Another Opening, Another Show: September 2024

September is still some sort of semi-official opening of the Performance Season, which weirdly coincides with the traditional school year, but increasingly it all just blurs into a year-round whirl. Here are a couple of brief reminders: the San Francisco Conservatory of Music has a great series of concerts, many of them free, & you can keep an eye on their on-going schedule here, & the Symphony Rush Ticket phone number is 415-503-5577, so catch some concerts with the great Esa-Pekka Salonen before the current Symphony Board burns the place to the ground & absconds to South America with the insurance money.

Theatrical

The African-American Shakespeare Company presents From One to Another: Homage to the Legacy of Maya Angelou, a new choreopoem by Leelee Jackson, directed by Devin A Cunningham, with music by DeVante’ Winn & choreography by Ashli Fisher, & it can be seen at different San Francisco libraries: on 24 August at the Bayview Branch, 7 September at the Potrero Hill branch, 14 September at the Western Addition branch, & 19 September at the Main Library.

Crowded Fire presents Shipping & Handling by Star Finch, directed by Lisa Marie Rollins & Leigh Rondon-Davis, a play-in-reverse that deals with "our historical expectations around Black plays" as well as AI, & that runs from 10 August to 7 September at the Magic Theater.

Berkeley Playhouse opens with the popular Broadway hit The Prom, with book & lyrics by Chad Beguelin, book (more book? book additions?) by Bob Martin, music by Matthew Sklar, co-directed & co-choreographed by Megan McGrath & Christina Lazo, music direction by Daniel Alley, & that runs from 6 September through 13 October.

Ray of Light gives us Legally Blonde: The Musical, music & lyrics by Laurence O'Keefe & Nell Benjamin, book by Heather Hach, directed by Phaedra Tillery-Boughton with co-director ShawnJ West, starring Majesty Scott as Elle Wood, & that's 7 - 29 September at the Victoria Theater in San Francisco.

Cal Shakes in Orinda presents As You Like It, directed by Elizabeth Carter, from 12 to 29 September. They are also presenting Mother Lear, a roughly hour-long version of King Lear created, adapted, & performed by Ava Roy & Courtney Walsh, concerning "an irascible middle-aged scholar with dementia who communicates with her caretaker daughter using only the text of King Lear as the two struggle with aging, love and their own balance of power"; be warned that the "performance is our Act One and a facilitated discussion with the audience follows as Act Two", though of course your view of a "facilitated discussion with the audience" might be more favorable than mine. You could always leave at intermission. Mother Lear is playing 15, 17, 18, 22, 24, 25, & 29 September & 1 - 2 October.

ACT presents Noel Coward's Private Lives, directed by KJ Sanchez (& relocated to tango-dancing Argentina), at the Toni Rembe Theater from 12 September to 6 October.

Berkeley Rep presents Mexodus, a "live-looping musical, composed in real-time" by Brian Quijada & Nygel D. Robinson & telling "stories of the Underground Railroad that led south into Mexico", directed by David Mendizábal, & that runs from 13 September through 20 October.

Brian Copeland's popular one-person show, Not a Genuine Black Man, returns to The Marsh Berkeley for one performance on 13 September. Copeland also revives another of his solo shows, The Waiting Period, about the mandatory 10-day waiting period before he could receive a gun, with which he intended to commit suicide due to depression, & that's at The Marsh San Francisco on 15 September, 20 October, & 3 November, & The March Berkeley on 22 September, 6 October, 24 November, & 1 & 15 December.

Reckless Son, directed by Richard Hoehler & written & performed by singer / songwriter Matt Butler & "inspired by his journey performing over 100 concerts in jails and prisons across the country", will play at The Marsh San Francisco on 17 September.

The Lorraine Hansberry Theater presents a "rolling world premiere" of the choreo-poem The Black Feminist Guide to the Human Body by Lisa B Thompson, directed by Margo Hall, at the Fort Mason Center from 19 September to 6 October.

New Conservatory Theater Center opens its season with Ride the Cyclone, a musical about a semi-fatal roller coaster ride & the possibility of another life, with book, music, & lyrics by Jacob Richmond & Brooke Maxwell, directed & choreographed by Stephanie Temple, musical direction by Ben Prince, & t hat opens 20 September & runs through 20 October.

San Francisco Playhouse opens its season with the comedy The Play That Goes Wrong, by Henry Lewis, Henry Shields, &  Jonathan Sayer, directed by Susi Damilano, opening on 21 September & running through 9 November.

Choir Boy, written by Tarell Alvin McCraney & directed by Darryl V Jones, about a queer Black youth who leads his prep school choir, opens on 24 September at Shotgun Players at the Ashby Stage & runs through 20 October.

The Oakland Theater Project presents that modern classic, Tony Kushner's Angels in America, Parts 1 & 2, directed by Michael Socrates Moran, from 27 September to 27 October at Marin Shakes in San Rafael.

Talking

City Arts & Lectures presents historian Heather Cox Richardson, whose daily Letters from an American chronicles & analyzes the chaos around us, will be interviewed by Steven Winn on 19 September at the Sydney Goldstein Theater in San Francisco.

Operatic

The big operatic event this month is the opening of the San Francisco Opera's season; abbreviated though it is, there are some powerhouse works coming up. It is too bad that they've reverted to sacrificing an actual opera to the opening night crowd, rather than giving them a shorter concert of famous arias before the party the audience is mostly there for, but so it goes. This year's victim is Verdi's Un Ballo in Maschera, conducted by Eun Sun Kim & directed by Leo Muscato, featuring Michael Fabiano as King Gustav III / Riccardo (so, clearly not the "Boston" version), Lianna Haroutounian as Amelia, Amartuvshin Enkhbat as Count Anckarström / Renato, Mei Gui Zhang as Oscar, & Judit Kutasi as Ulrica; performances are 6. 11. 15, 18, 21, 24, & 27 September (6 September is Opening Night, so use your discretion).

San Francisco Opera's second offering of the season is The Handmaid's Tale by Poul Ruders (music) & Paul Bentley (libretto), based of course on the celebrated dystopian novel by Margaret Atwood, conducted by Karen Kamensek & directed by John Fulljames. featuring Irene Roberts as Offred, Lindsay Ammann as Serena Joy, Sarah Cambidge as Aunt Lydia, & John Relyea as the Commander; performances are 14, 17, 20, 22, 26, & 29 September & 1 October.

