Passing Bull 112 – Bull about terrorism and patriotism

/ Geoffrey Gibson / 6 Comments

Sebastian Haffner was a law student in Berlin when the brownshirts evicted the Jews from the law library.  He said that the failure of educated Germans to deal with Adolf Hitler led to a kind of national nervous breakdown.  He summed it up as follows.

The only thing that is missing is what in animals is called ‘breeding.’  This is a solid inner kernel that cannot be shaken by external pressures and forces, something noble and steely, a reserve of pride, principle and dignity, to be drawn on in the hour of trial….At the moment of truth, when other nations rise spontaneously to the occasion, the Germans collectively and completely collapsed, and suffered a nervous breakdown.  The Kammergericht [superior court] toed the line.  No Frederick the Great was needed.  Not even Hitler had to intervene.  All that was required was a few Amstgerichstrats [judges] with a deficient knowledge of the law.

When Saudi funded terrorists successfully attacked the twin towers in New York, the Americans suffered a loss of nerve, a failure of mettle.  They harped on the need for patriotism and they passed a law called the Patriot Act. Why should one kind of crime lead to calls for patriotism, but not others?

Some terrorists do want to undermine government, and in that sense they resemble those guilty of the crime of treason – people who are called traitors.  If you feared that a fifth column may be at work and ready to aid an invading power, you might then appeal to patriotism.  You might even invoke terror yourself in order to meet the threat and to defend the motherland.  This was precisely the course taken by the French government after 1789 when they declared, for good reason, that la patrie est en dangère.

   But there is nothing like that threat facing people in Britain, the U S or Australia from I S or other manifestations of terror linked to Islam.  Nor does the present threat level appear to exceed that faced by Britain from terror linked to Ireland in the last third of the last century.  In none of those cases could it be said that the nation’s very existence was in peril.  Why then do some people feel the need to invoke patriotism for this kind of crime and not for others?

There is nothing new about terrorism.  The bible and the Koran are splattered with it.  Homer had the man-killing Achilles claim that he was the most terrifying man alive.  Ancient Athens thought nothing of putting a whole town to the sword for not paying protection money.  Sparta was worse.  One Roman general injected discipline by killing every tenth soldier in his army. (Hence we have the word ‘decimate’.)   Rome responded to a slave revolt by crucifying 6000 of them on the Appian Way.   Before at least one crusade, the crusaders got their arm in for the slaughter of Muslims by slaughtering thousands of Jews on their way to the Holy Land.  The nations of the U S, France, Ireland and Israel were all conceived and born amid acts of terrorism.

If you look up ‘terrorist’ in the OED, you will find that it ‘applied to the Jacobins and their agents and partisans in the French Revolution.’  Robespierre is not greatly loved now, but there is still a Robespierre Society in France devoted to the archetypal terrorist.  Whether you regard people like George Washington or Nelson Mandela as terrorists depends mainly on what side wins. As one American rebel mordantly remarked, they would either stick together or they would hang separately.  For that matter, more than a few blackfellas would think that the white occupation of Australia was only effected by terrorism, and brutally effective terrorism at that.

The Patriot Act was said to be about ‘Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism Act of 2001’.  That kind of silly word game of itself suggests a loss of nerve.  Outside of the U S, patriotism has not had a good press since Dr Johnson described it as the last refuge of the scoundrel, a proposition exemplified in a case we will come to, and E M Forster declared that if he had to choose between betraying a friend and betraying his country, he hoped he would have the courage to choose the latter.

Outside the U S, the word patriotism has become a dirty word since it was perverted by the scourge of Senator McCarthy.  For similar reasons, phrases like ‘Un-American’ die on our lips.

At the beginning of what we call the Cold War, many Americans felt that communism posed a threat that might be unhelpfully characterised as ‘existential’ (a word that should be left to followers of Jean Paul Sartre).  Some thought that this threat permitted appeals to patriotism.  They relied on high minded informers like Ronald Reagan to produce scapegoats by dobbing in their mates.  (Has any culture ever smiled on informers?)

Senator McCarthy – a vulgar, loud mouthed and vicious drunk – used a government committee to conduct an inquisition.  The inquisition was, like its European religious ancestors, based on fear and smear.  The fear was twofold – there was the popular fear of communism, and there was the fear felt by the targets of the inquisition.  (On one his trips to the Inquisition, Galileo copped this bell-ringer straight off: ‘Why do you think that you are here?’)  The smear consisted of labelling all communists as the same, and by saying that people were guilty merely if they were suspected of being communists.  In this, they reverted to type, and the infamous French Law of Suspects, that enabled Robespierre to lift the death rate sharply.  (On one occasion, Robespierre said ‘Look about you and share my fear.’  He was only brought down when those who were left realised it was just of matter of time until it was their turn.  One survivor bustled about saying ‘I hear he has a list – and that your name is on it.’)

The ultimate crime of McCarthy, as it is in all such inquisitions, lay in seeking to induce or compel witnesses to repeat the crime of Judas – not by holding out thirty pieces of silver, but by abusing the power of government.

We can I think see precisely these techniques being applied to Muslims in Australia by nasty people like Pauline Hanson, Alan Jones, Cory Bernardi, Andrew Bolt and other parts of the press (but not the decent press).  It may therefore be as well to reflect on why McCarthyism is such a dirty word, a word that casts at least as great a stain on the U S as the Salem witch-hunts (a word that the current U S President is greatly attracted to).  Indeed, it might be helpful if some scholar were to analyse the two together – with particular reference to the influence of perverted religion on each.  (The same scholar might consider the ways that the crusades involved a perversion of religion.  He or she may also want to look at whether religion was involved or invoked on either side of the terrorist atrocities of the IRA.)

Ike – President Eisenhower – loathed McCarthy, who said that his mission was ‘making certain that every government employee is a loyal American.’  Ike said:

We have opposed the confusing of loyalty with conformity, and all misguided attempts to convert freedom into a privilege licensed by censors…We must, even in our zeal to defeat the enemies of freedom, never betray ourselves into seizing their weapons to make our own defence…[America] is too strong ever to acknowledge fear and too wise ever to fear knowledge….This is the kind of America – and the kind of Republican Party – in which I believe.

As warriors go, Ike’s credentials are hard to beat.  Later he said of a critic:

The writer labors under the false but prevalent notion that bullying and leadership are synonymous; that desk-pounding is more effective than is persistent adherence to a purpose and winning to that purpose sufficient support for its achievement….As for McCarthy, only a short-sighted or completely inexperienced individual would urge the use of the office of the Presidency to give an opponent the publicity he so avidly desires.

(In the name of heaven, what would Ike have said about the ‘short-sighted or completely inexperienced individual’ in the White House now?)

Harry Truman was subpoenaed to appear before the House Un-American Activities Committee.  He condemned the government for ‘yielding to hysteria rather than resisting it’ and rounded on ‘fake crusaders who dig up and distort records of the past to distract the attention of the people from political failures of the present.’  Harry Truman was a model president.

Then four Puerto Rican terrorist gun-men opened fire in Congress and shot and wounded five congressmen. Terrorism had hit home on the hill. Ike responded by saying that ‘we are defeating ourselves by [using] methods that do not conform to the American sense of justice and fair play.’

Ed Murrow then gave a nationally televised address.

We must not confuse dissent with disloyalty.  We must remember always that accusation is not proof and that conviction depends on evidence and due process of law.  We will not walk in fear, one of another.  We will not be driven by fear into an age of unreason, if we dig deep in our history and our doctrine, and remember that we are not descended from fearful men – not from men who refused to write, to speak, to associate and to defend causes that were, for the moment unpopular.  This is no time for men who oppose Senator McCarthy’s methods to keep silent….We cannot defend freedom abroad by deserting it at home.

Ike gave an impromptu speech from rough notes – ‘Just let me get up and talk to the people’ – in which he referred to ‘the fear that we will use intemperate investigative methods, particularly through congressional committees, to combat communistic penetration.’  Then Ike attacked the press that he thought had a guilty conscience for having built McCarthy up.  (A preview of Trump.)  He said they ‘put a premium upon clichés and slogans’.  Boy, could he see them now!

We incline to persuade with an attractive label; or to damn with a contemptuous tag.  But catchwords are not information.  And most certainly , sound popular judgments cannot be based upon them….Freedom of expression is not merely a right, its constructive use is a stern duty….Along with patriotism – understanding, comprehension, determination are the qualities we now need.  Without them, we cannot win.  With them, we cannot fail.

McCarthy was finally brought undone in a confrontation with a Boston attorney called Joe Welch.  It was a stand-off that makes the hair stand up on the back of my neck whenever I watch it.  Welch was counsel for the U S army – which was another target of McCarthy.  Welch told a young man named Fisher on his staff that he should not take part in the case because when younger he had belonged to a suspect group.  McCarthy dredged this past up as a smear.  Welch responded in terms that do eternal honour to the profession of the law and which earned him a long ovation.

Until this moment, Senator, I think I never gauged your cruelty or your recklessness.  Fred Fisher is a young man who went to the Harvard Law School and came into my firm and is starting what looks to be a brilliant career with us……Little did I dream that you would be so reckless and cruel as to do an injury to that lad….. I fear he shall always bear a scar needlessly inflicted by you.  If it were within my power to forgive you for your reckless cruelty, I would do so, but your forgiveness will have to come from someone other than me……Let us not assassinate this lad further, Senator.  You have done enough.  Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last?  Have you left no sense of decency?….Mr McCarthy, I will not discuss this with you further…I will not ask Mr Cohn any more questions.  You, Mr Chairman, may, if you will, call the next witness.

There is much for us to heed from the cancer of McCarthyism.  If we are being attacked by people who want us to change our laws and customs, then it makes no sense for us to respond by doing just that  – whether under the label of patriotism, or at all.  If we respond to terrorism by giving up rights that preserve our freedom, are we not just giving in to the terrorists and completing their work for them?

Recent events in Holland, France and Germany suggest that Europe is holding the line.  That cannot be said for Australia, the U S or the U K.  Here, the two major parties are so much on the nose that either in government will be elected by about one third of the voters and then face people elected by the other two thirds of the voters.  And we have learned from the U S the art of unprincipled opposition.  The nation looks to be about as ungovernable as France was until recently. We have a government that is without principle or leader facing an opposition that is at least as deficient in both – and the people know it.

In the U S and the U K, people who look unfit for any kind of office have attracted large numbers of votes from voters who are as impervious to reality as they are indifferent to truth.  These people are not just disaffected with politics – they are deeply aggrieved that the whole world is unfair to them – and sensible people should understand their grievance.

And the malaise in all three nations is now such that politicians in senior positions and the lesser press feel no compunction about attacking judges and doing so in ways that are as spiteful as they are groundless.  Most of these people making these attacks should know better – except for Donald Trump, who has no sense of decency at all, and Peter Dutton, who may well be the most frankly vicious minister of the Crown that this nation has ever produced.

