Opera

Words and language in opera

/ Geoffrey Gibson / Leave a comment

My first Summer School at Oxford was on Verdi and Shakespeare.  Verdi had written operas for Macbeth Othello.  His last opera was Falstaff.  The tutor, who was excellent, explained why in his view Italian was the best language for opera – which is theatre set to music.  It all sounded very logical, and we discussed the differences with English and French – and giggled when we spoke of German – just a little bit of Jingoism at Oxford.

But I recalled a previous visit to England when I saw a great performance of Billy Budd at Covent Garden.  This was in the 90’s when the AO was blazing.  I had asked Moffat Oxenbould, the Artistic Director of the AO, whether I should see Billy Budd or La Bohème.  One reason he gave in favour of the former is that it would be good for me to hear an opera in my own language.  This was very good advice, because at that time I found the music of Britten to be challenging.  Billy Budd is now my favourite opera – beside Falstaff.  (I would add Die Walküre, with the proviso that I must skip the second act – and watch the closing duet at the bar.)

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Simone Young will conduct Wagner’s Ring Cycle at La Scala.  (She was the first female conductor of it at Bayreuth, just as she had been the first female conductor with the Vienna State Opera and the Vienna Philharmonic.) 

She will share the function with a younger conductor who has learned under her.  (The person first appointed pulled out at short notice.) 

Simone had come to Wagner via Barenboim, who in turn came to Wagner via Furtwangler.  She and Barenboim had started their roles in Wagner on the piano.  Since Furtwangler is my favourite conductor, this is some pedigree. 

You can get an idea of what is involved by watching a video of Young talking in fluent Italian about preparing for Das Rheingold.  (She had previously held a long appointment at Hamburg.)  It is a great comfort to see learning being passed down from one generation to another in this high art form.

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Young told The New York Times that it was essential for the conductor to concentrate on the words in the libretto, as well as the music – then she knew how to place the accents of the orchestra – if I may be permitted the phrase. 

That makes sense.  The composer of the music wrote it to be played with the libretto written for just that purpose.  And it was written to be played with the score in the language in which the libretto was written.  Nessun dorma can’t come out like ‘None shall sleep.’

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Now, when we who speak English see Shakespeare, we follow it in our own tongue – and miss some of the archaisms of plays written more than four hundred years ago.  We get the meaning and the poetry at the same time.  And while we may cut the text, and take other liberties, no one has suggested that we may in some way flirt with the text itself.  That would be the civil equivalent of blasphemy.  Like fiddling with the text Dante or Goethe.  Or the opening chords of Don Giovanni.  Or the background to the Mona Lisa.

Poetry, like music, is a mix of imagination, form, and rhythm – and, for the want of a better word, alchemy.  (When Wordsworth referred to a ‘spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings’ he was expressing a view good for Keats, but not so good for Wordsworth.)  And if you fiddle with either the music or the poetry, you might just wreck it.  Hamlet in French is a very different beast compared to Hamlet as it was written.

But most Australians who go to see the big operas of Mozart, Verdi, Wagner or Puccini do not speak the language in which the opera was written.  And with the possible exception of late Puccini, they are not the same as the audiences for which the operas were originally created.  Recording only started in the twentieth century.

This will not trouble those who go along to hear the big numbers and just bide their time otherwise.  (The Italians were notorious for gossiping until a set piece came on – when they exploded with applause – or derision.  Rather like a soccer match – or a bull fight.  Simone Young said that some thought that you had flopped in Germany with Wagner unless you got both raspberries and applause.  On the other hand, on one of my visits to Glyndebourne, the loudest applause came from the toff behind me who snored the loudest.)

But for the rest of us, at least two issues arise.  We are not getting the opera in the manner that its creators intended, and we cannot match the music to the language of the script.  We therefore have to put our trust in the translator, and in those directing the opera. 

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These misgivings – and that is what they are – show the wisdom of the advice I got from Moffat Oxenbould about listening to operas written in English.  This has led me to something like an addiction to Britten. 

Curiously, I have also become attached to Janacek, who was a fanatic about linking the music exactly to the text.  He used to patrol the streets listening to people and watching them speak, so that he could mould his compositions accordingly. 

My absorption with Janacek and Britten came at a time of extended leave from the great Italian composers.  I got to the stage that I had got to with Swan Lake and Giselle many years ago – if I heard La Bohème or La Traviata yet again, I might just give it all away.

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I doubt whether this gap for most of us between the text and the music in opera is grasped by many in the audience at the opera house or at home.

We are familiar with the problem with, say, French poetry.  On a good day, I can stagger through Verlaine and some of Victor Hugo.  (I subscribe to Paris Match, but I may say that is mostly for the photos – which is the precise opposite of what we schoolboys said when we smuggled in a Playboy.)  With Latin, I am on much firmer ground, and I have the luxury of not being called on to speak it. 

But take a well-known part of the Aeneid by Vergil.

Sunt lacrimae rerum et mentem mortalia tangunt.

We can have a sporting chance of translating that.  ‘Even things have tears, and our mortality touches our minds’.  That may get the meaning of the words, but it sounds ugly, and however we translate it, we know it does and cannot have the poetic effect of the original text.  Latin has a very different structure and ring to it compared to English.

Or take an example plucked from Gutenberg:

In the midway of this our mortal life,
I found me in a gloomy wood, astray
Gone from the path direct: and e’en to tell
It were no easy task, how savage wild
That forest, how robust and rough its growth,
Which to remember only, my dismay
Renews, in bitterness not far from death.

That is among other things ugly and apparently wrought.  This is how Dante began the Divine Comedy.

Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita

mi ritrovai per una selva oscura,

ché la diritta via era smarrita.

Ahi quanto a dir qual era è cosa dura

esta selva selvaggia e aspra e forte

che nel pensier rinova la paura!

Tant è amara che poco è più morte;

ma per trattar del ben chi vi trovai,

dirò de laltre cose chi vho scorte.

You do not have to speak a word of Italian to know that the translation into English now sounds like an act of strangulated butchery.

