fun stuff I may or may not get to: July 2013

This seems like a slow month, even for a July, but these all look worth the time and trouble. I could  use a slow month or two anyway; besides the perpetual backlog, I'm still digesting the fantastic Ojai North concerts that Cal Performances put on last weekend.

Shotgun Players present Sea of Reeds, a new monologue by Josh Kornbluth, 2 July to 4 August.

The San Francisco Silent Film Festival runs 18 - 21 July at the Castro Theater; I was  going to list highlights but I'd just end up listing everything, so check it all out here.

American Bach Soloists presents its annual summer festival of concerts and lectures, 12 - 21 July at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music; highlights include Handel's Esther and Bach's Mass in B minor; complete schedule here.

West Edge Opera presents Britten's The Turn of the Screw, 20, 26, and 28 July.

San Francisco Opera ends its season early in the month, but you can see future stars of opera in the Merola production of Britten's Rape of Lucretia on 11 and 13 (matinee) July, in the Everett Auditorium at 450 Church Street in San Francisco.

Poem of the Week 2013/25

Here's another boxing poem, and it's also another one by Ishmael Reed:

Petite Kid Everett

The bantamweight King of
Newark
He couldn't box
He couldn't dance
He just kept coming at
you, glass chin first
Taking five punches for
every one he connected with
you

Petite Kid Everett
He missed a lot
Slipped a lot and
By mid-life he'd
developed one heck
of a sorehead
Took to fighting in
the alley
Gave up wearing a mouthpiece
Beat up his trainers
Beat up the referee
Beat up his fans
Beat up everybody who was
in his corner

Even jumped on Houston Jr.
the lame pail boy
Who didn't have good sense
Petite Kid Everett
There's talk of a comeback
He's got new backers
He stands on one of the four
corners, near the Prudential Life
Building
Trading blows with ghosts
Don't it make you wanna cry?

Ishmael Reed

Here are some things I love about this poem:

I love that he's "Petite" Kid Everett; even more than little or tiny or Kid, petite gives you a sense of overwhelming odds against him – is it the fancy Frenchness of the word? its association with women's sizes? its general aura of daintiness? But it also sounds a bit grander than little or tiny: again, the fancy Frenchness, etc. In an almost Dickensian way, a lot of the character – his persistence, his loserdom – is rolled up in the name.

I love that he ends up standing on a corner, "near the Prudential Life / Building" – and there no doubt is an actual Prudential Life insurance company building on that corner in Newark, but a prudential approach to life is exactly what the flailing Petite Kid does not have – on one side, the vast imperturbable substantial walls of an impersonal calculating agency, on the other, a doomed man flailing away with increasingly random violence against first opponents, then friends, then bystanders, then ghosts – obsessions, visions, insubstantial but inescapable hallucinations.

And unlike last week's poem, the boxer's persistence isn't seen as necessarily an admirable, hopeful quality, and that's another thing I love about this poem: the way the last line jolts the whole thing into a certain framework. This isn't a sociological or protest poem about a man denied opportunities; it's much deeper than that, an encapsulation of rueful and even tragic wisdom about what life, at a basic level, is like, as the hapless Petite Kid spirals ineluctably down.

I took this from Reed's New and Collected Poems, 1964 - 2006.

Bronze by gold

Bronze by gold, Miss Douce's head by Miss Kennedy's head, over the crossblind of the Ormond bar heard the viceregal hoofs go by, ringing steel.

– Is that her? asked Miss Kennedy.

Miss Douce said yes, sitting with his ex, pearl gray and eau de Nil.

– Exquisite contrast, Miss Kennedy said.

When all agog Miss Douce said eagerly:

– Look at the fellow in the tall silk.

– Who? Where? gold asked more eagerly.

– In the second carriage, Miss Douce's wet lips said, laughing in the sun. He's looking. Mind till I see.

She darted, bronze, to the backmost corner, flattening her face against the pane in a halo of hurried breath.

Her wet lips tittered:

– He's killed looking back.

She laughed:

– O wept! Aren't men frightful idiots?

With sadness.

Miss Kennedy sauntered sadly from bright light, twining a loose hair behind an ear. Sauntering sadly, gold no more, she twisted twined a hair. Sadly she twined in sauntering gold hair behind a curving ear.

– It's them has the fine times, sadly then she said.

And is it Bloomsday again? Then Happy Bloomsday once again to my mountain flowers.

sketches for Gesualdo, Prince of Madness

Last Friday I went to the San Francisco Conservatory of Music for Opera Parallele's "opera lab" first public presentation of Gesualdo, Prince of Madness, based on the life of the Italian Renaissance composer, with music by Dante de Silva, libretto by Mitchell Morris, and graphics by Mark Simmons. The performance was held in the smaller recital hall there, which was packed. As usual with Opera Parallele, Brian Staufenbiel handled the staging and Nicole Paiement conducted. An electronic keyboard stood in for most of the orchestra, but there was also piano, percussion, and, for that distinctive Renaissance sound, a theorbo, along with a trio of women singers, to evoke the madrigals Gesualdo wrote for women's voices.

The opera is in two acts; the performance, which started late, lasted about an hour and fifteen minutes. The first half tells the notorious story of Gesualdo's murder of his wife and her lover when he caught them in bed together. The second half shows the aftermath: Gesualdo, struggling with obsessive memories of the murdered pair, withdrawn into a private world of musical calculations, is married for political reasons to a different young woman, who, advised by a cunning old attendant, is plotting her own way to freedom. The plot is as lurid as anything John Webster might have come up with, complete with adultery, murder, mad scenes, cross-dressing, and deadly herbal poisons, and is a reminder of the reason so many Jacobean tragedies take place in Italy.

But the emphasis isn't so much on the violence as on Gesualdo's distracted mental state; there is frenzied music, but also disquieting, plinking sounds reminiscent of a brain being picked at and over obsessively. There aren't really stand-alone arias; the dialogue flows on as in Wozzeck. Complex ensembles evoke Renaissance madrigals, and the music sounds contemporary with both us and the characters on stage.

Opera Parallele's stagings are always stylish, adventurous, and experimental. The idea for this one is that the "staging" will actually be a projection done in the style of a graphic novel. I assume in the finished version the singers will be in the pit or otherwise out of sight, but I might be wrong about that. I also don't know if the finished version will have continuous movements (as in an animated film) or "panels" that give way to other panels, with some interior animation, which is what we saw on Friday.

It's an interesting idea, and in some ways is the ideal of a certain type of opera creator (or fan): the characters will always look as they do in the drawings, without the variations and chance qualities that you get with different individuals (particularly in opera casting, where voice and not appearance is the primary concern). But I like seeing the different qualities different performers bring to a role; I was thinking about this when Nikola Printz started singing Artemisia, the older lady-in-waiting – I could tell immediately from the way she darkened her voice not only that she was singing a different character from before, but the type of guarded, calculating character this woman was. It played off in interesting ways against the singer's youthful appearance and Louise Brooks-style hairdo. But on screen Artemisia will always have the same dour, dessicated look. The drawings are very well done but personally I prefer a more stylized look (the style here is similar to the fairly realistic style used by Dave Gibbons for Alan Moore's Watchmen).

In addition to Printz, the singers were Daniel Cilli as Carlo, impassioned and convincing as both killer and composer, Michelle Rice as his first wife Maria, Maya Kherani as his second wife Leonora, Andres Ramirez as Maria's lover, Chris Filipowicz as a male servant, and Sarah Eve Brand, Lora Libby, and Rachel Rush as the female trio. Though there were projections there were no surtitles (a printed libretto was provided). I had little trouble understanding the words, though, except for some of the ensembles and the higher-lying voices, which are where I usually have trouble. Keisuke Nakagoshi played piano, Adam Cockerham played theorbo, McKenzie Camp played percussion, and Eva-Maria Zimmerman handled the keyboard. It was difficult to believe they'd only been playing this piece together for a week or so.

