a lustrous-eyed mezzo and this piano dude

The Guardian Archival Bit of the Week is worth a look in here. The first part could as easily be a JDD fanperson's review from the more purple regions of the operawebs (It would be impossible to select terms of admiration too strong in which to speak of her “Non più mesta”...), but the show was a double-header (He was warmly applauded by many of the most accomplished amateurs in the town...).

old skool diversions

DtO reminds us on Twitter today that there is good stuff to be had on francetv's Culturebox. Among the points of interest for Old Skoolers is a production from La Fenice of Stiffelio, Verdi's (at the time) failed experiment in bringing ambivalence -- Breaking: Accused Soprano Actually Guilty! -- to the 19th century opera stage. Written between Luisa Miller and Rigoletto, with a libretto by Piave, it suffered a complicated fate, and more or less disappeared for the next hundred and forty years. It had its Met premiere in 1993.

I haven't seen all of this video yet. At first glance, production-wise, it doesn't appear all that interested in challenging performance conventions -- nothing says "Verdi opera" like a long wooden conference table with books strewn across it -- but since for this opera there really aren't any performance conventions, it's not much of a crime to cleave to the standard, at least while the focus is on the score. The key thing is, unlike other works from this period of Verdi's career, this one hasn't had decades of performance history with every great singer under the sun, so, if you'll forgive the baseball metaphor, it has yet to pitch a perfect game. Which makes every production worth a listen in...for anyone into this kind of thing.

addendum: and while you're there, if you are one of those people, and if your French is pretty good, you have a little time yet to check out the source material for the aforementioned Luisa Miller.

and a bit with a dog: Jane Eyre, NTLive encore

If you’re familiar with the novel, Bristol Old Vic’s stage adaptation of Jane Eyre, in its planed-down, single-night National Theatre version, is a fairly effective representation as representations go. Director Sally Cookson’s staging makes excellent use of minimal resources: a unit set with ramp, platform, and ladders; sundry props; a small cast who mostly rotate characters (all except Jane and Bertha); and a smaller band (piano, percussion, double bass, miscellaneous other things) that supplies a beautifully atmospheric soundscape for events to unfold against.

And it’s an impressive job, given that much of it emerged from the actors improvising on a framework of scenes, anchored by Charlotte Brontë’s written dialogue for key moments. So we get most of the really iconic exchanges intact, along with a few deft shortcuts. (We also get a few extras, among them Rochester, having been thrown from his horse, employing the language most of us would use nowadays under similar circumstances.)

Perhaps the most effective addition is an expanded role for Bertha Mason (Melanie Marshall, voice of gold), an almost continual presence in the form of a woman in a red dress, singing a vocal line that weaves in and out of the action, through trad song, popular song (an anachronistic but fitting Mad About the Boy), and elsewhere, as she drifts through the scenes of other people’s lives and occasionally lights a match. Because she is always there, and because of what she sings, it draws a heavier line of relationship between her and Jane than the book affords.

Also of note: Jane’s portable psychological chorus, which coalesces from the cast at Jane’s moments of uncertainty, agree or disagree with her and each other, and pay attention to things she can’t be seen to be paying attention to.

Also, evil Mr. Brocklehurst (Craig Edwards) reincarnating as Pilot the dog is a bit of inspired leveling-up.



Now for the quibbling. C’mon, you knew there would be some.

Madeleine Worrall’s Jane and Felix Hayes’s Rochester are good but ultimately a bit samey. Worrall in particular, whose character has the longest distance to travel both mentally and physically, plays a Jane who exists on a knife edge, the same at Gateshead and Lowood as at Thornfield, and it shows in her face all the time, like she’s ready to explode any second. But the character that Brontë wrote, by the time she gets to Thornfield, has mastered inscrutability, the end result of years of abuse and privation and endurance being a dense carapace of equanimity. It may be she’s ready to explode at any second, but we shouldn’t be able to tell, and neither, necessarily, should she.

Likewise Felix Hayes’s Rochester is all bluster, which makes him a bit predictable after a while, in a shouty monolithic kind of way. It’s the kind of Rochester that equates physically dangerous with interesting, when what should be interesting (and dangerous) about him is his unpredictability.

Not surprisingly, it’s the Moor House episode that suffers the most from cuts. For one thing, we lose a Rivers sister. The result of this is we get one sister, Diana (Simone Saunders, also Bessie and Blanche Ingram), devoid of background and thus existing only to be cardboard cheerleader to brother St John (Laura Elphinstone, also Helen Burns, Grace Poole, and Adele), rather than two sisters working in the governess trade, spending vacation back at the old homestead, and reading scurrilous German literature to each other when St Bro is not at home. (I know that few people on Planet Anglo get why this is funny, or the point Brontë was ostensibly trying to make with it, but it’s the undercurrent that keeps us out of the shallows, people.)

