Opera Note: Edita

If the Lord is willing' and the Rhine don't flood, then in a couple of weeks we'll have a chance to see Edita Gruberová singing the title role in Donizetti's Lucrezia Borgia in Munich.   Our evidence base is thin here but it seems like something to look forward to.  We saw her once before back in 1998 at La Scala in Milan--one of only two times we've actually made it here to Opera's mother church.   It's not what you would have called careful planning: we walked up to the box office at 545p and asked if they had anything for 730p.  Well, yes. So we got to see Gruberová  of whom we had not heard, singing Linda Chamonex, of which we knew nothing.   It was well worth the effort: even without clues, you could tell she was a talent to be reckoned with.

So far as we can recall, that was the only time we've ever seen her live, though we are the proud possessors of a superb rendition of Così fan tutte where she sings Fiordiligi under the baton of Nikolaus Harnoncourt. I used to say I was no Harnoncourt fan, but this is one I could play again and again.

And that is that.  Or was until last night, when the domestic Netflix goddess conjured up a DVD of--here it is, folks, La Gruberová herself, doing the selfsame Lucrezia Borgia, in the selfsame Munich, five years ago.  As I say, we'd never seen her in it: actually we hadn't even seen the opera; we just wanted to do our homework.

We count it as well spent but for the moment, I want to set the opera aside and focus on the bonus DVD: a film, The Art of Bel Canto, built on Gruberová s career.  It was entertaining and rewarding for many reasons but here is one for the moment: your attention is called to the fact that the Diva is 67 years old--per Wiki, born December, 1946.   That's right, folks, 67 years old, and for an exercise class, how many singers can you name either male or female who are still ticking along at this stage in life?  Men, maybe a few--Placido Domingo (73) of course and I forget who else.  Women.  Hm.  Well, maybe in an earlier generation: I see that Ernestine Schumann-Heink sang Erda in Der Ring des Nibelungen, aged 71.  And that Nellie Melba staged a farewell at Covent Garden at 65.  I suppose there are others.

I haven't any idea how Gruberová  does it.  I'm sure good genes help.  But another guess is that she leads a quiet life: she seems to do most of her performing in Vienna, less than an hour's drive from Bratislava from where she was born.  Also Munich, Linz, Salzburg, Zurich: the neighborhood.  Barcelona and Madrid, but little or no Berlin or Paris.  New York, just a bit: I bet it didn't agree with her (an odd outlier: Tokyo).  About the only role that seems to bend the curve is Zerbinetta from Ariadne auf Naxos which, I gather, she performed some 200 times over 36 years.  And the DVD--it's a charming presentation but tells us almost nothing about the diva herself. She mentions in passing that she has a couple of children and we see her in what might be her country place, but none of the chummy details that are the stuff of celebrity (a Google search does turn up a husband but he doesn't make it to the Wiki).    Sounds like a well-ordered life, but a life well lived.

Movie Log: Different, or Maybe Not

Two items on the Netflix calendar.  They're different, but perhaps I can identify a common thread.

One: the legendary production of King Lear with James Earl Jones, given at Joe Papp's New York Shakespeare-in-the-Park in 1973.   It's a delight, although you have to get used to the fact that the actors are declaiming the way they need to for an outdoor audience on a summer evening. Not an easy job: I've joined the Shakespeare-in-the-Park audience exactly once in my life--this in 1996--and I sat in the back row from which, for all their apparent declamation, I couldn't hear a thing.  But then, the play was Timon of Athens (only time I ever saw it) and perhaps it was just as well that I did not hear a thing.

Lear is different on that score: this was actually our third Lear within a year and I haven't any idea how many I might have seen over a lifetime (actually not that many, but more than three).  We are at the point where (unless silenced) we can chime in with our own interpretation of favorite lines--never fun for anybody, I suspect, except the utterer.  We're also at the point where any performance is going to live in the shadow of previous performances, perhaps for good, more often for ill.   Is Raúl Juliá really okay for Edmund the Bastard?  Well, yes, actually, though it took a few minutes' getting used to.  But that guy who played Edmund's father, Duke of Gloucester--he of the old-pro résumé, should be dependable for anything. Grant that he had to shout, but can't he do anything but shout?

And Jones himself?  I quite liked him.  By our time he comes so close to self-caricature, you wonder if he can ever actually get out from behind the glaze.  But you got the sense that he'd given thought to every line, that he had a purpose and was determined to get it across.  Mrs. B did spot one problem--he seemed to get younger as the evening went on, or perhaps better, to forget how old he was (in life, 42; in character "fourscore and upward").  It was almost as if he was telling himself: hey, it's working, I'm bringing this off!  No matter, well worth the time and the attention.