The inference appears to me to be plain that at least some of these people attacking the judges are seeking to undermine public trust in that organ of government called the judiciary.  Having debauched their own currency, it is not hard for them to seek to spread that form of cancer around. That being so, it may not be all that simple to articulate the moral difference between these dissolute rock throwers and common garden terrorists.

We are looking at an illness, a cancer, across our public life.  But when we look at the events in the U S and the U K, and the hopeless and unworkable condition of our Commonwealth Parliament, then it is clear that not just historians but all of us will now gaze with different eyes on the irresistible rise and success of evil people like Mussolini and Hitler.  Only a glib idiot would say that it couldn’t happen here.

We are not just speaking of a failure of nerve.  We are contemplating the erosion of that ‘solid inner kernel’ so finely drawn by Sebastian Haffner.  It is this kernel that has prevented us from descending to the primeval slime experienced by so many nations that have been exposed to violent revolution because they failed to react decently to change.

It took the English and their descendants more than eight hundred years to develop the rule of law and the Westminster system. They are the institutions that underlie our rights and freedoms – our whole way of life.  We can lose it all in a fraction of that time – especially if we insist on parroting nonsense about patriotism, and especially if we do that, as I think that we do, in order to discriminate against those of a faith different to that which our elected leaders affect to pray to on each day that they sit together to lay down our laws.

Poet of the month: Homer’s Iliad

‘Ye kings and warriors! may your vows be crown’d, 

And Troy’s proud walls lie level with the ground. 

May Jove restore you when your toils are o’er 

Safe to the pleasures of your native shore. 

But, oh! relieve a wretched parent’s pain, 

And give Chryseis to these arms again; 

If mercy fail, yet let my presents move, 

And dread avenging Phoebus, son of Jove.’

Passing Bull 111 – Bull about the Prime Minister and the President

/ Geoffrey Gibson / Leave a comment

Our Prime Minister took the Mickey out of Donald Trump at an event for politicians and the press – where people are expected to be funny.  (They have a similar event in the US that this President boycotted.  He hates the press because they take the Mickey out of him all of the time.)

Sadly, a very experienced member of the press, who was at least until now respected, stayed away from the event.  Laurie Oakes takes the distorted view that his absence frees him from any obligation of confidentiality that he may have been bound by had he attended the party.  That casuistry of itself casts a pall on his trustworthiness.  I say that this incident is sad because it suggests that the reputation of our journalists might be sinking at about the same rate as that of our politicians.

I haven’t seen the parody, but everyone I have spoken to says it is terrific.  They found it hilariously funny and dead set true.

The exceptions, as we may have expected, also sadly, came from The Australian.  Three viscerally pro-Abbott hacks – Dennis Shanahan, Greg Sheridan, and Chris Kenny – rebuked the P M sharply.  Kenny was as usual revoltingly unprofessional (and he shares Oakes’ logic about confidentiality).

My golden rule for Liberal and Nationals politicians is that if they are pleasing the press gallery – especially Fairfax and ABC journalists – they will invariably be doing the wrong thing by their party and constituency.

It is a well-worn path – especially for moderate liberals – to appeal to the sensibilities of the so-called progressive media: speak with alarmism on climate and feel the love; speak with compassion on border security and be swept up in their embrace; or mock conservatives and have them eating out of your hand.

Someone should really tell the poor fellow that his view on the things that derange his thinking are about three generations out of date and that mocking the majority of his profession is as unprofessional as you can get.

But let me  make three comments on the kow-towers whose views were echoed in today’s editorial.

First, no one is suggesting that to the extent that the parody criticised Trump it was not justified.   It plainly was, and Trump is so absurd that he has generated a revival of late night comedy routines that command huge support in the U S.

Secondly, if the critics think this form of fun may impair our interests, the premise of that fear must be that in addition to all of his other faults, Trump is an irrational, vane, vengeful pig who might retaliate on Twitter in a way that could hurt us.  I agree with that, but I don’t think we should cringe in fear from an irrational, vane, vengeful pig – even one who holds the nuclear codes.

Thirdly, these commentators lead the charge in that newspaper in all that nonsense about freedom of speech and political correctness.  This must be the example par excellence of freedom of speech giving way to political correctness.

There is no to their hypocrisy.

Poet of the month: Homer’s Iliad.

Declare, O Muse! in what ill-fated hour

Sprung the fierce strife, from what offended power

Latona’s son a dire contagion spread

And heap’d the camp with mountains of the dead;

The king of men his reverent priest defied

And for the king’s offence the people died.

For Chryses sought with costly gifts to gain

His captive daughter from the victor’s chain.

Suppliant the venerable father stands;

Apollo’s awful ensigns grace his hands

By these he begs; and lowly bending down,

Extends the sceptre and the laurel crown

He sued to all, but chief implored for grace

The brother-kings, of Atreus’ royal race.

Why opera? 4 Bel canto

/ Geoffrey Gibson / Leave a comment

 

Bel canto

On 17 February 1959 a young Australian soprano made her debut in the title role of the bel canto opera Lucia di Lammermoor by Donizetti at Covent Garden.  A bad marriage leads to a murder at a wedding and the most celebrated Mad Scene in all opera.  This young woman darted and flitted about in a bloodstained shift, and struck amazing notes.  She generated intense excitement in the audience.  Almost no one had heard or seen anything like this.  The last act ended after the death of Lucia with what one observer called a ‘riot’.  The audience could not wait to give the Australian the biggest ovation heard at Covent Garden for years.  She seemed to be a different person through countless curtain calls.  She blew kisses to the crowd and that just made them hungrier.  Her reception was such that for the first time, the BBC changed its advertised schedule to broadcast the opera in full later that week.  A bright new star had erupted.  Well, you can’t hear Joan Sutherland on that debut night, but you can hear her nine days later on 26 February.  It is hard to know what is the more spine tingling – the singing or the audience reaction.

Bel canto means beautiful song or singing.  (An impresario would have to be a dill to offer mal canto.)  Sutherland would become a leading exponent of it for decades.  She was in some part responsible for its renaissance.  She had sought out Maria Callas in concert and in rehearsal as a model for her to follow.  The genre is associated with three Italian composers of what is called the Romantic period – Rossini, Donizetti, and Bellini.  With its customary pithiness, the Rough Guide says that we are speaking of:

…. highly dramatic operas in which the bulk of the emotional freight was carried by the vocal line – whereas in German opera, the orchestra was emerging as the dominant partner.  At its weakest, bel canto amounted to little more than floridly pretty music applied to a weak plot and inane libretto, but although the hugely prolific Donizetti was culpable of spinning a fair amount of musical candy floss in his operas, the same could not be said of Bellini, who often applied himself assiduously to the setting of the texts he used.

The genre comes in and out of vogue and it is not currently heavily represented in Australia.  The work of Bellini did however influence Verdi and Puccini and Wagner always acknowledged the importance of Bellini to him.  It is still widely taught, especially in Italy, where it is put forward as a goal which all singers should seek to achieve.

Before looking briefly at the three composers, may I make two introductory observations?  First, when we talk of opera as an art form, we are speaking of at least two kinds of artist – those who compose the work, the composer and the author of the libretto, and those who perform the work.  The latter include the singers, the orchestra, the director, the conductor, the costuming and lighting people, and all of the other people backstage or the front of house.  There is obviously a great scope for differing levels of quality to be delivered.  The reference we have just made to the performance of Joan Sutherland can reveal the immense impact of a single performer who just hits everything right on the night.  The examples that we looked at in the last chapter show the high place of acting now in opera.  As we saw, Sutherland was not there to act.  She took the view that if you want to see acting, you can go to the theatre.  She had the horse power to deliver at the limit, and no one has everything.  She was in truth a freak, but very few opera performers can get away with that attitude now.  But the simple point remains that opera is one of the performing arts.

And all sorts of learning and training and experience goes into developing the art and craft required by singers.  Like the rest of us, they learn as they go.  In the DVD Three Legendary Tenors, Nigel Lawson said that Beniamino Gigli had learned every trick in the book.  The memoirs of Richard Burton are replete with references to actors who would steal the limelight or the scene.  (A major culprit was Michael Hordern.  You can see why if you recall him as Kate’s dad in the Zeffirelli Taming of the Shrew, or the way he deals with Parolles in Act 5 Scene 2 of the BBC All’s Well that Ends Well.  The sidelong glances come from an alchemy that cannot be taught.)  Callas taught master classes, but the one thing she couldn’t teach was how to be Callas.

Let me here say something about the role of the director in opera.  The Ring Cycle of Wagner is a massive project for any company.  The first two Australian Opera efforts were great successes, in no small part because of the role of Neil Armfield (whose production of the AO The Makropolous Case was terrific).

Let me give an example of where a director can really get offside with at least some of the audience.  The 2006 Salzburg Figaro had Nikolaus Harnoncourt with the Vienna Philharmonic, and a cast that included Ildebrando D’Arcangelo, Anna Netrebko, and Christine Schafer (this time as a more orthodox Cherubino).  A Bentley cast for the Rolls Royce of operas.  But the director, a man called Claus Gutt, decided that they needed help.  He would improve on Mozart.  He put on a fairy.  A young man in the same schoolboy clothes as Cherubino, with two white wings attached to his back, wonders about casting spells and shedding feathers.  I regard this interference as an outrage.  Yes, Raphael put two putti in one of the most sacred paintings in western art – but they were Raphael’s putti.  This director had no right to second guess the greatest composer ever, and this act of defilement spoiled the whole show for me.

The New York Times did not mention this outrage, but they got another one:

In Act II, when Susanna and the Countess start dressing Cherubino in girl’s clothing, the game gets out of hand: the women fondle Cherubino like some boy toy, and all three wind up rollicking on the floor atop a fur coat. 

That’s what my kids used to call ‘gross.’  We have to put up with this kind of callous arrogance with Shakespeare.  In my view, it should carry jail time.

The problem may be not just the competition in Europe, but the sheer number of performances of the most popular operas.  Wagner is routinely treated in a way that would have horrified him, but if his operas were performed now as he wanted them performed, not many would turn up.  I recall hearing Simone Young give a talk before Tristan und Isolde.  She said that many Germans inclined to the view that a show might be thought to be a flop in Germany unless there were as many raspberries as cheers.  It’s very sad if Mozart has to put up with that sort of nonsense.

The second point is that although I have seen and enjoyed the operas I will refer to in this chapter, which contain some of the best known songs on the concert stage, this kind of thing is not really my cup of tea.  Well, there had to be a let-down after the descent from the Everest of Mozart, but you can sense the coolness in the guide I have referred to.  Even the more prosaic Oxford Dictionary of Opera refers to the ‘traditional Italian art of singing in which beautiful tone, fine legato phrasing, and impeccable technique are emphasised, though not at the total expense of dramatic expression, as some of its greatest exponents, above all Callas, have demonstrated.’

