Falling out of love with Flaubert

I have spent two days reading Flaubert’s Parrot.

Why on earth, one might well ask. Under ordinary circumstances – with other books present and vying for my interest – I wouldn’t; the first chapter seemed enough: it was uninspired; the reflections on the significance of the parrot seemed to me dull regurgitations. I couldn’t see how they were any interest; in any way worth thinking, let alone printing. The whole thing seemed to me a forced book (‘publish or perish’): written because the author had a need to publish something; not because he actually had anything to say.

But I was in the sticks, away from books, in a beautiful garden at the foot of a mountain, and this solitary book just sort of slipped into my hand. The first chapter was lousy, but it was a book, and it was about Flaubert; and so I persisted.

Which perhaps I shouldn’t have, since as a result of all this reading I have lost all my former sympathy for Flaubert.

While I was never fond of his Education, or Madame, or Simple Heart (however well written, they are books about people in whom I could not stir in myself the least interest), I have liked his Salammbo a great deal; and was delighted to learn of Flaubert’s attitudes to France and – Egypt. He had hated France, thought it utterly disgusting and stupid; and he delighted in Egypt – in part for its exoticism; but in the main for it not being France; just the opposite of French professors and of Polish poster artists.

People, I suppose, fall in two categories: those who like the familiar and those who rebel against it. Neither is a rational attitude (contra Flaubert, I am sure France is not worse than Egypt); but I can’t help feeling sympathy for the latter: it seems to me more individualistic and independent-minded, more pregnant with possibilities, more – interesting. After all, nothing interesting ever arises out of complacency. I was made in my mother’s womb to be this second sort; and so was Flaubert, it seemed. I liked him for it.

I even liked his ambition to be like a bear: a bear is a solitary animal, hates all around him, and bites off (and eats) the hand that attempts to feed him. I imagined him ripping to shreds French professors and Polish poster designers. I imagined him as a noble bear, of the sort Barnes describes in the sole line of magical poetry to be encountered in the whole book:

[Polar bears] travel great distanced carried along on floating pack ice. One winter in the last century twelve great white bears got as far south as Iceland by this method; imagine them riding down on their melting thrones to make a terrifying, godlike landfall.

But then part III of the chapter entitled 'Chronology', which consists entirely of quotations of Flaubert, has changed that view. Flaubert was not really a bear; he was a boor; and there is a substantial difference: bears may be ruthless but they are not striving to be rude. Rudeness is the weapon not of the powerful (bears), but of the weak (magpies, monkeys); and it is only employed by them when they know that they can deploy it with impunity.

Perhaps the overwhelming impression of offensive vulgarity arising from the selection of quotations is more due to Barnes than Flaubert; perhaps Barnes has selected, and thereby amplified, for us the choicest of Flaubert’s vulgarisms; what makes Barnes revel in them, I neither know nor care (it is unlikely I will read another word by him); but the truth is these vulgarisms have emanated from Flaubert’s mouth or pen. And I dislike him for it.

Zobenigo’s attitude to humanity is no less radical than Flaubert’s: I too have the sensation that I am drowning in stupidity; and I too seek solitude and avoid company as a result. But I think – or at least hope – that I express these foul attitudes in ways which are not vulgar. The views are disagreeable; what need is there to dress them in disagreeable language?

Perhaps it was Flaubert’s rebelliousness which led him to his incessant vulgarisms; in his day vulgarity was not part of the general public discourse; perhaps he therefore felt iconoclastic every time he pronounced words like ‘shit’ or ‘syphilis’ (I imagine he pronounced them slowly and clearly, rolling them with relish in his mouth). It is perhaps also a sign of rebellion on my part that, in an age of vulgar public discourse, I assiduously strive not to be vulgar. But there is more to it than that: I can’t help feeling that I am offended by vulgarity per se, not only per rebellion; and I suspect that there is less to Flaubert’s vulgar discourse than meets the eye.

Take his rebellion: yes, he did strive to learn Arabic while in Egypt; and yes, he did adopt Arabic dress when at home; but all his declared preference for things Egyptian aside, he did return, after a relatively short stay in Cairo, to the dull and boring and stupid Rouen, which he never ceased to curse roundly, to live his entire life there and die. His avowed orientalism was therefore just like Said says – skin deep: with the one exception of his wonderful Salammbo, in which he did try to escape to another, better world, his books were all about the stupid, boring and dull Frenchmen of Normandy and Paris, minutely analyzed in their small, shallow, empty lives. One can’t help feeling, upon reflection, that Flaubert was either perverse – a man enjoying treading in the disgusting feces which he denounces roundly all the while; or else the whole thing was a pretense. And perhaps it was. Why disbelieve him when he says that Madame Bovary, c’est moi? If Flaubert had really hated Norman stupidity, why would he have spent seven years writing about it? And then another seven? And then another?

George Sand, who knew him well, disbelieved his bearish pretense. To her he seemed as ‘gentle as a lamb’; and the two of them ‘chattered as magpies’. A magpie: there is a better simile for Flaubert than ‘bear’: bears, because they do not speak, are worth listening to when they at last do; magpies on the other hand – well, it’s all stuff and nonsense, even when they claim to be bears.

*

Two quotations from Flaubert worth mentioning (after they have been purged of their unfortunate vulgarity):

1872:

‘Never have things of the spirit counted for so little. Never has hatred for all things great been so manifest – disdain for beauty, execration of literature.’

This seems at first to be as true now as it was then. Perhaps others have felt (and maybe even written) the same in 1772 and 1672 and 1572. I suppose the conclusion is that things of the spirit have always counted for little.

On the other hand, it seems worth asking: what did Flaubert consider a thing of the spirit? Madame Bovary?