Beyond that, enough additional material is cut – what St John is giving up to go to India, for instance -- that we don’t really get much sense of why Jane would entertain St John’s proposal for more than a split nanosecond, or (disembodied voices notwithstanding) how the heat of those personal crises would propel her back to Thornfield.

Once she is back there, amid the broken wooden frames and with black ash falling all around, things get very thumbnail, to the point where I’m not sure anyone unfamiliar with the story would quite understand what had happened. But at the end of three and a half hours, it’s not necessarily a bad idea to finish things off with a few broad brush strokes, and they do it, ending where they began, with a certain calligraphic elegance.

Mrs Pankhurst pwns your number

I'm supposed to be at Glimmerglass right now, but the bug that kept me out of Old Songs back in June has devolved into an annoyingly persistent cough and so, yeah, no. So yay the 'Glass for being willing to do a ticket swap. Now it's off to the Medical/Industrial Complex to see if I can ditch this thing, because




is next on the agenda. Apart from the obvious attractions of the work, I confess I'm really interested to see how Leon threads the needle on this one, because remember that panel discussion a few years back when he argued that women writers in the 19th century didn't suffer discrimination in publishing because, look, Mary Wollstonecraft! Jane Austen! George Eliot! and one was all like Um...? So either Dame Ethel has afforded him a Come to Jesus moment, so to speak, on the Woman Question (i.e. that there actually was one) or I've (more likely) missed some nuance of his argument all along. Panel discussion! Bring it on!

scattershot funfacts of wiki

"The Lady of the Lake is a narrative poem by Sir Walter Scott, first published in 1810. ...Its influence is indirect: Schubert's Ellens Dritter Gesang (later adapted to use the full lyrics of the Latin Ave Maria), Rossini's La Donna del Lago (1819), the Ku Klux Klan custom of cross burning, the last name of the U.S. abolitionist Frederick Douglass, and the song "Hail to the Chief", were all inspired by the poem."

an idea whose time has

Me: Just saw branagh's cinderella flick. It's like trollope, only disney LOL

ETF: I don't know if I can see Branagh as Cinderella. When do we get Trollope World tho?

event horizon

Whatever one may think of the Met's newly-announced 2015-2016 season, we do believe it's the most bel canto season in living memory.

another smoking gun

From Daniel Deronda, one of those rare but crucial Schiller references that make geek life worth living:

"...But you know her, Mirah -- you can always say something descriptive. What do you think of Mrs. Grandcourt?"
     "I think she is like the Princess of Eboli in Don Carlos," said Mirah, with a quick intensity. She was pursuing an association in her own mind not intelligible to her hearers -- an association with a certain actress as well as the part she represented.
     "Your comparison is a riddle for me, my dear," said Mrs. Meyrick, smiling.


Yeah, that pretty much sums up every conversation I ever had with a VicLit professor.

return to the wheelhouse

three weeks

George Eliot weighs in

"The opera is a great, great product -- pity we can't always have fine Weltgeschichtliche dramatic motives wedded with fine music instead of trivialities or hideousnesses. Perhaps this last is too strong a word for anything except the Traviata. Rigoletto is unpleasant but it is a superlatively fine tragedy in the Nemesis. I think I don't know a finer." -- letter to Sara Hennell, 11 July 1863.

Dog Days in Annandale

Bard Music Festival is scoping Saint-Saëns this year, but since this festival is always "Composer Y and His World" (I think they have yet to do a "Composer X and Her World", not surprisingly), there's a lot of other stuff going on for the "World" part. So it's worth it to click on the little Browse the Brochure doodad in the left hand column to get the opera (Chabrier), the play (Molière), the film festival (France & the Colonial Imagination), and the Spiegeltent dope as well as the concerts, lectures and panel discussions. Or you can start from here if you don't mind some cumbersome web navigation.

On a totally unrelated note, the Met will be streaming the Makropulos Case prima here on Friday at 8:30 ET.

What Would George Eliot Do?

The "I could've told them that for fifty bucks" Quote of the Day:

Dr. Oatley and Dr. Mar, in collaboration with several other scientists, reported in two studies, published in 2006 and 2009, that individuals who frequently read fiction seem to be better able to understand other people, empathize with them and see the world from their perspective.

So much for sola fide, we must now be Justified through Science. And don't get me wrong, I like science, and I have no problem with spending huge amounts of cash to develop complex narratives about all sorts of things.  But so driven by Wall Street Mentality are we that it seems we now have to prove scientifically the market value of every bit of cultural activity we have been actively devaluing for decades. By the way, singing is now good for you.

Nevertheless, speaking as a tiresome pedant myself, let me point out that the deal with Casaubon is not that he's a tiresome pedant ("Ma'am, step away from the Cliff Notes."), but that he has so heroically dedicated his life to reinventing the wheel.

ping

Alex Ross posts a quote from Miss Evans -- okay she'd have been referring to herself as Mrs Lewes by then -- on the problem of judging new music by its criticism. If memory serves, she herself thought the third act of Tannhäuser dragged, when in fact we now know it is the first.

