fun.”

Core features:

• The Void Cursor™: Did you lose your place? Or did your place lose you?

• The Feral Engraver: Randomly generates expression markings like “constipated,” “with spite,” or “as though running from your past.” Changes your font to Papyrus if you take too long to decide on a tempo marking.

• The Existential Playback Engine: Plays your score in reverse, underwater, or as if performed by a four-part chorus of rabid raccoons.

Sibelius 6.6.6 also includes the first anti-procrastination subscription model: The longer you take to complete a project, the more features disappear (don’t worry, the Feral Engraver never disappears).

17. Alma Mahler Labubu

Perfect for: The friend whose love life consists entirely of artists and fuckboys.

Because Oskar Kokoschka’s fuzzy Alma Mahler sex doll was the original currency in the treat economy.

18. Fratres for Cats enrichment activity set

Perfect for: Your cat who understands minimalism.

A laser pointer that moves in slowly expanding concentric circles while the piece plays. The simplicity of the movement is accompanied by a set of strict rules for play that are as mathematical as they are poetic.

19. The Paganini Plague Doctor finger-lengthener

Perfect for: The violinist who said “I want longer fingers” and meant it biblically. Also people really into bouldering.

Adjustable! Torture-chic! Gives your hands the vibe of a late-Baroque Babadook who lives in the orchestra library and has absolutely consumed a human soul for technical facility.

20. Meredith Monk’s Book of Days, But Make it Daily Tasks 2026 planner

Perfect for: People who think Google Calendar is “too linear.”

Every page is a cryptic symbol, a single syllable, or a drawing of a medieval villager judging you from across space and time. You won’t get anything done, but will emerge at the end of the year profoundly altered, so win-win.

21. The “Anna Netrebko Accountability” Advent Calendar

Perfect for: The critic who has spent all year saying art is inherently political and who needs a little praxis as a treat.

Open each door to get a photo she wishes she hadn’t taken, a quote she wishes she hadn’t said, a melted chocolate PR statement, or a shattered candy apology.

22. The Susan McClary Semiotic Firestarter Tarot Deck

Perfect for: Everyone. Susan McClary is for everyone.

Every card is a theoretical dilemma. Every card makes bodies and ideology kiss like Barbies. Highlights include:

• The Dominant: Looming, insistent, problematic.

• The Sonata Form: A Hero’s Journey with intimacy issues.

• The Tristan Chord: Reversed = sexual chaos. Upright = also sexual chaos.

• The Feminine Cadence: Nuanced, underappreciated, misunderstood.

Previously in Dirtbag Music History: Dichterliebe. All due conceptual credit to Daniel M. Lavery and The Toast (rip).

SCHUBERT: come to Schober’s

i’ve written a cycle of horrifying songs

FRIEND: horrifying like “spooky”?

SCHUBERT: horrifying like emotionally “radioactive”

a guy who makes one (1) bad romantic decision and then weaponizes the weather about it.

it’ll permanently ruin your serotonin.

FRIEND: why would i want that?

SCHUBERT: i require feedback.

FRIEND: …

SCHUBERT: bring wine.

I. “Gute Nacht”

WANDERER [puffs on a vape]: showed up in town like “hi I’m depressed”

leaving town like “hi I’m even more depressed.”

MOM: you two are adorable, have you considered marriage?

WANDERER: wow this is going surprisingly well for once. maybe life isn’t—

GIRL: anyway i’m actually marrying someone else lol

WANDERER:

WANDERER:

WANDERER: cool cool cool

love that for you

love that for me

love that for the snow which is now my only remaining support system

WANDERER [peeing in the snow]: “gute nacht”

yeah…

she’s gonna see this

and know it was me.

Bitch.

II. “Die Wetterfahne”

WANDERER: this spinning piece of metal

has the EXACT same energy as her family.

fake. flimsy.

changes direction every time someone richer walks by.

WEATHERVANE: I literally spin because of physics.

WANDERER: wow okay rub it in

III. “Gefrorne Tränen”

WANDERER: are these tears??

did my face just… leak???

ew.

WANDERER: wait, why did my tears freeze?

probably because she hates me

GIRL: yeah see this is why i didn’t want to marry you

IV. “Erstarrung”

WANDERER: i can’t find her footprints in the snow

which is wild

because I literally keep circling her house like a depressed Roomba

WANDERER: where can i find a flower?

where can i find the green grass?

GIRL: the fact that you do not understand how winter works is becoming increasingly concerning to me

WANDERER: 👉🏼 👈🏼 what if i just

fucked the snow

until i could find the ground she walked on six months ago

GIRL: and yet I’m the villain in this song cycle

V. “Der Lindenbaum”

SCHUBERT: listen, if I want to dump twelve metric tonnes of emotional devastation onto a single piece of foliage,

that’s between me and god.

MÜLLER: uh… it’s literally just a tree.

