Why opera? 8

/ Geoffrey Gibson / Leave a comment

8

Twentieth century

John Eliot Gardiner, the conductor and musicologist and man for all seasons, is nothing if not an enthusiast.  In his wonderful book on Bach, he speaks of the Lutheran teaching that music is something for people to make and share.  Music is communal.  Bach’s cantatas were written for people to come together to sing. It serves to remind us that for the most part, the operas that we have been looking at may not have been by the people but they are of the people and for the people.  Wagner again looks to be the exception.  One criticism of Puccini was that he was too much for the people.  Well, a lot of that communion with the people was about to change in the period that we now come to.

We don’t think fondly or kindly of the last century.  The world saw two world wars, the depression, the Holocaust, and the atom bomb.  Then it saw half a century of sustained peace followed by the humiliation of the United States and the collapse of the Soviet Union.  Some optimists thought that history had reached the peak of its progress.  Any such optimism vanished early this century with a near miss on a repeat of the great depression from which we have not yet recovered, and which left capitalism only marginally more respected than socialism.  We have seen an erosion of faith in all pillars of our community, including what we call the arts.

In the first part of the twentieth century, we come to what is called modernism.  Picasso broke the mould in painting.  Diaghilev did the same in ballet.  Joyce wrote Ulysses and he would effectively dissolve in Finnegan’s Wake.  Eliot wrote The Waste Land.  It is not just that these people created what Robert Hughes called ‘the shock of the new’ – although it was a shock.  People remembered that when the impressionists arrived, some people could not see any pattern at all.  Rather, the point was that for the most part these revolutionary forms of art were only appreciated by a small minority in the community.  Had these works appealed to the community at large, there would have been no shock and no revolution.  Can you imagine a less ‘populist’ person than T S Eliot?  These works were not of or for the people – at least as the people then stood.  That’s a big change, and we can see it in opera.

Then came something less gripping.  Its label is Post-modernism.  I have always had trouble with that term and what it might embrace.  I sense that it may be as helpful as ‘deconstructing’.  Someone compared it to playing tennis with the net down, so my sense is that there is a wish to tear down all forms.  This is often a sure sign that the person doing the tearing down has no ability at all and wants to be free of the normal criteria for assessing that kind of art.  Whatever – the gap between the ‘artist’ and audience was even wider, and the audience was even smaller.  It follows that the works will not be seen to be ‘popular’ – although that is a weasel word.  It then follows that those who are seen to admire this new stuff are geeks or nerds.  That means that the cost of tickets will go up and the result then is that the people who go to these events are either geeks or toffs.  In any event, the ordinary person has little time or respect – or faith – in either the artist or the audience.

Generalisations like these are dangerous.  They represent what I call empiricism without the benefit of evidence.  Let me try to come at from the other side.  Mozart, Verdi, and Puccini were loved and admired for their art by the whole people.  Their nations were proud of them and they were happy to see their art woven into the social fabric.  By and large, that is not the case with the composers we are about to look at.  The reasons for the difference are, in my view, partly the factors I have just tried to identify, and the fact that few of the composers that we now come to got even close to any of their three great predecessors.  People have I think given up hope of ever seeing anyone constantly electrifying opera audiences in anything like those composed by Mozart, Verdi, or Puccini.  (One exception may be the comparison of Strauss and Puccini.)  That in turn leads to an underlying sense of decay and inbreeding, if not death.  Opera-goers might then feel about as safe and welcome and relevant as members of a gentlemen’s club.  And not many of them are prepared to chance their evening on an opera by Philip Glass; and even fewer companies are prepared to chance their arm on such a venture.

We might bear those admittedly large observations in mind as we consider, briefly, four composers – Richard Strauss, Alban Berg, Leos Janacek, and Benjamin Britten.

Richard Strauss lived from 1864 to 1949.  As a German, Strauss did therefore live through what the Chinese call interesting times – and he came out carrying some baggage.  Should we not try to be adult about this?  Furtwangler, the great conductor was pilloried for shaking hands with Hitler.  What was he supposed to do with his Chancellor – turn his back?

Strauss was brought up and taught in a family where the father was a distinguished horn player and a fervent conservative who hated the music of Wagner.  Accordingly, the son, an only son, grew up in what we might call the classical tradition – he revered Bach, Mozart and Beethoven, and it shows in his operas.  He was not like young Mozart, but he did start piano lessons at the age of four, and he began composing two years later.  He began his composing career with orchestral works, and after earlier efforts, landed with a bang with his third opera Salome that premiered in Dresden in 1905.  This set him up artistically and financially.  After Elektra, his best known work, Der Rosenkavalier, was first performed in 1911.  Works came steadily, some with the distinguished writer Stefan Zweig.  Strauss had a lull and came back to form with Capriccio in 1942.  He did act to please the regime, but he refused to give Zweig up to the Nazis, and he was later acquitted of collaboration.

In spite of his orthodox classical upbringing, Strauss has been called the last great German Romantic.  We shall look at two works, Salome and Der Rosenkavalier.  Some might find it hard to believe that they were written by the same composer.  Romain Rolland was a fan, but he said that Strauss was ‘a Shakespearian barbarian: his art is torrential, producing at one and the same time gold, san, stone and rubbish: he has almost no taste at all, but a violence that borders on madness.’

Salome is a mix of the bible and sex, and that really upset the Kaiser.  Try the 1997 Covent Garden version with Catherine Malfitano and Terfel.  Der Rosenkavalier is very different, a kind of dreamy rhapsody to the haute bourgeoisie.   It has similarities with Figaro, but, interestingly for our purposes, Strauss thought that some sections of the libretto were ‘too delicate for the mob.’  Well, the people loved it, and Strauss was rich.  You get humour, the waltz, and glorious tunes for sopranos.  ‘The Presentation of the Rose’ is legendary.  Gough Whitlam loved the work and Debussy said that there is ‘sunshine in the music of Strauss…it is not possible to withstand his irresistible domination.’  Others think that it is like Arabella – kitsch or schmalz.  The EMI recording with Schwarzkopf and Karajan is famous, and you can see the whole opera with that pairing at the Salzburg Festival.  If you want to sample the Presentation of the Rose, there is a wide selection – including Lucia Popp, Diana Damrau and Anne Sophie von Otter.  If you are a blokey sort of bloke, this may not be your bag.

Alban Berg (1885 to 1935) came from a wealthy Viennese family.  He was a student of Arnold Schoenberg, and his general output was not huge.  He wrote two operas.  They have both been well served by the AO, but neither is for the beginner.  Wozzek is about brutality in the army and it involves a brutal murder.  Both the music and the plot could very soon frighten off the beginner.  You can listen to the whole opera with Karl Bohm and Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau.  It is not a work for excerpts.  Lulu may be less depressing, but it’s marginal.  Lulu is sexually active and burns men off until she gets topped by Jack the Ripper.  Christine Schafer is provocatively sexy in the lead – she starts by taking a bite out of the apple and she looks like Eve giving Adam the come-on – in a wonderful Glyndebourne production that I have and which you can see and hear.  The music may be jagged to the ear of the novice, but this is very high theatre about desire and pleasure – sex.  Some of the characters may have stepped out of Dickens, but the power of Schafer’s femme fatale is hot.  (And just think – she also plays Gilda in Rigoletto.)  A lot Lulu evokes the cabarets of Berlin between the wars.  The AO version in 2003 with Simone Young and Emma Matthews was a winner.

Leos Janacek (1854 to 1928) is a very different proposition.  Although he was born in the year after La Traviata was finished, his substantive opera work is all twentieth century.  He was born into a poor teacher’s family in what was called Moravia, and he lived there most of his life.  He dropped out of studies in Leipzig and Vienna.  Most of his work premiered in Brno.  The Czechs in Prague were cool about it although Janacek was very supportive of the Czech Republic after its foundation in 1918.  He said that he wanted ‘to compose a melodic curve which will, as if by magic, reveal immediately a human being in one definite phase of his existence.’  That is a very interesting statement from the composer of operas.  So were two traits he had.  He was fascinated by what we call folk music, and by what he might learn about our humanity by carefully observing patterns of speech.  He went as far as to note down speech in musical notation.  He talked about ‘speech melodies.’  Here then was ripe ground for opera. His work came with a rush toward the end of his life.  His operas are less difficult to access than those of Berg, and for many people, they may be easier than a lot of Britten.  We will look at two, both performed by the AO.

Jenufa is one of those sad eastern European tales that may be a bit too unsubtle to resemble Chekhov.  It involves a thwarted love affair and the murder of a child – which might send us off in the direction of Ibsen.  But the music is easily gettable, and you can trace folk melody in it.  I have a recollection of Moffatt Oxenbould saying that this is one of the operas that the AO then really enjoyed putting on.  You can watch the whole of the 1989 Glyndebourne production with Roberta Alexander and Anja Silja, who is very good with this composer.  You may want to watch the conductor David Robertson discuss this opera at the Met.  He touches on some of the points made above.  There is also a 2014 Deutsche Oper version from Berlin.  The conductor Charles Mackerras was much involved in bringing this composer to the fore, and his recordings with Elizabeth Soderstrum are to be preferred.

The Makropolous Case is a Monty for lawyers.  It’s about litigation arising from the fact that the heroine has lived for hundreds of years in different guises and has now had enough.  The music is intensely dramatic, but it’s well worth persevering.  It’s like an orchestral recitative- you have staggered dialogue over staggered music, and restated motifs.  This really is music as drama in itself, and Act III, especially the soaring finale, is amongst my favourite pieces of music.  It’s curious that this acceptance of the end of life can seem to leave us at what Churchill called those ‘broad sunlit uplands.’  There is a film version with a Czech cast I’m not familiar with but it was recorded in the theatre in Brno – so you might get the real thing.  You can also hear a remarkably urbane Charles Mackerras interviewed about this opera, Jenufa, and other issues relating to Janacek.  On some days this opera features in my top ten.

Benjamin Britten (1913 to 1976) was a different kind of a cove again.  His mother was a keen amateur singer and musician, and Britten was composing at five.  He was introduced to the work of contemporary composers like Berg.  He worked at the Post Office and in conjunction with Auden who was important in his life.  Auden and Britten and his partner Peter Peers left for America.  Britten returned in 1942.  He was a conscientious objector.  After two lesser works, he wrote Peter Grimes which was first performed in June 1945.  Britten retained a great affection for the sea and his native East Anglia.  Peter Grimes made Britten’s name for him, and it began a change in attitude to home grown opera, and not just in England.  Billy Budd was first performed in 1951, and Midsummer Night’s Dream premiered in 1960.

There are other operas, but some with too much edge to be chanced by many opera houses.  Britten could be prickly dealing with people.  He loathed Puccini and he was sickened by Tosca, although he was determined to be melodic.  Peter Grimes remains his most celebrated opera, and its sea interludes are very popular on the concert platform.  Leonard Bernstein conducted them with Beethoven’s 7th on his last night with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra.

Peter Grimes is set on the coast.  A fisherman has lost a young boy.  The town people reject him as an outsider when another boy seem looks to have been mistreated.  The opera is surprisingly easy on the ear for such a macabre theme.  When I went to a talk about this opera at the AO by Moffatt Oxenbould more than twenty years ago, there was an older lady in a ruby red hat who had it in her mind that the show was about ‘pederasty,’ and nothing was going to change her mind on that score.  Both Britten and Peers identified with the outsider, and anyone who has lived in a small country town will know how nasty things can get if you are adjudged to be off side.  You can listen to a version recorded in 1945 or watch a BBC studio version in 1969.

Billy Budd is a beautiful novella by Herman Melville.  It is everything that Moby Dick is not and far more satisfying for the general reader.  During the Napoleonic War, a handsome young sailor, Billy Budd, was impressed into service on a British warship.  Billy is as innocent as he is handsome, and he is fortunate that his new captain is Captain ‘Starry’ Vere.  Vere is a civilised product of the Enlightenment with a refined sense of justice.  But Billy comes under the notice of the Master-at-Arms, John Claggart.  Claggart is in effect the Chief of Police on the ship.  He is morally bereft.  He may well be gay.  He cannot stand being in the presence of beauty and goodness like that of Billy ‘Baby’ Budd.  Claggart falsely accuses Billy of mutiny before Captain Vere.  Billy is horrified and incredulous.  When stressed, Billy’s voice falters.  When he is pressed for an answer, he strikes out at Claggart, and strikes him dead.

During a time of war, therefore, Captain Vere has witnessed a sailor strike and kill an officer.  He summons a drumhead court martial.  Billy is plainly guilty of the legal offence charged, but the officers are reluctant to give a verdict that will see Billy hanged.  They agonise over Billy, but Captain Vere persuades them to do their legal duty.  Billy is hanged.  The threat of mutiny passes.  Captain Vere carries the responsibility for the death of Billy to his grave.  A morally innocent man has been killed to preserve the integrity of the law of arms.

