Rules for Everyone

Posted on September 19, 2022 by leslie

Rules for Everyone

By Bill Hartley

Old turnkey

Most of our larger cities still have what used to be called a local prison. Usually they date from the nineteenth century and are monuments to Victorian civic pride. Like other public buildings of that period they were meant to impress. Leeds Prison for example, is said to have taken its inspiration from Windsor Castle, though the soot blackened facade doesn’t quite match the original.

By 1877, all prisons were under the control of commissioners, whose governance was exercised by standing orders of immense detail, running to over 1000 paragraphs (plus appendices). The 1925 edition is a masterpiece of bureaucratic micromanagement, taking in every aspect of institutional life, both for prisoners and staff. Back then the prison officer was required to work a 96 hour fortnight, presumably calculated in this way to allow maximum flexibility when detailing for duty. Augmenting pay, a variety of allowances were available for various additional tasks. Perhaps the most peculiar being five shillings for assisting at an autopsy. Interestingly the usual age for retirement was 55 with no-one permitted to remain beyond the age of 60. Today’s prison staff may view this with some envy, since their union has been waging a so far unsuccessful ‘Sixty Eight Is Too Late’ campaign, against the raising of the retirement age.

Allowances followed a strict hierarchy based on rank. On transfer, for example, a governor was allowed a maximum weight of furniture of eight tons whereas at the bottom end of the scale an officer was permitted only two. Some strange additions and omissions are to be found. ‘The removal expenses of sons of officers will not be paid after they have attained the age of 18 unless such sons have become dependant on their parents by reason of mental or physical disability’. Daughters don’t seem to have been considered at all. Perhaps, because ‘in no case will the expenses of more than one domestic servant be allowed without the previous sanction of the commissioners’ and ‘The railway warrant or fare for a servant will be third class’. Surprisingly, there was no mention of which ranks might be bringing a servant with them on transfer. Married officers were required to live in quarters and even here regulations intruded. Permission to have guests ‘for a short period’ was allowed, after submitting a request in writing to the governor. Continue reading →

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Thy Kingdom Come

Posted on September 18, 2022 by leslie

Thy Kingdom Come

On the 14^th September, six days after the death of Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth ll, Stuart Millson, Classical Music Editor of The Quarterly Review, was present at The Mall

On Thursday 8^th September, during the course of the afternoon’s broadcasting on news channels, presenters appeared in dark suits and black ties. Meanwhile, at the House of Commons, notes were passed across the despatch boxes – alarm and concern appearing on the faces of politicians of all parties. Reports had stated that HM The Queen, 96 years old and suffering from “mobility problems”, was now “under medical supervision” at Balmoral, the Royal residence in the heart of Scotland, to which all members of her family were now travelling, post-haste. By early evening, 6.30pm, BBC News showed the Union Flag of the United Kingdom being lowered at the Buckingham Palace flagpole – a scene transmitted with no commentary or explanation. Then, the programme’s presenter Huw Edwards, made the announcement that Elizabeth ll had died peacefully that afternoon (although this fact was only later released) – his words being followed by the playing of the National Anthem. Via television and radio, and news alerts to millions of mobile phones, the long, second Elizabethan Age came to its end: the Queen’s first Prime Minister, Winston Churchill, was born in 1874: the 15^th and last Prime Minister of her reign, Liz Truss, in 1974.

Acres of newsprint and hours of broadcast time, online comment and expert constitutional discussion of Her Majesty’s 70-year-reign, have since followed. One common assessment is that “in an age of change, the Queen remained constant” – followed by another, that the late monarch “devoted her life to duty”, in endless Royal tours; the presiding-over and patronage of numerous charities; the hosting of countless foreign leaders and fellow-monarchs; and as the guiding light of the Established Church and the Armed Forces. Continue reading →

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Amor Fati, Madama Butterfly

Posted on September 14, 2022 by leslie

Winston Churchill and Maria Callas, credit Wikipedia

Amor Fati

Madama Butterfly, Japanese tragedy in three acts, Royal Opera 12th September 2022, music composed by Giacomo Puccini, libretto by Giuseppe Giacosa and Luigi Illica, conductor Nicola Luisotti, reviewed by Leslie Jones

In The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State (1884), Friedrich Engels considers how sexual relationships might best be regulated “after the impending effacement of capitalist production”. He anticipates that women will no longer be obliged to “surrender” to any man “out of any other consideration than that of real love”. Cio-Cio-San (soprano Maria Agresta) is in no such privileged position. After her father killed himself by order of the Mikado, the women of her family had to become geishas to survive. Lieutenant Pinkerton (tenor Joshua Guerrero) is set to marry her “Japanese style for 999 years”. A house and servants are included in the marriage contract, which can be terminated at any time. Indeed, Pinkerton drinks a toast to the ‘real’ American wife he expects to one day have, after a ‘proper’ wedding. But although a cynic and misogynist, he is not without redeeming features.