SCHUBERT: okay Bob Ross

MÜLLER: i’m just saying

it sounds excessive

SCHUBERT: so does writing two dozen poems about one breakup

MÜLLER:

SCHUBERT: but here we are

LINDEN TREE: hey king

wanna come die under my branches?:)

WANDERER: honestly? best offer I’ve had all week.

SCHUBERT: this song slaps so hard

like “walk into the river but make it a vibe” slaps.

VI. “Wasserflut”

WANDERER: stg the snow is melting from the pure heat of my emotional instability

which is all her fault.

she is 100% the cause of climate change.

WANDERER: oh look a stream

I bet it runs past her house

i bet if i cry into it my tears will glow like uranium outside her window

STREAM: please stop using me as a DoorDash for your feelings

WANDERER: TAKE MY SADNESS TO HER HOUSE OR I WILL GIVE YOU A ONE-STAR RATING

VII. “Auf dem Flusse”

WANDERER: this river used to flow so happy and clear

now it doesn’t move

RIVER: seriously is this your first winter on earth

WANDERER [scratching her name into the ice with a stick]: literally vandalizing nature just to leave her a message she’ll never see

peak productivity

RIVER: please go home.

VIII. “Rückblick”

WANDERER: remember when everything was warm and happy?

yeah me neither

memory is a scam.

WANDERER: anyway i sprinted out of that village

like a Biedermeier Sonic the Hedgehog

just to relive the worst day of my life.

fun!

IX. “Irrlicht”

WILL O’ THE WISP: [flickers]

WANDERER: yes take me home little demon

WILL O’ THE WISP: bestie i am literally a hallucination

WANDERER: don’t care

WILL O’ THE WISP: [leads him into a ditch]

WANDERER: he understands me <3

X. “Rast”

WANDERER: oh look, a charcoal-burner’s house

i wonder if i can sleep here tonight

CHARCOAL-BURNER: oh, you’re staying? amazing! quick heads-up: check-in is 6:30–6:40pm only, no pets, no fires in the living room, cleaning fee extra, ash disposal fee extra, you must provide your own kindling, fee for byo kindling extra, no songs in minor keys, and please leave a 5-star review on departure.

WANDERER: I took a break from being miserable

and all that happened is i got MORE miserable???

LITERALLY EVERYONE ELSE: shocking.

XI. “Frühlingstraum”

WANDERER: no seriously you think it’s so funny that i saw flowers in winter

like oh let’s make fun of the guy who took a risk and put himself out there romantically.

WANDERER: dreamt it was spring

dreamt it was warm and the leaves were all green

dreamt that she still loved me

woke up in a freezing shed surrounded by icicles and bad decisions

RAVENS: lol look at this guy

WANDERER: I HOPE YOU ALL GET EATEN BY A CAT

GIRL [drawing a dick on the sleeping Wanderer’s face]: i read your dream journal

you’re not my boyfriend

XII. “Einsamkeit”

WANDERER: i wander lonely as a dark cloud in the sky

FIR TREES: yeah man

we noticed

WANDERER: good news:

i’m alone

bad news:

i’m alone

more bad news:

i’m me.

send tweet.

WANDERER: i wasn’t half so wretched when the storms still raged

STORMS: nah man

you were worse

SCHUBERT: welp that’s the last song

Winterreise done ✅

MÜLLER: actually

that was Part One

SCHUBERT: what do you mean Part One

MÜLLER: i wrote 12 more poems, each one bleaker than reading Schopenhauer at 3am

SCHUBERT: incredible.

hand them over immediately.

XIII. “Die Post”

POSTMAN: [just doing his job]

WANDERER: OH MY GOD MAYBE SHE SENT ME SOMETHING???

POSTMAN: she did not

unless you count “return to sender: grow up” as something

WANDERER: you just came from her town, right?

how is everything there?

POSTMAN: fine?

WANDERER: did she—

POSTMAN: —she did not say anything about you

WANDERER:

POSTMAN: bro, she addressed her dog’s heartworm medicine more lovingly than your entire existence

XIV. “Der greise Kopf”

WANDERER: [sees frost in hair]

WANDERER: thank god

i’m OLD. now i can finally die.

FROST: [melts]

WANDERER: are you fucking kidding me

XV. “Die Krähe”

CROW: [circles overhead]

WANDERER: my only friend 💕

CROW: i am literally waiting for you to die

WANDERER: crow

WANDERER: crow

WANDERER: CROW

CROW: jesus what

WANDERER: nothing

just wanted to make sure you were still there

CROW: this is why she dumped you

XVI. “Letzte Hoffnung”

WANDERER: oh look a leaf

i’m going to pin all of my hopes and self-worth on it

LEAF: [falls]

WANDERER: why does this keep happening

XVII. “Im Dorfe”

WANDERER: look at this stupid town

full idiots having cozy dreams about stuff they don’t even own

bunch of fuckin phonies

DOGS: SHUT THE HELL UP

WANDERER: dreams are fascist.

