Schoenberg on Spotify

Only the most devoted fans of the Viennese school or the most avid record collectors would risk their limited financial assets on Schoenberg records. His dodecaphonic oeuvre is not for the faint hearted. So why buy records you would most likely hear only once or twice? But - as far as I am concerned - Spotify has now come to the rescue of the famous and famously unloved and misunderstood Viennese master. On Spotify, you can listen to an unilimited choice of Schoenberg records - Boulez, Pollini, etc - and sample all this obscure stuff that he produced after straying from the narrow downtrodden path. Well, and a what a nice surprise it is! All of a sudden, Schoenberg does not sound quite as forbidding as one thought. On the contrary, he begins to grow on you... After all the late romantic "debordements", his astringent style can be quite a relief. But the main surprise is that these pieces sound musical and good. Who can tell who might come next? Ligeti? Berio? Stockhausen? Thanks to Spotify, there you have them all, in all these recordings impossible to find even in the best record store in the world.

Is History still over?

In a previous post in this blog, on April 2009, I argued that Fukuyama's famous boutade about the end of history still held true. Recent events in Egypt and Tunisia will confirm - or infirm - whether or not this is so. Personally, I - together with the likes of Barack Obama - still put my faith on Fukuyama's dictum. I know how terribly old fashioned it is to believe in human progress, but who could repress a stirring of hope watching these crowds in Tunes and Cairo claiming their right to freedom? I know that liberal democracy will be hard to implement in the middle east (the "muddle east", as an inspired error put it) but it does seem that this was precisely what this Facebook generation had in mind when it decided that enough was enough. Can anyone really believe that the crazed rantings of religious fanatics hold a greater appeal to egyptian youth than the prospect of free speech, free travel, free voting? Revolutions tend to be messy and bloody affairs and their outcome can be horrible, so it is probably naive to expect that everything will go smoothly in Egypt and Tunisia. But, whatever the outcome will be, the aspiration for freedom and democracy that is being expressed in the streets of Cairo remains a universal one.

Claude Lanzmann's memoir

Claude Lanzmann, the author of Shoah - that monument - has published a memoir with the incongruous title "Le liévre de Patagonie" which I have been reading - nay, devouring - compulsively. The whole thing may be faintly anachronistic - Lanzmann is 85 years old, he was a great friend of Sartre and longtime husband of Simone de Beauvoir - he remains faithful to both of them - he is a somewhat old fashioned fellow still living in the masculine myth "par excellence" - the myth of the hero, himself of course, the intrepid youth who fought in the resistance, the globe-trotting journalist, who met Kim il Sung, Bouteflika, Sofia Loren and Silvana Mangano, the fearless intellectual who directed "Les Temps Modernes" for twenty years. But the real theme of the book is jewishness, his own to begin with, Israel, the Shoah, his masterwork. With what deep reserves of emotion, and incomparable "verve" does Lanzmann recount his adventures, his very own personal odissey! C'est poignant, parfois bouleversant, a ne pas perdre!

Jonathan Franzen's Freedom

Not a word of praise was wasted on Jonathan Franzen's new novel, Freedom, which was widely hailed as a masterpiece. Though the plot - especially the ending - can sometimes verge on the soapoperish, the novel rises above it through the incredible vividness of its characters, dialogue and scenes, which unfold majestically, in a way that is funny, dramatic and moving. The tension never relaxes and you are drawn into the novel to the extent that its moods seem contagious. In America it was particularly celebrated for how it captured the "zeitgeist", but it seems to me that depression and family neurosis is the real theme of the novel. Politics are just background scenario. It is love not power which is really center stage and its pangs in this novel seem all too real.