Die tote Stadt

Posted on July 4, 2022 by leslie

In Bruges

Die tote Stadt

Music composed by Erich Korngold, opera directed by Carmen Jakobi, Saturday 25th June 2022, at Longborough Festival Opera, Moreton-in-Marsh, Gloucestershire, reviewed by David Truslove

You know that you have witnessed something special when a rapt audience withholds its applause, before roaring its approval. Such was the case following Erich Wolfgang Korngold’s Die tote Stadt, given by Longborough Festival Opera. A similar reception reportedly greeted the work’s joint premiere in Hamburg and Cologne in 1920, when the precociously talented composer (already hailed a genius by Mahler) was barely 23. Performances ran for over a decade, reaching more than 80 stages worldwide before the composer fell out of favour. The work only received its first professional outing in Britain in 2009, at the Royal Opera House, prompting The Times to ask “How can it have taken almost 90 years for Die tote Stadt to get a staged performance in the UK?”. But even after this long overdue appearance, Michael Tanner of The Spectator grudgingly characterised the work as an “almost impressive opera”. Continue reading →

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Go North, Young Man

Posted on June 29, 2022 by leslie

Paul von Joukowsky, design for a set of Parsifal, 1882

Go North, Young Man

Parsifal, Stage Consecration Festival Play in three acts, music and libretto by Richard Wagner, based on the poem Parzival by Wolfram von Eschenbach, Opera North Orchestra and Chorus conducted by Richard Farnes, directed by Sam Brown, concert performance at London’s Royal Festival Hall, 26th June 2022, reviewed by Leslie Jones

When Richard Wagner presented his wife Cosima with the second prose draft of Parsifal, she wrote in her diary, on 28th February 1877, “This is bliss, this is sublimity and devotion!…The redeemer unbound!”. Numerous other critics have endorsed this judgment. According to Frankfurt School social theorist Theodor Adorno, “Wagner’s criticism of the opera carries great weight”. Wagner, he contended, considered opera as “childish” and that music should “finally come  of age” (see ‘Wagner’s Relevance for Today’, an essay based on a lecture delivered in 1963). Adorno discerned both “progressive” and “negative [nationalistic] traits” in the composer’s oeuvre. He agreed that the familiar, showy forms of Italianate opera, notably the aria, the recitative, the ensemble, were superannuated. Stephen Moss, in similar vein, recalls that Wagner envisaged opera as a “gesamtkunstwerk”’ or “total art work”. He thereby ushered in a much needed revolution in opera (‘A to Z of Wagner; G is for Gesamtkunstwerk’, the Guardian, April 18, 2013). –

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Cattle and Copper

Posted on June 22, 2022 by leslie

 

Sedona Arizona, hiking above Oak Creek

Cattle and Copper, by “Wild” Bill Hartley

The owner of Rancho Mirago advised us against parking on the grass. This was nothing to do with a gardener’s pride, since the grass was brown and withered by the high temperatures and lack of rainfall. He was making a point about wildfires and explained that anything outside the firebreak, which surrounded his ranch house, was likely to be incinerated. There have been four such fires already this year, the last of which consumed 10,000 acres of Southern Arizona.

Rancho Mirago is in Cochise County: miles of harsh but beautiful prairie, desert and mountains, much of it open range. Once off the tarmac and onto the dirt roads, then cattle take precedence. The Southern Arizona Cattle Growers Association likes to remind visitors of its role in the food chain. A sign outside the entrance to one ranch read, ‘this ranch feeds 1600 American families’.

Cattle ranching is a tough business. The University of Arizona cites drought as one of the major problems and believes that small family run operations are the most vulnerable. Some of these small ranchers need other jobs to augment their income. Rancho Mirago provides accommodation. Perhaps the most eccentric example was Winn Bundy (1930-2020). Several miles up an isolated dirt road, she ran a bookshop at the Singing Wind Ranch. Continue reading →

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Matches, made in Hell

Posted on June 20, 2022 by leslie

Enrique Ponce, in his traje de luces (suit of lights)

Matches, made in Hell

Carmen, an opera in four acts, music composed by Georges Bizet, libretto by Henri Meilhac and Ludovic Halévy, new production by Opera Holland Park, directed by Cecilia Stinton, City of London Sinfonia and Opera Holland Park Chorus conducted by Lee Reynolds, 14th June 2022, reviewed by Leslie Jones

Carmen is an example of opéra comique, a musical genre in which numbers were inserted into a spoken libretto. Sections of the text, drawn from Prosper Mérimée’s novella Carmen (1845), accordingly, are recited not sung. Acting, as well as singing, was at a premium in opéra comique. The question “can you dance” was as important as “can you sing and act” (See Carmen Review – Dance of Death, Quarterly Review, November 2018).