And

1857:

“Books (…) are made like pyramids. There is some long pondered plan, and then some great blocks of stone are placed one upon the other, and it’s back-breaking, sweaty, time-consuming work. And all to no purpose! It just stands like that in the desert! Jackals piss on it, and the bourgeois clamber to the top of it”.

A reflection rarely heard by those who write. What is the purpose of a book? One wishes Barnes had asked himself that before he set out on Flaubert’s Parrot.

Catcher in the keyboard sonatas

Since the K. 475/K. 457 experience I have hungered to understand more about the relationships between the music of Mozart and Beethoven; and have set out on a listening campaign of the first 8 Beethoven sonatas.

Why the first eight?

Beethoven idolized Mozart and his greatest ambition as a young man, unrealized, sadly, due to Mozart’ premature death, was to be his student; it was in order to rub off on himself some of Mozart’s magical wig powder that he enrolled to study under Haydn. (Haydn and Mozart had had a long and close musical association). It is said that Haydn commented on the Prestissimo of his sonata number one, partly written in Bonn before his arrival in Vienna, that it showed the young fellow had talent but also – a lot to learn. (Interestingly, and out of character with his later self, Beethoven appeared to agree eagerly). There are figures in the Prestissimo which remind one of K. 475/K. 457; but the whole mood seems derivative of K. 475/K. 457. Perhaps this is all the sheet music of Mozart’s Beethoven was able to get in Bonn?

The first eight sonatas because the Pathetique, which seems to sound the most like K. 475/K. 457, is Number Eight. (It is also in the same key of C-Minor).

Having first tried the eight by Glenn Gould, I soon gave up; the man butchers the music; sometimes with quite open derision. Subsequently to the recording, Gould went on record on numerous occasions about his dislike for Beethoven; though who knows the real truth: there is an extremely beautiful recording by him of Beethoven’s 3^rd piano concerto; and another one of Beethoven symphonies in Liszt’s transcription; so perhaps what happened was this: he had been compelled by the record company to record the complete Beethoven piano sonatas and struck back by sabotaging them. We shall never know the truth; but sabotage them he did.

I passed over the recordings of Barenboim (please), Ashkenazy (hell no), and settled for Badura Skoda (I remembered some very old and very nice Mozart piano concerti by him). The results of the listening were a bit of a disappointment: the music tired me; it seemed too much more and more of the same: a man comes out on stage, takes a bow, then shakes and shoves the piano left, right and center, then takes a bow and leaves; then comes back for more of the same. I didn’t seem to detect much nuanced content.

Who knows whose fault it is – Beethoven’s; Skoda’s; or his tinny piano forte’s. (Pianists develop special feelings for their instruments; Gould’s attachment to his 318 was legendary; Landowska built her own harpsichord. Often the special liking is understandable: just listen to Schiff’s favorite instrument; but why Skoda should love his isn’t clear to me. Perhaps it sounds better to the ear of the man who plays it; after all the pianist not only hears but also feels his instrument. (There are other such unaccountable loves – Hogwood has had a special love for his clavichord; which sounded like – pardon the expression – jingle bells on laughing gas).

So, in order to keep going, I must keep looking. Tomorrow I shall listen to Richard Goode’s first eight. (With a name like that a man who is not a great gogo dancer is surely a superb pianist). But what I shall have to do is get either the Gilels or the Pollini.

While reading around on the subject, I learned that all of these men – Mozart, Beethoven, Haydn – thought that the true father of the keyboard sonata was… CPE Bach; now there is a name one rarely hears (though more often of late). In fact, some of the recent recordings by Spanyi were world premieres! I got them now and am slowly working my way through them, with delectation. (Another soloist with an inexplicable love for his instrument – with pretty but very small sound – its picture seems to feature on the cover of all his CDs!) His recording of CPE’s keyboard concertos may be more pleasant because there his instrument – it sounds like harp at times – is supported by a fulsome, rich, polished orchestra.

And I have also got Christopher Hintherhuber short selection: you can sample it (and buy in MP3 format) here.

Gramophone writes about him: “Christopher Hinterhuber is a rising Austrian pianist who…..[plays] with a bold brightness which never descends into harshness or percussiveness. Slower sections, too, find him able to tease textures out with intelligence and skill. This is fine playing.” Gramophone.”

And it is all true.

PS

I got hold of the Gilels; and he does play them well; and on a very beautiful, sonorous instrument. Unlike Gould, he clearly does make an effort; but even he can’t make a silk purse out early Beethoven. The tiresome pushiness of the composer, who like a drunk has button-holed you in the market and won’t stop talking at you, would be an asset perhaps if what he had to say was not just more and more of the same. Gilels’ wonderful playing makes the shallowness of the psychology of Beethoven’s first eight all the more glaring: he is like a fellow going on and on about his sexual frustration.

Please. Time to wash my ears. Perhaps with Francois Chaplin’s CPE; which is also very good.

Je m'apelle Elisabeth

Jean-Pierre Ameris’ Je m’apelle Elisabeth has many of the best traits of French cinema.

For one, it is a movie about childhood, a French specialty. I do not know why the French should be so especially good at making films about children, but they are. They make films about how the world seems to children – mysterious, frightening and wonderful, about the difficult and confusing learning process, about the inner states of the little people still learning how and what to feel and think. Such as the way half opened doors scare them. Film makers of other nations do not seem to notice what a rich vein of material this is.

French films about children show a very nuanced, insightful, and empathic view of children which is entirely free of any preachiness. The psychology of French films about children is also very rich because, like in most serious French cinema, so much is left unsaid: dialogues are sparse, there is much silence; the films show rather than explain, allowing the viewers to make their own guesses as to what is going on inside. This is by far the preferred method: after all, no one ever knows what is really going on inside; we are all mostly groping to understand our own selves; how could we presume to explain someone else? Far better to show – and let the viewer make his own guesses.

