Recommendation:

The Met's current production of The Magic Flute. The music is, of course, wonderful, but the costumes and choreography were almost as good. (which is saying a lot!) I haven't been so delighted by visual humor since, oh, I guess since I saw Miyazaki's Spirited Away a few months ago. Many scenes had a quality of sublime silliness, as if to say: "This is obvious," and then, "This is so obvious we can play with it." For example, Sarastro's men wear triangles, circles, and squares to signify their embodiment of reason.
My favorite moments were of Papageno eating: he tries to catch huge fruits, drumsticks, dumplings, etc, which are hovering in the air above him (a bit like Tantalus), and of Papageno singing "Ein Mädchen oder Weibchen": a bevy of ballerinas with goose necks and heads ("ein sanftes Täubchen") do a careful, mysterious, ridiculous, awkwardly graceful dance around him. Papageno is almost a bird himself, but a ruffled, garrulous, earthy kind of bird. These stylized Papagenas of his imagination are smooth, white, silent, dainty — a different species from Papageno. Luckily the real Papagena is just as comical and colorful as Papageno.

Throughout October and November I listened to Reynaldo Hahn's "À Chloris." It's stunning, in obvious ways — its beauty is patient and quiet but not subtle — lush, lush late Romantic, clear, pure, flowing (voice), and at the same time rich, weighed down (piano). It combines extreme tenderness with a sense of plodding toward the gallows — plodding but with little syncopations and grace notes. The left hand plays a melody of Bach's, which has a bracing effect on the melting lushness. But I try not to listen to the left hand — I like to hear its line as a vague tugging, an unplaceable magnet, rather than as an explicit melody.

Associations it sparks:

1. Bach

2. Hahn was Proust's lifelong companion. But I still haven't read Proust, so this doesn't mean much to me.

3. The words are by Théophile de Viau, whom Thomas Stanley translated and Andrew Marvell read. It may be that the names of shepherds and shepherdesses in pastoral poetry mean little (though I'm sure there are exceptions, like Thestylis in "Upon Appleton House"), but I can't help thinking of Marvell's "Damon and Chlorinda."


Here are the words:

S’il est vrai, Chloris, que tu m’aimes,
Mais j’entends, que tu m’aimes bien,
Je ne crois point que les rois mêmes
Aient un bonheur pareil au mien.
Que la mort serait importune
De venir changer ma fortune
A la félicité des cieux!
Tout ce qu’on dit de l’ambroisie
Ne touche point ma fantaisie
Au prix des grâces de tes yeux.

Jan Swafford's wonderful biography of Brahms had a lot on Brahms's debt to baroque and rococo.
Here's Hazlitt quoting Beaumont & Fletcher:

Or there are passages that seem as if we might brood over them all our lives, and not exhaust the sentiments of love and admiration they excite: they become favorites, and we are fond of them to a sort of dotage. Here is one:

'—Sitting in my window
Printing my thoughts in lawn, I saw a God,
I thought (but it was you), enter our gates;
My blood flew out and back again, as fast
As I had puffed it forth and sucked it in
Like breath; then was I called away in haste
To entertain you: never was a man
Thrust from a sheepcote to a scepter, raised
So high in thoughts as I; you left a kiss
Upon these lips then, which I mean to keep
From you for ever. I did hear you talk
Far above singing!'

A passage like this indeed leaves a taste on the palate like nectar, and we seem in reading it to sit with the Gods at their golden tables: but if we repeat it often in ordinary moods, it loses its flavour, becomes vapid, 'the wine of poetry is drank, and but the lees remain.'

-from 'On the Pleasure Hating'

I've been listening to Tosca constantly since last week; I liked walking from Sant'Andrea della Valle (Act 1) to the Castel Sant'Angelo (Act 3) listening to it. It's the first opera I really liked (not counting Hansel and Gretel) and still one of my favorites; I once saw a performance on TV that was filmed on location. It starts out at a very high, relentlessly lyrical pitch, and sustains that to the end. It's like Puccini's Richard II, Shakespeare's only play without a line of prose: there is some recitative in Tosca, but even that is full of little motifs, and always seems about to break into song (and usually does). I love the overblown pathos of the end, when she thinks he's playacting, and praises his skill — "Ecco un artista!" — and we know that he really is dead. (On the ramparts of Castel Sant'Angelo.) The music is just grand and passionate and sarcastic enough to pull it off.

