Time’s Sequestered Treasure

Posted on January 31, 2022 by leslie

Teatro San Carlo, 1830, credit Wikipedia

Time’s Sequestered Treasure

Donizetti in the 1830’s, 7-CD Box set, £32, from Opera Rara, reviewed by David Truslove

Founded in 1970, Opera Rara is a goldmine for anyone wanting to explore the remoter corners of 19th and early 20th century opera. Donizetti, in particular, has been a long-term favourite with the company which aims to document all his music through recordings and performing editions. This limited edition boxed set, released in September 2021 to mark Opera Rara’s 50th anniversary, comprises three seldom performed works (spread over seven discs) spanning Donizetti’s career-defining decade of the 1830s. Made from recordings between 1977 and 2005, this significant release, remastered with exceptionally fine sound, includes a specially commissioned essay by Roger Parker and a synopsis for each opera. Complete libretti are also available as downloads. As usual with Opera Rara, these rarities on the company’s own label enjoy outstanding singing, playing and conducting.

Gustave Doré, The Deluge, credit Wikipedia

Il diluvio universale (The Great Flood) is the second of four operas Donizetti composed in 1830. It’s something of an oddity and belongs to a vogue for biblical epics bearing kinship with Rossini’s Mosè in Egitto and Verdi’s Nabucco. Determined to stage a work during Lent, Donizetti combines the sacred and profane and peoples Il diluvio with a collection of imagined characters in which the unwavering faith of Noah (named Noè) is pitched against the hedonistic Babylonian court of Cadmo. His wife Sela shares in Noè’s belief of an impending flood, whilst also embracing the fleshly delights of Babylon. But at the close, when she renounces God, the first thunderclap erupts. Built onto this framework is Sela’s rival Ada whose efforts to ensnare Cadmo are doomed when Sela attempts to salvage her marriage.
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Abigaille’s Party

Posted on January 26, 2022 by leslie

Jerusalem Falls, credit Wikipedia

Abigaille’s Party

Nabucco, dramma lirico in four parts, music by Giuseppe Verdi, libretto by Temistocle Solera, conductor Daniel Oren, director Daniele Abbado, Royal Opera 23rd January 2022, reviewed by Leslie Jones

According to the Metopera guide ‘What to Expect from Nabucco’, the score demonstrates “…Verdi’s ability to innovate operatic convention in the service of character development and psychological depth”. The writer, however, overstates his/her/their case. As Professor of Music Francesco Izzo notes in ‘The ‘Biblical Grandeur’ of Nabucco’ (Official Programme), one contemporary critic, writing in the Gazzetta musicale di Milano in 1843, complained about “the more conventional formal features of the opera”, such as Nabucco’s aria [a cabaletta] at the beginning of Part IV, arguing that “… Verdi…had indulged in the ‘usual forms’ at the expense of the drama”. (The cabaletta was “particularly favoured for arias…in the bel canto era”, see Wikipedia). Professor Izzo, for one, respectfully concludes that Nabucco was “…solidly grounded in the conventions and practices of early 19th century Italian opera”, although Verdi gave the chorus, which hitherto had a subordinate role in bel canto, a more prominent position (see ‘Nabucco, the online opera guide and synopsis’).

This revival of Daniele Abbado’s 2013 production of Nabucco is replete with iconography from Judaism and the Holocaust. The piles  of clothes that litter the floor are reminiscent of photographs of the massacres at Babi Yar in 1941 and the stone blocks evoke the tombs on the Mount of Olives and Berlin’s Holocaust memorial. Claire Seymour, in ‘A stirring Nabucco at Covent Garden’ (Opera Today, December 2021) and Katy Long, in ‘Experiences of Exile’ (Official Programme), also detect topical references to other exiled communities, such as Syrian and Afghan refugees.
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Manilius – Three Caesars in one Text?

Posted on January 18, 2022 by leslie

    Portrait of Tiberius

MANILIUS – Three Caesars in one Text?(i)

By Darrell Sutton

Imperial titles in the ancient Roman Republic had diverse origins. They appeared on coins and in the prose and poetry of Latin writers. Caesar, at first a surname of the Julian gens, ultimately came to denote several emperors (cf. Mason Hammond, ‘Imperial Elements in the Formula of the Roman Emperors during the First Two and a Half Centuries of the Empire’, Mem. Am. Acad. Rome, 1957). In due course, the use of Imperator or Augustus within the populace was utilized as a derogatory or complimentary term, depending on the party using them. Bards therefore needed to be perspicacious with their poetic illustrations.

Latin poets of the Late Roman Republic and early Roman Imperial period unveiled fine distinctions in their metrical compositions. In arrangements of verse, even though their systems disclosed overt shades of meaning, here and there they betrayed subtexts whose connotations were not easy to grasp, especially in astronomical lyrics. One widespread principle which preoccupied its devotees was the assumption that fixed objects in the heavens determined human destiny and governed events in the sub-lunar sphere. Manilius’ Astronomica confirms the existence somewhere of that general belief (e.g., II.603-607). In its structure, hexameter lines that are original and complex ascribe supremacy to planetary configurations, making clear to the reader the prevailing power of ‘fate’.