WANDERER: “oooh look at me, i have a functioning circadian rhythm!”

get fucked.

WANDERER: and your little dogs, too

XVIII. “Der stürmische Morgen”

WEATHER: [is violently unstable]

WANDERER: so true bestie

WANDERER: [faceplants in the snow]

WANDERER: this is just like faceplanting in my own heart

CROW: is he always like this?

GIRL: ugh

yes

XVIX. “Täuschung”

LIGHT: hey hot stuff, want happiness?

WANDERER: oh hell yeah

LIGHT: lol psych

keep walking, loser

XX. “Der Wegweiser”

WANDERER: why do i always choose literally the hardest possible route?

GIRL: because you’re emotionally speedrunning despair

WANDERER: everyone else seems to know where they’re going

GIRL: yeah…

[exhales cigarette smoke into the shape of a dick]

GIRL: they read the signs

WANDERER: i haven’t even done anything wrong!

why do i need to shun mankind?

why does mankind shun me?

[GIRL makes j/o motion]

WANDERER: what’s down this road?

SIGNPOST: literally nothing. enjoy!

XXI. “Das Wirtshaus”

WANDERER: oh cool

a graveyard

finally a place to rest

GRAVES: ew, pass

WANDERER: literally does anyone want me

WANDERER: i’m fatally wounded i belong here

GRAVES: king, you got dumped by a situationship

XXII. “Mut!”

WANDERER: fuck it

i’m just gonna keep going

YOU CAN’T STOP ME

I’M INVINCIBLE

GIRL: is he hallucinating the whole forest

SCHUBERT: yes.

WANDERER: i’m FINE

and everything is FINE

and if i say it loud enough it becomes TRUE

XXIII. “Die Nebensonnen”

WANDERER: why are there three suns

SUN 1: we’re not all real king, you’re just dehydrated

SUN 2: also heartbroken

SUN 3: also stupid

WANDERER: i’ve only ever loved ONE sun!

SUN 1: awwww

SUN 2: kind of awkward that she didn’t love you back

SUN 3: we’re literally optical illusions, bro. get help.

WANDERER: wait i thought there were three suns but now two of you are fading

SUN 2: yeah, we’re ghosting you

just like she did

SUN 3: enjoy the rest of your grief hike!

SCHUBERT [composing on his deathbed]: i’m seeing the light

FRIEND: is it heaven??

SCHUBERT: no, just three suns again.

someone get the wanderer

he’ll fucking love this

XXIV. “Der Leiermann”

WANDERER: bro you good

LEIERMANN: i haven’t felt my feet since 1823

WANDERER: why are you barefoot

LEIERMANN: shoes are a construct

WANDERER: so is society

LEIERMANN: hell yeah brother

WANDERER: why are you playing that cursed crank machine

LEIERMANN: it’s not a phase

WANDERER: is anything

LEIERMANN: exactly

the acoustics hit different when you’re courting death

WANDERER: respect

LEIERMANN: wanna hit this rail with me after my dirge

WANDERER: what if we

and hear me out

made this even sadder

LEIERMANN: bold proposal

I accept.

FERDINAND SCHUBERT [at his brother’s deathbed]: do you want a priest

SCHUBERT: no

i want better lighting

and for someone to tell Beethoven that i died hotter

FERDINAND SCHUBERT: Beethoven is already dead

SCHUBERT: yeah

but i want him to KNOW that i went out

like the patron saint of unmedicated art gays

SCHUBERT: let’s go out

FERDINAND SCHUBERT: bro

you’re literally dying

SCHUBERT [wiping off his cunty little spectacles]: i know

I want to go haunt the Ringstrasse

like a short-king phantom in a bad mood

with a melody that will ruin everyone’s week

LEIERMANN: sick bro

i’m in

CROW: lets fuckin gooooooo

On November 6, 2016, banker and author Robert Lawrence Kuhn received a birthday email from financier and convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. Kuhn was surprised — Epstein had beat even Kuhn’s own family in wishing him many happy returns of the day.

“I cant [sic] avoid remembering numbers,” Epstein explained.

“You’ve got a jumbo-sized right superior parietal lobe,” Kuhn replied, linking to a Scientific American article. And then, somehow, things got weirder.

“for me it is tied to music,” Epstein responded in his lazily-punctuated and typo-ridden style. “beethovens fifth, is 555-3. though unbeknownst to most people the first note (you can verify, [by] looking at the score), is a rest note (silent) so 0-555-3.”1

Kuhn wrote back: “Didn’t know. Meaning of the rest note? Mahler’s 5th opens with the same rhythmic motif (but 4th note is the same as the first three, not lower as in Beethoven’s) - Mahler’s 5th is my favorite symphony.”

Epstein explained: “its not ba ba ba- bah. its regular (ba) ba ba ba - bah. regular four eighth notes, but the first is not sounded. changes the whole dynamic and wildly misunderstood”

“I almost get it…” Kuhn replied.