The opera has been in development for several years, but the company has only recently started working on it as a group. I look forward to seeing the finished version, or other intermediate stages. There was a Q-and-A session afterwards with the artists, followed by a reception, but I was unable to stay for either. Perhaps if I had I would have seen Axel Feldheim, who was there, though sadly for me I missed him.

Krispy Kritters at Cutting Ball Theater

A few Sundays ago I went to the Cutting Ball Theater to see their world premiere production of Andrew Saito's Krispy Kritters in the Scarlett Night, directed by Rob Melrose. The cheerful and efficient young woman who handles the tickets asked me how I was doing. "I'm OK," I lied. "Just OK?" she said. "Maybe our show will make you feel better." I smiled weakly, because that is what I do in situations like that, but damned if she wasn't right: two hours later I walked out feeling much, much better. Because a terrific evening of theater can do that to you.

But I'm not sure how to describe this play, or what I can say that would entice people to go, though I think they should. I often wonder why we decide to attend one event and not another – what piques our interest? People usually fall back on plot, but I often find that the least interesting element of a show – it's certainly the most transitory; once you let the horse of plot out of the theatrical barn, you can't coax it back inside. Some works grow richer if you watch them knowing how they develop and end, but works planned with such subtlety usually have other elements (character, psychological or social insight, language) that are even stronger than plot.

On the other hand, wondering what happens next is a basic human impulse. It's the energy that keeps a story moving forward. But I have to admit that one reason I've never seen a play by Neil Labute (on stage; I did see the film version of The Company of Men, which struck me as a bit off, like something written by someone who had read anthropological articles about "the alpha male" and corporate life but had never actually experienced either) is that they're generally sold in terms of their plots, which tend towards such overheated and calculated "controversy" that they seem to me the dramatic equivalent of clickbait. They just don't sound interesting to me, though I can see that they might to some others.

So I'm not sure what to say here that would be the right thing to say. Enthusiastic adjectives are too commonplace to catch attention, and though a lot happens in this play . . . well, the descriptions of Krispy Kritters that I saw beforehand made me think it might be trying too hard, or be a bit too cutesy or quirky. It's not; it's like being trapped inside several interesting minds at once. Here are some elements of the show, and I hope there's something that snags your attention:

There's a young man, Drumhead, who works in a mortuary, and has his own furry little version of a glass menagerie: a collection of stuffed mice and other vermin that he keeps in matchboxes (except for the hamster Jesus, hanging on a cross in his room); he's fascinated by the prostitute Scarlett. Scarlett's madame is her grandmother, a dear, semi-doddering old woman who enthusiastically recommends masturbation to women, and who occasionally loses her hearing, and when that happens, Scarlett or Nurse Candy will have to suck out the animal obstructing her ear, and the animal, caught in a paper bag, usually carries some sort of object as well, like a shoe (are these spirit animals carrying totems and portents? you can go as real or as metaphysical as you like with them); the animals get dumped out into the growing, growling, threatening menagerie in the backyard and basement. The grandmother sometimes requires a key body part from Scarlett; Nurse Candy traipses over and sweetly insinuates that Scarlett needs to do right by Gran Ma Ma until Scarlett gives in and the doctors take out her kidney or lung or whatever.

There's a rival prostitute as well, a young Japanese woman called Snowflake, and there are constant power struggles among these women. Drumhead is both fascinated and repelled by their sexuality. His father Pap Pap, a legless old man in a wheelchair, fights naval battles in a basin he holds on his lap. He dreams of getting his legs back. There are mysterious deaths among Scarlett's clients; Drumhead sees them at the morgue and plays detective, ineffectually, while he moons over Scarlett and Snowflake moons over him. It's all grounded in lots of bodily fluids, and lots of animal life, and lots of sex and death. There's flagellation and youthful yearning and aged regrets. Grotesque comedy gives way to grotesque tragedy, and vice versa. It all makes perfect sense while you experience it.

Credit for that goes not only to playwright Saito, who kept it all together while also taking it all apart, but also to director Melrose, and the versatile, deeply talented cast: Felicia Benefield as Scarlett, Wiley Naman Strasser as Drumhead, Marjorie Cump-Shears as Gran Ma Ma, Mimu Tsujimura as Snowflake, David Sinaiko as Pap Pap, Maura Halloran as Judge Gristle and Nurse Candy, and Drew Wolff and Caleb Cabrera in a variety of smaller roles.

It's the best kind of theater: you can't describe it, you can only really experience it. And if you go see it again, I think you'd have a different experience each time – you'll pick up on different themes and connections. The run was originally scheduled to end 16 June, but has been extended to the 23rd. Click here for tickets. Andrew Saito is just beginning a three-year assignment as Resident Playwright at Cutting Ball. I'm looking forward to what the next three years bring.

the sweet By and By

On a recent Thursday I went to the Ashby Stage to see the Shotgun Players presentation of By and By, a new play by Lauren Gunderson, directed by Mina Morita.

We plunge right into the story, with Denise's shocked reaction to her father Steven's announcement that she was cloned from his wife Denise, who died in a car crash about eighteen years ago. He is finally telling her this because a quasi-governmental agency has been trying to contact them – this is a slightly future world in which cloning humans is possible, but not all that successful; most of them die in their mid-teens, so the agency is very curious to find out why Denise has so far shown no signs of the usual illnesses. The downside to the immediate plunge into the action, though, is that we have no sense of what this family is like normally. I'm sure it would be a bit of a shock to discover you were cloned (I wonder how people react when or if they find out they were conceived through in vitro fertilization?), but Denise's histrionic, obscenity-laden repetitions make her seem like an annoying, self-dramatizing adolescent, not like the wonderful person Steven keeps saying she is. (The dead wife, also played by Jennifer LeBlanc, shows up for Steven's benefit after the daughter has run away, and is much more appealing.)

The cloning is very expensive – a cost of a million dollars per procedure is cited. We live in a country in which millions of people can't afford even basic health care, and there is angry debate over whether they should be able to. No one raises this issue. We live in a country in which reproductive rights and euthenasia and respect for life and what that means are also fiercely debated, but no one raises those issues either. We live in a country in which wealth and power are increasingly concentrated in a small percentage of the population, but here cloning seems widely and easily available. (No one seems concerned about overpopulation, either.) The only objection to the process seems to be that it doesn't work that well, which is why the quasi-governmental agency seems to be trying to shut down or at least control the process, despite the money to be made, a development which, how shall I say, does not seem congruent with long-term trends in American society. (As in last season's uneven Precious Little, the play is weirdly blinkered by a very narrow, class-privileged view of American realities). Some of the obvious (and potentially lucrative) possibilities of cloning are never mentioned at all: organ harvesting, for example, or the creation of a class of special workers or soldiers (that may seem too science-fiction-dystopian, but I recently saw an article on physiological research to increase wakefulness in combat soldiers; a huge amount of scientific research is funded by the military, and our society is increasingly militarized, but not in the world we see here).

Money is treated very vaguely throughout. The cost of the procedure is mentioned, but not how the families raised the money, or how the massive debt affects their lives; the only other clone we meet is a young black man who seems to come from an ordinary middle- or maybe working-class family. How did his mother get a million dollars to recreate her son? Steven (I wonder if he was made so nebbishy so he didn't seem like a Dr Frankenstein?) assures his daughter that he quit the lab after he cloned her, but though there's no indication he works anywhere else, he seems to have plenty of money – presumably he gets some sort of residuals from the process, since he invented it, though again this is never spelled out, and no one, even the angry receptionist at the clone support agency, accuses him of profiting from the pain of others, and he seems to think that quitting the lab absolved him of all further association with cloning.

I've gone on here about cloning and money because the play doesn't. It uses cloning almost entirely as a metaphor for trying to hang on to a loved one in spite of death. (Though it's an imperfect metaphor since, as Steven assures his daughter, cloning doesn't recreate the same person, because of the influence of environment and so forth – this raises the interesting possibility that some people paid a million dollars for what turned out to be an unsatisfactory reproduction of a missing original, but that possibility isn't explored).

