RadixJournal - March 13, 2026


Opera Is Dead!

Hosted by
Richard Spencer
Mentioned
Timothee Chalamet Stravinsky Schoenberg Stanley Kubrick Lay Trav Cardi B Benjamin Beatles Bach
The Center of the Universe Why Legal Immigration Is The Real Problem

Episode Stats


Length

9 minutes

Words per minute

138.89

Word count

1,347

Sentence count

30

Harmful content

Toxicity

3

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

In this episode, we talk about the death of classical music, and why it's not really as bad as it used to be. We talk about why classical music is a dying art form, and what it means to be a living art form.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 There was actually a quote by Timothee Chalamet that I think sort of resurfaced and got controversial,
00:00:07.480 but he said something to the effect of, well, they're opera singers and ballet dancers,
00:00:12.900 but they don't matter, so no one really cares about them. 0.99
00:00:16.560 And on one level, he's being a jerk, on one level, he's right, and so on. 0.94
00:00:25.160 But on one level, he's wrong in the sense that there's more classical music being performed at a higher level than there ever has been in world history. 0.96
00:00:38.540 Because keep in mind, what we call classical music now, which may be a misnomer, has never been the popular music of the day.
00:00:49.740 Now, Bach made a living selling sheet music and you could buy a Verity opera reduced to a piano score.
00:01:00.640 And I'm sure he made money off that and all that kind of stuff.
00:01:03.560 But it was never the popular music.
00:01:07.740 It might have been more mainstream than it is today, but it was not Cardi B.
00:01:14.140 Because Cardi B or the Beatles or whoever, they exist in a world of infinite reproducibility, in Benjamin's term.
00:01:23.620 They exist in a world where you can listen to music on a smartphone or buy a record or turn on the radio and hear pop music.
00:01:34.060 So there's no real comparison.
00:01:37.040 There is a juncture due to technology itself.
00:01:40.460 but the other thing is that classical music is a museum and museums are doing fine people
00:01:51.960 go to the met the last time i was in new york was um may of 2025 getting a ticket to the met
00:01:59.800 meant standing in line in the rain and it was impossible i mean museums are doing great and
00:02:06.120 they benefit from technology and people hearing about it or wanting to meet friends there and
00:02:12.220 have fun and so on. But it is a museum. It's not producing something new that's directly speaking
00:02:18.580 to people. Opera houses around the world are in effect producing the same 10 operas over and over
00:02:27.540 again from you know carmen la traviata i think is the most popular opera rigoletto uh the magic
00:02:37.660 flute and yeah tosca from puccini but they're all producing the same 10 works and maybe there's
00:02:43.160 actually a bigger canon of 50 to 100 works but it is actually quite limited and it is a museum
00:02:50.320 when you go to the metropolitan opera the chicago lyric opera la scala wherever it's a museum that
00:02:58.160 you are entering and it is maybe arguably more popular than ever and the quality has never been
00:03:07.220 higher arguably but it is not a living art form at all you're listening to old music as a kind of
00:03:17.300 elitist in a way that it's not in the slightest bit relevant to the world. Now, there could be
00:03:24.740 cool avant-garde productions of an opera. Can't really do that with a symphony that can kind of
00:03:31.440 speak to you. But nothing really creates the kind of cultural impact or scandal even that a film was
00:03:41.780 able to create in the 20th century. So classical music is dead, and it did push what music could
00:03:51.100 be to the limit and then just fell off a cliff. Like Stravinsky's Rites of Spring, or certainly
00:03:57.200 like Schoenberg and Twelve Tone, Stravinsky's Rite of Spring is listenable, but at some point
00:04:02.560 you reach this point of it not being listenable. Wagner was pushing tonality to the outermost
00:04:10.140 limit but the prelude to Tristan Isolde is still hummable for god's sake it it still is communicating
00:04:18.120 to the people in the audience and even communicating to the masses I would imagine
00:04:24.040 that if someone listened to mall
00:04:25.440 like even if you're working at a factory or McDonald's it still speaks to you on some level
00:04:36.860 Not so much Schoenberg at all. So the 20th century music committed suicide in this acknowledgement that music had reached its limit and had pushed tonality to beyond where it was even understandable.
00:04:56.360 and they just committed suicide in this effort of modernist alienation and even snobbery to be
00:05:04.840 honest of we're writing for fellow artists and we're not going to speak to the public in the
00:05:11.620 slightest bit and music ended and so what you are listening to even if you're listening to a
00:05:19.700 new opera that's produced you're still in a museum because new operas you know john adams
00:05:26.900 nixon and china or some of these operas that have sort of lasted like they did the dead man walking
00:05:32.920 opera and there's new operas coming out of the met it's played by a symphony orchestra that hasn't
00:05:38.380 fundamentally changed in 200 years in terms of its sonic vision or that's a weird way of putting it
00:05:45.340 In terms of its sonic quality, it's a museum piece.
00:05:49.040 You're just rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic.
00:05:52.240 Art music only exists in the way that, like, Renaissance painting exists in the Louvre.
00:05:59.000 So it's over.
00:06:00.740 It's been over for 100 years.
00:06:02.780 If you took a program of the upcoming season at La Scala or the Paris Opera or the Met,
00:06:11.120 and you took one from like 1940 and 2025 there would be no difference there's no discernible
00:06:20.460 difference they're playing the same music they're playing on instruments that have not changed in
00:06:25.500 well over a hundred years yeah it's over the canon is there i think if western civilization
00:06:32.900 survives another hundred years there's going to be an opera house at a capital city that is playing
00:06:39.220 La Traviata, Parsifal, and Carmen, which is great in a way from my perspective because I love those
00:06:46.940 works, but it just gets to the fact that the genre of Western European art music is totally
00:06:56.620 exhausted. There's one more thing I wanted to point out with regard to Timothee Chalamet
00:07:01.360 is that he is correct in dissing opera and ballet they are dead and they don't matter
00:07:12.640 sadly uh they exist in a museum a beautiful museum where they're performed at the highest level
00:07:20.340 and this is something a quick aside like a lot of people want to look back and think that like
00:07:28.200 these like violinists were better 100 years ago they weren't like one thing about the internet
00:07:34.620 is that it has increased the skill level of piano playing string playing etc etc i mean the one
00:07:43.560 possible exception is like the the opera singer who's who's a actor or actress as much as he or
00:07:52.600 she is a singer and so like are you gonna have anyone quite like maria callas or franco corelli
00:08:00.240 or so you know one of these just total showman and dramatist you know maybe not maybe in a way
00:08:06.540 singers today are like too good uh that they are able to capture just the the magic and the passion
00:08:15.260 and and and and so on of singers like that that i just mentioned but um the one thing about timothy
00:08:22.540 chalamet which he should remember is that cinema too is dead the exact same process that opera
00:08:31.340 went through in the 19th century cinema has gone through so like opera went opera was never a
00:08:40.180 total mass medium in the way that film was or certainly television uh but it was more middle
00:08:51.700 class more popular directly relevant cause scandals and controversies and so on in a way
00:08:58.380 that it doesn't now but the same story can be told about cinema like i think that what is going to
00:09:06.480 happen with cinema in the next hundred years is that rarely will they produce new films and what
00:09:14.640 cinema is going to be is going to be its own museum much like an opera house where you will
00:09:19.020 go in and like they'll have a this season what are we playing oh a 2001 by stanley kubrick oh
00:09:25.880 an amazing film gone with the wind have you ever seen it or you know uh birth of a nation oh that's
00:09:32.140 controversial yeah pulp fiction it's going to be that the 20th century time capsule basically
00:09:38.080 but anyway this is a good conversation