San Francisco Opera's annual free concert, Opera in the Park, conducted by Eun Sun Kim, is 8 September in Golden Gate Park; not my kind of thing (people are exceptionally awful at outdoor concerts), but, YMMV, as they say.

Opera San José presents The Magic Flute, which they describe as "family-friendly", & I'm not sure what that means in this context, conducted by Alma Deutscher, directed by Brad Dalton, featuring WooYoung Yoon as Tamino, Ricardo José Rivera as Papageno, Emily Misch as the Queen of the Night, Melissa Sondhi as Pamina, & Younggwang Park as Sarastro, & performances are 14, 15,20, 22, 27, & 29 September.

Livermore Valley Opera presents Donizetti's The Daughter of the Regiment (described by them, as is Opera San José's Magic Flute, as "family-friendly"), conducted by Alex Katsman; performances are 28 - 29 September & 5 - 6 October.

On 14 September at the Jewish Community Center of San Francisco, the Wagner Society of Northern California will help prepare you for the San Francisco Opera's upcoming run of Tristan with Tristan und Isolde: Wagner’s Most Subversive Opera?, a lecture by Simon Williams.

Choral

Chanticleer explores "music's power throughout the ages" in Without a Song, a program including motets by Francesco Landini & Orlando di Lasso, a new work by Ayanna Woods, & a new arrangement by Stacey Gibbs of the jazz standard Without a Song, & you can hear all that on 14 September at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, 15 September at Saint John's Lutheran in Sacramento, 17 September at First Church in Berkeley, 19 September at Mission Santa Clara, &20 September at Mount Tamalpais United Methodist in Mill Valley.

Vocalists

Cynthia Erivo joins the San Francisco Symphony, led by Esa-Pekka Salonen, on 14 September, & in addition to Erivo's set, the orchestra will play two pieces by Jessie Montgomery, Starburst & Strum.

On 29 September at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, their Historical Performance department will collaborate with their Studio for the Early American Musical to perform songs by Jerome Kern, Irving Berlin, Karl Hoschna, Victor Herbert, George Gershwin, Kay Swift, Jay Gorney, Rodgers & Hart, Cole Porter, & Frank Tours; performers include Alexandra Santon on violin & Corey Jamason on piano, with sopranos Taylor See & Camryn Finn, mezzo-sopranos Cathy Cook, Leah Finn, & Katherine Growdon, tenor Brian Thorsett, & baritone Matthew Worth.

Orchestral

The All San Francisco Celebration at the San Francisco Symphony will take place on 12 September, when Esa-Pekka Salonen leads the orchestra & harpist Katherine Siochi in Sibelius's Karelia Suite, Grieg's Peer Gynt Suite #1, Debussy's Danses sacrée et profane, & Ravel's Daphnis et Chloé, Suite #2.

On 19 - 21 September, Esa-Pekka Salonen leads the San Francisco Symphony in Verdi's Requiem, with soloists Leah Hawkins (soprano), Karen Cargill (mezzo-soprano), Mario Chang (tenor), & Peixin Chen (bass, replacing the previously announced Eric Owens, who withdrew for personal reasons); I would have thought the Requiem could stand on its own, but three pieces by Gordon Getty will also be performed: the Intermezzo from Goodbye, Mr. Chips, Saint Christopher, & The Old Man in the Snow. The Symphony describes the Requiem as "Crude as a gut punch, tender as a kiss, . . . " & here's a note to whoever writes these things: crude is not the word you want there. Visceral (used later in the sentence), powerful, mighty, majestic, terrifying, forceful . . . but crude? No, no, no. Nope. And again, no. (I suppose I should be grateful they didn't call it impactful.)

Donato Cabrera leads the California Symphony in Louise Farrenc’s Overture #2 & the Beethoven 9 with soloists Laquita Mitchell, Kelley O’Connor, Nicholas Phan, & Sidney Outlaw at the Lesher Center in Walnut Creek on 21 - 22 September.

Although it is preceded at the San Francisco Symphony this month by a concert featuring music from Studio Ghibli (not listed here because all performances are sold out), the "All San Francisco" concert, an evening with Cynthia Erivo (listed under Vocalists), & the Verdi Requiem plus gobbets of Getty, there is an actual official Opening Gala concert on 25 September, with pianist Lang Lang as the flashy star soloist, playing Saint-Saëns's Piano Concerto #2 as well as his The Carnival of the Animals (for which he will be joined by pianist Gina Alice); the program will also include selections from Prokofiev's Romeo and Juliet.

The San Francisco Symphony closes its month on 27 - 28 September with Esa-Pekka Salonen leading the world premiere of an SF Symphony commission, a French baroque-inspired Piano Concerto by Nico Muhly, with soloist Alexandre Tharaud; the program also includes Hindemith's Ragtime (Well-Tempered) , Bach's Fantasia and Fugue in C minor, BWV 537 as arranged by Elgar, & Hindemith's Symphony, Mathis der Maler.

On 27 - 28 September David Milnes leads the UC Berkeley Symphony Orchestra at Hertz Hall in Push by Trevor Weston, As Thus by Wang Dan Hong (Cassi Chen, guzheng soloist), & the Tchaikovsky 4.

Jessica Bejarano leads the San Francisco Philharmonic in Shostakovich's Festive Overture, Tchaikovsky's The Tempest, Prokofiev's Violin Concerto #1 in D Major, & Tchaikovsky's Sleeping Beauty Entr’acte #18 for violin solo with orchestra; the featured violinist will be Cordula Merks & that's 28 September at Herbst Theater.

On 28 September at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, Edwin Outwater leads the SFCM Orchestra in Richard Strauss's Don Juan & his Vier Lieder, Opus 27 (with soprano Alissa Goretsky), John Coltrane's Alabama, as arranged by Carlos Simon, & the 1947 version of Stravinsky's Petrushka.

On 29 September at Herbst Theater, Pete Nowlen leads the San Francisco Pride Band (until recently the San Francisco Lesbian & Gay Freedom Band) in Portraits of the Americas, a program featuring music from the Squamish First Nation of British Columbia, the Sephardic Jewish community in Brazil, Mexican dances, & more, including two world premieres: One Magnificent Light by current Composer-in-Residence Mattea Williams & Eyes To Look Otherwise, a new concerto by Juan Sebastián Cardona Ospina, featuring soprano saxophonist Michael Hernandez. 

