Poem of the Week 2024/6

The Ivy Green

Oh, a dainty plant is the Ivy green,

That creepeth o'er ruins old!

Of right choice food are his meals I ween,

In his cell so lone & cold.

The wall must be crumbled, the stone decayed,

To pleasure his dainty whim;

& the mouldering dust that years have made

Is a merry meal for him.

    Creeping where no life is seen,

    A rare old plant is the Ivy green.

Fast he stealeth on, though he wears no wings,

& a staunch old heart has he.

How closely he twineth, how tight he clings,

To his friend the huge Oak tree!

& slily he traileth along the ground

& his leaves he gently waves,

As he joyously hugs & crawleth round

The rich mould of dead men's graves.

    Creeping where grim death has been,

    A rare old plant is the Ivy green.

Whole ages have fled & their works decayed,

& nations have scattered been;

But the stout old Ivy shall never fade,

From its hale & hearty green.

The brave old plant in its lonely days,

Shall fatten upon the past:

For the stateliest building man can raise,

Is the Ivy's food at last.

    Creeping on, where time has been,

    A rare old plant is the Ivy green.

– Charles Dickens

Ivy is terrifying stuff. Years ago when I moved into my current residence & my first Christmas rolled around, I went into my yard & cut down some of the holly-branches from the trees lining the driveway & some of the bright-green ivy twining around them. The holly & the ivy – festive, right? When the holidays passed, I tossed the holly branches into my green bin outside & put the ivy into my compost pile in the back. Months passed, & every time I turned the compost pile, while everything else in there decayed (or, as our poem would have it, in its British spelling, mouldered) into dirt, the ivy emerged as fresh & green as the day I threw it in there; the only change was that it was now bright & glossy from the moisture in the compost. Eventually I pulled it out of the compost pile & put it in the green bin for pick-up. Let the industrial composters handle it!

Dickens wrote this poem for inclusion in his first novel, The Pickwick Papers. Pickwick & his traveling companions are staying with their new friend Mr Wardle, a well-off country gentleman, at his place in Dingley Dell. It is a winter evening, & an elderly clergyman joins the party & recites, at their urging, this poem, which he wrote as a young man. Given the chronology of the novel, that would make the intended time of this poem sometime in the late eighteenth century, but its style hearkens back to even earlier days, to the times when ballads were the main popular form of poetry. The basic ballad beat is  there (four beat lines followed by three beat lines), the regular rhymes (ababcdcd), the refrain that ends each stanza, the archaic -eth endings to the verbs.

Not just the style but the substance of the poem evokes a by-gone time: the ruins old, with crumbling walls & decaying stone, suggest, in this English setting, one of the monastic buildings deserted after Henry VIII broke with the Roman Church, a suggestion almost sealed by the reference to a cell, the typical term for a monk's or nun's room (the cell is lone & cold, which not only reinforces the picturesque quality of the ruin but brings to mind a typical English Protestant idea of a monk's or nun's life as something unnaturally cut off from normal human sensuality & domestic happiness). The fictional creator of this poem is, as I said earlier, a clergyman, & in the late eighteenth century country clergy of the Church of England were often more noted for antiquarian research than for spiritual zealotry. That sets the stage here: a romantic view of dilapidated Gothic buildings, stately buildings gone to dust, & the graves of the people (unnamed, probably forgotten) who built them.

There's a certain morbid element at play in this view, belied by the stealthy vigor of the main protagonist, the ivy. The ivy is consistently associated with green, the color of growth, of Nature at its most robust & lively. But the plant's full strength is revealed only gradually; the first description tells us that the plant is dainty, which is not a word that connotes strength, & that it creeps (creepeth) along, a style of movement associated with lowly & humble creatures. But we soon find out that the daintiness is deceptive: it indicates not fragility but the finicky tastes of a decadent connoisseur, insisting on a certain level of decay before he will consume what's left. (This is a standard trope in poetic mentions of ivy: that a seemingly weak exterior – ivy is frequently depicted as clinging, as it is in the second stanza here – hides a crushing & persistent strength.)

The ivy is deceptive, even treacherous; creeping adds to this impression; it is a sneaky, not-straightforward way of moving. The ivy crawls, it steals along, he is sly beneath his gently waving leaves. Whim & pleasure guide his devouring. But our final impression of the ivy is of its indomitable, even admirable, vigor. The first stanza gives us the contrast between the decaying ruins & the merry meals the ivy makes of them; as noted earlier, there are suggestions of decadence in the ivy's progress over the stones of the fallen buildings. The second stanza emphasizes his tight clinging & his joyous hugs, with an almost sexual physical intensity that contrasts with grim death and the dead men's graves. We find out the ivy not only has a heart, but a staunch one. But what is this staunch heart committed to?