Second item: Street of Shame, an account by the extraordinary Kenji Mizoguchi of intertwined lives in a Tokyo brothel.  It's filmed with all of Mizoguchi's legendary patient compassion.    You can't call it "realistic" exactly: I double-dare anybody to watch 87 straight  minutes of what life is really like in a brothel (though perhaps Boardwalk Empire comes close).  But it is unblinking in its own way. And you think--wait a minute, this is 1956. Say again, 1956?   Tokyo?  A compassionate film about the lives of sex workers?  Who exactly was watching?  Would anybody have done (did anybody do) anything in America even remotely close?

I've already conceded that there isn't much of a common thread here, although I suppose you can add both to your "unblinking compassion" file.  And here is one more: in both cases, I found my selves thinking about the film itself but also about the context--context(s) which seem so far away.  New York in the 70s: not a happy place, but there is something joyous about seeing Juliá and Jones and several other minority theater folks on on display in such a desirable venue.   I'd been telling myself it was some kind of a breakthrough, but now: a glance at the old cast list shows me that both Jones and Juliá had performed in the Park before.  Still in both cases, that in both cases, the content seems so long ago and so far away. From 1973, or 1956.  Long ago and far away: how did that happen?

They Could Have Saved Us All Two Hours ...

Last night for the first time I saw The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, and I can only wish I had waited longer.  How this steam in' heap of bloated confusion ever made it to the top of anybody's movie list, except perhaps as a Guantanamo torture film.

For starters, nothing about the setup makes any sense.  This guy has been in the Senate for 25 years and nobody back in Tinytown remembers how he got his start?   Not the editor?  Not even the old marshal?  And who made that lunkhead marshal to begin with?  And why did they let him stay in the job? And wouldn't somebody have wanted to clean up the debris of the incinerated old house?

But I guess my real problem is the prating busybody bullyboy John Wayne who reminds me of so many of the guys who used to make my life so miserable when I was a kid.    I guess I'm glad that he did (so it seems) indigent and alone. But if he was such a law and  order guy, why didn't he just take out Lee Marvin in the same reel and save the whole town its heartache?   Surely "looking like the Joker in a bad Batman remake"ought to be a capital offense even in the most raucous frontier town.

None of this, I admit, has anything much to do with the larger political message, supposed to give the film its heft and dignity. So just remember children: your nation is run by apron-wearing pantywaists who are the helpless pawns of gun-toting thugs.  

Bach Log: Baby Steps, and a Discovery

Another evening of Bach Cantatas, and I've already lost (=am too lazy to) count exactly how many we've done.  But we're at the second Sunday of Epiphany.  That would be BWV 155 ("Mein Gott, wie lang, ach lange?"), BWV 3 ("Ach Gott, wie manches Herzeleid!"--same as BWV 58) and BWV 3 ("Meine Seufer, meine Tränen"), and I'm taking baby steps at getting some sense of what to look for, what they are about and suchlike.  We note in passing that most of the CDs in the house bearing the label "cantatas" are in fact selections from cantatas, not the whole thing.  And I'm beginning to sense that (duh!) there is a reason why a chorale is put next to a recitative and so forth.

This evening also marked my discovery of the work of the late Craig Smith, who must already be a legend among serious Bach enthusiasts: Wiki says he "is considered a seminal figure in Boston's Baroque music revival of the 1970s," Emmanuel Music, he Boston Baroque music cooperative. I find him now in his avatar as annotator/commentator of Emmanuel's cantata series and it is pretty clear these are going to be indispensable.   I might have figured out on my own, for example, that the orchestration of the tenor aria in BWV 13 is "interesting and cool … Two recorders pitched quite high play a poignant duet above a meandering and expressive oboe da caccia line and an active bass."   But I certainly didn't have the breadth to see that As fascinating as this work is. ... it must be counted as a peculiarity. Bach goes to such extreme lengths to save an unsaveable text that he has written something in the end that is more odd than touching."

Department of New Old News: Falstaff

This one just came over the mountains by pony express, a couple of years late.  The subject is "The Hollow Crown," BBC-2's rendition of Shakespeare's "second trilogy"*--the Henry plays from the late 1590s, which (among other blessings) give us Mistress Quickly, Doll Tearsheet, the stews of Eastcheap and their presiding genius, Falstaff himself.    I paid no attention at the time--I'm not sure I ever heard of them--but Mrs. Buce churned them to the top of the Netflix crew and I must say that (in the words of the Michelin man) they are definitely worth a detour.  A scan of the reviews shows that they received plenty of praise on their first showing, not least for their place in a larger context.  That is: apparently fans still remember--and smart from--the all-of-Shakespeare series from the 70s.  Over time that series has developed a reputation (not entirely deserved, in my view) as the great clinker in the highway of dramatic evolution; the new ones are hailed as retrieving the Bard from the clutches of mediocrity (or worse).

