A Beautiful Tale of Love and Death

            We just got back from a quick trip to the opera—Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor at the Lyric Theater in Chicago.  Occasional extravagances of that sort are an unanticipated possibility of retirement, but even so we should hardly have indulged were the opera not a pretext for meeting up with Tamara, a very old and dear friend, recently widowed, who lives in Michigan.  We had been “young marrieds” together nearly a half century ago.  Charles and I spent several years together as junior faculty colleagues before the goddess Fortuna sent us our differing ways.  Death, the definitive separation, is of a different order.  Any sensitive person will probably have an empathetic sense of widowhood, but the long-married are likely to intuit it with a particular poignancy.

I recently read that divorce rates in America have been in noticeable decline, but even before I was able to register a silent, inward satisfaction at the news the next paragraph was upon me with its disquieting explanation.  The reason fewer people have been filing for divorce is that so few people have been getting married in the first place.  There is comparatively little difficulty in putting asunder those whom God has never joined.

“The iconic American family, with mom, dad and kids under one roof, is fading” says another statistical essay in a recent Economist.  “In every state the numbers of unmarried couples, childless households and single-person households are growing faster than those comprised of married people with children, finds the 2010 census. The latter accounted for 43% of households in 1950; they now account for just 20%. And the trend has a potent class dimension. Traditional marriage has evolved from a near-universal rite to a luxury for the educated and affluent.”

            A “luxury for the educated and affluent”—perhaps rather like flying trips to Chicago to attend the opera?  Our great literature has principally concerned itself with three things, two of which are God and marriage, frequently enough in combination.  English professors used to spend a lot of time worrying about “the decline of the novel.”  I think what they were really worrying about—either without realizing it or without being willing to realize it—was the decline of God.  The basis for the greatness of Moby Dick and Les Misérables and The Brothers Karamazov is actually the God-question.  Take that away, and artistic grandeur is an uphill struggle.

God’s literary disappearance still left us with marriage.   Marriage resolves complication, restores order.  The comic (meaning optimistic or happy) template of our literature is the so-called marriage plot: the “Knight’s Tale”, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, almost anything by Jane Austen.  The Marriage Plot, indeed, is the title of a novel, currently much admired, by Jeffrey Eugenides.  And it’s a really great title.  So it is more than a little alarming, simply in literary terms, to face the possibility that narrative fiction may soon lose marriage as well.  “Thus they split, and lived uncommitedly ever after.”  That seems a little lame.

Sir Walter Scott (1771-1832)

That is not the problem with Lucia di Lammermoor.  Donizetti’s opera (1835) is based in Sir Walter Scott’s novel, The Bride of Lammermoor (1819), and like most of Scott’s great tales this one was based in “real life”.  Our modern fetish for individual autonomy hardly prepares us for that old world (or most of our modern one outside the industrialized West) in which social relations are familial before they are personal.  If marriage can lead to comic fulfillment, the prohibition of marriage can lead to tragic destruction.  Hence according to the unfortunate comparative principle touched upon in my last post, Lucia di Lammermoor inevitably became “the Scottish Romeo and Juliet”.  

Gaetano Donizetti (1797-1848)

Yet things are worse even than that.  To forbid Lucy Ashton from marrying Mr. Right (Edgardo Ravenswood) would have been bad enough even without forcing her to marry Mr. Wrong (Arturo Bucklaw).  The sinister combination of oppressions means, in terms of a fine old essay on Scott’s novel by Andrew Lang, that Lucy is both Juliet and Ophelia: “for Lucy, in her soft and fragile beauty, her dutifulness to parental authority, and her final madness, corresponds to Ophelia with some closeness.”  Here are the ingredients for disaster, and on Saturday night in Chicago at least three geniuses—Scott, Donizetti, and the Alabaman soprano Susanna Phillips—made of it a disaster not soon to be forgotten.

