June 19, 2009

My Fifteen in Fifteen

In his 18 June posting on About Last Night, critic Terry Teachout issues a classic reader's challenge: Fifteen Books in Fifteen Minutes —acting quickly, name the 15 books that have made the greatest impression on you, ones “that will always stick with you.” 


My picks

Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë

Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen

Middlemarch by George Eliot

One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez

A House of Mr. Biswas by V.S. Naipaul

Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy

The Stranger by Albert Camus

Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy

The Way We Live Now by Anthony Trollope

Great Expectations by Charles Dickens

The Heat of the Day by Elizabeth Bowen

The Winged Horse by Pamela Frankau

The Good Soldier by Ford Madox Ford

Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert

The Power and the Glory by Graham Greene

June 14, 2009

A Bloomsday Offering

A Dream of Well-Filled Hose: Joyce’s Gerty

 “…women know perfectly well that the loftiest and most poetic love depends not on moral qualities but on physical closeness and on the way of doing up one’s hair, one’s complexion, the cut of a gown.” 

Leo Tolstoy, The Kreutzer Sonata


 “Think of her virtues; how she works, how true she is to her vocation [husband-hunting], how little there is of self-indulgence, or of idleness. I think she will go to a kind of third class heaven in which she will always be getting third class husbands.” 

Anthony Trollope on his character Arabella Trefoil in The American Senator

 

Henri girl seated by sea Like an insect embedded in a piece of amber, Gerty is relic from another era. We can still see her there, captured in the golden glow of the setting sun, pale and winsome, her love of a hat perched captivatingly on her nutbrown tresses. No longer a girl, she is womanly-wise, yet still innocent. Gerty is a late Victorian figure in a modern landscape—why did Joyce create such an elaborate portrait of this girl instead of, for example, Martha Clifford, a woman who has escaped the Victorian marriage machine to become a typist? Or how about the frumpy woman on the bicycle riding after the poet A.E., a disciple following her mentor? Joyce eschews the New Woman for Gerty, whose vocation is neither independence nor intellectual stimulation, but finding a husband.

Throughout Ulysses, Joyce frequently explores character in terms of consumerism, rhetoric, and desire, but the portrait of Gerty calls for renewed scrutiny of the means by which an author defines a character. In “Nausicaa,” Gerty serves not only as a locus for these elements, but also for the rituals of authorship Joyce employs to fashion an unconventional portrait of a conventional girl.

 

The Beauty Ritual

In his essay “In Praise of Cosmetics,” Baudelaire wrote “Woman is quite within her rights, indeed she is even accomplishing a kind of duty, when she devotes herself to appearing magical and supernatural; she has to astonish and charm us; as an idol, she is obliged to adorn herself in order to be adored.” Gerty takes her role as idol seriously, filling her days with beauty rites: applying “lemonjuice and queen of ointments” (286) to keep her hands white, developing a deft hand with the eyebrowleine, and learning how to cure blushing scientifically. Time-honored formulas—really superstitions—dictate her observances for personal hygiene: “She had cut [her hair] that very morning on account of the new moon … and pared her nails too, Thursday for wealth” (286).

At the center of Gerty’s beauty rituals is her clothing, which, like a priest’s vestments, is simple but appropriate to the circumstances. Her vocation calls for her to be dressed fashionably in well-cut garments that subtly show off her figure. She would never wear a tight skirt, awkward high heels, or a cheap blouse like Cissy Caffrey. (Of Edy Boardman’s clothing we learn almost nothing, as if her short-sightedness is transmitted to the reader as an indistinct view of the girl herself.)

As “a votary of Dame Fashion” (287), Gerty attends the department store, what Zola called in his 1883 novel Au Bonheur des Dames (The Ladies’ Paradise) “a chapel built for the worship of woman’s beauty and grace” and is subject to its corruptions. A socio-economic force, the department store concept originated in the 1850s with Paris’s Bon Marché. Offering all sorts of clothing and specialty wear under one roof, the department store welcomed women, offering them a place for socializing, fantasizing, and buying. As Zola showed, while the department store created employment for men and women with relatively few skills, it also fostered an environment of loose morals, materialism, and vindictiveness.

With the department store came advertising, in which “a fantasy [was] dangled before the consumer [of] the fulfillment of the democratic dream, at first politically and now materially,” according to Lori Anne Loeb in Consuming Angels: Advertising and Victorian Women. Stimulated by advertising to acquire what Loeb describes as “‘paraphernalia of gentility,’” women rushed to acquire goods and clothing in search of the social ideal, furnishing themselves and their homes with objects that had formerly been available only to the rich. 

Being of modest means, Gerty achieves with diligence what she cannot have in abundance. At Clery’s, she is rewarded after an afternoon’s assiduous hunting by finding just the right chenille, albeit “slightly shopsoiled” (287), to trim her hat. Having established not only Gerty’s fastidious appearance but also her punctilious temperament, Joyce compromises the impression he has worked so hard to create with this innocuous piece of cloth. Gerty has attained a certain value as a commodity in a literary and historical context, but her willingness to accept shopworn merchandise implies that she herself is slightly soiled, “Gerty’s status as a ‘marked down’ virgin allows Joyce to explore the full range of marketing and consumer strategies in the sexual marketplace,” as Garry Leonard in Advertising and Commodity Culture in Joyce describes it.

When she reappears in “Circe” brandishing “her bloodied clout” (361), the chenille soiled presumably with hymenal blood, her virginity is transmuted into unclean worldly goods. The fact that she cannot even properly recall the marriage vow (“with all my worldly goods I thee endow”) further indicates that her value has been deeply discounted.

Read in terms of the women’s magazines on which she so heavily relies, Gerty appears to be an apotheosis of womanhood, modest, clean-living, dutiful. However, by surrounding her with strong currents of commercialism, Joyce constructs her as part of an inventory, a “specimen” (286) made up of assembled parts culled from the by-products of bargain bins and penny papers. Bloom’s later remarks, “No reasonable offer refused….Out on spec probably” (302), reinforce the notion that Gerty’s value is based on market fluctuations and the theories of speculators. 

Implicit in Gerty’s advertisement of herself is that on which all ads rely: a lack or want. The hyperbole of her appearance belies the paucity of her sexual experience. Her transparent stockings make her legs shapely and unblemished—of stockings, Baudelaire praised the “abstract unity in the color and texture which approximates the human being to the statue, that is to something superior and divine”—yet they cannot conceal Gerty’s lameness (and her vindictive nature is far from angelic). Gerty is also wanting in worldliness, little imagining that her raised skirts and display of leg would later translate in Bloom’s mind as the decidedly unladylike Capel street peep shows and “a dream of well-filled hose” (301).