I do think they are good, though I wouldn't crown them with the laurel of perfection.  One or more reviewers also remark on the degree to which they are "faithful" to the original, but that doesn't seem quite right to me either.  For one thing, I don't see how you can be entirely "faithful" to a play originally  produced in a closed theatre when your television landscape extends to the entire British Isles.  More: it's clear that director Richard Eyre, however respectful he may be of the script (and he is respectful) still wants to put his own reading on the original material.

Which brings me to my particular point here--Falstaff, as rendered by Simon Russell Beale.  The Brits practically hold their breath at the mention of Beale's name and may even deserve his reputation.  Falstaff is usually remembered as the world's great comic part, and Beale has played Spamalot.

And here's the thing: Beale's (Eyre's) Falstaff is not the least way comic: Beale throws away or sits on (with his massive girth) virtually every memorable comic line in the play. This may not be exactly revolutionary but I suspect for most viewers, it is eye-opening. We usually see Falstaff as a scam: Beale's Falstaff is a scoundrel: a dark and disturbing presence fit not merely to make mischief among his friends but serious trouble for the whole realm.

But here's another funny thing: this darker interpretation--every bit of it is supported by the script.  We do see Falstaff in raucous merrymaking at the tavern. We also see him as a highwayman on the road from Rochester.  We see him as a "false honor"soldier, claiming credit for the Prince's own kill.  Worst: we see him taking payoffs to excuse recruits from service in the military.  This Falstaff is not at all a pleasant man.  When Doll Tearsheet says:

Well, fare thee well: I have known thee thesetwenty-nine years, come peascod-time; but anhonester and truer-hearted man,--well, fare thee well.

…all you can think is "boy, she sure knows how to pick 'em."  It's a startling performance.  I'm not sure it is entirely right but I can see why he/they chose to play it this way, and for (I suspect) almost any viewer, it will make the understanding of Falstaff richer and more nuanced than it was before.` 


--
*Oh. Right.  Plus Richard II.  Yes, that one was good, too.

Ashland Nails it Again

A couple of days back I wrote about what a great job the Ashland Shakespeare company did with a not-so-great Shakespeare comedy.  Last night I watched them do it again.  This time, the subject was Two Gentlemen of Verona--an amiable piece of juvenilia, perhaps Shakespeare's first play, of interest almost solely by virtue of the fact that it prefigures so many things Shakespeare would do again and better, later.  In good hands, these hands, it emerges not as a first rate play but as a rewarding entertainment and an instructive harbinger of what is to come.

And the reason it worked so well last night would be?  I'm not completely clear in my own mind: the cast was all women.  Yessiree folks, every creature on stage--even the one who could have qualified for an NBA tryout-- was presented as a guaranteed, bona fide, female (although I guess actually I am not clear about the dog).  The result was good a production of Two Gents as ever I've seen (surprisingly to me, I have seen a few):  tightly integrated, nicely paced, with a proper mix of pathos and  brio.  In short, all you would want of a Shakespeare comedy anywhere, ever.

I said I'm not completely clear why it was so good.  I suppose the natural response is just that "oh, girls just do everything better."  Could be: the performance offers nothing to contradict such view.  But I offer a slightly different spin.   Recall how Ashland too often doesn't trust the text and feels it has to lay on interpretations or devices that just get in the way of the real thing.  But here, of all places, they had the ultimate device.  Once having made their point ("Oh look!  We're casting women!"). they had the freedom to let the play go on its own. And that is exactly what it did.  With talented players, able direction, good coaching (the diction was top notch), they gave the audience a chance to explore everything that Shakespeare had to offer.  The fact that "what Shakespeare had to offer"  was not much--that fact is really beside the point.  It's a good natured, if limited, entertainment in its own right.  

Still, it is important to put the point in perspective  So, while the play may be weak by Shakespeare standards, it may be strong by anyone else's.  My guess is that Shakespeare had written nothing else, he still might be remembered for having written one engaging piece of work.   It's interesting also in that it really does display so many of the themes and devices that he explored and developed later.  You can almost see him in the audience watching his own product and thinking "I see possibilities here"--and unlimbering his own formidable capacity for self-correction.   You need a good production to get the point and that was precisely what was on display last night.

Ashland Nails It

I've whined more than is seemly about the ways in which they waste their resources at the Shakespeare Festival in Ashland.  About how they don't trust themselves with the Shakespearean text: they feel they have to tart it up with doohickeys.  And especially about farce: about how they're good at farce, but it's insidious--the very fact that they're good at farce means that they use it where it doesn't belong. I might have (although I don't think I actually have) complained about the way in which they use minority actors and actresses, particularly black. They've made a commendable effort to seek out and showcase good minority talent. But too often they've thrown them away on works are parts that are merely earnest and commendable, not really fun.