In Mérimée’s novella Carmen, the story is told from the perspective of besotted soldier Don José. He recalls that Carmen “walked, swaying her hips like a filly from a Cordoba stud farm”. But in Bizet’s opera, it is told from that of Carmen herself. Carmen (Kezia Bienek) considers herself a free spirit, confiding that she has “suitors by the dozen”. Love, she observes in the Habanera, Act I, is “un oiseau rebelle” (“a rebellious bird that no one can tame”), an “enfant de bohème il n’a jamais connu de loi” (“a gypsy child that has never heard of law”). The premiere of Carmen on 3 March 1875 was consequently received as “a gross assault on the senses and sensibilities of an audience accustomed to submissive heroines…” (Official Programme, ‘Introducing Carmen’). When librettists Henri Meilhac and Ludovic Halévy presented their plans to the directors of the Opéra-Comique, one of the latter, Adolphe de Leuven, pointedly interjected,

Carmen? Mérimées Carmen? Isn’t it her who’s killed by her lover? And among thieves, gypsies and cigar-girls? At the Opéra-Comique, the family opera, the theatre for marriage interviews!…You’ll drive the public away…it’s impossible!

Don José (tenor Oliver Johnson), in contrast to Carmen, is a weak willed individual, torn between his passion for her and a code of honour which entails loyalty to regiment and to family, in particular to his ailing mother. After a faltering start in the first act, Johnson was genuinely moving in the second, when telling Carmen how the flower that she threw him outside the tobacco factory “sustained his love during the long weeks in prison” (Official Programme, ‘Synopsis’). If you can move the audience as he did, all else is forgiveable. Continue reading →

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Janáček, The Excursions of Mr Brouček

Posted on June 18, 2022 by leslie

Peter Hoare as Brouček

Janáček, The Excursions of Mr Brouček

Thursday 9th June, 2022, Grange Park Opera, The Theatre in the Woods, West Horsley Place Surrey, directed by David Pountney, reviewed by David Truslove

With certain exceptions, Janáček’s operas are not often chosen for country house presentation. In the twenty-five years of Grange Park Opera’s endeavours, only two of the Czech composer’s stage works, namely Jenufa and The Cunning Little Vixen, have been staged. This year, festival director Wasfi Kani opened her season with the satirical and eccentric romp that is The Excursions of Mr. Brouček – a Cinderella amongst Janáček’s operas. First heard in the UK at Edinburgh in 1970 and later presented by English National Opera in the 1980s and 90s, its madcap invention makes ideal summer entertainment, even if its absurd lunacies defy comprehension and fail to make a satisfying narrative sequence. If you’re not a fan of its surreal, Pythonesque fantasy, you may be won over by strong performances and not least by Marie-Jeanne Lecca’s costumes and Leslie Travers’s super-size toytown sets (superbly lit by Tim Mitchell) which will surely engage your inner child.

Inspired by the novels of Svatopluk Čech, this up-to-date English translation by director David Pountney contains sardonic attacks on artistic philanthropy, lockdown parties and the latest “Boris balls-up”. Even music critics get a derisory mention. Brouček (its central character taken by the excellent Peter Hoare) is Janáček’s most uneven work. Conceived over nearly 10 years and completed in 1918, no fewer than eight writers were involved in the libretto which the composer fashions into two, hour-long single acts linked only by the presence of the time-travelling Mr Brouček. Continue reading →

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Belles Lettres

Posted on June 17, 2022 by leslie

 

Nicholas of Russia and Elizabeth of Hesse, as Eugene and Tatyana, credit Wikipedia

 Belles Lettres

Eugene Onegin, composer Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, based on Eugene Onegin (1823-31) by Alexander Pushkin, libretto by Tchaikovsky and Konstantin Shilovsky, Opera Holland Park, 11th June 2022, a new production directed by Julia Burbach, City of London Sinfonia and Opera Holland Park Chorus conducted by Lada Valešová, reviewed by Leslie Jones

Tatyana, played by British-Armenian soprano Anush Hovhannisyan, is something of a sentimentalist, one of those avid female readers of novels unable, according to Denis Diderot, to distinguish between fiction and reality (see Belinda Jack, ‘Tatyana’s Bookishness’, Official Programme). She confides that she saw Onegin before she saw him, i.e. that he was a fantasy or projection. Tatyana’s mother, Madame Larina (Amanda Roocroft) confirms that she too was once intoxicated by Samuel Richardson’s A History of Sir Charles Grandison and was ‘dreaming of another’ who ‘pleased her more in heart and mind’ than her eventual husband. But habit, as Madame Larina and the nurse Filippyevna (Kathleen Wilkinson) aver, is ‘heaven’s gift to us, sent as a replacement for happiness’. Contrary to romantic fiction, ‘there are no heroes in real life’. Tatyana, in due course, will draw similar conclusions.