As we find out in the third stanza, the ivy is committed to its own being, its own creative destruction of the world. It becomes a sort of Life Force. In this stanza, we move beyond the specific, limited locale in both space & time of the first two stanzas, with their ruins & their graveyards, into a sweeping view of whole Ages (fled) & whole nations (scattered), & the civilizations that emerged in those times & places are forgotten, abandoned, decayed, or lost, while the ivy crawls endlessly on. The poet's previously ambivalent or questioning views give way to admiration in this stanza: the ivy is stout, meaning sturdy, strong, & tough; it is hale & hearty, it is brave, which suggests splendor as well as fearless. It is also, more poignantly, an old plant, facing lonely days – as if it has outlived whole civilizations & their inhabitants to carry on alone. This is where the bravery comes in: to keep on keeping on. The works of humanity die, decay, & are lost, but the endlessly regenerative force of Nature in the shape of ivy continues, covering all.

This poem combines an intense, almost morbid interest in the picturesque & the ruined, in the grotesque byways of humanity, with an almost frightening sense of ongoing growth & creativity. In this it reminds me in capsule of the works of its great creator. Today is 7 February 2024; on this date in 1812, Charles Dickens came into this world.

I took this poem from the Oxford Illustrated Dickens edition of The Pickwick Papers.

Shotgun Players catch-up: Yerma, The Wolf Play, Hedwig & the Angry Inch

Not many performances for me this month so I'm catching up on some past stuff, starting with Shotgun Players. Their first show this year, Marivaux's The Triumph of Love, was wonderful (my write-up is here). The second play was Lorca's Yerma, & when the season announcement came out it was the Marivaux - Lorca one-two punch that made me decide to renew a subscription that I had let lapse during the pandemic. For years I have waited to see one of Lorca's plays on stage. I'm still waiting, because this mess didn't count as Lorca.

Yerma: The play was translated & adapted (emphasis on "adapted") by Melinda Lopez & directed by Katja Rivera. In her director's note in the program, Rivera mentioned that 1934, the year Lorca wrote Yerma, a play (to summarize baldly) about a woman frustrated by her inability to become pregnant, was also the year her grandmother died from complications of childbirth (the child also died). This coincidence led Rivera to move the location of the play from rural Spain in the 1930s to rural southern California in the 1930s. With all due compassion for the director's family tragedy – though I also have to mention that it is not something that is going to resonate for anyone outside of her family, which would of course include pretty much all of the audience – the relocation was this production's first major mistake.

Rural Spain in the 1930s was a place where the strictures of family (which encompassed those of Church & State as well) lay heavily on individuals. You were to do as had always been done, world without end amen; otherwise you were disgracing yourself &, even more importantly, your family. The United States, however, even in isolated rural sections, even in the 1930s, is a place where change – moving on, moving out, remaking yourself – is practically a cultural imperative. Moving the action from Spain to California undercuts the stifling conventionality of Yerma's society. It also makes nonsense of the ancient pagan remnants still holding on in the countryside: for example, the strange fertility ritual that the desperate Yerma goes to towards the end of the play. In Spain it seems like some atavistic survival of pre-Christian times, lying beneath the official religion, still surviving because it speaks to some weirdly deep need. Transfer that to the California hills & it becomes . . . what, exactly? Some kind of weird musical comedy interlude, complete with Victor, the young man the married Yerma is longing for, dressed in a silly looking bull outfit. (During this episode Yerma is wearing just a slip, & the performer had what I first thought was a large bruise on her upper chest, which turned out to be a large tattoo, which pretty much rules out any time other than the last 10 or so years. I will never understand why actors get visible tattoos.)

Earlier Victor had told Yerma that his family has been ranching in these hills for 100 years, which is pretty impressive by California standards but not so much by Spanish. In Lorca's play, when he announces that he's moving his herds to a different area, it comes as a seismic shock: people just don't move around that much, & his departure means Yerma's longings will never be satisfied. When he makes the same announcement in California, it doesn't mean much because of course he's moving to a better place – that's just what Americans do. This is one of many moments that fall flat because of the switch in locale.

