On the Hallelujah Effect as Performance

Every bit of kd lang's interpretation of Cohen's Hallelujah is deliberate, controlled, contrived, packaged, performed.  To say this takes no part of the achievement away from kd lang (nor, indeed as her performance is indebted to him, does it detract from John Cale’s song-setting achievement, just as Buckley and Wainwright are similarly, indeed far more closely indebted). And to say such things, as they also apply ceteris paribus, does not detract from Leonard Cohen, the master song-writer.  How could any such claim detract?

In each case, and this is a matter, in varying ways, of taste, programming, affect: we are watching a consummate artist at work. And as Nietzsche said, speaking of Wagner, we might do well to ignore all such issues of technique, that is to say, all questions concerning the conditions/motivations/practices of the “artist” where, as Nietzsche supposed, what matters is the work, the working of the work of art as music. 

Nietzsche himself suggests that he would be both drawn in and made anxious at the same time by what he in the title of a Gay Science aphorism, described as Women who Master the Masters.  As Nietzsche reflects and his observation touches on the voice quite apart from gender and apart from music, but not apart from the stage:

A deep and powerful alto voice of the kind one sometimes hears in the theater can suddenly raise the curtain upon possibilities in which we usually do not believe.  All at once we believe that somewhere in the world there could be women with lofty, heroic, and royal souls, capable of and ready for rule over men because in them the best elements of man apart from his sex have become an incarnate ideal. (GS §70)

 The problem for Nietzsche is that this ideality is usually then read back into men and that the entire project still falls short of what real human beings do, or better said what they do not do.  If Nietzsche had learned one thing from less than enraptured reading of Goethe’s Faust, it would be to see through love to its vanities.

But where Nietzsche challenged that the theatrical bet placed on the efficacy of such voices, female, or as he pointed out, mostly male (as in “the ideal male lover such as Romeo” [ibid.], and we should not miss the irony here), tended not to succeed, the musicologist, Ernest McClain reminds us that Leonard Cohen’s achievement is a real or working one, a practiced one, attuned to musical efficacy, for us, today.