Back and forth with Tom Rogers

…concluded Subject: Re: Onomastic bumps Date: April 8, 2018 at 6:08:15 PM MDT To: Richard B Anderson Dear Mean Man (“Boeser Mann”) Andy (its literal meaning in the language of my first mission) ! I’m truly flattered that you would keep on reading the essay collection I’ve given to a considerable number of others but heard little back about.  I suspect I’ve been just as guilty about not getting to what others have kindly passed on to me. Your sophisticated aesthetic tastes put mine to shame.  While I agree about the poetic force of Isaiah (yes, even in translation), I have a very restricted musical ‘palette.’  All baroque music, including Handel’s “Messiah” and with decided exceptions by Bach strike me as so many ‘jumping jacks’—the stocatto ‘wake up’ fare they play on KBYU-FM in the early morning.  I’m afraid that’s how I feel about much of Mozart too.  (What an interesting conversationalist he must have been though.)  Even Beethoven comes across as mostly bombastic and often angry.  It’s the late Romantics—beginning with Schubert and Schumann and culminating in Brahms, then Mahler—whose heartfelt outcries make me swoon.  They are supplanted in the Twentieth Century by mostly Russians—Shostakovich and Prokofiev primarily, with Scriabin in the wings.  Ravel is also on that list, more even than Debussy, who traveled to Russia incidentally.  Tchaikovsky, who wrote my favorite opera, “Eugene Onegin” (whose libretto faithfully conveys Pushkin’s great novel in verse, Mussorsky (His operas “Boris Godunov” and “Khovanshchina”, about the Russian Old Believers) and Rachmaninov also pull at me.    However, I’m only slightly drawn to musical theatre of any description, which tends to be melodramatically less nuanced and in its depiction of real life less realistic.  (That’s the tragedian in me speaking.)  Despite that, “Oklahoma,” “stside Story”“” and the other Rogers and Hammersteins “Carmen Jones” (with Bizet’’s music but portrayed by  contemporary American black) stand out.  Andrew Lloyd Weber is, like Elton John, a commercially successful lowbrow hack. (Imagine writing another “Aida” and replacing Verdi’s music with your own pop melodies.)  Bizzarely, I’m drawn to Stephen Sondheim’s “Sweeney Todd” after attending the Bountiful Legacy Charter School’s production which starred a grandson. So our tastes vary.  But it’s not important, I believe, that we favor the exact same art forms or creations.  A friend recently asked me which painter I most admire, and I had to admit it is Vermeer, whose inevitable depictions of young matrons at household tasks—more realism, I guess—convey an unsurpassed spirit of serenity.  (I could show you prints of a modern Iranian portraitist that do the same.} Edward Leer reminds me of Kipling if not Dr. Zuess.  I wish I’d been subjected to more such bed time doggerel as a child.  How’s that for an exchange? All best—Tom

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