That is a beautiful plot for an opera, and Britten and E M Forster did a wonderful job on it.  (There is a great film with Terence Stamp, Robert Ryan and Peter Ustinov.)  The drama is elemental – pure evil against pure innocence: which way does the law go?  If an angel must die for responding to evil, is this another redemption story?  In my view it is, and to my taste, it is a far more successful redemption story on every level than Parsifal.

Well, the music brings this out with an all-male cast – homosexuality is touched on by Melville in the text – and we already know that Britten can conjure up the sea musically like no one else.  You can see the full opera starring Peter Peers in a television film made in 1966, or you can see it performed at the Vienna Staatsoper in 2001.  You can also see and hear Billy’s final aria ‘Billy in the Darbies’ (Billy cuffed, the night before execution and taken from Melville) sung in concert or in rehearsal.  It is for me one of the most beautiful and moving songs in all opera.

That leaves Midsummer Night’s Dream based on the play of Shakespeare.  When I saw this in rehearsal with one daughter about thirty years ago, I thought that the music might be above our pay level, but the two of us nearly died laughing at the rustics at play.  This was ruthlessly hilarious slapstick.  The production was both gutsy and gorgeous.  The play was set in the Raj, and the little orchestra was put on stage in a rotunda.  You can see a clip of this quite wonderful AO production or watch the whole show.  There is a full recorded version, and various clips from others, but as far as I could see, no full vision of the whole show.  Enjoy, then, the clip from the AO version.  It is fully worthy not just of the composer, but the original playwright.

There then is what I think is a representative sample of what I see as the best of twentieth century opera.  I am very fond of a lot of it now, but it has taken me some time and effort.  I incline to the view that opera as an art form is not as dead in composition as some people fear.

Passing Bull 114 – Bull about a Christian nation

/ Geoffrey Gibson / Leave a comment

 

From time to time, you hear chatter about whether Australia may be called a Christian nation.

There is a problem with the question.  Religion involves faith.  Can an impersonal thing have faith? The word ‘nation’ is a form of abstraction, or a label, for a ‘distinct race or people, characterised by common descent, language or history, usually organised as a separate political state and occupying a definite territory’.  It may make sense to speak of a small body of people having feelings, but a body of 25 million?  How does a nation profess its faith?  Would it make any sense to ask whether BHP or the Melbourne City Council was a Christian corporation?

As I see it, the answer to those questions is no.  The inquiry presumably then becomes whether the number of people somehow or other professing their faith in Christianity entails that the nation might fairly be described as Christian – even if those who are not of that faith may be a little put out by the suggestion.

I suppose that nations like Iraq and Indonesia are loosely characterised as Muslim nations because a very large majority of their peoples actively practise the religion of Islam and their governments seek to apply its teaching.  Indeed, one of the things that makes people here fear Islam is a perceived threat that Muslims will seek to introduce Sharia Law among peoples not considered to be Muslim.

Well, then, let’s put to one side the question of how many Australians actually practise the religion of Christianity, do Australian governments seek to apply the teaching of Christianity?

A key statement of the teaching of Jesus of Nazareth is in the Sermon on the Mount.  Here are some parts of it as found in the fifth chapter of the gospel of St Matthew in the Bible.

Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

Blessed are they that mourn: for they shall be comforted.

Blessed are the meek; for they shall inherit the earth.

Blessed are they which do hunger and thirst after righteousness, for they shall be filled.

Blessed are the merciful, for they shall obtain mercy…..

Ye have heard that it hath been said, An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth, but I say unto you that you resist not evil: but whosoever shall smite thee on the right cheek, turn him the other also.

But I say unto you, Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you and persecute you…..

It would be absurd to suggest that any government in our history has ever sought to give effect to that teaching in government.  It would be seriously offensive, even to a lapsed member of the faith like me, to claim that the Commonwealth government, in any current manifestation, is adhering to the Sermon on the Mount in its dealings with refugees.

The reason is simple enough.  There is an unstated premise in government across the West – the Sermon on the Mount does not apply to governments.  Governing is hard enough as it is without worrying about high moral teaching about turning the other cheek.  I have never learned where this dispensation comes from, but you won’t find it in the bits in red.

It’s a fair bet that Donald Trump, who defames all Christians by claiming to adhere to their religion, would not know the difference between a beatitude and a Siamese kitten.  God only knows how he might react if Mr Bannon whispered in his ear that in the course of their Leninist destruction of Washington DC, the meek would inherit the earth.  There could be a Twitter meltdown.  And imagine what might be the reaction if you told a Queensland rozzer – say Peter Dutton – to turn the other cheek!

The Marquess of Salisbury (Robert Cecil) was the definitive Tory.  Andrew Roberts said he believed ‘in the politics of prestige and vengeance’ – a comprehensive repudiation of the Sermon on the Mount.

No one dreams of conducting national affairs with the principles which are prescribed to individuals.  The meek and poor spirited among nations are not to be blessed, and the common sense of Christendom has always prescribed for national policy principles diametrically opposed to those that are laid down in the Sermon on the Mount.

Elsewhere he said: ‘Christianity forced its way up from being the religion of slaves and outcasts, to become the religion of the powerful and the rich; but somehow it seems to have lost the power to force its way down again.’ We don’t speak so plainly about the first proposition now, but it is an inarticulate premise of our view of government

On those grounds, I suspect that people who claim Australia as a Christian nation are talking bullshit.  And, after all, why bother?  What’s the point?  Will anyone feel or act any better in the unlikely event that they see some merit in the proposition?  Who wants to make some Australians feel left out of it?

Who else might qualify?  All of both Americas, Western Europe, and the UK.  There would have to be exceptions.  The Germans know better than to label an entire nation.  The French have firmly locked religion out of politics since 1789.  And in my view the US are disqualified on three counts – their gun laws, their health care laws, and the election and adulation of an absurd graven image.  You would also have a problem with Ireland for the reason I am coming to.

May I now make a technical point?  The word ‘Christian’ has only come into vogue here in the last generation or so.  Prior to that, people identified their denomination, or their lack of it.  And for least some purposes, you still have to do so.   If you called yourself a Christian in Ireland, you would at best get a funny look.  It’s not good enough for our head of state to claim to be a Christian.  Because of the provisions of a foreign constitution, over which we have no control, our sovereign must be in communion with the Church of England.  Because of this relic of the Reformation, it’s not just Jews, Muslims, Hindus, or good God-fearing doubters like me who need not apply – Catholics are banned too, and all those the English called Dissenters.  How, as a matter of either form or substance, you square that barrier with our being a Christian nation is a matter that may have diverted the Medieval Schoolmen.

But to finish on a point of substance, haven’t we done enough to besmirch the teaching of the man Einstein called ‘the luminous Nazarene’ without applying his name to a crude political label?  The people who want to make this argument tend to have a reactionary caste of thought, and invoking the name of the Lord to make some political point, with an exclusionary tendency, looks to me go infringe the spirit if not the text of another biblical injunction.  Indeed, the whole discussion leaves a bad taste in the mouth – and partly for reasons that might fairly be called religious – even in an old apostate like me.

Poet of the month: Walt Whitman

O Captain!my Captain!

(In memory of Robyn Williams)

O CAPTAIN! my Captain! our fearful trip is done;

The ship has weather’d every rack, the prize we sought is won;

The port is near, the bells I hear, the people all exulting,

While follow eyes the steady keel, the vessel grim and daring:

But O heart! heart! heart! O the bleeding drops of red,

Where on the deck my Captain lies,

Fallen cold and dead.

O Captain! my Captain! rise up and hear the bells;

Rise up–for you the flag is flung–for you the bugle trills;

For you bouquets and ribbon’d wreaths–for you the shores a-crowding;

For you they call, the swaying mass, their eager faces turning;

Here Captain! dear father! This arm beneath your head;

It is some dream that on the deck, You’ve fallen cold and dead.

My Captain does not answer, his lips are pale and still;

My father does not feel my arm, he has no pulse nor will;

The ship is anchor’d safe and sound, its voyage closed and done;

From fearful trip, the victor ship, comes in with object won;

Exult, O shores, and ring, O bells! But I, with mournful tread,

Walk the deck my Captain lies,

Fallen cold and dead.

Here and there – Macaulay on Glencoe, zealots, and superior orders

/ Geoffrey Gibson / 3 Comments

 

The Clan McDonald (or Macdonald) of Glencoe was a band of robbers.  Most Highlanders were.  The Campbells of Argyle hated them and they had ruthlessly preyed on a man named Breadalbane.  The British Crown offered money to all Highlanders to take an oath of allegiance by 31 December 1691.  Anyone who did not do so in time would be treated a traitor and outside the law.  Breadalbane was in charge of handling the money. The Highland chiefs dragged their feet but they came in.  The McDonald chief left it to the last day – but no one there could take his oath.  He finally got sworn six days later.  That the McDonald chief was outside the law was good news for the Campbells, Breadalbane and for the Scots Prime Minister, Sir John Dalrymple, known as the Master of Stair.  Dalrymple had hoped to strike at a number of clans. In a letter written in this expectation, he said ‘I hope the soldiers will not trouble the government with prisoners.’  Then he found out that McDonald had sworn his oath after the cut-off.  He resolved to strike at that clan.  Without saying that McDonald had taken the oath late, Dalrymple put an order before King William that said:

As for Mac Ian of Glencoe [the McDonald chief] and that tribe, if they can be well distinguished from the other Highlanders, it will be proper for the vindication of public justice to extirpate that set of thieves.

You can get an argument about what ‘extirpate’ might mean there – clean the glen out of these bandits by rooting them out (as the Scots  king swore to ‘root out’ heresies), or wipe  them out in the sense of killing all, including women and children?  A soldier killing a bandit might seek to rely on that order as a defence – but killing a woman or child?

The design of the Master of Stair was ‘to butcher the whole race of thieves, the whole damnable race.’  But the troops would not just march in and execute the condemned outlaws.  Dalrymple was afraid that most of them would escape. ‘Better not meddle with them than meddle to no purpose.  When the thing is resolved, let it be secret and sudden.’ Macbeth himself might have said that.  The troops accepted the hospitality of the clan at Glencoe for twelve days.  Then at five o’clock in the morning, the troops started to kill men, women and children.  But they used firearms, and three quarters of the clan escaped the fate of their chief.

Macaulay could understand the hatred of Argyle and Breadalbane for the McDonalds, but Dalrymple – ‘one of the first men of his time, a jurist, a statesman, a fine scholar, an eloquent orator’?

To what cause are we to ascribe so strange an antipathy?….The most probable conjecture is that he was actuated by an inordinate, an unscrupulous, a remorseless zeal for what seemed to him to be the interest of the State.  This explanation may startle those who have not considered how large a proportion of the blackest crimes recorded in history is to be ascribed to ill regulated public spirit.  We daily see men do for their party, for their sect, for their country, for their favourite schemes of political and social reform, what they would not do to enrich or avenge themselves.  A temptation addressed to our private cupidity or to our private animosity, whatever virtue we have takes the alarm.  But virtue itself may contribute to the fall of him who imagines that it is in his power, by violating some general rule of morality, to confer an important benefit on a church on a commonwealth, on mankind.  He silences the remonstrances of conscience, and hardens his heart against the most touching spectacles of misery, by repeating to himself that his intentions are pure, that his objects are noble, that he is doing a little evil for the sake of a great good.  By degrees he comes altogether to forget the turpitude of the means in the excellence of the end, and at length perpetrates without one internal twinge acts which would shock a buccaneer. There is no reason to believe that Dominic would, for the best archbishopric in Christendom, have incited ferocious marauders to plunder and slaughter a peaceful and industrious population, that Everard Digby would, for a dukedom, have blown a large assembly of people into the air, or that Robespierre would have murdered for hire one of the thousands whom he murdered from philanthropy.

This analysis is vital.  There we have a description of our greatest enemy – the zealot who has God or the people on his side; the quintessential Catholic terrorist, Guy Fawkes; Robespierre and the people of la patrie; Osama bin Laden and the religion of Islam – all responsible for some of ‘the blackest crimes recorded in history’, and all convinced of the blackest falsity mankind has been guilty of – that the ends justify the means.   

Dostoevsky put it this way.

One cannot live by rebellion, and I want to live.  Tell me straight out, I call on you –imagine me: imagine that you yourself are building the edifice of human destiny with the object of making people happy in the finale, of giving them peace and rest at last, but for that you must inevitably and unavoidably torture just one tiny creature, that same child who was beating her chest with her little fist, and raise your edifice on the foundation of her unrequited tears – would you agree to be the architect on such conditions?  Tell me the truth.