As I mentioned, Steven's wife appears to him when his daughter runs off, and she is full of the sort of warm, loving wisdom not untinged with condescension frequent to spirit visitors from beyond as well as to wives. She finally urges him to let her go – in other words, he may be the agent of his actions, but she is the agent of his emotional growth. In life as on stage, that's certainly not an unknown situation, but it would have been maybe less conventional to have a more painful realization on his part – that his experiences as a father and widower and scientist had led him to grow past her, since her development had been cut off by her early death.

At the end, father and daughter are re-united; he has tried to shield her from scrutiny, but now, in an effort to move on and, in general, heal, he talks her into going public with him. Earlier his dead wife had chided him for not dating again (though she also expresses jealousy that he might do so) and had mentioned how restricted his life has been since her death, and even though this is because he's trying to protect his cloned daughter, I also thought that maybe Gunderson had noticed, as I have, how underpopulated a lot of plays are. But I guess I was wrong about that, since father and daughter head off into a future that seems clear of anything to trouble or harass them, outside of the committee: for one thing, there seem to be no media, social or mainstream, that might hound and exploit them (can't you see the headlines now? "Clone Girl Breaks the Silence! Clone Girl: 'I'm not my mother!' Clone Girl in DUI!"). There is no indication that there might be violence directed towards them, or even lawsuits, or other unpleasantness or danger. It's all about their personal emotional growth, which seems to happen in a social vacuum.

It's not that every play needs to be a searing denunciation of American realities, but if you're going to bring up a topic like cloning, you need to make it more than a hook. I had the feeling Gunderson really just wanted to write a play about moving on after the death of a loved one. And as such this play has some touching scenes – between father and daughter, and husband and wife, and with the ill young man, and with the wife's kindly, aging sister, whose mind is starting to wander. There are some beautiful speeches about appreciating each moment, because you never know which will be the last (I guess I envy people who haven't already been taught that by life). But the superficial handling of the cloning theme keeps weakening the play.

The cast is strong, though I felt they were sometimes a bit too emphatic, but then I often feel that, so maybe that's just me, though the Ashby Stage is such an intimate space, I wish more advantage were taken of the intimacy. Michael Patrick Gaffney is Steven, Jennifer LeBlanc is both wife and daughter Denise, Lynne Hollander plays the other female roles, and Bari Robinson the other male roles (it would have been witty, or at least interesting, to work the multiple roles played by two actors into the cloning theme). The play moves rapidly, lasting about seventy minutes with no intermission. It runs through 23 June; click here for more information.

Poem of the Week 2013/24

the loser

and the next I remembered I'm on a table,
everybody's gone; the head of bravery
under light, scowling, flailing me down . . .
and then some toad stood there, smoking a cigar:
"Kid you're no fighter," he told me,
and I got up and knocked him over a chair;
it was like a scene in a movie, and
he stayed there on his big rump and said
over and over: "Jesus, Jesus, whatsamatta wit
you?" and I got up and dressed,
the tape still on my hands, and when I got home
I tore the tape off my hands and
wrote my first poem,
and I've been fighting
ever since.

Charles Bukowski

I don't really have much to add to this. Poets, keep battling! I took this from Perfect in Their Art: Poems on Boxing from Homer to Ali, edited by Robert Hedin and Michael Waters. More books by Bukowski are available here.

a fantastic new Flute

Kenneth Branagh's film of The Magic Flute was made in 2006 but is only now being released in the United States. I have no idea why there was such a delay – the film is captivating, and Mozart is well served. Over the years I've seen quite a few of Branagh's films (he's described on the DVD case as "the director of Thor," which is accurate but not adequate), and though I generally liked them (some of them quite a lot) I was really not prepared for the excellence and inventiveness of his Magic Flute. I preferred it to Ingmar Bergman's celebrated film adaptation. Even if, like me, you feel you've seen enough Magic Flutes to tide you over for the next decade, or two, I urge you to check out this one.

As with Bergman's film, this is an adaptation for film of the opera (as opposed to a recording of a stage production). Branagh did the adaptation, as well as directing, and he had the brilliant idea of setting the story in the midst of World War I, the war that broke open the modern world. Before I saw the movie I would have hesitated to declare that a brilliant idea, but the result is completely convincing, and accommodates the familiar story with surprising ease. The setting amid the trenches and the slaughter immediately raises the stakes, and many elements that before had a fairy-tale arbitrariness now make life-and-death sense: the vow of silence, for example, when Tamino cannot tell even Pamina what his mission is. For once I wasn't irritated that he didn't turn to comfort her. Or the trial by fire, when he and Pamina, both holding the flute, actually walk through enemy fire in their quest for peace.

But I shouldn't make the staging sound too literal: though there are some substitutions (the fierce serpent at the beginning is a hissing grenade, which releases a long tail of black smoke), we still have the titular flute and the spell-casting silver bells, and there are elements that evoke Surrealism, one of the several artistic responses to the war: a trench-wall of sandbags sings a chorus; characters fly and bounce and appear in different locations; when Papageno dreams of one day finding a Papagena, he is suddenly in a bright flowery field, and a huge pair of red lips float Magritte-like in front of him, until he suddenly snaps back to reality, where he's in a cell.

The ambiguities of war help explain some of the story's seeming contradictions: who can tell who is good and who is not and why, in the middle of battle? The Three Ladies first appear when the grenade knocks out Tamino; they float down from the night sky, all in wimpled white, like nurses or nuns. Then when they see how handsome the young soldier is, they pull off their headresses and show a lot more cleavage than nuns or nurses generally show. It's amusing, and part of learning how deceptive appearances are, particularly during wartime.

There's a constant tension in the film between the realistic and the magical (between war and peace, you might say). At the beginning as the overture plays a white butterfly flutters in musical time over green fields and then over the trenches and then war planes drop out of the clouds and also start rolling and dipping in time. The three boys appear and disappear and float in air or roll out of chimneys (their white and beige garments showing no sign of the soot billowing out with them) but they also behave like three actual little boys: when they clap their hands over Papageno's mouth, they do it a little too roughly, enjoying the mischief of it. (There are many excellent touches like this in the performances, as when Pamina hastily smooths her hair before seeing Tamino again.)

There's no simple equation of, say, the Queen of the Night with the Germans and Sarastro with the British. She is bent on war, driven by a personal enmity towards Sarastro (as in Bergman's film, he is a former lover of hers). She makes her entrance backlit, astride a tank. As she sings her first aria to Tamino, commanding him to rescue her captured daughter, the camera moves in until her mouth, issuing its sparkler notes, takes up the whole left-hand side of the screen, and as the other tanks in the background slowly move over the horizon, they look as if they are all issuing from her mouth. The movie is full of inventive touches like that.

Sarastro sometimes seems to be a medical man, at other times a military leader. Subtle touches make him more complex than usual: Sarastro is a good man, but how good, ultimately, were any of the men who led the war? One of the mystic signs of wisdom inscribed on the wall of his temple is the famous line from Horace which the British Empire took from the Roman, Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori (It is sweet and fitting to die for one's fatherland), a reminder of the imperialistic, patriarchal culture of war and patriotism that led to such massive carnage and devastation.

Monostatos is still a dark-skinned man, and initially I was a little surprised that Branagh didn't just change that to avoid the racially-tinged treatment of the character. But it lends some complexity to him; he feels he's victimized because of his skin color (he smashes mirrors as he laments his appearance), and it's a reminder of the imperial era's pervasive racism (he first appears in sort of Indian garb). But this staging doesn't excuse Monostatos or make him too sympathetic; he still tries to rape Pamina. There are darker-skinned men who have positions of authority in Sarastro's army. The crowd that supports Sarastro contains many different types of people (as many as were ruled by the British Empire), and I felt this conveyed the universal import of the story better than Bergman's device of showing "faces of many lands" during the overture.