Lorca's character The Old Pagan Woman has been renamed (which, under the circumstances, makes sense: what pagan past could she possibly represent in a community that came to California from someplace else?), & we completely lose the sense that she is somehow outside of Church, State, & Family, a remnant of an older order, one rooted in Nature & the body. Here she's just another one of the conventionally & frankly tediously bawdy women, only a little older than the rest of them. In Lorca's play, when she tells Yerma that her husband, like the rest of his family, is sexually feeble, it has the force of someone speaking truths no one else dares to speak. But in this version, it is another line that falls flat; based on what we've seen of Yerma's husband & their relationship, the description is way off base. In this version, we are told repeatedly that the two have a warm, loving relationship. Yerma feels deeply for him. He feels deeply for her! Juan (Caleb Cabrera) is a charming & sexy guy. He's very sensitive to her desire to get pregnant; when he suggests adopting a baby, it is a considerate & thoughtful approach, not a dismissive one. This version of the play opens & closes with scenes of the two having sex together, & they clearly have a playful, considerate, affectionate, & very physical relationship. & that's the second big mistake this production makes. But before I go into that, a little digression:

Years ago at ACT I saw a production of Hedda Gabler in which Judge Brack came across as very obviously a gay man – not a repressed gay man, but the kind of happy-with-who-he-is guy who would go on Bear weekends with the hubby & bring you a casserole when your cat died. He clearly had no sexual interest in Hedda or any other woman. It was so cozy when he called her "Miss Hedda!" When he urges her to think over the details of her involvement in Lovborg's suicide, there was no undertone of menace or threat; he sounded genuinely anguished as he urged her, "Think, Miss Hedda!" If this production had happened more recently I might have considered that they were experimenting with "queering the classics"; instead I sat there somewhere between amazed & amused: did they really not understand the sexual subtext there? How were they making sense of the ending if they didn't have Brack setting a blackmailing sexual trap for Hedda?

Something similar happens here with sexual subtext. (Are people in these less repressed times just unable to interpret these things? Do they have to be spelled out before people will see them, no matter how obvious they are?) Yerma's inability to become pregnant may well be due to how her body functions, not his. We don't know because apparently she never goes to see a doctor – something else that makes sense in rural Spain & much less sense in California, even in a fairly isolated rural area in the 1930s. The only way we can be sure it's her husband's responsibility is if he's not sleeping with her, or having only a bare minimum of sex. I feel I should put that sentence in italics. He & Yerma do not have an affectionate, loving relationship. They insist they "love" each other because that is what husbands & wives officially feel, & to feel otherwise, to long for the more virile Victor, much less to cheat with him, is an unthinkable violation of social & religious norms (unless you're the Old Pagan Woman, who looks askance at these oppressive formalities). Think of the family name! Unless you see that Juan is neglecting Yerma physically, the action of the play doesn't make much sense – &, indeed, it didn't make much sense in this version.

No one really seemed to know what to do with this play. Lorca's lean drama is padded out with various irrelevant excrescences, including some extended musical numbers. Another example: when Juan berates his sisters for not keeping a close enough watch on his wife, he mentions that they're eating his bread & drinking his wine without being useful. Bread & wine have a certain sacramental resonance in a Catholic country, of course, but also that's just what you mostly eat & drink in rural Spain. But the mention of wine apparently prompted someone to decide that Juan should have a drinking problem. There had been no signs of it before, but suddenly he's lurching around the stage in ever-increasing states of inebriation – until the end, when he's suddenly sober & he & Yerma realize this has all been some sort of misunderstanding (I guess?), because they love each other so deeply, so they reconcile (again, I guess?), & have sex again. Which is when she kills him by choking him to death. Why? (To Lorca's point, though not this version's: Juan would have to be a physically fairly feeble man if he could be choked to death so easily by his wife.)

Lorca wrote a swift tragedy about a woman whose sexual longings, represented by a regenerative, Life-Force wish for a child of her own, are thwarted by the crushing conventional pieties of Family, Society, & Church (probably in that order), with tragic results. This version is the meandering tale of a sexually satisfied woman who is not dealing in any realistic way with her increasingly nutty (&, I have to say, increasingly tiresome) obsession with getting pregnant (& her failure to do so, again, may be due to her physiology, not her husband's), which leads her to murder her husband, who is a considerate, attentive, & sensitive lover & companion. Why exactly am I supposed to sympathize with her rather than with him?

Another thing, about those conventionally bawdy women & the sisters who are supposed to monitor Yerma (a purpose that was not made clear enough or oppressive enough in this production): the director isn't the only one with family associations with this story; my father's side of the family comes from a very similar Latin culture to the one Lorca portrayed, & I am old enough to remember some of these women in real life. The notion that they were slyly subversive of gender norms & of "the patriarchy" is a contemporary American fantasy. They would not be sympathetic at all to women like Yerma; they were there to make sure she toed the line. That is why Lorca had to speak for her.