Reportedly, this revival of Directors Moshe Leiser and Patrice Caurier’s twenty year old production was given the go ahead only on condition that it was made “more authentic in its representation of Japan” (see Oliver Mears, Director of Opera & Antonio Pappano, Music Director of Royal Opera, Official Programme, p 21). This apparently involved some input from Japanese practitioners and academics. As Michael Church remarked in the Independent, 15th June 2022, the revival director was required to find a slant “which doesn’t offend those who regard the opera as an expression of racist stereotyping”. Yet messrs Mears and Pappano, somewhat inconsistently, consider Madama Butterfly “ahead of its time” and “a savage indictment of the evils of imperialism”. Continue reading →

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Endnotes, September 2022

Posted on August 29, 2022 by leslie

Camelot, Gustave Doré’s illustration for Tennyson’s Idylls of the King

Endnotes, September 2022

In this edition: the Celtic musical world of Arnold Bax, by Stuart Millson

In 1917, the nature- and myth-worshipping English composer Arnold Bax travelled to the northerly Cornish coast, to the “castle-crowned cliffs of Tintagel”, for a holiday (romantic, in both senses of the term) with his mistress and fellow-musician, Harriet Cohen. From this visit was born one of the most striking tone-poems in the history of the English musical renaissance: a work of about a quarter-of-an-hour in length, which contains some of the most powerful passages ever penned by a composer of this period and style.

Bax was born in the London suburb of Streatham, a place far removed from the sunshine and shadow of Eire and Kernow (the Celtic name for Cornwall). But after discovering and absorbing Irish literature and folklore, he claimed that: “The Celt within me stood revealed.” The Arthurian site of Tintagel was a major point of fascination for this Celtic-like wanderer of the imagination; Bax linking his own passionate affair with Harriet to the legends of King Mark and Tristan and Isolde. And so, on “a sunny, but not windless summer’s day”, he envisaged in musical form the sea-drift of the Atlantic lulling the onlooker into a reverie of ancient, mythical times. The heady, yet tightly-argued symphonic poem, Tintagel, came into being: a brilliantly-condensed, high-romantic musical drama; a piece that evokes high-tides, remote seabird-sounds and the clash of arms of ancient British warriors. The piece was recently performed at the Proms by the Sinfonia of London, conducted by John Wilson – a musician known, principally, for his immaculate staging of Hollywood musicals, but now forging a reputation as a champion of early-20^th-century British works. Continue reading →

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Paul’s Epistle to the Romans, Part V

Posted on August 18, 2022 by leslie

Eleusinian Mysteries, Demeter Enthroned, Varresse Painter, credit Wikipedia

Paul’s Epistle to the Romans, Part V

By Darrell Sutton

Sects that employ predestinarian systems (theological determinism) must adopt rigorous forms of textual analysis and interpretation to shore up their ideological frameworks. Romans, chapter eleven, which adresses the foreordination of human destinies, tends to inspire longer and detailed explorations. Scholars seem to enjoy the entanglements they encounter in its theological presentation. The notions included are not novel or unusual – e.g., Heracles disregarded his sufferings and his disdain for Deianira once he learned that he was doomed to die by the premeditated will of the gods; but when Pauline (or Judaic) statements on ‘fate’ and ‘foresight’ are presented to modern minds, normally they are off-putting, and without question would not have been favorably received among ancient Greeks and Romans within the Mediterranean basin who appreciated Eleusinian mysteries, exotic Orphic ideas or the cult of Cybele.

In ancient Italy, speakers of Latin regularly paid homage to the gods and goddesses they believed properly served their best interests. These factors are delineated fully in that “Augustan epic” composed by Virgil. The Aeneid tells the tale of Rome’s sacred origins. Virgil’s poem honored Homer’s legacy, and the deities portrayed in his verse were well known on street corners in Rome, indeed more or less throughout the Roman Republic. The mention of divine beings in early Roman writings permeated speeches and public documents, much like Christian themes were trumpeted later and openly in England during the Victorian era.