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In course of the opera named after him, the third in the Ring Cycle, Siegfried kills his foster father before the latter kills him; he slays the dragon; he talks to the birds; he walks through a fire to free Brunnhilde from the spell put on her by her father; and then he takes off with her to the tune of what Simone Young says is one of the most beautiful pieces of music ever written.  The final two lines of the text are:

Leuchtender Liebe,

Lachender Tod!

Even allowing that Siegfried is the dull child who refuses to grow up, those lines could surely not be as banal as their translation:

Radiant love,

Laughing death!

(And there is certainly nothing to laugh about in the death of either in Götterdämmerung.) 

The splendid Penguin version of the text and translation gives this comment of Nietzsche, who knew something about this.

Wagner’s poetry is all about revelling in the German language, the warmth and candour in his communion with it, something that as such cannot be felt in any other German writer except Goethe.

That is close to saying the text in this context is barely translatable. 

The score of the Ring was formally dedicated ‘with faith in the German spirit’.  You would not want it get into the wrong hands, especially one who like Wagner wanted to plant frenzy in the German audiences; a leader who, like the master, could wield magnetic power over the German psyche; a German whose favourite opera was Götterdämmerung, but who failed to see that it prophesied the fall of his regime, and of the whole German volk.

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There is another way of looking at what happens when the demands of the audience or reader require tampering with the work of a genius.  Goethe and Pushkin are celebrated in their own country to about the same extent as Shakespeare is in England, but neither travels well.  (Ibsen and Chekhov do not have the same problems.  Homer is seen as untouchable, in part because of intellectual snobbery, and the myth of Oxbridge that ancient Greece was civilized.) 

It is hardly surprising that mutilation carries huge risks.  Rare people of nerve and imagination and the soul of a director can occasionally succeed.  Nearly forty years ago, I took my young daughters to see Goethe’s Faust put on at the little Russel Street theatre, blessed of memory.  I warned them that it might be long and tedious.  I think a young Barrie Kosky directed it.  At the start, the lights went right out.  Gorillas were just seen running up and down each side aisle.  Then, two spotlights shone down the middle aisle.  A gorilla emerged at the front of center stage.  From out of it emerged the smiling face of Barry Otto.  There may have been the sound of machine-gun fire.  And our close attention was held for the duration.  I still recall it.

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Which brings me back to the suggestion that Italian is the ‘best’ language for opera.  Well, opera was born in Italy, and a majority of its superstar composers were also born there, but, putting to one side what experts in linguistics and phonetics might say, you may want to be careful in expressing that view in Amsterdam, Bayreuth, Berlin, London, Madrid, New York, Salzburg, Stockholm, Vienna and other cities that know something of music and theatre.  Or Commedia dell’ Arte.

And the discovery of the meaning of what you have heard so often may have its own entertainment value.  Nessun dorma is the best-known aria.  Who knows the real circumstances of ‘None shall sleep’?  Who knows just how plain silly Siegfried, the great hero of the Ring, is?  (Even the Master thought he was stupid.  The Rheinmaidens knew he was mad.  And by the time he finally gets to depart, we do not go into mourning.)  Heaven knows how many times I had heard Jussi Bjoerling sing Mama chel vino es generoso, before I saw Cavalleria Rusticana, and I started to giggle.  ‘Well might you need a stiff drink from your Mum, Comrade, because you are about to greet the guy with whose wife you have been playing tootsies, and in your part of the world, there can only be one result.’

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We should be careful about talking about meaning in this context.  We have trouble with the meaning of some passages in Hamlet because our language has changed – it is always evolving.  We have even more trouble with Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, but with some tuition and encouragement – like I got at another Oxford Summer School – you can get by.  Then Beowulf is beyond all but those taught at tertiary level.

It is obviously silly to ask the meaning of the Pietà or the Moonlight Sonata – or Rigoletto or Don Giovanni.  Or Ode to a Nightingale. 

Macaulay said that ‘perhaps no person can be a poet without a certain unsoundness of mind…. Truth indeed is essential to poetry; but it is the truth of madness.’  That may sound over the top, but Ibsen admired Michelangelo because he had ‘the courage to commit a madness now and then.’  A psychiatrist asked – ‘Why cannot more light enter a mind that is cracked than one that is whole?’  Einstein and Keynes would have had a view on that (as would Barrie Kosky).  Keynes said that Newton was ‘the last of the magicians, the last of the Babylonians and Sumerians…. the last wonder-child to whom the Magi could do sincere and appropriate homage.’  And, of course, Newton was up to his neck in alchemy.

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When we speak of a libretto in a foreign tongue, we are in some kind of hinterland when it comes to meaning.  Logical analysis is on very shaky ground.  We face three filters.  First, we depend on the conductor and director to present their version of this musical drama called opera.  Secondly, we depend on the translators to tell us their view of the meaning of the script in English.  And, finally, we get a very different account of the carefully managed marriage between the music and the text. 

You would not want to be on an ascent of Everest or undergoing heart surgery on such a wobbly footing.

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Opera translated into English does not have a good name – for good reason.  (One exception is the Mackerass Makropoulos Case.)  There is therefore a lot in favour of operas created in our own language.  We could never have survived Faust in German with voice over or subtitles.  Like the time some well intentioned internationalist got us at a Melbourne festival to see a Romanian theatre group do Titus Andronicus – in Romanian!  And our Romanian friends just hung their heads in horror. 

This was I think the ultimate risk in fiddling with the work of a giant, but at least to some extent, we take on some of that risk whenever we go to see most of the operas that are put on, especially in the straitened times since Covid.

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And the great success of Simone Young in Bayreuth, Berlin, Hamburg and Vienna is a sad reflection of the decline of the AO since its glory days of the nineties. 

I had been to a talk given by Simone on Tristan, which she opened with a thundering chord on the piano, and I saw her conduct that opera and a Wagner gala.  On each occasion, I was transfixed.  A chairman of the AO told me that Simone had allowed him to stand at the back of the pit during a performance.  He said his hair stood on end as she entered the pit, and she stayed back later to talk to the orchestra.  She may be our best export since Melba or Sutherland – but she is just not seen by those up the back as having that éclat.