So the great Russian writer, in The Brothers Karamazov, foretold the misery that would flow over all of the Russias from the righteousness of Marx, Lenin and Stalin.

In the House of the Dead, Dostoevsky explained how we are corrupted by power.

Whoever has experienced the power, the unrestrained ability to humiliate another human being….automatically loses power over his own sensations.  Tyranny is a habit, it has its own organic life, it develops finally into a disease.  The habit can kill and coarsen the very best man to the level of a beast.  Blood and power intoxicate…The man and the citizen die with the tyrant forever; the return to human dignity, to repentance, to regeneration becomes almost impossible.

Those words are deathless because they are so true, but they have frightening ramifications for Donald Trump.

Shortly before citing those words, Paul Johnson referred to some equally relevant remarks of Joseph Conrad in Under Western Eyes in 1911:

In a real revolution, the best characters do not come to the front.  A violent revolution falls into the hands of narrow-minded fanatics and of tyrannical hypocrites at first.  Afterwards come the turn of all the pretentious intellectual failures of the time.  Such are the chiefs and the leaders.  You will notice that I have left out the mere rogues.  The scrupulous and the just, the noble humane and devoted natures, the unselfish and the intelligent may begin a revolution, but it passes away from them…..Hopes grotesquely betrayed, ideals caricatured – that is the definition of revolutionary success.

All that is so true of the French and Russian revolutions.  A Marxist historian applied this kind of learning to the Communist Party under Stalin: ‘The whole party became an organization of torturers and oppressors.  No one was innocent and all Communists were accomplices in the coercion of society.  Thus the party acquired a new species of moral unity, and embarked on a course from which there was no turning back.’  George Orwell saw all this.

The violence, the randomness, and the cruelty all come to be taken as part of life, and people become what we now call ‘desensitised’.  Commenting on the butchery that followed the fall of the Bastille, the French historian Taine reflected mordantly that some mockery is found in every triumph, and ‘beneath the butcher, the buffoon becomes apparent.’  The result is that the people become less civilised.  They are degraded.  You can get an argument over whether terror or ‘the Terror’ commenced on 14 July 1789, but there is no denying that bloody violence and lawless butchery erupted on that day and continued off and on until at least the time when Napoleon put a former break on hostilities with a whiff of grapeshot.  The nation itself was destabilised for the best part of a century.

To go back to Glencoe, who was to be answerable?  It was all hushed up for a while, but word got out, and there had to be a public inquiry.  It was full and fair, and its findings went to the Scots parliament, the Estates.  The commissioners of inquiry concluded that the slaughter at Glencoe was murder, and that the cause of that crime lay in the letters of Dalrymple, the Master of Stair.  They resolved with no dissenting voice that the order signed by King William did not authorise the slaughter at Glencoe. But the Estates let Dalrymple off with a censure, while they designated the officers in charge as murderers.

Macaulay says they were wrong on both counts.

Whoever can bring himself to look at the conduct of these men with judicial impartiality will probably be of opinion that they could not, without great detriment to the commonwealth, have been treated as assassins.  They had slain no one whom they had not been positively directed by their commanding officer to slay.  That subordination without which an army would be the worst of all rabbles would be at an end, if every soldier were to be held answerable for the justice of every order in obedience to which he pulls his trigger. The Case of Glencoe was doubtless an extreme case: but it cannot easily be distinguished in principle from cases which, in war, are of ordinary occurrence.  Very terrible military executions are sometimes indispensable.  Humanity itself may require them…..It is remarkable that no member of the Scottish Parliament proposed that any of the private men of Argyle’s regiment should be prosecuted for murder.  Absolute impunity was granted to everybody below the rank of serjeant.  Yet on what principle?  Surely, if military obedience was not a valid plea, every man who shot a McDonald on that horrible night was a murderer?

Should officers have resigned rather than carry out their orders?

In this case, disobedience was assuredly a moral duty: but it does not follow that obedience was a legal crime.

That sounds to me like common sense. What about the Scots Prime Minister, the Master of Stair?

Every argument which can be urged against punishing the soldier who executes the unjust and inhuman orders of his superior is an argument for punishing with the utmost rigour of the law the superior with whom the unjust and inhuman orders originate.  Where there can be no responsibility below, there should be double responsibility above. What the parliament of Scotland ought with one voice to have demanded was, not that a poor illiterate serjeant…should be hanged in the Grassmarket, but that the real murderer, the most politic, the most eloquent, the most powerful of Scottish statesmen, should be brought to a public trial and should, if found guilty, die the death of a felon….Unhappily the Estates, by extenuating the guilt of the chief offender, and, at the same time demanding that his humble agents should be treated with a severity beyond the law, made the stain which the massacre had left on the honour of the nation broader and deeper than before.

That analysis seems fair – even if it is distorted by the author’s need to be gentle with King William, one of his heroes, and the failure to mention in this context the hatred of the Campbells for their targets, the McDonalds.  You wonder how many of these killers were reluctant, and how many were actuated by what lawyers call ‘malice’. And it must take some acquired coldness to kill in cold blood members of a family you have lived, eaten, and slept with for so long, and some of whom were morally and legally incapable of committing any crime.

But people who say that the soldiers should have rebelled rather than comply with orders are postulating a very high moral standard, one that calls for immense courage, which may not be appreciated by the dependants of the soldier so called upon.

Very few people have the still strength or firm insight of Dietrich Bonhoeffer in Germany after Hitler became the Chancellor.

We have been silent witnesses of evil deeds; we have been drenched by many storms; we have learned the arts of equivocation and pretence; experience has made us suspicious of others and stopped us being truthful and open; intolerable conflicts have worn us down and even made us cynical.  Are we still of any use?  What we shall need is not geniuses, or cynics, or misanthropes, or clever tacticians, but plain, honest, straightforward men.  Will our inward power of resistance be strong enough, and our honesty with ourselves remorseless enough, for us to find our way back to simplicity and straightforwardness?

It took a hero even to ask the question.  Moral giants like Lincoln, Bonhoeffer and Mandela come along once or twice a century.  The rest of us just hope that we don’t get called on to seek to emulate them.  If we do, and if we fail, as is most likely, then the judgment will belong not to us or the law, but to God.

This sordid affair was all Scottish.  The avengers took the view that the ends justified the means.  In doing so, they sank below the level of those whom they attacked.  It’s a lesson on how not now to respond to terrorism.  Lawyers have a saying that hard cases make bad law.  If you stretch or bend the law for a tricky or hard case, you make the law worse.  You debauch it.  That, too, is a lesson of the massacre at Glencoe.

Why opera? 7 Puccini

/ Geoffrey Gibson / Leave a comment

7

Puccini

Now we come back to the problem of snobbery. In the case of Puccini, I have felt it at Oxford, but the worst culprits tend to come from the acolytes of the Master whom we have just been looking at.  It is, frankly, hard to see why people should feel so superior for worshipping at the same shrine as Adolf Hitler, but some of that Wagner crowd do stick their noses in the air and then hold them when the subject of Puccini comes up.  Well, there is one crowd that is hardly well placed to claim the high moral ground over the other on private life.  Perhaps the problem is that Puccini is and always has been popular.

Now, populism is right on the nose just now for obvious reasons.  But why was Puccini so popular?  He had an eye for drama, a natural sense of theatre, the knack of creating good songs, and the skill in manipulating the emotions of his audience.  Isn’t that essentially the case with Wagner – or any successful composer of opera?  Ah, yes, old boy, but think of the difference in the audiences – the Master did not patronise the gutter.  It is hard to think of a better case of pure snobbery.

In truth I think too many purists get needled by Puccini because he was like The Magnificent Seven – he just knew when to unleash his big guns, and the crowd – the unwashed crowd – specifically including ME – just bloody well loves it and calls out for more.  And, of course, Puccini was Italian, and opera is their invention.

Giacomo Puccini (1858 to 1924) was born into a fine musical family.  He began studies with his father who had studied with Donizetti, and then his uncle.  He then went to the Milan Conservatory and studied with Ponchielli.  His first works flopped, as did Verdi’s, but he had a success with Manon Lescaut in 1893 and a big hit with La Bohème in 1896.  Bernard Shaw then said that he was heir to Verdi.  Tosca and Madam Butterfly were also huge hits and came out at regular intervals.  Then came some hiccups around the time of the premiere of La Fanciulla del West in New York in 1910.  Puccini was working on Turandot when he died.  It premiered in Milan in 1926.

Puccini had become very wealthy and he could indulge himself in fishing and shooting.  His marriage was unhappy, as was his extra-marital life.  Many affairs became public, and one servant was driven to suicide.  Puccini won no friends by calling her ‘a silly girl’.

He did not have the sure conviction of his predecessors, but it might be said that he fused bel canto with verismo.  The Rough Guide’s summary is fair.

It can’t be denied that Puccini has his weaknesses: he often lapses into glutinous sentimentality; there’s more than a hint of misogyny in his preference for helpless heroines dominated by despotic men; and his plots are sometimes feeble or trivial.  But for most audiences, these weaknesses are beside the point, for his operas contain some of the most enjoyable music ever written, carrying into the twentieth century the legacy of Bellini, Donizetti and Verdi.

Now for the operas.  There is for some, including me, a structural problem with La Bohème and Tosca – some feel that the climax comes too soon, or, put differently, that each opera reaches a peak that it never gets back to – or that the end is a bit of a fizzer.  For some that problem is worse in the first opera than the second because the perceived climax comes at the end of the first act – in Tosca, you wait for the end of the second act – and, boy, there you do have a climax.  Some people feel the same about Beethoven’s third symphony, the Eroica.

Poor garret residents in the Latin Quarter are doing it hard – and cold.  Rodolfo falls for a consumptive seamstress, Mimi.  Some past attachments lead to rift which Rodolfo tries to heal too late.  The songs of the lovers in Act I are among the most popular in all opera – ‘Che gelida manina’ and ‘O soave fanciulla’.  The 1952 recording with Bjorling, Victoria de Los Angeles and Robert Merrill was long seen as pre-eminent.  But now we are again spoiled for choice.  For the whole opera, you can go straight to Netrebko with Villazon, or listen to versions conducted by Karajan or Carlos Kleiber, who some good judges thought was one of the best, conducting at La Scala.  The Karajan version was directed by Zeffirelli, but it is fascinating to compare the two orchestral sounds.  At the least, you should listen to the two great songs I referred to.  They are best sellers for good reasons.  Try the 1964 concert version in Russia of Pavarotti – he really had the bullets to fire when the composer unleashed the guns.  That’s what the fans have come for.  Or try the Peruvian Juan Diego Florez, who is hot in bel canto and here.  He reminds me of Di Stefano.

When I was looking at Thomas Allen in the last act of Don Giovanni, and I said that it may have its dramatic equal, I had in mind the second act of Tosca, and one famous version of it in particular.  A painter, Cavaradossi, the lover of Tosca, a jealous opera singer, shields a political prisoner.  The evil head of police, Scarpia, forms a scheme to seduce Tosca while destroying the painter.  Scarpia has him tortured in her presence.  She reveals where the escaped prisoner is and agrees to sleep with Scarpia if he lets Cavaradossi go.  They do a deal which backfires even after Tosca kills Scarpia at the end of Act II.

It is relatively unusual to find a piece for the stage where a central figure is a study in pure evil.  That is very much the case in Billy Budd with John Claggart.  It is so here with Scarpia.  The tenor has two wonderful arias ‘Recondita armonia’ and ‘E lucevan le stella’ and the soprano has ‘Vissi d’arte’.  But the whole show centres on the life and death struggle between Tosca and Scarpia in Act II.  The 1953 recording of Callas with Gobbi was one of the most successful records ever made.

But now you can watch them on screen.  Try the 1964 Covent Garden version directed by Zeffirelli.  The voice of Callas may not have been what it was, although this was not her biggest test vocally.  But just look at the stage presence of each of Callas and Gobbi in a struggle between ineluctable evil and overwhelming innocence by two superstars of the stage in one of the great set pieces of theatre, so well-known that it has its own liturgy.  Just look at their eyes and feel the timing.  I doubt whether many saw intensity like that since the soprano’s ancestors were putting on Orestes and Medea.  The sense of elemental force is physically unsettling.  At Covent Garden, they take curtain calls at the end of the act.  You will see here that the audience does not applaud ‘Vissi d’arte’, and properly so because of the point in the drama, but they can let go at the curtain.  Even from here you can feel the tension – it reminded me in part of the tension on Broadway when Richard Burton loaded up on Hamlet.  And just look at the serene way these two pros take their bows.

Now, we have some wonderful singers now who can act, but I doubt whether the two we have just been looking at will ever matched for raw horse-power on the stage.  If you get nothing else but this act from these notes, you will not have done your money.