Joyce carries Gerty’s deficiency over into religion, implying that her naïve enthusiasm has betrayed her into an all-too-human egotism. He insinuates this with the passage in which Gerty slides effortlessly from her capacity to convert a Protestant lover into a Catholic, to the lover’s passionate embrace, to her view of Mass as if she were seeing it from her vantage point as the object of worship, a statue of Mary, Star of the Sea (433–449). Attired all in blue, “her own colour” (288) as well as that of the Virgin Mary, Gerty combines the material and the spiritual, offering a secular iconography for the color that threatens to displace its religious connotations. 

 

The Ritual of Rhetoric

In contrast to Bloom’s first-person monologue in the second half of “Nausicaa,” Gerty’s thoughts in the first half of the episode are resolutely third person. Joyce at once utilizes and breaks with conventional literary tradition, employing a narrative style that appears to convey the heroine’s innermost thoughts while at the same time distancing the reader and undermining the character’s authenticity.

When Trollope, for example, relays the thoughts of the scheming Arabella Trefoil in The American Senator, he uses a traditional form of free indirect discourse: “[Arabella] had, no doubt, been driven to tell a series of barefaced, impudent lies,—lies of such a nature that they almost made her hair stand on end as she thought of them;—but they would matter nothing if they succeeded….and some lies she must have told;—such had been the emergencies of her position!”

Joyce, too, uses free indirect discourse, but with deliberate variations in tone: “For an instant she was silent with rather sad downcast eyes. She was about to retort but something checked the words on her tongue. Inclination prompted her to speak out: dignity told her to be silent. The pretty lips pouted awhile but then she glanced up and broke out into a joyous little laugh which had in it all the freshness of a young May morning” (286–287). Trollope retains the narrator’s tone even when inside the character’s head. Joyce, on the other hand, employs that Hugh Kenner calls in Joyce’s Voices the Uncle Charles Principle, where “the narrative idiom need not be the narrator’s.” In this passage, Joyce’s narrator impersonates the traditional omniscient narrator, giving us Gerty at her most impulsive and her most trite, sounding suspiciously like an advice columnist or even an advertising copywriter.

The difference applies even to punctuation: Trollope uses the semi-colon and dash to connote spontaneity while maintaining controlled syntax; whereas Joyce removes virtually all punctuation, flattening the line and loosening his authorial grip to such a degree that an insidious instability creeps in. The result is that the reader can trust neither Gerty nor the narrator. The inconsistencies in tone also suggest psychological inconsistencies in Gerty: “By revealing Gerty’s bitterness, Joyce shows the partial failure of her textual inculcation: the reading of ‘appropriate’ didactic fictions cannot magically eliminate personal frustration” (“The Romance Heroine Exposed: ‘Nausicaa’ and The Lamplighter,” Kimberly Devlin, James Joyce Quarterly 22:4).

Further, Joyce reveals Gerty’s dissatisfaction with herself through the spiteful language she directs at the Caffrey twins. If Gerty was invited to the beach to help Edy and Cissy watch the children, she is not helpful at all, distancing herself from the group physically and mentally. She becomes increasingly resentful of the twins: “Gerty wished to goodness they would take their squalling baby home out of that and not get on her nerves, no hour to be out, and the little brats of twins” (293) and “The exasperating little brats of twins began to quarrel again and Jacky threw the ball out towards the sea and they both ran after it. Little monkeys common as ditchwater” (294). Her scorn is particularly nasty and hints at her frustration at being unable to rise above her class simply by dressing well and “educating herself” with high-toned magazines.

Devlin adds that Gerty’s response to the children demonstrates her hostility to motherhood itself: “When the narrative moves towards a more immediate representation of Gerty’s inner life, the reader starts to hear her unspoken discontent, a discontent directed in part towards the children, the traditional responsibility of women.” Sadly, Gerty can express herself only in the spotty and unfulfilling language gleaned from women’s magazines.

Having already recorded his opinion of newspaper journalism through Stephen in “Aeolus,” Joyce indicts the mixed messages and sentimentality of women’s journals through the character of Gerty. The confessional nature of these magazines has led her to reveal things a true lady never would, such as her laundry secrets, her reliance on cosmetics, and the disclosures to the priest. Far from impersonating a tabloid heroine, Gerty is merely an immodest and rather unremarkable young woman.

Still, she persists, congratulating herself on her many lovely qualities as if a fairy tale mirror in her head were talking back: “If ever there was undisguised admiration in a man’s passionate gaze it was here plain to be seen on that man’s face. It is for you, Gertrude MacDowell, and you know it” (296). Though Bloom’s admiring gaze affirms all this, the reader has the impression that were he not there, Gerty would still find validation in her inner reflection. Joyce gives Gerty different registers in which to speak, the clichéd, sentimental tone of romantic prose, the slang of a young Dublin girl, and the knowing interior voice—yet for all this evidence of character, the reader feels distanced. We, like Gerty, are kept “aloof, apart, in another sphere” (297), removed from identifying with a character who is prevented from identifying with herself.

In a side note, Joyce utilizes a long-standing authorial prerogative in drawing on his own experience for the character of Gerty. Richard Ellmann cites the 1917 meeting of Joyce and Dr. Gertrude Kaempffer in Locarno while the author was working on Ulysses. Attracted by her “delicate features and somewhat subdued manner,” Joyce pursued Kaempffer by lending her A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and writing her provocative letters. She was put off by Joyce’s suggestive manner and the affair went nowhere. “All that he had left was a recollection of having been aroused by a woman named Gertrude,” notes Ellmann. The fictional Gerty is thus a sort of rhetorical rebus, an amalgam of signs and symbols from high and low literature, popular culture, the world of commerce, and Joyce’s own memory. 

 

The Rite of Onan

Joyce founds Gerty’s character squarely on the concept of desire, as he declares with his query “But who was Gerty?” (285). In answer, he establishes a cycle of Gerty’s thoughts, the Mass at Mary Star of the Sea church, and the activities of the children on the beach. These elements gradually run together, blending into each other, until the climactic passage in which the fireworks explode and Gerty has what might be described as an orthographic orgasm. As Gerty walks away from Bloom, she is unable to disguise her lameness; characteristically, her defect is left unwritten (unspoken even in her own mind), trailing off with an ellipsis. It is Bloom who completes the sentence, just as he might have completed another form of communication, the love-making scene on the beach, had either he or Gerty not been indulging in some form of masturbation.

Masturbation was at the top of the list of Victorian anxieties, generally attributed to the adjustments required by industrialization and urbanization among nineteenth-century populations. As Peter Gay notes in his Pleasure Wars, “The panic of divines, teachers, physicians, and parents over the evils of ‘self-pollution’ was a transcontinental epidemic of collective hysteria, as cajoling or bullying anti-masturbation tracts were quickly reprinted and widely translated.” Ulysses is full of masturbators: Stephen in “Proteus,” Bloom considering it in “Lotus-Eaters,” Bloom doing it in “Nausicaa,” and Molly possibly doing it in “Penelope.” Joyce places Gerty in a metaphorical masturbation in which her self-love and self-regard act as a poor substitute for intimacy with another person.