But in the new  Comedy of Errors, for once they get everything right.  For starters, CE really is farce, although ironically, not every director seems to grasp the point. Ashland does get it, and no pratfall, no silly little dance routine goes underappreciated.  Add one more element to the mix: the almost impossibly rich tradition of black stage comedy which white folks didn't know anything at all about until a generation ago, probably know way to little about now.  Think of Flip Wilson doing Geraldine; think of Sammy Davis Junior doing "Here Come Da Judge:" move CE from Syracuse/Ephesus to New-Oreleans/Harlem and you have an jive updating that works on almost every level.  

All of which makes CE on the whole about the most satisfying production I've seen at Ashland in several years.  As an added bonus, they have the good sense to do it in a single act, no intermission. Which makes perfect sense: it is one of only two Shakespeare plays that obeys the classic unities (the other is The Tempest).  It's also the shortest of Shakespeare plays--just ninety five minutes in this run, exactly enough to squeeze the juice out without getting mired in the rind,.

One irony: they're presenting it in the small theatre across the street--the one they often save for productions that are experimental or which (you suspect they suspect) just aren't going to sell.  Might have been a mistake.  I've seen only a couple of productions here this spring but this one surely counts as one you wouldn't want to miss.

Footnote:  We also took in the Ashland rework of the Marx Brothers' Cocoanuts in the big indoor theatre across the street.  More farce.  Polished to perfection and remember what they say: dying is easy but comedy is hard and farce is even harder.  Not the best of the Marx Brothers' movies: it is the first of the canon and I think they hadn't figured out how to do it yet. A bit on the long side: wpuldn't have been worse if twenty minutes shorter. But still, worth the ticket; keep it on the list.

Another footnote: A companion alerts me to the insight that "the Duke of Harlem" in CE is pretty clearly the Duke of (as he might be called) Ellington. Take the "A" train, baby, and enjoy.

Shakespeare's Gentlemen

The unfailingly interesting Harold C. Goddard offers a typically provocative insight  inspired by what may be Shakespeare's least interesting play:

From The Two Gentlemen of Verona to The Tempest, without any deviation, he drew one portrait after another of the fashionable gentleman, either Italian or after the Italian model, and there is no possible mistaking what he thought of them, no matter how good their tailors or how "spacious" they themselves "in the possession of dirt" (as Hamlet remarked of Osric's real estate).  Boyer, Don Armando, Gratiano, Tybalt, the Claudio of Much Ado, Bertram, Parrolles, Si Andrew Aguecheek, the "popinjay" whom Hotspur scorned, Roderigo, Iachomo; these are just a few of the more striking examples, to whom should be added in spit of the anachronisms, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, Osric, Paris (in Troilus and Cressida) and even, in some respects, men like Bassanio and Mercutio, not to mention many of the anonymous "gentlemen" and "lords" scattered throughout the plays.  Let anyone who doubts trace the word "gentleman" with the help of a concordance in the texts of Shakespeare's works as a whole. He will be surprised, I think, to find how often the situation or context shows it to be used with ironical intent.' 

There is a story that Abraham Lincoln, on being told that in England no gentleman ever blacks his own boots, asked in his quiet manner, "Whose boots does he black?"  If I am not mistaken, The Two Gentlemen of Verona, even more quietly, makes the same point.

So Goddard in The Meaning of Shakespeare, vol. 1, 47 (1951).  Yes.  Well.  But where exactly does that leave the most remarkable of young gentlemen, Hamlet himself, not to say Hamlet's staunch companion, Horatio?  One might object that that they are not "after the Italian model," but this is to confuse effect with cause.  The problem is not that Italians are popinjays; it is that popinjays adopt the Italian manner. And this is precisely what Hamlet and Horatio did not do. What saved them, I wonder, from so dismal a fate?

Afterthought:  And cf.:

    And gentlemen in England now-a-bed
    Shall think themselves accurs'd they were not here,
    And hold their manhoods cheap whiles any speaks
    That fought with us upon Saint Crispin's day.

So Henry V on the eve of Agincourt, in the play of his name, Act IV, Scene 3.   But then, where else would you expect to find a "gentleman?" when there is work to be done?

Geography Quiz

One of these refers to a person; three to places.  Which refers to a person and by what name is he better known?  Extra credit if you can locate the other three.

1. The Banat of Temesvar
2. The Rann of Kutsch
3. The Epop of Emor
4. The Ziggurat of Ur.

A  Middle Eastern political leader claimed he was defrauded last year in a real estate deal with "a friend."  Which of these is the leader and which the land that is the subject of the dispute?