This is the only Flute I've seen in which the very end, the final attack against Sarastro by the Queen of the Night, Monostatos, and the Three Ladies, doesn't feel sort of arbitrary. Amid the celebrations of the triumph and subsequent wedding of Tamino and Pamina, the Queen and company scale the walls of Sarastro's tower. Sarastro tries to help her but the Queen's rage and despair are so great she chooses death rather than his help. This is not only psychologically plausible, it also helps complete the theme of suicide – both Pamina and then Papageno finally resist the urge to kill themselves (though he's never quite as serious about it), but the Queen cannot bring herself to reconcile with her enemy.

Yes, this is an opera, so music must have the final word, and fortunately the visual felicities and thought-provoking staging are in service of an excellent performance. James Conlon conducted, pacing and shaping the music beautifully (and I believe I also saw him in a Hitchcock-like cameo as an officer in the trenches, comforting a sharpshooter). Joseph Kaiser as Tamino really dominates the story as a leading man in a way that stage Taminos usually don't – and here the wartime setting definitely helps; as I have previously noted, Tamino is the most hilariously unmanly of all opera heroes, but there's something really at stake in what he does here, and the chivalrous idealism that motivates his actions movingly evokes the high-minded romanticism of many of the young men killed in the war. The charismatic Kaiser is an excellent actor as well as a singer of warmth and sensitivity.

Benjamin Jay Davis as Papageno also gained from the wartime setting; he's still a bird-catcher (he first shows up with a canary used to test for poison gas) and still fun-loving, but Davis brings out a wistful side that sometimes get shortchanged when it's all about Papageno guzzling booze (here his drink of choice is beer, not wine, which shows how careful the adaptation is with details; of course a working-class man like Papageno would drink beer, not wine). Rene Pape brings his sonorous authority to Sarastro. The women are just as strong; Amy Carson is a lovely Pamina (when Tamino first sees her portrait, he imagines dancing with her, in a swirly swoony black-and-white dance that epitomizes youthful romanticism). Lyubov Petrova brings surprising nuance to the Queen of the Night. The men in particular had clear diction, though it's probably also more difficult to understand words sung by higher voices. Generally all the soloists are clear. Ensembles are more difficult to understand, which is to be expected. I did wish the DVD had the option of subtitles, though in general they weren't necessary.

The excellent English libretto is by Stephen Fry – no filler, no banging rhymes, no straining for effect; mostly just good straightforward English rhymes, and the right balance of jokiness and seriousness in the dialogue. I had to laugh when Papageno rescues Pamina and tells her about Tamino who loves her after seeing her portrait, and she says, "But where is he?" I always wonder that too during that scene. But then she and Papageno sing that all who are deceitful and treacherous should be punished, and we see the battle lines and the trenches of a war brought about by deceit and treachery and foolishness, with all the attendant waste and slaughter of a generation, and I found myself, to my surprise, bursting into tears.

The film is being released in theaters Sunday 9 June, with a reprise screening Tuesday 11 June. In some theaters the Sunday screening will be followed by a webcast Q-and-A session from London with Branagh (check www.emergingpictures.com to check for showtimes and theaters near you). The film is also being released on DVD on Tuesday 11 June, and is available on Amazon and the other usual sources.

fun stuff I may or may not get to: June 2013

To pick up where I left off on my preview of this preview, Cal Performances closes out its season with its annual presentation of Ojai North; this year's director is Cal Performances favorite Mark Morris. A highlight is sure to be the world premiere of Spring, Spring, Spring, Morris's new version of The Rite of Spring as rescored by The Bad Plus and featuring the Mark Morris Dance Group, but the entire schedule is jampacked with enticements, some free, and I encourage you to check it all out here. The festival runs 12 - 15 June.

San Francisco Opera closes out its season with Mozart's Cosi Fan Tutte, Offenbach's Tales of Hoffman, and the world premiere of Mark Adamo's The Gospel of Mary Magdalen. The Opera has also sponsored a host of Magdalen-related ancillary events, some of which are upcoming. Performances of all three operas runs through early July.

The San Francisco Symphony closes its season with a strong series of concerts: Kirill Karabits conducts Honegger's Pacific 231 and the Sibelius 2, along with Britten's Double Concerto, featuring Concertmaster Alexander Barantschik and principal Violist Jonathan Vinocour, 6 - 9 June; Roberto Abbado conducts Schumann's Genoveva Overture, the USA premiere of Ivan Fedele's Scena, the Schubert 3, and the Schumann Piano Concerto, with soloist Jonathan Biss (returning to Schumann and San Francisco after his excellent four-concert series earlier this year for San Francisco Performances), 13 - 15 June; Michael Tilson Thomas conducts Stravinsky in honor of the centennial of The Rite of Spring: first up is the Rite, Agon, and the Violin Concerto with soloist Gil Shaham, 19 - 20 June, followed by an exploration of Stravinsky's Russian roots, on a program featuring the Rite, Les Noces, and Russian folk songs with the Dmitri Pokrovsky Ensemble, 21 - 22 June; then for the season finale Tilson Thomas leads West Side Story, 27 June - 2 July, with Alexandra Silber as Maria and Cheyenne Jackson as Tony. I haven't heard her before, but I heard him in Finian's Rainbow on Broadway about three years ago; he's a very winning leading man.

The San Francisco Silent Film Festival presents The Hitchcock 9, nine silent Hitchcock films newly restored by the British Film Institute, with live music. That's at the Castro Theater, 14 - 16 June. The Festival also offers a special Hitchcock walking tour of San Francisco on Saturday, 15 June.

The Cutting Ball Theater's Hidden Classics series closes its season with Leonid Andreev's The Black Masks, in a new translation by Allison Horsley, at 1:00 on Sunday 9 June. And Andrew Saito's Krispy Kritters in the Scarlett Night, which I recommend highly, runs through 16 June.

Ray of Light Theater presents Sondheim's Into the Woods, 31 May - 29 June.

Crowded Fire Theater presents 410 [GONE] by Frances Ya-Chu Cowhig, 6 - 29 June, at Thick House Theater in San Francisco.

The New Conservatory Theatre Center presents Charles Busch's The Divine Sister, 31 May - 29 June.

And the International Orange Chorale of San Francisco presents recent works by women composers; two concerts remain in the run, Friday 7 June at 5:00 in the Solarium Atrium at 55 2nd Street, San Francisco, and Saturday 8 June at 7:30 at St Matthew's Lutheran Church at 3281 16th Street in San Francisco. Performances are free but donations are encouraged and appreciated.

Poem of the Week 2013/23

Sappho: Fragment 47 x 14

The last time I held a Sapphopalooza, we looked at six different versions of what is possibly her only surviving complete poem, the Hymn to Aphrodite. This time I thought it would be interesting to see the many possibilities of one short fragment – really just a simile, about love but grand in the epic style, that survives from an otherwise unknown poem. The oldest version here from my ever-growing collection of Sappho translations is only from the late 1950s. I think earlier periods prized these surviving remnants of the past, but were more likely to see in them antiquarian rather than aesthetic interest; the twentieth century, under the influence of Imagism and other poetics that favor brevity and fragmentation, were more likely to find a remnant like this a satisfactory poem on its own.

And it is indeed a vivid and emotionally complete statement. The translations, though all from a relatively compact period, show a surprising range emotionally (from wonderment to agony and various places in between) and technically (from an emphasis on the fragmentary and dislocated to attempts at recreating the formal structure of the original). Each version reflects a slightly different view of love, of Sappho, of what Sappho should sound like to our foreign ears, and of what makes an effective poem.

 The original was preserved in the Orations of Maximus of Tyre:

Socrates says Eros is a sophist, Sappho calls him a weaver of tales. Socrates is driven mad for Phaedrus by Eros, while Sappho's heart is shaken by Eros like a wind falling on oaks on a mountain; (i.e.):
Ἔρος δ’ ἐτίναξέ μοιφρένας, ὠς ἄνεμος κὰτ ὄρος δρύσιν ἐμπέτων

That quotation is from the Loeb Classical Library text, and so is the first translation below. I'm starting with this one because, as previously noted, the purpose of the Loeb series is to provide a straightforward, fairly denotative guide on the right-hand pages to the original on the left-hand pages, so this version should be a fairly clear guide to the basic meaning of the words. The other translations are arranged alphabetically by the translator's surname; the date after each is the copyright date of the translation. One translator rendered it twice; his come in order of copyright date.