Chamber Music

Here's this month's line-up at the Noontime Concert series at Old Saint Mary's Cathedral in San Francisco: on 3 September, Ensemble SF will perform Mozart's Piano Quartet in G Minor & Mel Bonis' Piano Quartet #1 in B-flat Major, Opus 69; on 10 September, violinist Maya Ramchandran with pianist Miles Graber will perform Schumann's Violin Sonata #1 in A minor, Opus 105 & Faurè's Violin Sonata #1 in A Major, Opus 13; on 17 September, piano duo N Blanco Y Negro with violinist/violist Jennifer Redondas will perform a program of Cuban music; & on 24 September, pianist Mark Valenti will play Estampes: Pagodas, Evening in the Granada, Gardens in the Rain by Debussy, the Andante from Prokofiev's Sonata in B-flat Major, Opus 84, & Beethoven's Sonata #28 in A Major, Opus 101.

On 1 September at Old First Concerts, Lieder Alive! in collaboration with the San Francisco International Piano Festival presents mezzo-soprano Kindra Scharich & pianists Gwendolyn Mok & Jeffrey LaDeur performing Fauré's La Bonne Chanson, Debussy's Épigraphes Antiques, & Florent Schmitt's Trois Rapsodies.

On 9 September at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, Margaret Halbig of the Collaborative Piano Department has arranged a program including Rachmoninoff's Valse & Romance for 6 Hands (with pianists Halbig, Andrew King, & Natasha Kislenko); Jennifer Higdon's Little River Songs (with Halbig, mezzo-soprano Melinda Becker, cellist Megan Chartier) Stjepan Šulek's Sonata for Trombone and Piano, "Vox Gabrieli" (with Halbig & trombonist Timothy Higgins), & Bartók's Sonata for Two Pianos and Percussion (with pianists Halbig & Natasha Kislenko, & percussionists Zubin Hathi & Elizabeth Hall).

The Hillside Club in Berkeley presents the New Esterházy Quartet (Kati Kyme & Lisa Weiss, violins; Anthony Martin, viola; William Skeen, cello; joined for this series by violist Cynthia Keiko Black & oboist Marc Schachman) performing the complete viola quintets of Mozart in a 3-concert series: 11, 13, & 15 September.

N Blanco y Negro Piano Duo (Mirta Gómez & Sahily Cánovas), with special guest violinist Jennifer Redondas, will perform pieces by Dvořák, Schubert, Fauré, Jason McCauley, Carlota Garriga, Fazil Say, Rachmaninoff, Piazzolla, & José White Lafitte at Old First Concerts on 20 September.

​San Francisco Symphony musicians will perform a chamber music program at Davies on 29 September, featuring Café Damas for Violin, Viola, and Bass by Kinan Azmeh, the Quintet for Piano and Winds, K 452 by Mozart, the Sonatine en trio for Flute, Clarinet, and Piano by Florent Schmitt, & the Piano Quartet, Opus 47 by Schumann.

Players from the Berkeley Symphony present Advocates and Influencers, a program consisting of Clara Schumann's Piano Trio in G minor, Opus 17, Caroline Shaw's Concerto for Piano and Strings, & Joaquin Turina's Piano Quartet in A minor, Opus 67; the program is said to be "curated" by violist Darcy Rindt, which I guess means she selected the pieces, & you can hear them on 29 September at the Piedmont Center for the Arts.

Instrumental

On 29 September in Hertz Hall, Cal Performances presents violinist Njioma Chinyere Grevious with pianist Andrew Goodridge in Influences, a program featuring Coleridge-Taylor Perkinson's Blue/s Forms for Solo Violin as well as Mozart's Violin Sonata #21 in E minor & Beethoven's Kreutzer sonata.

Early / Baroque Music

The Cantata Collective continues its series of free concerts surveying Bach's cantatas at Saint Mary Magdalen's in Berkeley on 1 September, with Weinen, Klagen, Sorgen, Zagen, BWV 12 & Wachet! betet! betet! wachet! BWV 70, featuring soloists Tonia D’Amelio (soprano), Christine Brandes (alto), Derek Chester (tenor), & Ben Kazez (bass), & trumpeter Dominic Favia, who will be performing not only on the natural trumpet but also the tromba da tirarsi or "slide trumpet".

Modern / Contemporary Music

The Hillside Club in Berkeley hosts Celebrating Schoenberg, a 5-part lecture series run by Jonathan Khuner with selections performed by Earplay New Chamber Music Ensemble, The Left Coast Ensemble, Voices of Silicon Valley. & vocalists Nikki Einfeld & Charlotte Khuner (additional insights will be provided by lecturers Matilda Hofman, Bruce Bennett, & Cyril Deaconoff); the musical selections include the Opus 11 Piano Pieces, the Hanging Gardens song cycle, the String Trio, Pierrot Lunaire, & two religious choral pieces: Peace on Earth & Three Thousand Years. The schedule is: 1 September, Piano Works; 7 September, Songs; 15 September, Chamber Music; 22 September, Choral Works; & 29 September, Cabaret. You can attend all or some; tickets are here.

The San Francisco Contemporary Music Players present the second annual ARTZenter Institute Emerging Composer Program Concert at Herbst Theater on 12 September; this year the featured composers bringing us fresh new chamber works are Laura Cetilia, Sofia Ouyang, Luca Robadey, Ethan Solodad, Chawin Temsittichok, & Max Vinetz.

Pianist Thomas Schultz will play selections from his 40 years of working with composer Hyo-shin Na at the Center for New Music on 14 September.

The annual Other Minds Music Festival takes place at the Brava Theater in San Francisco on 25 - 28 September; each concert is preceded by a panel discussion or workshop; nights 1 & 2 feature the world premiere of Trimpin's The Cello Quartet, featuring cellist Lori Goldston & circus artists Joel Herzfeld, Bri Crabtree, & Calvin Kai Ku, with choreography by Margaret Fisher; night 3 features Annea Lockwood's Becoming Air (with trumpeter Nate Wooley) & Into the Vanishing Point (with piano/percussion duo Yarn/Wire) along with Jan Martin Smørdal's Both sides. Now (with Yarn/Wire); night 4 features Annea Lockwood's RCSC (with pianist Sarah Cahill), drummer Marshall Trammell & saxophonist Hafez Modirzadeh performing We Say NO To Genocide, & IMA (Amma Ateria, electronics; Nava Dunkelman, percussion) performing The Flowers Die in Burning Fire.