Feminists and neo-Freudians have had a field day interpreting Tatyana’s personality. One widely held opinion is that she is a sexually frustrated victim of a repressive patriarchal social order. Upper class Russian women had no option but to prepare for marriage and motherhood. And given that the plot partly focuses on two men, the influence on the opera of Tchaikovsky’s homosexuality is hard to avoid. Indeed, it transpires that when he was composing it, he received a fateful letter from Antonina Milyukova, declaring her love for him. Bizarrely, the composer’s disdain for Onegin’s offhand treatment of Tatyana led him to encourage Antonina, since “to behave like Onegin would be heartless and quite impermissible on my part”. The upshot was his disastrous marriage, in July 1877 (see ‘Looking for Lensky’, Philip Ross Bullock, Official Programme). Continue reading →

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Ars Poetica, Remembering A.E. Housman, 1

Posted on June 9, 2022 by leslie

View from Wenlock Edge

Ars Poetica – Remembering A.E. Housman, 1

By Darrell Sutton

The history of classical Greek and Roman philology is replete with names of distinction. The list extends over 2300 years. It is an intellectual tradition containing poets, prose writers, their interpreters, grammarians, and textual critics. In the last seven decades, the issuance of private letters, extracts from diaries, and reminiscences by friends and family members, has bolstered the fame or infamy of a select group of men and women who made their living studying Greco-Roman literature. Arnaldo Momigliano (1908-1987) firmly established the history of historiography by conducting extensive biographical studies of ancient and modern figures of importance in classical scholarship. He asked the right questions and he provided insightful answers that were founded on new interpretations of extant evidence.

Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff (1848-1931), arguably a better Hellenist than anyone before or since, was once known in English classrooms only by pupils who had studied under him. Through the herculean efforts of William Calder III, Wilamowitz’ name, if not his specific publications, is known today within wider fields of classical studies. Deploying philological gifts that are better suited in translation for paraphrase than exactness, students owe much to Anthony Grafton for his broad studies of the history of ideas, Renaissance classical traditions, and analyses of Joseph J. Scaliger (1540-1609). Likewise, Christopher Stray’s interests have reshaped how one views the educational contexts of British classical studies in the last two hundred years. Disclosures  regarding the careers and temperaments of Richard Jebb (1841-1905) and Eduard Fraenkel (1888-1970) have been enlightening. Granted, the subjects Stray treats did not require him to engage in philological criticism, yet his literary frameworks help separate fact from fiction apropos some notable figures and institutions.

British classical scholarship, in  a ‘specialist’ sense, began with Richard Bentley (1662-1742), who possessed a unique aptitude for critical studies of Greek and Latin texts. During the century and half following his death, Bentley’s legacy endured. Of English classicists at work one hundred years ago, few rivaled Mr. Housman in scholarly precision or in scholarly contempt for one’s peers. Aggressive and audacious, his emendations of texts were prodigious, he poured forth vitriol in abundance on German classicists; and he was hailed by a few of them as the best Latinist of the day, the best Bentleian textual critic since Bentley. Continue reading →

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Man of War

Posted on June 6, 2022 by leslie

Man of War

The Mind in Exile; Thomas Mann in Princeton, Stanley Corngold, Princeton University Press, 2022, reviewed by Leslie Jones 

Between September 1938 and March 1941, the novelist Thomas Mann, in exile from Nazi Germany, was a Lecturer in the Humanities at Princeton University. This prestigious appointment was made possible by Agnes E. Mayer, wife of Eugene Meyer, publisher of the Washington Post. It provided him with a generous income and also with a platform of which he took full advantage at this critical period when “Fascism was rampant both outside and inside America”.

Stanley Corngold is Professor Emeritus of German and Comparative Literature at Princeton. His focus in this book is on Mann’s “humanist resistance to populist totalitarianism”. But, as he acknowledges, some critics (including Manfred Görtemaker, author of Thomas Mann und die Politik, 2005) consider Mann a political lightweight and never a sincere supporter of democracy. Indeed, another recent commentator referred to the “irremovable glaze of irony” that permeated Mann’s writings on democracy at this juncture. Corngold manfully contests these criticisms but this reviewer was not convinced.