Like many French films, Je m’apelle Elisabeth is also extremely beautiful visually; I don’t know why the colors of French films should be so beautiful; after all, the technology is the same as that used in California. Yet, the colors are not the same; whether this is a function of the climate or of the culture, I do not know. And there is a lot of really beautiful photography: wind-tussled trees bathed in silver moonlight seen through the dark frame of the window; walkers in the frame of trees.

And then there is the usual French cinema trick: the setting. The heroes of French films invariably reside in some really fantastic real estate: huge beautiful homes with furniture to kill for and glassed doors opening onto lush gardens. The French have an advantage over the Americans here.

And the typical French ending: so this is how things stand, now, what shall we do with it? French films do not typically offer a resolution, perhaps in recognition of the fact that there is never in life an ever after, only more of the same; when a French film does appear to offer a resolution, this often is nuanced – some might say muddled – a kind of compromise, or resignation, or acceptance; a very Old World kind of message.

Which is perhaps the reason why I like French films: they aren’t American.

More poetry

The same Ziolkowski:

In the idyllic poem "Hours in the garden" (1936), which he wrote during the composition of the novel, Hesse speaks of "a game of thoughts called the glass bead game" that he practiced while burning leaves in the garden. As the ashes filter through the grate, he says, "I hear music and see men of the past and future. I see wise men and poets and scholars and artists harmoniously building the hundred-gated cathedral of mind."

And thus I come to be moved by a poem I do not know, cannot find anywhere here, can't google, and will probably not find for years. Yet, I find something irresistibly beautiful about the contrasting images: dried up leaves burning, rising up in blue smoke, their ashes filtering through a grate; while the mind rolls shiny glass beads of thoughts.

And I sincerely hope that the poem, when I at last find it, won't be like many other literary works to which I have been led by later commentary or review and which turn out less interesting than the commentary was to begin with.

Associating freely

Remembering the tapestry at the Spirito Santo, I decided to look for the Durer rhino today (the one from the Manoeline embassy); and while looking it up, remembered this poem:

The broad-backed hippopotamus
Rests on his belly in the mud;
Although he seems so firm to us
He is merely flesh and blood.

Flesh-and-blood is weak and frail,
Susceptible to nervous shock;
While the True Church can never fail
For it is based upon a rock.

The hippo's feeble steps may err
In compassing material ends,
While the True Church need never stir
To gather in its dividends.

The 'potamus can never reach
The mango on the mango-tree;
But fruits of pomegranate and peach
Refresh the Church from over sea.

At mating time the hippo's voice
Betrays inflexions hoarse and odd,
But every week we hear rejoice
The Church, at being one with God.

The hippopotamus's day
Is passed in sleep; at night he hunts;
God works in a mysterious way --
The Church can sleep and feed at once.

I saw the 'potamus take wing
Ascending from the damp savannas,
And quiring angels round him sing
The praise of God, in loud hosannas.

Blood of the Lamb shall wash him clean
And him shall heavenly arms enfold,
Among the saints he shall be seen
Performing on a harp of gold.

He shall be washed as white as snow,
By all the martyr'd virgins kist,
While the True Church remains below
Wrapt in the old miasmal mist.

Which is of course wrong: this is a hippo, that a rhino. A hippo feels more cuddly (though it is a vicious beast in fact).

A hippo playing a harp, rising into heaven surrounded by singing angels reminded me that on the outside of the Chartres cathedral, the wall to the right of the front entrance, which is probably the Southern Wall (if, like others, the cathedral also faces East) there is a one of those Gothic cartoons: an especially goofy looking man-sized donkey playing a mandolin and -- er -- singing. A striking figure, it has even given a name to a tavern in front of it; yet, I couldn't find its photo on the internet. I can't believe no one thought to photograph it. Yet, maybe it is true: the internauti seem more interested in the labyrinth; how very mathematico-computational of them. (Not many admirers of the Hippopotamus poem among them, I guess).

Another cute donkey in stone is in the courtyard of the Pitti in Florence: under the statue of Hercules at rest there is a memorial tablet of a donkey -- the beast who had worked and died at the site. It was dedicated by the thankful stone masons whose labor it had eased. (Did they call him, jokingly, Hercules?)

Donkeys and Hippos, Chartres and TS Eliot. A glass bead game?

The viewfinder

I stumbled upon this while rummaging in some old Albertini recordings; the picture caught me off balance: an iron hand reached into my chest and squeezed my heart for an instant. The shadow on the cheek of the dying woman; the white pearl against her pink neck; her open mouth gasping for air; the skin on the hands, transparent like fish gulls. I couldn't stop gazing.

I kept thinking that I had seen it of course; the technique was unmistakable: Italian, mid 1600's. The scene must have been the death of Cleopatra (what else). For a long while I thought this may have been something by Lavinia Fontana and kept flipping through her catalogues, to no use. I also googled images of Cleopatra and finally stumbled upon it. Here:


The painter is Guido Cagnacci. The painting is 153 x 168,5 cm, dated to 1659, and hangs in Kunsthistorisches in Vienna.

The contrast between the two pictures -- the fragment and the whole -- could not be greater. It is interesting how the choice of what one shows, what one places in his viewfinder so to speak, makes for a totally different picture. I can't help feeling that the designer of the CD who had decided what bit of the picture to cut -- and how -- was much more successful at composition than Guido who had gone to all the trouble to paint the thing.

Of course, the cut fragment shows us the best part of the picture -- skips the less than successful crying maids for example; but more importantly, the magnification of the fragment shows us more technical detail -- the texture of the canvass, the near-transparent clarity of the skin of the girls; it shows us more of the pleasure of seeing a picture, which is as much a physical object as it is a bunch of color patches and therefore rarely done justice to by reproduction.