The annual Darius Milhaud Concert will take place at Mills College on 27 September, featuring pianist Brett Carson & performances of Lou Harrison's Homage to Milhaud, Milhaud's Le printemps, Volume 1, Opus 25, Steed Cowart's Blackberry Winter, Sidney Corbett's From the Garden, Lou Harrison's New York Waltzes, Milhaud's Le printemps, Volume 2, Opus 66, Zeena Parkins' LACE, & Erik Satie's Embryons desséchés.

On 27 September in Zellerbach Hall, Cal Performances presents soprano Julia Bullock & pianist Conor Hanick, with choreographer-dancers Bobbi Jene Smith & Or Schraiber, in a staged version of Messiaen's song cycle Harawi, directed by Zack Winokur.

Jazz

Ethan Iverson "Plays and Talks about the History of Jazz Piano" at the Piedmont Piano Company in Oakland on 1 September.

The Mike Greensill Trio (Greensill on piano, Ruth Davies on bass, Noel Jewkes with the saxes), with vocalist Gale Terminello, will be at Old First Concerts on 8 September for their annual trip through the Great American Songbook.

San Francisco Performances has a new series taking place in the Presidio Theater, & it opens on 28 September with The Hot Club of San Francisco giving you the jazz styles of 1930s Paris.

Dance

The Alonzo King LINES Ballet presents a world premiere set to the music of Alice Coltrane & a revival of King's dance to Ravel's Mother Goose Suite, as seen last spring at the San Francisco Symphony (it is not a direct retelling of any fairytales but instead an evocation of mood through movement; I enjoyed it); that's at the Yerba Buena Center from 26 to 29 September.

Smuin Contemporary Ballet presents Dance Series 1, featuring Renaissance (choreography by Amy Seiwert to music performed by Kitka Women's Vocal Ensemble), the world premiere of ByCHANCE (choreography by Jennifer Archibald), & The Last Glass (choreography by Matthew Neenan to music by the indie-rock band Beirut), & that's 13 - 15 September at the Mountain View Center for the Performing Arts, 27 - 28 September at the Lesher Center in Walnut Creek, & 11 - 20 October at the Cowell Theater at Fort Mason in San Francisco.

Art Means Painting

At the Contemporary Jewish Museum, Nicki Green: Firmament, the artist's first museum solo exhibit, shows "new and existing artworks in ceramic, installation, fiber, and more" & that opens 5 September & runs through 2 February 2025; Looted. a multimedia installation by Dorota Mytych (Poland), Jessica Houston (Canada), Marcia Teusink (UK), & Tracy Grubbs (USA), explores the "art, memory, politics, and loss" of Polish-owned paintings looted by the Nazis, & that also opens 5 September & runs through 27 July 2025.

A couple of new shows are opening at SFMOMA: Table Manners, exploring the ways design affects our relationship to food & mealtimes, opens 14 September & runs through May 2025; Consuelo Kanaga: Catch the Spirit exploring the work of the pioneering photojournalist, opens on 28 September & runs through 9 February 2025.

Hallyu! The Korean Wave, exploring South Korea's current world-wide influence on art, music, film, & fashion, opens at the Asian Art Museum on 27 September & runs through 6 January 2025.

Cinematic

BAM/PFA is launching its autumn film series:

* from 6 September to 3 October, Cities & Cinema: Los Angeles explores that elusive city not only through Hollywood eyes but through those of expatriate & marginalized observers;

* Special Screenings includes some wonderful films that don't fall into a regular series, such as the new restoration of Kurosawa's Seven Samurai & a lecture by PFA founding director Sheldon Renan on The Early Days of the Pacific Film Archive, followed by a screening of the archive's print of one of my favorite films, Masahiro Shinoda's Double Suicide (this presentation is in collaboration with the Berkeley Historical Society & Museum, whose current display on Berkeley and the Movies runs through 21 September;

* Alternative Visions, BAMPFA's annual showing of avant-garde & experimental films, runs 11 September through 20 November;

* Silent Cinema Pioneers: From Alice Guy-Blaché to Lois Weber, exploring "four pioneering directors of the silent era: Alice Guy-Blaché, Louis Feuillade, Cecil B. DeMille, and Lois Weber" (yes, DeMille when he was creating stylish shockers rather than gargantuan Biblical epics) runs from 14 through 25 September, & though the films will be familiar to aficionados of silent cinema, they are all worth seeing again; 

* the month ends with Gregg Araki’s Teen Apocalypse Trilogy on 28 - 29 September.

At the Vogue Theater in San Francisco, you can catch that wonderful film The Maltese Falcon on 4 -5 September, & on 13 - 14 September you can see the notorious Caligula, & I'm guessing this is the new restoration I've heard about, though the website doesn't actually say that.

Friday Photo 2024/35

 

along Shattuck Avenue in Berkeley

Poem of the Week 2024/35

Song

Fear no more the heat o' th' sun

    Nor the furious winter's rages;

Thou thy worldly task hast done,

    Home art gone and ta'en thy wages.

Golden lads and girls all must,

As chimney-sweepers, come to dust.

Fear no more the frown o' th' great;

    Thou are past the tyrant's stroke.

Care no more to clothe and eat;

    To  thee the reed is as the oak.

The scepter, learning, physic, must

All follow this and come to dust.

Fear no more the lightning flash,

    Nor th' all-dreaded thunder-stone;

Fear not slander, censure rash;

    Thou hast finished joy and moan.

All lovers young, all lovers must

Consign to thee and come to dust.

No exorciser harm thee,

    Nor no witchcraft charm thee.

Ghost unlaid forbear thee;

    Nothing ill come near thee.

Quiet consummation have,

And renownèd be thy grave.