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Well, at least my girls got to see our team at its best.  But it is sobering for an eighty-year-old lawyer who has been listening to or going to the opera for more than sixty years to reflect that not only can he not read the score – he cannot even read the script. 

That is just one of the reasons why I wonder if I am not much better off watching the live theatre of a test match – cricket or rugby – or a Grand Prix or Grand Final.  Or the Melbourne Cup.  Then I know just what is going on, but I have no idea how it all may end.  There is a lot to be said for that – it is called drama.

Then there is the shortest poem of Chris Wallace-Crabbe.  ‘Whatever Christ meant, it wasn’t this.’

Falstaff at Covent Garden – a kind of alacrity in sinking

/ Geoffrey Gibson / Leave a comment


This is how Sir John Falstaff reflects on the ignominy of being dumped in the Thames with filthy washing.

Have I lived to be carried in a basket like a barrow
of butcher’s offal, and to be thrown in the Thames?
Well, if I be served such another trick, I’ll have my
brains ta’en out and buttered, and give them to a
dog for a New Year’s gift.  S’blood, the rogues
slighted me into the river with as little remorse as
they would have drowned a blind bitch’s puppies,
fifteen i’ th’ litter! And you may know by my size
that I have a kind of alacrity in sinking; if the bottom
were as deep as hell, I should drown. I had
been drowned, but that the shore was shelvy and
shallow—a death that I abhor, for the water swells
a man, and what a thing should I have been when
I had been swelled! By the Lord, I should have
been a mountain of mummy.

This may remind you of the philosophical reflection of a sometime Spanish knight after a similar humiliation.  After being trampled on by a herd of bulls, Don Quixote laments:

Here I am with my name in the history books, a famous man of arms, courteous in my conduct, respected by princes, sought after by damsels, and just when I was expecting palms, triumphs, and crowns, I find myself this morning, as a climax to it all, trodden under foot, battered and kicked by a herd of filthy animals.

These are probably the two most famous characters in our literature.  They were created at about the same time.  In saluting what we may call the modern era, or the end of the Middle Ages, they stand for the end of all that moonshine about chivalry.  In the case of The Merry Wives of Windsor, we seethe arrival of the middle class as the centre of attention on our stage, a kind of Elizabethan prelude to Coronation Street, Neighbours, and Friends – although we had to wait centuries before Jennifer Anniston became the most photographed person on the planet, and bowed out in front of 52 million television viewers.

Well, that is one factor behind the snobbery that this play of Shakespeare attracts.  It may be his only play for which he supplied most of the plot, but the lead, Sir John Falstaff, had exploded on the stage in two history plays, before being killed off in another. 

But, as fans of Shakespeare are wont to remind fans of Verdi, the Falstaff of the comedy is much softer than the Falstaff of the history plays.  The brash insolence, fraud, drunkenness, cowardice, and womanizing are constant.  But in the comedy, and the Verdi opera Falstaff, we are spared watching Falstaff the recruiter accepting bribes to allow some poor blighters to be be despatched for cannon fodder.  If he cannot be said to rat on his mates, it’s because he does not have any.  It was this kind of nastiness, which gives a guilty edge to our glee, that led Sir Anthony Quayle call Falstaff ‘frankly vicious.’

The play and the opera are both put on to make us laugh and give us a good time – and reconcile ourselves to our condition.  Well, God only knows how much we need that release and therapy now.  Someone in the trade got up Verdi’s nose by saying he could not write an opera for comedy like Rossini.  Falstaff was Verdi’s answer.

At the beginning of the play, Page is discussing the form of his greyhound, which had just been outrun.  He tells Falstaff they have a hot venison pasty for dinner, and says ‘Come, gentlemen, I hope we shall drink down all unkindness.’  At the end of the play, his wife says ‘let us every one go home, And laugh this sport o’er by a country fire….’  That is precisely the tone of the whole show – and it is precisely the tone of the whole Verdi score.  It may be the most remarkable marriage of script and score that I know.

Still, some snobbery attaches to the play – but not I think to the opera.  W H Auden just refused to lecture on the play.  Well, at least he had the courtesy to refer his audience to the opera.  My own view is that if you are not uplifted by any decent performance of the play, you need help.  As for the opera – Shakespeare is the best playwright that we know, and there are only two challengers to Verdi for that position as composer of opera.  In the result, Falstaff is not just my favourite Verdi opera, but my favourite across the board.  (I may say that I have never taken to the opera Macbeth, and that the play Othello gives me the willies.   Strawberries out of order have the same effect on me as they did on Humphrey Bogart in The Caine Mutiny.)

And for those who have been cruelled by Wagner, Falstaff has one unassailable charm.  It is not too long.  It takes less time than the final act of Wagner’s comedy.

Well, those who turned out to Covent Garden in October, 1999 to see a new production of Falstaff sure got their money’s worth.  The house, especially behind the famous curtain, had just had a major rebuild.  The lead was played by a popular local, Bryn Terfel.  The band was conducted by the urbane and unflappable Bernard Haitink.  The costumes and sets were alarmingly attention-grabbing.  The full crowd was expectant and knowing – and they got all that they wanted.  This is, after all, a show in which the English may claim some rights.  And I was at home, with Opus Arte, red at hand, cheering them all on.

At first, I thought the sets and costumes were overdone, and distracting.   But I acclimatised, especially after hearing the director say later that this is after all an Italian opera, and that the story had Italian roots.  (In the extras, Haitink said this is the one opera of Verdi where not one note, not one, is out of place.  Terfel in interview was entirely at ease and bore a remarkable resemblance to Richard Burton in so many ways.  The commentary on the massive work backstage is riveting.) 

This is an opera where the music is integral to the whole show to an extent rarely seen outside of Mozart and Wagner.  As it goes, it gets ethereal, but we always come back to what it is there for – to give us a great night out and send us home more at peace with our neighbours and the world.  And that’s God’s work.