Usually Shotgun's outside murals do a wonderful job capturing the essence of a play. Here they showed Yerma blowing seeds from a dandelion puff with the tag line "Give me something to hope for." This seems . . . awfully soft for a play about a sexually thwarted woman who murders her husband. Did no one involved have the slightest idea what this play was actually about?

The Wolf Play: Written by Hansol Jung & directed by Elizabeth Carter, this was a bit of a disappointment. It started off strong, with a kind of metatheatrical speech by the boy who thinks he's a wolf (his personality split was portrayed by having the actor voice his thoughts while he manipulated a puppet who interacted with the others on stage). Maybe it started off too strong, because I was expecting something a little wilder than the more straightforward "issue" play we got. The basic situation is that the boy had been adopted by a couple who ended up having another child of their own & decided to unload the adopted boy via the Internet. He winds up with an interracial lesbian couple, one of whom is a professional boxer being trained by her partner's brother. Then the original couple splits up & the man decides he wants the boy back, especially once he finds out that the new family is same-sex.

Maybe if I were more familiar with what is apparently an actual thing that happens – people unloading adopted children via Internet chatboards? that seems only dubiously legal, but what do I know – then some of what happens would have made more sense to me. For example, there is a lawsuit at the end which was staged by having the participants (first adoptive father, the brother, the two women) yelling at & over each other. It was pretty effective but would have been more so if I'd had a clearer idea of the legal issues in play. I was also a little disappointed that the brother (Caleb Cabrera again), who started off making some excellent points to his sister, who is trying to figure out how to raise this new child, about how boys & men are treated & expected to behave in the world, & how he (the brother) can help the child with that, is turned into an easily manipulated, guys-should-stick-together guy once he talks with the original adoptive father.

The child takes a dislike to the brother, & it's not clear why, as the only person he's drawn to is the boxing member of his new family. Why would he resist the brother, who also boxes & was trying to bond with him? It's almost as if the child has to like the Black lesbian boxer because not to do would be uncool. (This notion is reinforced by seeing that the original adoptive father, a fairly dweeby white guy, is really put off by having lesbians raise "his" son – that's a surefire way to damn someone in the eyes of a Berkeley audience.) The other woman was the driving force behind the adoption, barely got her partner's agreement, & seemed to have little idea about what she'd do with a child once she had one; she just knew she wanted one. Maybe I had residual impatience from Yerma a few months earlier, but I didn't have much interest in or sympathy with her. Children are not toys for the mother's amusement! Mikee Loria was very good as the adopted boy, but the whole "I'm a wolf" thing started to drag over the course of two intermissionless hours; the boy just keeps saying, "Wolves do X" or "as a Wolf, I feel X"  & nothing develops or changes.

On the whole, not a disaster like Yerma but a bit disappointing.

Hedwig & the Angry Inch: The John Cameron Menzies / Stephen Trask musical, directed by Richard A Mosqueda. This turned out to be a pleasant surprise, & aside from the Marivaux, the best thing this season. I didn't go in with high hopes; I had seen the movie years ago & liked it, but the words "rock musical" are not ones that set my soul ablaze with excitement & I frankly didn't remember much about the show. Also, Shotgun tends not only to amplify their musicals (for reasons I don't understand: it's a small space; if your voice can't fill it you probably shouldn't be performing professionally) but to over-amplify them. I saw Hedwig on one of the nights when Chris Steele was performing, & a lively & thoughtful performance they gave. The band, Skip the Needle, was energetic & fun. The show was about an hour & forty minutes, no intermission, & before & after I ended up having a pleasant conversation with the woman next to me. She & her wife were visiting from Denver (I think they knew people in the band; they had bought tickets at the last minute, so the wife had one of the stage seats & the other woman was in the front row with me). All in all a very enjoyable evening. I don't have much more to say about it. I have a lot to say about the final play of the season, Babes in Ho-lland, & its audience, but that will have to wait as this is long enough already.

Museum Monday 2024/6

 

detail of The Nativity by the Master of the Retable of the Reyes Católicos, now in the Legion of Honor in San Francisco

San Francisco Performances: Raehann Bryce-Davis

After my three days at Gabriel Kahane's Pivot Festival for San Francisco Performances, I was back at Herbst Theater for the fourth night in a row, this time for SFP's presentation of the San Francisco recital debut of mezzo-soprano Raehann Bryce-Davis, accompanied by pianist Jeanne-Minette Cilliers.