It rather reminds me of some batsmen in cricket who think that style is everything.  It’s not – their job is to make runs.  We go to the opera to be entertained – but to be entertained by the drama in the music, not by vocal pyrotechnics.

Well, I have made my disclaimer, but any introduction to opera, even one as short as this, must look at bel canto.  And, as indicated, we will come across some of the best known songs of all opera.  And if you like a good serve of Italian melodrama, or if you just want to wonder at the range of the human voice, it would be hard to think of anything better than the Mad Scene from Lucia.  And just spare a thought for those sopranos coming on who see and hear how high Joan Sutherland set the bar for everyone else that night at Covent Garden.

Now, for the bel canto composers.  Gioachino Rossini (1792 to 1868) became a national treasure in Italy, a place that he would cede only to Verdi.  His parents were both musicians, and he quickly learned a number of instruments – by the age of fourteen, he had learned the horn, violin, cello, and harpsichord, and he had sung professionally, and written a cavatina in the buffo style.  Within three years of starting at the Bologna conservatory, he had composed his first opera.  He had written ten of them by the time he turned twenty-one.  His first comic masterpiece was L’italiana in Algeri.  He tried tragedy with Otello – but the Italians were not then conditioned to Shakespeare, and they didn’t like the unhappy ending – which was replaced with the Rome revival.  His enduring prize is The Barber of Seville, which again features the Figaro of Beaumarchais.  It in fact got a stormy reception, but it soon recovered and it is in a lot of top tens today.  For whatever reasons – perhaps he had just run out of steam – Rossini retired from conducting at the age of thirty-seven.  Stendhal had said of him: ‘The glory of the man is only limited by the limits of civilisation itself, and he is not yet 32.’  But for his last 39 years, he wrote no more opera.

Rossini was nothing if not Italian.  He was also a famous food tragic. Not only did he come from an area where food was central to life, but he went to a school in Bologna, that was known as La Grassa, or ‘The Fat One.’  Then he moved to Paris. His life was spent in the most famous food cities in Europe.  His modest upbringing made him value the pleasures of fine food.  He adored truffles and foie gras.  Recipes are still being attributed to him even now.

He had a long running feud with another composer, Meyerbeer.  The latter would send two well-dressed gentleman to every performance of a Rossini opera.  They had to sit in the most observable box and fall asleep after fifteen minutes – to be woken by the usher at the end.  Rossini sent Meyerbeer some tickets – the best in the house – with a note that ended: ‘Shortly before the end of the performance I shall have you waked.  Your true admirer, G Rossini.’  It’s hard not to like a dude who has that kind of sense of humour.

Leigh Hunt described Rossini’s operas as ‘the genius of sheer animal spirits.’  We know that Stendhal, the great novelist, was a fan, but so too was D H Lawrence, and he was no lightweight.

I love Italian opera – it’s so reckless.  Damn Wagner, and his bellowings at Fate and death….I like the Italians who run all on impulse, and don’t care about their immortal souls, and don’t worry about the ultimate.

Some might say the same for Scuderia Ferrari – at least on a bad day.

When it comes to recordings of bel canto, two pairings tend to dominate – Callas and di Stefano, followed by Sutherland and Pavarotti.  For The Italian Lady in Algiers, you can catch the overture played by the wonderful Chicago Symphony Orchestra under Georg Solti.  (Just where do they get their white ties laundered?)  You will recognise the style if not the tune.  You can get the Finale to Act I from the Met Centennial in 1983.  For a composer who worked at a whirlwind pace, this music is amazingly intricate.

For The Barber of Seville, you can get one of the great pairings of opera – Callas and Tito Gobbi (at least on EMI).  The opera has edges of commedia dell’arte.   You can watch the indecently good looking Russian baritone Dmitri Hvorostovsky having a whale of a time entertaining a Montreal concert crowd with the famous ‘Largo al Factotem.’  Again, it’s hard to see what is more affecting – the performance or the crowd, which erupts like kids at a birthday party – and they know how to stand in North America.  You can get the pairing of the whole opera with Callas and Gobbi live at La Scala in 1956.  There are also many other arias and couplings from this opera from these two including ‘Una voce poco far’ and Figaro’s aria above.  This Italian, Tito Gobbi, was the outstanding opera actor of his time, and some of his pairings with Callas will never be forgotten.

Gaetano Donizetti (1797 to 1848) comes to us as a sad character.  If you look at his portrait, you may see a withdrawn, anxious character, someone down on his luck.  If you look at a portrait of Bellini, you see assurance and breeding, nobility even.  Heine called him a ‘sigh in silk stockings’ – which is one up on what Napoleon said of Talleyrand.  He produced a massive seventy-three operas – it is very hard not to debase your currency at that rate of printing.  His syphilis helped to send him mad, and he wound up in an asylum.

Yet The Oxford Dictionary of Opera is sympathetic.

…Donizetti is the most important direct forerunner of Verdi.  The tunefulness of his 70 stage works, not to mention their superiority, even at their most erratic, over most contemporary operas, long ensured their place in the repertory; and in modern times, they have won new audiences for their dramatic power as well as for their melodic charm and skilful stagecraft.

We have looked at Sutherland in Lucia.  You can get her at later times in the same role.  You can hear Callas and Di Stefano at La Scala in 1953 for the whole opera.  There is also a better recording of the pair at Berlin with Von Karajan.  There is stunning vision of Anna Netrebko at the Met if you want to be brought up to date – stunning to the eye and ear.

Mary Queen of Scots and Queen Elizabeth I never met – but they do in Maria Stuarda and there is the mother of all catfights.  You may care to watch Joyce Didonato rehearse and talk about her role in one of those HD broadcasts from the Met.

L’elisir d’amore is full of songs the most famous of which is ‘Una furtiva lagrima’ (‘A furtive tear’).  You can hear Pavarotti either in concert or, when he was younger, and softer, and when the engines fired on all cylinders, in the theatre.  The effort and strain are palpable, and the crowd goes wild.  You should also listen to the great Caruso.  The differences are remarkable.  You can also get Netrebko and Villazon in a duet.

Vincenzo Bellini (1801 to 1835) is a very different proposition, but as you can see, he died young, Keats young.  He left ten operas – the other two were in their thirties by then.  He sought to focus more on the drama.  Wagner said that Bellini was all heart – ‘he is one of my predilections because his music is strongly felt and immediately bound up with the words.’  Bellini even saw himself in much the same way as Beethoven – the instrument of a greater force.  It was said that Chopin’s long melodies owed a lot to his admiration of Bellini.  He fell ill and died alone in Paris.  At the Requiem mass at the Invalides, Cherubini and Rossini each held a corner of the shroud.

The best known opera is Norma.  Wagner said he hoped Isolde would become his Norma.  You can have Sutherland in Sydney, or Callas with Corelli at La Scala.  The Rough Guide says that Corelli’s part:

….is one of the most moving examples of heroic tenor singing on record.  If you think Pavarotti is exciting, listen to this – Callas rarely came so close to being outshone by her leading man….Callas’s voice is not what it was , with some shrill high notes and plentiful outbreaks of the notorious late Callas vibrato, but as a singer-actress, she has no equal…’

That is a sensible critique.  You can also see an astonishingly statuesque Netrebko sing the famous aria ‘Casta Diva’ in concert, and compare this to the stage versions of Montserrat Caballé, the powerful Spanish singer who was a gun in Bellini roles.  The trouble with Norma is a bit like the trouble with Shakespeare’s Cymbeline.  It’s set among pagans; the names are dumb; and the plot is dumber.

For La Somnambula, try Nathalie Dessay at the Met with some very imaginative staging.  It is a very evocative reading of ‘Ah! non credea mirarti’ and a beautiful example of bel canto.  You may wish to see the same artist entertain the crowd with a song and dance routine to the folksy ‘Ah! Non giunge.’  This is an artist working at her limit, and getting her reward from the audience.

Natalie Dessay had some issues with her voice, but she had a vital and perky presence on the stage.  This lovely French born woman started off in dance but having discovered her voice, she became a greatly loved coloratura on both sides of the Atlantic.  She left the stage at about the same age as Renée Fleming, and for similar reasons.  After a Carnegie Hall concert in 2017, The New York Times said:

Ms. Fleming, 58, and Ms. Dessay, 52, faced the same problem over the past decade or so.  Their voices didn’t much darken or deepen in their 40s, leaving them basically stranded in the ingénue roles they’d been singing since they were young.  This was a particular frustration for Ms. Dessay, whose specialty was cute, spunky girls whose vocal lines exploded into stratospheric coloratura, the likes of Zerbinetta in Strauss’s Ariadne auf Naxos.

L’elisir d’amore was done by the AO in an Australian setting in 2015.  Lucia was, I think, last done by them in 2012, with Emma Matthews.

Well, that is the intro to bel canto.  I enjoyed this part of the journey more than I thought I would, but now it is time for Italian opera royalty.

Before coming to that, may I for completeness mention two works by Italian composers who were anything but bel canto?  Leoncavallo (1857 to 1919) and Mascagni (1863 to 1945) wanted realism – opera verismo.  The first wrote I Pagliacci and the second wrote Cavalleria Rusticana.  Each is a short one act affair, with plenty of vendetta.  They are commonly paired on the one program, although in the reverse of the order above.  ‘Veste la giubba’ is the famous aria from the first and ‘Mama quel vino generoso’ from the second is popular with concert audiences.  There are plenty of versions of each in full.  You might for example take the Zeffirelli film of the first with Domingo, although you may want to catch Jonas Kaufman rehearsing the aria.  For the second, you can again get a Zeffirelli film, and listen to the aria sung by Kaufman and Corelli.  (Do you think it may help if you are Italian to sing these numbers?)

Each of Mozart and Wagner is in a class of his own, but when we get to dedicated opera composers in the great tradition, there is only one king.

An Australian novelist on being Australian

/ Geoffrey Gibson / 2 Comments

 

Tim Winton’s book the boy behind the curtain contains lyrical reflections on the Australian condition.  I think that the notion of ‘Australian values’ is at best empty, and at worst dangerous.  In the present climate, it is commonly invoked to advance a kind of McCarthyism against those of one faith.  The usual suspects of the IPA and the Murdoch press commonly refer to ‘western values’.  We have waited a long time to hear how those values are different from ‘eastern values,’ or why our Chinatown might feel out of sorts, if not out of place.  We tend to forget that the three main faiths in Australia come out of Asia.  That’s why I thought it was very droll of Disraeli to see the Church of England as ‘a sacred corporation for the promotion and maintenance in Europe of certain Asian principles’.

So, I thought I might take out some of the snapshots of us taken by Tim Winton, and see if they might help us to frame a better view of what might pass for Australian states of mind – to use a neutral phrase.

