You know, the Christmas/Hanukkah pas de deux is just around the corner, at least in geological time, and our librarian friend (we’ve said it before—really, everyone should have a librarian friend) Rebecca Hunt has spotted the perfect stocking-stuffer in this year’s Neiman Marcus holiday catalog: Valery Gergiev conducting the Kirov Orchestra.

Classical music lovers, hold on to your batons. The world-famous Kirov Orchestra. Uber-maestro Valery Gergiev working his Russian magic. Firebrand virtuoso Lola Astanova beating the daylights out of a Steinway® Concert Grand. Performing The Nutcracker Suite, the Tchaikovsky “Piano Concerto,” and another Tchaikovsky masterpiece of your choice. In your hometown, at a private holiday concert for you and 499 of your closest friends. Hosted by Regis Philbin!

The concert will be filmed as an after-party favor for each of your guests. You even get to keep the tour piano after all the artists autograph it. BRAVO!, if we do say so ourselves. (And we do.)

The price? $1,590,000. (Are cannons extra?) That’s an awful lot of money. On the other hand: it’s hosted by Regis Philbin! Time to make some billionaire friends.

Let me just savor that again: hosted by Regis Philbin. God, I love this country.

[T]he piano [in the “Quartet for the End of Time”] in particular often has “tangles” of notes thick with dissonance. Not one, but crowds of notes compete for attention under the hand of the pianist. Yet Messiaen makes of this cluster of discord something lustrous: “Tangles of rainbows.” There is something spiritual in these dissonances which makes me wonder whether the most beautiful sound might not be the most various, the most discordant. Dissonance here is not experienced as rivalry or irresolution but as an infinite and all-inclusive unity. The “harmony of heaven” might not be silence but on the contrary the capacity—and the willingness—to hear every note, to the fullness of its truth, at once. Again, there is a strong sense in which reading Schoenberg only as the creator of an authoritarian order, a musical fascist, does an injustice to his role in developing this new aesthetic. For Schoenberg, long before Messiaen, claimed to be involved in the “emancipation of dissonance” and the destruction of the old order of human certainty. In its place he founded a vast new palette of expressive possibilities on which composers such as Messiaen have been able to build with imagination and freedom. As Schoenberg wrote, “here, liberated dissonance became anew harmony, psychological chaos, a meta-sensuous order.” Releasing the potential of dissonance from the shackles of Romantic harmony is emblematic of what amounts to an ultimate pluralism.

—Desmond Manderson, Songs Without Music:
Aesthetic Dimensions of Law and Justice
(University of California Press, 2000)

(Soho the Dog is pleased to welcome to these virtual pages the operatic luminary and advice columnist La Divina, to answer readers’ questions on life, love, career, and fioratura.)

Dear La Divina,

I am a guileless diva who was recently fired from a production of La Bohéme simply for missing one or two unimportant rehearsals in order to see my tenor husband open a production at, let’s face it, a far more internationally renowned house. How dare they deny me permission to be by his side at this important time! And now my replacement is garnering the glowing reviews that should rightly be mine. Shouldn’t my public be rallying to my defense for placing romantic fidelity before a mere run-through of an opera that I could, and frequently do, sing in my sleep?

Signed,
Tanto freddo in Chicago

Dear Tanto,

Tired repertoire is not the issue here. And the only place you should be by your husband’s side is on stage. Otherwise, you can only share in his applause vicariously. A diva is never vicarious. I don’t care how prone to a meltdown this man is.

But your real problem is this guilelessness you mention. There is simply no excuse for finding yourself released from a contract on any terms but your own. You should have walked out long before any simple administrator had the chance to fire you. Now, if certain legal issues meant you had to push this bean-counter into dissolving the contract, the proper response on your part is to blame them for overworking you, for treating you like a farm animal, for deliberately endangering your voice through all these pointless run-throughs. Whining that they failed to give you permission to leave? Unacceptable. The prima donna neither asks for nor, indeed, requires permission. As for your replacement, let this be a lesson to you: always demand that your understudy be incompetent and, if possible, physically unattractive. If you cannot, through threats or histrionics, obtain this guarantee, you hardly deserve to call yourself a diva.

Signed,
La Divina