The highlight of this show was the peak of dramatic irony where Falstaff is telling Ford disguised as Brook how he will get Ford’s wife into bed.  The incoming bourgeoisie, the future rulers of television and the world, are terrified of being cuckolded.  You may as well be castrated.  The English language has no female counterpart to ‘unmanned.’  The sequence is as paralyzingly funny as the mirror sequence with Groucho Marx in Duck Soup, and is a warrant for the value of filming this kind of theatre, so that we can see close-up the facial contortions of the splendid Italian actor.  For some reason, his pain and anguish at the cruelty of fate reminded me so strongly of that of Jackie Gleason in The Honeymooners.  There are times when we get almost viscerally grabbed by the universality of theatre going right back to commedia dell’ arte and the Greeks.  And all this at what used to be a convent, then a red-light area, and now one of the more singular tourist traps on this earth.

And with it all there is a sense of elegy – unless that is just my coming to grips with coming gutsers as I get older.  Falstaff is not what he was.  They know it, and so does he.  An autumnal wistfulness pervades Henry IV Part II until it is shattered by an act of brutal betrayal.  We are spared this in the comedy and opera based on it, but not in Orson Welles’ Chimes at Midnight also entitled Falstaff.  (I do think it was a bit rich to give Jeanne Moreau second billing, when the tart Doll Tearsheet gets about three lines.)

In his play, Parolles gets his come-uppance too, but his decline and fall is total, and the pathos is scarcely funny.  As Tony Tanner remarked in discussing All’s Well, Falstaff in the comedy ‘dusts himself off fairly breezily…his attitude is more resigned – you win some, you lose some, and as you get older you lose more.’ 

I know just what he means, and perhaps that is why this play and opera just keeps getting better for me as I age.  It calls to mind a desolate Friday lunch in an Adelaide pub after court about forty years ago with a fading silk.  ‘You know, Mate, we are just like cats.  For every fight you have, you have one less to give.’

The Australian Opera put on a show of Falstaff in Melbourne about twenty years ago that mesmerised me and converted me to being a life-long a fan of both the play and the opera.  Well, this show at Covent Garden, now on film, is up there with the best – perhaps the locals can claim a home ground advantage, even if we now miss the subtle charms of the Crush Bar.  If anyone wants to challenge the West End as the beating heart of world theatre, they will have to get up bloody early.

Shakespeare’s Kings in Their Time

/ Geoffrey Gibson / Leave a comment

It was always yet the trick of the English nation if they have a good thing to make it common.

Death, as the Psalmist saith, is certain to all; all shall die.  How a good yoke of Bullocks at Stamforth Fair?

Shakespeare wrote his ten English history plays when it suited him.  It is instructive to view both the history of England and his development in the chronological order of the plays.  (The references to the shows are to those on Arkangel.)

King John (1199-1216)

(c1596)

This is a vitally medieval play – the king against his barons; the French against the English; and God and his Church over all.  We may as well be on Mars – but for the humanity of the playwright.  It is about perfidy and treachery on high – a favourite theme in drama. 

But the actors that get to us are not noble –the Bastard ( the son of Richard Coeur de Lion), Hubert, and the Papal Legate (Pandulph) – put there to fire up a Tudor Protestant audience (and the modern one I was in when in London once).  Constance is a pain.  (Very unlike Connie in The Godfather.)   The bastard is like a Greek chorus on the nobles – and he prefigures the politician.  Hubert is humanity in the raw – and an English man to boot.

King John is a rat.  He is the epitome of weakness – he urges brutal murder – and then he blames the chosen killer – who has had to defy ‘superior orders’.  The king is one of God’s gifts to the English – provocative but containable.  (The Stuarts in embryo.)  He would lead ineluctably to rebellion and Magna Carta – the foundation of the rule of law. 

Bill Nighy as Pandulph is insidiously malicious – like a gliding taipan in uncut grass.  The intervention of a foreign potentate will come to an end in the last of these history plays, Henry VIII.  The ‘supremacy’ vainly asserted by King John is a reality under King Harry.  What a difference a king makes. 

This  play is in my view sadly very underrated as theatre.  It  is high political drama.

Richard II (1377-1399)

(c1595)

Possibly because the first recording of Shakespeare that I bought had Sir John Gielgud in this role, it has remained very high in my favourites.  It has the aural beauty of Iussi Björling.  As a passion play, it has the pathetic majesty of The Saint Matthew Passion.  (And the recording has Leo McKern groaning that this other Eden is ‘now leased out’ – King John had hocked the kingdom to the Vatican.)

Another weak king is brought to heel – this time terminally, by deposition and death.  Put to one side the law – if a medieval English king did not measure up, he risked being deposed – on a good day.  It is the familiar story of a weak king surrounded by flatterers.  The play starts with full medieval chivalry – that would be detonated in the next play.  The last Plantagenet aborts the process of the law and then unlawfully seizes the property of one side.  This is the dilemma of the whole series – if you take the law into your own hands, how do you stop someone doing the same to you?  ‘How are you a king but by fair sequence and succession?’

Bolingbroke reminds me of the Inquisitor of El Greco – shifty.  And with him we now get populism and a new world.  He is seen to court the commons – ‘Off goes his bonnet to an oyster wench.’  Dead right.  He is the first spin doctor.  He will school his son in stealing ‘all courtesy from heaven’ – and young Harry will be a ready pupil in or out of the stews of London.  We will even get the phrase ‘vile politician’.  When the coup is complete, the rebels prefigure the Inquisition and Stalin.  They want to give a ‘confession’ to the Commons.  The flatterers had said that the love of the Commons ‘lies in their purses’ – how very modern!   And this is another play where a ‘misunderstanding’ leads to the execution of a king or an heir. 

But here is pathos not seen since the Greeks – in the most operatic play ever written.  Rupert Graves grows into the role as the hero softens in his crashing descent.

Henry IV (1399-1413)

(c1597; c1599)

The whole world has changed.  In the second scene of the first of these two plays – which many say are the best this playwright put on the stage – it explodes with the entrance of his most famous character, Sir John Falstaff – and theatre would never be the same again.  Falstaff is fat, old, a liar, a coward, a drunk, a thief, and a womaniser – and that’s on a good day.  But the audience loves him.  He is the living repudiation of honour and chivalry, and he arrived at about the same time as Don Quixote, who was on a similar mission.  But he has that most priceless attribute on the stage – he endears himself to the audience.