1. Wadi Abu Seif
2. Wadi Jumblatt

For answers, go here.http://underbelly-buce2.blogspot.com/2014/06/geography-quiz-answers.html

Let's Not be Beastly to the Protestants

The next leader of the free world thinks he knows the secret:

 “Give me a country in 1600 that had a Protestant led contest for ... power and I will show you a country that is rich today,”

My guess he is probably thinking of England, if "Anglican"is "Protestant," and if you count "England" as "rich," and if you blind your eyes to the extent that England has fallen from the preeminence it enjoyed in the Land-of-Hope-and-Glory days of yore.  You might also want to finesse over the role played by he 200-plus years the English spent hoovering up the wealth of the antipodes in the creation of perhaps the most extensive empires in the history of humankind

But I wouldn't want to be quick to blame the culture of loot and pillage on Protestantism alone.  The Vikings had their moment; the plains still thunder with the hoofbeats of the Mongol horde.  Not to mention the other great Jewish heresy.  Heck, it was the Assyrians who virtually invented the idea of empire hundreds of years before the Sage of Bethlehem ever touched the hem of his garment to the latchet of his shoe.    Grant that the professor is right when he says that Protestant influences had much to do with the shaping of the English character.  But don't be too hard on them, boys, they're not alone.  

That Time of Year

Back from a high school commencement, about our dozenth such occasion in our couple hood, if you count a few eighth grades and a least one University.  This one was down on the Central California coast and the weather, which does not always cooperate, was on its best behavior. Which is a blessing: three thousand devoted progenitors on bleachers together for three or so hours in the blazing sun broiling like so many mackerel--now that is a sight not to behold.

Others idled the time away gossiping, blowing whistles, tossing balloons and suchlike, but me, I chose to marvel on the oddity of such a spectacle: all that sitzfleisch  devoted to waiting the occasion to yell, or shout, or whistle, or cowbell, at the sound of just one name.   it is further proof, if any be needed, that parenting such like are activities that take insane devotion. Forget about the tuition bills  (I dare you) and stand awe-stuck at the present of those who forged these little Pol Pots into halfway passable trial-run, human beings.

I sound snide. Very well, I usually sound snide. But the fact is I rather enjoy it all.  Which is odd in that I never went to my own commencements (if I could escape it) and it never occurred to me that anyone else would want to.  Because the throngs, the stamina, the enthusiasm, the general air of Gemütlichkeit is something you couldn't cut with a bandsaw.   Reminder to self, be sure to book hotel room now, before it's too late, so we can go through the same exercise again next year.

But an afterthought: one thing I can't figure out is where it was that the great designators assigned the role of "commencement song" to that down-market imitation  Händel snow-stopper, "Pomp and Circumstance"?   Wiki is no help on the provenance, although it does weigh in with the words:

       Land of Hope and Glory, Mother of the Free,
            How shall we extol thee, who are born of thee?
            Wider still and wider shall thy bounds be set;
            God, who made thee mighty, make thee mightier yet,
            God, who made thee mighty, make thee mightier yet.

Wiki offers countless recommendations.  Here's he iconic Gracie Fields:

Bach Log: Epiphany

Tonight's selection comprised music for the first Sunday of the new year (BWV 153, 58) and also for Epiphany (BWV 65, 123), of which I'd say the clear winner is BWV 123, Liebster Immanuel, Herzog der Frommen, "dearest Emmanuel, duke of the pious."  As a commentator says, "Herzog=duke" seems an odd choice, perhaps best savored in a foreign language.  The remarkable part is the bass aria, "Lass, o Welt, mich aus Verachtungnwhich," "leave me, world, for though dost scorn me."*  Gardiner calls it "one of the loneliest arias Bach ever wrote" (sic, not "loveliest?").  The aria's austere dignity is surrounded/festooned/ornamented/complemented by flute and continuo which Gardiner encounters as ""some consoling guardian angel."  Right enough as long as you leave it in the abstract.  Once you start to think about it, you find yourself imagining some hitherto undocumented Disney character and the effect is, shall we say, not enhanced.  There, I told you  not to think of an undocumented Disney character.

Here's the aria** (oddly, YouTube appears not to identify the musicians):

--
*Translation by one Z. Philip Ambrose, hitherto unknown to me, seemingly a remarkable man about whom I must say more later.

**And now that I listen to it, I realize this version is not nearly as Disneyfied as the Gardiner.

The New British Richard II

Chez Underbelly (or is it Chez Buce? I forget) rounded off its evening after the New Year's Cantatas last night with acts four and five of Shakespeare's Richard II, as presented in The Hollow Crown, the new British rendering of the playwright's "Lancaster" trilogy.   It's a creditable job on what I've long thought a fascinating play.  A bit ham-handed in its attenuation of Christian symbols (does he really need to spread his arms out as if crucified?  Does he really need to ride in on the mule?).  The selection of geographic locales was imaginatively done--amazing what you can do when you are freed from the theatre, if you don't screw it up, which often enough they do.