The 20,000+ pages of documents recently released by the Epstein estate give us some glimpses of the role that art played in his world. Much editorial space has been devoted to how Jeffrey Epstein laundered his reputation through philanthropy. His donations to institutions like MIT and Harvard gained him entry into elite circles of academics, scientists, and technocrats, and he quickly placed himself at the center of these circles as the moneyed savant. “He came to prominence in the 1990s, as the modern meritocracy was taking shape in the collision between the cult of technology and the burgeoning class of billionaires,” Gabriel Sherman wrote in a 2019 article for Vanity Fair. These billionaires, like Epstein “wanted to certify their own genius by conversing with other geniuses.…Science was sexy, a way to beat the markets.”

Art, by contrast, was the underbelly to a science-led meritocracy. If science was battling the markets, art was the spoils of that war. It legitimized the victor through the right investments at auction and the right references dropped in emails with other powerful men. Indeed, the first allegations against Epstein came from an art-world connection. A board member of the New York Academy of Art from 1987 to 1994, Epstein met student Maria Farmer in 1995 and hired her as a sort of art advisor. The following year, Farmer went to both the NYPD and FBI with complaints that Epstein had assaulted both her and her teenage sister, to no avail. She had a similar experience in 2002 when discussing her experience with Vanity Fair.

The subsequent Vanity Fair profile (which ran in 2003 without any mention of Farmer) was part of an oblique publicity tour that Epstein made via a series of prestigious magazine profiles that helped to curate his reputation as an intellectual and cultural sophisticate (as well as a man of mystery — most profiles were published without ever interviewing their subject). “As some collect butterflies, he collects beautiful minds,” wrote Landon Thomas, Jr. in a semi-fawning New York magazine article from that year. Of the subject’s early career teaching math at Dalton in the ’70s, Thomas described him as “something of a Robin Williams–in–Dead Poets Society type of figure.”

Around the same time that Epstein was teaching at Dalton (in what one former student described less as Dead Poets Society and more as “sleazy polyester pants”), French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu was formulating a theory around how power was maintained in contemporary, capitalist society. “The task of legitimating the established order does not fall exclusively to the mechanisms traditionally regarded as belonging to the order of ideology, such as law,” he wrote in 1972’s Outline of a Theory of Practice. Law had long since taken a backseat, with controlling the means of production resolutely behind the wheel.

Bourdieu clarifies, however, that while business was in the driver’s seat, cultural capital had its hand on the clutch. Power was the domination of both the markets and the discourse. “The most successful ideological effects,” he concluded, “are those which have no need of words, and ask no more than complicitous silence.”

Epstein, whose working-class backstory always paled under the light of scrutiny, understood the value of cultural capital. Like so many other masters of the universe before him, he kept a hand in the world of art, including music. He claimed to have been a budding piano virtuoso in his youth, having started lessons when he was five, and had accompanied cellist Jacqueline du Pré (through whom he eventually met Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor).2 An alumni of Interlochen, where he spent a summer playing bassoon, he later became a donor to the academy, sponsoring one student’s tuition at Juilliard after encouraging her to apply. There was also the question of a $165,000 Ettore Soffritti cello that he had purchased in 2010 for a cellist named Yoed Nir.

(Nir returned the instrument to Epstein’s estate in October 2019; it was eventually acquired by a firm called Musikhaus, with plans to sell NFTs of the “Epstein Cello.” However, the NFT launched shortly after Ghislaine Maxwell’s conviction. It was removed from Musikhaus’s website, though its founder hoped to relist it eventually.3 The company’s website is now down and they haven’t posted to Instagram since January, 2022. A highlighted Story still lists the instrument as an upcoming token.)

These engagements between Epstein and music were about building up both his performative authority and a moral smokescreen. His email exchange with Kuhn accomplished both. The irony just underneath the surface, however, is Flinstonian. What is more authoritative or ethical than Beethoven, that beacon of Enlightenment humanism whose music is the soundtrack to self-determination and human dignity? And what is more of a Bourdieuian wet dream than a millionaire financier invoking his deep connection to Beethoven in one email while simultaneously orchestrating a sex-trafficking conspiracy in another?4

Perhaps even more telling about Epstein’s real connection to music, however, is another email from this latest Epstein document dump. Among his former romantic partners is Paula Heil Fisher, a onetime associate at Bear Stearns who pivoted into opera. Among her notable output in this area was directing the 2004 documentary Finding Eléazar, which followed tenor Neil Shicoff as he prepared to sing the role of Eléazar in Halévy’s grand opera La Juive. She also has written two operas with Frédéric Chaslin — one based on Wuthering Heights, the other an adaptation of Théophile Gautier’s La Morte Amoureuse (about a priest who falls in love with a female vampire) titled Clarimonde.