In matters of moral excellence, cultivated Roman writers acknowledged their debt to Hellas, nonetheless they believed their present ethos was equal to, or superior to, all former cultures and existing societies. Cicero said as much when declaiming the uniqueness of his people: he spoke of the Romans’ solemnity, steadiness, greatness of mind, faith, virtue etc., in ‘quae enim tanta gravitas, quae tanta constantia, magnitude animi, probitas, fides, quae tam excellens in omni genere virtus in ullis fuit?’ – Cic. Tusc. Disp. i.2.

For these reasons, Roman citizens would have had little use for an eastern god that could not safeguard its devotees from neighboring aggressors, permitting them to be made subject to the imperium of Rome. The passages below from Paul’s epistle to Roman believers, in either Greek or Latin idiom, represent classic Judeo-Christian conceptions formally expressed, and literary ideas that were advertised to spur debate. They are worthy of reflection, and benefit readers whose desire is to grasp how first century Christians, both Jewish and non-Jewish, conceptualised their God and their relation to their spiritual kin: Israel, the people nominally created by Jehovah.

Paul’s expressions in the Latin Vulgate are clear and compact. In forceful idiom and verbiage, chapter eleven offers a summary of what Paul has stated in previous chapters regarding Israel’s status ‘coram deo’, before God. These thirty-six verses bring to an end my abiding endeavor to translate anew chapters 1-11 of Paul’s interesting epistle to the Romans.

Outline

11: 1-6 Paul, a type of Israel, and the remnant according to the election of grace

11: 7-10 Israeli disinterest in God’s electing grace

11: 11-14 God’s redemptive project unites Jews and non-Jews [in Christ]

11: 15-25 Reconciling gentiles to God despite Jewish unbelief

11:26-32 Israel, God’s beloved, finds mercy in their unbelief

11: 33-36 Paul utters praises to God

Chapter eleven

1 I ask, as well, has God now thrown away his people? Absolutely not. Indeed I, too, am an Israelite of the seed of Abraham, of the tribe of Benjamin. 2 God has not rejected his people whom he knew previously [foresaw]. Do you not know what scripture says of Elijah? just how he besought God [with objections] against Israel? 3‘Lord, they murdered your prophets, they displaced your altars. I too am left alone, and they indeed pursue my life.’ 4 But what does God say in response to him? ‘I retained for myself seven thousand me who did not bend their knees before Baal.’ 5 There is a saved remnant at this time, all the same, conforming to the determination of grace. 6 And if by grace, [it is] not of works now. Otherwise, grace is not grace.

7 What then? Whatever thing Israel wanted was not obtained. But the election followed on; truly the others were blinded. 8 Exactly as it was written, ‘God gave them a spirit of slumber, eyes so that they cannot see, ears so that they cannot hear, down to this present day.’ 9 And David declares, ‘May their table be made a snare, and a deception, a cause of offense, and a retribution to them.’ 10 ‘May their eyes become dim, that they cannot see and always bend their back’ [or, stoop].

11 So I ask, ‘did they stagger that they might fall down?’ Absolutely not. But [on account of] that fault, salvation is [intended] for the gentiles, to provoke them to be jealous. 12 What if their fault are the riches of the world and the decline of them the riches of the gentiles, how much greater their abundance? 13 For I declare to you gentiles in so far as I am an apostle of the gentiles, I will regard-with-reverence my ministry [efforts]: 14 if, somehow, I might provoke my flesh to be envious and may save a number of them.

15 Even if the dismissal of them is the world’s reconciliation, oh what an acquisition without life from the dead! 16 If the portion is holy, the lump as well. And if the root is holy, the branches too. 17 And if some of the branches are broken, but you, being a wild olive tree, were joined to them, sharing too in the root and fullness of the olive tree, 18 do not boast against the root. And if you boast, [remember,] you are not sustaining the root, but the root, [supports] you.

19 Will you say then, the branches are broken off that I should be inserted? 20 Good. They are separated by unbelief. You indeed stand by faith. Do not relish the exalted but be reverent. 21 For if God did not spare the native branches, no, not by chance will he spare you. 22 Perceive then the goodness and severity of God. To those who in fact were cut off, severity; but to you also, God’s goodness. If you will be persistent in excellence; otherwise, you too will be cast away. 23 And them too, if they persist not in unbelief will be implanted. For God is able to graft them in again.