So does Percy Hotspur, that most feisty son of Northumberland (who had taunted Richard II, while Percy mocked the heir apparent).  He carries the audience with his reckless energy: he embodies the old world of chivalry.  He is in truth a hero, of the kind Wagner never got close to.  And he too rushes like a torrent to his inevitable death.  Percy also stands for the provincial nobility and the seeds of the Wars of the Roses.  ‘An if we live, we live to tread on kings’.

There is very little that is endearing about Prince Hal.  He is cold and calculating.  He will use Falstaff and his rough mates and others in the taverns until it suits him to drop them.  He is two faced, and in some cultures repudiating a mate is the ultimate crime.  Percy calls him a ‘vile politician’ – ‘a fawning greyhound’ who proffers ‘a candy deal of courtesy.’  Falstaff said Hal is ‘essentially mad without seeming so’.  Auden did not hold back.  He says ‘Hal has no self.’  Auden compares the ‘scoundrel’ Henry V with Richard III.  ‘Hal is the type who becomes a college president, a government head, and one hates their guts.’  Boy – does that ring a bell! 

At least Hal is honest.  ‘I’ll so offend to make offence a skill.’  Say hullo to Boris.  Hotspur?  ‘It were an easy leap to pluck bright honor from  the pale-faced moon.’  Falstaff?  ‘What is honor?  A word.’

Richard Griffith and Alan Cox are up for the leads and the tavern scene is a triumph.

Those who seek to exculpate Hal for his premeditated betrayal of Falstaff are blinded by the poetry, and forget that the object of the game for Shakespeare was to give the audience a great show – one that tells big truths.  If Hal stands for chivalry, was not Falstaff right to repudiate it?  And might we say the same for Hotspur, who seemed to think more of his horse than Kate and who resembles the crazy Siegfried as he staggers laughing to his doom?

In Part I, we get stews and pubs like those in Measure for Measure.  In Part II, we get the middle class and landed gentry like those in Merry Wives of Windsor.  We are a very long way from King John and the feudal barons, and the word ‘feudal’ was not in use then – and Rome is nowhere in sight. 

The whole mood is now autumnal.  ‘We have heard the chimes at midnight.’  (And somehow, I see the gaze of Orson Welles flickering in the firelight.)  And another son of Bolingbroke breaks his word in a way that would have thrilled Hitler, before we get to the scene of the transmission of the Crown – and there are not many scenes as strong as that.

Someone said that watching Shakespeare was like touching the face of God.  Falstaff is a paternal Master of Fun with roots in commedia.  But, as Sir Anthony Quayle said, he is also ‘frankly vicious.’  Well, he is human and so are we.  That I think led Tony Tanner to say that we ‘invariably feel a spasm of pleasure and liberation when someone blows the gaffe on human nature as Falstaff so often, consciously or subconsciously, does.’

That’s when you hear the chimes at midnight.  It is pure alchemy.  Which is to say: it is beyond analysis. It is, like the Pieta, what it is.

(Opera-goers might note that the Falstaff of Verdi, my favourite of his operas, is not that of these plays, but the watered down and worn-down version of Merry Wives of Windsor – a rom.com that the poets turn their noses up on.)

But there remains the conundrum of Falstaff.  He trades in human souls.  He figures that only three of his 150 ragamuffins will survive the battle.  The Hostess complains that she has been ‘fubbed off, fubbed off, and fubbed off.’  The truth is that Falstaff rides roughshod over the whole lot of them.  All chivalry is gone.  It was at best a pretty conceit to soften the brutality of the ethnic cleansing of the Crusades.

Donald Trump could have modelled himself on Sir John.  If you are going to lie, lie big.  The more you outrage the Establishment, the more popular you shall be.  He gets away with things quite out of our reach.  We should forever bear in mind the caution of Dr Johnson. 

The moral to be drawn is that no man is more dangerous than he that with a will to corrupt hath the power to please ;and that neither wit nor honesty ought to think themselves safe with such a companion when they see Henry seduced by Falstaff.

Or vice versa.

And at the end – there is a new player.  ‘Now call we our high court of Parliament.’  And the next play begins with power brokers discussing a bill in the Commons.  The political landscape is shifting massively.

Henry V (1413-1422)

(c1599)

Prince Hal is now King Henry.  As promised, he has cast off Falstaff et al and he is justly blamed for Falstaff’s death.  He and the Holy Church are fit to prey on each other.  The Church will fund a war of national pride.  Honour.  This leads to posturing on both sides.  And tennis balls.  And bloody carnage.

The puppeteer can now play deadly games with traitors before issuing blood-red threats of war crimes before the gates of Harfleur.  Then he presides over the death of Bardolph with sickening hypocrisy.  ‘I know you not old man’ becomes ‘We would have all such offenders so cut off.’  Then he does commit a war crime by ordering the killing of prisoners.  Olivier and Branagh left that out.  For Olivier and Churchill, the Second World War was the reason: I am not sure for Branagh.  Those who do not paint the full picture leave us with Kiplingesque jingoism that is not Shakespeare, no matter how much it warms the cockles at home.  Auden thought ‘the most brutal scene in Shakespeare is Henry’s wooing of Katherine’, and I know what he means.

The scene of the death of Falstaff comes from the gutter.  It is wonderful theatre.  No other playwright has claimed this range.  And at the end, Harry still plays games with those beneath him.  Narcissus to the end.

Henry VI (1422-1461, 1470-1471)

(c1592- 1596)

‘The cease of majesty’.  These three plays are about the weakest king, and the strongest queen, my favourite character, Queen Margaret, the She Wolf of France, especially as played by the immortal Dame Peggy Ashcroft.  (A younger David Tennant is just right as this pathetic young king – like a lost child late for Sunday School.)

But somehow the times are out of joint.  Perhaps here the sequence of composition asserts itself and we seem to be going backward.  There is a jolt – a palpable jolt.  The fingerprints of the Church pervade.  Crashing warrior barons clash with each other and crash out of France.  A champion woman is cruelly treated because she is French – an English failing, and not this author’s high point.  It all feels so medieval.  There are king-makers whom no king can ignore.  And, then, for the first time, we see the masses rise up in the rebellion of Jack Cade: about three hundred years before the French Revolution.  (And that sounds about right on the scales of history.)