Madame Butterfly is another tear jerker.  It is all so inevitable – and for that reason, like Othello (on stage), it is not among my favourites.  You just find yourself bracing for the fall.  An American naval officer marries a young Japanese girl, impregnates her, and dumps her.  When he comes back with a white wife, Madame Butterfly kills herself.  I can’t help thinking that plot might be better placed in a ballet.  It crashed on its first night in the face of concerted attacks on the composer before an audience not as entranced with the orient as the French, but one used to the hard action of verismo.  Then Puccini cleaned it up a bit and it became a hit.  It has always played well for the AO.  I prefer the Tebaldi and Bergonzi version.  You may wish to see Alana Gheorghiu sing ‘Un bel di’ at the Lincoln Centre in New York.  (I saw Carmen there.  At the first break in the action, a guy about four rows back said, with a perfect Brooklyn accent that carried: ‘She’s got great legs, but she can’t (pronounced ‘Kant’) sing!’)

That brings us to another show set in the east.  Turandot is about an evil princess who tempts young blades to their death when they fail to answer her riddles.  She finally succumbs to the hero after the unfolding of a story involving his servant Liu.  It is a show that can stand a big production, and it got it from the AO when it was choreographed by Graeme Murphy, the ballet choreographer.  It now gets featured on Sydney Harbour.  It is a big role for the soprano.  Some think that ‘In questa reggia’ was what broke Callas.  I have a Wagnerian soprano Birgit Nilsson doing it with Bjorling.  You might listen to her doing the opera with Franco Corelli – and then you can listen to two belters.  Another big voice for this aria was the great Leontyne Price.  You can get the famous Sutherland and Pavarotti version.  You should look out for the big aria for the soprano, and a lovely song for the tenor, ‘Non piangere, Liu’.

And yes, you are allowed to take ‘Nessun Dorma’. It comes near the end of the show. Try Jonas Kaufman who is thought by some to the best tenor now going.  You can get him on Last Night at the Proms with the BBC Symphony Orchestra conducted by a woman.  Again we see that assurance.  It’s like being passed by a Bentley – you know he’s got a fair bit left in the tank.  Just watch him at the end before an enraptured English audience.  He knows he’s nailed it.  And he bursts out in laughter.  I mean this – really – when I say that it reminded me of the 2007 NRL Grand Final.  Greg Inglis ran more than half the field, and then while balanced just inside the line, he put on a fend to see him over the try line – he was a freak, and as he touched down, he burst out laughing.  At that level, you are entitled to enjoy your own great talent.  God bless all of them!

I might mention two well-known pieces from other Puccini operas that are popular in the concert hall – ‘Ch’ella mi creda’ from La Fanciulla del West and ‘Donna non vidi mai’ from Manon Lescaut.  Both are on the disk Allegro al dente that we began with.

For completeness we might mention here also the French composer Georges Bizet (1838 to 1875).  You will see that he died too soon.  He of course wrote Carmen and The Pearl Fishers that has the great duet we looked at when we started.  Bizet said: ‘I tell you that if you were to suppress adultery, fanaticism, crime, evil, and the supernatural, there would no longer be the means for writing one note.’  He was not alone.  For even more completeness, I may say that Tchaikovsky (1840 to 1893) who is famous for his ballets, wrote two operas.  Eugene Onegin is well supported when put on by the AO.

Well, there you have Puccini – a wonderful source of entertainment at the opera and of solace before the fire.  Don’t let any snob tell you anything different.  And remember, he was an Italian – and second in opera only to one other Italian and Mozart.

Here and there – A Tale of Two Mountebanks

/ Geoffrey Gibson / Leave a comment

 

Sir Lewis Namier, the distinguished English historian, specialised in eighteenth century English history.  But he was born in Eastern Europe and he had a lifelong interest in European history.

In 1947, Namier published an essay called The First Mountebank Dictator.  It was about a nephew of Napoleon called Louis-Napoleon who, as Napoleon III, ruled France for a period in the nineteenth century.  The regime is called the Second Empire.  This was one of the many regimes that France went through in the century of agony that followed the fall of the Bastille.

Louis-Napoleon has not had a good press.  Many parts of this essay remind me of a contemporary figure who is not a dictator, but who is certainly a mountebank.  There are differences, but we can see the similarities. You have probably already guessed who I have in mind, but to remove any doubt, here is the OED definition of a mountebank:

An itinerant quack who from a platform appealed to his audience by means of stories, tricks, juggling and the like, often with the assistance of a professional clown.  An impudent charlatan.

Curiously, poor sad Gerry Henderson took exception to the word ‘charlatan’ being employed to the mountebank you and I now have in mind.  Appropriately, I see that Coleridge referred to ‘the Mountebanks and Zanies of Patriotism’ – a fair description of the rump of one of our political parties, or what’s left of it.

Here then are extracts from Sir Lewis Namier’s description of a mountebank.

The modern dictatorship arises amid the ruins of an inherited social and political structure, in the desolation of shattered loyalties – it is the desperate shift of communities broken from their moorings.  Disappointed, disillusioned men, uprooted and unbalanced, driven by half-conscious fears and gusts of passions, frantically seek a new rallying point and new attachments.  Their dreams and cravings projected into the void gather round some figure.  It is the monolatry of the political desert.  The more pathological the situation, the less important is the intrinsic worth of the idol.  His feet may be of clay and his face may be a blank: it is the frenzy of the worshippers which imparts to him meaning and power.

Why, of course!  We see it at once.  It’s just that we don’t have the command of either history or language to paint such a gorgeous portrait.  But don’t worry – there is plenty more to come.

Such morbid cults have by now acquired a tradition and ideology, and have evolved their own routine and political vocabulary.  With Napoleon I [Bonaparte] things were serious and real – the problems of his time and his mastery of them; he raised no bogies and whipped up no passions; he aimed at restoring sanity and consolidating the positive results of the Revolution; and if, in superposing the Empire on the Republic and in creating Realm of the West, he invoked the memories of Caesar and Charlemagne, the appeal was decorative rather than imitative.  There would have been no occasion for his dictatorship had not the living heritage of French history been obliterated by revolution; but his system has left its own unhealthy legend, a jackal-ghost which prowls in the wake of the ‘Red sceptre.’

Well, of value for us here is the catalogue of what Bonaparte wasn’t – although it’s as well to recall that he left Europe with five million dead, and he left France a smoking, spent ruin.  We go on.

Napoleon III and Boulanger were to be the plagiarists, shadowy and counterfeit, of Napoleon I; and Mussolini and Hitler were to be unconscious reproducers of the methods of Napoleon III.  For these are inherent in plebiscitarian Caesarism, or so-called ‘Caesarian democracy’, with its direct appeal to the masses: demagogical slogans; disregard of legality in spite of a professed guardianship of law and order; contempt of political parties and the parliamentary system, of the educated classes and their values; blandishments and vague, contradictory promises for all and sundry; militarism, blatant displays and shady corruption.  Panem et circenses [bread and circuses] once more – and at the end of the road, disaster.

There seventy years ago you have a word for word portrait – word for word: read them again – of our current mountebank.  Note especially the contempt for the educated classes and look at the vague contradictory promises and the shady corruption.  And remember that two the most fascist regimes that the world has known – ancient Sparta and Nazi Germany – were also among the most corrupt.

…the taciturn, shadowy impassive figure of Napoleon III has puzzled the century which has gone by, as the shrieking, convulsed, hysterical figure of Hitler will puzzle the one to come.  ‘A sphinx without a riddle’ was Bismarck’s summing up of Napoleon III ‘from afar something, near at hand nothing.’ ‘Louis-Napoleon is essentially a copyist.  He can originate nothing; his opinions, his theories, his maxims, even his plots, are all borrowed and from the most dangerous of models….[Bonaparte]….  ‘His range of ideas is narrow, and there is always one which preoccupies him…..and shuts out the others….He learns little from his own meditations, for he does not balance opposite arguments; he learns nothing from conversation, for he never listens’….‘as he is ignorant uninventive and idle, you will see him flounder from one failure to another’….[his] ‘writings were not read by the soldier or by the prolétaire…  and the principle of his regime was to rest on the army and the people, and to ignore the existence of the educated classes.’

This brings us closer to the personalities of out two mountebanks.  Each was or is anything but educated but deeply troubled by those who were or are.  All that is missing – so far – from Louis-Napoleon is a massive ego masking a chasm of insecurity.  Princess Mathilde, a cousin, wanted ‘to break his head, to find out what there is in it.’  His writing was described as ‘turgid, contradictory, and baffling, both naïve and cunning’ – in other words, bullshit.  He wanted to forego parliament and the plutocracy and go with his ‘unformulated doctrine of direct contract between sovereign and masses.’  Then Namier describes the critical mistake of educated people.

They thought that because he was intellectually their inferior, they would be able to run him or get rid of him; the German conservatives – Junkers, industrialists, generals, Nationalists – thought the same about Hitler.  [And the Italians thought the same about Mussolini.]  ‘The elect of six millions executes  and does not betray the will of the people.

The pulling down and rebuilding of capitals is again a recurrent feature in the history of despots and dictators, from Nero to Mussolini and Hitler.  Self-expression, self-glorification and self-commemoration are one motive…..The careers of Napoleon III and Hitler have shown how far even a bare minimum of ideas and resources, when backed by a nation’s reminiscences or passions, can carry a man in the political desert of direct democracy’; and the books written about Napoleon III show how loath posterity is to accept the stark truth about such a man.

The phrase ‘political desert’ is good.

There was in him a streak of vulgarity.  He was sensual, dissolute, undiscriminating in his love affairs: his escapades were a form of escapism, a release…He talked high and vague idealism, uncorrelated to his actions.  He had a fixed, superstitious, childish belief in his name and star.  Risen to power, this immature weak man became a public danger.

There, near the end of the essay, we get the perfect marriage of our two mountebanks.  At their best, they’re nothing but bullshit-artists.

English was probably about the sixth language learned by Namier, but when he referred to ‘a streak of vulgarity’, he was using the word ‘vulgar’ which is based on a Latin word for the ‘common people’ or herd.  That is the perfect word for our other mountebank.

We might take as our text the opening lines of the book of Ecclesiastes.  There is nothing new under the sun.  It is risky to speculate about what Shakespeare thought of the herd, but his Roman plays and an early English historical play suggest that he had a most righteous fear of the mob. He examines an aspect of what we call ‘populism’ in Coriolanus.  This haughty patrician is the anti-populist – he refuses to bow to the plebeians.  He holds them in contempt and says so.  Plutarch said of the historical character that he ‘lacked the gravity and affability that is gotten with judgment and learning…and was wilfully given to self-opinion and obstinate mind.’  The fine English critic Tony Tanner said of Shakespeare’s character that ‘he is a prime example of what Renaissance thinkers regarded as the ill-educated prince, a man from the governing classes who is, by nature, temperament, and upbringing, unfitted and unfit to rule.’

That brings us back to our two mountebanks – again, word for word.  But Coriolanus was a tragic figure; our two mountebanks are merely preposterous.

Let me finish with a zinging one-liner from Sir Lewis:

The view that it was not a regime but a racket is not altogether unfounded.

Not with our mountebank, Mate.  There’s no doubt that there’s a racket going on there.

Passing Bull 113 – Bleating from the banks

/ Geoffrey Gibson / Leave a comment

New taxes on banks, both federal and state, have caused outrage. My paper, the AFR, got itself into a right tizz, and went into a leaden, clichéd overdrive.

First Canberra held up the banks because the politicians couldn’t control their spending, and the banks were both profitable and unpopular. Now that the Feds have broken into the banks’ vaults, other levels of government are joining in the looting of private stakeholders’ money. What we are witnessing is nothing less than the debauchery of the political system.

In yesterday’s budget, South Australian Treasurer Tom Koutsantonis announced that his state was going to follow Scott Morrison’s lead and whack the big four banks plus Macquarie with a 0.015 per cent tax on the South Australian share of their liabilities. Whereas Morrison said the banks could afford to ‘‘pony up’’ because ‘‘no one likes you anyway’’ and it was just a ‘‘fair additional contribution’’, Mr Koutsantonis said ’’we know they are making super profits’’ and that ‘‘even if every other state follows, they’d still be under-taxed’’. Sound familiar? Oh, and it will raise $370 million for the mendicant state whose disastrous renewable energy policy means they can barely keep the lights on, just as Morrison’s version is expected to raise $6.2 billion federally.

As we editorialised after the May budget, this is the Willie Sutton school of budget management: robbing the banks because that’s where the money is. Strapped governments simply reach around for cash wherever it can be found. Morrison’s Liberal Party, ostensibly the party of fiscal discipline, thought this was a great idea. Why shouldn’t the states follow suit? Yet this is serious, and may be the thin end of the wedge if other cash-strapped states choose to follow South Australia’s lead.

