previous decade? I have sometimes thought that, too, I must admit; for example, while watching you conduct your own five-hour opera, ten years ago during the festival in Darmstadt.
You looked extraordinary down there in the orchestra pit: the tics and the mutterings, the tossing of the head, the fluid expressions of fury and beatitude, lust and piety, playing in endless succession across your face. Then there were your huge, waving arms, your enormous shock of white hair, backlit and glowing like some mad explosion. Did you know the effect your hair had on the audience up in the gallery, distracting them constantly from the events on stage? Of course you did. Maybe you even arranged the lighting accordingly, to make yourself the radiant centre of attention. As a vain man myself, I cannot help but recognise the quality in others.
What you did not appear to recognise, however, was the effect your music had on the audience that evening. Did you really not notice? All the yawning and coughing? The checking of watches? The endless shifting about in our seats? Anika and I were clearly guilty on that last count. Three hours into the performance, she leaned across and told me that her buttocks felt like a boxerâs face â and by that point we hadnât reached the interval. Even the orchestra and singers seemed a little confused, but then one can hardly blame them. There was the bizarre and stuttering overture, the meandering arias, the explosive, discordant choruses that went off like grenades, making us jump from our seats (at least they gave poor Anikaâs buttocks a momentary respite from their torture). Forty skilled musicians in search of a tune â that was how your opera felt to me. And Iâm afraid they didnât find one, all evening long.
As for the plot, to this day I have no idea what I was watching. Wolves, bears, some people in togas â and then an astronaut appearing on stage? The relief at the end was palpable. You could see it in the fixed grins of the few members of the audience who remained.
But the only person who seemed oblivious to the sheer awfulness of it all was you, my dearest Laszlo. Beaming in delusional triumph, you bowed extravagantly and waved to the gallery, despite the sparse and embarrassed ovation you received. And then you returned for a curtain call with the auditorium nearly empty.
I know my criticism of your music seems harsh, but please donât think of me as uncultured. Iâm no musical reactionary, I assure you â not stuck entirely in the classicism of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. I enjoyed the musical experiments of the post-war avant-garde â of Stockhausen, Ligeti and Boulez. They were, after all, our cultural bedfellows. What they, and you, produced in sound, I suppose I produced in concrete. The intellectual currents in which we swam were much the same. I only wish that your own work hadnât left me quite so cold. When not cold, I must confess, then rather terrified.
Your music is unlistenable, incomprehensible. Yet still you persist with it after all this time. Part of me admires that persistence; another part believes you require treatment for it. You are eighty-four years old now, Laszlo â when are you going to give up? Apologies for not mentioning this to you sooner, but honesty on the epic scale is never easy. To put it bluntly, how does one tell an old friend that the past fifty years of his life have been an utter waste of time?
Yet, if itâs of any comfort to you, and I sincerely hope that it shall be, I find myself in exactly the same position. Just look at my sad repertoire of dysfunctional buildings: leaking, creaking, longing to pull themselves down, standing evocations of alienation and violence â and those are just the ones Iâd like to save. No, Iâm hardly in a position to discuss legacies.
Am I too, then, guilty of a monumental waste of time? Is there really any difference between the
You looked extraordinary down there in the orchestra pit: the tics and the mutterings, the tossing of the head, the fluid expressions of fury and beatitude, lust and piety, playing in endless succession across your face. Then there were your huge, waving arms, your enormous shock of white hair, backlit and glowing like some mad explosion. Did you know the effect your hair had on the audience up in the gallery, distracting them constantly from the events on stage? Of course you did. Maybe you even arranged the lighting accordingly, to make yourself the radiant centre of attention. As a vain man myself, I cannot help but recognise the quality in others.
What you did not appear to recognise, however, was the effect your music had on the audience that evening. Did you really not notice? All the yawning and coughing? The checking of watches? The endless shifting about in our seats? Anika and I were clearly guilty on that last count. Three hours into the performance, she leaned across and told me that her buttocks felt like a boxerâs face â and by that point we hadnât reached the interval. Even the orchestra and singers seemed a little confused, but then one can hardly blame them. There was the bizarre and stuttering overture, the meandering arias, the explosive, discordant choruses that went off like grenades, making us jump from our seats (at least they gave poor Anikaâs buttocks a momentary respite from their torture). Forty skilled musicians in search of a tune â that was how your opera felt to me. And Iâm afraid they didnât find one, all evening long.
As for the plot, to this day I have no idea what I was watching. Wolves, bears, some people in togas â and then an astronaut appearing on stage? The relief at the end was palpable. You could see it in the fixed grins of the few members of the audience who remained.
But the only person who seemed oblivious to the sheer awfulness of it all was you, my dearest Laszlo. Beaming in delusional triumph, you bowed extravagantly and waved to the gallery, despite the sparse and embarrassed ovation you received. And then you returned for a curtain call with the auditorium nearly empty.
I know my criticism of your music seems harsh, but please donât think of me as uncultured. Iâm no musical reactionary, I assure you â not stuck entirely in the classicism of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. I enjoyed the musical experiments of the post-war avant-garde â of Stockhausen, Ligeti and Boulez. They were, after all, our cultural bedfellows. What they, and you, produced in sound, I suppose I produced in concrete. The intellectual currents in which we swam were much the same. I only wish that your own work hadnât left me quite so cold. When not cold, I must confess, then rather terrified.
Your music is unlistenable, incomprehensible. Yet still you persist with it after all this time. Part of me admires that persistence; another part believes you require treatment for it. You are eighty-four years old now, Laszlo â when are you going to give up? Apologies for not mentioning this to you sooner, but honesty on the epic scale is never easy. To put it bluntly, how does one tell an old friend that the past fifty years of his life have been an utter waste of time?
Yet, if itâs of any comfort to you, and I sincerely hope that it shall be, I find myself in exactly the same position. Just look at my sad repertoire of dysfunctional buildings: leaking, creaking, longing to pull themselves down, standing evocations of alienation and violence â and those are just the ones Iâd like to save. No, Iâm hardly in a position to discuss legacies.
Am I too, then, guilty of a monumental waste of time? Is there really any difference between the
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