TWO RESTLESS GIANTS IN THEIR FIELDS
PETER BROOK, RICHARD TARUSKIN BOTH DUG UNDER THE SURFACE
DIRECTOR PETER BROOK and musicologist Richard Taruskin were transformative figures, and fixtures, in their fields. While alive they were too unalike — separated by age, temperament and activities — to tempt us to connect them in any way. Yet their deaths a day apart at the beginning of July placed their obituaries and appreciations on the same weekend cultural news cycle. Chance, ever the illuminator, brought them together.
On the surface, they occupied opposite ends of the intellectual and philosophical spectra. One came across as a quiet, reserved, eloquent, thoughtful force of nature; the other, a boisterous, querulous, troublemaking and sometimes thoughtless and mean force of nature. One was a tidy, careful and emptyspace minimalist; the other, a voracious maximalist, with something (a lot) to say about everything and ever ready with a cutting repartee.
That, anyway, was the public image each cultivated. Brook was far better known to the general public, especially for his Broadway successes and films. In his old age, he acquired a reputation as a wise, mystic elder of theater. For an academic whose subject was historic musicology, Taruskin made a considerable splash as a public intellectual who published extensively in the New York Times and elsewhere. He too was sage-like, however feistily so, in his later years, an éminence grise who in 2017 was awarded the Kyoto Prize, the closest a musicologist can get to a Nobel. They held court in different realms and were products of their different generations. Brook died at 97, Taruskin at 77.
The great irony about Brook and Taruskin, and one thing that profoundly joins them, is that, while neither was quite what he seemed on the surface, each was possessed by the need to dig under surfaces. Each was an exposer extraordinaire: in Taruskin’s case, a composer like Stravinsky; in Brook’s case, an opera character like Don Giovanni. It was always the bigger picture they were after, art being a process through which we might better understand ourselves and society. Taruskin revolutionized musicology by placing all music in social context. Brook felt the same need for theater.
Taruskin claimed again and again, with an academic’s powerful surety, that he had found answers. Brook loved to declaim that he had no answers, because there are no answers. Brook’s surety, of course, was the same as Taruskin’s but in a mystic’s clothing.
Both were exceptional showmen who came from similar roots and cosmopolitan backgrounds. Brook grew up in London, the son of Russian Jewish emigrants. Taruskin grew up in New York, the grandson of similar emigrants. “Russian” is how many emigrants then identified, regardless of where they came from in the Eastern European Russian empire.
Russia played a crucial role in them both developing world views. Although Taruskin was a notable scholar of early music, he also specialized in Russian music and wrote the most impressive study of Stravinsky to date. Part of Brook’s family remained in Russia. His cousin, Valentin Pluchek, worked in Moscow with famed Russian dissident director Vsevolod Meyerhold, an influence on Brook. Brook didn’t mount much Russian theater but his 1988 production of Chekhov’s “The Cherry Orchard” at the Brooklyn Academy of
Music has always been for me the one to beat.
Music, moreover, played an important role in both their early educations. In Brook’s case, at Oxford University, it was directing theater. Taruskin performed as a violist and choral conductor who specialized in early music while studying at Columbia University.
Taruskin and Brook went about their business in their own particular and peculiar ways, each in his own time. But the great questions they asked were often the same. Brook was the yin and Taruskin the yang of a shared cosmology.
In my own experience, I have never encountered a pair of art-world tricksters at once so outrageous, so infuriating and so magnificent. Both men made me very uneasy with their intimidating posturing. Both drove me up the wall with their preposterous egos. Even so, both left me in awe of their brilliance and, to my surprise with two largerthan-life theatrical figures I initially distrusted, their humanity.
DISTRUST doesn’t go far enough. I despised each of them at first. Brook’s unsuccessful attempts in the 1950s to get the opera world to take theater seriously were before my time. But seeing his 1967 film “Marat/Sade” and his 1970 “A Midsummer’s Night Dream” onstage — two of his most famous and influential productions — sufficed to make me anti-Brook. At a time when my rigidly avantgarde aesthetics were being shaped by the likes of John Cage and Merce Cunningham, Robert
Wilson, Andy Warhol, Fluxus, the Living Theater and the like, the brutish “Marat/Sade” (which Cunningham called “disgusting”) and the circusy “Dream” felt like cheap and manipulative parading experimentalism for the masses and mainstream media.