Susanna Phillips as Lucia di Lammermoor

All art is determined by both its form and its content.  The very concept of bel canto opera is that the beauty of the singing matches the splendor of the dramaturgy and the moral dignity of the narrative content.  I had never before seen this opera, and I had read the Scott story so long ago that I could remember nothing more than the basic narrative situation.  But it hardly matters.  I have discovered that works of art are like Heraclitus’s river.  You never can step into the same river twice.  The intellectual and spiritual experiences of one’s seventies are not those of one’s fifties, let alone those of one’s twenties.  In some miraculous way the old is also new.  The word re-reading is thus inexact.

Still, in art as in life the complement of change is continuity.  The origins of our romance tradition are sometimes traced to the opening words of the medieval story of Tristan and Iseult: “My lords, would you hear a beautiful tale of love and death?...”  That might be called the bel canto of the eternal human experience.

“My lords, would you hear a beautiful tale of love and death?...”

De-Bard

 Roland Emmerich: a lean and hungry look, with a clear focus on the box office

My dear old Dad had a number of really corny jokes and riddles, apparently devised by and for the simple-minded, that he would pull out for all occasions.  This was unfortunate, since at the very best they worked on one occasion.   “My name’s Schmaltzmeller.  I sell Fuller brushes.  Anything you want to brush up on?”  Also: “I call my sweetie Oleo.  I haven’t any but her.”  That sort of thing.  Well, yesterday I had amazing success with one of these chestnuts.  I was walking along with a young lady when I injected into the conversation, all casual-like, one of my Dad’s favorites.  “Do you know who,” I asked her, “is buried in Grant’s Tomb?”

            Got her!  She fell for it!  Of course it is true that that the young lady, my granddaughter, is six years old, has had all her education (meaning pre-school and first-grade) in France, had never heard of Ulysses Grant, and did not know what a tomb was.  Still, my feeling of triumph was considerable.  If you wait long enough, and stoop low enough, you can find an audience for almost anything.

            I presume that is the principle animating the Hollywood “Shakespeare” film directed by Roland Emmerich and about to be unleashed upon us.  News of its dread approach has been crackling through the synapses of English Teacher listservs for the past month.  It is entitled Anonymous, and amid much foot-stomping, boob-baring, head-chopping, quill-flourishing, and fire-blazing (otherwise known in Hollywood as “Tudor history”) it dusts off the old one about Shakespeare not actually writing the plays of Shakespeare, which were in fact written by Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford.

THREE CONTESTANTS

Lord Verulam (Category: niftiest hat)

The Earl of Oxford (Category: itchiest chest; cf Donnelly, below)

William Shakespeare (Category: coolest earring)

            The pre-emptive concerns of English teachers have to do with the cinematic power to render their students’ simple ignorance invincible—what might be called the “Kennedy effect”.  By the late nineties most undergraduates I met at the supposedly elite university in which I taught were sure that President John Kennedy had been assassinated by CIA agents—Lee Harvey Oswald having been nothing more than a convenient patsy, though of course also the possible author of the works once attributed to Christopher Marlowe.  That was on account of a movie of Oliver Stone’s (JFK, 1991).

            America’s English teachers constitute an endangered species already.  They have the unenviable task of trying to coax the kids to get beyond Act One, Scene Two even in the CliffsNotes version.  They need to persuade them of the redeeming social content of technical terms like soliloquy, stichomythia, and dramatic irony.   It is an annoying distraction, to use one of our President’s favorite terms of disapprobation, to have to explain to them that Shakespeare wrote the plays of Shakespeare, as of course he indubitably did.           
            Though it has by now been around for quite a while, the idea that Shakespeare did not write Shakespeare is a comparatively recent aberration; it couldn’t appear until the last of Shakespeare’s close friends, business partners, and fellow players had all been dead for a couple of centuries.  When the theory did arrive, it must have been at least potentially pleasing to college professors.  It maintained that it was impossible that anyone could master the learning deployed in the plays without benefit of a college education, whereas it was a well-known fact that William Shakespeare was diploma-less. “Thou hadst small Latin and less Greek.”  Didn’t his old buddy, Ben Jonson, write that himself?

