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

A great Roman building: Castel Sant'Angelo. At first I was just glad to have such a noticeable landmark near my home. (The apartment I was staying in adjoins the wall that runs from the Vatican headquarters to the fortress, along via dei Corridori: a safe outdoor hallway for the pope and his messengers.) The Tiber curves sharply around it, so that from most points of view it seems to stand in the way of the river: an illusion of arrogance. Then I liked the way it starts out squat and broadens from bottom to top: it's like the original of the Guggenheim. (I like the Guggenheim, but next to Castel Sant'Angelo it looks as thin and flimsy as turnip peelings.) As if to say: "I'm big and heavy, but I can still defy gravity." And just so we get the point, there's the statue of the Archangel Michael flying on the top. It's all so incongruous, and it works somehow.
Then, coming closer, I noticed how rough and irregular the stones at the base were; they must be very ancient, I thought. And the smooth and precise brickwork above looked much more recent. Another interesting contrast. I'm glad they didn't cover the old stones with new bricks.
All I knew about the fortress, at first, was from the last act of Tosca: the place where Cavaradossi is executed by a firing squad — a terrible dungeon, a symbol of papal oppression. But one evening I wandered in; you need a ticket, and I didn't have one, but no one stopped me. "It must be because I'm in the atrium; further on they'll ask me for my ticket." But I ventured deeper into the building, and no one stopped me. A plaque informed me that the building started as Hadrian's mausoleum. There's a model of the mausoleum as it looked in 137 AD: the cylinder is the same breadth from top to bottom, so that marvellous broadening must have happened over the centuries as the mausoleum was turned into a fortress. On top of the mausoleum there was a temple, and on top of that, a statue of the emperor where we now have Michael. I walked up the long spiral walk, gradual enough for a horse, deep in the center of the building, to Hadrian's burial chamber, which is now empty except for a plaque with Hadrian's reflections on mortality:

Animula blandula vagula
hospes comesque corporis,
quae nunc abibis in loca
pallidula, rigida, nudula,
nec, ut soles, dabis iocos

Gentle little wandering soul,
guest and companion of the body,
to what pale, stark, naked
places will you go now,
where you won't joke as you are wont

It was disconcerting, and moving, to find those five lines of affectionate, apprehensive second person intimacy at the center of that ancient pile.

I like crossing the bridge that leads straight to its entrance; it makes you feel like the ruler of the world. At night there are torches lining the bridge and surrounding the fortress. (Is that possible? That's how I remember it, but maybe there were only torches around the entrance.) In summer the castle is open until 1 am for cabaret, music, food, and some exhibits.* I wandered around taking in the views, looked down the ramparts (where Tosca jumped) at a stand-up comic, and walked past someone singing the Tarantella del Gargano.

[*There are places in Florence like this — in summer they're full of music, food, exhibits, book tables. I think London's pleasure gardens — Vauxhall and others — must have been like this. I wonder why they closed — did people stop going? What didn't they like?]

Mausoleum, fortress, dungeon, museum, performance space — that building knows more than any mortal.

Here are some marvellous pictures, including 360 degree images that swing you around the Tiber.

Coincidence: These days I'm translating the entries in Il Giornalino di Gian Burrasca about Giannino's visit to Rome. He mentions several monuments, but not the Castel Sant'Angelo.

Coincidence: on the train to Germany I was finishing Mary Renault's The Bull from the Sea. In the last chapter the aging Theseus hears of and glimpses the young Achilles. As I was reading, an eight or nine-year-old boy across the aisle told his father everything he knew about Achilles, and Patroclus, and Hector, and Alexander the Great; and he knew a lot. (Renault wrote three books about Alexander.)

Coincidence: I had just finished a soup for lunch and meant to go over to the Kaffeebaum next door for tea. (It was raining, I was far from home and deep in a book, so there seemed to be nothing else to do.) There were some books lying on a sill, and the title of one volume caught my eye: Du meine Seele Du mein Herz. This is the first line of Schumann's "Widmung" for Clara Wieck. Curious, I picked it up. "A novel about Robert Schumann," said the title page. I turned to chapter one: "All the regulars were at the Koffebaum's evening Stammtisch: Herr Wieck…"

I've never loved Rome, the city where I was born. I had only the vaguest impressions until I visited it several times about seven years ago, and decided it wasn't for me. Its will to impress, to take one's breath away, seemed clumsy and overbearing; the churches, with precious objects heaped up alla rinfusa, seemed more like treasure chambers than churches. It lacked the delicacy of Medieval and Renaissance cities, like Venice, Florence, or Bologna; it lacked the humane, sturdy cheerfulness of those last two, and the splendid melancholy of the first; in fact I couldn't read any expression in it beyond, "Bow down to my wealth and power." The ruins were impressive and sobering, but entirely discontinuous with the modern city; they stick up suddenly, like skeleton fingers from an unsuspected grave.