– William Shakespeare, Cymbeline, Act IV, scene 2, ll 258 - 281

Cymbeline is one of Shakespeare's four late romances (the other three being Pericles, The Winter's Tale, & The Tempest) & even in that fanciful, fairy-tale influenced company it is an extremely strange play. It combines multiple times & places – early Britain & Wales, the Rome of Caesar Augustus, the Italy of the Renaissance – into a famously complex plot; the chain of discoveries in Act V that resolves the various storylines is notoriously complicated (so much so that Shaw wrote a condensed finale, Cymbeline Refinished, as an aid to theatrical producers). And the cavalcade of plot points must be deliberate, as an additional & completely unnecessary one is added right before the finale, when the jailed Posthumus has a vision of his dead family & the god Jupiter, who leaves him with a cryptic prophecy that must now also be interpreted before the action can be considered complete. The play is filled with characters giving us elaborate explanations of their backstories or of their actions & motivations; there's even amusing meta commentary on this convention, as when Cornelius the Doctor explains to us, in an aside, that he has given the wicked stepmother (the Queen) what she thinks is deadly poison, but is actually a medication that causes a sleep that feigns death, & contrary to the standard assumption that characters speaking an aside to the audience are not noticed doing so by those on stage, the Queen repeats to him her previous injunction to go ahead & leave. He does finally get off the stage, having given us another key piece of plot knowledge.

The box containing the alleged poison is not the only container that isn't what it seems; there is an elaborate plot involving an attempted seduction & a treacherous man hidden in a trunk. There is the trunk of the Queen's loutish & menacing son, which gets mistaken by the heroine, Imogen, for the body of her husband Posthumus (the corpse has been beheaded, so this is a plausible mistake, one of several involving bodies that are mistaken in one way or another). Most of the characters are at one point or another (or all the way through), either actively deceiving others or in outright disguise. These remarks are the barest summary of the play, but as you can see, it is crowded with incident & colorful characters, although the title role is not one of them. Cymbeline is the King of Britain & I can't think of another title role in Shakespeare's plays who is so much a cipher, more of a plot device than a character, so consistently overshadowed by the people & actions around him.

I think the play used to be staged more often than it is now; I base this loose assumption on the number of reviews / references in Shaw's theater criticism (right now as part of the on-going upheaval around me, I can't find my copy of that wonderful volume, Shaw on Shakespeare, but my memory is that he reviewed it more than once, & not as a rarity; whereas I believe he never saw a staging of The Winter's Tale, which is now almost a standard), as well as the fact that the Act V revision he wrote was meant as a practical piece of theater. And references to the great Shakespearean heroines often use to include Imogen, though I think anyone coming up with such a list these days would most likely not automatically think of her.

The play may have slipped a bit with theatrical producers, but this song remains well-known. It comes a bit past the halfway mark of the show. It is sung in alternating stanzas & then lines by Guiderius/Polydore & his brother Arviragus/Cadwal, the two sons of Cymbeline who were kidnapped at an early age & raised in the mountains of Wales, ignorant of their origin (hence the two names). They are singing it to Imogen, disguised as the page boy Fidele, whom they think is dead (she has taken the poison / sleeping potion, having been told it was helpful medicine, one in the on-going series of misunderstandings & false information believed true). Imogen is sister to the two young men, though none of them yet knows their relationship. The song provides an oasis of reflection, a moment of stillness, a pause in the on-going machinery of the plot. It provides an almost philosophical reflection on the surrounding frenzy of actions at cross-purposes, hidden motives, rage & regret, lust & loss: it all ends with death. The play itself does not; it has a happy ending, filled with reunions, recoveries, & forgiveness, but in the center of the show sits this reminder of death.

The song also balances out an unpleasant strain in the play, in which "blood", meaning class origin, will out: the two young princes, raised in the wilderness & ignorant of their birthright, are nonetheless filled with the spirit of your ideal princes; the King finds himself strangely drawn to a young pageboy, who is his daughter in disguise; there is much surprise that a peasant soldier can fight valiantly (he turns out to be Posthumus, an aristocrat in, of course, disguise). Opposed to this sense of birth / blood as destiny is the reminder that all end up in the grave; in the celebrated lines from the first stanza, Golden lads and girls all must, / As chimney-sweepers, come to dust. The word play on come to dust, meaning both end up dead (dust you are, & to dust shall you return) & coming to clear the built-up dust out of the chimney, is characteristic of Shakespeare's many-layered language. It's a wonderful line, though of course the singers, who dwell in a cave, could really have no idea of what a chimney-sweeper is or does. (Presumably this is one of the evils of court life told to them by Belarius/Morgan, the wronged noble who kidnapped them.)

The first stanza is the standout; there is a dignity about it, & a reach: the extremes of hot & cold weather, the dignified image of the worker, receiving his wages for whatever he has managed to accomplish, going "home", followed by the memorable final lines, encompassing the Golden with the Lowly. It is consolatory – fear no more; your task is done. It is elegiac – excessive heat is over, furious cold is over, the day is done & you're going home.

The second stanza continues in the same vein. Again the subject of the song, the now-dead person addressed with the intimate & affectionate thou, is adjured not to fear, this time earthly power rather than that of extreme Nature, & comforted with the thought of being now past caring about even the basic necessities. The stanza ends with another proclamation that everyone must come to this, but this time the list is of the great & accomplished (the scepter, learning, physic: that is, governors, scholars & priests, & doctors) who cannot escape death.

The third stanza continues listing the earthly concerns that the mourned one is now past, concerns both natural (lightning & thunder) & social (slander & censure). A thunder-stone can refer to various things, but in this context it's pretty clearly meant as "whatever causes the thunder", the aural equivalent of the lightning flash. (Interestingly, my Signet Classic edition of the play doesn't annotate that word, though it does others that seem to me more obvious.) But this stanza also takes a turn away from the earlier ones: it is not only difficult & painful things that the mourned one is done with, but happy things: joy, as well as moan, is now finished. Love is done, & even young lovers end like this. (Consign in this context means end up the same category as you, that is, dead.) The dead are bereft of the beauty of life, as well as its struggles.

The final stanza is a sort of charm, a conjuration that nothing harm the body in its grave. This is suitable not only for the period in which the play is set, but the one in which it was written; think of the epitaph on Shakespeare's own grave. An exorciser would be one who performs exorcisms, that is, one who summons spirits from a body or a place; an unlaid ghost would be a spirit not laid to rest, one doomed to haunt the earth (like Hamlet's father, for instance). So apparently even the grave is not free from disturbances & struggles; the elegy ends with this protective prayer for quiet in the grave – yet not the quiet that comes from being forgotten; the final line is a wish that the mourned one, in this case a youth the singers have known only very briefly, whose story they never learned, may not be forgotten. It's a poignant moment in a tumultuous drama.