In fact he did—in a passage in which he compared Shakespeare, by no means unfavorably, to some other under-educated playwrights, such as Euripides, Æschylus, and Seneca, none of whom had college degrees, there being no colleges from which to get them back in the day.  Anyway, it must have been somebody else—Lodge, Greene, Chapman—yes, Chapman was the best bet, though even there one could occasionally identify the leaden hand of George Peele.

            Lord de Vere, though a late starter, is proving to be a strong finisher.  He could not append his name to Macbeth or The Merry Wives of Windsor because writing plays was, in the eyes of polite society, infra dignitatem, aristocratically speaking.  The hot candidate beginning in the later nineteenth century was Lord Verulam, the Viscount St. Albans, more familiarly known as Francis Bacon.  Bacon was not merely a much more appropriate author of Shakespeare’s plays than was Shakespeare, he was also immensely learned.  It takes erudition to write stuff like “The devil damn thee black, thou cream-faced loon ...”

            Better yet, since espionage was one of Bacon’s many things, he had developed an interest in codes and ciphers.  Under these circumstances it was certain that, although he published all his plays under the ridiculous name “Shakespeare,” he cunningly left coded messages within them revealing their true authorship.  The great expert in crypto-Shakespeareanism was Ignatius Donnelly, author of The Great Cryptogram (1888) in about a thousand pages, a sequel to his equally revolutionary Atlantis : the Antediluvian World (1882).  Donnelly was a Republican congressional representative from Minnesota—founder of a great tradition.  Few men achieve even one truly cockamamie idea in a career.  Donnelly was so prolific of them as to capture the title “Prince of Cranks,” so far without serious challenge.

 Ignatius Donnelly (R-Minnesota)

            The word is that if you can manage to backmask the sound track to Anonymous—play it backward at one-third speed—it offers other startling revelations.  It gives a definitive resolution to the stirred-or-shaken controversy, and it confirms the fact that Nine-Eleven was engineered by the Mossad.  Finally, after centuries, we learn why Hamlet hesitated.

 Shakespeare's breakfast

           

Getting to Carnegie Hall

“How do you get to Carnegie Hall?”  You know the old joke question; you know also the answer: “Practice, practice, practice!”  I have found that in practice, however, for the talentless the N, Q, and R lines are a better bet.   So it was the Subway Route that took me there on Monday night for the Carnegie Hall début of the new Salomé Chamber Orchestra.           

            Among the pleasures of association with a great university are the opportunities to bask in the reflected glory of distinguished colleagues and to enjoy the varied and infinitely surprising talents of brilliant young people.  During the last decade of my active service at Princeton the University Orchestra under the leadership of Michael Pratt--a teacher-musician of great talent--reached a very high level of excellence.  I became a loyal fan, and all the more so since several of my own students played in it over the years.  About the time I was retiring there were three siblings named Carpenter, each of genius quality, among the string players.  Their pleasingly ecumenical given names were Sean Avram, Lauren Sarah, and David Aaron.  I never taught any of them in class, but I made the slight acquaintance of the latter two simply by being a groupie.  On a trip to Philadelphia to hear David Carpenter play the Walton viola concerto with the Philharmonic there I also met the young musicians’ charming mother.

       Fiddlers three: Sean, David, and Lauren Carpenter    

A couple of subsequent pleasant experiences kept them in my mind; and my ears naturally pricked up when I heard that the three siblings, along with a group of other beautiful young people, were forming a chamber orchestra called Salomé, with David Aaron Carpenter as artistic director.  Naturally I showed up for opening night at Carnegie Hall.

When I got to the Weill Recital Room and examined the playbill, I noted with some interest that the program was divided more or less evenly between W. A. Mozart and Joseph Martin Kraus.  I should amend the narrative to say that I noticed this fact with interest and some alarm.  “Who,” I found myself blurting out to my neighbor, “Who is Kraus”?  My neighbor was an Asian-American woman of striking, mature beauty, and I immediately sensed that she was not particularly happy to be blurted out to by strange men.  But she answered quite civilly: “Kraus is the Finnish Mozart.  It says so right here.”  What the musical notes actually said, when I tardily read them, was this: “Very little is known about the music of Joseph Martin Kraus, a composer referred to as the ‘Swedish Mozart’ as he lived almost the exact same dates as his contemporary.”