Guns

Perhaps, deep down, everyone wants to feel dangerous.  Being rich can do that for you.  So can being very smart.  For the rest who are neither, the gun is a short-cut.  And whatever our circumstances, we’re all steeped in its romance.  We’ve marinated in this cult all our lives; it’s inescapable.  Even in a country where there is no fetishized right to bear arms, gunplay is a staple of entertainment.  Researchers estimate that by the age of eighteen, the average American child is likely to have been exposed to as many as 26,000 gun murders on TV, and there is no reason to assume Australian children’s exposure differs much.  In TV, movies and video games, the underlying showbiz message is that the world is a dangerous place and the only tool that will make a difference in it is a firearm.  The gun ends the discussion, solves the dispute, and, of course, brings the episode to its ‘natural end.’

This is a potent trope against which our children are largely undefended.  All-pervasive as it was in my childhood, it is even more raw and brutish now.  I’m not suggesting entertainment is uniquely responsible for gun violence, but in a country like ours, where gun ownership is uncommon, most young people’s knowledge of firearms is drawn from the festival of screen time killings.  And as the Internet has made plain, humans are suckers for a script.  In recent years to organisations have prospered by broadcasting real executions and assassinations, showing young men and women all across the world that they’re ‘getting things done’, just as the gun-slinging idols of every generation have, from Randolph Scott to Idris Elba, from Dirty Harry to Harry Brown.  Jihadis don’t upload these outrages solely for their own masturbatory gratification; the fact is, these video clips work as propaganda, as recruiting tools, they hit home.  For those who claim to believe that God is Greatest, the AK – 47 ends the discussion.  In their minds, it would seem, even the most sacred words are utterable are insufficient to the needs of the faithful.

A youth who is confused, depressed, or fearful will be tempted to resort to whatever means he has to make himself felt, if not understood, even if his problems, like those of my puberty, are minor and ephemeral, and a truly angry kid is liable to do something extreme and impulsive.  In countries where firearms are commonplace in the home, this often extends to more than self – harm.  Mass shootings have become a fixture of American news.  The carnage in schools and public places is so unremarkable that ritual ‘outpourings of grief’ border on the perfunctory.  Gun murder is so normal in the US it’s banal.  And the gun itself is sacrosanct.  The right to bear it outstrips a citizen’s right to be protected from it, and even a tearful president is impotent in the face of this cult.  In 2016 Barack Obama declared that modern gun restrictions were ‘the price of living in a civilised society’ but it seemed few were listening.  By all accounts, God is Great in America, too, but in truth the nation has always lived as if the gun is greater.  In God they trust, but armed they must proceed.

Most Australians have never owned a firearm.  Few will ever handle or discharge one, and I think this is something to be glad of. In moments of turmoil, the mere presence of a gun alters the atmosphere.  In a domestic dispute, a roadside altercation or a bout of depression, the thing most likely to push the scene out of shape beyond saving is a firearm.  It so often gets the wrong job done. 

Later on, Winton spoke of the leadership that then Prime Minister of Australia, John Howard, showed on the issue of gun laws.

I was never a fan of John Howard.  I despised his retrograde social policies and was dismayed by his nostalgia for the unchallenged whiteness and patriarchy of the 1950s, but at a pivotal moment in our history, he literally stuck his neck out and did something vital and brave. By following through on gun reform, he made this country a little safer.  Fronting angry rednecks from the dais that day, he looked pale and stiff, like a man unwell, but that sick look was the face of courage.  That was the spectacle of a man exceeding himself.

That writing is beautiful, but here’s my bias.  I agree with every word of all of it, and I wish I could have put it even half as well.  Two things are involved in this kind of piece – having a clear view, and saying it well.  Winton succeeds completely in both and he brings sense – no, sanity – to areas of public discussion that are mired in nonsense and pure bullshit.

Winton allows us to see some of the nonsense about mass murder and terrorism in context.  We allow our children to soak up fake murders and our Protector indulges in the mass murders of its children by adherence to a fake ideology and a corrupted lobby.  We mash our children’s’ brains with Netflix and then smash their manners with Twitter.  Then we expect them to look solemn when a mass murder takes place in real life.  But what is ‘real’ and what is ‘life’ for these children of cyberspace who take their reality from Facebook before electing another fake politician?

If your child has been one of the victims of a mass murder, does it make any difference to you if the killer was a psychotic misfit who should never have been allowed to go near any kind of gun, or a deranged young man who has concluded, with help from the internet, that his religion warrants his joining in mass murder ending in his own suicide?

Would I say that these views should represent the chimerical values of this land?  Bloody oath, I would.

But there’s the problem.  When the late Jim Kennan was Attorney General, he told me that he was having trouble with our gun lobby.  I said that I thought that was a U S problem.  He said that we had such a lobby here, and that they were the last people I would ever want to see behind a gun.  The opposition to John Howard – about semi-automatic weapons – was such that our Prime Minister wore a Kevlar vest to the dais that Winton referred to.  And now some very unreliable people are being voted into parliaments on gun tickets, and the views of Tim Winton would gravely offend the heartless imbecile who currently resides in the White House. And if our politicians have one unshakeable value, it is that we don’t get fresh with Uncle Sam.

I shall return to Tim Winton’s Oz later.

Passing Bull 110 – Australian values again

/ Geoffrey Gibson / 2 Comments

After the recent attack in Manchester, and well before that of yesterday, the AFR published an editorial.  It included this:

It is not an inversion of western liberal values to say that living in Australia means at bare minimum an acceptance of democracy, rule of law, freedom of speech and equality of race, gender and belief. If you won’t defend these basics that allow you – and every Australian around you – to live in freedom; if you think your own intolerance comes first, then you need to change. That’s a civic inclusiveness which is quite different from the mindless nationalism of the fringes.

Then it got down to what it referred to as ‘Australian values.’  I wonder if they are different to ‘western liberal values,’ and if so how.  The author doesn’t say.

A totally secure police state would destroy the freedoms we enjoy, and migrants seek. But nor can we allow institutions of government, education and free speech to be intimidated by cultural concerns into ignoring unacceptable threats and dangers. We have been too passive in projecting the values that Australians hold, and why they are a better way of life than intolerance and jihad. Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull is right to insist on an Australian values test for new citizens – so that migrants know what those values are, and why they matter. And in one clear statement of those values: there is no moral equivalence between Western military actions in the Middle East that strive to minimise casualties, and terrorist attacks on the West that maximise them.

What caught my eye was the reference to ‘Western military actions in the Middle East that strive to minimise casualties.’  Hopefully, any such military action was subject to the rules of war, in which case the reference to minimising casualties adds little.  I say ‘hopefully’ because nothing about the war in Syria suggests that any of the many parties involved in bombing in Syria has the slightest interest in keeping casualties down.

Let’s put that to one side.  We are invited to make a moral judgment that Western military actions in the Middle East are less immoral than or in some way morally superior to acts of terrorism that are driven by the conflict in the Middle East.

Two issues then arise.  What if you take the view – which many responsible people do – that no such military action has benefited the people who live in the affected nations?  Secondly, what if you take the view – which many responsible people do – that Western military action in Iraq was based on a false premise, was badly managed, and has left Iraq and Syria as failed states and breeding grounds for the most lethal kinds of terrorist?

About the worst crimes that politicians can commit is to lead their people into war on a false premise and for a bad result.  Most people think that that is what the governments of the U S, the U K, and Australia did in the second Iraq war.  It’s also clear to me – and many others – that the political leaders were not just wrong – they lied.  They said that they were invading to remove the threat of weapons of mass destruction when in truth they were invading to effect regime change, and it is precisely their botching of that function that has done so much to increase our exposure to terrorism.

Let’s assume then that some people believe that Bush, Blair and Howard lied about why they were going into Iraq, or at the very least they invaded Iraq on a false premise, and that as a result both the people of Iraq and we are worse off because we are all now exposed to more terrorism than we were before.  Then turn to a young Muslem who is deceived and deluded into accepting a perversion of his religion so that he becomes a suicidal terrorist and kills himself and others.

At bottom, all the above parties are involved in killing people to achieve political ends.  Many would think that any issue of moral equivalence or otherwise is one on which reasonable minds might differ and is also one that might best be left to God.  But it would be monstrous, would it not, to suggest that that there can only be one answer, and that such an answer might be found by applying ‘Australian values’ – the relevant premises of which are yet to be revealed to us?

So, in my view it’s best to stay away from ‘Australian values’.  As soon as you get away from motherhood – like ‘western liberal values’ – and you get specific, you risk finding yourself in a political quagmire and exposing people to the risk of g that brand of political blackmail that we call McCarthyism.

Poet of the month: Homer (Iliad, Book I)

Achilles’ wrath, to Greece the direful spring

  Of woes unnumber’d, heavenly goddess, sing!

  That wrath which hurl’d to Pluto’s gloomy reign

  The souls of mighty chiefs untimely slain;

  Whose limbs unburied on the naked shore,

  Devouring dogs and hungry vultures tore

  Since great Achilles and Atrides strove,

  Such was the sovereign doom, and such the will of Jove!

 

  Declare, O Muse! in what ill-fated hour

  Sprung the fierce strife, from what offended power

  Latona’s son a dire contagion spread

  And heap’d the camp with mountains of the dead;

  The king of men his reverent priest defied 

  And for the king’s offence the people died.

Why opera? Part 3

/ Geoffrey Gibson / Leave a comment

3

Mozart

When the great spin-bowler Bill O’Reilly died, Keith Miller, his all-rounder team-mate, said that after Bill O’Reilly, there was space – before you get to the next great bowler.  This is sometimes called the blue sky test.  Well, with Mozart you can take the blue sky of Bradman, Phar Lap, Babe Ruth and Muhammad Ali all rolled up into one.  There may have been a competitor in the concert hall or in the opera house – but someone who could be ranked with Mozart in both?  The very idea is insane.  In the concert hall, Mozart comes between Haydn and Beethoven.  Haydn’s operas are forgotten.  Beethoven’s one opera, Fidelio, is dour and not box office.  At any given time, you may find four or five of Mozart’s operas among the ten most popular in the world.

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756-1791) was born in Strasburg, the youngest of seven children.  Five of those children died in infancy.  That is a sobering reminder of the dice-board of Providence.  Mozart remained very fond of his sister.  His father was a musician and composer who soon discovered that his son was a prodigy.  He was playing the piano at three and composing at four.  He had written more than half of his forty one symphonies by the time he was twenty.  He is now thought to have come of age in opera at the age of twenty-four, with the opera Idomeneo, which may have been his personal favourite.  It was then that he was showing his own personal command of values in drama.  In corresponding about the drama, Mozart certainly felt old enough to say that if ‘the Ghost’s speech in Hamlet were not so long, it would be far more effective.’

His father showed him off on road-shows across Europe and their relationship grew rocky.  The child prodigy would become the leading pianist in Vienna, the musical capital of the world.  Mozart had a happy marriage that produced some children who survived.  It is hard to assess his finances, but he never looked settled.  He relied on patronage.  He was only thirty-five when he died, and, as was the custom, he was put in a common grave.  The film Amadeus gravely offended a lot of people, but it may not have been too wide of the mark, and it led many people to some of the most beautiful music ever written.  Mozart was a freak, but like most of us, he had to work to pay the rent.