Dear, dear, dear – looting!  ‘Of private stakeholders’ money’ – in a public company?  Should we be looking for reds under the bed?

Then they published what lawyers call a plea from Ian Narev of the CBA (in which I hold shares).

The providers of the capital that fuels our economy are international pension funds, just like the Australian super funds looking after our retirement savings. These funds place high importance on strong banks. But they also place high importance on strong, predictable government policy. Providers of capital hate surprises. Surprises undermine their confidence to invest. They wonder where surprises will end. And in a world where they have abundant choices for investment, surprises ultimately lead them to take their capital – the capital we need to build businesses and create jobs – elsewhere.

Unpredictability of government policy has a clear label: sovereign risk. Ask global investors about their view of Australia, and most will point to significantly elevated levels of sovereign risk.

It is in this context that we should view the South Australian government’s unprincipled and reckless tax grab as it walked through the gate the federal government left open. Despite the fact that almost every Australian has an economic stake in the banks, and that banks directly and indirectly create jobs and wage growth, the Federal and South Australian Governments revel in saying how easy it will be to gain support even for populist policies that have no basis in sound economics.

They may be right. But they miss the big point. Under their watch, sovereign risk in Australia is rising exponentially. That won’t show up in short term opinion polls. It will show up over the longer term in reduced investment and higher costs of capital. And the community may take a different view when, in time, the consequences of these ill-considered policies become obvious, and can’t be explained away by slogans.

What that means, I think, is that Mr Narev fears that he may now have to pay more for his money.  Poor fellow – quel domage!  The business of banking is simple.  You take money in through the left window at X% and let it out through the right window at X+Y% and you pocket the difference.  Mr Narev is here worrying about the left widow – X may grow a bit.  But what got the silly buggers into trouble was the right window – they found that in their greed they could not get their money back.  You should watch The Big Short at the cinema and listen to the audience sigh and groan at the galahs that nearly sent us down.

The banks may have a ground of objection in economics.  I wouldn’t know – but I do know that I am suspicious about economists.  Where were these gurus when we needed them in the lead up to the GFC?  Why could some whizz kids working in a U S garage see what was coming when no practising economist could?  I’m even more suspicious when an appeal is made to the knowledge of business insiders.  ‘Trust me, I’m a banker’ does not wash – to the certain knowledge of ‘I the banker.’

What about the politics then?  A home run against the banks.  How many people are in favour of cutting taxes paid by large profitable companies and reducing support for the young, the sick, the unemployed, and the aged? (Disclaimer – I may qualify under three of those headings.)

The federal government was crude – as is its wont – in saying that they could be cavalier with the banks because banks are unloved.  But we do have a kind of democracy, and that is a form of government that should reflect the thinking and feelings of the people at large.  It’s just tripe to dismiss that fact of life as ‘populism.’  If the people as a whole are angry with the banks – and they are – then it is natural that the government reflects this anger in their laws.  That’s just what we have here.

For my part, I see no substance in the Commonwealth’s criticism of the state of South Australia. The people of that state have a government of a different political colour to that of the Commonwealth.  For reasons I understand, people there are angry with both the Commonwealth and the banks, and that anger too will be reflected in their laws.

Of course there is a risk that these taxes will expand.  That’s a risk with any tax and with just about any law.  Income tax started as an emergency wartime measure to stop Napoleon.  The government just got hooked on it, just as our governments got hooked on gambling revenues.

The banks were on the nose before the GFC.  Someone like Mr Narev gets paid about one hundred times what Peggy Sue the bank teller gets.  One of his main functions – one of his ‘drivers’ – is to sack as many Peggy Sues as he can and to  leave me dangling on the line to the bowels of Bengal.

In their defence of their obscene pay levels, the banks refer to market forces.  But their embrace of these forces dissolves into the ether when those forces don’t suit them.  When market forces threatened the very existence of the banks, they came running to Daddy and Mummy for their dummy.  They want me to stand behind them, whether I like it or not.  They need us to guarantee them.  So much for market forces, and those reactionaries who fulminate against government funded bodies like the ABC.  At least the ABC acknowledges that it’s there to serve us – and don’t even think of asking which people trust more, Aunty or the banks.

With our help, the banks rode out the GFC.  That crisis had been brought on by criminal greed and profit-driven ineptitude.  We picked up the tab.  The bankers trousered their bonuses.  Almost no one went to jail.  But people kept losing their jobs.  Those left in work saw their wages stall, while their bosses were rolling in it.  The banks sat pretty on our backs.

And they didn’t bother to support the government or even decently liaise with it.  Instead they gave it the bird by appointing someone from the other team to lead their defence.

The banks behave with this lordly insouciance in an industry that doesn’t just need what politicians call a ‘social licence’ – they must have a legal licence to open their doors, just as I need a licence to drive a car.  Well, they have got used to being callous with their staff, and rude to me – but can’t they see the sense of getting on with their government, or, if you prefer, their sovereign?

And in cataloguing some of the reasons why people don’t like or trust banks, I have not mentioned that the top pay levels are often set by criteria that encourage bank officers to cut corners with the law and decency.  The word for that is ‘corrupt’.

What about sovereign risk?  This is a protean term.  I would think that people dealing with a bank may have to account for the chance that the government behind it may default on its debts or other obligations or that it might legislate against the banks.  The greatest risk, as it looks to me, is that the government might repudiate its guarantee of the banks or fail to honour it.  It’s not in Mr Narev’s interest to mention that risk in this context.

My little super fund holds a significant part of its shares in banks.  I did that on advice from a mate who is a broker.  He said that the conduct of the banks that made them jerks to their staff or me may make them more profitable and enable them to maintain their flow of dividends.  He also advised that I look for markets that are tightly controlled and looked after by governments. (I can’t recall if he used the word ‘cosseted’.)

These new taxes may lead to a reduction in my dividends.  I doubt that – I certainly don’t fear my being ‘looted’.  But it will all be worthwhile if this little démarche leads to an improvement in the banks’ manners.  I am sick of their arrogance, posturing, and bleating.  Frankly, I’m even sicker of looking at people making twenty times what I made at my top with little of the learning and none of the risk.

Poet of the month: Homer, Iliad, Book 1.

The Greeks in shouts their joint assent declare, 

The priest to reverence, and release the fair. 

Not so Atrides; he, with kingly pride, 

Repulsed the sacred sire, and thus replied:

‘Hence on thy life, and fly these hostile plains, 

Nor ask, presumptuous, what the king detains 

Hence, with thy laurel crown, and golden rod, 

Nor trust too far those ensigns of thy god. 

Mine is thy daughter, priest, and shall remain; 

And prayers, and tears, and bribes, shall plead in vain; 

Till time shall rifle every youthful grace, 

And age dismiss her from my cold embrace, 

In daily labours of the loom employ’d, 

Or doom’d to deck the bed she once enjoy’d 

Hence then; to Argos shall the maid retire, 

Far from her native soil and weeping sire.’

Here and there – Three Naughty boys

/ Geoffrey Gibson / 4 Comments

Three ministers of the Commonwealth Crown criticised members of the Victorian Court of Appeal while they were hearing an appeal on sentence in a case of terrorism. The ministers said that the judges were too lenient. Even by the degraded standards of Australian politics, their language was disgraceful. They used phrases like ‘divorced from reality’ and ‘ideological experiments.’ The content, tone, and timing of the remarks suggested that this was a concerted political attack. In case you are in doubt as to the crude party politics involved, one comment was:
Labor’s continued appointment of hard-left activist judges has come back to bite Victorians.
Yes, it was as bad as that. The ministers sent their messages to an organ of the press that is known to be sympathetic to their cause. The Australian is loaded with Liberal rejects and Labor rats. That paper splashed the attack over its front page. The headline left no doubt that this was the paper that was the chosen vehicle of the attack: ‘Victorian judiciary ‘light on terrorism.’ ’
These events raised issues about the common law offence of contempt of court (which should be renamed as ‘interfering with the due administration of justice’). One form of contempt may be put this way. If someone publishes material that is either intended to interfere with pending proceedings or that has a tendency to interfere with pending proceedings, that person may be found guilty of contempt of court. Plainly there could be an issue about both the intent and tendency in the conduct of the ministers.
Another issue of contempt arose. The interference with the course of justice may occur in the context of a particular proceeding – this is called the sub judice rule – or by an attack on the system generally. The old name for this kind of contempt, which is rarely seen now, was ‘scandalising the court.’

But you need to bear one thing in mind about the first, or sub judice, kind of contempt. As indicated, that contempt may involve either an intent or a tendency. The law is clear about the first. If a person is found to have intended to interfere with the administration of justice in a way that would be unlawful, then that intentional conduct will found a finding of contempt, irrespective of whether that conduct could have achieved the desired result. Intent is not necessary but it is sufficient in this difficult part of the law. So, if I brandish a knife at a witness to deter her from giving evidence against me, I am guilty of the offence even if my conduct had no effect on the witness.
The question of intent is of course one of fact. As a judge said a very long time ago, the state of a man’s mind is as much an issue of fact as the state of his digestion.
This issue is important because the judges tend to hold that they are not and cannot be influenced by what the press says. That is just as well because the press very often gets it very wrong on sentencing, and you can’t help thinking that bleating about light sentences sells newspapers. Descendants from convicts curiously don’t often seek lighter sentences.
What normally happens when there is a credible allegation that a crime has been committed? The police investigate and the relevant officer of the Crown decides whether to prosecute the accused on that evidence before a court. In contempt cases, as with most serious criminal cases, it is the Director of Public Prosecutions who makes that decision. As I recall it, that office was created so that the Attorney General, an elected politician, does not have to make legal judgments that have political consequences.

The normal process of the law was not followed here. As far as I know, neither the police nor the DPP were consulted. The police could have investigated the issue of fact I referred to above. Did these ministers in fact intend to interfere with the course of justice in the case before the court? Had the police interrogated the ministers, the ministers could have sought advice on whether they might take the fifth – that is, whether they might refuse to answer on the ground that they might be incriminated. It is not hard to imagine the seismic reaction to that course. If the DPP had been approached, that office could have determined what on all the evidence was the best way for the public interest to be protected. That is precisely the job of that office.