Erebus and Terror

For Northwest Passage geeks, poet Jo Shapcott's radio play Erebus, about the ill-fated Franklin Expedition, is up on BBC iPlayer for a week. Brrrrr.

I want my Music Telephonovision

A Liberal's Libretto has posted a link to a Library of Congress lecture by Mark Schubin, the Met's HD Über-Geek, about opera as engine for technological innovation. Okay, that sounds kind of dry in description, but in execution it's actually quite awesome. The lecture is about an hour of opera-lover's steampunk holiday, followed by a Q&A which is mostly about the technical ins and outs of HDcasting the Met, which, inquiring minds...

res retro

So, by the time the crunching begins, how many generations of tablet and smartphone will have been used argue about, design, and build the thing? And will the Lego version get there first?

While we wait, there exists a relevant chronicle of crime-fighting escapades, wherein, among other things, Charles Wheatstone* is revealed to have been an evil criminal mastermind. And there's loads of footnotes. And monkeys. And Isambard Kingdom Brunel.


*Inventor of the concertina, which should have been the giveaway.

The fur-lined bathtubs of moral rectitude

Mark Lawson's analysis of why 19th century novels (a select few, anyway) make attractive options for tv and movie producers may be found here. It's an interesting read if you've been wondering why the Austen / Dickens / Brontë juggernaut seems to roll along with only an occasional veering off into the odd siding.  His chief argument comes at the end:

At their simplest level, each of these books features a couple whose union is impossible or dangerous: Cathy and Heathcliff face the bar of class and propriety, Anna and Vronsky challenge the adultery taboo, and Pip and Estella are thwarted not only by their starkly different social backgrounds but by her bizarre guardian... Fiction is driven by friction and taboo but, in most parts of contemporary society, we have created a society in which there are few obstacles to people doing what they want or being with the person they desire.

In other words, we've torn down the walls so convenient for characters to smash into, so contemporary life isn't interesting enough. Which is to say modern moral ambivalence makes for bad television.

It's arguable, I suppose, to a point.  Really what he means is we like straw men to tilt at, particularly in these troubled times.  It is, after all, excellent fun catharsis to watch people -- particularly women in corsets -- be persecuted for loving the wrong people, and yet how pleasing it is to think that it could never happen in this day and age. Or at least not in those clothes.

Update: Meanwhile, over at The Independent, D J Taylor wonders why we're still taking the 19th century's phone calls.

Quote of the Day

The Japanophile Republic of East Thirdflooria writes:

Gotta love late 19th century translations:

"The Records sound queer and bald in Japanese, as will be noticed further on; and it is therefore right, even from a stylistic point of view, that they should sound bald and queer in English. The only portions of the text which, for obvious reasons, refuse to lend themselves to translation into English after this fashion are the indecent portions. But it has been thought there could be no objection to rendering them into Latin."

lost Mayan calendar reckons time according to film adaptations of Jane Eyre

Update 12/12/12: If you've landed here because it's the week before the end is nigh, allow us to direct you to the Dresden Codex and the wiki that will attempt to explain the math. Good luck.

Another flick version fades into obscurity -- was it the one with Toby Stephens? Who can ever remember? -- as a new clone takes its place. The NYT reports here.  The money quote from screenwriter Moira Buffini:

Jane spends a whole year [chez Rivers], agonized with longing, and that’s when she begins to see what the alternative to Rochester is: a loveless marriage or spinsterhood.

But I always thought the best part of JE was what the apparently off-putting, spinstery Rivers sisters are reading when pious, straight-laced brother St John is not home, and how Brontë reveals it through an untranslated, unattributed, and very selective quotation.  lmao, as they say in the common parlance.  

Will this detail ever make it into a movie version? Hell no.  And this isn't what affects the gender politics of the piece -- that's always up to the screenwriter and director to emphasize or bury under the novel's own Sturm und Drang. But, for all its obscurity of reference (and it was probably obscure enough in Brontë's time that to get it you had either to be hanging out with shady disreputable Carlyle types or be a governess who could teach German), it's the true subversive element of the novel, sitting there contentedly in its spinsterhood, waiting for the world to change around it. 1848 is coming.




Update: Okay, forget the wiki link.  For an astute analysis of the life of Die Räuber in England during the Napoleonic era, this is the place.  (I would only suggest two alterations, apart from fixing the typos: first, that there is a difference between "carousing with" nuns and raping them. (Seriously, Professor, I'm just going to assume that English isn't your primary language.)  Second, that Goethe and Schiller are spinning in their graves at being mentioned in the same sentence with Kotzebue, that traitorous hack. But never mind. He's no doubt burning in Hell by now.)