In 2013, an email exchange with a woman identified only as Paula begins with an invitation to Epstein:

“Last night we confirmed a studio recording with an stunning soprano to record a new aria Fred wrote. Its early 7:30-9pm on April 4. F really wants to see you, so is after that too late? Wanna join us somewhere to eat after? Wanna come to the studio? Fred will be playing the piano for the demo. Otherwise, we could have a visit anytime you want after the 4th. But if you can, the studio would be fun and I would love to have your input in the booth:).”

This would align with the period of time during which Fisher and Chaslin were working on Clarimonde, which was workshopped by On Site Opera in 2014. The other detail provided would also suggest that the soprano being discussed is Alyson Cambridge, who sang the title role in 2014:

“Its an awesome aria sung by a Vampiress who looks just like (better) Vanessa Williams from our day. (The Miss USA that somehow had some haha nudie photos floating around).”

In the tradition of no ethical consumption under capitalism, it’s hard to find clean money in the arts — just ask any museum that used to have a Sackler wing or gallery. In truth, Epstein wasn’t much different. The cello he purchased for Yoed Nir? Nir is the son-in-law of former Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak (who is also, as it happens, namechecked in the email exchange with Paula). The musician whose tuition he paid at Juilliard? Her name is Melissa Solomon, and Epstein cut her off after she turned down an invitation to a party with the former Prince Andrew.

In the end, the investments Epstein was making weren’t in music. They were in the complicitous silence. Art either bought him more of that silence, or it gave him something (or someone) to focus on under the plausible deniability of that silence. Amy Davidson Sorkin touched on this in 2019 for The New Yorker when she questioned how Epstein was able, for years, “to operate and be fêted in the social, financial, and academic worlds, despite barely bothering to conceal his illicit activities.” It wasn’t, she argued, “simply a matter of bystanders focusing only on the dollar amount and not seeing the rest.”

Sorkin is right — it goes beyond the dollar amount. To riff on James Carville, it’s the cultural economy, stupid. Epstein’s repertoire of cultural gestures, from financial support to philosophical observations, operated to that effect and bought him the plausible deniability that so many other patrons have been granted throughout history. They bought him the silence. That rest at the start of Beethoven’s Fifth, the silent beat that Epstein insisted “changes the whole dynamic” is an indictment of the world that enabled him. Silence — institutional, social, and cultural — shaped the dynamic of Epstein’s ascent. It wasn’t the notes that protected him. It was the silence that surrounded them.

Last week, Verona’s Teatro Filarmonico removed bass Ildar Abdrazakov from its upcoming production of Don Giovanni after outcry from the cultural organization Liberi Oltre le Illusioni — outcry further amplified by Alexei Navalny’s Anti-Corruption Foundation.

A few hours later, a few hundred miles away in Paris, the concert hall of the Philharmonie de Paris filled with smoke and shouting as demonstrators interrupted an Israel Philharmonic Orchestra concert, led by Lahav Shani and featuring pianist András Schiff. Video from the concert shows one activist holding a lit flare in the audience — a visible outcome after similar outcry and attempts to cancel the concert went unmet. One statement from the French performing-arts union CGT Spectacle said the concert “cannot take place without reminding the public that the leading representatives of the Israeli state are currently accused of crimes against humanity.” Four demonstrators were arrested.

It was seemingly in response to these two events that mezzo-soprano Aigul Akhmetshina posted a statement to Instagram last Saturday, which began:

“In these times it feels deeply wrong that artists constantly stand under pressure — because of politics, religion, nationality or simply because society needs somewhere to unload its frustration. Too often the easiest target becomes art. But our mission is the opposite of division. Even in the darkest times — we are here to bring people together.”

If this sounds familiar, well… running Akhmetshina’s entire statement through more than one AI detector suggested the invisible hand of a large language model.

But the ideas of soft-power universality and a collective human experience predate Chat GPT. In 2022, following the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Anna Netrebko wrote on her own social media channels: “I am not a political person. I am not an expert in politics. I am an artist and my purpose is to unite across political divides.”

In 2017, preparing to sing at Donald Trump’s first inauguration, Jackie Evancho said she hoped her performance could “just kind of make everyone forget about rivals in politics for a second, and just think about America and the pretty song I’m singing. I hope I can bring people together.”

Only a few months ago, Lawrence Brownlee defended his decision to sing at a Kremlin-adjacent concert hall in Moscow, saying: “As an artist, I believe that my art is the most powerful way for me to create positive change in the world.…For me, the greatest power of music is that it can lift us above the divisive rhetoric of present-day politics, and remind us of what truly unifies us in our shared human experience.” (He later withdrew from the concert.)

The gesture is nearly always the same: art as a sanctified sphere beyond conflict; the concert hall as an airlock that separates the listener from the contaminated atmosphere of politics. Historian David Rothkopf once wrote that even Henry Kissinger (famed war criminal and onetime opera character) “would, of course, say that he was not political like Nixon.”