Love shook my heart like a wind falling on oaks on a mountain.
— trans. David A. Campbell, Greek Lyric: Sappho & Alcaeus, 1982

          Love shook my heart
like the wind on the mountain
rushing over the oak trees
— trans. Josephine Balmer, Poems & Fragments, 1984

Without warning

As a whirlwind
swoops on an oak
Love shakes my heart
— trans. Mary Barnard, Sappho: A New Translation, 1958

THE BLAST OF LOVE
Like a mountain whirlwind
punishing the oak trees,
love shattered my heart.
— trans. Willis Barnstone, Sappho and the Greek Lyric Poets, 1962

Eros

Love shook my heart like wind
on a mountain punishing oak trees.
— trans. Willis Barnstone, Sweetbitter Love: Poems of Sappho: A New Translation, 2006

          Eros shook my
mind like a mountain wind falling on oak trees
— trans. Anne Carson, If Not, Winter: Fragments of Sappho, 2002

Desire has shaken my mind
As wind in the mountain forests
Roars through trees.
— trans. Guy Davenport, 7 Greeks, 1965

Love shakes my heart
like a wind
sweeping down a mountain
onto oaks
— trans. Suzy Q. Groden, The Poems of Sappho, 1966

     Eros has shaken my mind,
wind sweeping down the mountain on oaks
— trans. Stanley Lombardo, Poems and Fragments, 2002

like a cyclone
shattering oak
     love smote
          my heart
— trans. Richard O'Connell, 1975, from The Sappho Companion, edited by Margaret Reynolds

Like a gale smiting an oak
On mountainous terrain,
Eros, with a stroke,
Shattered my brain.
— trans. Aaron Poochigian, Stung with Love: Poems and Fragments, 2009

Then love shook my heart like the wind that falls on
     oaks in the mountains.
— trans. Jim Powell, The Poetry of Sappho, 2007

Love shook my senses,
like wind crashing on mountain oaks.
— trans. Diane J. Rayor, Sappho's Lyre: Archaic Lyric and Women Poets of Ancient Greece, 1991

          Love
shakes my heart like the wind rushing down on
     the mountain oaks.
— trans. M L West, Greek Lyric Poetry, 1993

(The second photo was taken at the San Francisco Legion of Honor; the others are from the Metropolitan Museum's classical galleries.)

a preview of the preview

I seem to be falling behind at a faster pace than usual these days, so though I'm putting together my usual monthly preview for June, I thought I'd mention some performances of interest that are coming right up:

On Tuesday, 4 June, at 8:00 in the concert hall of the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, Curious Flights presents the second concert of its inaugural season. This one celebrates the centenary of Benjamin Britten with some of his rarer chamber music pieces, including the west coast premiere of  a reconstructed concerto for clarinet. I went to their first concert and enjoyed it tremendously. Tickets and more information are available here.

On Friday, 7 June, at 7:00, again at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, Opera Parallele presents a workshop performance of Gesualdo, Prince of Madness, a new opera based on the lurid true-life story of, no surprise, Gesualdo, with music by Dante De Silva and libretto by Mitchell Morris. As usual Nicole Paiement conducts and Brian Staufenbiel is in charge of the production. The idea here is to make the opera sort of a living graphic novel. The workshop is free but the venue is small so tickets are limited and on a first-come, first-served basis (pre-reserved seating is available for donors). More information here.

And I assume I'll have my regular preview up by mid-month, but it doesn't hurt to remind everyone that from 12 - 15 June Cal Performances presents Ojai North, guided this year by Mark Morris – full information on the awesomeness here.

Poem of the Week 2013/22

Today is Memorial Day in the United States, a holiday that began after the Civil War, when it was known as "Decoration Day" because southern white women began decorating the graves of Confederate soldiers who fell defending states' rights, or race-based slavery and white supremacy, or their homeland, or their "way of life," or just because they followed orders to fight, or for any number of other reasons. The holiday has since expanded to commemorate the dead American soldiers in all our wars, just unjust and mixed, with all their various personal motivations for fighting. It also has come to mark the informal beginning of the summer season, which means mostly that in our stuffy airless cubicles we complain about how hot it is outside, instead of how cold.

Here is a poem from the Civil War, from Walt Whitman:

Vigil Strange I Kept on the Field One Night

Vigil strange I kept on the field one night,
When you my son and my comrade dropt at my side that day,
One look I but gave which your dear eyes return'd with a look I shall never forget,
One touch of your hand to mine O boy, reach'd up as you lay on the ground,
Then onward I sped in the battle, the even-contested battle,
Till late in the night reliev'd to the place at last again I made my way,
Found you in death so cold dear comrade, found your body son of responding kisses, (never again on earth responding,)
Bared your face in the starlight, curious the scene, cool blew the moderate night-wind,
Long there and then in vigil I stood, dimly around me the battle-field spreading,
Vigil wondrous and vigil sweet there in the fragrant silent night,
But not a tear fell, not even a long-drawn sigh, long, long I gazed,
Then on the earth partially reclining sat by your side leaning my chin in my hands,
Passing sweet hours, immortal and mystic hours with you dearest comrade — not a tear, not a word,
Vigil of silence, love and death, vigil for you my son and my soldier,
As onward silently stars aloft, eastward new ones upward stole,
Vigil final for you brave boy, (I could not save you, swift was your death,
I faithfully loved you and cared for you living, I think we shall surely meet again,)
Till at latest lingering of the night, indeed just as the dawn appear'd,
My comrade I wrapt in his blanket, envelop'd well his form,
Folded the blanket well, tucking it carefully over head and carefully under feet,
And there and then and bathed by the rising sun, my son in his grave, in his rude-dug grave I deposited,
Ending my vigil strange with that, vigil of night and battlefield dim,
Vigil for boy of responding kisses, (never again on earth responding,)
Vigil for comrade swiftly slain, vigil I never forget, how as day brighten'd,
I rose from the chill ground and folded my soldier well in his blanket,
And buried him where he fell.

Walt Whitman

This is not a poem about war, or even battle: we are given no information on who is fighting whom, or why, or even where (we can infer that these are Union soldiers in the American Civil War, based on what we know of Whitman's life and the context of the poem within the Drum-Taps section of Leaves of Grass, but if you handed the poem to someone without attribution or context that reader couldn't find this information within the poem itself). There are no mentions of generals or other commanders, or strategy, or what if anything is at stake, and no descriptions of the fighting other than that it is "even-contested." The speaker was presumably on the winning side, whichever it was for that battle, since he could return to where his friend fell and stay there all night and then bury the boy at dawn. Though he later calls the site a battle field, initially it appears in its more basic eternal shape as simply a field.

The dead boy himself is characterized enough to be vivid and his death felt as a loss – he is brave, he is dear, he is a comrade – but he's not so individual that he could only be one particular youth; he stands for all the young men cut off in their youth by war. His age is emphasized: he is referred to repeatedly as a boy and as a sort of son to the speaker (who is presumably a bit older, though still young enough to be a soldier as well). The language the speaker uses around the dead soldier evokes a rich complex of many types of love: that of a comrade, a friend, a parent, a caregiver, even a hint of the erotic: the first time we hear of the responding kisses, the youth is seen in a filial capacity ("son of responding kisses"), but the second time, he is simple "boy of responding kisses." The nineteenth century was in some ways more open to complicated emotional and physical relationships among men than our own supposedly more tolerant time, when all such relationships tend to be reduced to simply sexual ones, so I think it's important to read passages such as this with a view to complications, rather than deciding (as the simplistic tendency often is nowadays) that some predetermined social category of our own time is what the poem is "really" about. (There are too many references to the fallen boy as the speaker's son for a purely sexual reading not to be kind of creepy.) Whitman always and intentionally eludes our easy views. I think the important thing here is that all kinds of possible loves swirl around this figure – and all of them are cut off; in the chant-like nature of the poem, each time we hear of "responding kisses" there follows immediately the reminder never again on earth responding. In the last few lines, the speaker refers again to many of these past and potential identities – son, child, friend, lover, comrade – but they are all finally subsumed into that of soldier, which becomes the boy's final, official, identity. His death makes him an army statistic, though his individuality and the possible meanings of his death – vigil I never forget – remain alive in the speaker.