I wonder whether Russell, who dedicates so much time to color patches in his philosophy of perception, has ever looked closely at a painting. But I do not wonder at all whether Walter Benjamin has looked closely at paintings: Work of art in the age of reproduction makes it clear he didn't.

Resposible, thoughtful dropping out

Ziolkowski writes in his preface to the 1989 edition of The Glass Bead Game that the book is about leaving the ivory tower and taking up one’s duties with respect to his society. Ziolkowski’s being in favor of such a solution is very commendable for an academic; if not exactly unusual: academics often worry about being cut off from the world, and therefore irrelevant.

But his premise that

The Glass Bead Game makes it clear that Hesse advocates thoughtful commitment over self-indulgent solipsism, responsible action over mindless revolt

seems a little far fetched; perhaps an instance of the writer being carried away by his own rhetorical flourish. After all, it’s hard to see anything in the book as a matter of a mindless revolt; one should probably say that the Glass Bead Game represents rather a thoughtful retirement from the world.

But then – does it? The Glass Bead Game is a society with its own (pretty strict) rules. If joining this society represents some kind of dropping out from the society at large, it certainly is not a case of dropping out of society per se. One simply exchanges his duties with respect to the broader society for those with respect to the smaller one. There is no similarity at all between the Glass Bead Players and the Egyptian anchorites – mysanthropes dwelling in abandoned tombs in the desert -- the absolute drop outs par excellence.

“Dropping out” was a key word in a certain very important letter which I received from a friend many years ago. In it, he advocated dropping out as a moral duty. (Unsurprisingly, he himself promptly thereafter disappeared). What the friend wrote was: if our actions as a society are damaging to the planet, to our traditional way of living, to our values, to us as individuals, toour ability to attain happiness, then the only decent thing one can do is refuse to participate. It would be difficult to call that solipsism, even if it is, at bottom, self indulgent.

Listening to K. 475

which I have not heard in some time (like 15 years) I keep thinking this is really Beethoven (whose sonatas I have also not heard in 15 years perhaps; from this distance of time they seem to blend into each other seamlessly). Really, K. 475 feels like the Apasionata (only better of course): the same rhetorical tricks, same sort of abrupt, unfriendly melodies, rising disquieting arpeggios in the left hand, the same sort of abrupt ending without a coda.

The work is practically romantic; I can't get it through my head the fantasia predates the utterly classical Sonata Facile. Wow.

And I wonder: what kind of music would Mozart have composed had he lived -- like Haydn, or Strauss -- forever (say, till 1830s or 40s)? There really is a very good chance that he would have invented -- and by-passed -- atonality in his early 50's. And what would he have made of the Prokof 6 - 7 - 8 cycle? I can't resist the idea that he would have liked this stuff.

Really, Mozart sitting in on a Richter's premiere of Prokof's 8th -- what a fantastic idea. I am amazed no one had written this as a radio play.

Better yet, Mozart premiering them himself. A prima vista, of course.

PS

Probably what happened was that Beethoven got hold of 475/457 in Bonn; and finding that it resonated with him in a particular way, ran away with it. His entire piano oeuvre, indeed, perhaps all of his later work, grows out of it. It was all very wonderful, of course, but one does wish he had got hold of, and ran away with, the Sonata Facile, instead.

Sickness and cure

Prokof's piano sonatas 6 - 8 can perhaps be seen as a cycle of mental disease and treatment. The 6th is absolutely mad; a kind of Thai raw salad, with lemon grass, and mouse shit peppers, and all those inedible things added for color; the sort you bite and then the thing -- it bites you right back; but with shards of ground glass added for extra bite. The music bites you in the ears, then divides and clashes against itself, throws itself against the bars of its cage, raw and bleeding. It sounds like Aleksander Wat's California diary -- painful, heavy, impenetrable like a misbaked cake diary of madness. (Wat had been tortured in the USSR). From seventh on things ease off; the eighth ends on a quite (if not entirely) healthy note.

And no one plays them better than Richter.

Richter: the relationship between size and softness

What surprises most about Svatoslav Richter's playing is the delicacy of his pianissimi; not that his fortissimi lack oomph -- they don't; they are among the best, most oomphatic oomphs out there. But his ability to go from oomph to soft and sensitive without becoming soppy or saccharine astounds. Perhaps it has to do with his size: only large men with shoulders like barns and hands the size of millstones can afford to be genuinely sweet and soft. After all, their physical power -- their ability to do damage if push come to shove -- is never in doubt. It is the little guys, the less than average height, who tend to overdo the testosterone and aggression; and who cannot do soft, and will not do soft for the life of them.

(In any case, Richter's argument that he merely plays come scritto is no help in trying to unravel the mystery of his greatness. Most people imagine they play come scritto and the results vary, to say the least).

Not spending much time in intimate conversations

Not spending much time in intimate conversations with men -- men, I hear aren't good at it; but mainly I am not much interested in the internal states of men -- I come to some realizations late; like the one that men talking to each other about their significant others like to preface certain claims with "women...". For instance, "women illocute" or "women are obsessive about cleanliness", and such like. Usually the cognitive value of the claim is zero: having known a few women in my life I know that while some women might be like this (or that), many others are just the opposite. Generally speaking, men are ignorant about women; statistics say that an average man has 12 women in his life; these statistics probably lie (how can an average man have 12 women while an average woman has 5 men?); but even if they do not, most of these encounters don't seem to come with a lot of psychological insight. So men are left with the impression that all women are like the one they know. Just like my Asian friends think all of my countrymen are slim, balding, six-foot-eights with a talent for Asian languages.