The recital's general theme was In Honor of Women, & the first half had a woman composer setting a male poet (Amy Beach / Robert Browning) & then a male composer setting a female poet (Wagner / Mathilde Wesendonck). Beach's trio of Browning poems was commissioned by the Browning Society of Boston. They are brief but wonderfully varied; from the very first one, The Year's at the Spring, it was immediately apparent that Bryce-Davis uses words very expressively. She was looking very glam in an ivory sheath covered with light-catching strings of beads, some of which hung loose from the arms. The effect was warm, rich, & striking, sort of like her voice made visible. She had Cilliers speak an introduction to the Wesendonck Lieder, as she was one of those who had been urging the piece on Bryce-Davis. The performance was commanding & intimate. The piano accompaniment was poetic but I felt at times perhaps a bit underpowered, but then the mezzo's voice is an attention-grabber. As the man behind me said more than once, "She's got some pipes on her."

After the intermission, Bryce-Davis came out in a new but still glam look, a sparkly black sheath with broad white stripes running diagonally down the front. Cilliers also had a new outfit, which fit around her like a gilded lily. Both were designed by Bryce-Davis's fiancé, whose name I unfortunately did not catch. [UPDATE: His name is Allen Virgo, & thanks to Lisa Hirsch for the information; click here for her blog entry with a link to her review of the recital.]

The second half was all twentieth-century material, most of it contemporary, though it started with two earlier pieces, Birth, a setting by Margaret Bonds of words by her friend Langston Hughes, & Florence Price's The Crescent Moon, a setting of words by Louise C. Wallace. The on-going rediscovery of Price's work is one of the more exciting concert-hall developments of the past few years. These songs were followed by Melissa Dunphy's Come, My Tan-Faced Children, which revises a section of Whitman's Pioneers, O Pioneers! as a song of Black empowerment. This was written for Bryce-Davis, as was the next series, three songs by Maria Thompson Corley: Black Riders' Freedom Song (written as a tribute in particular to the Black cowboys of the American West), The Beauty in My Blackness, & I Am Not an Angry Black Woman. The latter in particular was a whole dramatic monologue, allowing Bryce-Davis to display, once again, her considerable dramatic skills, covering moods from speculative to wistful to defiant.

By now it was clear how gorgeous & big Bryce-Davis's voice is, but also how emotionally open & engaged her whole personality is. I had seen her in the Met Opera livecast last fall of Anthony Davis's X: The Life & Times of Malcolm X, & I am eager to experience her live in opera. The recital closed with three elegant & lively settings of Jamaican folk songs made by Peter Ashbourne, in tribute to the mezzo's Jamaican mother. As she & Cilliers both said, you can't sing in honor of women & not acknowledge your mothers.

Friday Photo 2024/5

 

Market Street, San Francisco, January 2024

San Francisco Performances: Gabriel Kahane's PIVOT Festival

Last Friday was the third & final night of San Francisco Performances's annual PIVOT Festival, held at Herbst Theater & planned this year by Gabriel Kahane, who performed along with the Attacca Quartet & Roomful of Teeth. The three nights felt like one long & wonderful concert.

The First Night: featured Kahane & the Attacca, who began with Ravel's String Quartet, but in a festival spirit of mixing things up, only the first movement; the remaining three were interspersed through the rest of the program. This was a refreshing way to hear what was easily the most familiar music of the evening; breaking the quartet apart gave us a fresh listen to each isolated movement & provided a spine for the rest of the pieces. The Attacca is a lively & intense bunch.

After the first movement came Red Letter Days, a song by Kahane. As with his other songs over the festival, no lyrics were provided. I was OK with this; I think it's within the bounds what an artist can ask of us, his audience. The advantage is that instead of reading along in our program books (or shuffling the pages noisily so we can find the lyrics), we have to commit to listening extra-closely. It does help involve the audience. The disadvantage, of course, is that we're probably not going to catch all the words, particularly if the text is somewhat dense. But even a broken text combined with music & expressive singing (Kahane sounds more like a folk singer than a classically trained singer, but his voice is pleasing) can give us the poetic image & mood.

The song was followed by Part 1 of Paul Wiancko's Benkei's Standing Death (Part 2 came in the second half), an instrumental piece commissioned by the Attacca based on a Japanese legend about the warrior monk Saitō Musashibō Benkei. It's very visual music, especially the second half, with the staccato strikes of the fatal arrows. Then Kahane sang another song, To Be American, followed by the second movement of the Ravel. The final piece in the first half was the world premiere of a revised version by Kahane of his string quartet, Klee, which did for me evoke the painter's strange, slightly surreal figures & patches of color. During the quietest part someone managed to drop an umbrella or something that landed with a loud bang. Other than that, the audience was, for the most part, well behaved.

