Benjamin Dreyer: It's the sort of thing I might appreciate by attending it (I suppose you could say the same about Lulu), but listening to it? Nope.

Currently listening to: Leoš Janáček's Lašské Tance 🎶 Lašské tance, last chance, for love! 🎶

There’s a quite delightful moment in Brian Friel‘s play Performances where Janaček, seated at the piano, describes his enjoyment of No, No, Nanette and belts out a few bars of I Want to Be Happy.

Oh, that sounds wonderful! And I'll bet that LJ was quite capable of enjoying a snappy tune, having written a number of them himself.

I found my way to LJ via The Makropulos Case because I was intrigued by the idea of, more or less, a gothic thriller science fiction opera, but it was musically way over my head (this was the early 80s) so I didn't really take to it. Now I adore it. (That happened with Richard Strauss too.)

(It still hasn't happened with Berg's Lulu, but to be fair I've given up trying.)

Wozzeck is brilliant but it's approximately as much fun as a tax audit.

It's the sort of thing I might appreciate by attending it (I suppose you could say the same about Lulu), but listening to it? Nope.

I *did* attend it when I was a grad student at IU. Brilliant performance, as one would expect, but it was received with a kind of ashen silence.

I vaguely recall watching the telecast with Teresa Stratas, and if that wasn't going to get me to like the thing, I don't imagine that anything else would.

*nods* 12-tone serialism was the great pointless cul-de-sac of 20th century music. I appreciate that Schoenberg, Berg, and Webern were trying to do something new, but to be perfectly honest, most of it simply doesn't work.

I've read up on that from time to time, and my reaction tends to hold to (a) I guess I get what you're doing, but maybe I don't?, and (b) why would you want to do that?

OK, I just tried again, got as far as "The music avoids being in a key," and stopped dead in my tracks.

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