Compare that to the last opera I saw, a few years ago, Don Carlos, which has about half an hour of good music in four hours. It's hard to take. In compenso, that's an opera with a serious story, and the most shocking line I've ever heard in a play or an opera. It's about the son of King of Philip, who wants to go off and fight for the freedom of the Netherlands, against his father's army. There's a bright and hopeful little tune whenever he and his best friend talk about this. (It hardly lasts a minute.) As if that weren't bad enough, he meets his stepmother-to-be in a forest; they're both masked, each doesn't know who the other is, and they fall in love. (OK, that's not serious.) So King Philip has two good reasons for wanting his son out of the way. He thinks this over, limping heavily around his darkened study. (That, and the Dutch melody, make up the grand total of really good music in the whole opera.) He calls in his confessor, the Grand Inquisitor, to hear what he thinks. "Why not?" the Grand Inquisitor asks. "God himself sacrificed his only son."

It's so shocking! I still can't get over it!

Schiller wrote the play; I wonder if the line is his, or Verdi's.

The Tarantella del Gargano — I've been meaning to write about this for months. Sometime towards the end of winter I heard this on the radio:

Confraternità de' Musici

1.03am Anonymous (C.17th): Tarantella del Gargano
1.09am Frescobaldi, Girolamo (1583-1643): Se l'aura spira; Voi partite, mio sole; Vanne, o carta amorosa; Varie partite sopra passacaglia; Cosí mi disprezzate?
1.14am
1.16am Monteverdi, Claudio (1567-1643): Quel sguardo sdegnosetto
1.21am
1.33am Merula, Tarquinio (1594/5-1665): Su la cetra amorosa
1.42am

Broadcasts are available on the internet only for a week, and for the rest of that week I listened to nothing else. When the week was up I started looking for this music all over the place. I managed to track down "Su la cetra amorosa" and a piece called "Chiome d'oro" by Monteverdi, which uses the same melody as "Quel sguardo sdegnosetto." I was taken aback, months later, to hear a a piece for choir that had the same melody. "Beatus Vir, by Claudio Monteverdi," said the announcer. He must have really liked the melody to use it three times! But it doesn't work as sacred music; it's as secular as they come, as evinced by the two titles, "Golden locks," and "That disdainful glance" — "sdegnoso" with a suffix of affection. The texture of it is like hair, or metal, catching the light in a darkened room. I like the light, energetic, forceful rhythm of the violins and harpsichord, which the voices (two sopranos) go along with at first, and then slow down very suddenly, as if they'd discovered something fascinating — we must linger and look, and figure this out, and fall into it — and op! we're off again, violins and harpsichord leading the way (though it ends in slow, glimmering luxury).
And Tarquinio Merula! I'd never heard of him! He's a genius! Part of his thing is letting you think, or showing you, that up can be down, that seconds contain hours, and between this pitch and that there are a dozen fascinating microtones. He's always dropping the listener and catching her higher up, like a magician-acrobat. But that doesn't do justice to just how catchy, how hypnotizingly rhythmic, the music is. You just can't listen to it and sit still. At first the basso continuo is just a viola and a guitar, repeating a skipping, syncopated phrase that lasts all of five seconds but never gets tiresome, and then the mezzosoprano comes in, joined by a clarinet (?) and they perform acrobatics above the syncopated basso continuo. The mezzosoprano always seems to land in the wrong place, or on the wrong note, and she draws out that wrongness until one's discomfort becomes pleasure. And oh, a hundred other things happen: the clarinet goes back and forth between basso continuo and duet (with the soprano), and sometimes seems to be the soprano's partner, catching her and soaring up just when we worry that she might lose her footing; and a harpsichord joins the basso continuo, lending it a third dimension: if a harpsichord deigns to join something so small and single-minded, there must be a world in it. Thus encouraged, the guitar turns it upside down. It spreads like concentric circles on the surface of a pond, and the mezzosoprano is everywhere.

Nancy used to say that all music is either a song or a dance, or a puzzle — a combination of song and dance, or an abstraction. If there ever was a puzzle piece, this is it: it has the obsessiveness of thought, of a mind chasing down, teasing out an idea.