Gerty’s narcissism is depicted as a sort of lotus-eating, a continual round of trashy magazines and retail therapy, drugging her into a life of hollow bliss. Her beauty rituals stupefy her, much as Bloom imagines Latin does for Catholics, into a pointless life of fantasy and self-gratification. The iron jelloids are, in fact, nothing more than placebos. In addition, Gerty’s self-referential fantasies are clothed in language from a bygone time that also seems to exemplify what Keith M. Booker calls “the nostalgia that Joyce identifies throughout his work as one of the major reasons for the paralysis and sterility of his contemporary Dublin society (Ulysses, Capitalism, and Colonialism: Reading Joyce After the Cold War). 

In addition to broader themes of lethargy or sterility, many specific images from the “Lotus-Eaters” episode are repeated in “Nausicaa”: Bloom writes to Martha Clifford under a pseudonym and later conjectures that Gerty might be a “false name” (305); the importance of “caste” to women (60) and Gerty’s lament that she was not born a gentlewoman with patrician suitors (286); and Bloom’s thoughts about poisons, lovephiltres, laudanum, and sleeping draughts (69) are reworked as Gerty’s pills and potions, the powders to cure her father’s drunkenness, and the menthol for her mother’s headaches (286, 290–291). 

Common in Ulysses, repetition often creates reinforcement or shows images in new permutations; repetition in the context of masturbation implies climax. In his portrait of Gerty, Joyce cycles through thematic motifs such as those above, as well as the clichéd prose, the recurring pattern of fantasy interrupted by the Caffrey twins, and the incantatory brand names and slogans mixing indiscriminately with liturgical phrases. Even Bloom echoes Gerty’s inner life with his musings on his headache, girls’ strange habits and longings, and women’s menstrual cycles—perhaps he has read a few women’s journals himself. It could be argued that the climax of Gerty’s portrait takes place in the jump from her limited consciousness to the space inside Bloom’s head (lines 741–753) where not only his empathy, but also his sympathy, and his more complete self-awareness show his capacity for intimacy in a way that is closed to Gerty. 

“Narcissism, the fairy tale teaches, despite its seeming attractiveness, is not a life of satisfactions, but no life at all” noted the indispensable Bruno Bettelheim in The Uses of Enchantment. Joyce’s Tale of the Beach Tableau does not teach this lesson so much as present the ambivalence of a quality such as self-love in the human psyche. Based on a set of false assumptions, Gerty is destined for frustration and impotence. Bloom, too, seems restless after his self-pleasuring, feeling relief, exaltation, skepticism, and exhaustion. Thus, Joyce seems to be implying that the “return” on masturbation is doubtful, making the practice more of a denial of life experience rather than an embrace of it. 


 “Returning not the same”

Joyce puts the finishing touch on Gerty’s portrait with a sly linguistic twist. With his introduction of the palindrome in “Aeolus,” where the sophomoric Lenehan announces “Madam, I’m Adam. And Able was I ere I saw Elba” (113), Joyce demonstrates the inherent fragility of language and the ease with which connections may be broken. The insertion of the contraction “And” destroys the structure of the palindrome, breaks the mirror image, and prevents the running back of the phrase. In “Nausicaa,” the palindrome returns as one last bulletin from Gerty’s consciousness: “…Gerty MacDowell noticed the time she was there because she was as quick as anything about a thing like that, was Gerty MacDowell,…” (313). This phrase with its folksy locution epitomizes the ritualized portrait that Joyce has crafted of Gerty as literary palindrome. Dressed all in blue from head to toe, Gerty’s thoughts run back and forth along the same well-worn track, emanating from and returning to only herself. However, being lame, she can fulfill the running back of the palindrome neither physically nor figuratively; further, her idiosyncratic syntax has crippled the palindrome’s structure.

Joyce brings her back for one final recapitulation in “Ithaca,” this time as Bloom’s ideal ad: “one sole unique advertisement to cause passers to stop in wonder, a poster novelty, with all extraneous accretions excluded, reduced to its simplest and most efficient terms not exceeding the span of casual vision and congruous with the velocity of modern life” (592). Under the Catechist’s cold gaze, her erotic exhibitionism is reduced to a scientific equation: “Because the controlled contemplation of the fluctuation of attraction produced, if desired, a fluctuation of pleasure” (602). 

Finally, she fades out altogether, omitted from Bloom’s answers to Molly about how he spent his day. Despite Gerty’s late Victorian qualities, Joyce paints her more as a poster child for modern life, embodying its craze for novelty, its speed and changeableness, and, finally, its embrace of obsolescence.

© 2009 Leann Davis Alspaugh. All rights reserved. 

Photo: Robert Henri, Girl Seated by the Sea (1893), Collection of Margaret and Raymond Horowitz; National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC

June 06, 2009

Red Flag

Three More Little Prints Plus One

Another trip to Old Japan in Lenox, Massachusetts, where this time, I was prepared and could shop without being overwhelmed by riches. It seemed as if the selection of e-hon prints (those from illustrated books) was smaller. The selection, as last time, ranged from ikebana arrangements to stories as well as several from a series on Japanese poets. I also spent some quality time looking through the restrike prints from blocks by woodblock masters Hiroshige and Hosukai.

Two Ikebana Prints

As noted in the August 2008 posting on a previous ikebana print, these two also show a non-realistic perspective, one that would be unlikely were these arrangements to be seen in the tokonoma (sacred alcove). No doubt, this is attributable to the fact that these images are for instruction rather than art for art’s sake.  Ikebana is frequently called the art of flower arranging, but some commentators contend that it is more correct to say that it is the art of flower contemplation.

Ikebana-fan The print top right shows two containers fitted together and resting on an open fan, the fan on top of some sort of fringed material. The container at the right is light colored with a curved spray of branches, serving as a lovely complement to the iris planted in it. The container at the left, possibly a blue and white porcelain case with Japanese characters and a modified Greek key design holds a plant with blade-like leaves or flowers. The harder edges of the plant are well-suited to the writing on the vase, both of which serve as counterparts to the organic motif on the vase at the right. In addition, the left vase appears to be a parallelogram while the right vase has right angle. Fitting these together would angle the pair into a slight V. This V is repeated in the open fan, its panel wedge-shaped and its edges forming more Vs. The two plants themselves also form several V. The florid, almost Latin fan with its filigree motif and the frothy swirls of the material underneath serve to offset the angularity of the vases.

Ikebana-elephant The second ikebana print at right is more minimalist, with what looks like a chrysanthemum growing from a bell shaped pot on a pedestal of three elephant heads. The vase sits on a low black, lacquer table. The fierce elephants remind me of netsuke, miniature carvings in ivory or wood used to fasten pouches to a kimono. Not unlike ikebana, netsuke evolved from functional to objects of great beauty and detail, valued for their own sake.