Perhaps even more tellingly, a moderator at September’s inaugural World Public Assembly — a peace-washing event held in Moscow and run by an organization with multiple ties to Vladimir Putin — said “we have a common language that transcends political differences. It is the language of art, beauty, memory, and friendship.”

Akhmetshina’s post moves within this same stream of reasoning. “I never supported violence of any kind,” reads another slide. “I stand for humanity.… Art, music, connection — this is what I believe in. I believe in people1.”

Art is therefore “supposed to be a safe place for everyone — a space where any human can come to feel, to breathe, to heal, to find peace inside themselves. Not a place where anyone is judged, attacked, or excluded.”

And further: “By cancelling artists… simply because of nationality, race, gender, identity, or politics — we are destroying the very bridge that art exists to build. We are breaking the places where people could still meet each other as humans.”

I’m willing to believe that Akhmetshina is sincere when she says that the climate within classical music today “hurts [her] heart,” when she says that she opposes violence, and when she claims the belief that art should be a safe space. The problem is that art has never existed for safety. The people making that argument are the same ones who think John Cage’s 4’33” is a piece where you’re supposed to enjoy the sounds of birds or people walking by in the hallway.

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After a few nonstop news weeks, I have a piece up on the London Review of Books blog from my trip to Ukraine last month for the Lviv National Opera’s quasquicentennial (a word that Google Translate renders into the great Ukrainian language as кваскі-сторіччя — literally, “kvass-century” — which is visually intriguing but ultimately inaccurate).

I arrived in Lviv just a few days after the October 5 attacks (I was on a train to Poland to get a ride into Ukraine as the attacks were still going on), which, as I note in the LRB piece, elicited “zero real reaction” from the West, in the words of Volodymyr Zelensky. For some reason, I was reminded of this line that week during a daylong musicological conference held at the opera house: “We haven’t managed yet to find the appropriate level of our national identity and cherish it as other nations have done,” said Liubov Kyianovska. Later in her talk, Kyianovska pointed to Borys Lyatoshynsky’s Zolotyy Obruch as an object lesson in how such a failure “can spin out of control, leaving the best people to pay for it.”

Zolotyy Obruch, which the LNO renders into the great English language as “The Golden Crown,” was performed that Friday, in a new production by Ukrainian theater director Ivan Uryvskyi that transposed Lyatoshynsky’s libretto (borrowed from the Ivan Franko novella Zakhar Berkut) into a faceless authoritarian setting, one that reminded me of the opening classroom scene in The Lives of Others — a stark contrast to the democratic principles upheld by the inter-Carpathian network of villages via the metaphorical golden crown. Lyatoshynsky, who had been pressured by the Soviets to revise his opera after having his music denounced for “formalism” (the same allegation that was levied against Shostakovich in an infamous 1936 Pravda editorial). It was, in Uryvsky’s words, “a clear and very serious example of how the system tried to control creators.”

The landscape is also a nod to similar terrain that Franko describes at the beginning of Zakhar Berkut, whose first words are: “How melancholy is our Tukhlya today!” Yet when Franko goes back in time to tell the story of star-crossed lovers and sundered sovereignty in 13th-Century Galicia, his prose turns pastoral and nostalgic. The landscape of Lyatoshsynsky’s opera is inhospitable to the bucolic.

Explaining the plot of an opera, particularly one that is rarely heard and details a little-known story from a little-known period of history, is a bit like using a wine list to describe a hangover. The disconnect becomes even more pronounced with describing Ukrainian operas to non-Ukrainian audiences, particularly those like The Golden Crown (or one I covered last year for the Financial Times, Yuliy Meitus’s Stolen Happiness), where the source materials are so well-known and easily received ideas for audiences. Even if Lyatoshynsky’s opera hadn’t been performed in nearly 40 years since this new production for Lviv, most Ukrainians know Franko just as well as Americans know Arthur Miller or Germans know Friedrich Schiller.

It therefore became necessary to focus my piece for the LRB on the story of The Golden Crown, and the generational resonances it held between the Franko source text, a 95-year-old opera, and today. As a non-Ukrainian, it was relatively easy for me to follow along with the work, thanks to both the inclusion of English supertitles for this gala performance and my having discovered an English translation of Zakhar Berkut before I saw it. I missed some of the elements Franko introduced, particularly in his character development. His heroine Myroslava (annoying translated into English as Peace-Renown) is full of “intrepid ardor,” a princess raised with the skills and fearlessness of a prince. There’s something more reserved and shrinking about her in Yakiv Mamontov’s libretto, and in the LRB I add that he doesn’t offer any of the characters much in the way of development. Fables rarely do.