Speaking of the elusiveness of Whitman, I almost restricted my note here to the use of the word "moderate" in line 8: cool blew the moderate night-wind. It's such a Whitman touch, and such a touch of genius. The tendency of most writers would have been either to make the wind a reflection of the bloody grief-filled mood and the human wreckage of the battlefield or, with sophisticated piquancy, to make the wind a complete contrast, a pleasant breeze over the slaughterhouse. Whitman chooses an exact but neutral word – it's a moderate wind – and you feel he is an accurate observer (a quality which lends credence to his other thoughts and experiences). The speaker's ability to remark the wind detaches him from his life as a soldier and as a mourner and connects him with a deeper world of Nature: not with other animals or living things (living things always cause noise – even trees and grass will sound, when the wind blows through them – but the speaker emphasizes the silent night, the stars silently moving aloft, and the lack even of a sigh or a sob), but with the wind, and the far-away stars, and the night and the sunrise, the mute indifferent unseeing companions of human suffering. There is a kind of peace in surrendering to these forces, and feeling their greater strength. The mourning here lies deeper than immediate sorrow. The self-prompted vigil is a "curious scene." Though the speaker grieves for the boy, the vigil is "wondrous" and "sweet" and the experience "strange" – different from what might be expected. (I'm reminded of the praise of "sane and sacred Death" in Whitman's great elegy for Lincoln, When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd.)

This is not a poem about war, or battle; it is very specifically a poem about watching your comrade fall – fall before what should have been his time, and feeling as a result not just the deep human loss but both the indifference and the pity of the ever-renewing universe. Whitman's essential modesty deepens the spiritual effect of the poem; to clarify my point, let me contrast this with a poem I used to love but increasingly do not love, Plath's Lady Lazarus, in which some of the larger-scale and more terrifying world-historical tragedies of the twentieth century are subsumed into the narrator's self-aggrandizing descriptions of herself; depending on your mood and, I suspect, your age, you will find Plath's poem either striking and powerful or narrow and morally indefensible in its use of other people's horrific tragedies as decorative amulets. All poets tend to self-mythologize, but there is something longer-lasting about the detachment and larger awareness of a poet like Whitman.

I took this poem from the Library of America edition of Whitman's Poetry and Prose.

Poem of the Week 2013/21

Richard Wagner's 200th birthday is on 22 May, two days from today. Here is a current American poet offering refractive tribute to his continuing cultural vitality:

Rhinemaiden

Who are you, fair-haired lady,
Dissecting me with blue stares?
Why do you watch me only?

Here on the streets of Cologne,
Across the seats and peopled aisles
Of the Strassenbahn, alone

On evenings in the Alstadt,
Near the twilight Cathedral,
You probe and etch my dark heart.

Though Tristan clasps your prim form
As you navigate the crowd,
I rivet you. Am I charmed?

Is it my caramel flesh,
Or the black gloss of coiled hair,
The gnome's goatee – or anguish

In the eyes? Perhaps you see
James Meredith sprawl – shotgunned –
Or hear Dizzy Gillespie

When you watch me. Can I know
What I am beside the moon:
The darkness or a shadow?

I sing your beauty, lady.
For I can never touch one
Foreign as the moon to me.

D L Crockett-Smith

The poem starts with a basic evocation of the public spaces in the German city Cologne, with the hint of a possible romantic encounter with an interested stranger, but as it begins its second half (in the fifth of eight stanzas), we become gradually aware that it's more about alienation than union. Even in a foreign country the narrator cannot escape his American experience and his consciousness that it shapes the assumptions made about him by others. He feels himself marked out, set permanently apart, by the eyes of this European woman (or women; he mentions several locations in which he has been "dissected with blue stares," so either he's running into the same woman several times or, what seems to me more likely, "she" is a stand-in for all the ultimately unknowable German women with whom he's had such fleeting ocular encounters). Her gaze turns out to be mostly clinical, a dissection, with a curious assumption that his "dark heart" is reflected in his dark skin. Like the Volsungs, his race sets him apart.

Yet he is also projecting his cultural assumptions on to her – she ultimately remains "foreign as the moon" to him. He assumes she is prim (it is actually her "form" he calls prim, but form can imply essence and conduct as well as shape, and the word hangs over her trim figure). But he also associates her, since she is German, with the music of Wagner (just as he is associated, in his own mind and, he thinks, possibly in hers, with the black American jazz of Dizzy Gillespie, though he clearly has knowledge of other kinds of music), and the association with Wagner connects her, despite her primness, with the erotic possibilities of Tristan. But even more than Tristan, it is the Ring that hangs over this poem: not just in the narrator's being set apart like the Volsungs, but in his association with Alberich, the gnome who could be seen as having "anguish in his eyes," the "schwarz [black] Alberich" forever cut off from the love of his desired Rhinemaidens.

Collections by D L Crockett-Smith may be found here; I took this poem from The Oxford Anthology of African-American Poetry, edited by Arnold Rampersad.

mass magnificence

Last Saturday I was at Davies Hall for the San Francisco Symphony's mass double-header: excerpts from Palestrina's Missa Papae Marcelli (the Kyrie, Gloria, and Agnus Dei) and Beethoven's Missa Solemnis. I had heard the latter at the Symphony's most recent performance of it, which was, I am kind of horrified to realize, not last year but two years ago. My thoughts on that performance are here, in the second half of the entry. I think I have performances on my list of things to write up that are almost as long ago as that one. And the horizon keeps receding before us, ever azure in the distance, doesn't it?

There was a lot of discussion swirling around that earlier performance; I liked it more than some others did. But even so last Saturday's was superior: just a really magnificent display of flexibility and power – but technical details miss the point. A successful performance has to hit the heart, and elevate us towards an emotional – a spiritual – mood that seems like the place in which we should always dwell, no matter how quickly it slips away in the after-concert crush of aimless chatter and slow-moving patrons and the general dirt and noise of life. I'm sure there were things the performers wished had gone differently, but the onward struggle is part of the piece's magnificence.

The quartet of soloists was different from last time, featuring some lighter voices, particularly Laura Claycomb (two years ago the soprano soloist was Christine Brewer), though bass-baritone Shenyang also had a lighter voice than I had expected (I think this is the first time I've heard him). The mezzo-soprano was Sasha Cooke, who has been so good in so many things here, and the tenor was Michael Fabiano, last seen here in less spiritual circumstances as Lucrezia Borgia's long-lost son. All four were very fine, though maybe a bit recessive, but that might have been because I was sitting much farther back in the hall than I usually do, and Davies in my experience is not particularly kind to vocal soloists. I wondered what the effect would have been if I were closer. But in a way the slight recessiveness of the soloists added to the power of certain moments when they are highlighted, as in the Benedicturs with its accompanying violin solo (once again exquisitely played by concertmaster Alexander Barantschik), when the mighty chorus pauses around an oasis of meditative calm.

The chorus throughout was just stunning, as they were in a different way in the preceding Palestrina. There's something about Palestrina's music that just cuts through the frazzle. He reminds me of Gluck, in that both have a certain purity and clarity that admittedly some will find a bit dull but that for others will have the sort of strength and stripped-down beauty that Georgia O'Keeffe found in skulls bleached by the desert sun.

Poem of the Week 2013/20

No Swan So Fine

"No water so still as the
    dead fountains of Versailles." No swan,
with swart blind look askance
and gondoliering legs, so fine
    as the chintz-china one with fawn-
brown eyes and toothed gold
collar on to show whose bird it was.

Lodged in the Louis Fifteenth
    candelabrum-tree of cockscomb-
tinted buttons, dahlias,
sea-urchins, and everlastings,
    it perches on the branching foam
of polished sculptured
flowers – at ease and tall. The king is dead.