How it sounds

Listening to a friend conduct his own composition -- a fifty piece orchestra -- I was wondering how it struck him: did it sound the way he had conceived it would? Better? Worse? Was he surprised by some things? Like, for example, how some things drown out each other and are totally lost? When composing again, would he now compose differently?

Now, Charles Rosen (The Classical Style) writes that orchestras did not use to rehearse in the classical times. (Haydn once suggested in a letter that as for the Paris symphonies at least one rehearsal would be nice to have, please). And Braunbehrens (Mozart in Vienna) adds that all musicians were by and large amateurs -- assorted footmen, bellhops, and shoeshines who got a few florins extra a month for playing the clarinet in His Lordships' orchestra (if his lordship had such a fancy).

We by comparison have professional orchestras which rehearse a great deal. It is therefore entirely possible that no classical (or baroque) composer ever heard any of his works as well performed as they happen to be from time to time these days (sometimes happen to be, since so many miss the mark); and that none of them ever knew how good they could sound.

Did it -- lack of experience with a half-decent orchestra -- limit their potential? Had Beethoven -- or Mozart -- had a symphonic orchestra of his own -- like Mahler -- to command, would he -- they -- have composed differently? Better?

The Zobenigo seal of good sawing

There is a tsunami of lousy recordings of everything; and more everyday. Not only do the likes of Ashkenazy and Koopman insist on recording everything; but, amazingly, they have their fans. (Makes you wonder what the fans hear -- like the crowd who not only pays to hear, but can actually sit through Sting's Dowland; incredible). Yet, few can interpret a work in a way that makes it worth listening to.

To help cut through the garbage, here is Zobenigo’s seal of worthy wood sawing:

for Josquin’s Missa Pangue Lingua by Tallis Scholars for its unalloyed, total, crystalline beauty; for Hilliard Ensemble’s Periton for the liquid, oceanic rhythm (also detectable in their recording of Josquin’s Homme Arme masses), whose swaying eases one’s soul so thoroughly that one forgets completely just how ugly Hilliard’s treble is; (by comparison Huelgas’s recordings of the same music are damned dull); for Preucil, Finkel and Wu Han’s Haydn Trio H. XV 18, perhaps the first Haydn trio ever played really extraordinarily well (you never knew how interesting Haydn actually was); for Stern, Istomin and Rose playing Beethoven Trios while alternating between extraordinary brio and extraordinary sensitivity, all in the right moments -- one should think they have been playing together a century (compare them to Perlman and Ashkenazy's version of the same -- yuck); especially for their rendition of Op. 1 No. 3 (wow); for Harnoncourt’s Concertus Musicus Wien for Telemann’s Double Concerti (as far as I know, Harnoncourt has never recorded anything badly; he needs no seal from me); for Collegium Musicum for Albinoni’s Concerti a Cinque; and for Eugen Jochem + Berliner for Haydn's London symphonies (wow, again).

But the greatest discovery of the last month is Richter and Oistrakh's 1972 performance of Prokof's 1st violin sonata, which starts with an incredible scratchy violin, rasping like an angry bee on a wire mesh, a sound that even the very excellent Gidon Kremer cannot reproduce, over a positively spell-binding carefree piano ground base of the sort Martha Argerich could not bear to hear on a dreamy day, let alone play. (Does Martha have dreamy days? And interesting question. She must. Yet, this is hard to imagine).

Richter and Oistrakh had been playing together for 30 years; and that particular piece god-knows how many times; moreover, they both knew Prokof personally with his difficult personality and unstable moods (do you sometimes wake up feeling like this?) (Say, said David to Svatoslav, shall we play it the way Prokof sounds when he raves about Hollywood capitalists over vodka and pickles?); and had often been asked by him to give world premieres of his various works. This is not only an amazing technical virtuosity, but also a depth of understanding of the music which will knock you flat: I had been listening to the Kremer/Argerich recording of the same piece with greatest pleasure for years now; and still think it is a great recording; but the nuance, sensitivity and depth of the Oistrakh/Richter recording simply leaves these two geniuses -- in the dust.

Haplessness and confusion

Jonathan Spence’s Treason by the book delights and terrifies at once; and in ways which are strikingly reminiscent of Burn After Reading: it describes a course of events which starts simply enough with two people taking up a daring, but hopeless, action in order to change their lives; and then explodes into a huge ado in which countless others across the world are affected in strange, unexpected, often deadly ways; a case of a moth flapping wings.

Both works succeed in creating the impression of the dangerous unpredictability of the world, in which numerous actors, each acting reasonably and predictably, produce surprising, unpredictable, apparently irrational, and dangerous consequences. (Like market panics, for example).

When, at the end of the book, the Qing bureaucracy puts a clamp on events (preventing anyone from offering comments on the imperial edict which specifically requested them) they are acting in a manner identical to that of the CIA director in the film who -- mystified by what is going on -- just wants it all to stop. He issues instructions: let him escape, burn that he body, pay her off, etc. – designed to just bury and forget the business. At the end of the film he says to himself: “What is the lesson of all this? Do not do what we did". Then he takes a double take: "But what the hell did we do?”

The Chinese equivalent of the two plotters who in the movie propose to sell CIA secrets (discovered in a Washington gym) to the Russians are the Hunanese Zeng Jing and his student Zhang Xi who set out sometime in 1520’s from their overcrowded, infertile corner of Hunan, riven by floods, droughts, and earthquakes, for Sichuan where land is plentiful and cheap. After much travel they arrive in the capital of Hunan, Changsha, where they are overwhelmed by the metropolis. While still in the country-bumpkin’s typical big-city-daze, they stumble upon an astrological prediction posted somewhere by someone of the beneficial effects expected from an imminent wonderous conjunction in the sky; they assume this means that things will get better and therefore – note the logic – give up on Sichuan and return home. But in South Hunan there follow more droughts and floods and the economic situation gets even worse. After some time, the two decide that maybe that wonderous conjunction is – about something else?