The elephant in Japanese culture holds various places from a children’s song to being used in wartime in Burma to the modern practice among school children of using elephant dung charms to improve test grades. There was also a recent theatre production of the stories of Haruki Murakami called The Elephant Vanishes.

Loop or Mirror Print

Loop-woodblock Unlike the ikebana prints above which each measure approximately 6 1/4 x 8 1/4, this print measures 6 inches by 3 inches—the perfect size for a bookmark as the owner of Old Japan points out. The focal point is the off-center loop or mirror, presumably black lacquer with two tasseled cords. The text to its right is interspersed with circles. My theory is that the circle—both the image and those within the text— may refer the enso, or the circle motif that is important in Japanese art. The simple, empty circle is called the mirror enso and has no inscription leaving all meaning to the viewer’s interpretation. In the zen world, the enso can also be the universe (all the cosmos), the moon (enlightenment), the zero (the emptiness of time and space that is the birthplace of all things), and the “What is this?” enso, the most frequently used inscription on Zen circle paintings and a way of saying, “Don't let others fill your head with theories about Zen; discover the meaning for yourself!” (all this by way of the Shambala Zen Art Gallery).

Komakata Hall and Azuma Bridge, Hiroshige restrike

Hiroshige-red-flag According to monograph One Hundred Famous Views of Edo (1856–58) (George Braziller, Inc., Brooklyn Museum of Art, 1986), this restrike is #62 from Hiroshige’s woodblock series. The owner of Old Japan believes the print I have is 50 years old; if so, it has been well-preserved and though trimmed close, it has only one tiny spot of foxing.

Overall, Hiroshige’s trademark intense colors are there along with a hint of mica in the sky. The registration is perfect and I can’t resist noticing that this image is complete with its entire heavy black rule frame unlike the Brooklyn Museum print which is torn vertically along the right.

As Henry D. Smith II notes in his commentary, the mood of this image is determined by the blue-gray rainy sky and the red flag being tossed in the breeze. The red symbolizes rouge and is the sign of a cosmetics dealer. Above the flag, a hototogisu, a small cuckoo that migrates through Edo, lets out a cry that Smith describes as similar to “tearing of cloth, a cry associated in poetry with dawn and with loneliness.” Smith further notes that the cuckoo, the red flag, and the building in lower left, Komakata Hall, form the kind of complex imagery that Hiroshige was known for, a composition that is not only pleasing to the eye but also draws in natural and literary connotations. The hototogisu above Komakata Hall would have called to mind for the nineteenth-century Japanese connoisseur a famous love poem composed by Takao of the Yoshiwara, a celebrated courtesan (or series of courtesans who bore that name):

“Are you now, my love, near Komakata? Cry of the cuckoo!”

In this rainy dawn, the lover, said to be the lord of Sendai, portrayed in kabuki drama as the paramour of Takao II, is returning to Edo (like the migrating cuckoo, which also has associations with cuckold). The courtesan misses her man in the lonely dawn and wonders if he as far as Komakata. Smith even points out the similar staccato sounds of hototogisu and Komakata, which, although interesting, may only be remarkable to Western ears.

This print was made from more than 10 blocks and is a fine example of Hiroshige's mastery of the exquisite art of ukiyo-e, or pictures of the floating world (though usually associated with images of theatre and the pleasure life, later came to include landscape prints as well). Hiroshige himself was born in Edo and spent a lifetime cultivating his perceptions of this city of more than one million. Hiroshige was a member of the samurai class, and his father was an official with the shogunal firefighting organization entrusted with protecting Edo Castle and residences of the shogunate retainers. Tokutaro (Hiroshige’s childhood name) succeeded to doshin (lower rank samurai) at age 13 following his father’s death and continued in his official duties even while he worked as an ukiyo-e artist. All of this sounds very prestigious, but men such Hiroshige and his father lived in poverty and second jobs were necessary.

This supplemental income frequently took the form of handicrafts, making umbrellas or lanterns. Woodblock prints was another. Ukiyo-e master Utagawa Toyohiro taught the young artist he renamed Hiroshige for 17 years. During this apprenticeship, Hiroshige developed his love of drawing and “absorbed the values of the [ukiyo-e] world: a commitment to careful workmanship, a disdain of accumulating worldly goods, a love of the theater, and a certain parodic spirit that tempered the serious classical training that he must have received as a samurai” (Smith).

Hiroshige quickly established a specialty in landscapes, making over his lifetime close to 2,000 sheets. The One Hundred Famous Views of Edo mark a shift, according to Smith, that includes “a renunciation of the world” associated with Hiroshige's decision to shave his head and take at age 60 the vows of a Buddhist priest. This recognition of the nearness of the end of life, Smith adds, may have led to the predominant sense of loneliness or melancholy that characterizes so many of the prints.

Komakata Hall (plate 62) also shows Hiroshige’s propensity for the Western technique of cutting off elements in the composition as with the Hall at the lower left. The foreground-background juxtaposition—the flatness that influenced so many Western artists—appears here with the more active, symbolic elements in the foreground against passive, conventional landscape elements. The red flag, the cuckoo, and the Hall link the story line from top to bottom while the harbor, ships, houses, and forest recede. Uniting these elements, the gray dawn sky and blowing rain lend the melancholy strain that runs through many of the prints from this series.

Among Hiroshige’s technical innovations in One Hundred Famous Views of Edo is the use gradation, or bokashi, seen here in the sky and the harbor surface. Komakata Hall also includes the use of mica (kira) which was probably applied as a dust to the colored area while it was still wet.

Famous views of Edo would have been old news to Hiroshige’s contemporaries, but the printmaker re-introduced his fellow citizens to their city by making 100 scenes on large-scale sheets that demanded their attention. The series was very popular in no small part because Hiroshige’s art was already well-known. The original Table of Contents described the views as Hiroshige’s “grand farewell performance,” itself a dispirited start but oddly fitting to a series where the color blue predominates.

However, it is the color red which also draws attention, especially in Komakata Hall. In Japanese culture, the color red (aka) has a host of connotations and as many shades of meaning as there are shades of red. In language, it forms part of several expressions, many of which are familiar to Westerners, but some unique to Japanese (including the ironic “shu ni majiwareba akaku naru” or “you cannot touch pitch without being defiled”). In this print, Hiroshige’s chop, or signature, appears midway down at the left at the same eye level as the cosmetic dealer’s red flag—in fact, the flag blows to the left in effect pointing to the chop. I’d like to think of this as Hiroshige’s way of bringing his signature into the foreground of the composition and thus aligning himself with the narrative. He becomes part of the courtesan’s loneliness just as he is part of the landscape of Edo. Ultimately, I think that it is this empathy with the surrounding world in all its manifestations that makes Hiroshige so interesting. The appeal of the Japanese print relies on this subtle harmony with life.