When Brook’s eighthour “Mahabharata” came to the 1987 Los Angeles Festival, I was aghast. Here was every pretentious avant-garde trick in the multicultural book for a staging of India’s great epic. It was given on a Hollywood soundstage, with the audience in bleachers. The fourth wall was gone. The music sounded pseudo-Indian. The spirituality was boiled down to sound bites.
And yet it was riveting theater. The brilliant cast from all over the world, which seemed contrived at first, provided a kaleidoscopic perspective. The epic contained the world’s people, and over the eight hours you got to know them. It became their story.
I went back twice. Saw it again when it traveled to BAM, where it was not as readily welcomed as in L.A. Interviewed Brook, who figured me out in about two seconds and then told me everything he knew I wanted to hear. His Cheshire cat grin was disarming.
I was hooked and followed Brook closely over the next 35 years as he whittled away at theatrical excess to get to the essence. Whenever I met him, he was very nice, yet I always felt he was putting me on. I couldn’t separate the man from the performer.
When he could finally stage opera on his own extravagant terms of a nearly empty stage, with little more than great acting and singing developed over a year of rehearsal and performance, he mounted a revelatory “Don Giovanni” at the Aix Festival in 1998. Rather than expose the Don as the sexual predator he was, as is de rigueur in modern productions, Brook forced us to consider why we continue to take pleasure in one of the world’s most performed, celebrated and discomfiting operas.
Brook’s Don lives for the moment. His impulses are amoral rather than immoral. Brook goes beyond good and bad in his “Don Giovanni” to get at what drives us. Unless we can understand that, as Mozart’s music does (and Brook took time to consider the reason for every note in the score), real goodness will evade us. Otherwise, we do what we think is good but in bad faith. Brook doesn’t present us with answers, just acknowledgment.
The older Brook got, the leaner his productions got. “A Magic Flute” was a sublime condensation of Mozart’s “The Magic Flute.” One of his last works, “Battlefield,” was an epilogue to “Mahabharata,” not the epic but the life force it sent us as a message.
Brook claimed that he would go into a production without a point of view, allowing extensive rehearsal and reflection to guide him. Taruskin could, by contrast, let a point of view guide him from the start, which I discovered firsthand. That impulse of his became apparent when, in the wake of 9/11, I wrote that John Adams’ “The Death of Klinghoffer” needed to be heard and not banned; at the time, the Boston Symphony canceled performances of the opera’s choruses, sung by Israelis and Palestinians, which were thought too raw after the terrorist attacks. Just as Brook showed us what drove warriors in the “Mahabharata,” Adams controversially considered the mind-set of Palestinian terrorists in the 1985 hijacking of a cruise ship and the murder of a Jewish passenger.
Taruskin, however, believed art must have a moral purpose. Otherwise, it could be, like “Klinghoffer,” dangerous, and he then misrepresented what I wrote in an article for the New York Times. I sent a letter to the editor, which irritated Taruskin. He emailed to say he couldn’t see what I was complaining about. It didn’t matter if he had misrepresented me, because, he wrote, “You know I’m right.”
FOUR YEARS later, Taruskin published his magnum opus, the five-volume “Oxford History of Western Music.” I rushed to write something about it after only having time to skim its more than 4,000 pages. But there were already complaints about his excessive editorializing, about his pronounced likes and dislikes, about what he had left out, and I wanted once more to set the record straight with Taruskin. I thought that the “Ox” was not only a phenomenal history of music, greater and more valuable than any other, but also a joy to read. It was — and still is — exactly what we need.
I got an email from Taruskin saying he couldn’t believe I would write this considering what had gone on between us. I replied that it was not about him but his book. The grudge was over, and I saw him at concerts and conferences often and enjoyed his company. He continued, nonetheless, to needle me about “Klinghoffer” and to continue to spell my name wrong in articles. That was Taruskin, and his vision was too vast to worry about all the details.