I found, along with the 8:30 minute long "Su la cetra amorosa," two other excellent little pieces by Merula: "Folle è ben chi si crede," and "Un bambin che va alla scola." But I meant to write about the Tarantella del Gargano. It's anonymous, meaning it's a folk tune, but the radio program gave the courtly version; it fit in with Monteverdi's and Merula's civilized, polished pieces. The version I found on the internet, by Daniele Sepe, is the raw untamed version. He has an androgynous, high tenor voice, and occasionally slips into a kind of rough yodel. In the background someone barks, someone else makes owl sounds, and when Sepe takes a break the instruments take center stage: tambourines, bagpipes, banjos, people stomping and clapping. Listen for yourself.

I wish I could find the Confraternità dei Musici's version: how did someone manage to tame such a wild animal?
The version I overheard at the Castel Sant'Angelo was halfway between the two extremes.

Chiome d'oro: Emma Kirkby, Judith Nelson, and the Consort of Musicke
Su la cetra amorosa: Montserrat Figueras, Jean-Pierre Canhac, Ton Koopman, Andrew Lawrence King, Rolf Lislevand, Lorenz Duftschmid, Jordi Saval

In 2004 I heard Angela Hewitt play Couperin's "Mysterious Barricades" on the radio. It reminds me of Handel's "Harmonious Blacksmith," or maybe just the connotations of the title — a quiet, joyful pleasure in work. Now I have all three of her CDs of Couperin's "Ordres." Here are some of my favorites:
Les langueurs tendres
Gazoüillement
Les Bergeries
Le Ménetou
Les lis naissans
Le rossignol-en-amour
Les favètes plaintives
Le Dodo, ou l'Amour au Berceau
Le Turbulent
Le tic-toc-choc
Le Gaillard Boiteux
La Muse Plantine
L'Amphibie
La Convalescente
L'Épineuse

Aren't the titles wonderful?! Not that I understand every single word. ("Ménetou"? "Gazoüillement"?) Here are the titles of the miniatures in the 25th order: (I was going to say sketches, but they're too finished. But "miniatures" may not be right either — some of them are five minutes long.)
1. La Visionaire
2. La Misterieuse
3. La Monflambert
4. La Muse Victorieuse
5. Les Ombres Errantes

It's like wandering through a formal garden full of statues at dawn.

A-ha! I just looked up "gazouille*" on artfl. Here's the definition:
GAZOUILLER. v. n. Faire un petit bruit doux & agreable, tel que celuy que fait le cours d'un petit ruisseau sur les cailloux, ou celuy des petits oiseaux. On entend le soir les oiseaux qui gazoüillent. ce ruisseau gazoüille agreablement sur les cailloux.

How appropriate.

Here's another extraordinary set of titles, the 13th order. None of these is more than a minute long:
1. La Virginité sous le Domino couleur d'invisible
2. La Pudeur sous le Domino couleur de roze
3. L'Ardeur sous le Domino incarnat
4. L'Ésperance sous le Domino vert
5. La Fidelité sous le Domino bleu
6. La Persévérance sous le Domino gris de lin
7. La Langueur sous le Domino violet
8. La Coqueterie sous le différens Dominos
9. Les Vieux Galans et les Trésorieres Suranées sous des Dominos pourpres et feuilles mortes
10. Les Coucous Bénévoles sous des Domino jaunes
11. La Jalousie Taciturne sous le Domino gris de maure
12. La Frénésie, ou le Désespoir sous le Domino noir

He can be as warm, confident, calm and expansive as Handel, in "Mysterious Barricades" and also in "Le Dodo, ou l'amour au berceau," but he's Bach's match for poisonous, paralyzing bitterness. See "La Muse-Plantine" for gentle bleakness. Or he can weave together extremes, as in "La Convalescente" — fleeting consonant intervals like hints of forgiveness.

Other pieces are simply the epitome of exquiteness and delicacy. You want to hold your breath so as not to disturb the birds and flowers.

I lent these to Mark and he said, "Some of them are run of the mill, but the best ones are astonishing." I would have agreed with him when I first became acquainted with the pieces, but the more I listen the more I think, "Couperin invented his own language, and anything he says in it is fascinating."