24 If you were cut out of an olive tree, [one] wild by nature, and against nature grafted into a good olive tree, how much more these, which are according to nature inserted into their own olive tree? 25 For I do not wish you to be ignorant brothers of this mystery, that you not be firmly set in your own wisdom seeing that blindness touched Israel in part, while the fullness of non-Jews do enter. 26 And as you see, all Israel will be saved: just as it is written,

‘Out of Zion will come one who takes control [who] will remove irreverence from Jacob. 27 And this covenant from me [is] for them when I will take away their sins’.

28 Certainly concerning the Gospel [they are] unfriendly on account of you; but regarding election, ‘precious’ because of the Father. 29 Namely, God’s gifts and callings are without repentance. 30 I mean, just as you did not believe God at one time, now however, you were shown compassion through their unbelief. 31 And as has been stated, they also have not believed now [in] the mercy that is yours, that they should find mercy. 32 Truly God shut them all up in unbelief that he might be compassionate to them all.

33 O the extent of the riches and wisdom of God! How incomprehensible are his judgements and his unsearchable ways! 34 For who has understood the mind of the Lord? Or who was his advisor? 35 Or who first gave [anything] to him?, then it will be restored to him. 36 Seeing that all things are by him and through him and for him, forever praise him! Amen.

Classicist Darrell Sutton is a regular contributor to QR

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Glyndebourne Festival, 2022

Posted on August 16, 2022 by leslie

Glyndebourne Opera House, credit Wikipedia

Glyndebourne Festival, 2022

Two new productions from the Glyndebourne Festival: Poulenc’s La Voix humaine & Les Mamelles de Tirésias, Saturday 6^th August 2022, Glyndebourne, Lewes, East Sussex, reviewed by David Truslove

Emotional turmoil and exploding breasts bring heartache and hilarity to Poulenc’s double staging at this season’s Glyndebourne Festival. Both works explore different facets of the female psyche, one affecting, the other absurd. The expressive range of these two one-acters may be worlds apart yet form two sides of the same musical coin. While a late Gallic romanticism is embedded in the abbreviated phrases of La Voix humaine (Debussy with a bittersweet twist), echoes of Offenbach and Stravinsky dazzle the ear in Les Mamelles de Tirésias, yet both scores belong unmistakably to a composer once described as “half monk, half hooligan”. Whether elegant or earthy, Poulenc’s scores are brilliantly served in bold, brightly lit productions by the much sought-after French director Laurent Pelly, with stylish performances from the London Philharmonic Orchestra under Glyndebourne’s own Robin Ticciati.

Based on a 1930 monologue by Jean Cocteau, La Voix humaine (1958) was originally written for the French soprano Denise Duval. It is the final adieu of a heartbroken woman known only as Elle who has been deserted by her lover. Charted through a string of broken telephone conversations over some forty minutes, her pain, pleas, self-delusion and final parting is one of Poulenc’s most personal creations in which one feels every momentary shift in mood. In recent years this tragédie-lyrique, an operatic one-off, has had much exposure (virtually achieving cult status as the go-to socially distanced opera), with Barbara Hannigan, Danielle de Niese and Claire Booth creating highly individual enactments. Continue reading →

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To the End of the Line

Posted on August 12, 2022 by leslie

Darlington Railway Station, credit Wikipedia

To the End of the Line

by Bill Hartley

Railway junctions don’t usually have signposts. However, the observant traveller on the East Coast Main Line may spot one just north of Darlington. The sign points to the Stockton and Darlington Railway, or at least what’s left of it. Three years short of its two hundredth anniversary, the northerly branch of the route is now known as ‘The Bishop Line’ since it terminates at Bishop Auckland. The journey takes about half an hour and provides an opportunity to view the mixed fortunes of towns and industries which grew up near the tracks.

The departure point is Darlington Station, once a showpiece on the East Coast route; a piece of grandiose Victorian architecture covered by a barrel roof, supported by cast iron pillars with heraldic adornments. In contrast, that sign just to the north takes the traveller into a curious world of Railwayana both ancient and modern but rarely Victorian.

Darlington’s original station North Road lies just a short distance away, a lucky survivor of the Beeching cuts. Here, the architecture is far from Victorian swagger, reflecting instead the light touch and elegance of the Regency era. This was a line which opened in 1825 and the building appears more like a large villa, providing a rare example of what stations were like before the railways really got going. There is a museum here too, where they keep George Stephenson’s Locomotion Number 1 which pulled the inaugural passenger train on the day the Stockton and Darlington opened. Beyond, the station Regency elegance is rapidly overwhelmed by streets of terraced houses. A good barometer of economic decline is the number of pizza outlets and the district has several. Close to one of these is the Darlington Locomotive Works. Not to be confused with the long departed original, they are still in the same business, constructing steam locomotives. Back in 2008 the works finished building Tornado and now have another in hand.<