To that end, his output was staggering.  It covers more than 200 CD’s.  He wrote about twenty–two operas.  He also wrote many concertos for piano, piano sonatas, and string quartets.  It is said that he wrote his last three symphonies – each one a masterpiece beyond that of any other composer ever with possibly one exception – in six weeks.  His letters contain many references to his love of the German nation, and to his love of the fugues of Bach and Handel.  He put several of the fugues of The Well-tempered Clavier into his own handwriting.

Mozart liked to compose in the fresh air.  Don Giovanni was said to have been written on a bowling-green, and the principal part of the Requiem in a garden.  In a letter that he wrote in a garden, he said that he had arrived in Vienna to find that dinner was served ‘for me unfortunately rather too early’ – 11.30 am!  One of the greatest artists the world has seen sat down to eat with, among others, two valets, the confectioner, two cooks ‘and my littleness.’  (He was only about five feet in height.)  Mozart told his father that there was ‘a great deal of coarse silly joking’ from which he remained aloof.

When Mozart died, he was working on the Requiem.  He had previously composed the Ave verum corpus (‘Behold the true body’), possibly the most refined sacred music ever written.  Einstein (the music critic) said of it that Mozart had ‘resolved the problem of style’.  Either work could only have been written by a man of profound Catholic conviction.

A few years before that, this man beloved of God (amadeus), had written to his father: ‘As death, rightly considered, fulfils the real design of our life, I have for the last two years made myself so well acquainted with this true friend of mankind, that his image has no longer holds any terrors for me, but much that is peaceful and consoling….I never lie down in bed without reflecting that – young as I am – I may never see another day….’Some say that those who are beloved of God die young.  This small young man probably never hurt a soul, but he did so much for all of us that we are all under obligation to his memory.

Before our big four operas of Mozart, I may mention The Abduction from the Seraglio, a farce sung and spoken in German, a singspiel?  It is seriously funny when well done on the stage, but is also very easy to listen to.  The Victorian Opera production in 2016 was hilarious.  I may have been the only non-German speaker in the Athenaeum.

That brings us to The Marriage of Figaro, which Stendhal said was ‘a sublime mixture of wit and melancholy, which has no equal.’  He was dead right – it is farce laced with misgivings.  (Don Giovanni is the reverse – it is heavy drama with comic asides.)  The magic is in the mixing.  Mozart was under thirty when he wrote it – ridiculous by our standards; old in Mozart years.  It was the first of three miraculous combinations with a baptised Italian Jew, Lorenzo Da Ponte.  It was based on a play by Beaumarchais that had been a smash hit in Paris.  That play was revolutionary in more senses than one.  It was an attack on the aristocracy.  Its most famous line was ‘Monsieur Le Comte, what have you done to earn your exalted position?  You put yourself to the trouble of being born, nothing more.’  The French nobles thought it was hilarious – until a few years later when they felt the worst kind of blade.  (A few years after that, they were effectively extinct.)

A randy old count, with a disappointed wife, has eyes on the maid who is to marry the hero that day.  All the action takes place in one day, and a lot of the farce is supplied by a randy young lad, played by a woman, who is accident prone, and who has the hots for the countess.  Historians have differed about the so–called ‘first night’ (prima noce) rights or rites, but you will see already that this show is about class privileges.  And that’s what the French Revolution was about.

Start with the overture.  Try the Vienna Philharmonic – possibly the best band in the world – playing in Japan and conducted by a young Italian.  Not many girls, and one fiddle looks to be held together by a rubber band, but you get the dignified courtesy of the concert hall, and the urgent drama of the music.  Then go to the aria ‘Se vol ballare’, not my favourite, but this is when the hero throws down the gauntlet to the ancien régime, which is what the show is about.  Try the great Welsh bass-baritone Bryn Terfel at the Met in 1998.  Both in singing and acting, this part is blood to a tiger for Terfel – who has moved on to heavier parts in Wagner.   Then go to Cherubino singing ‘Non so piu cosa’ (‘I no longer know what I am or what I am doing’).  Try Frederica Von Stade with Solti at the Opera Garnier or the Latvian Elina Garanca who is very much á la mode.  Then try Christine Schafer.  She is a distinguished singer who is drop dead gorgeous – she could have started a riot the way she turned out as Lulu at Glyndebourne.  Here she makes a heroic sacrifice to art by turning out as schoolboy in glasses and a sawn-off haircut and a flattened chest.  Listen to the wonderful Jessye Norman on ‘Porgi amor’. Then go to the underlying melancholy of the opera in the other great aria ‘Dove sono’ of the Countess.  This was a role well suited to Kiri Te Kanawa, but her Met Centennial piece in 1983 is not to my taste.  Try Mirella Freni, who was pre-eminent in her day, or the delicious Lucia Popp.  The Countess will move from being a passive victim to an agent of reconciliation (as David Cairns remarked). Finally go the Finale, where all participate and where the Count asks for forgiveness.  Those who have seen the movie Amadeus will recall the glum horror of Salieri as he heard this miracle unfold.  Try the amazing John Eliot Gardiner version.  This great expounder of Bach has a complete mastery of the drama of Mozart.

There you have a picture or slice of one of the great works of art of the western world.  The magic is in the blending of music and drama and of humour and sadness.  Frankly, if you haven’t found this to your taste, and you stay that way after seeing or hearing the whole show, there may not be much point in reading these pieces any further.

As mentioned, in Don Giovanni, it’s the darkness that comes first, edged with humour, most of it very black.  It was at least in part composed in Prague, and it was first performed there.  (You can visit Bertramka, the house it was written in.)  The people of Prague still have a soft spot for the author.  This show too is shot through with references to the privileges of the aristocracy, but the Don makes the Count in Figaro look like a saint.  He is a gross sexual predator with more form than the current President of the United States.  He begins by murdering the ageing father of a woman he has seduced or raped.  He has to deal with past victims while he tries to seduce a peasant girl about to be married.  Eventually his past catches up with him – the ghost is like Hamlet in reverse – but he goes out unrepentant.

A demonic force, unlike anything else in opera, underlies the whole show.  All emotions arrive at high pitch.  The great German poet Goethe said: ‘How can anyone say that Mozart ‘composed’ Don Giovanni?  It is a spiritual creation, the detail like the whole, made by one mind in one mould, and shot through with the breath of life…[the author] bidden by the daemon of his genius to do what he did.’

Again, start with the overture, and hear that demonic force.  One critic says that it began with ‘the most magically evocative chord in the history of music.’  Try Ricardo Muti, who is terrific with Mozart, or if you want a slice of history, go to Furtwängler at Salzburg in 1954.  (He got into trouble with the Americans for shaking hands with Hitler; the great Von Karajan went further – he joined the party – twice.)  Well, you know from the start that you are in for a big doom laden night.  Now try ‘La ci darem ma mano’ (‘Give me your hand’) with the Don in serenade mode.  Try Bryn Terfel with the gorgeous Renée Fleming, in concert, but delivered with massive assurance and style.  And try Thomas Allen with Susanne Mentzer at La Scala (with Muti).  I studied Allen in this part at a summer school at Oxford and the evil he could evince was uncomfortably close to being frightening.

Near the end of Act I, two female victims meet with the male friend of one of them in masques to go to a ball put on by the Don.  Don Ottavio just schleps about getting knockbacks, but he gets two gorgeous songs and a part in a trio ‘Protegga il giusto cielo’ (‘May just heaven protect.’)  One version I have is an EMI recording conducted by Carlo Maria Giulini that features Joan Sutherland and Elizabeth Schwarzkopf with Luigi Alva.  It is on the internet and the trio is at I hour 13 minutes 30 seconds.  It just exceeds two minutes, but it is I think what Mendelsshon thought was the most beautiful music he had heard.  If you find something closer to God let me know.  This is the precise point where this artist reminds me most of Shakespeare – some of the most beautiful music ever put down is an interlude in nowhere, almost a throwaway line.  It’s the sheer bloody profligacy of it all!

The trio comes at a time of eerie tension – you can feel the tempest coming – and it is followed by a defiant Don celebrating ‘liberty’ when he means ‘licence’.  That brings the first act to its thunderous end.  Then go the scene with the Commendatore at the end of Act 2 with Thomas Hampson at La Scala.  This scene is very famous – part of it was in Amadeus – but it’s not hard to get it wrong.  Allen’s acting is riveting.  If you stick with us, and if you come across a piece of theatre as strong as this scene, you might let me know.  Offhand I could think of one bit of theatre that some might put in that league, and I will try to recall it when the time comes.  This is drama at its most elemental.  Sophocles and company would have gone big on this kind of drama.  For me personally, I have not seen drama like that since the 1964 Grand Final.  (And, yes, with the curse of Norm Smith, that was the Demons’ last flag.)

Cosi fan tutti has had an up and down ride.  It is tricky in what might be called a political sense.  Take the title for starters.  ‘All women are the same.’  You could be shot for less.  Two young blades are conned by a nasty old codger into betting on their brides to be, and, not incomprehensibly, the result gets what NRL footy callers describe as ‘ugly’.  It’s like ripping off a scab.  But it is a remarkable ensemble piece and it is often the favourite of the musically literate.  It is a great night out for those who like great music and theatre, but not many go home thinking that all will be well with the lovers.

My preferred version is James Levine on DG with the Vienna Philharmonic, and a cast that includes Kiri Te Kanawa and Ann Murray, whose credits include ‘Animal Crackers in my Soup.’

But there was a production in 2006 at Glyndebourne directed by Nicholas Hytner.  It is nothing if not modern and opulent and hot.  The Guardian said:

Rather than allowing Ferrando and Guglielmo (Topi Lehtipuu and Luca Pisaroni) the usual measure of comic absurdity when they don their disguises to begin their games of seduction, Hytner re-introduces them as a pair of glamorous Byronic brigands, whose sexuality is an unstoppable force. It’s a touch of genius that allows us to understand not only why Ainhoa Garmendia’s coldly rational Despina finds their poses so absurd, but also why Fiordiligi and Dorabella (Miah Persson and Anke Vondung) are so swiftly swept off their feet.

What follows is often deeply erotic, as the two pairs of lovers find their emotional security undermined by desire. The scenes between Pisaroni and Vondung are particularly incendiary.

So, that may or may not be a show for aunty, but it is available on the internet.  Check out first the trio ‘Una bella serenata’.  The two heroes are insolently good looking, and riding for a fall.  Then check out the two gorgeous ladies in ‘Soave sia il vento.’  The heroines and the malefactor farewell the lover boys – and, yes, it’s another two minute miracle trio.  (This one is very well known – I don’t why the Don Giovanni trio is not as well known.)  The women are as pretty as the boys, and they’re not holding back.  You can compare this with Renée Fleming, Susan Graham, and Thomas Hanson.  Then at Glyndebourne get the sextet ‘Alla bella Despinetta.’  The two idiots are in stupid disguise, and the maid (who is perfect) is in on the joke, but the women respond like country gals whose portraits get shown in Country Life.  This is adult musical comedy and it is hilarious.  Then check them when they are dotty in ‘Prendero quel brunettino.’  If you compare it to the Gardiner version, you will see the premium that is now placed on acting in this famous duet.  Then go to the uneasy bodice ripping quartet ‘E nel tuo’ before the traditional finale ‘Fortunato l’uom che prende’.