Because of the paintings on the covers of the CDs, I thought, "This is rococo music." And then it occurred to me that Marvell is rococo poetry — not just "Picture of Little TC in a Prospect of Flowers" and "On a Drop of Dew," but practically all the lyric poems, or all the ones that treat nature as art.

More on "Remember My Forgotten Man":

Here's the first stanza:

Remember my forgotten man
You put a rifle in his hand
You sent him far away
You shouted hip-hurray
Look at him today

I was tempted to put in a great deal of punctuation to make up for the lack of conjunctions, but decided not to: the sarcasm of the song has everything to do with the absence of transitions: nothing is connected to anything else.
Another great thing about this song: the regular march, the unvarying rhythm of the words vs. the lurching crippled rhythm of the music (and especially the violin & piano accompaniment).

Last year I bumped into an old elementary school classmate on the bus. I had seen her only once since 6th grade, in high school, when she came to a recital a friend of hers and I were in. Anyway, she told me she was a cabaret singer specializing in songs of the 20s and 30s. Although she was awfully mean to me in 6th grade, she was perfectly nice to me when we met in high school, and downright effusive when we met on the bus. So I looked up her website, listened to samples, and ended up buying all three of her CDs. I really like them. I like her invocation of her Ziegfeld's Follies grandmother (I've had a weakness for vaudeville ever since watching a great deal of Charlie Chaplin and reading Angela Carter — Wise Children and Nights at the Circus — in high school, and it all came back to me last week when I read Philip Pullman's magisterial Shadow in the North. There's a song by Jan Johansson that perfectly captures one aspect of vaudeville: the self-deprecating, shabby yet spiffy, humorous, good-natured mournfulness. It's called "Det sjunger nagontig inom mig," and it's in the Spelar Musik Pa Sitt Eget Vis. (There are circles over some of those a's.)) Anyway, back to Maude Maggart: at first all I could do was listen to her rendition of Cole Porter's "Looking at You" again and again. Now I've been able to tear myself away from it long enough to appreciate (on the same Look for the Silver Lining album) "I'll See You Again," "J'ai Deux Amours," "Look for the Silver Lining," and "My Man," and on the With Sweet Despair album, "Beyond Compare," "Remember My Forgotten Man" (I love the haunted bitterness, the stomping fierceness & the grace of it), and "Happy Days Are Here Again." It's hard to believe, listening to her calm, melancholy performance that this was FDR's campaign song.

I love how Dvorak can be both playful & intense to an extreme. In the last movement of the sonata in F, there are two fan-like runs in the piano 36 seconds to the end. It's quiet, so it happens in a penumbra, but surrounded by the aura of pedal. It opens like a quick breath, like the lifting whirl of the hem of a skirt, & then it's over. A few seconds later the figure is repeated in the violin. I usually like Dvorak's violins, so vigorous & pressing & present, all muscles & tendons, but in comparison with the brief loveliness, the vanishing sublimity of the piano — well it can't compare.

I'm staying in the room of my dear friend Amber, who's out of town. If you want to see what Amber looks like, take a look at John Eliot Gardner, the Monteverdi Choir, and the English Baroque Soloists' recording of Bach's Ascension Cantatas. There's Amber, smack in the middle of the CD cover, next to Bach. She did not pose for the picture, and she didn't even know it existed til she saw the CD in a store. It has to be her — it's small, but it looks like no one else, and she was spending a lot of time in the Thomaskirche the year before the CD came out. We were all astonished. (It so happens that she plays the baroque violin!)
The Thomaskirche is Bach's church — where he worked, where he's buried — at the altar, no less. I sang there once, & thought, "I can't believe I'm singing Bach's music in the presence of Bach's bones!" At moments like those relics & ancestor-worship make perfect sense.

Recommendations:

Terry Castle's memoir of Susan Sontag in the LRB is very amusing, and true to my own impression of Sontag (from the one time I met her). It's rather cruel and catty, but so funny you can't really feel guilty. I like how Castle casts herself as a clumsy ingenue.