Beyond North Road and passing through the cornfields of Durham, it’s hard to appreciate that the route was built primarily to shift coal from collieries around Bishop Auckland, down to Stockton and the River Tees. The contrast in the fortunes of the various settlements along the line is marked. For example, the one economic success story is Newton Aycliffe. This is a well manicured new town, with various industries housed in bright modern buildings. Among these is Hitachi. Take a long distance rail journey in Britain and the likelihood is that you’ll be riding in one of their trains. The company involved in building the trains for HS2, Britain’s newest railway, is next door to the Stockton & Darlington. Continue reading →

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Lamming It

Posted on August 7, 2022 by leslie

St Botolph’s church, Boston, Lincs., credit Wikipedia

Lamming It

Edge of England, Landfall in Lincolnshire, Derek Turner, Hurst & Company, London, 2022, 446 pages, hardback, £20, ISBN 978-1-78738-698-3, reviewed by Stuart Millson

The mainly low-lying coast and country of Lincolnshire – the unregarded Fenland world to the north of The Wash and to the south of Edward Heath’s local government region of ‘Humberside’ – has exerted its spell on writer Derek Turner. Eire-born and then migrating to London, the author – deeply sensitive to history and place – began to feel stress and strain in the metropolitan environment of the capital during the Blair years, and so decided that a change of life was in order. [Editorial note; see ‘Deptford dreaming’, Derek Turner, The Brazen Head, March 11, 2021]. In a trajectory similar to that of fellow author Adam Nicolson, who left London life for the woodsmoke of Sussex, Turner found much to admire in the mediaeval churches of Lincolnshire, its sometimes odd villages and hamlets (many with strange tales of folklore or the supernatural) and marshy countryside, criss-crossed by ancient drainage systems – and all under a high procession of clouds and breezes, or rain from the North Sea.

The Edge of England offers potential visitors to the county many interesting directions: through lost kingdoms (the Kingdom of Lindsey, for example); the long era of Roman administration, succeeded by the incursions and rule of the wild, long-bearded kings of the Dark Ages, and into the environs of Lincoln Cathedral, or to places of past trading glory, such as Saltfleet, and even to Margaret Thatcher’s home-town of Grantham. Continue reading →

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Darkness Visible

Posted on August 3, 2022 by leslie

Le IX Thermidor an II, by Charles Monnet, credit Wikipedia

Darkness Visible

Robespierre: the Man Who Divides Us the Most, Marcel Gauchet, translated by Malcolm DeBevoise, Princeton University Press, Princeton & Oxford, 2022, Hb, 199pp, reviewed by Leslie Jones

As Professor Gauchet sagely observes in his new book, “All the arguments that were employed by the revolutionary rhetoric of the next two centuries”[1] were prefigured by Robespierre, as in his keynote speech to the Convention of 28 October 1792. Indeed, something akin to democratic centralism and the dictatorship of the proletariat emerged in France during the ascendancy of the Committee of Public Safety, to which Robespierre was appointed in July 1793. Excesses, such as the September prison massacres, were justified as part of a popular movement. During the Terror, Robespierre maintained that an enlightened and beneficent minority was acting on behalf of the majority. His objective was always “the empire of virtue, achieved through democratic and republican government”. [2]

Lenin considered Robespierre a “Bolshevik avant la lettre”. Although eminently bourgeois himself, Robespierre anticipated Marx’s class analysis. He believed that corruption invariably accompanies wealth, that incorrigibly ambitious and greedy men had latched on to the Revolution which they viewed “as a trade and the republic as a spoil”. “Virtue is always in the minority on earth”. [3] “The motives of the people”, in contrast, were at heart “always pure”, for the people love justice and equality, the public good over self-interest. The author thinks that Robespierre saw himself as “a foremost example” of the political virtue “incarnated in the people” and highlights his “self-idolizing impulse”. [4]

Robespierre discerned a “single foreign conspiracy [but] with two faces”, to wit, the “Indulgents”, or lukewarm revolutionaries (Dantonists) and the “Exagérés, or extreme revolutionaries (Hébertists). When Hébert accused the Queen of incest with her son, Robespierre called him an “imbécile”. “All the factions”, he insisted, “must perish together”. The Hébertists campaign for de-Christianisation represented for Robespierre a foreign inspired attempt to divide the patriots. The French people were deeply attached to the notion of a supreme being, in his estimation. Continue reading →

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