Leitmotifs in New York

Central Park

As a teenager, when I first began listening to classical music, I far preferred bombast to subtlety. Themes from Wagner were therefore high on my list of preferences, including, of course, the overture to Tannhäuser.  But opera was still an unknown land, and these stirring themes were largely divorced in my mind from the operas for which they were written.

I had the opportunity this past weekend, during a brief visit to New York, to attend the Metropolitan Opera's performance of Tannhäuser. While Wagner might have devised a more compelling illustration of the conflict between sacred and profane love than a minstrel's inability to choose between enjoyment of eternal subterranean orgies with Venus on the one hand, and high-minded and musically uplifting raptures with the Blessed Virgin on the other -- still it was an impressive, memorable, and certainly musically stirring experience. 

The opera's various musical themes, including that of my beloved overture, kept running through my mind for the rest of the weekend.

That evening was topped off, after 4½ hours of musical exaltation, by my discovery that my alma mater's football team was ahead by 17 points at half time on the West Coast.  A more contemporary contrast between the sacred and the profane, perhaps.  But I grab happiness wherever I can find it.

Prospect Park, Brooklyn

I make these quickie jaunts to New York fairly frequently.  I've seen most of the major tourist destinations, but I now enjoy just immersing myself for a few days in a world that is similar to the Northwest Corner's (as opposed to, say, Mumbai), but just different enough to be interesting. 

In a constant quest for affordable housing, I keep seeking hotels ever farther north, but still within my favorite part of the city, the Upper West Side.  I was up to W. 95th this time, an area of the Upper West Side that is only slightly less opulent than that twenty blocks farther downtown.  Same small, interesting shops, same busy sidewalk life, same well-dressed, well-behaved children walking hand-in-hand with a parent on their way to school.  

Brooklyn Bridge
Pedestrian deck

Sunday, I walked from my hotel up to Columbia University.  I wandered around for a while in that attractive Ivy League school, its (for the most part) traditionally-styled architecture sequestered from the urban world about it by a fence with open (but guarded) gates . 

I then re-walked the High Line from the just-opened No. 7 subway stop at Hudson Yards (behind Penn Station) down to 14th Street in Chelsea.  The High Line's landscaping is growing ever more mature and attractive, but the crowds of tourists are becoming ever more oppressive as it becomes a "must-see" destination.  And the on-going construction around the High Line -- in what had been a somewhat derelict post-industrial area of town -- is truly amazing, illustrating how public works of this sort can attract private investment in surrounding residential and office construction.

I spent a couple of hours at the Metropolitan Museum, in the 19th and 20th century paintings area. Later, I did my traditional tramping about and photography in Central Park, and did similar walking and clicking in a return visit to Brooklyn's equally beautiful Prospect Park.  I didn't walk across the Brooklyn bridge this time, but I did stroll out as far as the tower on the Manhattan end of the bridge to take a couple of photos.

In addition to all of this walking, I plowed a substantial amount of money into the MTA subway system, enjoying not only the convenient travel but my observations of my fellow passengers -- "a million stories waiting to be told."  You may recall my review a few years ago of Lowboy, a novel about a schizophrenic teenager who essentially lived on the New York subway, learning all of its moods and secrets intimately.  Hey, I could do that.  You don't have to be crazy to love traveling hither and yon through the subway's labyrinthine tunnels.

I don't think.