June 03, 2009

Equal Opportunity Offender

Romance by David Mamet

American Repertory Theatre, Cambridge, MA

Romance230x352 Playwright, screenwriter, and “no longer brain dead liberal,” David Mamet loves nothing better than a good hearty laugh. If it’s at the expense of whatever idea/ethnic group/religious belief/lifestyle/political issue that you hold dear, so much the better.

Playgoers will know what to expect as they enter the theatre lobby and see a screen in the corner that warns of the impending insults—an apparently endless loop of, well, just about everything and everybody (even Icelanders!). The American Repertory Theatre’s production of Mamet’s 2005 play delivers on shocking language, hilarious non-sequiturs, and equal opportunity offences.

This courtroom farce of politically-incorrect proportions is designed to play for laughs and shudders. None of the characters has a first name, except for Bernard the gay boyfriend, later nicknamed “Bunny” which leads to a running gag involving a legal document and a burned roast. The Prosecutor, Thomas Derrah at his most fey, and the WASP-ish Defense Attorney, Jim True-Frost (the latter best known as the cop-turned-teacher in HBO’s “The Wire”) are not only legal adversaries, they are also in conflict on about every viewpoint they share from clothing to cars to lifestyle and religion. The Defendant, played by Remo Airaldi, is a Jewish chiropractor who prefers not to say why he went to Hawaii. Will LeBow plays the Judge, lost in a histamine haze due to hay fever and befuddled from too many allergy pills. The Bailiff (James Senti) tries valiantly to keep the Judge in line, but he’s really more concerned with ordering lunch.

Thomas Derrah, Will LeBow, and Remo Airaldi all appeared most recently in the exemplary ART production of Samuel Beckett’s Endgame (see OTG 30 March 2009). I saw Derrah many times at the Alley Theatre in Houston, and he is a remarkably adaptable actor even though he is prone to bodily mannerisms that sometimes become too obvious. Remo Airaldi will forever be associated in my mind with his role as Nagg popping up out of Beckett’s rubbish can and calling “Me pap!” In Romance, LeBow shows a real knack for comedy, both physical and verbal. Mamet writes the Judge in many voices, vacillating from bombastic to benign, from lucid to confused, and LeBow is able to turn on a dime without sounding forced or overplaying the line.

Jim True-Frost is the weak link in the cast. He never seems at ease as the divorced attorney anxious to jump in his Volvo and get to his son’s hockey game. He and the Defendant have an astonishing scene in which they attempt to strategize, but the result is essentially a slugfest. “You people can't order a cheese sandwich without mentioning the Holocaust!” shouts the Defense Attorney. Oh yeah? “I hired a goy lawyer,” the Defendant retorts. “It's like going to a straight hairdresser.”

The pace and language of Romance is of the Glengarry Glen Ross variety, but the emphasis on prejudice is characteristic of most of Mamet’s works whether in the form of victim's perceptions (Oleanna) or the meaning of loyalty (American Buffalo). Mamet's characteristic dialogue of halting rhythms and repetitions is something you either love or hate. (Beckett was surely one of the first practitioners.) Other playwrights have tried to imitate this style, but Mamet is surely the master. At this point, this kind of dialogue has reached a point where it is neither authentic nor theatrical—it has carved its own niche. 

In his 2005 review for The New York Times, Ben Brantley wrote “Romance fits into that unloved category that might called be the Work of Contempt, created when an artist becomes weary of hearing about his limitations and perhaps equally weary of working within them.” The weariness that Brantley notes could explain much about Mamet’s truculence, but it’s difficult to imagine that any playwright would deliberately sustain a kind of energy that might eventually turn self-destructive. Contempt is a sentiment that it’s easy to imagine Mamet using to great effect, especially because of its proximity to prejudice. Contempt is also interesting in the context of Romance because of its courtroom connotations. The conjunction of Mamet and contempt is a natural one, however, providing the playwright with his favorite happy place where disrespect and the willful disobedience of authority run amok.

© Leann Davis Alspaugh All rights reserved.

June 02, 2009

Turgenev’s Two Ghosts

Faust and Yakov Pasynkov by Ivan Turgenev

Faust These two short, strongly autobiographical novels abound in missed opportunities or chances taken and pushed tragically to their limits. Turgenev’s piquant voice saves these stories from being just Slavic versions of German romanticism, but their melancholy and occultish atmosphere does owe a great deal to Goethe, one of Turgenev’s greatest literary mentors.

Turgenev did much to bring western literature and, in particular, Goethe to Russia, translating Goethe’s Faust in 1844. As Hugh Aplin notes in the book’s introduction “More than any other of the great Russian writers of the nineteenth century, Turgenev was, by instinct and experience, a European.” His love of German culture and romanticism came from his years studying the Berlin University. At one time, he claimed to have memorized the first part of Goethe’s Faust. Later, however, Turgenev moderated his enthusiasm for the sometimes stifling German romantic themes of egotism and individualism. Still, Turgenev always retained a respect for the movement and its aspiration to move beyond the conventions of the literary establishment.

Turgenev wrote the epistolary Faust while living at Spasskoye, his mother’s estate in Orel Province. There, he met Maria Tolstaya, Leo Tolstoy’s sister. As he would do repeatedly throughout his life, Turgenev “formed an attachment.” (The most curious and long-lived attachment Turgenev formed was being one of a ménage à trois that included mezzo-soprano Pauline Viardot and her impresario husband Louis Viardot.) Maria, it seems, expressed an “indifference to poetry” that Turgenev picked up in Vera, the love interest in Faust.

The letter writer, Pavel Alexandrovich B, meets a girl he describes as a “virgin of the imagination,” a young woman who has never experienced novels or art. Pavel is one of the Russian author’s many “superfluous men,” a group consisting of learned and perceptive men, usually writers or poets, who observe and record but contribute little of perceivable value to modern life. Turgenev’s portrayal of such men should be read with tender irony as they were no doubt variations on an autobiographical theme.

Faust incorporates one of romanticism’s key themes, obsession, a leitmotif that appears here alongside another romantic favorite, ghosts. Initially, Pavel Alexandrovich is haunted by the past on his return to the country home of his youth. The servants, the garden, the rooms—all evoke nostalgia, causing his youth to loom up almost as another character in the story. 

Where Pavel Alexandrovich has education and worldly experience to moderate his poetic imagination, however, the young woman he meets, Vera, has no such reserves. She is unspoiled to such a degree that she doesn’t even recognize a lie. Her life has been utterly controlled by her mother and if mamma says there are ghosts, then Vera believes it. Her imagination is undeveloped to such a degree that she is completely unable to experience empathy for others or self-direction.

When her mother dies, Vera is defenseless and begins to see her mother’s ghost in the garden holding out her arms to her daughter. She falls ill and soon dies unable to cope with the dangers from which she had been protected by her mother. Vera’s death returns her, in effect, to her mother’s protection once again.