In his 1938 essay ‘A Brother’, the brother in question (although never named) is Hitler. According to Mann, the latter was “possessed of a bottomless resentment and a festering desire for revenge”. Neil Ascherson, likewise, refers to the “shattering blow to his [Hitler’s] self-esteem when the Vienna Academy turned down his application to study art…” Mann even suggested that the Anschluss was motivated by Hitler’s detestation of Freud. But Morten Høi Jensen, in ‘The Unbearable Pathos of Thomas Mann’ (2016), makes some telling observations about ‘A Brother’. It is informed, in his view, by Mann’s guilt about his support for German imperialism and militarism during the Great War. Thomas A Baggs, for one, reminded readers of Mann’s ‘To the Civilised World, a Manifesto’ (1938) that  in 1915, in Frederick und die Grösse Koalition, Mann had supported German Kultur in opposition to the supposedly civilised values of “democracy, politics, newspapers”, espoused by the Entente. Back then, he deemed the German soul “too deep to accept civilisation as the motivating force”. And, in his Reflections of an Unpolitical Man (1918), he once again opposed democracy in the name of true freedom and culture. Continue reading →

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ENDNOTES, June 2022

Posted on June 1, 2022 by leslie

 

Whaling, Zwischen, 1856

Endnotes, June 2022

In this edition: Vaughan Williams at the Barbican, Lennox Berkeley in Paris, reviewed by Stuart Millson

Many musical events, festivals and programmes this year are celebrating the 150th anniversary of the birth of the great English symphonist, Ralph Vaughan Williams – or RVW as he was known. The composer was one of the inspirational forces behind the cultural phenomenon known as the English Musical Renaissance: the period from the late-19th to early-20th century, when a distinctive national style of music was evolving in these islands. Elgar and Parry already dominated the musical landscape – their work often compared to the sound-world of Brahms – but with Vaughan Williams, a new course for English music was plotted: a journey along the coast and countryside of England, in which folk-songs were collected; and a scholarly immersion in the history of our church music, which led to such masterpieces as the Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis.

Elements of all sides of Vaughan Williams’s style came together on Tuesday 3rd May at the Barbican Concert Hall, London, as the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra and City of London Choir took to the stage, with conductor Hilary Davan Wetton, for a performance of the anniversary composer’s A Sea Symphony. This was his first symphony and completed in 1909 – a substantial work about mankind’s place within the universe which had occupied RVW’s mind for some years. Setting the inspirational words of American 19th-century transcendental poet Walt Whitman, in the first movement the composer depicts a scene in which the ships and “ship-signals of all nations” can be seen: a sunlit moment, beginning with an exhortation, supported by brass, by the full choir – “Behold, the sea itself…”

Yet the piece also works at a much deeper level, and by the second movement, we are beginning to ponder eternity in a slow, processional nocturne: On the Beach at Night Alone. The baritone soloist has an important role to play in this section – and for this performance, the well-known and much-admired Roderick Williams (an advocate of English music) sang the words with an intimate, chamber-like intensity. Although a large hall, somehow the Barbican seems to offer a much “closer” experience for concertgoers; closer to the music and performers: the platform design being such that an orchestra seems to be almost within arm’s reach, or extending into the heart of the front stalls, with ample seating at angles on either extremity of the stage. Continue reading →

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Sick Art

Posted on May 24, 2022 by leslie

Sickert, Jack the Ripper’s Bedroom

Sick Art

Walter Sickert, Tate Britain, 28 April 2022 – 18 September 2022, an exhibition in collaboration with the Petit Palais, Paris, reviewed by Leslie Jones

Walter Sickert eschewed the “idealised nude”. He painted street vendors, as in Two Coster Girls (1906) but also sex workers, in La Hollandaise (c 1906), Cocotte de Soho (1905), Two Women on a Sofa (1903-1904), Fille Vénetian Allongée (1903-4) and The Prussians in Belgium (1912). In Le Lit de Cuivre (1906), according to one Parisian reviewer, Sickert depicted “whores with withered bodies”. The Star, in 1912, referred disdainfully to an “ordinary street corner loafer”, seated on a bed alongside a half-naked prostitute in Dawn Camden Town (c 1909).

The language changes but the song remains the same. The curators of this exhibition, an Anglo-French collaboration, dissociate themselves from artwork that might ‘objectify women’, likewise from Sickert’s supposedly voyeuristic, ‘keyhole view’, as in Woman Washing her Hair (1906), which brings to mind Degas’ Après le bain femme nue couchée (1885). They draw attention to what they call “the more threatening juxtaposition of male and female figures”, as in the drawing Persuasion (1907). “Some people”, they opine, “are critical of the potential for violence that they see” in works like The Camden Town Murder (c 1907-1908). Continue reading →

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