It is their second attempt to change their lives which will result in a 10 year investigation of hundreds of people, executions of dozens, wholesale book searches and destruction, and enslavement and expropriation of scores of people. But horrible and scary as that is, this is not the strongest impression of the book on me – which is why I do not discuss the plot here at all. The strongest impression is of the numerous stories of private lives, which is like the one above: of the hapless, half-hearted, stupid way in which ordinary people manage their lives.

An especially touching story is of the itinerant salesman who meets the old man called Wang Shu. It is winter and snowing and Wang Shu is selling his socks in exchange for a meal. Moved by pity, the salesman gifts him the money for the food; they begin talking; and Wang Shu explains that he is traveling to Hunan where he will perform great deeds. He proposes to hire the salesman at the exorbitant sum of 38 coppers a day, to accompany him on his journey and carry his luggage, with the proviso that the money won’t be paid until they reach Hunan; meanwhile he proposes that they should live off the salesman’s savings, which he, Wang Shu will borrow and pay back once they are at their destination. And so they travel, through the bitter cold of the mountains, for weeks, eventually running out of the salesman’s money and reduced to begging, until, at one of the mountain passes Wang Shu dies, without having revealed to his companion the objective of his travel. And thus the salesman finds himself out his savings, and stuck in some god forsaken nook of the mountains, no hope of ever collecting on his princely salary.

While reading this fragment I thought to myself how cinematographic it was – an old man in a purple jacket and his half-witted attendant in a red cap struggling through mounds of crane-white snow; how much like something you might expect to see tucked in among Kurosawa’s Dreams. And, of course, how much like the story of Zeng Jing and Zhang Xi, the never-came-to-pass Sichuan settlers: hapless, random, silly, meaningless, unproductive efforts to make something of our lives with only the vaguest hopes attached to them most insecurely.

Two Asian gentlemen

Ruiz is a Filipino Spaniard – part of the thinnest and toppest of the thin top colonial crusts; on his father’s side his Spanish roots go back to 1870’s; on his mothers to seventeen hundreds. The family are in the usual: sugar and palm oil; a small airline operation. His education was English, and now that his parents have passed away, English is his first language – he speaks it with his Filipino Japanese wife and his brother who had emigrated to the US; yet, his accent has remained very strong – if one can call the delicate Spanish lisp strong, that is.

For all his parchment whiteness, Ruiz is an Asian gentleman: he dresses impeccably (never a t-shirt on him) and has the generous and polite, but slightly aloof, manner of a pakka sahib. The way you put that girl in place last night was very well done, he says about the friendly manner in which I have called to order an unruly servant: an act of cultural virtuosity missed by all the Europeans at the table. We’re sitting at an outdoor café, watching people go by. Look at dees, he says, and shakes his head at a bare-chested European man; and at deese girls, he adds. I hate tattoos. My grandfather used to brand his cattle, I say. Presaisly, he answers. Ruiz does not pick up girls in bars, either.

Explaining myself

After dinner, the others proposed to head in the predictable direction, but we variously pleaded sickness or early morning departure; and found ourselves, sheepish, one on one, with the night still young. We settled on the beach – there was some rowdy celebration in progress – and there he had forced me to explain myself: why, if I am not gay, am I not interested in girly bars. Because, I said, I prefer to find a woman who represents something – education, brains, accomplishment, social position, style – and then use her. (The point that this is arguably more perverse than hiring pros in bars missed him; not surprisingly). But what if, he asked, you find yourself wanting sex and such a woman is not available? I puzzled over this one: this does not seem to happen to me; I seem always to desire a person, never the deed. It was his turn to puzzle. Yet, that flash in his eyes when we met was not general but -- specific desire. Don’t waste your time, I had said: I feel great sympathy for you, but I am not made that way, I can’t.

Gender bending Handel

The BBC people introducing Handel’s Partenope on Opera on 3 enthuse over the gender-bending aspects of the plot. (In a typical Handelian flourish, one figure in the opera is a woman who, in order to get close to a man she wishes to woo, cross-dresses as a man and begins to woo the woman her beloved is wooing). That the BBC anchor people find this fascinating shows several interesting things: such as that, for example,

1. they find the inanities of Handel’s plots interesting, a notable fact in itself; and

2. that they have no notion of the uses of cross-dressing in the past.

(The breadth and depth of the general historical incompetence among the so called educated classes today is absolutely astounding. Here, for their edification, a 15 second tutorial: a) Men fleeing from law disguised themselves as women in order to borrow the gender’s traditional voluminous dresses and protection from searches; b) women traveling alone disguised themselves as men in order to escape unwelcome advances (or worse); c) these uses of trans-gender disguise would have been obvious to anyone in the original audience; it is therefore very unlikely that the librettist had meant to titillate them with the pomo-sort of drivel like: “oh, this heroine, disguising herself as a man, is in actual fact a man disguised as a woman and singing in a falsetto voice, wow, how cool”. This kind of inanity had to await modern times to attain scholarly attention).

So why do these BBC people find Handel’s gender-bending fascinating? There can only be two reasons: either they find themselves uncertain of their own sexual identities (whether hetero or homo); or, more likely, they do not actually find it at all fascinating, but take their clue from fashion: since it is intellectually fashionable to talk about gender bending in the academia, they reason, then, surely, the topic is fair game in an opera program.

In other words, they would not know what to talk about without first drawing some notion from the observation of others as to what it is that it talkable about. Conversations on radio, it seems as much as in real life, are not about saying something new, but always more of the same. Always. Why do we bother?