But while there were moments in the first two acts of The Golden Crown that felt disjointed or rushed — the developing love between Myroslava and the hero Maksim, the internal struggles and external pressures facing Myroslava’s father, Tugar Wolf — the third act was completely gripping. It carries that same brand of sensory overload tempered with ethnographic folklore that would resurface several decades after The Golden Crown’s premiere via the Ukrainian poetic cinema movement (especially Sergei Parajanov’s Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors). I still think about the final moments of last month’s performance, with Maksym’s lifeless body being cradled by a grandmotherly figure of death and a score that, like Stravinsky’s finale to Mussorgsky’s Khovanshchina, ends as if being reabsorbed by history.

“Yes, but we already have Mussorgsky,” is one variation on the responses I’ve heard to opera companies incorporating more Ukrainian works into their repertoire. The October 5 attack on Lviv made an already-small number of non-Ukrainian audience members at this performance of The Golden Crown even smaller, and I was surprised by how muted the reception felt among my fellow travelers.

Beyond last month in Lviv, conversations about incorporating more Ukrainian music into the canon has also invoked the fear of losing Russian repertoire; a false dichotomy that in many ways supports propagandistic claims that Ukraine has no indigenous culture of its own. While The Golden Crown hasn’t been heard onstage — anywhere — in decades, more popular works like Meitus’s Janáček-ian Stolen Happiness haven’t been staged further west than Poland. The Ukrainian work most performed in opera houses around the world since February 2022 has been its national anthem.

This, too, was something I had discussed with my editor at the LRB. The last time I wrote for them was in July, when Danni Perry took their curtain call at the Royal Ballet and Opera holding a Palestinian flag, only to be met with physical resistance from company director Oliver Mears. This led to many critics (myself included) pointing out the dissonance and the incongruities between the company’s censuring of one gesture of solidarity while supporting others (after the start of the full-scale invasion, for a time, the company prefaced each performance with “Shche ne vmerla Ukraina,” and illuminated the opera house in the colors of the Ukrainian flag).

Despite the company insisting that Palestine and Ukraine were two different matters, particularly as their involvement was concerned, they couldn’t escape their confluence this summer. A decision to cancel their plans to tour a new production of Tosca (helmed by Mears) to Tel Aviv also brought up the fact that this Tosca, which opened the company’s season in September, would be the first time Anna Netrebko returned to the RBO stage. The company was one of several who broke ties with the soprano given her previous, unambiguous support for Vladimir Putin (and one incident in which she was photographed holding the flag of Novorossian separatists in Donetsk).

In August, an open letter (signed by over 50 writers, leaders, and intellectuals1) called for the RBO to reconsider this casting choice. It also took issue with Mears’s statement that the company’s previous support for Ukraine “‘was aligned with the global consensus at the time’ and that its position has since changed due to ‘complex geopolitics.’” Both Labour and Conservative MPs criticized Mears and the company. While audiences watched Netrebko’s return to the stage (as an opera diva grappling with her apoliticism under increasing autocracy), several dozen protesters demonstrated outside of the theater.

Even if the RBO had replaced Netrebko, however, this gesture of solidarity towards Ukrainian cultural sovereignty feels only half-baked. An even more non-starter of a conversation with many opera administrators these days is to ask when they plan on producing a work from Ukraine (or asking a major orchestra when they’ll do the same without pairing that work with something from the Russian canon). It’s hard to sell untested works in this climate. Singers need time to learn new works and it’s hard to find one who would be a fit for this. We program so far out that there may not even be a war by the time we’re ready to produce it. None of these arguments have stopped a messy political saga like Khovanshchina from enjoying a recent revival with newfound resonance.

There are other reactions from the west: Earlier this week, Kyiv received UNESCO status as a City of Music, in “international recognition of the musical heritage, contemporary potential, and creative energy of the Ukrainian capital.” Denmark also became the first foreign nation to commit funding for the newly-formed Ukrainian Cultural Heritage Fund.

“The war in Ukraine is not only fought on the battlefield,” said Danish Minister for Culture Jakob Engel-Schmidt. “It is also about the Ukrainian people’s right to preserve their culture, their language, and their connection to the values and places that define their nation.”

But the realness of these reactions is still up for grabs. Denmark’s pledge of €1.3 million is modest compared to the cultural destruction across Ukraine over the last three-and-a-half years, and (as of this writing) it’s the only country to commit to this new fund. Denmark’s pledge is also pendant upon acceptance by its Parliament.

All of this begs the question of who a national identity and historical memory are for. For the last 125 years, the LNO has preserved Ukrainian opera’s past while vouchsafing its future. Its reception outside of Ukraine, however, has been next to nil. For an international art form, this lack of curiosity from the wider public is lazy and condescending at best.2 If this continues at pace, Ukraine will keep doing the work, and we’ll keep mistaking our non-reaction for solidarity.

“turns out
there are no
dead bodies
after all
unless you
put them there”

— D. A. Powell, “A Night at the Opera”

At intermission for Khovanshchina in Salzburg this past spring, I had the opportunity to meet Gerard McBurney, who midwived this new version of Mussorgsky’s unfinished — if not unfinishable — score. Because I am incapable of having a normal human interaction, I immediately told him how much I enjoyed his 1994 essay on the work for the English National Opera.1 He was, understandably, taken aback until I explained that his essay helped me to understand what it was that I love about Khovanshchina.