After the intermission we continued along the path of the first half: first a song by Kahane (Little Love), then the third movement of the Ravel, then the second movement of the Wiancko, then the fourth & final movement of the Ravel, followed by the world premiere of a new arrangement by Kahane of Final Privacy Song, with lyrics by poet Matthew Zapruder, written for Kahane's wedding. He had the words framed up near his piano & finally decided he should set them to music. Again, a verbally complex & thoughtful piece, but the words came through with the music to bring the evening to a lovely & meditative close.

The Second Night: featured Roomful of Teeth. It also featured more talking from the stage than I like, but that does seem to be inevitable these days. The first piece was Caroline Shaw's The Isle; as Shaw is a member of the chorus, the composer was there singing with the rest of the group.  It started with sounds rather than words, murmurs & swells of sound, but when the words started appearing I realized that the isle in question was Prospero's; there were a couple of songs & a couple of speeches from The Tempest flowing along until the piece dissolves back into sounds. (It had been commissioned by the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington DC). This was followed by Movement 4 of Peter Shin's Bits torn from words, which the Roomful speaker described as "bonkers", which is a recommendation, I think. I'd love to hear the whole work. The first half concluded with Angélica Negrón's Math, the one which is sweet, which the Roomful speaker (sorry, I don't know which member of the chorus it was) described as a sweet & sassy long song. I would not have gotten any of those things from what I heard. There were ethereal sounds floating from an instrument (maybe a synthesizer?) over a thudding bass – not the sort of monotonous thudding you get with a lot of pop music; more like a stately progression of thuds. The words floated above that. I found it all . . . OK. Sort of a nondescript end to the first half.

The second half was excellent, though: Kahane's Elevator Songs, written so that each of the chorus's eight members had a spotlight number. I loved the variety in the chorus; the voices are obviously all different (though they also blend together quite well), but they each have an individual look. Some dance & sway while singing, others are still. The songs are Kahane's characteristic blend of empathy with off-kilter oddities, somewhere between comic & weird & sometimes very sad. Kahane mentioned from the stage that he wrote the piece specifically for these singers' voices, & it was conceived as sort of a theater piece: in other words, not just some songs strung together, but songs emerging from instrumental & vocal bits, focusing on different people who find themselves in this odd hotel somewhere out in America. A wonderful way to end that evening.

The Third Night: both the Attacca & Roomful of Teeth were on stage with Kahane. This was the best attended of the three nights, & the audience definitely was there (not just physically present, but in the sense "I am THERE for this!") for modern-music makers. We opened with Kahane's song Where Are the Arms, followed by the first of several pieces by one of the Couperins, this time Louis, the Unmeasured Prelude in D Minor, which, like the other Couperin pieces, was a keyboard work which Kahane arranged for string quartet. I love French baroque music & though it's customary & accurate to mention its elegance & sophistication, there was also a very deep sense of joy which the Attacca gave to it.

That was followed by the first of the four movements of Caroline Shaw's Partita for 8 Singers, which, as with the Ravel the first night, was split up over the program, providing a solid spine to it. I had not heard the piece before. It's wild & wonderful. You can hear everything from medieval church music to Tibetan throat singing reflected in it. It's like some loopy celestial chant from a gonzo monastery. That was followed by François Couperin's La Logivières, the second movement of Shaw's Partita, & another François Couperin piece, Le Tic-toc-Choc, & that ended the first half.

The second half was just as satisfying. Opening with the world premiere of Kahane's song Under a Tree, we then had François Couperin's Le Carillon de Cythère, then part three of Shaw's Partita, the final François Couperin piece, the Passacaille in B Minor (8e Ordre), & then the fourth & final section of Shaw's Partita. The concert, & the festival, closed with an arrangement by Kahane for the chorus & quartet of Paul Simon's American Tune. I don't know this song, but as with Final Privacy Song that closed the first night, it capped things off on a lovely & meditative note. Despite the ebullience on stage, that really was the best way to end a program that, to some extent, was trying to reflect a current American mood.

Kahane mentioned, from the stage & in his posted statements about the festival, that what he was mostly trying to celebrate with these evenings was a sense of community: community that comes from making, creating & performing, music together, & from gathering together in a specific space to listen to the people making these sounds. "Community" is not a word I particularly like or trust, but I saw what he was getting at, & he achieved it admirably & memorably. It will be a long time for me before these concerts fade into memory.