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756-1791) and Joseph Martin Kraus (1756-1792)

 Ordinarily I don’t like this mode (“the gorgonzola of wines,” “the Ghengis Kahn of Shakespeare Scholars”) of comparison, because one is never sure what is actually meant.  And it can be worse.  Recently someone assured me with a straight face that “the Alfa Romeo is the Rolls Royce of cars”.   If you insist on using such comparisons, they should be reversible, and they rarely are.  I attended a small liberal arts college in Tennessee, Sewanee.  It was a good place, but its aspirations to excellence had seduced its more enthusiastic admirers to an uncautious bumper-sticker: “Sewanee: the Harvard of the South.”  Then, over the years, I began to have commerce with people at or associated with Harvard University.  Great was my disappointment to discover that not a single one of them thought of that institution as “the Sewanee of the North”.  Even the movie Amadeus, which did everything in its power to turn Mozart into a twit, stopped short of turning him into “the Austrian Joseph Martin Kraus”.

Nonetheless, as interpreted through the viola of David Carpenter, Kraus really is a Scandinavian Mozart.  (Actually, he was a German, but let it pass.)  And he is unlikely to remain so obscure in the future.  Somehow the Salomé came up with two very arresting pieces (a concerto for viola, cello, and orchestra and another simply for viola and orchestra) that so far as anyone knows had never before been played.  So not merely was I privileged to be present at the début of an exciting new musical ensemble, I was hearing the world premiere performances of two major works by Joseph Martin Kraus, aka the Swedish Mozart!

Saint Augustine found the emotional experience of listening to music so intense and passionate as to be morally hazardous.  I vaguely understand his concern.  The experience of the listener is probably always an unstable compound wrought of the objective laws of physics and private, subjective associations.  For such private and subjective reasons the viola solo, especially in its higher ranges, had for me come to be plangent, echoing with loss and regret.  Salomé and Kraus between them may have rescued me.

One most encouraging feature of the evening was the age and enthusiasm of the audience.  It was mainly composed of young people.  I suppose many of them were personal friends of the players, come out to lend support and encouragement for such a worthy initiative.  But the audience also clearly responded to a kind of “mission statement” on the group’s website: “New York City compels young adults to be at once adaptable, optimistic, multi-faceted and resourceful. At Salomé, we feel that the very survival and evolution of classical music within such a fast-paced, cosmopolitan environment requires a dynamic balance of novelty, tradition, and hard work.”  The evening’s final (pre-encore) piece was “Primavera Porteño” by Astor Piazzolla, the Monarch of Tango.  It was brilliant even without—dare I say especially without—the accordion!  Sort of like this-- only better yet.

David Aaron Carpenter in Artistic Director Mode

The Class War

We must deny before God and man that one’s attitude towards men may be determined solely by considering them as representatives of this or that class….Every man is made in the image of God, however indistinct that image may become, and every man is called to eternal life; in the face of these truths, all differentiation by class, all political passion, all the superfluities that social life piles daily on the human soul are trivial and unavailing.                 

Nicholas Berdyaev, Christianity and Class War (1931)

There is in contemporary America a widely shared perception that a large and growing disparity in material well being among our citizens is problematic from both the social and the moral points of view.  I confess that I share this perception. I regard the situation as serious and dangerous.  On another occasion I might attempt to address its substance directly.  It is conceivable that an expertise in medieval Franciscan thought, in which the biblical account of Dives and Pauper (see Luke xii) received penetrating analysis, might allow me to say something useful--but only barely conceivable.  What this essay is about is class war.