Brook and Taruskin had their detractors all along, and both might be seen to have begun losing relevance of late. Brook had long been criticized for cultural appropriation in his works, especially with “Mahabharata.” Taruskin, who made enemies as easily as friends and acolytes, had been criticized for his sheer aggression. Both men wrote defensive, score-settling last books — respectively, “Playing by Ear” and “Cursed Questions.” Try to get your hands on out-ofprint DVDs of Brook’s “Mahabharata” or “Don Giovanni” without breaking the bank. Both men left behind legacies too large and important to get rid of it all.
Faults and all, these were genuine seekers who asked the biggest questions about art, culture and society, and who will surely withstand cultural vagaries. Whether they offered answers or nonanswers didn’t matter, because one question always led to another. It was in the asking, in the spiritual journey, that they, in the tradition of art and scholarship that matters most, found humanity where the rest of us so often miss it.
F Y O U S E A R C H “Safia Elhillo” on YouTube, the first entry you’ll see is a video from 2016: a reading of her visceral, mesmerizing poem cycle “Alien Suite” at the 2016 College Unions Poetry Slam Invitational. ¶ This particular video has more than 150,000 views, but what makes it different from other slam poetry videos is the length. Elhillo recites her verse for 16 minutes to an audience we cannot see, though we hear their collective murmurs and snaps. ¶ Her voice is both sweet and expansive — helium and honey — as the Sudanese American poet speaks of Arabic study, of her identity in relationship to nation-state and family. And even though she never raises her voice, the sincerity of her stories pulls you deeply in. ¶ This effect is only magnified in person. During a recent meeting in her Los Angeles apartment to discuss her fearless second collection, “Girls That Never Die,” Elhillo, now 31, talked expansively about everything from her artistic evolution to the challenges of finding someone who can properly do her hair. She exuded the supreme self-awareness that marks both her performances and her online presence. Though she is also arguably one of the most fashion-forward poets on Instagram, for this interview she eschewed her usual vibrant colors and eclectic prints for a loosely fitted cream-colored dress that she said feels more authentic to how she relaxes at home.
Throughout our conversation, her somber expression often cracked into a wide grin, revealing the joy that bubbled underneath — as it does below the surface of her writing.
And it is her written poetry that now makes impressions. Over the six years since she appeared in that video, Elhillo has gone from winning slams to winning book prizes. Her first collection of poems, “The January Children,” won the Sillerman First Book Prize; it was followed by a young adult novel in verse, “Home Is Not a Country,” that was long-listed for a National Book Award and awarded a Coretta Scott King Honor. These books examined belonging in a postcolonial world and creativity in defiance of manmade borders.
“Girls That Never Die,” out this month, has the makings of a breakthrough. Compared with her earlier work, it’s less about nostalgia and more explicitly about shame and silence in relation to Muslim girlhood. It also signals a change in style and perspective. Where she used to mirror speech by writing without punctuation or capitalization and used frequent caesuras, or rhythmic pauses, instead she opts for prose poems to depict a set of hard facts more directly — and to more effectively critique violence against women in her community.
Poems like “Infibulation Study” delve into cultural taboos like genital mutilation. Others leaven the
collection — again that balance of gravity and joy — with shrines to womanhood and solidarity. “Ode to My Homegirls,” for instance, depicts the mischievousness and protective loyalty of young women.
Opening up about misogyny in Muslim culture bears a risk Elhillo well understands: A white audience might find its stereotypes about Islam reinforced. But for the poet it’s far better than not speaking up at all. “Ultimately, silence is not going to protect any of us,” she said. “If harm is being done, harm is being done. Me keeping quiet about it is not going to make the harm disappear.”
Elhillo isn’t writing for a white audience anyway. “Girls That Never Die” is for her aunts and uncles and the religious community she grew up in. It is not, she emphasized, for those who have already made up their minds about Islam or girlhood or the intersection of the two. “I’m really tired of trying to prove my humanity and the humanity of my community to people who don’t hold that as a core belief,” she said.