I took the text from the Signet Classic Shakespeare, which now seems to be available only in a 3-play volume, but of course there are many editions of the play available.

Museum Monday 2024/35

 

the Archangel Gabriel; a detail of The Annunciation by Peter Paul Rubens, seen at the Legion of Honor in San Francisco as part of the Early Rubens show

Friday Photo 2024/34

 

summertime tomatoes

Poem of the Week 2024/34

The New Love

If it shine or if it rain,

    Little will I care or know.

Days, like drops upon a pane,

    Slip, and join, and go.

At my door's another lad;

    Here's his flower in my hair.

If he see me pale and sad,

    Will he see me fair?

I sit looking at the floor.

    Little will I think or say

If he seek another door;

    Even if he stay.

– Dorothy Parker

Aficionados of silent film have probably seen some of the "working girl in the Big City" movies of the 1920s; often starring Gloria Swanson (in her first fame, before she became known mostly as Norma Desmond) or Colleen Moore, these films blend the comedy of daily life with romance, often with a wealthy (&, needless to say, handsome) young man, with the heroine always dressed a bit more stylishly than she realistically would be. Commentary tracks on DVDs of these films will often mention the new market these movies were aimed at: in the 1920s, there began to be a sizable population of young single women living on their own or with other young women, working in the Big City. New York City would be the main & ultimate example; always a bit apart from the rest of America (particularly the dull rural regions), inherently glamorous, exciting, & (inextricably linked to those two qualities) dangerous. It was also a place of greater freedom for young women. It was no longer assumed that unchaperoned women must be up to no good or no better than she should be. We're so used to young women being on their own & working to support themselves that we no longer deeply register it as the cultural shift it was.

I've also been reading through the anthology A Century of Sonnets: The Romantic Era Revival, edited by Paula R Feldman & Daniel Robertson, & in their introduction they make the interesting point that when the sonnet, the poetic form par excellence for expressing Love, was introduced to English in the Early Modern period, it usually took the form of male poets expressing their devotion to (usually) a woman, building off of Petrarch's foundational work, but when the sonnet was revived in the late eighteenth century, women poets used it to express their romantic feelings for men (culminating perhaps in the Victorian period with Barrett Browning's Sonnets from the Portuguese).

These cultural shifts were rolling around in my brain & made me think of Dorothy Parker, the celebrated wit, critic, short-story writer, & poet. She is not only an avatar of the clever, ambitious young professional woman in the Big City, but she also, as a poet, brought a new element to love poetry: not devotion or heartbreak but rueful realism, even cynicism (this is probably why her work often gets called "verse" rather than poetry, or even "light verse", a term which is just another way of dismissing the comic view as inherently less significant than the serious). Parker wrote a lot of love poems, she's not breaking away from that norm (the way Marianne Moore did), & she writes them in traditional verse forms (though not, in fact, the sonnet), but there's an element of disenchantment & wit that seems to me something new (I'm willing to be corrected on this, if someone can cite another woman poet of Parker's time or earlier who puts Love in an ironic, even dismissive light as consistently as Parker does.)

This week's poem is more somber than satirical, but it does convey a level of indifference to love that is remarkable. In fact, it's almost alarming, as these three quatrains etch a powerful image of depression. Depression, anxiety, alienation: the modern world certainly didn't invent these qualities, but it made them its own, & here they are juxtaposed with the traditional accoutrements of love poetry: appropriate weather, flowers, a lad . . . (that word, along with this poem's formal structure, reminds me of Housman's Shropshire Lad, & this poem would fit right into that collection).

The first quatrain – a whole third of the poem – doesn't even mention love, or another person, much less the "new love" promised in the title. It's a succinct portrayal of emotional numbness. The shine of the sun immediately turns into rain (& I think the order is not just for the sake of the rhyme scheme, as shine is an easy word to rhyme). The narrator can hardly distinguish between sunny & wet weather, & what's more, she doesn't really care. The distinction makes no difference to her. The days drop & blur like rain. Slip, and join, and go – the commas make us pause a bit between the words, isolating them from each other, making the process seem a bit slower, a bit more monotonous perhaps, than it really is. Perhaps underlying these words is a metaphorical intimation of what the poet's love life is like: an almost accidental joining, followed by rapid dissolution.

In the second quatrain we finally meet the new love: or is he? The title looks increasingly ironic, as we get the feeling he's just one in a not particularly distinguishable series. He is not called a lover, or a suitor, but "a lad": young, obviously, as the word implies, & also with a suggestion that he's young enough to be a bit naïve or callow – & perhaps those those qualities are inseparable from a sincerity in love. He has given her a flower! That's sweet. She has even roused herself enough to put it in her hair. He's previously given her a flower, so this is not their first time together. But apparently she has been pale & sad each time. Is that what he's drawn to? Does he see himself as a rescuer, & if so, will he stick around once he realizes she doesn't really want to be, or can't be, rescued, or if he is shown another side of her? (There seems like a witty play here on Keats's La Belle Dame Sans Merci, in which the pale & haggard one is the knight in love.)

If he see me pale and sad, / Will he see me fair? suggests that perhaps he only wants to see her pale & sad, or perhaps he won't stick around long enough for her mood to lift, or perhaps he is incapable of seeing her any way other than pale & sad: Fair can mean beautiful, specifically a  beautiful woman (as in "the fair one" or "his fair", a now archaic or comic usage), but it can also mean impartial & just, or equitable (play fair!). Perhaps this "lad" can't see his lover clearly through the fogs of love.

The third & concluding quatrain combines the description of depressed enervation with the description of this unromantic romance. The narrator, even after a person has entered her rooms, is staring at the floor rather than at the visitor. This is the shadow side of Parker's wit: a persistent, perhaps even debilitating, gloom. The scene is presented as a complete sentence: I sit looking at the floor. (The punctuation in this poem is so carefully done it is a thing of beauty.) A complete sentence, & a complete summation of a mood, & perhaps a life. Little will I think or say starts the next sentence, echoing Little will I care or know in the first quatrain (little sets the mood of diminishment); the line tells us the narrator will not think or feel much: under what circumstances? Perhaps any, but specifically, whether the lad goes or stays. The order here, as with the shine or rain earlier, is significant: she will not be communicative if he leaves (how can she fall apart for love, when she is apparently already numb?). She doesn't even phrase it as "leaving her"; it's If he seek another door: not another woman, but another door, another opening into one of the isolated cells that fill the anonymous city. There is a semicolon after that phrase, marking a significant pause, & then the kicker: she will feel the same (that is, lacking in feeling) even if he stays. This is a sad & haunting poem, but also a brilliant summation of modern trends in independence, alienation, depression, & that strange wavering thing labeled love.