What has long fascinated me about Richard II is not that it is Shakespeare at the top of his game--it's not--but that it is Shakespeare trying to figure out who he is, trying to negotiate a fully mature identity out of his newly-discovered (and no doubt hitherto unsuspected) talent for writing world-class verse.  Recall the chronology: this is 1595, when the the theaters reopened after an extended closure due to plague.  It was probably during the closure that Shakespeare discovered his power as a sonneteer, but that's the thing: Shakespeare's honeyed sonnets, somebody called them, and it is not quite a compliment.  Few if any of the sonnets are awful; not many are really bad and a few are brilliant. But a lot, however fluent, are a bit too cute, too clever--one might almost say "too honeyed," if somebody hadn't said it before.

Back in the theatre, Shakespeare has to figure out what to do with his new-found power.  I think it was Peter Saccio who said that when he first read some of Richard's set-piece speeches, they almost blew the top of his head off.  But it was when he saw them in context, he saw them in a whole new dimension: here is Richard, a fine poet in his way, but precisely because he is so fine a poet, thus fatally  ill-equipped to be a good king.  King, hah: Richard is the original drama queen, who dazzles with his eloquence, all the time disclosing that he won't be able to get out of this mess alive.  It's an amazing piece of work and enough to convince you, despite its imperfections, that here is a still-young man of whom great things can be expected. 

As an aside, he plays another version of the same game in Romeo and Juliet, apparently written the same year.  Few can versify with such eloquence as young Montague (well, perhaps Richard can). But again, that's his curse:  For Romeo it's all about words, and his tragedy that he doesn't know it is all about words.  So in both plays, it is Shakespeare's peculiar gift to explore, to exhibit, and yet to criticize, almost to mock, the very gift that obviously so astonishes him.

Re Saccio's point, I can relate: I first heard the Richard set-pieces in an old vinyl recording of John Gielgud's one-man presentation, "Ages of Man." It was only a few years later that I actually got round to reading the play (I didn't actually see it until much later still).   And I learned only recently how his early casting as Richard was a breakthrough role for Gielgud, and also for the king himself: how Gielgud's performance restored the play to the conversation after long periods of neglect.

I can believe it.  One reason why I can believe it is that last night watching the new production--worthy though it was--the voice I kept hearing was that of the old man himself.

Bach Log: New Year's

'Twas New Year's Eve at Chez Underbelly last night, at least according to the Lutheran calendar implemented in John Eliot Gardiner's rendering of the Bach Cantatas.  That would be four items: BWVs 143, 41,16 and 171.     Apparently some critics suspect that Bach many not have written 143, and I tend to suspect they might be onto something: to my untutored ear, it just doesn't sound Bachy enough.    BWV 41 strikes a celebratory mood, with  a lot of trumpets: there's also a remarkable obligatto wherein a violoncello converses with the tenor recitative.  Of BWV 16, Spitta says it is close to the spirit of Telemann, but that "Telemann would have had difficulty even attempting to imitate what Bach accomplished here."  BWV 171, produced in the grand tradition of musicians who steal from themselves and others, harbors  a parody: "Scented kisses of Zephyrus are turned into Jesus on New Year's morning,"

Velvet Mills Bleg

Here's a bit of lazy man's research: can anybody direct me to some good granular stuff about the velvet mills of Rhode Island (and bits of Connecticut) in the late 19th Century? I know there's a bit of velvet mills kitsch; even an item in the National Register of Historic Places. But so far I haven't been able to drill down and figure out how it really worked. Was it high-skill, low skill? Did they import workers from Europe? Were there industrial health issues? Love to know anything you can offer.

Afterthought:  And wouldn't it be a great name for a stripper?

Dépigeonnage

The Wichita Bureau learned a new word today--dépigeonnage, which you can probably figure out for yourself but if you are stumped, don't count on Google Translate: they say the English for dépigeonnage is dépigeonnage.  Really never thought of our feathered friends as being high on the list of French nuisances but evidently somebody does--here's a French "environmental" (sic?) website with news on " La Lutte Contre les Pigeons." Here's another site, this one cautioning that "Les pigeons causent des nuisances directement sur la santé," and warning that "Le dépigeonnage nécessite l’expertise d’un professional."  Or, as Wichita suggests, does it have something to do with St. Francis and feeding (or not feeding) the birds?  It does, I admit, remind me of one of my favorite Biblical chestnuts--workable in any language but somehow more convincing in French.  It's the one where Mary explains the baby to the elderly Joseph: c'est le pigeon, Joseph.

Mrs. Buce pronounces herself only mildly amused by the pigeon concept, but would consider démoleage or désquirrelage, if either is on offer.

Here's the authoritative American approach to the topic.  Not sure how well it would translate:

Strike Up the Band!