*

(PS. Come to think about it, there is a great deal of cross-dressing in Handel. Though I have not run a 6-sigma analysis, statistically speaking, I should imagine, the elevated frequency of his cross-dressing -- as opposed to it i Mozart, say, or Vivaldi -- may be significant. Handel, of course, almost certainly was gay; which I conclude not because he never married; but because he always traveled everywhere with various male secretaries, frequently changed).

Being outcompeted by dull fellows

"I am sorry I cannot be different for you," I said. "But not really sorry, for if I were different, you wouldn't want me."

"That's my fate", she said. "I always seem to fall for guys like you."

Of course it isn't her fate, but that of all women. All women fall for fellows like me. It's just that they do not stay fallen for long. Sooner or later they tire of us exciting, interesting types and settle down with the newspaper and slippers type -- and begin to breed. In the last 4 years 3 out of my 4 ex-girlfriends got pregnant by someone else within a short time of breaking up with me. Yvette commented: you are like the Holy Spirit, you inseminate women without even being present.

Why did these girls do that? The answer is that -- there was something concrete in that fellow. A house, a picket fence, a monthly check, a pension plan: he was boring but reliable; in other words, a good bet for breeding.

I used to think it unjust that such dull fellows could so easily out-compete me, but now no longer do: the truth is I am glad the girls, having once fallen, then get up and go on: it saves me the trouble of telling them off. In the end, being dumped is better than dumping: there is no guilt. They spare my feelings by leaving. I owe them thanks.

PS

Perhaps what is really going on here is this: perhaps the girlfriends set out needing to reproduce and find in me an attractive prospect; though I tell them right out that I am not a breeding bull, perhaps they assume that they can change me (as do the wives of alcoholics, kleptomaniacs, gamblers and so forth, invariably with the same outcome); but in time they figure the error of their ways, leave, and conceive as per nature's plan with someone else who happens to be to hand. I am glad for both: their naivety -- and my ability to resist their efforts at conversion. Together they make for an interesting love life.

More on racism

Perhaps it works like this: the Polish construction worker in Rome feels that he is being out-competed by the Romanian Gypsy: after all, he labors in the sweat of his brow, and illegally and therefore at risk of imminent deportation, to make a living which isn't any better than hers, who merely begs -- and legally, too. So it comes down to economic competition and -- envy. It's like South African racism, then, instigated by poor white miners to keep poor blacks from competing for white miners' jobs.

And my hosts' friend going to Paris finds her potential economic niches occupied by blacks: no openings there for her in cleaning or cooking. (I thought she was a small time merchant, but perhaps not all is well with the trading company).

And Starowieyski? Perhaps his work suffers from black competition? No surprise there: compare this -- Starowieyski's work -- to for example this -- Benin art -- and you will see that Starowieyski has a problem.

Non intelligunt quod dicunt

And the following day, Starowieyski waylays me with what he proposes are the virtues of educated (or is it benign?, I forgot the precise lingo) cultural racism:

I am Polish and therefore find Mazowsze more appealing than African drums; that seems natural.

So – Starowieyski is a fan of Mazowsze, well, well. No need to read another line of him, then. (Would I want to find out that he likes Czerwone Gitary, too?)

More interesting is the mention of African drums: the subject of the salvo is thereby identified for us as a color-line racism, a most curious thing in Poland, a nation which has no Africans, and no contacts with Africa. Like my friends’ neighbor, Starowieyski therefore objects to... Africans in Paris (and Turks in Berlin). How very, very odd.

More interesting yet, Starowieyski mentions African drums but not -- Javanese Mahabharata ballet; nor Lady Murasaki; nor Chinese porcelain nor painting; nor the 400 Tang poems; nor Mamluk lusterware; nor Iznik tiles; nor Aruna Sairam; and why? The answer, i am afraid is -- the simple reason that he has not heard of any of them.

In other words, Starowieyski, pronouncing for us liberally on culture, is, I am sorry to say, in the modern globalized world -- an ignoramus. He literally has no idea what he is talking about: many Europeans fall in love with these things at first sight; and for those who do, it is hard to imagine anything more natural than that.

But Starowieyski simply does not know it.

I am not really surprised.

Racism in Poland

In Poland again, sadly.

My hosts’ friend says she will never again go to France because there are so many blacks there. This, she pronounces, is the end of a civilization. Though she be a solidly middle class entrepreneur, her views regarding race are not any better than those of the Polish construction worker in Rome whom I saw cursing a Gypsy woman. That event had given me a lot to think: she was in Rome legally (begging is not illegal) while he was almost certainly there illegally (working without permit is); and she was sober while he was drunk: two-to-one for her, so far. More fundamentally, I wondered: why was he opposed to Gypsies coming to Rome? Why did he propose to have an opinion about it? What business was it of him? Who was interested in his opinion and why did he proposing to give it?

Likewise, what business is it of her -- my hosts' friend -- that there are blacks in Paris?

More interestingly, what civilization does she propose is ending as a result? The lady isn’t a consumer of the opera and gave only the usual cursory look to the Louvre, thus her concern doesn’t seem to be really for anything that could be called culture. Pressed, she says that to her mind a culture is, for example, the way children related to parents and vice versa; yet, I will bet rubies against hazel-nuts that my attitude to my parents isn’t like the lady’s: so much for the presumed common European culture; and I’ll bet diamonds against raisins that neither she nor I know how Africans relate to their parents: so much for their proposed difference from us: we simply do not know it.

I suppose that what really disappointed the lady about France is the absence of mustachioed fellows in berets playing accordions and smoking pipes; a sad thing, I must agree, as sad as the absence in Sweden of fellows in leather armor and bucket helmets with horns. The world is going to the dogs. But maybe not in the sense she thinks: there was a large population of blacks in Paris in 1780’s. Black members sat in the Assemblee Nationale at the time of the French Revolution.