Pavel Alexandrovich is left to muse on the “incomprehensible interference of the dead in the affairs of the living.” His conclusion is the story’s epigraph “deny yourself—take life seriously, not as an amusement with other people as playthings.”

Yakov Pasynkov is told in retrospect as a group of friends exchange stories over a long lunch. One of the group relates the tale of Pasynkov, an unassuming man who died believing he had never been in love. After Pasynkov’s death, this friend learns that this was not true. Pasynkov was in fact loved by not one but two devoted women. The story leaves the friend with the impression that Pasynkov possessed the noblest heart he had ever encountered.

Yakov Pasynkov is also strongly steeped in German romanticism. Clearly autobiographical, Pasynkov is further influenced (as Turgenev was) by Schiller and Schubert; he is an idealist keen for truth and beauty. With this character, Turgenev explores the notion that “the actual achievement of a many is arguably of less significance than the nature of his aspirations and the manner of his life.”

Aplin notes that Turgenev took this idea from Goethe and developed it off and on throughout his fiction and at length in the lecture “Hamlet and Don Quixote” (1860). The fear behind this idea seems to be that an artist may die before he can fulfill his potential, leaving behind a body of work that will be misinterpreted by future generations as unrealized or incomplete. On the other hand, others may look at the works of an author such as Turgenev and feel that no matter what he left undone, it would be more than most of us could produce in several lifetimes.

 © Leann Davis Alspaugh All rights reserved.

 

 

Girl of a Hundred Lists

Recent Books Read

Agnes Grey by Anne Brontë

Position at Noon by Eric Linklater

Bacardi and the Long Fight for Cuba by Tom Gjelten

Dodsworth by Sinclair Lewis

Taras Bulba by Nikolai Gogol

Testament of Youth by Vera Brittain

The Return of the Soldier by Rebecca West

April 23, 2009

Girl of a Hundred Lists

Last 10 Books Read

As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner

Inside the Stalin Archives: Discovering the New Russia by Jonathan Brent

The Heat of the Day by Elizabeth Bowen

Phineas Finn by Anthony Trollope

Phineas Redux by Anthony Trollope

Effi Briest by Theodor Fontane

Doctor Zhivago by Boris Pasternak

The Beginning of Spring by Penelope Fitzgerald

Human Voices by Penelope Fitzgerald

Faust and Yakov Pasynkov by Ivan Turgenev

April 13, 2009

Uncomfortably Close to Home

An Easter meditation on The Screwtape Letters by C.S.Lewis

C.S. Lewis’s The Screwtape Letters is a book most Christians know well. It is also one that repays multiple readings—if you can stand how close to home its truths fall.

The edition I have just finished is Macmillan’s 1982 paperback that includes Lewis’s 1960 Preface as well as the 1962 “Screwtape Proposes a Toast” and its Preface, the latter published for the first time in this edition. This comprehensive edition contains so many additions that it is worth buying a copy even if you already own an older version. Though scholars and theologians have written far more eloquently than I on this enlightening book, here are some ideas that stood out.

In the original Preface, Lewis clarifies the idea of devils and Evil (the capital letter is “essential,” he writes). First, he notes that “the Devil” is not the evil counterpart to God, a mirror image, or an equal signifying everything that God is not. “Satan, the leader or dictator of devils, is the opposite, not of God, but of Michael” (vii). Then, in the clear-eyed fashion that is so refreshing and characteristic of Lewis, he adds that this is so because it agrees with the “plain sense of Scripture, the tradition of Christendom, and the beliefs of most men at most times” (vii). Non-believers who think Scripture is full of fairy tales and fantasy would surely find this passage thought-provoking. Without denying the presence of the supernatural in the Bible, Lewis also confirms the paradox of the possibility of faith for beings so dependent on the rational and empirical.

Lewis goes on to note the practicality of devils, pursuing single-mindedly their twin goals of punishment and keeping men hungry. It is easy to see how devils would use the fear of punishment, but this notion of hunger and how evil ones use it on us is one of Lewis’s most fascinating devices. Throughout the book, Screwtape, the senior devil, constantly refers not only to how this impulse may be subverted by evil, but also how, in all too realistic detail, hunger leads to consumption—how sin consumes and transforms us into tasty morsels for the delectation of devils. By the end of the book, Wormwood, Screwtape’s pupil, has failed in his mission so miserably that he too will become “as dainty a morsel as ever I [Screwtape] grew fat on” (145). It is truly diabolical how Screwtape collapses the distinctions of love and affection into the gaping maw of his hunger.

The depredations of evil that pervade this book cannot be separated from the time in which Lewis wrote it, that is, World War II and the Third Reich. When Screwtape admonishes Wormwood to keep his patient focused on the needs of the present or the sweet consolations of the worldly future, the reader recalls that this was the time of the Blitz and nighttime air raids. Bombs were exploding over a great city, food shortages were common, and it was distinctly possible that Hitler might be soon be photographed posing in front of Parliament just as he had in front of the Eiffel Tower. London and indeed Europe as a whole might present a banquet of souls to devils such as Screwtape and Wormwood, most easily captured in the midst of mass complacency or desperation.

We are no longer a world at war, but that doesn’t mean that Lewis isn’t still speaking directly to us. Among his many trenchant observations are those that apply to our relentless requirement for proof as a precursor to belief. In order to believe, we generally demand that the object of our potential admiration demonstrate some kind of transcendence or greatness. We saw this during election season as we eagerly watched for evidence of statesmanship and the promise of greatness from the candidates. We continue to watch avidly to see how the new president will measure up to our concept of greatness—all measurements bounded by the limits of our humanity.

Screwtape addresses the idea of greatness by encouraging the concept of a historical Jesus, an idea frequently broached by believers and non-believers alike. He summarizes the many attempts to understand Jesus by tracking down His footsteps and traces of His existence. He adds that, in order to keep things interesting, the Evil One changes the nature of these constructions every 30 years or so. In turn, man continues to be fascinated by the idea of grasping who Jesus was when essentially He was unhistorical, and therefore unknowable according to the constraints of human perception. In a rare moment of truth, Screwtape clarifies:

“The documents say what they say and cannot be added to; each ‘historical Jesus’ there has to be got out of them by suppression at one point and exaggeration at another, and by that sort of guessing (brilliant is the adjective we take humans to apply to it) on which no one would risk ten shillings in ordinary life…” (106–107).

Put simply, we have to take the Scripture as the authority on Jesus, that it is complete and provides all the evidence we need to arrive at an understanding of Jesus’s time on earth and of His greatness. By demanding more evidence than God’s word provides, man becomes distracted by what He did rather than who He was. “For the real presence of the Enemy, otherwise experienced by men in prayer and sacrament, we substitute a merely probable, remote, shadowy, and uncouth figure, one who spoke a strange language and died a long time ago” (107).

