I'm guessing this will be easy:
But what has always struck me about [X]’s work – certainly, the [mature items] – is not that they enthral us through bewilderment or narcosis, but how unnervingly intelligible they are, and how, in being so intelligible, they hold our attention, and, in holding our attention, draw us ineluctably in.Who? Go here. [Hint: it doesn't work for me.]
2 comments:
What? Not William F. Buckley, Jr.?
What's the difference between Brunhilde on the hill and Siegfried in the valley and Siegfried on the hill and Brunhilde in the valley?
About two and one-half hours.
And it feels even longer if you sit through a fcking Zefferelli production at the Met.
The wag who said his music "is better than it sounds" isn't wrong. But I keep thinking that even the successes--Syberberg's film of Parsifal comes to mind--are in spite of the setting.
There's an alternate world where he is born a few decades later and writes musical theater instead of opera, and we think of him as the peer or even superior of Kurt Weill.
This is not that world. And "intelligible" is not an asset.
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