Why didn’t any of that happen here? The short answer is that I don’t know, but one press report suggested that a previous Chief Justice of the Federal Court had pursued a course like that followed by the Court of Appeal here.
This is what happened. An officer of the court wrote to the ministers asking them to appear before the court to show cause why they should not be dealt with for contempt of court. They did not attend court personally, but the Commonwealth Solicitor-General did on their behalf. The result was a very unhappy shambles. The ministers were prepared to express regret, but not to apologise. Are these the kinds of games we pay our ministers and Law Officers to play, like little boys playing with matches behind the shelter shed? Should the Solicitor-General be appearing for politicians who get into trouble for taking part in a crude party political stunt? Is it part of the portfolio of a Commonwealth minister of the Crown to shaft the State government of the opposition party?
As a result of forces that we shall probably never know of, the ministers changed their minds. They again did not attend court personally, but this time the Solicitor-General on their behalf retracted all their claims and apologised unreservedly. They tossed the towel in. The judges said in that case they would not then seek to proceed further. Case closed. The Commonwealth Attorney-General gives one of his watery smirks, and the three naughty ministers, who have not set foot in the court, remain at large to practise their dark arts.
But some people, like Mercutio, have misgivings.
Three idiots who should have known better put three of our judges in a very difficult position. The judges had to react quickly and firmly to protect the integrity of their high office, both in this particular case, and generally. I have no reason to doubt the rightness of their course, but it may be as well to reflect on what we have lost because that course had to be taken.
This was a serious and calculated political attack by members of one arm of government upon another. If this kind of malice is tolerated, we could be in deep trouble in this country. This is precisely the form of cancer that was a symptom of the rise of those regimes that we least admire. Not many people trust their politicians now, here or elsewhere, but we do by and large trust our judges. A concerted political attack on them is therefore as vicious as it is sinister.
It matters not that the attack was childishly inept, but it does matter that the three miscreants were trained as lawyers. It also matters that with the benefit of the advice of the Solicitor-General, at my expense, they persisted in and aggravated their criminal conduct. It also matters that they sought to recite themselves into a possible defence by claiming that ‘our own role as ministers’ necessarily involved them in ‘participating in public debate on controversial issues’. The sentencing of terrorists has nothing to do with their portfolios, and their ignorance of the law is boundless.
Even these politicians must know that in these troubled times, when public faith in public office is falling through the floor, the most likely result of their initial offence – that is, their crime – and their contumacious persistence in it, was to bring into question the conduct of the judiciary. It’s as if having debauched their own currency, they were content then to debauch that of the judiciary.  Yet they walk away with nary a smack, and not even a reprimand to their face. Some people out there are, then, likely to feel short changed.
Due process goes both ways. The accused have rights. So do we, the public. (That’s what the appeals were about.) Did not the public have an interest is seeing that the serious issues raised here were dealt with in the ordinary way? Evidence is led and tested and arguments on the law are all held in public before a dispassionate and unengaged court. It then gives a considered judgment. There may then be appeals. The public knows exactly what is going on and why. These shabby ferrets would have been pursued into their burrows and then brought out again into the cauterising glare of a public hearing, where otherwise high personages get the same treatment as you or I would get. We are all, after all, supposed to be equal under the law.
And in addition to inquiring into the evidence of the state of mind that led to this attack, the court, including quite possibly the High Court, could have given us guidance on two important legal issues.
First, litigation cannot act as a brake on all public discussion. There is a defence to this kind of contempt, associated with the unromantic name of Bread Manufacturers. In that case, one of our distinguished jurists held that:
The discussion of public affairs and the denunciation of public abuses, actual or supposed, cannot be required to be suspended merely because the discussion or the denunciation may, as an incidental but not intended by-product, cause some likelihood of prejudice to a person who happens at the time to be a litigant.
You can see again the importance of the issue of intent, which is here expressed in the negative, so possibly raising nice questions about onus. The issue of intent would also be fundamental to the question of punishment if the ministers were found guilty.
A second question may then arise. Would this finding of guilt for an offence which is punishable by indefinite imprisonment disqualify these people from retaining their seats in parliament under the Constitution?
And if the court found that these men did intend to interfere, a political question, and possibly a legal issue, might then arise. Are they fit to hold office as ministers of the Crown?
In the events that have happened, we will not see any of those issues dealt with.
Instead, after the first appearance, the judges may have felt uncomfortably close to be being seen to have performed any one of the following roles – victim, informant, witness, prosecutor, judge, jury, and court of appeal. Some of that confusion may occur in what is called contempt in the face of the court, but that was not the issue here.
The judges may also have felt a little like Mr Bush or Mr Blair after they occupied Baghdad – it seemed like a good idea at the time, but what do we do if the natives don’t cooperate and play ball?
Then we have to ask whether it was right for the judges to be embarking on this contempt inquiry while sitting in judgment on the relevant case. What on earth may have happened if either party had asked the court to step aside because its members were publicly discussing the possible reaction of the public to their conduct in the case from the pressure being brought to bear on them by the government?
For reasons I can well understand, the Chief Justice put it to the Solicitor–General that the Ministers had put the court in a difficult position. If they dismissed the appeal, ‘we’ll be accused of engaging in an ideological experiment or being hard-left activist judges.’ But if they increased the sentences, ‘the respondents [the convicted terrorists] may have an understandable grievance that we were doubtlessly affected by what three prominent ministers for the Crown had to say.’ Well, sentences were increased, and we are left with the worry that not just the interested parties may think that the government had its way after all.
As it happens, some sentences were raised in a way that has brought a warm outer glow back to The Australian, whose front page headline reads this time ‘Bar raised for terror sentencing.’ This happens shortly after three members of the government have attacked not just the judiciary, but members of this particular court, for being too lenient. What inference does the average terrorist draw from that sequence? What does the fair minded observer in the public think?
That brings me back to the issues fact in this tawdry case. What did these ministers intend to achieve by their attack? As we saw, they were not interrogated by the police. They were not, so far as I can see, asked to put their response on oath. They certainly were not cross-examined – in a case where counsel would not have to be Buddy Franklin to be kicking goals from all round the ground. Instead, they were suffered through their mouthpiece, the Solicitor-General for the Commonwealth of Australia, to offer what lawyers call a bare denial. As indicated, they said in part that:
…. it was never our intention nor would it ever be to influence its decision-making process…we did not intend to undermine public confidence in the judiciary…
Well, then, what did these three soi disant lawyers intend to do – hold communion with the pixies, or have Crocodile Dundee sing Advance Australia, Fair? How would the average punter react to that rubbish? Try answering that question in polite language. It’s as if the apathy about honesty has wafted our way over the Pacific.
May I make one final observation about the course that these ministers by their conduct imposed on the court? In the 70s, 80s and 90s, I was involved in fighting many contempt cases. I lost them all – by some margin. Since then I have been involved in advising the press before publication. These issues are often difficult, especially with deadlines. Journalists, and their lawyers, don’t usually get the clear air that judges have. Nor do they get any sympathy from the judges. The risks are awful – for example, the Crown only has to prove a tendency; the accused has no right to a trial by jury; and the sky is the limit on penalty. The owner may be able to write a cheque, but it can’t do the jail time.
But in all my time, I cannot recall a journalist being asked to show cause why he or she should not be prosecuted for contempt – on the apparent footing that an apology will end the matter. In I think every case I have known, I would personally have embraced the offer – with both bleeding arms. Why is it then that ministers of the Commonwealth get offered this soft velvet treatment but journalists do not?
One thing looks clear. The next time a journalist is charged with contempt without having received the offer made to Commonwealth ministers, we can expect a thumping editorial about inequality – and possibly an industrial reaction.
How did the press react? The ABC News at 7 pm led with the story and said that the three judges had been ‘fuming.’ It would be tart to say that the judges aren’t paid to fume, but Aunty need not expect a rude letter. As I said, The Australian thought the increase in sentences was terrific. With their ineffable capacity to get legal affairs wrong, one article commenced with phrases captioned on page one:
Victoria’s Court of Appeal judges have muscled up. No longer will courts let convicted terrorists off with a lenient sentence.
The editorial is indeed remarkable. It begins by saying:
Victoria’s Court of Appeal made a fair and responsible ruling yesterday when it increased sentences of two men convicted of planning separate terrorist attacks in Melbourne.
Well, that’s nice for their Honours – they are secure in the knowledge that they have the blessing of The Australian. The editorial later referred to a ‘problematic twist.’ They referred to the purple language of the ministers that I have set out, like ‘hard-left activists’ and ‘divorced from reality.’ Then we get this:
Yesterday’s sentencing decision proves otherwise.
Have these people got no sense of decency at all? They apologised unreservedly to the court that they had published these vile and baseless charges – and now the editor finds that the judges are not guilty of them! The newspaper has found in favour of the judges! It passes belief. Then they go on to explain why the ministers’ ire had been raised’. Then they make one of their trademark infantile digs at the ABC. What mistake did the ministers make? They had based ‘their remarks on an ABC report that had not given the full context of the judges’remarks.’
God give us strength to endure all this. It’s as if Rupert Murdoch has done the people of Victoria a favour.
What is the most worrying thing here? These three bunnies were in the sewer up to their necks and they didn’t even smell it. That shows the shocking decline in standards in our public life.

Sir Owen Dixon is by common consent the greatest judge that this country has produced. He was a stickler for form. In a very well-known passage, his Honour said:
Such a function has led us all I think to believe that close adherence to legal reasoning is the only way to maintain the confidence of all parties in federal conflicts. It may be that the Court is thought to be excessively legalistic. I should be sorry to think it is anything else. There is no other safe guide to judicial decisions in great conflicts than a strict and complete legalism.
We may hope that Sir Owen’s view prevails and that it’s business as usual when cases like that of the three ministers come up again in the future. It would too much to hope that our politicians might get better.

Why opera? 6 – Wagner

/ Geoffrey Gibson / Leave a comment

6

Wagner

Let’s fast forward to 7 May 1942.  Reinhardt Heydrich was the head of the Gestapo.  The son of an opera singer and an actress, he excelled in fencing and he wept when he played the violin.  He was cashiered from the navy after he revolted other officers by blaming a pregnancy on the girl.  An American journalist described him as a ‘long-nosed, icy-eyed policeman, the genius of the final solution.’  He was known as Hangman Heydrich in occupied territories.  He hated Catholics as much as Jews.  He embodied the moral disintegration of the people who had given the world Bach, Kant, Goethe, and Beethoven.  He might be said to represent the fall of man.

Two Czech patriots, for such they may be called, assassinated this monster on the date I mentioned above.  The reprisal was the liquidation of the town of Lidice and the murder or enslavement of its people.  More than a thousand people were killed.  The Teutonic death rites were ghastly in Berlin.  Heydrich had been the Reich’s flaxen haired Siegfried.  All the frightful Nazi paraphernalia came out.  The Fuhrer personally consoled the family.  He lay German Order and Blood Order medals on the funeral pillow. And the climax was of course the appropriate music from Hitler’s favourite composer.  Siegfried’s Funeral March (‘Trauermarsch’) from Gotterdammerung (‘The Twilight of the Gods’).

Alan (Lord) Bullock said this in Hitler and Stalin, Parallel Lives:

Hitler’s great hero was Richard Wagner, whose music dramas held him spellbound.  Hitler was later to declare that he had no forerunners, with the single exception of Wagner.  Much has been made of the fact that Wagner was anti-Semitic, but what first attracted Hitler to him was the theatricality and epic scale of his operas, which he never tired of seeing, and which were the source of the theatricality and epic scale of his own political style.  Even more important was Wagner’s personality and the romantic conception of the artist as genius which Wagner had largely created, and which he put to the proof by triumphing over every conceivable obstacle to establish the shrine of German art at Bayreuth….so Hitler identified himself with Wagner.  It was an inspiration that never failed him.  Whenever his confidence in himself wavered, it was immediately restored by the magical world of Wagner’s music and the example of his genius.

Now, it would be very wrong to seek to blame Wagner for Hitler.  But it is not just the case that Wagner hated Jews and that he was a dreadfully selfish egomaniac who believed that the world owed him a living.  The problem for a lot of people, including me, is that the image of Hitler keeps surfacing when we listen to Wagner.  That happens in part because of the matters I have just referred to, but also because Wagner was fiercely nationalistic and he used his magic to enthral Germans about their future by idealising their past in a way that emotionally overcame them, so that they could lose their judgment.  And that was precisely the modus operandi, or as we would now say, the schtick, of Adolf Hitler.  And for reasons I will come to, I find Parsifal to be utterly repellent.

That’s one of the issues that some people have with Wagner.  Now listen to the Prelude to the opera Lohengrin (from which opera we derive one of our wedding marches).  Can you think of another piece of music of such exquisite beauty?  Anywhere?  In any mode?

Now listen to Wotan’s farewell (‘Leb wohl’) from Act III of Die Walkure.  Can you think of another piece of music drama as compellingly moving as this?  Would you not be happy to have it played at your funeral?

Wagner’s operas contain many moments of such utter transcendence – although you often have a long wait for the next one.  But what happens if this awful power falls into the wrong hands?

Well, let’s put this aside as the musing of a squeamish neurotic.  Obviously this is not an issue for a lot of people – although it might be one that some dedicated, snooty Wagner fanatics might bear in mind.  Speaking of which, they would be disappointed if I didn’t mention Mark Twain on Wagner.

One in fifty of those who attend our operas likes it already, perhaps, but I think a good many of the other forty-nine go in order to learn to like it, and the rest in order to be able to talk knowingly about it.  The latter usually hum the airs while they are being sung, so that their neighbours may perceive that they have been to operas before. The funeral of these do not occur often enough….I have witnessed and greatly enjoyed the first act of everything which Wagner created, but the effect on me has always been so powerful that one act was quite sufficient; whenever I have witnessed two acts I have gone away physically exhausted; and whenever I have ventured an entire opera the result has been the next thing to suicide…..The banging and slamming and booming and crashing were something beyond belief.  The racking and pitiless pain of it remains stored up in my memory alongside the memory of the time that I had my teeth fixed…

Some of the Wagner fanatics, especially the Ring addicts, do take themselves very seriously.  Perhaps they think that they have earned that right through pain and suffering.

Now, the second problem people have with Wagner cannot be batted away as easily as the first.  In my case, it is unanswerable.  It comes from the Bill of Rights, which is still part of the law of Victoria.  That basal law expressly forbids ‘cruel and unusual punishment.’  That’s what most of Wagner has become for me.  I survived and more or less enjoyed the two Ring Cycles in Adelaide.  I just survived Tristan und Isolde in Melbourne.  Simone Young told us that if we were lucky, someone or other might give us the extended version.  I prayed that it would not be for us, but I fear that it was.  I limped home in serious physical pain, a saddened man.  My memory is of a backbreaking celebration of neurosis, narcissism, and aural masturbation.  But it was Parsifal in Adelaide that finally broke my will.  Two of the three acts are set on Good Friday.  It is not just endless; it is so repetitive.  I thought that I was at risk of screaming if I heard the same phrase again.  Here is Mark Twain again:

The great master, who knew so well how to make a hundred instruments rejoice in unison and pour out their souls in mingled and melodious tides of delicious sound, deals only in barren solos when he puts in the vocal parts.  It may be that he was deep, and only added the singing to his operas for the sake of the contrast it would make with the music.  Singing!  It does seem the wrong name to apply to it.  Strictly described, it is a practising of difficult and unpleasant intervals, mainly.  An ignorant person gets tired of listening to gymnastic intervals in the long run, no matter how pleasant they may be.  In Parsifal there is a hermit named Gurnemanz who stands on the stage in one spot and practices by the hour, while first one and then another character of the cast endures what he can of it and then retires to die.