I took this from The Portable Dorothy Parker; my copy is ancient, but I assume the newer editions include the same poems.

Museum Monday 2024/34

 

detail of Still Life by Charles Sheeler in the de Young Museum in San Francisco

Friday Photo 2024/33

 

at the Ferry Building, the Embarcadero, San Francisco

Poem of the Week 2024/33

The Definition of Beauty is

That Definition is none –

Of Heaven, easing Analysis,

Since Heaven and He are one.

– Emily Dickinson

Beauty: it's one of those basic terms that gets invoked frequently as if everyone agrees on what it means, but no one really does & there is no real definition. I've had more than one conversation with people who dislike "modern" music (by which they mean modernist, as in specifically Arnold Schoenberg, who died 73 years ago), in which I am plaintively asked, "But what about beauty?" I explain that I find Schoenberg's music beautiful, an argument which never gets very far (& how could it? we disagree on the meaning of basic terms). I once attended a play about Schoenberg vs Gershwin whose whole argument depended on finding Schoenberg's music "ugly". It was a small artsy theater so the actors lined up to meet us as we left. I made a point of telling the actor at my door that I found Schoenberg's music beautiful & enjoyable. He seemed quite startled but said he was glad to hear I felt that. Once someone countered my Schoenberg with Mozart (whom I also love), & asked again, What about beauty? Apparently you can't genuinely feel both types of sound are beautiful. But when Mozart's music was new it was considered modern & difficult ("too many notes!"), so the net people throw over items with the term beauty differs with time. Perhaps beauty is linked for many to familiarity. And I'm sure we've all heard people say something is beautiful when what they seem to mean is more accurately it is  pretty & pleasing.

Probably the most celebrated attempt in English-language poetry to define Beauty is in Keats's Ode on a Grecian Urn, with its oracular ending: Beauty is truth, truth beauty – that is all / Ye know on earth, and all you need to know. But this doesn't really help, as Truth is perhaps an even more ambiguous term than Beauty. When you find one, you will have found the other, though there still is no good definition for either, which, in the context of Keats's poem, is probably the point. It's even ambiguous, depending on how the editors have punctuated these lines, who is speaking: is it the poem's narrator, swept up, at least for the moment, by his contemplation of the eternally unchanging action depicted on the urn, or is it the urn itself, offering its formal perfections as a kind of solution to those endless problems, How do we live? And what do we live for? (Is Beauty = Truth really all we can know on earth? And is it really all we need to know?) If something that initially strikes us as ugly makes us realize something important about ourselves or the world, does that mean the ugly thing is, in fact, beautiful? Like all the most useful terms, Beauty is, & must be, slippery & capacious.

In her gnomic style, Dickinson deals with this question, forthrightly telling us that there is no definition of Beauty: or, more precisely, as she then proceeds to give a definition in the last two lines, that any definition we come up with will be too limited, too lacking in too much. It's certainly an arresting opening, & seems implicitly in dialogue with Keats's Grecian Urn: Truth doesn't enter into it, & this isn't all we need to know on earth, as Dickinson positions Beauty outside of Earth, in Heaven. Heaven can mean many things, from the upper atmosphere to a religious conception of the dwelling place of God to an unearthly state of bliss (check out the various definitions for the word given in the Emily Dickinson Lexicon), but it clearly means something beyond our world & therefore, to some extent, unknowable by earth-bound mortals, making her attempt at a definition the opposite of the one Keats gives: in the Grecian Urn, beauty is truth, truth beauty, & is all we can or need to know on earth; in  this poem, Beauty is not of our world, & not knowable through our world. In this very short poem, two words are emphasized: Definition appears in each of the first two lines, balanced (& . .  .explained? rebuked?) by the appearance of Heaven in each of the concluding two lines.

After the direct phrasing of the first two lines, the next two become more complicated, which is probably inevitable for any attempt to define Beauty. Of Heaven, the opening phrase, seems to come out of the blue (which is another way of saying from Heaven), & it takes a moment for the phrase to settle in (to the extent that it ever does): what is of Heaven? and what exactly does of convey here? (Again, check the Emily Dickinson Lexicon for this fluid word.) Beauty is born to, linked with, contains, Heaven. The phrase strikes us abruptly & with a fruitful ambiguity, as Dickinson, with her terse, elliptical, & arresting lines, must feel Beauty would: it certainly seems to be the effect she aims for in her work. Beauty's effect is whole & entire; with no need for the breakdown & dissection of analysis. Heaven-born & Heaven-sent, beauty doesn't need analysis, as we feel it when we see it – we just know. Yet the experience of this wholeness can only be conveyed with abrupt & broken phrases (perhaps that is how heavenly things must came to earth). Analysis is eased, unnecessary, but the word conveys more gracefully than would removed or relieved of what is happening here: with a certain lightness, Beauty manifests.

It's arresting that Dickinson refers to Beauty as He, rather than It. Did she want to make Beauty more human, warmer than an It? There is endless, mostly pointless speculation about her sexuality, but we can't rule out her use of He for a romantic, physical, connotation. Or is she, as they would say now, queering the word by making it masculine, when Beauty was often seen as the role & duty of women? Or perhaps she just liked the connection between He / Heaven.

Dickinson said, “If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry.” (And for a poet, what is beauty but poetry?) Clearly she felt an overwhelming & physical sensation when she saw something she considered beautiful, & perhaps this poem's broken & abrupt phrasing conveys how the experience made her feel. She counters Beauty = Truth with Beauty = Heaven. This gives us a different sense from the one in Keats's Ode: Heaven seems more glorious, more ethereal, more ecstatic than Truth, which has something moral & lawful about it – but beyond those implications, does it really offer a definition? Heaven is another slippery term, & ultimately not really more knowable that Truth, which may be Dickinson's point: you know them when you see them. Ultimately, it's all in the eye (or mind, or soul) of the beholder.

This is Poem 988 in the Thomas Johnson edition of The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson.