The preceding passage demonstrates one of the most interesting elements of Lewis’s book: how the author maintains the persona of Screwtape. In this world, everything is upside down: the “Enemy” is the Lord, “our Father’s house” is hell, and “our Father” is Satan himself. Screwtape’s language sounds biblical and the hierarchy of his world is modeled on that of heaven; as readers, we must remain constantly on our guard against, first, taking Screwtape at his word and, second, being beguiled by language that sounds comforting and familiar, but is in fact insidiously treacherous.

The book’s final section, the “Toast,” received much criticism when it was first published as it contradicted prevailing ideas about education. Foremost, among these ideas was a preference for the cultivation of self-esteem at the expense of learning. To distinguish smarter children from others led to accusations of elitism, and Lewis notes (in the voice of Screwtape) that from there it was a short step to cries of “I’m as good as you” and contentions that anyone trying to be different was being “undemocratic” (163). The malicious misuse of the notion of democracy is one of the devil’s most powerful weapons; under its guise, sins of resentment and discontent fester. Lewis’s revelation of how democracy can be just another name for envy is somewhat shocking, especially to Americans who take great pride in their democratic heritage. Yet, Lewis counsels us to remember that government—even one as laudable as our own—is simply another human construct. In the end, we have to remember, to paraphrase Lewis, that the fate of nations is hardly as important as that of individual souls.

Leann Davis Alspaugh © 2009 all rights reserved.

 

March 30, 2009

Theatre and Music in March

“All life long the same questions, the same answers.”

Endgame by Samuel Beckett
American Repertory Theatre, Cambridge, MA

 Beckett Endgame, or Fin de partie (Beckett wrote it in French and translated it into English), is a meditation on the human condition as only Beckett the bemused curmudgeon could have imagined it.

When the current ART production opened, one Boston reviewer recalled the consternation that resulted in 1984 when director JoAnne Akalaitis planned significant departures from Beckett’s stage directions. Among her suggestions were changing the set from a single room to a post-apocalyptic subway station and adding an overture by Philip Glass. In addition, she proposed casting black actors in the roles of Hamm (the main character) and Nagg (his father). Word reached Beckett’s publishers and a testy exchange followed. Ultimately, the production went on with programs containing this disclaimer from Beckett himself: “Any production of ‘Endgame’ which ignores my stage directions is completely unacceptable to me. The American Repertory Theatre production which dismisses my directions is a complete parody of the play as conceived by me. Anybody who cares for the work couldn’t fail to be disgusted by this.”

No doubt, the encounter left everyone at the ART chastened. Beckett’s choice of the word “disgusted” implies a visceral repugnance, loathing, and aversion. That’s pretty strong stuff. But someone had to have asked the question: why bother to follow Beckett’s meticulous and hyper-focused stage directions in the rest of the play, but ignore his vision for the basic way the play looked on stage? Are there expendable elements to the stage directions?

Beckett’s publisher felt that Akalaitis’s interpretation skewed the play toward issues of the homelessness and miscegenation. The recent review revisits the story perhaps to imply that Beckett was intractable and possibly even a racist. Having been involved in theatre management, I can well imagine the stress of trying prepare an already difficult play and then facing the potential scandal of a production cancelled due to the playwright’s objections.

But there’s something else here worth addressing. In grad school, we talked a lot about authorial intentions. In literature and the performing arts, authorial intentions drive much of how we approach, interpret, enjoy, and discuss works of art. How closely should a conductor follow Beethoven’s metronome markings, given the instrument’s notorious inconsistency (and at the time its novelty). How does Henry James’s convoluted style and glacial pacing affect our reading of his novels? Was it really important to Samuel Beckett that the actors be in a plain room, that the main character's parents be housed in ashcans at the edge of the stage, and that all the actors be the same race?

This is the stuff of dissertations, but my opinion is that, yes, it does matter. Richard III works surprisingly well updated to the Third Reich, while Mimi in a leather jacket isn’t maybe the most successful reinterpretation of La Bohème. Would Shakespeare have protested? Would Puccini have threatened to shut down the opera house? Who knows, but in 1984, Beckett was still alive and exercised his right as a living artist to ascertain that his wishes were acknowledged and that his artistic vision was respected. The fact that Beckett specifies the actors’ movements down to the step in Endgame shows that he thought his authorial intentions were important—and that should tell us something whether or not the author is alive to enforce them.

It is also telling to read the letter from ART Director Gideon Lester in the program from the 2009 production. He refers to Akalaitis’s “bold production” as a “pivotal moment in the history of American contemporary theatre.” Diplomatically put. Lester goes on to write of the stamina, technique, and audacity required to stage Endgame. True enough. What comes next? “A theatre can only produce it with exactly the right cast.” A cast, it should be noted, that more closely corresponds to Beckett’s original wishes.

Written at a time of deep despair (when he wrote the play in 1955, Beckett had lost his father, mother, and brother), Endgame is tragically funny and hilariously dour. A blind invalid, Hamm occupies center stage, alternately master of and subject to his caretaker Clov. At the edge of the stage, Hamm’s parents, Nagg and Nell, pop up from ashcans, crying for pap or reminiscing about rowing on Lake Como. Only Beckett could have an actor portraying a mother live in a rubbish can and utter the line “Nothing is funnier than unhappiness, I grant you that.” Beckett’s facility with language also leads to dialogue that can trigger an instinctual laugh though the words are more than vaguely menacing:

HammWhy don't you kill me?
Clov: I don't know the combination of the cupboard.

It’s a fine brooding work, solemn and desolate. But Beckett clearly valued the human capacity for resilience and laughter. Physical humor—and there’s a lot of it in Endgame—alleviates the purgatorial feel of the stripped down stage where a man who cannot stand is dependent on another man who cannot sit. The term endgame, a chess reference, brings in many metaphors and symbols, and the names that Beckett has chosen all have interesting interpretations. Yet, one doesn’t require exigesis and dramaturgy to understand what going on here. If nothing else, there is an undeniable convergence, a need for fellowship, a motivation toward togetherness that draws attention to Beckett’s capacity for hope. Far from eager to distance himself from the human race, Beckett practiced a bracing kind of compassion. One that made few grand assurances other than an existential truth about the perennial nature of the human condition. The last words of the play—“You...  remain.”—confirm exactly this.

 

“The poor postman, he hates to come without a letter.”

Messe für zwei vierstimmige Chöre, Frank Martin
Oseh Shalom Bimromav, Michael Schachter
Songs of Love and War, Paul Moravec
Harvard-Radcliffe Collegium Musicum
Sanders Theatre, Harvard University

Sanders Theatre, a glorious Gothic confection, looks like a church but was never used for that purpose. Rather it is a memorial to Harvard men who died in the Civil War. The marble plaques in the lobby attest to the heroism of these soldiers. No less than Oliver Wendell Holmes composed a hymn in their honor as he laid the building’s cornerstone in 1870, prophesying: “Rise from the sod ye far columns and arches!
Tell their bright deeds to the ages unborn.”