In what follows, an attempt is made to clarify one of the many ambiguities in Manilius’ Latin poem. It will be argued that the use of the imperial title, Caesar, in IV.776 does not apply exclusively to Tiberius Caesar Augustus since Manilius alludes to more than one sovereign.
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Brief Encounter

Posted on January 12, 2022 by leslie

Haus der Wannsee Konferenz, credit Wikipedia

Brief Encounter

Peter Longerich, Wannsee: The Road to the Final Solution, first published as Wannseekonferenz: Der Weg zur Endlösung (2016), translated by Lesley Sharpe and Jeremy Noakes, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2021, Notes, Bibliography, Appendix, Index, ISBN 978-0-19-883404-5, reviewed by Frank Ellis

The twentieth century may well come to be known as the age of genocide, not because what was formally defined as such in the mid 1940’s represented something new in man’s affairs – humans have always engaged and even revelled in mass slaughter and enslavement of the “other” – but because of the frequency and severity of the slaughter. What made the genocides of the twentieth century unique (so far) was the fateful combination of technology (rail, telephones and radio), powerful, centralised government bureaucracies with access to huge amounts of personal information, dedicated enforcement and extermination agencies, vastly improved methods of efficient mass killing and, above all, exceptionally aggressive ideological worldviews – Marxism-Leninism-Stalinism, National Socialism and Maoism – that sought to justify mass extermination (genocide) as necessary and desirable, the mandate of History.

The Holocaust (the Jewish Catastrophe) was a process. Victims were demonised, defamed, dehumanised, dispossessed, deported and then destroyed. Their suffering and deaths were then denied, something that has continued in various forms since 1945. The Wannsee Conference, the subject of Peter Longerich’s book, was a critical event in the process of the genocide. Here, in this lakeside villa, a small group of NS-Germany’s top administrative functionaries, invited by Reinhard Heydrich, head of the Reichssicherheitshauptamt (RSHA), discussed how to resolve what was called the Jewish question.

Reinhard Heydrich, credit Wikipedia

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Res Publica

Posted on January 9, 2022 by leslie

 

Res Publica

Bill Hartley, on community assets

A recent newspaper report claimed that more than 11,000 pubs, restaurants and hotels have closed in Britain over the past two years. Clearly lockdown will have played a part, though doubtless some were teetering on the edge before the pandemic hit. Rural pubs have been particularly affected and often it’s the location. Hidden away up a country lane or in an isolated village may have been fine back when the  labour force trudged in from nearby fields but the demographics of villages has changed and if the locals won’t use the place then passing trade may not be enough.

A fight back began some years ago with the growth of community pubs. Of course pubs were always about community but the idea is that the place is seen as a broader resource. Even government began to recognise this with the passing of the Localism Act (2012). The Act gives people the right to step in and save what is recognised as a community asset. When it comes to pubs there is plenty of advice available and many success stories. Both CAMRA and the Plunkett Foundation offer information, to assist those who may be considering this approach. Continue reading →

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ENDNOTES, January 2022

Posted on January 5, 2022 by leslie

Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, credit Wikipedia

ENDNOTES, January 2022

In this edition; Stuart Millson on composer Samuel Coleridge-Taylor

When one thinks of English music, one thinks immediately of Edward Elgar, or Ralph Vaughan Williams: figures who represent a very rooted, ancestrally-determined Englishness. Few people realise, however, that during the turn-of-the-century period, a composer was at work in Britain whose single-minded pursuit of excellence and the romantic spirit in our musical tradition placed him at the pinnacle of the profession. Most famous for his great choral-orchestral work, Hiawatha’s Wedding Feast, this artist also produced dozens of other beautifully-written works, including chamber quintets and sonatas, an orchestral Ballade, and a Violin Concerto – recorded by both the Chandos and Lyrita labels.

The composer was Samuel Coleridge-Taylor (not to be confused with Samuel Taylor Coleridge, the poet) and, at first glance, he could be considered a musical outsider. Samuel was born in London in the August of 1875, the son of a doctor from Sierra Leone and an Englishwoman. His talent was marked out from a very early age: in 1890, at the age of just 15, he entered the prestigious Royal College of Music, that powerhouse which sought to establish an English, or British national school of music. The violin was his instrument, and by 1892 the gifted young student joined the composition classes of the great and somewhat forbidding Sir Charles Villiers Stanford, an Irishman and a disciple of Brahms. Continue reading →

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Canon, to the Right of Them

Posted on January 3, 2022 by leslie

W E B Du Bois

Canon, to the Right of Them

Colonialism and Modern Social Theory, Gurminder K Bhambra & John Holmwood, Polity, 2021, 257 pp, hb, reviewed by Leslie Jones

The toxic legacy of European colonialism and imperialism underpins the “populist ressentiment and rejection of multiculturalism” of the white working class in Europe and the USA [i],  according to Bhambra and Holmwood. Assumptions of racial superiority drive “populism and zenophobic hostility to minorities and immigrants”.[ii] The authors dismiss the notion of a threat to European identity, which they attribute to “the loss of an advantage over people who were previously excluded and dominated”.[iii] In short, ‘white privilege’ is key to understanding contemporary politics. Indicatively, Black Lives Matter is described herein as “…the self-organisation of African-American communities and the necessary protection of their lives”.[iv] And Alexis de Tocqueville is credited for acknowledging, in Democracy in America, that whites were more prejudiced about blacks in states which had never known slavery.