Chez Underbelly has a new project: the Bach cantatas.  Somebody gave Mrs. B the thick, sturdy hardbound edition of John Eliot Gardiner's Bach:  Music in the Castle of Heaven  for Christmas last year (actually, two people did but that is another story).   It's almost impossibly rich in insight but also dense and requires attention--neither one of us has actually read it through yet.  But happens we are also the proud owners of the boxed set--the John Eliot  Gardner CDs from"The Bach Cantata Pilgrimage."  So it was she who said--look, let's do this right.  One or two a night. Work our way through the Lutheran Church year.   We'll use Gardiner. But it is your job (she said to me) to dig up more useful background, etc.

And we're off and running. Last night we did BWV 63 and 191, Christmas, and would have recognized, even if not told by notes, that 191 gives us an early draft of the B-Minor mass  (it was a one of the first pieces of Bach to make my hair stand on end, back when I was about 19).  I also discovered the eye-popping Bach cantatas website, with (to all appearances) a profusion of resources (here is BWV 191 in Chinese, if that is to your taste).  If I just don't tell her about the site, I can make myself look like a hero.  More anon.  Meanwhile, here's a rendering of BWV 191--not Gardiner, but the Amsterdam Baroque Orchestra and Choir with Ton Koopman.  Less assertive or dramatic than the Gardiner, but also lovely:

D-Day: What did you Do in the War, Grandpa?

Yes, I was there.  Well, no, not on Normandy Beach, but I do remember coming down the stairs to breakfast on the morning of June 6, 1944,  and hearing the radio news and saying "is it today?"  Yes, it is today.  I breathed a huge sigh of relief: I had long since computed the number of days* to my 17th  birthday and expressed the prayerful expectation that they would get this nuisance over with before then or I would have to go, and I would die (on the last point, I had no doubt).  So I heartily endorsed General Eisenhower's decision to smack 'em good.

I followed the newspapers thereafter and shared the general dismay when it turned out to be far harder than I had supposed it would be.  I learned about places I had never heard of (Aachan?)  Who spells a word with three a's?).** By the time the Battle of the Bulge rolled around--well, I suppose Ike wasn't too happy about it either. 

---
*3,180, with put me square into the Korean War.  But here, I had some of the best luck of my life.  Young men could "test out" of that one by getting high grades on the exam.   I guess you had to be 18 before you had to take the test: in the fall of my 17th year I remember watching my elders troop into the big open assembly hall for their moment of truth (or error, as the case may be).   By 
then, of course, we had the Eisenhower detente.   In any event, they must have suspended the test before they ever got to me.

Careful observers will be able to anticipate that I got lucky on the other end, also: by the time Viet Nam rolled around, I was too old to be of much interest to anybody.  I did have to serve a brief spell as a reserve trainee but that was more or less of  lark, of no earthly use to anybody.

**Wichita, who claims to have lived there, says my memory is faulty:  it's "Aachen," with only two As.  Very likely, but three is what I remember and two is more than enough.  And see also this.

Taub and the Long, Bleak Story of Housing

Jennifer Taub's Other People's Houses is likely to be about as good a book as we are going to get by way of overview of the woes of the housing market over the last generation. Which is a pity because it might have been better.   It has some great virtues, of which more in a moment.   I suspect its primary problem is that the author set herself too ambitious a goal and wasn't able to get control of her material.

In particular, she decided it was necessary, in order to tell the story of the recent uproar, also to go back and (re)tell the story of the Savings and Loan debacle of the 80s.   I can understand her thinking here:  much of our late calamity does indeed have its roots in the S and L mess, and you can understand today better if you understand yesterday.  But there are similarities as well as differences and would be useful to try to isolate and identify those differences for whatever lessons they may offer. On the same theme, while we may not yet be ready for the last word on the Savings and Loan era, still, we ought to be in a position to impose some kind of framework (however simplistic) and to formulate some useful questions.  

  Taub doesn't do that, and so she is reduced to telling some individual stories.  Some of the stories are good, but there's no identifiable pattern to what she has put in and what she has left out.   Moreover in the nature of things, she winds up relying heavily on secondary sources: if you read Martin Mayer or William K. Black on the S and Ls (or, to one forward, Kirsten Grind on WaMu) you're going to find a lot here that you have read before (exhaustively footnoted, I should say--Taub is nothing if not conscientious about sourcing).

One irony is that, protean as her reach may be, it is remarkable how much she feels she has to leave out. Sometimes the choices appear just arbitrary. For example, she includes an account of the notorious "Keating Five"--the senators who earned themselves a moment's notoriety for their role(s) in seeking to protect the infamous Charles Keating, one of the poster boys of S and L bad behavior.  Yet she does almost nothing with the underlying Keating story.  Very well: she had to leave a lot out--but if Keating isn't important, how can the Keating Five be?