Poem of the Week 2024/5

On Snuff-Taking

Custom, in this small article I find

What strong ascendance thou hast o'er the mind.

My friend's advice the first inducements were:

"Take it," said she, "it will your spirits cheer."

All resolute the offered drug to take,

But in the trial sickened with my hate.

By repetition I was brought to bear,

Then rather liked, now love it too, too dear.

Be careful, oh, my soul! how thou let'st in

The baneful poison of repeated sin;

Never be intimate with any crime,

Lest Custom make it amiable in time.

– Elizabeth Teft

As a lover of old novels, I was familiar with the concept of taking snuff, but realizing how imperfect my knowledge is I turned to that Sibylline oracle of our times, Wikipedia, & read what turned out to be their very interesting entry on snuff. It turns out I was mistaken in thinking that its purpose was to induce sneezing; apparently that was looked down upon as the mark of an amateur or a beginner. & many snuffs were flavored in some way. & – but this was no surprise, as it's a tobacco product – it is addictive & causes cancers, a link noted back in the eighteenth century, when this poem was written.

What I love about this poem is that its subject is very current – I think we've all heard people talk about their first use of some drug, legal or not (beer, marijuana, all the usual suspects), usually urged by what used to be called "peer pressure", & how they didn't like it at first, yet (somewhat inexplicably) they kept on trying, until they ended up not only loving it, but needing it – but the poem's treatment of the subject is echt eighteenth century: the moral reflections turned into general truths (the way Custom, or Habit, rules our behaviors, mental as well as physical, a theme beloved by Proust, & the warning to avoid vices lest we grow inured to them); the regular beat of the iambic pentameter lines; the rhyming couplets (though she does, unusually for her time, use a slant rhyme (take / hate); this doesn't seem like a case in which the pronunciation used to make it a perfect rhyme, as with Pope in The Rape of the Lock when he rhymes tea / obey); the vocative address to her soul, as the guardian against & potential victim of sin; in fact, the reference to sin, along with the rest of the vocabulary (soul. baneful poison. amiable); the whole sense that moderation & balance are best, even for poets (what a contrast with the Romantic poets of the late eighteenth & early nineteenth century, who welcomed drug-induced hallucinations as pathways to creativity!)

I took this poem from Eighteenth Century Women Poets: An Oxford Anthology, edited by Roger Lonsdale.

Museum Monday 2024/5

 

detail of Saint Francis Venerating the Crucifix by Domenikos Theotokopoulos (El Greco), now in the Legion of Honor, San Francisco

Friday Photo 2024/4

 

some graphically bold leaves from the San Francisco Conservatory of Flowers

Poem of the Week 2024/4

On Sitting Down to Read King Lear Once Again

O golden-tongued Romance, with serene lute!

    Fair plumèd Syren, Queen of far-away!

    Leave melodizing on this wintry day,

Shut up thine olden pages, and be mute:

Adieu! for, once again, the fierce dispute

    Betwixt damnation and impassioned clay

    Must I burn through. once more humbly assay

The bitter-sweet of this Shakespearian fruit:

Chief Poet! and ye clouds of Albion,

    Begetters of our deep eternal theme!

When through the old oak forest I am gone,

    Let me not wander in a barren dream,

But, when I am consumèd in the fire,

Give me new Phoenix wings to fly at my desire.

– John Keats

Why is Keats sitting down to read King Lear, instead of going to the theater to see it? The reason is that, in a perverse tribute to the horrifying power of Shakespeare's tragedy, the version of Lear that held the English stage from 1681 until around 1838 (years after the death of Keats in 1821) was an adaptation by Nahum Tate that ended with Lear restored to sanity & his throne, & a still-living Cordelia marrying Edgar. (Tate was a Poet Laureate of England, best remembered for his adaptation of Lear, which is rarely staged these days, & his libretto for Purcell's Dido & Aeneas, which is still frequently done.) So reading was the only way to confront the real Shakespearian deal.

