Nicholas Wolterstorff
"Why Philosophy of Art Cannot Handle Kissing, Touching, and Crying"
(2003)
[17]I
From Friday, March 15 through Sunday, March 17, 2002, the Vienna Philharmonic performed four concerts in New York City, three in Carnegie Hall, and one, on Sunday evening, in St. Patrick's Cathedral. Two of the three Carnegie Hall concerts were enthusiastically reviewed inside the Arts section of the New York Times of Tuesday, March 19, by one of the Times regulars, Allan Kozinn. The heading for the review was "Fresh Power in Familiar Works." In his review, Kozinn writes that Bernard Haitink, the conductor of the Carnegie Hall concerts,
imposed order and an almost narrative sense of drama on [Anton Bruckner's Symphony No. 8] without taming it or smoothing its raw emotional edges. The Vienna players were in their element: the brass and winds produced the textured chords that are central to this orchestra's trademark sound, but it was the dusky, dynamically fluid string playing that gave the performance its soul.... The Schubert Ninth, on the Saturday program, was appealing in a similarly visceral way. Its familiar themes were writ large and driven hard, yet there was also sufficient transparency in the orchestra's sound that details of the music's inner lines sometimes shone through and altered the perspective.
The review of the concert in St. Patrick's Cathedral took up three columns on the front page of the Arts section, and then continued inside with three columns at the top of page 5, side by side with the two columns of the other review. The concert was described as a "free program to honor the victims of Sept. 11"—this being the date, in 2001, that a terrorist attack destroyed the Twin Towers in New York City. The review was headed "A Somber Memorial from the Vienna Philharmonic." The reviewer, another of the Times regulars, James R. Oestreich, wrote,
The memorial program anchored a basic sense of mourning in the Christian season of the Passion, centering on Haydn's unrelentingly somber "Seven Last Words of Christ on the Cross." The evening opened with the solemn Adagio from Bruckner's Seventh Symphony. It ended with Mozart's "Ave Verum Corpus," a simple consolatory choral work, performed without applause and with everyone in the audience holding a lighted candle.
One concertgoer was quoted as saying afterward, "After all the angst and the anger and the hassles of the last few months, the Mozart was like a benediction. It seems O.K. to let go a little, to let the dead rest in peace." Another attendee was quoted as saying, about the whole evening, "It is a warm, wonderful gesture [on the part of the Vienna Philharmonic]. It is very generous and very healing."
How unthinkably rude it is, even within the social norms of New York City, Planet Earth, ca. 2002, to subject this attendee's pronouncement to the scrutiny of analytic philosophy!