This is sensational – bravura – musical comedy, but it does come with an edge.  Perhaps, therefore, it is a show for our times.  Indeed, 2006 was a bumper year for Cosi.  The Glyndebourne production, that is part of the boxed set of the complete operas, is in my view as close to perfection as we can decently hope to get in opera.

By contrast, there is something almost holy about The Magic Flute.  Mozart was a devout Catholic and a dedicated Mason.  The two come together in a piece that combines the sacred and the profane, the farcical and the sacramental.  His accomplice for this his last opera was not Da Ponte, but an actor-manager-playwright called Schikaneder.  He was into popular theatre, and that conjunction troubles some snooty people who see themselves as purists.  Balls.  The show combines high sentiment and pantomime, and it has been admired by poets from Goethe to Auden, but it has inspired almost as much conjecture as Wagner.  The plot – about the elevation of a bird catcher – inspired the English philosopher Isaiah Berlin to fresh heights in a famous essay.  When I saw it at a matinee in the opera house on Unter den Linden, a lot of the Germans brought their neatly attired children who sounded like they enjoyed at least the panto parts.  The text is in German.

My preferred version is the EMI Classic with the great classical conductor Otto Klemperer, and a cast that includes Nicholai Gedda, Gundula Janowitz, Lucia Popp, Elizabeth Schwarzkopf, and Christa Ludwig.  That is serious music and I may not recommend this show to a first timer.  Start with the overture – try Muti and the Vienna Philharmonic.  This time the fairy music is mixed with the sacramental and the result is almost symphonic.  Then try the aria ‘Dies Bildnis ist bezaubernd schön’ with the great Placido Domingo.  Then go to Papageno’s Song.  There is a version in Swedish directed by the great Ingmar Bergman.  Then go to the finale – this is not a show that responds to fragmentation.

If you want the full Masonic treatment – this is definitely one opera that I prefer just to listen to – try Kathleen Battle at the Met in 1991.  (Battle’s behaviour was so bad the Met fired her in 1994.  She was due for a comeback in 2016.  After a stint at San Francisco, some staff wore T-shirts ‘I survived the Battle.’  She was once in a limo in New York.  She rang her agent, I think in Europe, to get him to ring the limo company to get the air con changed by the driver sitting three feet away.  Perhaps she had read too much about divas, and believed some of the propaganda.)

Well, there are Mozart’s big four.  When Rossini was asked which of his own operas he preferred, he replied ‘Don Giovanni.’  Shortly before his death, Richard Strauss put his hand upon a score of Mozart’s clarinet quintet and said ‘I would have given anything just to have written this.’  We have a kind of convention that when it comes to genius in art and letters, both as to output and as to range, there are Shakespeare and Mozart, and then there is blue sky.

Here and there – Past Political Principles

/ Geoffrey Gibson / 1 Comment

 

In 1926, a series of eight lectures was given at King’s College, London on the political principles of notable prime ministers of the nineteenth century.  Learned people spoke of politicians from a different time.  The essays were edited by F Hearnshaw and published by Macmillan and Co under the title Prime Ministers of the Nineteenth Century.  The lectures make fascinating reading – not least at a time when it is not easy to detect principle in politics anywhere.

Before looking at some of the PMs, one commentator recalled that in Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith spoke of ‘that crafty and insidious animal vulgarly called a statesman or politician.’  Well, we all have a fair idea of what it takes to be a politician.  What is a statesman?

There are many politicians; there are few statesmen.  A statesman, I take it, is a man who performs some constructive work, who guides a country through a difficult crisis, who restores its prosperity and self-confidence after a period of disaster or distress, whose career marks an epoch in its history.

That seems fair enough, although the ‘epoch’ barrier may be too high.  But as the same speaker said, a person can hardly aspire to that status before serving an apprenticeship, generally a long one, in party politics.

In other words, he must be an insidious and crafty animal before he can become something greater and better.  He may have all the qualities of a great statesman, but he has little chance of showing them unless he also has the support which the party machine alone can give him, and which he must earn by party service.

The trouble is that a lot of decent people don’t want to be seen getting their hands dirty – they are reluctant to set foot in the swamp, and some get out of it too soon after they have sampled it.  These remarks also remind us that although we have electoral laws that deal with political parties, for the most part the parties run their affairs as they see fit.  The system of ‘party government which Great Britain has given to the world’ is in large part beyond the control of government.  How could it be otherwise?

The first of the PMs is George Canning.  He had a disability – his mother.  One future Whig PM ‘regarded the son of an actress as de facto incapacitated from being Prime Minister of England.’  His mother, it was said, raised a ‘brood of illegitimate children, but Canning’s uncle sent him to Eton and Oxford.

Canning was brilliant and vain, but he got on.  He went over the heads of the party and appealed to the people.  The Times demurred.  Mr Canning, it said, was ‘acting very improperly in rubbing shoulders with business men, and in exciting the clamours of the crowd.’  You must remember that democracy was a dirty word then, but Canning was seen ‘to be wielding the thunderbolts of an enormous popularity….He had not relied on or made use of the party machine as such.  He had smashed it, and that is not an easy thing to do then or now.’

Well we don’t to reflect on a recent U S example, but Disraeli ‘never saw Canning but once’ and never forgot ‘the melody of that voice….the tumult of that ethereal brow.’  Gladstone as a child literally sat at Canning’s feet and said ‘I was bred under the shadow of the great name of Canning.’  We don’t hear talk like that now.  Canning’s liberalism shaped English foreign policy until the end of the century.  Metternich said Canning was ‘a whole revolution in himself alone’ and Coleridge said that Canning ‘flashed such a light about the constitution that it was difficult to see the ruins of the fabric through it.’

His Grace the Duke of Wellington could not stoop to the swamp.  He was ‘suspicious, autocratic, sparing of thanks, possessed of a very long memory for offences, and a very short memory for services….the Duke had an intellectual contempt for his social equals, and a social contempt for his intellectual equals.’  He believed that ‘all reform is bad because all Reform ends up being Radical.’  In short, his Grace was a one man political landslide.  But it was in some part his intervention that allowed the great Reform Act to pass, and avert a possible civil war.  The English aristocracy would intervene to similar effect again in 1869 and 1911.

Sir Robert Peel is remembered as the man who gave England its police – Bobbies or Peelers – and the man who repealed the protectionist Corn Laws.  He had along political career, and an intense sense of duty – national duty, not party commitment.  He showed his sense of principal while in opposition.  He disclaimed ‘factious’ opposition, and as a Tory he claimed it was necessary to support a Whig government when it espoused Conservative principles.  He detested ‘anti-governmental principles’ for their own sake and he preferred the claims of public authority to those of political doctrine.  As a corollary, he refused to flirt with Radicals or try to outbid the Whigs and restate the Tory case in radical terms.

A man of principle indeed!  We could do with some Orange Peel, as he was of course known, around here.  As a result, one colleague described him as ‘an iceberg with a slight thaw on the surface’; another compared his smile to the gleam of the silver plate of a coffin lid.  He would be dismembered in the House of Commons by Disraeli.

Lord Palmerston was something of a ladies’ man and was welcomed by the English public as a jingoist.  Again, contemporary events are uncomfortable.  His lecture is becomingly droll.  We forget that ‘though history is about dead men, they were not always dead.’  One critic had described Palmerston in a way that made him look like ‘a cross between a successful bookmaker and Carmen.’  The lecturer then makes the point ‘that it is always easier to find a man’s principles at the beginning of his career than at the end, because in the later stages principles are so lamentably apt to become obscured by practice.’  We are warned of the danger of studying a person’s career from the wrong end – by staring at the end rather than the beginning.  And we are reminded of the perennial danger of hindsight with an anecdote from a novel of M. Maurois.  ‘Let us remember, we men of the Middle Ages, that tomorrow we start for the Hundred Years War.’

The lecturer has a great line on the statesman’s upbringing:

His formal education, conducted with becoming pomp at Harrow and Cambridge, was of the type that lends dignity to a man’s obituary without unduly modifying his attainments.

A later PM made a similar remark about the impact of Oxford on her career, and a few at Oxford haven’t forgotten it.  Palmerston spent a lot of time in the War Office, and he was known to conduct serious controversies with cheery gusto.  He once officially informed the Military Secretary that ‘the war will be carried on with as much courtesy as a State of Contest in its nature admits.’

The cornerstone of his foreign policy was national interest.  ‘We have no eternal allies and no permanent enemies.  Our interests are eternal, and those interests, it is our duty to follow.’  The Americans could learn from this man.  He wanted England to be ‘the champion of justice and right’ – provided that she – England – was the sole ruler of what that task might entail.

Here is an anecdote from another source.  In his late seventies, Palmerston, the ladies’ man, was cited a co-respondent in a divorce.  He was accused of adultery.  The aggrieved husband was Mr O’Kane.  Polite society had a new gag: ‘While the lady was certainly Kane, was Palmerston able?’

Lord John Russell was another survivor.  His portrait reveals an aesthete and man of enlightenment.  He could be very prosaic.  ‘My dear Melbourne, I am afraid you do not take exercise enough or eat and drink more than enough.  One of the two may do, but not both together.’  That’s not the kind of stuff to get men walking over hot coals for you.  His greatest achievement, more than thirty years before he became PM for the second time, was to pilot through the great Reform Act of 1832.  But for that legislation, the whole course of British history may have been very different.  His father, the ninth Duke of Bedford, once reproved him for ‘giving great offence to your followers in the House of Commons by not being courteous to them, by treating them superciliously, and de haut en bas, by not listening with sufficient patience to their solicitations or remonstrances.’  The lecturer says that by ‘study, by diligent attendance, and by frequent and fearless intervention in debate, he had made himself a House of Commons man of the best type.’  But doubtless parts of the swamp repelled him.

Now we come to the first of two undisputed titans.  The grandfather of the next PM in these lectures had migrated to England sixty years before he was born.  Benjamin Disraeli, the grandson of an Italian Jew, was the leader of the Tory Party, the Prime Minister of England, and he would become the closest confidant and adviser to the most powerful monarch in the entire world, and whom he, Disraeli, would anoint as the Empress of India.  It is a truly remarkable story.