In 1993, The Times reviewer said of Tristan:

Nearly six hours spent in the theatre being buttonholed with long winded and specious justification of the composer’s taste for other people’s wives in general and Mathilde Wesendonck in particular is wearing on one’s patience.

The English critic Neville Cardus complained of the ‘eternal recurrence of leading themes.’  He spoke of being ‘imprisoned’ for hours ‘by this unreasonable tyranny of Wagner, this inordinate length and prolixity….utterly lacking in poise and taste.’  This was of Parsifal, which started at the ungodly hour of 5.45, and in which he heard another critic say ‘Amfortas is the wisest man here; he’s brought his bed with him.’

The third problem I have is that too many of the plots are plain silly or boring.  For example, the Valkyries are the women who choose the soldiers who will die.  The chosen go to Valhalla.  One of the most moving parts of the Ring is the entry of the Gods into Valhalla, but it is no accident that when the makers of Apocalypse Now wanted to show the most frightful aspect of the Vietnam War – ‘I just love the smell of Napalm in the morning’ – they chose to do so to the swelling sounds of the Ride of the Valkyries from the final act of Die Walkure.  I think Wagner wanted live horses on stage.  One version I saw had them as mermaids sitting at a bar.  How do you figure that out?

Richard Wagner (1813 to 1883) was a rolled gold five star jerk.  He was born in the Jewish quarter of Leipzig to lower middle class parents about two years before Waterloo.  His parentage is problematic, and that issue recurs in his work.  He got interested in theatre, and then he took music lessons.  He wrote his beginner’s pieces.  He married in 1836.  He was perpetually in debt, but he was already coming to the view that the world owed a living to a man of his genius.

Rienzi premiered in 1842.  The Flying Dutchman came out the following year.  This was the start of Wagner’s revolution.  Tannhauser and Lohengrin followed.  He had ideas for Die Meistersinger, Tristan and Parsifal.  Wagner was after the ‘total work of art’, involving all the arts.  He would write the script and have total control.  The music would have interacting themes – the leitmotifs, or ‘leading ideas.’  He would push Romanticism so hard and far that the reaction would be uncomely.

Wagner was involved politically.  He did of course believe that he could do anything.  He was involved in the events of 1848, what Sir Lewis Namier has described as ‘The Revolution of the Intellectuals’.  Wagner had to flee to Zurich.  (Did he prefigure Lenin?  God forbid!)  In 1850, Liszt conducted the first Lohengrin in Munich.  Wagner then completed the poetry for the Ring.

His marriage finally dissolved in the 1860s.  Wagner had fallen for Cosima, the wife of a close friend and the daughter of Liszt.  He was bailed out by a nut, King Ludwig II of Bavaria, who kept shrines to the Master in his crazy castles.  Wagner’s capacity for self-adoration at least matched that of Donald Trump.  He spoke of himself in the third person.  Like Hitler, he was an animal-loving vegetarian who was hateful to any human who did not bow to him.  In his eyes, his genius excused all.  He is the most appalling example of the artist as hero.  In 1872, a Munich psychiatrist said that Wagner suffered from ‘chronic megalomania, paranoia, and moral derangement.’  As part of that syndrome, he was toxically racist and a predatory womaniser.  What psychiatry hasn’t explained is why people who fall for these jerks are so forgiving.

The Ring was composed in the 1850s and premiered then and in the 1870s.  In 1871, the people of Bayreuth gave him the land for his temple.  Wagner devoted much time to Parsifal.  It was first performed at Bayreuth.  It premiered there six months before his death.

In conjunction with this opera, Wagner published a nauseating polemic, ‘Heroism and Christianity’.  He insisted that Jesus was of Greek origin and that the New Testament had nothing to do with the Old.  Sweet Christ, is this not the seed of the obscenity of the Reich?  Wagner said that the Aryans, the German leaders of mankind, had evolved from the gods, while lesser races had evolved from the apes.  He was revolted by the notion that Aryans might worship a Jew.  Nietzsche in his turn was revolted by Wagner.  He described Parsifal as ‘Christianity arranged for Wagnerians…a work of malice, of vindictiveness….an outrage on morality.’

After Wagner’s death, Cosima managed Bayreuth.  She was followed by her son Siegfried and his English wife, Winifred.  It was Winifred who befriended Hitler, and ensured that he and other Nazi leaders made pilgrimages to the birthplace of the new Teutonic order.

In 1993, Wagner’s music was first played live in Israel.  The event caused huge conflict.  The Master may have turned in his Wahnfried grave.  Wahnfried means ‘Peace from Illusion’.  God knows that I love the Germans, but their penchant for euphemism can be alarming.

In discussing Verdi, I referred to Berlin’s description of him as a ‘naïve’ artist.  He said that naïve artists were at peace with themselves and happily married to their Muse.  He distinguished them for ‘sentimental’ artists like Wagner.

Hence the effect of the sentimental artist is not joy and peace, but tension, conflict with nature or society, insatiable craving, the notorious neuroses of the modern age, with its troubled spirits, its martyrs, fanatics, and rebels, and its angry, bullying, subversive preachers, Rousseau, Byron, Schopenhauer, Carlyle, Dostoevsky, Flaubert, Wagner, Marx, Nietzsche, offering not peace  but a sword.

Some of that is a bit large, but I get the drift.  Against that, two English philosophers have written books in praise of Wagner – Michael Tanner, and Roger Scruton.  I only have the first.

So, they are some problems with Wagner.  But I don’t see that as a reason why people should not look and listen for themselves, and I recommend that you do just that.  There are any number of recordings of extracts or famous parts – including some that exclude singing and just present as finished orchestral works.  You could start with one of those.  Many years ago now, someone who had succeeded in business told me that she was interested in coming to terms with the Ring Cycle.  I lent her a two disk set of extracts, and listed the order in which she might play them – beginning with Wotan’s Farewell.  The experiment came off – and with some fruit for the company as this lady is a leading sponsor.  Try a recording called ‘Richard Wagner: The Best Overtures and Preludes’, or ‘The Best of Wagner’ – there are two on offer.

As for individual operas, I have seen Tannhauser, Lohengrin, Tristan und Isolde, and The Flying Dutchman by the AO on stage and a concert program conducted by Simone Young.  I very much enjoyed The Flying Dutchman.  As I recall it, there was no interval.  There are many full recordings available on the internet.

Here is how an English writer summarised the Ring under the heading ‘Fifteen hours in a few words.’  (It’s a clip I found in one of my books on Wagner.  I think it came from The Guardian by John Crace.)

Three Rheinmaidens – either naked or in fat suits, depending on the production – frolic in the water while teasing Alberich the dwarf.  He throws a strop and nicks their gold, which he forges into the ring of absolute power.  Elsewhere, Wotan, king of the gods, is involved in a complicated series of double crosses with a pair of giants, Fasolt and Fafner, over arrangements to build him a castle.  Loge, the god of fire, persuades Wotan to steal the gold and give it to the giants.  By the end of Das Rheingold, Alberich is sulking, Fafner has killed Fasolt, and Wotan is skipping off to Valhalla.

Wotan is busy between operas shagging his way through Valhalla and has had a couple of kids, Siegmund and Sieglinde, with Fricka, and Die Walkure opens with Siegmund turning up unexpectedly at the home of Hunding, Sieglinde’s life.  Needless to say, Siegmund and Siegfried don’t recognise each other at first, but after Siegmund has magically pulled a sword out of a tree and been threatened by Hunding, they cement their relationship by embarking on an incestuous affair.

Fricka tells Wotan he has to put a stop to this.  He doesn’t want to as he has been banking on Siegmund to get back the ring; but he gives in and sends Brunnhilde, the top Valkyrie, to sort them out.  She reneges on the deal, so Wotan has to step in himself.  Siegmund dies, Brunnhilde is put to sleep on a mountain top and Sieglinde goes off to have Siegmund’s baby.

Sieglinde dies in childbirth and baby Siegfried is brought up by Alberich’s brother, Mime.  Don’t ask.

The best that can be said for Siegfried is that he is a dreary, brain-dead Aryan lummox who spends most of his eponymous opera either in a vegetative state or a psychopathic frenzy.  After re-forging his father’s sword, killing Fafner and taking the ring, Siegfried decides to take his orders from the birds.  They tell him to kill Mime and head for the woman on the mountain.  En route, he bumps into Wotan, who now calls himself the Wanderer, and breaks his spear.  Brunnhilde then thrills at Siegfried’s arrival.

For no good reason, Siegfried abandons Brunnhilde at the start of Gotterdammerung in favour of adventure and winds up with the Gibichungs another bunch of halfwits, who are ruled over by Gunther and his henchman, Hagen, who just happens to be Alberich’ s son.  Hagen slips Siegfried a Mickey Finn that makes him forget Brunnhilde and he agrees to marry Gunter’s sister, Gutrune, and to abduct Brunnhilde for Gunter.  Brunnhilde is none too happy.  Hagen then kills Siegfried and everyone left standing falls out with one another.  Hagen claims the ring but Brunnhilde insists it be given back to the Rhine and rides into Siegfried’s funeral pyre.  Valhalla combusts and the Rheinmaidens drag Hagen to his death as they reclaim their gold.  Fifteen hours later, we are back where we started.

For the Ring Cycle, I collected some extracts and I have full sets by Karajan, Bohm, and various conductors at Bayreuth.  It is better to search for individual names – Das Rheingold, Die Walkure, Siegfried and Gotterdammerung.   In each you can watch the whole production of Patrice Chéreau with Pierre Boulez.  I have the Die Walkure, which is the best of the four for me, and this is a wonderful filmed version of this work performed at Bayreuth.  Each member of the cast is sensational.  (The French director, Chéreau, received death threats.)  Wotan in particular is beautifully presented and it was, I think, this version that first alerted me to the power of his farewell to Brunnhilde – and of the cycle at large.

After Leb wohl, my favourite music of Wagner is the overture to Rienzi, about his first work of note.  It has for me all the music drama of the later work, but none of the imagined pagan Golden Age or the perversion of Christianity.  And it swings, and it is decently German.  Try it with Georg Solti – who is Jewish – and the Vienna Philharmonic.  Those cats can really swing, man.

Well, there you go – you have an introduction to the glorious enigma of Waggers.  Sample and enjoy what you can.  There is much of pure beauty, but there are long arid moments between drinks, and I can’t help feeling that the prodigious ego of Waggers is at the root of most of the problems.

I met the late Gough Whitlam for the first time before the opening of the first Ring Cycle in Adelaide.  Gough nailed it on the spot.  ‘The problem with Wagner is that he was such a megalomaniac, he had to write his own libretti.  He badly needed an editor!  Margaret and I saw Tristan in Dresden.   The hero gets caught in flagrante.  The king comes out to castigate.  Fifty minutes!  Ten would have been more than enough.’  Spot on, Gough.  The world is coming to grips with living with another unmannered egomaniac – still, at least Wagner had some brains, if no manners.

Here and there – An Australian novelist on being Australian

/ Geoffrey Gibson / Leave a comment

This is the second piece on Tim Winton’s reflections on Australia in his book the boy behind the curtain.  The following extract comes from a discussion about aborigines and the environment about Lake Moore and Mount Gibson.

Aborigines on site

Although the site on the lake is protected under federal legislation, its custodian is a frail old man who lives nearly 200 km away, and upon his passing there is small prospect of the place having a new guardian with the full authority of traditional law.

There are human sites in this country that thrum with power, places whose ancient presences intimidate and confront, but this is not one of them.  This feels like a monument to lost songs, languages, connections and clans, and a place without its people is bereft.  Across Australia, many of the 250-plus Aboriginal languages have disappeared since the colonial era, and too many folkways have fallen away in our own time.  The coercive paternalism of earlier eras has been replaced by a paralysing and infantilizing regime of cradle-to-grave welfare.  And to be blunt, the journey from cradle to grave is scandalously brief great shame, for despite significant legal and political advances, there are likely now more Aboriginal Australians in ill health, without education or employment, than in the years of my childhood, more adults without agency in either tradition or modernity, more young people illiterate in every sense.  In some Aboriginal communities, the funeral has become the dominant form of social gathering.