But above all, we see the inhuman misery of a weak monarchy and a grizzly civil war, that people I respect simply cannot bear to listen to.  It is like Mad Max.  The Wars of the Roses will be the last hoorah of the magnates.  Next, the English will celebrate Religious Home Rule in the Reformation, and the Stuart kings will cede sovereignty to Parliament. 

Perhaps my editor may forgive me for quoting my favourite lines of Queen Maragaret once again hissed out by Peggy Ashcroft.

Where are your mess of sons to back you now?
The wanton Edward, and the lusty George?
And where’s that valiant crook-back prodigy,
Dicky your boy, that with his grumbling voice
Was wont to cheer his dad in mutinies?
Or, with the rest, where is your darling Rutland?

They would have blushed at that out the outer at Windy Hill or Victoria Park in 1948, the year of the blood premiership.  Even Quentin Tarantino might pause.  This is a long way from Midsummer night’s Dream, and this playwright is nothing if not rounded.

Taken as a whole, the three plays are I think sadly underestimated.  There is plenty of blood and guts.  Kings and nobles were in the front in the wars, but this was a time when winners could cut the heads off their enemies and display them in triumph.  In that they were savages.  Kings and nobles were merely human – but, like the rest of us, capable of dragging us back to the primeval slime. 

There are family or tribal vendettas like those in The Godfather.  The howling protests of the father and son in Part II have no parallel on our stage.  Chivalry?  A ‘gigolot wench’ looks with contempt at the ‘stinking and fly-blown’ corpse of a noble – who had murdered a child in cold blood. 

The plays are intensely political – and politics are about people, not policies.  It was only a matter of  time before the playwright let sex rear its potent head.  There is wall to wall duplicity – and faction, and grinding discord in the caucus.  One faction resorts to murder; another incites the mob to rebellion.  If you cannot get rid of your opponent lawfully, do what you must for the good of the state – or for your party – or for yourself.  What is the upshot of that policy?  ‘I am myself alone.’  And he is the subject of the last of this quartet of plays.

Richard III (1483-1485)

(c1597)

At the start of Act 4 in Part III, we see a bitchy split in the York brothers when Edward IV puts his sex drive before the crown.  Clarence defects.  Richard gives notice of future horrors.  Judas had nothing on him – played by David Troughton with lascivious malice.  ‘I am myself alone…Counting myself but bad til I be best.’

From weakness at the top and chaos below, to evil and misery everywhere.  The trouble is that this evil king sucks us the audience in with him.  The style and ambience are all so different.  This man lives for conflict – that is his oxygen: a small-scale Napoleon or Hitler or Trump.  He will be the last unguided missile to sit on the English throne, and the earth sighs with relief at his inevitable fall. 

This Richard has at least two things in common with Donald Trump.  First, his ego does not allow for a superego, or conscience.  Secondly, and relatedly, ‘he hath no friends but what are friends for fear / Which in his dearest need will fly from him.’  It is just a matter of time before someone who gets too close is cut off – with extreme prejudice.  ‘Richard loves Richard, that is I am I.’

Franco, the Caudillo, used to read through the sentences of death of his enemies while taking his coffee after a meal, often in the presence of his personal priest.   He would write an ‘E’ against those he decided should be executed, and a ‘C’ when commuting the sentence.  For those he considered needed to be made a conspicuous example, he wrote ‘garrote y prensa’ (garrotting and press coverage).  Richard wanted to be told after supper in detail how the two infant princes died – after which he will again be ‘a jolly thriving wooer’.  Well, you could not levy that charge against Hitler, but the psychotic paring is there – and it all gets a bit too much.  The dramatic technique is evolving, but I still prefer the regal tragedy of Richard II.

But this author and producer has now found his feet, and he knows how to play with us.  If you can go the distance with the whole play, it is worth it.  It has about it the aura of an ancient Greek family cursed by fate, with discarded queens hissing curses from a barbed wire fence.  In that way, it is utterly timeless, as is the remark that all power corrupts. 

Plus ça change….

Henry VIII (1509-1547)

(c1613)

Home waters at last as in Yes, Minister – power, greed, corruption, deceit – and pure bullshit.  Above all , put not your trust in princes. 

The king has imposed a tax that makes him unpopular.  Naturally, he blames his first minister, and tells him to fix it.  In turn, the first minister, Wolsey, summons a flack: ‘let it be noised that through our intercession this relief comes.’  Sir Humphrey Appleby, eat your heart out.

It is a play of people falling from a great height, pushed by a randy British bulldog, not much of a rock to build a church on.  ‘Then in a moment, see how soon this mightiness meets misery.’  Given that the Armada and Guy Fawkes were well within living memory, Queen Katherine (Jane Lapotare as I saw it at Stratford and heard on Arkangel) is extraordinarily generously dealt with by Shakespeare, and the authors do not shy away from the issue of the impact of Harry’s sex drive on this world-shaking constitutional issue.  It is masked by high ceremony, that the English are so good at.  Buckingham feels ‘the long divorce of steel’, and the Queen and the Cardinal go their ways to God. 

Timothy West was made to play Cardinal Wolsey.  This ‘holy fox’ is the archetype of the modern politician.  He intrigues with the Vatican to prevent the king marrying Lady Anne, ‘a spleeny Lutheran’ – and he gets caught, and sacked.  When told of the appointment of Sir Thomas More: ‘That’s somewhat sudden.’  When told of the marriage of Anne: ‘There was the weight that pulled me down.’  In the end, he might resemble an up-market Paroles.  The kind Griffith, Katherine’s usher, said of him after his death: ‘His overthrow heaped happiness upon him/ For then and not until then, he felt himself.’  That is very Shakespeare – as is the remark about Cranmer – ‘He has strangled language /In his tears.’

Paul Jesson plays Henry VIII as a vicious manipulator, a man who fancies dark corners.  He reminds me of Churchill on Stalin – as I recall, it was to the effect that he smiled like a crocodile.  (I was told never to get between one and the water; with Putin, you steer clear of sixth floor windows.)  Lytton Strachey said that ‘the Defender of the Faith combined in a peculiar manner the unpleasant vices of meanness and brutality; no! he made the Reformation – he saved England – he was a demi-god.’  It would be left to a daughter to put a humane face on the House of God.

