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I am forever fascinated by the cults of celebrity in Western art music. Perhaps it is the constraints of their performing lifetime which make singers particular objects of dedication. I openly admit that there are singers for whom I will always break and always at the top of that list is Dame Janet Baker. Baker is one of the few British singers of the generation to emerge after World War Two still living, but she has lost none of her vitality in retirement. Like many of my generation, I can and will only experience her voice after the fact through her recordings. Indeed, it is through her recordings that I can credit Baker with two of the most moving spiritual experiences of my life. The first was hearing “He was despised and rejected” from Messiah which turned an afternoon of house painting into a soul-searching self-confession of spirituality, and the second is really a repeating instance. Every time I hear her any of her three renditions of “Ich bin der Welt abhanden gekommen,” I am truly and gloriously lost to the world.

Continue reading “Her Own Voice: The Majesty of Dame Janet Baker”

“The history of the theater is the history of the transformation of the shape of the human being.”—”Human and Art Figure” (1925). 

Today is the birthday of Oskar Schlemmer (1888–1943), one of the doyens of the Bauhaus and perhaps its most seminal theatrical exponent. Merging the threads of pantomimic, heightened expression and mechanized movement and rhythm, Schlemmer’s designs and productions provided one of the many modernist answers to the (in)famous concept of the Gesamtkunstwerk, the “unified” work of art, as (in)famously espoused in Wagnerian aesthetics. In keeping with this schematized approach to theatre, Schlemmer provided the above diagram of “entertainments” in the seminal 1925 anthology Die Bühne im Bauhaus, translated in English in 1961 by Arthur S. Wensinger as The Theater of the Bauhaus. I always find it fascinating. Where does your “theatre” fit in?