 Lazarus (Pauper) at the Door of Dives   Heinrich Aldegrever, 1552

            President Obama has called for increased tax rates for rich people (a vaguely defined group variously denominated as “the most fortunate among us,” “millionaires and billionaires,” “job creators,” “small businessmen,” and “Warren Buffet”).  Several Republican politicians immediately indicted this proposal as class warfare.  The President himself just as quickly denied the charge, but since then other Democrats have opined that a little class warfare is just what we need.  In informal remarks innocent of any serious pretensions to coherence, former Speaker Nancy Pelosi seems to suggest that the famous phrase “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” was a salvo in an early skirmish of the class war.  Less equivocal is the essay entitled “Obama, Don’t Run from Class War by Howell Raines, former Numero Uno at the New York Times.  I have seen several others in a similar vein.

To be sure Raines stresses a concept of “non-violent” or metaphoric class war.  I still protest.  A professor of English can hardly adopt a general hostility toward metaphor, but there are some metaphors that have been ruined by being made literal, just as there are literal realities that have been ruined in becoming metaphoric.  If you look up the word holocaust in an old reference work you will see that it is the English form of the biblical Greek term for the “burnt offerings” that played such an important role in early Jewish sacrificial worship.  It was a theological concept.  Perhaps one in a hundred people who talk about the Holocaust today knows that fact; but it doesn’t matter, for what holocaust is is what Auschwitz made it.  To use the word in its old sense would be pedantic and trivial.

Having spent a certain amount of time studying twentieth-century Communism, I have a similar attitude to the phrase class war.  The phrase made its serious claim on the modern consciousness through Karl Marx. Marx believed in the “class war,” though the word famously used in the first sentence of the Communist manifesto was “struggle” (Kampf), which is a little different from war (Krieg).  “The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.”

I must pause to say that I am no Marx-basher.  A lot more of the people who talk about Marx flippantly would do well to read some actual  Marx.  Much of it is tough slogging, but no fair reader will fail to find even in the leaden pages a profound and original thinker animated by an attractive humanistic spirit.  I want to adopt the attitude of the great Russian Orthodox philosopher Berdyaev, from whom I took the epigraph for this post.  The dedication of Christianity and Class War reads as follows: “I dedicate this book to the memory of KARL MARX who was the social master of my youth and whose opponent in ideas I have now become.”  Marx is no more responsible for all things done in his name or that of his ism than Freud is personally responsible for Ernest Jones’s interpretation of Hamlet or Jesus Christ is responsible for the Spanish Inquisition.

Nicholas Berdyaev (1874-1948)

Marx was a social analyst, not a revolutionary practitioner of political power, and it was left to later Communists in power like Lenin, Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot to define what “class war” meant in a concrete sense.  What it meant is so appalling that the words should not be used in a casual way.  In statistical terms class war has meant something like the following (taken from the Black Book of Communism, p. 4):

            The Soviet Union, 20 million dead

            China, 65 million dead

            Cambodia, 2 million dead

            North Korea, a million dead

            Vietnam, a million dead…

and more.

            Class war means that it is right and necessary to kill a very great many people.  I suppose that Marxism was never more prestigious among western intellectuals than in the 1930s, which was the decade of the Spanish Civil War, regarded by most intellectuals as a nearly pure instance of good (the Spanish Republic and its allies) versus evil (Franco and his Nationalist insurgents, with their allies.)  The following events from the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939) are well-documented.  Nationalist soldiers upon battling their way into a largish village against stiff resistance gathered all the male population of the place into the town square.  A committee of officers then examined the hands of all the men who had been rounded up.  Those with heavily calloused palms were removed for immediate execution, the assumption being that as manual workers they must be Communists or Communist supporters.  In other places where the Republican forces and their international allies were for the moment victorious, all men (and sometimes women) in religious garb were shot.  In at least one instance anyone wearing a religious medal was shot.  Here the assumption was that such people were necessarily “class enemies”.

            By all means let us have vigorous political debate in this country.  Let us debate our absurd tax code and even, if we have the stomach for it, reform it.  Let us engage our “enemies in ideas,” to use Berdyaev’s term; but, please, leave the class war out of it.

 Class War: some collateral damage in Spain