Much as it pains me to admit this, the first classical music I ever heard was the soundtrack to a cartoon. Probably Bugs Bunny. I remedied this at first thanks to a high school teacher who played us Shostakovich and Mozart and John Cage. Now, I listen to the classics with joy, and without thinking of Bugs or "The Lone Ranger." But opera? That's pretty much a hemi-demi-semi-quaver too far.
Which is why I was grateful to talk to John Rockwell. With Wagner's "Ring" cycle spending the summer at the Los Angeles Opera, Rockwell — former Los Angeles Times and New York Times critic and editor, author and founding director of the Lincoln Center Festival — is the ideal guide to the art form (that's a copy of the CD booklet for the seminal 1953 Bayreuth "Siegfried" tucked in his pocket).
Is Wagner your specialty?
I'm not a Wagnerian in the sense that it's my only area of fascination, nor do I pretend to know more about Wagner than [does] anybody else. I simply like Wagner, and I've seen a fair number of "Rings." I haven't gone around the world like these "Ring" nuts.
They're like Deadheads?
Sort of, except better music. I'm not a Grateful Dead fan. They struck me as kind of low-level, stoned, blues-ish noodling.
What made classical music a career rather than just a pleasure for you?
I had taken piano lessons as a kid, showing no great talent, and my father played violin and my mother played piano, but the turning point came when I was 15 and went [from California to Massachusetts] to boarding school. I turned to classical music — in particular, Toscanini. I collected most of his LPs, which meant collecting the bulk of the Western orchestral repertory. My first passion for Wagner was Toscanini's recording of Siegfried's Rhine Journey, which is still the most impassioned performance of that bleeding hunk of Wagner that you'll ever hope to hear.
Why did you move from fan to critic?
I didn't think I showed the talent or had started early enough to be a musician. I was a good writer, so I figured being a critic was a good solution. I went to see Alfred Frankenstein, the classical music and art critic of the San Francisco Chronicle. He was brilliant, and extremely kind to this 15-year-old geek. He was encouraging in the sense that he wished me well, discouraging in the sense that even before newspapers started collapsing and the Internet started giving criticism for free, making a profession as a critic [was] hard. I did programs on KPFA [radio], wrote program notes for the San Francisco Opera, did a lot of freelance things, but I couldn't get a music critic's job until I got an interim job at the Oakland Tribune, and then Martin Bernheimer hired me as his assistant at the L.A. Times [in] 1970.
What do you think of all this free — in the reading and writing of it — music criticism online?
Obviously the Internet is the future. The question is, how can owners and writers make money? Right now, if you're a young critic, I can't think of anybody who will give you a job on the Internet that would allow you to pay a mortgage. And that's turned criticism over to dilettantes, enthusiasts, gossipers and people who blog in the evenings after whatever else they do. You can be the narrowest of specialists. You can be interested only in historical re-creations of supposedly dead ballet choreography. Whereas on a newspaper, you're forced to be broad — and then you can be attacked by these specialists who know everything there is to know about the fingering of a bassoon solo.
Sounds like it's happened to you.
It's happened to everybody. You can't imagine the snarkiness and the passionate enthusiasm — which I think is cool on the whole. What worries me is that people get blinkered. If you're a general reader interested in culture, in L.A., you read the L.A. Times. You may bitch about the movie critics or the music critic, but that's the central voice around which your discussion coalesces. With the Internet, the average person is led down strange paths into odd blogs, which can be interesting, [but] people seek out things which simply reinforce their own opinion.
In this country, classical music has been mocked for ages as "longhair" and elitist.
Seventy years ago, in the days of the great radio symphonies and all that, there was a lingering effort to have classical music perceived as the apex of musical art. Now the popular culture is so dominant, classical music can be ignored or derided or considered class-bound or race-bound. On the other hand, complaints about dumbing down and crossover are a little less strident because many younger composers naturally blend impulses from popular music or reach out to classical idioms from their pop backgrounds. I do think there's a kind of organic and healthy fusion going on.
Does that mean that operas and symphony concerts are withering and geriatric institutions?