Marianne Moore

[Moore's endnotes:]
A pair of Louis XV candelabra with Dresden figures of swans belonging to Lord Balfour.

Lines 1-2: "There is no water so still as the dead fountains of Versailles." Percy Phillip, New York Times Magazine, May 10, 1931.

The art-forged swan stands tall, and the earthly king lies low. I love the tangy shock of "The king is dead," coming in unexpectedly at the end, when we thought we were looking at a profuse description of a swan amid flowers, or rather, a profuse description of a statue of a swan amid sculptured flowers – a triumph of Art rather than Nature; or, to tighten our terms again, a triumph of Art over Nature, since the poem declares that no living swan (with its suspicious, slanted dark looks and its bandy legs working the water) could be as splendid as the one perfected by the artist. This may seem like a simple assertion of the lasting power and superiority of Art compared to haphazard Nature and ephemeral Kings. But this haunting poem offers more ambiguous suggestions. The presence of the king has been suggested all along: first, the appearance of Versailles, then the sculptured swan's gold collar "to show whose bird it was," and then the reference to the Louis Fifteenth style. Any mention of Versailles along with a later Louis is bound to bring to mind for a contemporary reader the world-historical convulsion of the French Revolution. Whatever your opinion of the ancien regime, even if you rarely spare it a thought, it does possess the poignancy of all vanished things – that's why no water is so still as the water that no longer sparkles through the great fountains of the empty palace; its presence is felt most strongly in its absence. It was Nature that inspired the candelabrum, and the King who, directly or indirectly, ordered the artist to create it, for his amusement and and as a display of power, wealth, and skill. The created object – Art – grows out of both Nature and political and economic systems, yet stands everlastingly outside of them. But the statue is also linked inextricably not only with the natural world but with the specific time and place and manner of its creation; it is a talisman of memory, nostalgia, and reverie, carrying an inseparable association with long-gone worlds.

The poem is from The Complete Poems of Marianne Moore .

Poem of the Week 2013/19

When lovely woman stoops to folly,
    And finds too late that men betray;
What charm can sooth her melancholy,
    What art can wash her guilt away?

The only art her guilt to cover,
    To hide her shame from every eye,
To give repentance to her lover,
    And wring his bosom – is to die.

Oliver Goldsmith, from The Vicar of Wakefield

Recently, out of the blue, I had the admittedly bizarre urge to re-read The Vicar of Wakefield, a novel I had not read and had barely thought of for probably over forty years. All I remembered of it was that it contained a song that became celebrated on its own: "When lovely woman stoops to folly."

So I picked up a copy of the Oxford World's Classics edition, which was fine except the annotations give away, early on, a key point that a reader really wouldn't want given away. I understand that it's a bit silly to issue spoiler alerts for a novel first published in 1766 (and be warned I'm going to give away some plot points here), but it's all new if you've never read the book before (or read it over forty years ago and have forgotten most of it), and surprises should be revealed by the author, not the Kinbotish annotator. I'm still extremely bitter about reading the Penguin edition of Felix Holt the Radical years ago and having a crucial relationship revealed long before George Eliot wanted it revealed. This seems to be a thing academic annotators do, and seriously, what the hell?

Anyway, the tale of the Vicar Mr Primrose and his family is a very enjoyable and strange little book, part philosophical parable in the style of Rasselas or Candide, part nostalgic picture of country life, part protest against class and gender power inequities, part satire of the Vicar and his family, and part praise of them, and usually it's several of those things all at once.

The song is sung by the daughter Olivia, who has indeed stooped to folly, succumbing (partly through vanity and a desire to rise socially, and partly through genuine affection and interest) to the blandishments of wealthy and powerful Mr Thornhill, the local young rakehell. It seems a bit strange under the circumstances to have her sing such a song to entertain her family, but its gentle melancholy has a therapeutic effect on her spirits, much as if she were a young woman today encouraged to speak about her feelings by sympathetic or at least curious friends.

Through the machinations of Mr Thornhill (here come the spoilers) the Vicar is imprisoned, and his daughter does indeed go through a kind of death: while her father is imprisoned, he is told that his languishing daughter has died. He has never held the Thornhill episode against her, and is devastated, but it turns out that not only is she still living, but Thornhill was outwitted by one of his confederates, who wanted something to hold over him, and his marriage to Olivia is in fact legal. The accomplice confesses this out of affection for the naive goodness and spirit of the imprisoned Vicar (I'm sure that Dickens had these prison scenes somewhere in his mind when he wrote the great scenes of Mr Pickwick in debtor's prison at the end of The Pickwick Papers.)

Even at the time it was clear that woman, particularly lovely woman, had a few options other than death after she had stooped to folly; in fact, in Goldsmith's other famous work – though perhaps, like The Vicar of Wakefield, it's less famous than it once was – when she stoops, She Stoops to Conquer. I haven't seen or read that play in years, but if I'm remembering correctly, the plot concerns a woman who disguises herself as a barmaid because the guy she likes is free and easy with lower-class women but tongue-tied and bashful around women of his own more elevated social class. There's a lot of class and gender stuff in these works, but, you know, how could there not be?

This song, in the context of the novel, is an artistic expression of a simple, old-fashioned sort of morality, and as such is part of the novel's play on nostalgic longing for what was perceived as a simpler time, because there's always the impulse among us to consider the past a simpler time. In the nineteenth century, a novel such as Cranford filled this role, and in our own day, it could be filled by something like a BBC-TV adaptation of Cranford. It should also be noted that the song is presented not as the view of "Society" (those around Olivia take very different views, often of indignation against the wealthy and powerful man who abandoned her); it is Olivia expressing her own personal view of her condition. She is, of course, the creation of a male author, and the tendency nowadays would be to assume he's expressing some sort of patriarchal "male-gaze" blah blah blah, but there's really no reason besides our own preferred thinking to assume he's basing this scene on anything but accurate observation from life, and indeed Goldsmith is too eccentric and complicated a writer for any such simplistic theories. It's also useful to keep in mind that historically novel-reading, and this is particularly true of the eighteenth century, was seen as a (middle-class) female occupation, and there's no particular reason to think those women readers were so easily persuaded by male authority (just as in this novel, Mr Primrose's wife and daughters feel free to dissent from Mr Primrose's husbandly/paternal/clerical guidance).

Despite what she sings in her song, Olivia does not really die of her folly. Even so, twenty-first century readers are unlikely to be satisfied with her ultimate fate, though it occurs to me that my own preferred resolution, in which she grows into a cheerful and sturdy independence in a country cottage, raising chickens, vegetables, and bright flowers, is in fact more sentimental and less realistic than Goldsmith's ending, in which she lives apart from but pines for her seducer/husband, longing to return to him once he shows any sign of acceptable repentance, while he, having lost his money and social position due to his uncle's anger at his misbehavior, tries to ingratiate himself as a companion to another, still-wealthy, relation, and endeavors to learn the French horn.

This song was once well-known enough, and symbolic enough of an old-fashioned, sentimental morality, to warrant parody; here is TS Eliot to do the job. Before he gained his current world-wide renown as lyricist for the smash-hit musical Cats, Eliot was perhaps best known for a number of high-modernist poems, chief among them The Waste Land, published in 1922, from which this excerpt is taken. (To explain the reference to "the Bradford millionaire": according to a footnote in the Norton Critical Edition of The Waste Land, "Bradford is a manufacturing town in the north of England. A millionaire from that town would have made his money in trade or manufacturing. Hence, nouveau riche.")

He, the young man carbuncular, arrives,
A small house agent's clerk, with one bold stare,
One of the low on whom assurance sits
As a silk hat on a Bradford millionaire.
The time is now propitious, as he guesses,
The meal is ended, she is bored and tired,
Endeavours to engage her in caresses
Which still are unreproved, if undesired.
Flushed and decided, he assaults at once;
Exploring hands encounter no defence;
His vanity requires no response,
And makes a welcome of indifference.
[...]
Bestows one final patronising kiss,
And gropes his way, finding the stairs unlit. . .