Race, Bhambra and Holmwood contend, has been neglected by social theory, witness the exclusion until recently of W. E. B. Du Bois from the sociological canon. The authors, accordingly, undertake an immanent critique of the latter, in particular of Marx’s analysis of capitalist society. His predictions of immiseration, proletarianization and social boulversement, as they remind us, were confounded by the construction, pioneered by Bismarck, of national welfare states. Certain citizens, to wit, the indigenous populations, benefitted from the distribution of a ‘colonial patrimony’. Racialised hierarchies emerged, contingent on the latter. A ‘caste-like relation’ was thereby superimposed on the supposedly universal class relations posited by Marx – witness the stark contrast between nominally free labour in Europe and the various forms of slave labour in the colonies and empires.
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THE CAMBRIDGE GREEK LEXICON

Posted on December 29, 2021 by leslie

Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema RA, Sappho and Alcaeus, credit Wikipedia

THE CAMBRIDGE GREEK LEXICON, ed. James Diggle et al., Vol. I A – I; Vol. II K – Ω, Cambridge, 2021, $84.99. Pp. i-xxiii, 1;1529, reviewed by Darrell Sutton

Sophists in ancient Greece employed figures of speech in formal addresses and publicized their rhetorical skills through sophisticated arguments. As collectors of proverbs, tales and choice terms, certain Sophists created crude glossaries to clarify the gist of Homer’s idiom and that of other authors. That impetus did not die with them. Scholars in the medieval age, as well, lacked suitable lexical tools. And this deficiency induced a handful of persons to compile lists of words for their own private tuition and for personal reference. Manuscripts which contained intelligent marginalia or scholia were usually added by individuals whose knowledge of that idiom ranged widely. In time, glossaries proved to be useful for research and writing.

In contrast to other ancient tongues, Greek writings have for a long time been supplied with lexical tools. This advantage is hard to quantify. The old stand-by dictionary compiled by Liddell-Scott-Jones, also known as LSJ, because of its later supplements by H.S Jones, was used by all. First published in 1843, it became the yardstick by which other lexicons were measured. In due course it was abridged, revised, and augmented several times. But shortcomings soon became apparent. Notable scholars referred to its deficiencies both orally and in print, especially its treatment of terms in the Septuagint. John Chadwick (1920-1998), an erudite forerunner in the study of Linear B texts, provided the Greek scholarship and lexical insights which contributed significantly to procedural improvements to Greek lexicography. Chadwick’s genius in this regard was deployed deftly in his volume Lexicographica Graeca (1996). Continue reading →

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Soul on Ice

Posted on December 29, 2021 by leslie

Shane Doan, credit Wikipedia

Soul on Ice

Mark Wegierski recalls a rare victory over “political correctness”

In April 2007, the Canadian media were convulsed by the allegation that Shane Doan, the captain of the Canadian team at the World Ice Hockey Championships, had uttered an anti-French slur years before – and was therefore unfit to lead the team. In the event, massive public resistance nullified the efforts of various Quebec Liberal and Bloc Quebecois politicians to destroy him.

A number of issues were raised by this cause célèbre. Firstly, the dredging up of a “politically-incorrect” incident from years before, to try to deny a highly talented person some official position or honour, smacked of Stalin’s Soviet Union. Secondly, even if Doan had shouted something egregiously offensive, it would have been unfair to punish him for it. In physical, contact sports, all kinds of things are said in the heat of the moment. A realistic view of human nature would regard such verbalisations as simply part of an often brutal, competitive struggle. It is absurd in itself to try to introduce a blanket ban on so-called “offensive speech” in the context of such often ferocious, competitive sports. Continue reading →

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Some Suggestions for Canadian Conservatives

Posted on December 21, 2021 by leslie

Second Union Station, Toronto, 1878, credit Wikipedia

Some Suggestions for Canadian Conservatives

from Mark Wegierski

The Canadian federal election of September 20, 2021 was another failure for the Conservative Party of Canada, despite Conservative leader Erin O’Toole’s attempted “move to the centre”. Now, the Conservative Party is consumed by a battle between pro- and anti- O’Toole factions. Looking back at history, the Conservative Party (called the Progressive Conservative party from 1942 to 2003) has largely failed to make an impact on Canadian society, politics, and culture, since the critical election loss of the staunch Tory John Diefenbaker to Liberal Lester B. Pearson, in 1963.

The Canadian Right will make little headway in the teeth of a hostile social, cultural, and political climate, unless it endeavours to give encouragement to the creation of infrastructures in which intellectual explorations of right-wing ideas and philosophies can take place. What is especially needed is a broadly right-of-centre magazine which could serve a mobilizing, galvanizing role similar to the early years of National Review in the United States. Perhaps Candice Malcolm’s True North Canada initiative could grow to include a monthly print magazine. Continue reading →

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