That has all changed. I know what I was thinking, which buildings I was looking at, but I see other things too now. Partly because I know more. (You can be perfectly ignorant and still fall in love with Venice, but not Rome.) Partly because I've been taking public transportation. (Last time I hung on for dear life behind my friend & host, a daring motorcyclist.) But for another reason too. I went to dinner at the Cortesi (who told me the dove story) following Corso Vittorio Emanuele. Lots of pompous, heavy, boring buildings. "Take via del Governo Vecchio on your way home," they suggested. It runs parallel to Corso Vittorio Emanuele (which might as well be called "via del Governo Nuovo"), and it's another world — narrow, winding, quiet and mysterious but (because of all the cafés and restaurants) lively at the same time, the buildings full of leering, laughing, weeping stone faces; glowing lanterns shedding irregular light on the street signs, which have always looked like grave stones to me. (cp. the street signs in Florence — cheerful blue and white ceramic, like Delft.)

And so behind most square, flat, regular things in Rome I think there's something winding, irregular, round and deep. The ruins, once no doubt the most regular, imposing things in the world, embody this doubleness, but many other things do too.

There's a curved street with a curved apartment building on the concave side of the curve; the reason for the building's unusual shape is that it's built on the old Teatro di Pompeo; a colonnade extended several hundred meters from the theater to the civic complex of Largo Argentina, and the Cortesi say that in their building's basement there are the stumps of some of these columns. Those blocks are now a warren of little streets, and I like to think of the columns still marching (furtim) from basement to basement to their old destination, the site of Caesar's assassination. (I would say "like a ground-bass," but that sounds too much like a pun.)

There are other things: Rome is much more appealing at night — at least in this season — than during the day. And there's the good nature, the energy, and (in some neighborhoods at least), the vigorous informality. I can even say that sometimes, in certain lights, the heavy buildings remind me not so much of power, arrogance, and a ton of bricks, as of a big, clumsy, shaggy dog, eager to please and to make its presence known. It steps on a lot of toes, but means no harm.

Here I am in Rome, studying Latin. My mother reported to me that her friends had asked, what was I going to do with it? And so I said that after I finish this course I'll be able to teach more advanced students, and that Marvell wrote some poems in Latin, and I'm interested in neo-Latin poetry. All of which is true, but I think it's a bit rich of these academics to ask why I should want to study Latin. Why do they do what they do? It's their job, fine. But does their job feed anyone? How can it be justified? In the end you're left with an article of faith: thinking about these things is a good in itself. I'm actually quite happy to say that studying literature and history equips us for our own lives, but I know my mother is against this means-to-an-end argument: she believes in history for history's sake. No compromises with expedience. I'll accept that, but she shouldn't question how I spend my summer. Especially after teaching so much this year, I feel no compunctions about abandoning myself to the luxury of study for two months.
There's also the feeling: we owe it to the past — to the legions of dead who were once so alive — to think about them. I know that's something R. F. feels strongly too; why else would he draw our attention to the shrug of the shoulders, the wry, half-finished joke, the saltiest colloquial moments? Why else, to point out the obvious, would he speak in Latin? He often says, "This morning, friends, this happened this morning," about something that in fact happened 2000 years ago. (But: this approach scants extra-ordinary uses of language — we hardly do any poetry at all.) I don't think we'll measure up so well to posterity: we produce too much excruciatingly bad prose. In comparison to the Romans — to anyone before the 20th century — we shall seem humorless, wooden, false, pompous, inhumane.

Update: I told my mother to read Alexander Stille's chapter on R. F. in The Future of the Past, and now she's thrilled about my course — prompts me to talk about it in company, etc.

A horrible story:

(This happened to friends of friends in Rome.)

A dove* flew into an apartment, and kept very quiet, perhaps hiding in a corner, or under a bed. Then the owners left for vacation. When they came back the stench, of course, was unbearable, but even more striking was the amount of damage the bird had done in its death agony, weakened though it must have been by hunger. Any number of glass and ceramic objects were in pieces, and even the glass on picture frames had been shattered. Perhaps the bird thought they were windows.

*"colomba." You can think of it as a pigeon if that makes it any less awful.

A few weeks ago my sixth grade was going to critique Danny's essay in response to this question: If you could spend an afternoon with any author, living or dead, with whom would you spend it? What would you talk about?

Danny can be annoying, he's often lazy, but every once in a while I realize I don't give him enough credit; in any other class he'd be a star. He wrote his essay on Dave Pilkey, author of the Captain Underpants series (which I'd never heard of, but his classmates knew what he was talking about). His essay contains the following endearing passage:

We could exchange ideas for books that he is planning to write, or make comic books. I always run out of ideas when I try to write a story or a comic book, and after I finish it sounds lame from a lack of ideas. He could help me when I get stuck and we could have fun writing, drawing, and reading books.

I like the good-natured honesty of "lame from a lack of ideas."
The transcripts of student essays that I hand out are anonymous, but of course they're all eager to know who the author is, and since Danny is the class expert on the literature of silly and indecent humor, I and Danny, in his way, were the only ones keeping up the pretense of anonymity. Danny was torn between embarrassment and pride, and he dealt with his mixed emotions by hamming it up: whenever we pointed out a flaw (but mostly we said good things), he'd shake his head and sigh, "I can't believe the author made such a foolish mistake." In my printed transcript I had written "Dan" for "Dave," and Danny asked me, "Ms —, how could you make such a mistake?" And I answered in the same sorrowful tone that he was using, "Well Danny, some students' handwriting is not what it should be." The class erupted in laughter: "Ooh, she got you there!" Danny was laughing too.