    She turns and looks a moment in the glass,
Hardly aware of her departed lover;
Her brain allows one half-formed thought to pass:
"Well now that's done: and I'm glad it's over."
When lovely woman stoops to folly and
Paces about her room again, alone,
She smoothes her hair with automatic hand,
And puts a record on the gramophone.

TS Eliot, from The Waste Land, Part III, The Fire Sermon

symphonic variations

I've been distracted for the past couple of months by a number of things that lie outside the purview of what I discuss in this space, so the strike at the San Francisco Symphony came and mostly went before I had a chance to post (for what they're worth) my thoughts. They've continued to swirl around in my head, along with other half-written entries I haven't had time to write yet, and so I figured I might as well unload them, since they are less about this specific strike than about things going on in America in general, and besides, as I implied above, I need some distractions.

I was initially surprised by the strike, and then by its bitterness, but sadly I was not surprised by the reactions to the musicians: mostly contemptuous dismissals and reprimands for being insufficiently grateful for management's gracious largesse (check any comments section for any story about the strike over at SFGate.com). They were told that their specialized skills and years of training could easily be replaced, that they'd be lucky to get a similar situation anywhere else, that they had no idea how lucky they were to get anything at all – the usual sneers and jeers that accompany any worker protests in the United States. The flip side of that was also depressingly in evidence, with management repeatedly congratulated for its wisdom, prudence, foresight, and so forth, in steering the symphony through these economically fragile times (you remember the crash the finance industry brought about, don't you? Of course you do! You're still suffering from it, even if those who caused it are not).

I have no doubt that the management of the Symphony has been excellent in many ways. I am sure Symphony management is made up of thoughtful, conscientious, and capable administrators (more or less). But the heart and soul of an orchestra is its musicians. And if you, as a manager, have reduced them to such a state of frustration and anger that they embark on a strike that they must know will be widely savaged, then – and this seems to me a really obvious point – when it comes to perhaps your most important responsibility, you, as a manager, have failed. (But perhaps I am underestimating management's passive-aggressive prudence; why shouldn't they sit back and count on the American public's bizarre CEO-worship to take over and eliminate the troublemakers for them?)

I understand that Symphony management plays a crucial role in making it all happen. I understand the poignancy of making it all happen and then watching others receive the applause, and the irritations and frustrations of dealing with temperamental, self-important people (according to your preferred prejudices and favorite stereotypes, you may take that to refer to wealthy patrons, headstrong artists, or anyone in between). But it's completely possible to have a rewarding artistic relationship with the San Francisco Symphony without having any idea at all who any of the managers are. If, as the musicians were often told, they could be replaced, well, so can management: that's how organizations work. Anyone can be replaced at any time. The replacement might be worse in some ways, or better, or just different, but the organization goes on. (If someone is irreplaceable, what you have is not an organization, it's a cult.) So why tell the musicians they can be replaced, and not tell the managers that? Why jump to attack them? Why not at least withhold judgment, on the assumption that maybe the musicians (who are competent adults, and live in the same world as the rest of us) are the best judges of what their particular situation is?

The deference to executive power shown in many of the strike-related comments is evident throughout American life. People love to sneer at "government bureaucrats" while allowing Presidents insane amounts of power and deference. Wages and benefits have stagnated or gone backwards for decades, while CEOs and others at the very top are given insane amounts of money. Think of all the tax breaks given to the obscenely wealthy in this country – and then we're told that their privileges must be paid for by slicing benefits to the poor and struggling or anyone else who can't buy political influence. During the latest crash you may have heard the expression "privatize profits, socialize losses." On a smaller scale, it looks as if this dreary pattern was also playing out at the Symphony: benefits and large bonuses (and, increasingly, press) go to those at the top, while sacrifices are demanded of those at the bottom (and what used to be the middle increasingly looks like part of the bottom).

Yes, the musicians are well paid (which is not at all surprising or unwarranted, given their years of training, exceptional skills, and the extremely expensive area we live in). But I think what we have here is one of those situations in which facts get in the way of the truth (that is, certain too easily understood and easily publicized facts, such as the players' salaries and benefits, overshadow less tangible but no less real matters of attitude, communication, and treatment – and when you try to explain those things, even you, as the words fly out of your mouth, realize how trivial and petty you seem when these tiny incidents are taken out of the vast and crushing and ultimately ineffable flow of circumstance and occurrence). What matters is not that the musicians receive salaries and benefits worth X number of dollars, but what percentage they receive of the total salary-pie (I didn't hear nearly as many attacks on management's large salaries and bonuses), and how much of the organization's income depends on them (nobody goes to the Symphony to listen to its management). And even more than the money, what matters is how they – as I said, the heart and soul of the organization – are treated.

We hear similar attacks whenever some young athlete complains that his multi-million dollar offer is "an insult" and that "it's about respect." Yes, most of us claim we'd love to be "insulted" in such a manner. But an offer, even if it looks generous to outsiders, really can be an insult, and it really is about respect. Don't most people know this, at some level? Is it that difficult, even given differences of scale, to make the connection between similar situations in our lives and the complaining athlete (or musician)? I was once asked at a job to pick up someone's dry-cleaning, but the executive was so apologetic and gracious, and so clear about the work-related reasons for the request, that I didn't mind going out (in the rain!) to help her out. On the other hand, I've been thanked in ways that left me seething with rage. It was the underlying attitude, of respect or of being considered a second-class citizen, that made the difference. Haven't we all been there?

Those complaining athletes are frequently young African-American men, and the Symphony musicians are artists, and neither group is much respected in American society, but I can't think of anyone who doesn't understand what it means to be taken for granted or treated with condescension. But instead of reacting with support, or at least indifference, people go straight into Day of the Locust mode: not just towards athletes and musicians, but increasingly towards teachers, firefighters, police, nurses, and others who used to be called public servants and are now seen as entitled and uppity because they fight back against the increasing consolidation of money and power. People who attack these workers are asking the wrong questions: instead of "Why should they get generous raises? Why should they get job security? Why should they get generous amounts of vacation time? Why should they get pensions?" they should be asking, "Why don't we have these things? Why have we allowed them to be taken away?"

Yes, I am fully aware that there are problems associated with unions (the BART union is an obvious case in point), but there are also problems, ones that affect more people more profoundly, with unopposed management power. Back when I worked in the dining commons at Cal someone explained to me that the reason I had a surprisingly decent salary for an unskilled student worker was that the full-time workers were unionized – and ultimately, we all benefited from the higher salaries their union had won. There were students who couldn't have put themselves through college on a lower wage. Sure, a few of the unionized workers were lazy, or seemed so to my eighteen-year-old eyes. So what? There are lazy and incompetent people all over (even in management). Most of the full-time employees were hard-working and conscientious and deserved everything they got and more. I wonder if their children have been able to make the same sort of life in this era when unions are regularly jeered at by people who don't realize how many union-related benefits they take for granted.

This dangerous trend of increasing money, power, and respect to the few at the top while life becomes more and more difficult for the growing number at the bottom has been going on for my entire adult life, but it is neither inevitable nor irreversible. That's why even though the striking musicians already made what most people would consider a very generous salary, I supported them, as a step, however small or insignificant, towards correcting the balance of American society. When the strike was settled, the musicians released a statement that was criticized for – well, I'm not sure what. I for one applaud their refusal to back down, to play nice, to pretend that they were bad children who didn't appreciate their wise and benevolent managers. I thought they very appropriately made it clear, in a professional and dignified manner, that management had failed in some key ways and they were holding them accountable for their mistakes. Good for them. Why do we attack people who stand up for the same things we say we want?

Ultimately we all benefit from the social stability and cultural ambition produced when people know they will be treated fairly and with respect. The song tells us that The People United Will Never Be Defeated, but I wonder if we'll ever start moving towards that sort of sympathetic solidarity, or if human nature dictates that that will remain yet another piece of difficult music wafting above a puzzled and resentful public.