Last year I heard Jill Crossland perform in Balliol College. I sent her a very appreciative e-mail, asking if a Händel CD was in the works. Her secretary wrote to thank me, and say that there was no Händel CD nor would there be one for a while. I didn't reply, because I didn't really have anything more to say. Then a few weeks later this kind soul wrote to me again, apologizing that she, and not Ms Crossland herself, was writing, and saying that there was a homemade recording of Händel's Suite No. 5 (which includes the miraculous Harmonious Blacksmith variations), would I like a copy? Would I! And how thoughtful and excessively modest of her to apologize for not being Jill Crossland. Anyway, I got it in the mail a few weeks ago — Händel's Suite no. 5 and the Chaconne. I love love love them. Especially in the Chaconne, the way it slows down after that marvellously self-confident, majestic entrance (so typical of Händel). "Let me savor this," it seems to say, and goes into variations (explorations really) that range from the contemplative to the energetic. After five minutes it modulates into minor and you think, "This is just another variation; such self-confidence can afford to entertain self-doubt." But after a while it becomes clear that this is no entertainment: the poison almost makes the music grind to a halt, until suddenly it catches a kind of despairing energy: "If it must be, so be it!" Might as well go down in style. It gathers momentum (baroque music is the best at conveying extremes of bitterness and despair without ever losing shape, quite a feat when you think about it; gives the lie to Johnson's comment about Milton's "Lycidas"). And then all that running in a miserable panic through a wasteland leads one to, of all places — I don't know, a sunrise, a banquet, a loved one, all rolled in one — the joy of the beginning, except that this time it feels earned. It starts out majestically, and then it starts running too. But this is a happy running.

What a piece! All that in under twelve minutes!

Then I started listening to John Potter's recordings of John Dowland. At first I thought I only liked "Come Again" (I bought the CD for that song) but then I discovered "Fine Knacks for Ladies" and "Now, O Now, I Needs Must Go." They're excellent. (All the other songs promise to be real downers: "In Darkness Let Me Dwell," "Lachrymae Verae, " "Lachrymae Tristes," "Lachrymae Amantis," "Flow My Tears," "Go Crystal Tears.") The liner notes for the CD are interesting. They start out defending the use of the saxophone in a recording of Elizabethan music, and end up as an impassioned declaration of artistic independence from historicism. It's very well-written, and it struck a chord with me since I read it during a period when I was spending days and weeks with boring historicist criticism. (The saxophone, in case you're wondering, works astonishingly well in Dowland's songs.)

Apparently Schumann's Papillons (Op. 2) "is a musical rendering of the ballroom scene from a chapter of the novel "Flegeljahre" by Jean Paul Richter, Schumann's favorite novelist." This information comes, if you can believe it, from a website called "amazing butterflies," which recommends a CD of "butterfly" music to attract butterflies to your garden.

Schumann’s butterflies

A few years ago I attended a performance of his Carnaval “Scènes mignonnes sur quatre notes.” They’re sketches of people at a masked ball: friends, musicians, commedia dell’arte characters, and two versions of Schumann himself. After the eighth sketch the pianist closed the piano, wiped his hands on his knees, and waited. At first I thought he was collecting himself for the next challenge, but as the silence lengthened I began to worry that he might have hit a block. After two minutes I was so frantic for him that I heard ringing in my ears. (He was an acquaintance.) Finally, smiling, he opened the piano and played the next sketch. After the performance I asked a musician friend what had happened. “That’s the sphinx. Schumann’s instructions are to shut the piano and sit and wait for a long time.” A sphinx at the masked ball: as if to say, some people are utterly inscrutable; we just don’t know what to say about them.” (“We dance in a ring & suppose./ The secret sits in the middle & knows.” The sphinx comes almost halfway through the Carnaval.)

Recently I read that “the motivic seeds of Carnaval are revealed by the notated but unplayed “Sphinxes” (inspired by Jean Paul’s Sphinx moths): the pitches E-flat, C, B, A (“es c h a” in German) denote Schumann, and A-flat, C, B (“as c h”) or A, E-flat, C, B (“a es c h) stand for Asch, the birthplace of Ernestine.” (“A.S.C.H-S.C.H.A (Lettres dansantes)” is no. 11, and “Estrella” (Ernestine) is no. 14.) What are Jean Paul’s Sphinx moths?! Are they related to Schumann’s Papillons Opus 2? The Sphinx comes right before a sketch named “Papillons.” It also comes after the “Réplique” (no. 8) to Coquette (no. 7), so maybe it’s part of a conversation.

Suggestions welcome.