Perhaps a deeper structural flaw is that she tells the reader almost nothing about Michael Milken and the junk bond revolution.   Needless to say, I feel her pain: the Milken story is stuff enough for a book in itself (actually, there are several good ones).  I certainly can't blame her for not wanting to tackle it here--but if she doesn't tackle it, she can't really claim to be telling the whole story.

She also spends what I would regard as an undue amount of time on one Supreme Court case--Nobelman, well known to bankruptcy cognoscenti.  For those outside the inner circle, this is the case where the Supremes held that the Bankruptcy Code debars a Chapter 13 ("regular income") debtor from rewriting his home mortgage.  Taub disapproves.  She's strongly of the view that rewrites in troubled times. But here matters get complicated.      She also believes that rewrites should be done via the bankruptcy court.    After some waffling, I've pretty much come round to the view that rewrites are a good thing (see this).   But must it be done by the bankruptcy court?  Again, I think she might be right that it should be.  But I don't think it is a deal point: I would rather have seen her concentrate on rewrites per se, leaving the question of who and how as a side issue.   Linking the two as if they were necessary corollaries unduly complicates her argument. 

[And FWIW I think she was too hard on the Supremes.  The issue was a fairly straightforward matter of statutory interpretation.  I think they read it correctly (and the decision was nine-zip, so I am not alone).  But right or wrong, statutory interpretation is all they saw themselves as going.  So if Taub has a beef, it's really with the Congress that wrote the statute to begin with.]

But enough about stories  In contrast to the early chapters, I think far the best part of the book is, ironically, also perhaps the least salable.  That would be Chapter 14, her careful account of the institutional structure, both in the banks and in government, its slow, inexorable path to disaster.  She identifies five "links" (supine Fed; securitization;  collateralized debt obligations (CDOs) and CDOs-squared; credit default swaps (confusingly, CDSs); and leverage.  The tag lines will be familiar to anyone paying attention, but it is the richness of her detail that gives her account density and heft.  To this we can add her final chapter, in which she traces the failure of housing reform in the Obama administration--and lays the blame like a dead rat on the doorstep of the President himself (she tops it off with a useful aide-memoir of the arguments against mortgage rewrites, together with rebuttals).

There is, in short, a lot of good stuff here.  I'm glad I read it, and I'll go back to it. But at the end of the day, I think she does nothing so much as just prove how damn complicated the whole story is.

Chintzy afterthought:  the title is touching, but does it make any sense?  Her whole point (with which I would agree) seems to be that it is these people we are talking about, the owners, and that these are their houses, not those of anybody else.

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[Oh dear no, please. Well, I guess you can if you want to. But this isn't at all what I intended. I just wanted to post some photos--which won't make any sense without some commentary. which I don't have ready yet. I guess the Leviathan is just capturing more and more of my life. I will try to get to a "commentated" version in due course.--Buce]

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What He Really Meant Was...

Translation in an earlier time did not insist on point-to-point accuracy.

Where Montaigne writes, "Our Germans, drowned in wine (now Allemans, noyez dan le vin) Florio has "our carowsing tospot German soulders, when they are moses plunged in their cups, and as drunke as Rats." A phrase which the modern translator Donald Frame renders calmly as "werewolves, goblins, and chimeras" emerges from Floriation as "Larves, Hobgoblins, Robbin-good-fellows, and other such Bug-beres and Chimeras"--a piece of pure Midsummer Night's Dream.

So Sarah Bakewell in How to Live 277 (2010), her exposition in the guise of a biography of Montaigne.

We're Doomed

Hast thou not seen one of our late Kings slain in the midst of his sports?  And one of his ancestors die miserably by the chocke of an hog?  Eschilus, fore-threatened by the fall of an house when he stood  most upon his guard, stricken dead by the fall of a Tortoise shell, which fell out of the talons of axxn eagle flying in the air; and another choked with the kernel of a grape?  And an Emperor die by the scratch of comb, whilst he was combing his head?  And Lepidus with hitting his foot against a door-sill?  And Aufidius with stumbling against the council-chamber door as he was going in thereat?  And Cornelius Gallus, the Praetor; Tegiliinus Captain of the Roman watch; Lodovico, son of Guido Gonzaga, Marquis of Mantua--end their days between women's thighs?

--Michele de Montaigne, of course, in the essay, "That to Philosophize is to Learn How to Die," in the "Shakespeare translation" by John Florio,  from a new edition of selections issued as Shakespeare's Montaigne, by NYRB Classics, with a helpful introduction by Stephen Greenblatt, edited and modernized by Peter G. Platt.  Interesting, after a lifetime of reading Shakespeare I can deal easily with (most) Shakespearean text, but this Florio, issued around the midpoint of Shakespeare's career, can be tough going. 

The notes tell us that Henry II (of France) was "killed in a tournament," and that "his ancestor Philip, who never ruled, was killed by a pig."