Museum Monday 2024/33

 

detail of a hanbok (birthday dress) from late 20th century Korea, now at the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco

Friday Photo 2024/32

 

Embarcadero Plaza, San Francisco, California

Poem of the Week 2024/32

Theater Impressions

For me the tragedy's most important act is the sixth:

the raising of the dead from the stage's battlegrounds,

the straightening of wigs and fancy gowns,

removing knives from stricken breasts,

taking nooses from lifeless necks,

lining up among the living

to face the audience.

The bows, both solo and ensemble –

the pale hand on the wounded heart,

the curtsies of the hapless suicide,

the bobbing of the chopped-off head.

The bows in pairs –

rage extends its arm to meekness,

the victim's eyes smile at the torturer,

the rebel indulgently walks beside the tyrant.

Eternity trampled by the golden slipper's toe.

Redeeming values swept aside with the swish of a wide-brimmed hat.

The unrepentant urge to start all over tomorrow.

Now enter, single file, the hosts who died early on,

in Acts 3 and 4, or between the scenes.

The miraculous return of all those lost without a trace.

The thought that they've been waiting patiently offstage

without taking off their makeup

or their costumes

moves me more than all the tragedy's tirades.

But the curtain's fall is the most uplifting part,

the things you see before it hits the floor:

here one hand quickly reaches for a flower,

there another hand picks up a fallen sword.

Only then, one last, unseen hand

does its duty

and grabs me by the throat.

– Wisława Szymborska, translated by Clare Cavanagh and Stanisław Barańczak

Theater occupies a strange liminal space, culturally, intellectually, emotionally. It is both popular & elitist, low & high art, respectable & subversive, mocking & empathetic; filled with fakery & with truth; it both imitates & inspires real life, or perhaps that should be "real" life, as there is always the sense that we're playing parts offstage, even if we don't think we are: famously, All the world's a stage, / And all the men and women merely players. (At the time Shakespeare wrote those words, women were of course not allowed on the English stage, so Jacques's theory is truly all-encompassing.)

Szymborska, with characteristic lightness & penetration, investigates the selvage of an evening at the theater: not just after the play has ended, but in that more precise in-between space & time in which the players emerge, in costume but out of character, & take their bows, while we applaud our acknowledgement that we've known all along that the action that has absorbed us for several hours didn't, in some sense, really happen. (To quote another of Shakespeare's plays, What's Hecuba to him, or he to Hecuba, / That he should weep for her?). She adds an imaginary sixth act to the canonical five of classical tragedy. I've always found the minutes before a play begins a weird blank space of non-time; Szymborska finds, in the moments after the play has ended, a richness & a fruitful ambiguity.

It is a sort of resurrection, as the dead are raised; as in a film run backwards, fatal knives emerge out of the wounds; & deadly enemies clasp hands & bow together. Smaller things happen as well: wigs gone askew during the action get adjusted: that would be distracting in a performance, but the actor wants to look appropriate for the bows. The things that mattered so much during the play – whatever love or treachery or loss made the action tragic – fade in significance. Even "redeeming values", presumably whatever message we're supposed to take from the play, gets swept aside by the elegant gestures of an actor in a fancy hat.

And the unrepentant urge to start all over tomorrow: we know, at some level, that what we've been seeing will be repeated, night after night, for the duration of the run, with the words & actions all pretty much the same, over & over. And given that this is probably, given the description of the costumes & actions, a classical tragedy, it may be something we're intimately familiar with on the page, even if we've never seen it brought to life on stage. We may even enjoy the show so much ("enjoy" is such a strange word to use of a tragedy) that we buy a ticket for another performance or two, eager to see again what we've already seen.

As the poem moves on, Szymborska gradually increases the emotions she is expressing during her sixth act. The beginning mostly describes the actions of the actors taking their bows, collecting both precise moments (adjusting a wig or gown, a "dead" performer bowing gratitude for the applause) & ironic juxtapositions that make us question whatever reality we're in: the rebel & tyrant walking out together, the victim & torturer smiling in their theatrical complicity. But then she moves to the actors who weren't in the finale, who have been waiting patiently in full make-up & costume to have their moment of applause: their patient waiting to show themselves to us, hoping for our approval, when for all practical purposes they could have already been home & in bed, she finds moving, more moving that the tragedy's speeches, which she dismisses as "tirades" (obviously the word would be different in Polish, but I believe the translators knew Szymborska & are faithfully conveying her intent here). They are perhaps a figure of the artist, staying in costume even when it's inconvenient, waiting patiently, hoping for their artistry to be noted & appreciated.

But it's at the very last stanza that we are told why she loves her sixth act so much, as Szymborska deftly transitions between amusing & interesting ironies towards an emotional clenching. We begin with another ironic & ambiguous image: the curtain falls, & that's uplifting. Down means up! We are again in the strange world of the theater, both unreal & very real. And a curtain falling is a frequent image of death: the description of life's end as a curtain falling on someone's personal tragedy is an example of how theatrical our lives can be, & how we tend to see our lives as theater. There is a sense of finality, but in those remaining moments, before we really do have to enter whatever world we consider "real" – as we stop applauding & appreciating, & gather our belongings, & trudge towards the restroom & then the subway – we are shown a few, final, very human gestures: someone reaches for a flower, a fragile bit of beauty. Someone else picks up a sword, continuing whatever unending fight had been fought. . . .

A few fleeting moments of beauty, or of longing for recognition, for being seen, before the curtain, literally & metaphorically, descends. The poet describes her reaction to this ultimate ending in vivid physical terms: the emotion grips her by the throat. This unseen hand "does its duty": is this why she has come to the theater? Not for the official show, the classic tragedy (whose purpose, according to Aristotelean authority, is to purge the viewer of pity & terror), but for the strange moment that brings us from dramatic action to our less well arranged world? Here, in the unending attempt to impose order, meaning, significance, & beauty on the chaotic world, & the inevitable confusion & dissolution between the borders of theater & life, is the true source for the poet of the cleansing emotions. At last she is moved, just as she's moving away, a mirror of our own ambiguous relation to the truthful lies of the theater.

I took this poem from Map: Collected and Last Poems by Wislawa Szymborska.

Museum Monday 2024/32

 

detail of Water Lilies by Monet, seen at the de Young Museum in 2019 as part of their special exhibit Monet: The Late Years

Friday Photo 2024/31

 

Lincoln Park, San Francisco, California