It had not always been so smooth.  Disraeli had been a frightful dandy, and he had an acid tongue.  The queen had called him ‘detestable, unprincipled, reckless & not respectable.’  Her husband had dismissed him as ‘having not one single element of the gentleman in his composition.’  Well, Her Majesty and His Royal Highness may have had held strong views, but they were free to change their mind.  And Disraeli could ‘work’ the queen.  He said that with her, you had to ‘lay it on with a trowel’ – and he did so, ever so shamelessly; and he was always careful to heap honour and praise on the late Prince.  Her Majesty loved it, and she loathed poor Mr Gladstone.  She felt like he addressed her like he was addressing a public meeting.

And besides, having a PM with a background in finance might be useful.  In 1875, the bankruptcy of the Sultan of Turkey left the Khedive of Egypt wanting to sell his shares in the Suez Canal.  The French were in the market.  Disraeli was determined to get this stake in the Canal.  He could not get the money from Parliament as it was in recess.  He sent his private secretary to ask Baron Rothschild for a loan of 4,000,000 pounds.  Baron Rothschild asked two questions:  ‘When?’, and after eating a grape and spitting out a grape skin, ‘What is your security?’  (The crown jewels?)  The money was available next day to the British government at 2 ½ %, and a one-off fee of 100,000 pounds.  Disraeli wrote: ‘It is just settled: you have it Madam.’  The Queen was ‘in ecstasies,’ but she was keen to hear how her Prime Minister had got the ‘great sum.’

These were the days of great debates with Gladstone and others about affairs in Europe and elsewhere.  They really were titans the like of which we have not seen.  Disraeli was instrumental in settling the affairs of Europe – and Bismarck greatly admired him at the Congress of Berlin.  ‘Der alte Jude, das ist der Mann.’

Not long after this, the French nation would be convulsed by controversy over the fate of a Jewish officer named Dreyfus, and it is more than a little difficult to imagine the third generation of a migrant Jewish family becoming Prime Minister of any country in Europe at that time.

As a baptised Jew, Disraeli had a mature view of religion.  He saw his religion as a fusion of two faiths and had a definition of the Church that appeals to me immensely – ‘a sacred corporation for the promotion and maintenance in Europe of certain Asian principles’.  I wonder how that went down in drawing rooms in Bath.

The lecturer drily observes that Disraeli ‘escaped the permanent infantile paralysis which is often the consequence of a public school curriculum.’  (These lectures were given in 1926 – it looks like the Great War had shattered faith in the English education system.)  He once said that ‘we put our money on the wrong horse’.  As the lecturer, the editor, says ‘he perhaps did not sufficiently realise that in the Balkans all horses are wrong horses.  The pitiful victims of atrocities lack nothing but opportunity in order themselves to become atrocious.  That is a truth which the painful experiences of the last half century have taught us.’  Too many have not learned that truth about the Middle East even after the painful experiences of the last half century.’

Disraeli also comes down to us as the Tory who effectively brought democracy to England with the ‘leap in the dark’ of the reform laws in 1869.  The Tories were becoming Conservatives.

Gladstone was different in so many ways.  The Whigs were becoming Liberals.  All this was before the Labor Party was thought of.  Gladstone was a man of the most formidable intellect, integrity and industry.  He had one very English trait.  The Spectator said of him: ‘Mr Gladstone has done less to lay down any systematised course of action than almost any man of his political standing.’  As the lecture says, ‘He was essentially an empiric, docile to the teachings of experience.’  That is precisely the instinct of the common law – don’t look at questions in the abstract; wait until the issue arises on the evidence.

He started off opposing reform in 1832 and defended slavery, but conscience and intellect led him to radical change, and, as the lecture said, ‘his courage forced him to accept the teachings of his conscience, at whatever cost to himself.’  There is the key to the man.  This intensely religious man came to the view that the enforcement of a State religion was not right in a modern state.  He advocated the removal of Jewish disabilities.  ‘I am deeply convinced that all systems, whether religious or political, which rest on a principle of absolutism, must of necessity be feeble and ineffective.’  That I think is a liberal way of thought.  But he repudiated laissez-faire and he would not ‘hesitate to apply the full powers of the State to ameliorate social anomalies.’  How does that square with our Liberals?  Or his wish to nationalise the railways?  He was never a Little Englander, and he learned to appeal straight to the people, saying that he preferred liberty to authority.

On foreign policy, he challenged he challenged Turkish rule ‘not on the ground of national interest, but in the name of justice to the oppressed.’  The lecturer said: ‘There cannot be much doubt that, but for Gladstone, the England of the seventies would have accepted the Turkish atrocities in Bulgaria as placidly as we have accepted those in Armenia.’

The last of these PMs, the Marquess of Salisbury, is the model of a true and decent Conservative politician – and statesman.  Unusually in English politics, Salisbury was an intellectual.  He survived the brutality of Eton, but he never lost his horror of the mob.  ‘First-rate men will not canvass mobs; and mobs will not elect first-rate men.’  That is archetypal Victorian snobbery – until you look at people like Farage, Hanson, and Trump, and the people who vote for them.

Salisbury had the attitudes of the by-gone squire.  He distrusted book learning and experts.  He was another matter-of-fact man.  ‘I would not be too much impressed by what the soldiers tell you about the strategic importance of these places.  It is their way.  If they were allowed full scope, they would insist on the importance of garrisoning the Moon in order to protect us from Mars.’  The stain comes from the Conservative contribution to the Irish tragedy, and their fixated opposition to change by Home Rule.

So, there is the twentieth century looking back to the nineteenth.  The urbane style of the lectures is something we miss; indeed, we just about miss all style now in this kind of discussion.  The story of the emergence of the parties known as Conservatives and Liberals may tell us a lot at a time when those parties no longer stand for much at all.  There was a focus on character and leadership that we don’t feel now.  The competition for the top job is there throughout, as is the disdain of theory or ideology, but the job of climbing the greasy pole does not seem to have annihilated statesmanship as much then as it does now.  Why that may be so is a proper subject of inquiry.  You can almost hear the rush of the cascade of clichés.  In truth, you can almost see them on your television as we speak.

Passing Bull 109– Structural problems in U S politics

/ Geoffrey Gibson / Leave a comment

The chaos and bullshit that are engulfing government in the United States reveal differences between our two constitutions and systems of government.  By and large, we adhere to the Westminster model.  We have jettisoned most of the idea of responsible government – ministers being liable for the actions of civil servants – and we have made deep inroads on the need for a politically neutral executive.  But we are closer to Westminster than Washington.  Some of the differences are as follows, not in any real order.

1.     The head of our government, the P M, is answerable in and to our parliament when it is sitting.  The ability of the leader to respond to questions without notice on a daily basis is one of the key factors that the party takes into account in choosing that person for P M.  The candidate must have real parliamentary experience.  This is not so with the President of the U S.  It was hard to imagine someone like George W Bush getting the job here.  It is impossible to imagine someone like Trump doing so.

2.     Nor are other Cabinet members answerable to Congress.  Some of the absurd appointments Trump has made simply could not happen here.  Like the Barbie Doll daughter and her visible husband.

3.     The opposition party has no recognised office of Leader of the Opposition.  This leads to irresponsibility in opposition, and it facilitates a wrecking opposition.  An opposition should not be heard unless it pledges to implement a different policy or platform.  I am not sure how far this practice feeds the custom that the outgoing president lays low (while making a fortune).  Who better to critique and oppose the incoming president?

4.     The President speaks through others – in the White House – in a way that encourages irresponsibility and incoherence.  Sean Spicer and Kellyanne Conway would be inconceivable here.  Trump has slow or slippery front people whom he then contradicts on Twitter.  The Marx Brothers White House show is not funny anymore.

5.     There is a much greater infection of partisanship in the U S executive.  Departments suffer wholesale reconstituting when the party in power in Congress changes.  The Department of State has been mutilated.  It has suffered political purges.  Sally Yates was attacked for being a Democrat.

6.     A lot of these issues derive from an ideological embrace of the separation of powers.  We follow the English.  We ask not whether a scheme or proposal conforms to theory, but whether it works.  The U S division of powers leaves them like the Stuarts on war powers – the executive declares the wars, but only the legislature can fund them.  We and the English want our ministry to be members of parliament and at least to that extent to be both elected to and answerable to the parliament.

7.     The process of finding nominees for the parties and then electing the president allows for the election of someone who is not just not qualified, but who ought to be disqualified.

8.     That process is hideously long and expensive.  It is as notorious for its inefficiency as their health system.

9.     The Supreme Court is and has been split along ideological fault lines that would be anathema here.

10.                        The Bill of Rights has a constitutional effect in the U S and is far too ideological for our tastes.  It gives unelected judges far too much law making power, and it is prone to debase the currency of the independence of the judiciary.

11.                        Apart from their gun laws, the crassest example of the sad triumph of theory over sense in the U S is their failure to make voting compulsory.  That to us makes as much sense as not insisting on a secret ballot, or making jury service optional, or giving a green light to going through a red light.  This absurd obsession does not fulfil democracy, it mocks democracy.  And, if it matters, some say that it sits on a sad throwback to racism.

12.                        The President is the head of state in the US.  Our Prime Minister is not.  Americans invest much more faith in their President than we place in our PM.  We expect more from the system than Americans do, but we place far less faith in the people actually in office.  At least Australian republicans have a model to avoid.

13.                        Finally, it is too hard to get rid of a dud president.  None has ever been removed by a completed process of impeachment.  Here, we just leave it to the party room.  It has happened too often here recently, and it’s never pretty, but the alternative looks awful.

That’s not a good report card, and it is not just Americans who are paying the price.

Confucius says:

A gentleman makes friends through being cultivated, but looks to friends for support in benevolence.

Analects 12.24

From the next Passing Bull, we shall cease our protest at ‘Western values’ and return to Poet of the Month.

Why opera? Chapter 2

/ Geoffrey Gibson / Leave a comment

[This chapter may seem prosaic to some, but from now on, it will be all systems go.]

2

Sources and courses

Would you be surprised to hear that the Greeks were toying with what might be called a version of opera centuries before the birth of Christ?  Aristotle had something to say about everything.  He commented on the Greek use of music in drama:

Tragedy, then, is an imitation of some action that is important, entire and of a proper magnitude – by language rendered pleasurable… language that has the embellishments of rhythm, melody and meter… In some parts, meter alone is employed, in others, melody.

About two thousand years later, Greek scholars had fled west after the fall of Istanbul in 1453.  They sought to recreate Greek drama and they worked on this in the late 1500s.  A group of these scholars in Florence looked closely at the use of music and drama.  So, we have people in Italy, and indeed especially in Florence, going back to the ancients to see how an art form might be revived – in other words, we have an example of the Italian Renaissance in action, and one that is not often noticed.

During the period of what we call the Renaissance – about, say 1400 to 1600 – we can see two strands in western music – the glorification of God, and the celebration of the harmony of the spheres.  During the period that we describe as the Baroque – about, say, 1600 to 1750 – we see the emergence and development of opera.  The actual birthplace was Venice.