The Collegium Musicum’s Reverence and Reflection concert included bright deeds in music, highlighting the Sanders Theatre’s well-deserved reputation for fine acoustics. The choir itself, composed of male and female students, is only one of nine faculty directed choruses on the Harvard campus. That’s more than 500 students singing along with almost 60 student-led operatic and theatrical productions per year, in addition to many other vocal and instrumental groups. These are happy statistics in a world where music is in danger of becoming a disposable commodity.

Martin The Frank Martin Mass for double choir is an intense work of deeply-felt faith. Martin (1890–1974, at right) completed the work in 1926, but felt it to be so personal an expression of faith that he did not allow it to be premiered until 1963: “I did not want it performed…I considered it… as being a matter between God and myself.”

I know the piece fairly well as the Maestro made a recording of it with two American choirs and it has moved to the top 10 of my favorite classical recordings. Expressive and lyrical, the mass combines seamlessly medieval and Renaissance modes with Ravel-like harmonies and textures. From the Credo to the Agnus Dei, it is a work of confidence in divine truth and beauty.

The program also included a lovely piece by Harvard student (and Collegium tenor) Michael Schachter. Oseh Shalom Bimromav uses text at the end of the Kaddish to remind us of the peace that comes from the consolation of obedience and the assurance of faith. Schachter has clearly absorbed the lush textures of the romantics to which he adds the rich Jewish cantorial tradition. He notes that the first section of the work uses a prelude to draw us in as individual listeners, establishing an empathy, and that the next section moves on to a fugue where the role of the collective of listeners and performers is emphasized. Schachter’s touch is sure, and his grasp of how to orchestrate voices makes me wonder what an instrumental piece of his might sound like.

Songs of Love and War by American composer Paul Moravec uses the texts of letters either to or from soldiers in four American wars. The setting employs chorus, a baritone soloist (the wonderful Sumner Thompson), trumpet, and strings. Moravec notes that the “the texts [appealed] to me on the strength of their simple dignity, compassion, and eloquence.” Rather than political statements, these letters reveal our all too human reactions in extreme circumstances. 

One of the most telling is the Vietnam veteran’s terse words: “Don’t ask questions/when I come home/If I feel like talking about it/I will, but otherwise—Don’t ask.” In 1918, Sol Segal wrote from the front to the mother of a fallen comrade, saying “Dear lady, the very thought that you are in grief tears my heart” and assured her that the Marines of the Twenty-third Company salute her. A Civil War soldier writes “Sarah, my love for you is deathless,/It seems to bind me with mighty cables…And yet my love of Country comes over me like a mighty wind/and draws me irresistibly on with all these chains to the battlefield.” How the attitudes toward war and duty and love have changed.

 

“Let all mortal flesh keep silent”

Canticum Calamitis MaritimaeJaakko Mäntijärvi
Various Irish songs
From Passion Week, Op. 58, Alexandre Grechaninov
Messe pour double choeurFrank Martin
Phoenix Chorale and Kansas City Chorale
Troy Savings Bank Music Hall, Troy, New York

Charlesbruffy At the very top of my favorite recordings that the Maestro has made in recent years are ones that contain three pieces from this concert: Martin’s Mass for Double Choir, Mäntijärvi’s tribute to the victims of the 1994 Estonia ferry disaster, and the gorgeous Grechaninov Passion Week. The common denominator here is the performers, the Phoenix Chorale (formerly the Phoenix Bach Choir) and the Kansas City Chorale. (The Phoenix Chorale just won the 2009 Grammy for Best Small Ensemble with its Spotless Rose recording and has received several nominations this year and last year.)

You may be surprised to learn that the Troy Savings Bank is one of America’s greatest halls and also the site of a performing arts series that originated in 1918. I asked the Maestro what makes the acoustics so great, and the answer was...nothing exotic, just the right combination of wooden seats and floor and diffusion through two tiers of balconies. Credit also has to go to the city of Troy and its love of music, a sustained effort that has kept music alive in a town that is only a ghost of its former self.

The Mäntijärvi’s haunting beginning was augmented by a recording of the Estonia’s mayday signal. To me, this was a bit overdramatic, but it was so brief that it did not really detract from the music. The piece begins with a soprano in an elevated balcony singing a folk melody. On stage, the choir first exhales in one breath and then begins a set of whispered prayers. The text is composed of the words of Psalm 107:23–30 and the broadcast of the disaster in Latin on Finnish radio. 

Mäntijärvi’s web site reads “Nil significat nisi oscillat. Du vap. Du vap. Du vap.” While the Canticum doesn’t swing (and in fact has nothing of levity about it), the use of Latin is redolent with meaning. The composer is clearly conversant in what is usually referred to as a dead language. Yet his piece reminds us that at one time, millions of believers cherished their faith at its sound. Mäntijärvi returns to its elegaic nature, this time as a memorial of and a living testament to 852 lost souls.

Grech The last work on the first half of this concert was five movements from the Passion Week, premiered in 1912. Grechaninov was one of the new Russian choral school, along with, among other composers, Rachmaninov. In fact, many critics feel that Grechaninov does not bear a comparison to Rachmaninov whose choral works are giants in the repertoire. It doesn’t take anything away from Rachmaninov to say that Grechaninov’s Passion Week is simply one of the finest works of Russian choral music ever written. Listening to it, one is certain that God is present.

Phoenix and Kansas City render this formidable work with loving care and immense musicianship. Their performance was quite literally spellbinding. The Maestro has related that some have described their singing as “more Russian than Russian.” A backhanded compliment it isn’t. This group has succeeded in understanding how not only to pronounce the mellifluous Russian, but also how to interpret the particularly Slavic spirituality that inspired it. Light and dark, richness and desolation, glorious music and eloquent silent—it’s all there in a monumental tribute to the Resurrection, the single event that makes Christianity possible.

 

 

March 05, 2009

Audio Guides Redux

Audio-guides It has already been noted in this space that I have little or no patience with museum audio guides. A recent event reinforced this antipathy.

A few weeks ago, I was standing in line at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) waiting to pay my admission fee. I had limited time and a show to review, so I was eager to hand over the cash (exact change for parking and entrance fee). In front of me, two young men held up the lengthening line as the admissions desk employee tried to figure out how to activate the audio-visual player. One device gave the admissions woman only limited trouble, but the second caused the line to stall for about 20 minutes, while the long-suffering LACMA employee tried and rejected several players before finding one that worked.

The young men expressed their apologies as did the LACMA employee, but the whole episode need never have happened. At the museum ostensibly to look at art, why can’t people do just that?

June 2009

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