But the main point is this. Fear of strangers is perhaps an unavoidable and natural reaction: I recall well the sense of anxiety I felt when I found myself the only European – straight out of bone-China-white Eastern Europe, in a room full of Chinese men. The difference between me and the lady is, I suppose, that I did not leave the room and let the initial feeling of strangeness pass, while she let it dictate to her.

Perhaps neither the feeling of anxiety at strangeness, nor the reaction of flight from it are in themselves racism per se, anymore than envy is theft. It seems to me that racism begins only when we propose a flimsy ideological program with which to justify our feelings. In the past the program was anatomical – blacks had smaller brains; Chinese brains were incapable of invention, etc. Today that those views have been discredited, the ideological justification for our anxiety is “culture”. The modern racist is perfectly prepared to say that all cultures are equal but insists that they represent something valuable and should not be mixed – “adulterated”. The problems of this view are enormous – whatever culture is (and there does not seem to exist any definition we can hang a hat on) it is always changing; cultures are constantly mixing and polluting each other; so the view in fact makes no sense at all; but like all ideologies which appear to justify our emotions, it has a great appeal, even to professors’ minds. So why not an intelligent but not otherwise particularly philosophically inclined merchant in chemical reagents?

Not a particularly hopeful reflection, I must say.

Miking fado

I think it was Renee Flemming who challenged any pop star to sing what Renee does as loud as she does -- without a mike. Without doubt, operatic singers have stronger voices; not only because they are better trained, but also because they are selected for the natural gift of powerful voice. (As the size of the opera halls grew, so did the voices).

So, what, one might say, it's just bragging: does not modern electronics erase the difference between a strong and a weak voice?

It doesn't: it is in the nature of the mike that it captures only a certain range of the ambient sound; thereby, per force, even the best, most faithful microphone magnifies only a part of the complete sound -- the part closest to it -- and thereby erases other parts, drowns them out; and thereby distorts the sound. One of the best ways to hear this is to attend a gamelan performance in Bali.

The gamelan is a complex beast, with a great number of instruments, each with different sonority. The traditional setting of the gamelan, with some instruments types in front and others in the back, some to the left and some to the right, has been selected over the centuries, through trial and error, with the intention of producing a certain sound effect, a certain shape of the emanating bubbles of sound, one which had been found optimal. You can hear it clearly if you walk around a playing gamelan: as you circumambulate it, the quality of the sound changes; now you hear some instruments less, others more, though of course you do not hear them individually, but a different way in which their individual sounds merge and clash in a single fabric full of crosscurrents and eddies.

Nowadays, the Balinese gamelan is almost always miked up. Yet, the mikes, supposedly placed "strategically" around the orchestra, are no such thing at all: they distort and flatten the original richness of the sound which you notice immediately the moment there is a power outage in the middle of a concert. The miked up sound may be bigger, but it is thin and tinny by comparison with the real thing. It is no more than its shadow.

Just as the gamelan is a three dimensional object, so is every instrument: there is a reason why no instrument is perfectly symmetrical -- guitars have lobes, the grand piano opens to one side and not the other. The reason why these instruments have been shaped this way was to produce a certain kind of sound melange. If you mike up such an instrument, you are per force miking up only its one side. You get a fraction of the music you were intended to get.

In view of this, it is hard to understand why modern Balinese insist on miking up the gamelan. It is a very powerful instrument, capable of producing huge volumes; and it is almost never played in venues so large that it would not be heard clearly. It is possible, I suppose, that the reason why the Balinese mike up the gamelan is some misguided notion of updating, modernizing, spiffing up the concert. But a more likely cause is the same why Indian classical musicians mike themselves up: it is the damage done to their ears precisely by years of miking up.

Several years ago, I was at a chamber concert in Jaipur -- flute, tabla and the drone. It was played in a small room, at most 80 meters square; three musicians, perhaps 10 or 12 of the audience. Yet, though we could count every hair in their nostrils from where we were sitting, the musicians insisted on miking themselves up and putting up the volume very, very high. Tired of this, I objected. We can hear you perfectly without the mike, I said. Besides, Tansen never needed to be miked up. Shamed, they did try playing without the mikes. But we cannot hear ourselves, said the flutist after trying a few bars. He had lost his hearing.

The problem isn't limited to musicians. Years of exposure to amplified sound -- you notice how high the sound is when a person wearing a walkman walks by -- or a car with its windows closed and the music on high drives by -- have literally made us hard of hearing. Visiting a movie theater in Thailand makes it painfully obvious: I cannot go to cinema there, because even with ear plugs on the sound is too loud for my ears. And here, in Portugal, the problem is also apparent: I had to leave the Grande Matinee do Fado given yesterday at Forum Lisboa in honor of a fado singer who had passed away because the volume was simply too unbearably high. Yet, incredibly, no one in the audience seemed to mind it.

One could say, with Boyle (who imagined that professional divers failed to report increased pressure when making deep dives because they were working class and therefore by definition insensitive) that the audience being working class is rude and possessed of dulled senses only. But these people aren't rude: the more likely explanation to me seems that they too are simply going deaf.

Too bad for the Grande Matinee: there were some 30 second tier musicians there (the superstars -- Mariza, Camene -- being, natch, above a local shindig like this), and the audience was perhaps the most worth watching: it was like a being on The Good Fellows set.

I also noticed the high average age of both singers and the audience: there was hardly anyone under 50. As they say in America, fado is history. Which is of course a very fado sort of thing to be. Soon, we will feel saudade not just for madrugada and perdida and Alfama, but also for fado itself. The stuff the modern stars sing -- the Camenes and the Marizas -- the ones who didn't attend the Matinee -- isn't really fado anymore.

Good thing they stayed away.