On previous visits to this ancient site I have walked away consumed by sadness and anger.  But my conviction that it was a lost place, another bit of silent country, was presumptuous.  In recent years Aboriginal people have been coming to the lake and its environs more frequently, either seeing these sites for the first time or revisiting them in an effort to revive the old and educate the young.  Separated by great distances, some Aboriginal people are looking to the internet as a tool for the encryption and propagation of secret and sacred lore, and although cultural connections are sometimes as sketchy as the register of extant species of marsupials hereabouts, the will for recovery and restoration gives some cause for optimism.  When the surrounding country bore all the disheartening marks of degradation, it was harder to sense much human promise in this place.  The old war on nature, for too long our prevailing mindset, seemed unassailable.  It was evident in every bullet-riddled sign, every bleached paddock, every redneck bumper sticker and depressing roadhouse conversation.  But this year, in a landscape speckled with new growth, hope for the cultural and environmental future of the region is just that little bit easier to cling to……

These projects are all private concerns, the labour of mere citizens.  The native flora and fauna under their protection belonged to the state, but the operations are leaner and nimbler, and can be more immediately responsive than most government agencies, which are politicized and bureaucratically inert.  Faithful public servants working to protect the environment have to endure vacillations of policy, infuriating budgetary constraints, and the sick reality that every other arm of government is hostile to their efforts.  The advent of this new movement will hardly make the work of government agencies redundant.  Nor does the welcome emergence of philanthropy in this part of the world mean that strident advocacy has become unnecessary – far from it, for most significant gains in conservation must still be won in the brutal, sapping rhetorical arenas of the courts, the parliaments and the media.  But the arrival of a quiet and respectable third way is a critical part of the cultural change needed in Australia if we are to restore our scorched earth.

If you drive from Broome to Darwin, you will likely be reduced to hopeless despair about our blackfellas. Apart from saying that in my view Jonathon Thurston is the most valuable and the grittiest footballer in Australia – he plays rugby league – I have no idea what to do or say about the first owners of our land.  I think that what Winton says sounds sensible and fair, about both the land and its people, but who would want to try frame Australian values about the aborigines?

Why opera? 5

/ Geoffrey Gibson / Leave a comment

5

Verdi

When Verdi died in 1901, the nation that he had helped to shape, Italy, was convulsed with grief.  It was not just that the Italians could be heard whistling tunes like Donna e mobile or De quella pirra the day after they had seen the relevant show.  Verdi had become associated with the movement for the unification of Italy, known as the Risorgimento.  The chorus from Nabucco known as the Slaves’ Chorus (Va pensiero) had become a kind of anthem.  It is thought that more than 300,000 attended the memorial service.  Arturo Toscanini led a choir of more than 800 in performing that chorus.  (When Caruso died in 1921, at the cruel age of 48, the King of Italy opened the Royal Basilica for the funeral.)

Verdi was born to parents who owned a tavern in the Parma region of Italy.  Shortly after he was born, Russian troops committed an atrocity in the local church.  Verdi’s mother hid with him in the bell tower and they survived, but the incident left its mark.  The family was poor, but the young boy showed talent with music – but not enough to get a pass at the conservatory at Milan.  (Well, Harvard would later knock back Warren Buffett.)  Verdi took some private lessons and got a job with the local orchestra.  He married and then he moved north and submitted the first of his operas which has survived to La Scala.  He became known for being single-minded and coming straight to the point.  With help from a young soprano called Giuseppina Strepponi, La Scala accepted one opera, and gave a contract for three more.

In 1840, Verdi lost his wife and children, and he went into depression.  He wrote a bad comic opera, but in 1842, he produced Nabucco.  This biblical tale spoke to the needs of the Italian people at the time.  In the next eight years, he produced thirteen operas mostly tragic and historical.  He married Strepponi in 1859.  The relationship would last half a century.  She was the ideal companion for a man who could be blunt.

In 1851, Verdi produced Rigoletto. It was based on a story by Victor Hugo.  This was followed by Il Trovatore and La Traviata.  Verdi was now both famous and rich.  He was obsessed with Shakespeare (whom he read in translation).  Macbeth came early, but Otello and Falstaff are among his mature masterpieces.  He had fully mapped out his King Lear, but he never wrote it.

The most famous and wealthy composer in the world set up a retirement home for musicians in Milan.  He died of a stroke in 1901.  He was not overtly religious and he had prescribed for his funeral ‘One priest, one candle, one cross’, but, as we saw, the occasion became one of national mourning.

Verdi managed to blend drama and melody, and in his later works, he gave opera new direction.  About a dozen of those are still in demand.  He had a natural ear for melody, and a feel for drama, and some of his greatest music sounds like a tuneful village band.  From Rigoletto on, he was able to devise melodies that were striking and that expressed the deepest emotions without sacrificing what sounds like simple tunefulness.  That is a very high form of art.

One biographer of Verdi said this:

What, then, remains in his work if the ephemera of time and place are drained away?

First, the potential nobility of man.  In his early and middle years, Verdi saw men and women risking life and personal happiness to further an ideal, and in his operas he celebrated them, holding them up as models to be copied.  In La Traviata, Verdi wept for Violetta, but he presents her decision in her circumstances as right.  His operas, though with artistic restraint, are didactic: they urge men and women to be noble.

As a corollary, however, his work throughout sounds a constant note of melancholy.  Life, he suggests, is hard, happiness fleeting, and to death the only certainty.  He never pretends in his call for generous, noble actions that these do not often end in suffering, but offers them as the best response to death.

Though these themes, the potential nobility of man and the tragedy it often entails, was stimulated  by the events of the Risorgimento, they are universal, sensed by adult men and women everywhere.  Though in different eras they may be more or less to the fore, they are never wholly absent from the feelings of men.  They are an important reason why Verdi’s operas, generations after his death, still find an audience.

Let us start with Rigoletto which, with La Traviata and The Marriage of Figaro, would be the ideal opera for the first timer.  The hero is a misfit, a hunchback who hates his court, and is hated and baited by them in return.  His only solace is his daughter, but she is cruelly seduced by the evil duke.  They plot revenge with a professional killer.  Verdi said of the Victor Hugo plot that it was ‘the best plot and perhaps the best play of modern times…it cannot fail.’  He said Rigoletto was ‘grossly deformed and absurd but inwardly passionate and full of love.’  The opera overturned many conventions, but it was a quick success and it remains hugely popular.

As you could imagine, there is a smorgasbord of great performances on offer, and you will not be surprised to hear that my fancy is for the EMI with Callas, di Stefano, and Gobbi.  This was a golden time for the three of them, and together, they were in my view unsurpassed.  In his prime di Stefano was a thrilling and assured lyrical tenor.  There are many complete versions of the opera, and even more of the big hits like ‘Donna e mobile’ and ‘Caro Nome’ (neither of which enthrals me) and the famous quartet in the last act ‘Bella figlia dell’amore’.   In that quartet, you might compare the version above with the raw horse power of that of Sutherland and Pavarotti.  But this is an opera where the acting of the lead is vital, and Gobbi had no peer.  And if you want to see and hear the beating heart of Italian opera get the ‘Si, vendetta, tremenda vendetta’ (you won’t need translation) and watch Tito Gobbi and Renata Scotto set the stage ablaze – the clip begins with a repeat of the curse.  You just can’t get more Italian or dramatic than this, and it’s a reminder of the sustaining influence on opera of commedia dell’arte.  As nights go at the theatre, this is very hard to beat.

You can just about repeat all of that for La Traviata, including the preferred casting.  There was a famous photo of Callas on a record cover showing her wringing her hands, and someone said that ‘even her hands wept.’  (I think this was from the famous 1955 Visconti version.)  This is one of the great tear-jerkers of the stage; when it comes to Kleenex, this is a full box job.  It is also the most frequently performed and recorded of these operas.  The story comes from Alexander Dumas’ La dame aux caméllias.  Violetta is a courtesan who is unwell.  Alfredo, a member of the gentry, falls for her.  His father, Germont, persuades him to drop her.   She reluctantly agrees – for his sake.  He then throws money at her.  He later repents, but too late.  La Traviata has about it the horrible inevitability of King Lear.  In the famous letter scene, you can hear Callas, you can feel Callas, spitting her anguish at God.

We are really spoiled.  Why not start with the whole of the Salzburg 2005 version with Anna Netrebko, Rolando Villazon and Thomas Hampson with the Vienna Philharmonic under Carlo Rizzi.  Years ago, I bought the DVD (for $34).  The DG sleeve notes said that this was the opera event of 2005 and that ‘this thrilling production prompted riotous ovations not see since Karajan’s heyday.’  After that you can take your pick.  There is a famous duet for Violetta and Germont in Act II which you can take, among others, with Renée Fleming and Dmitri Hvorostovsky in Moscow, in 2006.  The sound is gorgeous – but the gorgeous soprano looks like anything but a sick prostitute – not least because she is dressed in white in something like a bridal gown.  This duet is a shining moment in our theatre.

A Masked Ball got savaged by the censors.  It resembles Traviata in that it’s about love and death among the better people, but it has the kind of hot drama we get in Trovatore.   Some see it as flawed.  I’m not one of them.  It might sound silly, but for me it is intensely musical.  One critic called it ‘the most operatic’ of operas’.  A ruler – the censors forced some changes: political assassination was sensitive – meets the wife of his mate who warns him of plot to kill him.  A fortune teller tells the ruler he will be killed by the next person to shake his hand.  That is the wife of the mate.  A lot of the music has a kind of dancing, mocking lilt, but, if you key in the Italian name, you can get the whole opera featuring either Pavarotti or Domingo.  The Domingo version comes with Claudio Abbado from Covent Garden, if you are not familiar with it, and it features Katia Ricciarelli and Piero Cappuccilli – each of them is assured with Verdi.  It would be hard to top this version.

Don Carlos is long, and the plot is not simple, but it has great music and drama.  As to length, Bizet wrote that ‘Verdi is no longer Italian, he is following Wagner.’  We listened to the great duet in the first chapter, and there is a magnificent confrontation between the Grand Inquisitor and the King.  The show is charged with tension, and lyrical moments are rudely interrupted.  This show is not one for the first timer.  The Solti version has Tebaldi, Bergonzi, and Fischer-Dieskau.  Renata Tebaldi and Carlo Bergonzi may not have the cachet of others of their time, but they are Italian, and they are normally flawless, as is their German colleague on this recording.  There is also Von Karajan at Strasburg in 1975 with Domingo, Freni, Cappuccilli and Ghiaurov.  Both these performances represent opera royalty.  If you want to know how things are now, you could try the fearfully good looking and assured Kaufman and Hvorostovsky with another version of the show-stopping duet.  This is men into bodice-ripping on each other!  These guys may have tickets on themselves, but they are entitled to at least some.  Assurance at this level counts for so much, and I could imagine footy coaches using this before a grand final.  This is spell-binding stuff from a man who had ascended his own Everest.  If you ever hear more powerful music than this, could you please let me know?

That leaves us with Falstaff.  Some romantics get seduced by the lying coward Falstaff, who is probably Shakespeare’s most popular character, but opera goers only get the soft version that comes from the comedy farce The Merry Wives of Windsor, the only plot, I think, that Shakespeare ever invented for himself.  The silly old drunk thinks he can seduce the wives, but he is easily foiled, and a sub-plot for young lovers allows some very pretty tunes.  So here we have a combination of humour and sadness, redolent of Mozart.  The farce is brilliantly orchestrated by Verdi, and it requires a strong orchestra and baritone.  This is an ensemble piece in which the company is the star.

Rossini had said that ‘Verdi was incapable of writing a comic opera.’  Verdi decided on the project at the age of seventy-five.  He laboured on it for four years with the librettist in secret.  He conducted it at the opening at La Scala.  It was received as the masterpiece that it is.

My preferred version is that of Gobbi with Karajan – you can choose your own.  But you should watch the clip of James Levine in rehearsal at the Met – it is from one of those HD films (one that I saw) and the clip is presented by Renée Fleming.  You should also see the clip of Ricardo Muti assisting an awe-struck student at rehearsal.  The young man could not get over being taught by the maestro – who has a sense of humour – in person.  There are some full versions including the 1982 Covent Garden production under Giulini with Bruson, Nucci, Ricciarelli, and Hendricks.

Well, there are just some of the reasons that we owe so much to this Italian composer.  The English philosopher, Sir Isaiah Berlin, wrote a paper called The Naiveté of Verdi.  In it, he said:

Noble, simple, with a degree of unbroken vitality and vast natural power of creation and organisation, Verdi is the voice of a world which is no more.  His enormous popularity among the most sophisticated as well as the most ordinary listeners today is due to the fact that he expressed permanent states of consciousness in the most direct terms, as Homer, Shakespeare, Ibsen, and Tolstoy have done.  This is what Schiller called ‘naiv’.  After Verdi this is not heard in music again.  Verdi’s assured place, in the high canon of the musical art, which nobody now disputes, is a symptom of sanity in our time.

It is significant that in this essay Berlin distinguished Verdi as a composer from the kind that is up next.