But Archbishop Cranmer survives in a great scene when the king puts the gutless plotters to shame.  It is wonderful theatre when the accused shows his accusers the royal seal.  It could be an ALP caucus in 1948 or a Liberal Party caucus in 2024.  And it is not kind to one of those leading the posse – Sir Thomas More – who would have to be axed before he could be ensainted.  (Which Rome was inclined to do for those killed by English kings.  Henry VIII was furious about their treatment of Becket.)

The king does not get his son, but the now Stuart audience gets a ritual salute to the birth of the daughter, Elizabeth Gloriana.  OK – this is propaganda, butto my mind, this play, although not intended as such, sits well as the epilogue of a great historical cycle.

And if you look back at this motley of kings, there is no stand-out.  This playwright was not there to glorify his kings – although his warmth to the realm is everywhere.  Rather, he is there to show us not just English kings, but the humanity in all of us.  And no one else has got even close.

I am forever reminded of that remark of Richard Burton, when he referred to the ‘staggering compassion’ of William Shakespeare.  The full comment in the diary was –

What chance combination of genes went to the making of that towering imagination, that brilliant gift of words, that staggering compassion, that understanding of all human frailty, that total absence of pomposity, that wit, that pun, that joy in words and the later agony.  It seems that he wrote everything worth writing and the rest of his fraternity have merely fugued on his million themes….

The novel as opera: dramatic truth

/ Geoffrey Gibson / Leave a comment

In the post yesterday, I suggested that you might want to treat a novel such as Crime and Punishment like an opera.  By chance, I picked up Les Miserables again, and my eye fell on the following by Peter Washington, who was the General Editor of the Everyman Library, and who I see wrote a book called Literary Theory and the End of English.  His Introduction deals with another problem I have had with great nineteenth century novels – the role of coincidence.  Mr Washington says this:

In European literature up to the later eighteenth century, coincidence is a synonym for the workings of Divine Grace in the world.  By Hugo’s time, few writers subscribed to this view, though we can still find it in novels by George Eliot where the language and symbolism of Christianity survive the metaphysical reality.  For most nineteenth century novelists and librettists, coincidence is simply a lazy way of jazzing up the plot or moving things forward, but in Hugo it seems to take on a genuine dramatic and philosophical value.  Like Dickens at his best, he uses coincidence to articulate a sense of order and inevitability amidst the terrifying flux of modern life.  Even as we recognise how unlikely it is that Valjean should encounter Javert in the street, or that Marius and the Thenardiers should settle in the same house, we accept the dramatic truth of events which are superficially unrealistic.  This is the essence of great opera, the deployment of preposterous artifice to express unavoidable reality.

That is put so well.  We do not go to great art for a snapshot of the physical world.  We are sick of it.  We go to get some insight into life, and some relief from the ordinariness and pain of so much of it.  And some of us at least get the greatest of such insight or relief from high theatre – in tragedy, opera, or however.  To be put off by some departure from surface reality in a novel or opera is like rejecting the Pieta of Michelangelo because the Madonna is obviously too young to be the mother of the executed Christ, or to reject El Greco’s painting of Christ’s Cleansing of the Temple because his legs are too long, the background is medieval Italy, and young tearaways do not look so rhythmically serene when they are signing their own death warrant.  Or, if you prefer, the coyote perpetually eluded by the Road Runner has unbelievable recuperative powers.

This notion of dramatic truth is terribly important – although insight or enlightenment may be safer terms than truth.  I know something of the French Revolution.  I have read the major works by French and other historians.  If someone asked me how to come to grips with these earth-moving events, I would point them in two directions.

Carlyle’s history is likely to give them far more insight than any other written work simply because of the almost biblical power of his language and the journalistic structure of the work.  The other source would be two great movies.  La nuit de Varennes gives you the spirit of the uprising as you follow the king and queen on their fated and failed escape that stopped at Varennes – you never see them, but you know their fate.  Danton is a film from a flawless play about the two leading figures in the Terror – and the guy playing Robespierre is up to Depardieu as Danton.  These two movies will give you better insight – dramatic insight – than a shelf of books.

As an example, very early in Les Miserables, a most unusual man, a saintly bishop, comes across a man despised because he had been a member of the National Convention that condemned Louis XVI.  (It starts in 1815.)  The dying revolutionary says ‘The French revolution is the consecration of humanity.’  The bishop murmurs ‘Yes, ’93!’ (the year of the Great Terror.)  ‘Ah! You are there! ’93!  I was expecting that.  A cloud had been forming for fifteen hundred years; at the end of fifteen centuries it burst.  You condemn the thunderbolt.’  The novelist, the artist, can open different windows into our minds.  Every now and then, as with Carlyle, you get a historian with the same capacity, and the result is ravishing, and you get a different kind of insight or enlightenment.

I shall come back to this, but below is an attempt I made to show the magic of Thomas Carlyle, The French Revolution.  I can give you an assurance.  It is hoary, but here absolute.  They don’t make them like that anymore.

Extract

THE FRENCH REVOLUTION

Thomas Carlyle (1837)

J M Dent & Co (Everyman), 1906; 2 volumes; burgundy cloth with gilt lettering; subsequently placed in split slip-case with marbled exteriors, and burgundy silk ribbon extractors.

The Art of Insurrection.  It was an art needed in these last singular times: an art for which the French nature, so full of vehemence, so free from depth, was perhaps of all other the fittest.

How would a French provincial official back then have gone about making an observation about King Louis XV in a ‘sleek official way’?  At the very start of this book, Carlyle tells us that a man called President Henault took occasion ‘in his sleek official way to make a philosophical reflection’ about Louis XV.  If you look up President Henault, you will find that he seems to have been just the sort of French official who might have acted that way.  So, here we have a writer who arrests us in his first line.  We know at once that he is writing this book as literature, or, as we might now say, journalism.  But the book is much more than journalism or literature – it is theatre, and very high theatre at that.