The progress involved both the sacred and the profane.  Music was vital to the Mediaeval and Renaissance church.  Music had spilled out of the church into the town or village square, but then the church banned biblical representations from musical exposition.  One source of opera was removed, but there was among the profane in Europe a very strong tradition of commedia dell’arte, a stage presentation of stock figures like Harlequin and Columbine ad-libing a kind of farce, and there was a strong tradition of masques in England and of ballet in France that provided sources for the development of music drama in those countries.  (My tutorial notes for Harlequin read ‘twisted wit and the cunning of an amoral child.’)

What we now know as opera first appeared in Venice at the end of the 16th century.  A piece called Dafne was performed there before Orfeo by Monteverdi was staged at Padua in 1607.  That opera is still performed and recorded.

People also began to write oratorios after the church had taken biblical themes from the stage.  The movement crossed the channel, and in about 1689 Dido and Aeneas by Henry Purcell was performed in England.  The French continued to be more influenced by the dance, while in Germany Bach wrote countless cantatas and two of the great monuments of Western civilisation, the St Matthew Passion and the St John Passion.  His work for piano, The Well-Tempered Clavier, liberated the keyboard.

In Italy, they were discovering what it was for material to be musicabile – with experience, they found that for material to be capable of being set to music, they needed three things: a certain ambience, striking characters, and strong scenes.  In very broad terms, music went from moving feelings to expressing them, and in what we call the classical phase, we get orchestral colouring and the contrasts of chiaroscuro.

Now we get our first composer who is still celebrated in the opera house and the concert house, Handel, the German who settled in England.  Handel was undoubtedly a great composer, and he wrote many operas, but those operas have not commanded the same following and respect as his oratorios and orchestral works.  Mozart would free up the structure, but the profligate Handel has left us some of our most beautiful songs.

Throughout his career, Handel borrowed freely from himself.  Before the opening of the opera Rinaldo, his first London opera, Handel and his backers let it out that he had composed it in only fourteen days.  The opening at the Haymarket in 1711 was a sensation.  The Spectator said: ‘The opera of Rinaldo is filled with Thunder and Lightning, Illuminations and Fireworks.’  The composer was, as many of them had to be back then, something of an impresario.

Haydn wrote some opera, but it is hardly heard of.

Until now, the role of the singer was just to sing, with perhaps a gesture or two – acting was not yet part of the deal.  The structures of the arias and the recitative were formal and observed.  It was more like watching tableaux of gods or heroes.  Mozart would change all that, and would give us the emotions of real people.  Gluck provided a bridge, and his Alceste and Orpheus and Eurydice are still played.  Some say that Gluck’s emphasis on emotional truth could be compared to Rousseau’s view of naturalness.  Nature was coming into its own then in poetry and painting.

The Australian Opera went through a purple patch in the 1990s.  Their production of Orpheus and Eurydice in 1993 (David Hobson and Miriam Gormley) and Handel’s Julius Caesar in 1994 (Graham Pushee and Yvonne Kenny) were huge hits, and justifiably so.  The National Library holds videos of each of them.  The sets and the ballets are adventurous but wonderfully entertaining.  And you can get to see David Hobson suspended over a dancing horde climbing up a wall and Yvonne Kenny as Cleopatra taking a bath in milk.  It is hard to imagine a better night out at the theatre than either of these great AO productions.

Well, if you go to Orfeo by Monteverdi, and start at the beginning with the Toccata, you will hear the music that Kenneth Clark used for at least one episode of Civilisation.  Then in the Ritornello you get a kind of chorus called ‘Music’ who acts as a kind of prologue to set the opera up.  The music is the sound of the Renaissance.  It is tightly disciplined.

The Saint Matthew Passion is not an opera, but it is like an opera performed in concert.  As a music drama, it has never been surpassed for either drama or music.  The Evangelist acts as a kind of MC, or, if you prefer, he fulfils the role played by Joel Grey as the MC in Cabaret.  Some people will recognise tunes of Lutheran hymns, but there is absolutely no religious test for this masterpiece, which is one of the title deeds of our civilisation.  If you want to feel the awful power of a choir in music drama get the famous Chorus ‘Sind Blitze, sind Donner in Wolken verschwunden’.  It is an eruption of outrage at the arrest of Christ.  ‘Have lightning, has thunder vanished in clouds?’  In his magisterial work Bach, Music in the Castle of Heaven, the conductor and musicologist John Eliot Gardiner agrees with the proposition that this is ‘one of the most violent and grandiose descriptions of unloosed passion produced in the Baroque era.’

You may feel the passion if you see Nicholas Harnoncourt conduct this work in rehearsal.’  You may compare it to the previous Chorus with Duet, ‘So ist mein Jesus nun gefangen’ ‘So is my Jesus captured now.’  It is very hard to imagine more intense moments in music drama.  Then go to near the end of the work for a recitative with Chorus ‘Nun ist der Herr zur Rach Gebracht/ Mein Jesu, gute Nacht!’ ‘Now the Lord is brought to rest. /My Jesus, good night!’  Try the Herreweghe version (which I have) and then go to the final chorus.  It’s like a Negro spiritual.

Now try ‘Lascia ch’io pianga’ from Rinaldo.  Try Cecilia Bartoli.  (The castrato sings it in Farinelli, but that makes some of us nervous.   I forget whether the film shows the audience shouting ‘Long live the blade!’)

Handel’s Xerxes (or Serses) is famous for the aria ‘Ombra mai fu’ which comes early in the opera and is known as ‘Handel’s Largo.’  The Caruso recording is scratchy, but this song is one of the most popular in the repertoire, and Caruso is said by many to have been the greatest tenor ever.  And you can compare him head to head on this with Bjorling.  You might also try Franco Corelli, if only to see the film star good looks.  There are buckets of choice.

Finally, try ‘Che faro senza Eurydice’ from Orpheus and Eurydice.  You can choose between two great mezzos, Janet Baker from England or Marilyn Horne from America, or you can hear Callas sing it in French.  And don’t forget the terrific AO production.

Well, there are the stately and ordered songs of the baroque.  We now move to when that world is exploded, like a planet being hit by a shooting star.

Passing Bull 108 – Timbo back and in form

/ Geoffrey Gibson / Leave a comment

Tim Wilson just oozes bullshit. As you plough through the following, ask yourself what part is worse.

Menzies knew there was no contradiction between the values his party embraced…

Monday’s 75th anniversary of the “Forgotten People” speeches, understandably, has prompted nostalgia in Liberal ranks.

In a column in this newspaper on Monday, former prime minister Tony Abbott argued that there were three lessons from Menzies’ work — to “know who you represent”, “your values” and “never shirk a fight in a good cause”. On those he is right, but Abbott’s observations represent only the conservative chorus.

Completion requires the liberal verse — know where you want to take Australia. Menzies’ exceptionalism comes from understanding that successfully prosecuting a political message follows from commanding the context of choices before a country, not just the answers….

His solution was to frame Australia as a nation with an organic society born of individuals, forming families, building community as the foundation for nationhood. It is a citizen-up approach from the middle class to slay the easy temptation of Canberra-down government planning.

He then built a modern, forward-looking Liberal Party to ensure “in a country like Australia the class war must always be a false war”.

In doing so he also knew it was not the only “false war”. So was the debate about whether his party was liberal or conservative, because such a debate starts from a falsehood.

It cannot be a debate about competing or different political philosophies for one very simple reason: conservatism is not a political philosophy. It’s a disposition. A temperament. An approach to bring the best of the past forward with incremental change.

In his memoir Afternoon Light Menzies wrote of taking “the name ‘Liberal’ because we were determined to be a progressive party, willing to make experiments, in no sense reactionary but believing in the individual, his right and enterprise, and rejecting the socialist panacea…

After all, a person can be socialist and conservative. They’re called Fabians. Conservatism is the virtue. Liberalism is the vision.

Yet liberalism alone is not a solution. Liberalism is the force of water through a loose garden hose that flaps around indiscriminately after the tap has been turned on. Conservatism is the calming hand that directs the hose towards the plants needing hydration….

Today the symptoms of what must be rejected are obvious, from identity politics, increased dependence on taxpayer-financed welfare, rising public debt, placing the needs of government before households and the corrosion of our culture.

But recharging the nation’s course requires analysing the disease. The disease is the shift of the centre of gravity that was, as Menzies described it, anchored in the ambitions of “homes material, homes human, and homes spiritual” that built the foundations of our society from the citizen up.

In place of the home and family life has been a centre more closely anchored to the ambitions of the academy, state capitals and Canberra, driving a vision of a nation from bureaucracies and institutions down…

The consequence is people of “the left” and “the right” are turning to populism to break the system in an attempt to regain the certainty that comes from being in control of their lives.

For left-progressives the turn to popular brings a silver lining because it creates the opportunity to tear down the institutions that underpin liberal democracy and remake them to achieve their ends…..

You may have noticed that Timbo falls for the cliché ‘left-progressives’ although he quotes Menzies as ‘taking “the name ‘Liberal’ because we were determined to be a progressive party’.  But the two prize-winners – world-beaters – for pure bullshit are ‘Conservatism is the virtue. Liberalism is the vision’ and ‘Conservatism is not a political philosophy. It’s a disposition’ – although the ‘loose garden hose’ deserves a Palme d’Or on its own.

Let’s look at three problems with ‘Conservatism is not a political philosophy. It’s a disposition’.  First, The Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy does not agree.  It gives two versions of conservative ‘ideology.’  Its comments are extracted below.  Secondly, if it is hard to define a political philosophy, it is even harder to define a state of mind.  How then do you frame a coherent argument on such loose premises?  (I think the common law can be a state of mind – but I’m careful of where I say that.)  Finally, is this not just a false dichotomy?  Of course a political philosophy can be a state of mind.  How can it – say, Fascism – not be?  Was the man from Quadrant who wanted to bomb the ABC deranged or depraved?  Why do we have to choose?  He is probably both and more – and he’s still got a job.

And when did you last see a Fenian?  At about the time you saw Father Christmas going down the chimney?  And do we think that Timbo has the same feeling about ‘virtue’ as Robespierre?

The Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy has the following.

conservatism Originally in Burke an ideology of caution in departing from the historical roots of a society, or changing its inherited traditions and institutions.  In this ‘organic’ form, it includes allegiance to tradition, community, hierarchies of rank, benevolent paternalism, and a properly subservient underclass.  By contrast, conservatism can be taken to imply a laissez-faire ideology of untrammelled individualism that puts the emphasis on personal responsibility, free markets, law and order, and a minimal role for government, with neither community, nor tradition, nor benevolence entering more than marginally.  The two strands are not easy to reconcile, either in theory or in practice.

liberalism A political ideology centred upon the individual thought of as possessing rights against the government, including rights of due process under the law, equality of respect, freedom of expression and action, and freedom from religious and ideological restraint.

The author then goes on to describe how that ideology is attacked from both ‘left’ and ‘right’, as defined, showing that all those terms are now exhausted and worthless.

 

Confucius says:

The gentleman agrees with others without being an echo.  The small man echoes without being in agreement.

Analects 13.23.