At first blush, it’s a mess of an opera — such a mess that it requires several live experiences (ideally in different productions). Its rarity also means that those opportunities to see it live are inadequate. If you see it, however, it’s very easy to fall under its spell, even if you aren’t sure of what it is you’re actually falling for. That was the experience I had when I first saw the work at the Met in 2012. It got under my skin, but I had no idea why. I just knew I wanted more.

McBurney points out the symmetry and organization at the heart of Mussorgsky’s libretto, and centers that symmetry in the various layers of time, place, and character that become more meaningful than the plot itself. “There is a quality of coldness in the characters of Khovanshchina,” he writes. “The music often feels almost callously designed to make us feel the great distance between them and us.”

Nonetheless, he adds, “if the composer has turned cold towards his characters, he has certainly not turned cold towards the flood of the greater drama on the surface of which his almost helpless characters bob along.”

I love that image of a flood of drama on which Mussorgsky’s characters bob. The fact that I initially read “flood” as “blood” added another level to this already rich image, and underscored the heat that is at the heart of the work. But that heat’s source isn’t what we think it is. It’s not the people themselves; it’s not their passions or wants or fears. It’s the uncontrollable tide of history.

This can very easily lead to no two interpretations of Khovanshchina being the same. I saw a concert performance of this new McBurney adaptation last year in Helsinki with a slightly different cast. From that evening I still remember Mika Kares’s Prince Ivan Khovansky. Khovansky is the source of the work’s title, and while he’s not a namesake hero or antihero (like Boris Godunov), he takes up a lot of space onstage. His musical lines are vast and imposing, peppered with asides and verbal punctuation — he likes to hear himself talk. Absurdly tall and broad, Kares also physically dominated in the role with a leonine ease. He was manspreading manifest, taking up more and more space as his character amassed more and more power.

And yet, when Khovansky’s attempted coup against a young Peter the Great unravels, Kares deflates to the size of a neutrino. When Kovansky realizes he now faces certain death, Kares let out a short breath of shock. It felt like he was sucking all of the air out of the auditorium. When, a few scenes later, his Khovansky was stabbed by a Peter loyalist, I was genuinely saddened by the loss, which was pathetic in the literal sense of the word. That sadness was soon accompanied by shock, because Khovansky’s death is categorically in the “Fuck Around and Find Out” subfolder of history.

With Vitalij Kowaljow’s Khovansky earlier this year in Salzburg, I was less sorry. In a full staging (by Simon McBurney), Kowaljow sported a wardrobe that embodied Mar-a-Lago-on-the-Moskva. The supertitles for his lines, somewhat tailored to the present moment, led to Khovansky singing of “making Russia great again.” I found that I missed the sympathy I had for Khovansky at the end. This, too, was shocking. But at least I’m not about to start arguing that Ivan Khovansky was practicing politics the right way.

Maybe this is one of the great gifts of Khovanshchina: that we are forced to reckon with the distance that Mussorgsky places between audience and characters and, just as we think we’re onto something in that reckoning, the distance is all but closed up. A gift? No, an augur. That closing of the distance is a warning that the floodwaters of history are once again rising, and our levees won’t hold.

In his essay on Khovanshchina, McBurney points to the second act as the standout of not only the opera, but of 19th-century opera. Khovansky joins Old Believer Dosifei and the classically aristocratic Prince Golitsyn to “wrangle over their respective hierarchical positions in the historical process that swirls around them.” The act unfolds as one uninterrupted scene, represented in one frequently-interrupted musical line as we go from Golitsyn alone to Golitsyn and Khovansky, to Golitsyn, Khovansky, and Dosifei (with various interruptions from Marfa, servants, and Old Believers). “Indeed,” McBurney adds, “in a paradoxical way, all those stops and starts actually increase the sense of unstoppable motion.”

This is Mussorgsky at his most experimental, attempting to layer different forms of time onto one another. Even the densest scenes in Boris Godunov are less focused on time or history as they are on the characters living out those times and historical periods. But something in Khovanshchina detaches and begins to float, inexorably and infinitely. It’s a sonic representation of time’s arrow moving monomaniacally in one direction while history moves in on itself like an ouroboros, forever repeating.

Mussorgsky, who argued at the time he began writing Khovanshchina that “we haven’t moved forward” (meaning that Russia hadn’t progressed since centuries earlier when the early years of Peter the Great’s reign were a dynastic free-for-all), struggled with this. And if this is indeed what he had been going for with his work, McBurney argues, then it might be that his failure to complete it before his death “was not only a result of alcoholic debilitude, but also the excruciating problem of finding a right way to bring an ending to a music and a drama that by no means necessarily demands an ending.” When the swirling historical process is more central than the characters wrangling therein, does an opera really end when the last body falls?