As you get into this book, you will get used to being affronted in both your prejudices and your senses.  It is like being on the Big Dipper, and you are frequently tempted to ask – just what was this guy on when he was getting off on all this stuff?

The writing is surging, vivacious, and elemental.  The author likes to see the world from on high, and to put us all on a little stage.  When poor Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette quit the Louvre under cover of night in a bid to escape from France, we get a costume drama.  ‘But where is the Lady that stood aside in gypsy hat, and touched the wheel-spoke with her badine?  O Reader, that Lady…was the Queen of France!…Flurried by the rattle and rencounter, she took the right hand, not the left; neither she nor her Courier knows Paris…They are off, quite wrong, over the Pont Royal and River; roaming disconsolate in the Rue de Bac; far from the Glass-coachman, who still waits.’

You too can ‘roam disconsolate’ in Paris.  It is simple to retrace those steps, and it must have been quite a stroll for the Queen of France.  Instead of heading up the Rue de L’Echelle, they went up Rue Saint Honore, and then ended up on the left Bank.  What turn might the Revolution have taken if the Queen had turned the other way?  Or if the Austrian Marie Antoinette had known as least something of the lay-out of Paris?  That the Louvre was then, as it is now, on the Right Bank?

The coach driven by the Swedish Count Fersen gets the royal family out of Paris ‘through the ambrosial night.  Sleeping Paris is now all on the right-hand side of him; silent except for some snoring hum…’  There is a change of carriage and then a German coachman thunders toward the East and the dawn.  ‘The Universe, O my brothers, is flinging wide its portals for the Levee of the GREAT HIGH KING.  Thou, poor King Louis, fares nevertheless, as mortals do, toward Orient lands of Hope; and the Tuileries with its Levees, and France and the Earth itself, is but a larger kind of doghutch, -occasionally going rabid.’  This is very typical – a surge of Old Testament, Shakespeare and Romantic poetry that invokes the heavens, and then falls calmly but flat in the gutter.

Louis is spotted by a tough old patriot called Drouet who recognized the nameless traveller from the portrait on the currency.  They are brought back from Varennes to the City of Light.  At Saint Antoine, the workers and the poor have a placard; ‘Whosoever insults Louis shall be caned; whosoever applauds him shall be hanged.’  This was the second time that the family was returned to Paris.  The first was when the fishwives brought them in from Versailles.  Carlyle had then said: ‘Poor Louis has two other Paris Processions to make; one ludicrous ignominious like this: the other not ludicrous nor ignominious, but serious, nay sublime.’  That will be his trip to the scaffold.

Carlyle would later become infatuated with heroes and the idea of the strong man, but even French historians struggle to find heroes in their Revolution.  Carlyle does his best for Mirabeau and Danton, but they were both on the take.  The bad guys are easy for him – Marat and Robespierre.  (Both Danton and Robespierre used the ‘de’ before it became lethally unfashionable.)  When someone moots a Republic after the flight to Varennes, we get: ‘“A Republic?” said the Seagreen, with one of his dry husky unsportful laughs, “what is that?”  O seagreen Incorruptible, thou shalt see!’  After Robespierre lies low in the general unrest, we get: ‘Understand this, however: that incorruptible Robespierre is not wanting, now when the brunt of battle is past; in a stealthy way the seagreen man sits there, his feline eyes excellent in the twilight…..How changed for Marat; lifted from his dark cellar into this luminous” peculiar tribune!”  All dogs have their day; even rabid dogs.’

The two references to rabid dogs are characteristic.  The son of a Calvinist stonemason in the lowlands understood and loathed the lynch mob, which France had descended into.  At the beginning of the chapter headed The Gods Are Athirst, Carlyle said that La Revolution was ‘the Madness that dwells in the hearts of men.’

And this Scots Calvinist rails against the weakness of mankind like a Hebrew prophet.  He knew, with Isaiah, that all nations before God are as nothing, and are counted before God as less than nothing, and as vanity; and that God brings the princes to nothing, and makes the judges of the earth vanity.  And he knew, with the author of the book of Ecclesiastes, that all is vanity, and that when it comes to evil, there is nothing new under the sun.

The lynch mob was at its peak in the Terror.  In some of the strongest passages in the book, Carlyle tells us how they made wigs (perrukes) taken from the heads of .guillotined women and breeches from human skins at the tannery at Meudon.  (The skin of men was superior and as good as chamois, but women’s skin was too soft to be of much use).  There is, we know, nothing new under the sun.

Hilaire Belloc thought that this writing was ‘bad’ and ‘all forced.’  That moral evasion may have been possible in 1906, when Belloc wrote it, but not after Gallipoli, Armenia, Auschwitz, Hiroshima, Rwanda, and Srebrenica.  We have now seen other nations, European nations, forfeit their right to be part of the family of man.  Carlyle is merely documenting one such case in one of the most civilized nations on earth.  Does history hold a more important lesson for us?  Has the story been told this well elsewhere?

So, we can put to one side all the later stuff about heroes.  (It is just as well that the book ends with the non-existing ‘whiff of grapeshot’ – Carlyle had a view of Napoleon that is not now widely shared on either side of the Channel.)  If nothing else, Carlyle believed that people make history.  The alternative, that history makes people, has to face the challenges that it is dogmatic, boring, dangerous, and bullshit.  You will see that problem in spades when we get to Tolstoy.

Carlyle wanted to tell a story and to make the dead come alive.  In his own terms, he wanted to ‘blow his living breath between dead lips’ and he believed that history ‘is the essence of innumerable biographies.’  He has done that for me six times, and I am about ready for my next fix.  The graph-makers can stick with their graphs.  The French Revolution is history writ very large, and it has never been writ more largely than here.

When Winston Churchill came to describe the heroism of the Finns in resisting Soviet Russia, he finished with a figure of speech that concluded with the words nay, sublime.  When a journalist on The Wall Street Journal came to describe how French bankers recently went long on Italian debt, she said that they had done so in their sleek official way.  There was no attribution in either case, and none was needed – it is a comfort for some that there may be a community of letters out there that we can all bank on.

And look out for the one who gives you a dry unsportful laugh, whether or not his feline eyes glitter in the twilight.