That lack of eagerness to cater to a wider (and whiter) audience is exactly where Elhillo’s power resides. She said she never looks at sales numbers for her books; it’s not her responsibility. Instead she prefers the freedom to write with specificity about being Black, Sudanese and Muslim in its myriad complexities. Any other reader is likewise free to listen in.
“The plan is to write as if only the people I’m talking to are going to read the poem. … Then everyone else is eavesdropping on what is hopefully a super-interesting conversation,” said Elhillo. “I don’t have an ambassadorial bone in my body. I’m just minding my business, minding my people’s business.”
As a bilingual writer, she allows untranslated Arabic to interweave itself naturally into the fabric of her verse. She regularly references the lyrics and stories of iconic Arab singers, especially the Egyptian artist Abdel-Halim Hafez in “The January Children.” Elhillo references the word asmarani, a term of praise and adoration for darkskinned people, to describe her own Black identity in an Arabophone world.
The Muslim American experience is essential to her work but never essentialized; Elhillo’s poems are too multifarious for that. She does draw a parallel, in one respect, between her poetry and the Quran; allusions aren’t explained, and the reader (eavesdroppers and insiders alike) is expected to work to understand the context.
Elhillo is a secondgeneration U.S. citizen, but she describes herself as an outsider writing at a distance from American culture. It makes sense when she talks about her upbringing in the U.S., surrounded by a community of Sudanese immigrants in the Washington, D.C., area and going to Arabic school on the weekends. But she’s still informed by — and trained in — the American poetic tradition. “I think of like a Frank O’Hara, just that frankness in that plainspokenness,” she said. “The colors are really solid — that feels very American.”
Performance is also still in her bones; reading her work aloud is the first step in her editing process. “Your ear can always catch something that your eye might not be able to.” The existential crisis every poet faces is when to stop editing. For Elhillo, that moment arrives when she’s able to read the poem in front of other people. As far as she is concerned, the dichotomy between the stage and the page is a false one.
Still, “Girls That Never Die” is more structured than her earlier work. In part, incorporating new forms was a way to cope with the pressure to live up to her earlier work — a way of lowering the stakes. “I was like, ‘Well yes, this contrapuntal sucks because I’ve never written before,’ ” said Elhillo. “Instead of being like, ‘This poem is bad because I myself have no value as a poet.’ ”
As her second collection moves out into the world, Elhillo’s life continues to evolve in ways that will surely expand her work. Having moved through different cities — from D.C. to New York for school, then to Oakland for her Wallace Stegner Fellowship at Stanford — she’s always found a Sudanese community that’s grounded her. After moving to L.A. last year during the pandemic, she found relief in the sunny weather and close friends, but she has yet to find her local community.
Elhillo has found a way to keep up with her Arabic, though: “All I have to do is go to a hookah bar I’ve never been to before, place my order, wait five minutes and then [ask], ‘Where are you from?’ And then the floodgates open, you know?”
The poet is more focused these days on creating such new rituals, simple pursuits that mark a life’s transitions. Her aunt, who would regularly cut her hair, recently married and moved to Sweden, so she needs to find a stranger she can trust with her split ends. She also needs more shelves for the dozens of books on the floor of her office. And she’s finally learning to drive after putting it off in favor of learning how to write a contrapuntal.
A homebody at heart, Elhillo loves hosting intimate gatherings of close friends in her living room — but when she goes out, it’s always in style. On Instagram or out in the world, fashion is, for her, just another source of self-expression. Much like her poetry, her clothes borrow from a variety of influences.
In navigating her new life, the immediate present makes more of an impression on this history-focused poet than ever before. Expect to see more of it in her next collection, to be published next year.
“In the poems I’m writing now, a lot of them feel more mundane in a way that feels nice,” she said. “I’m taking my little walks and making observations and it’s nice to know that’s deserving of poetry too. It doesn’t have to be some enormous rupture in history.”
Deng is a queer Taiwanese/Hong Konger American poet and journalist born and raised in the San Gabriel Valley.