The poet begins by saying farewell to the more alluring world of Romance, a word which suggests a certain amount of fancy & playfulness with a perhaps tangential relationship to reality – a world with the possibility of escape from the world we live in, & of escapism. The description of Romance brings to mind The Faerie Queene, by Shakespeare's contemporary Spenser, & the reference to the Queen of far-away reinforces the suggestion. I wouldn't describe that work as serene or as an escape, but it does tend towards a "happy" ending, in which Virtue eventually & after hard struggles overcomes its many enemies. But perhaps serene refers more to the melodious sound of Spenser's verse, its sensuous & musical evocations, which were influential on Keats. There is a suggestion of danger in such charms, as the reference to Syrens hints; the sirens of course were sea-women of Greek mythology (best known from their appearance in The Odyssey) whose entrancing songs led sailors to their deaths. The lute, already an outmoded instrument in Keats's time, the olden pages (Spenser's epic is written in a deliberately & self-created "archaic" style & is modeled on the great Italian Renaissance epics by Ariosto & Tasso), the far-away, all suggest a work that, however absorbing & even irresistible, is perhaps also distant from modern & local concerns. Is there a danger of being lured into a lovely land, far from the crushing world we live in? The sudden appearance in the poem of the wintry day is a reminder that reality is often cold & harsh & cannot be safely escaped for too long.

There is a feeling that revisiting King Lear is a bit of a compulsion with the poet. Once again appears not only in the title, but in the body of the poem, as he turns from bidding adieu to Romance to explaining why he must (& that is the word he uses, the imperative must) read the original tragedy again. Once again suggests that this is a periodic corrective he feels obliged to undertake. That may make it sound like eating your vegetables. But the description of the Lear experience evokes not drudgery or duty but the frightening & the sublime: fierce, burning, humbling. Here is no concord as guided by the serene lute of Romance, but a struggle, a fierce dispute / Betwixt damnation & impassioned clay. Damnation is usually associated with divine forces, forces larger than humanity's powers. Yet humanity struggles against this fate. Redemption does not appear to be a possibility, nor does any sort of limbo. The universe opposes us, in the world of King Lear, with the hopelessness of damnation. We are the impassioned clay. Clay is interesting: it connects humanity with the basic stuff of earth, it is reminiscent of Biblical language, but the usual terms there are ashes or dirt. Clay in the Bible is also used in comparisons involving a potter working on a wheel: something being shaped, formed, yet fragile, breakable. The potter in that metaphor is usually God; are we clay being shaped by divine or otherwise unseen powers? & being smashed by the same? The power we have, between damnation & our clay-like nature, is being impassioned: driven to resist, not intellectually, but emotionally, spiritually.

This poem's form is a sonnet: a fourteen line poem in iambic pentameter. There are two main variants in English: The Shakespearian, three quatrains & a concluding couplet, & the Spenserian, an octave & a sestet. For this poem about Shakespeare's play, Keats chooses Spenser's form. The octave describes the poet putting aside the temptations of Romance to deal with the intensity of Shakespeare's tragedy. Then he opens the sestet by addressing, not the general spirit of a type of literature, as in his opening lines, but the specific poet who wrote the tragedy in question: & not just as a poet, but as Chief Poet, an acknowledgement of the primacy of what he created over the melodizing of Romance. But Shakespeare seems to be only a co-creator: listed as the other begetter are the clouds of Albion. Albion is an archaic / poetic term for Britain. It is of course suitable for the period in which King Lear is set. Perhaps as an elegantly outmoded term it also hints at the continuing influence & power of Romance. (& we shouldn't underestimate its importance as a rhyme for gone; English is a language notoriously poorer in rhymes than, say, Italian.) Mentioning England in connection with co-creation of Shakespeare's play gives it a bardic power: something rooted in the history of a nation (& King Lear was in fact considered an historical figure).

But it is not Albion itself but its clouds that are co-begetters of the deep eternal theme. Clouds gives us a force of Nature, something outside of human control, maybe suggesting a heaven, but one absent of a personified Deity. They are above the world, perhaps a source of poetic inspiration, or at least of seeing beyond the daily (to have your head in the clouds is to be dreamy, unrealistic). Clouds of Albion suggests some specifically British connection to this powerful natural force. The term also brings to mind the famous storms in the drama, during which the maddened Lear rages. Sunny & clear skies are usually preferred to cloudy ones. I will admit to being uncertain about Keats's old oak forest here. If I think of the landscape of Shakespeare's play, I picture the wild heath, or of the cliffs of Dover. Perhaps old oak forest is meant to suggest an older, even primeval & Druidic England. But forests, oak or otherwise, don't really play a major role in Lear the way they do in other plays by Shakespeare. Possibly the image is meant to suggest Dante at the beginning of his Commedia, struggling to find his way out of a dark & obscure forest. Possibly Keats just liked the image & the sound.

Why is Keats addressing Shakespeare, & Nature (& History) as represented in the Clouds of Albion? He is praying, in a substitution of the Poet & Nature for the Divinity, for guidance & mercy. When he has been burnt up, consumed, by the fire that is King Lear, when he has experienced the hollowing-out & purification, the catharsis that great tragedy is supposed to bring us as its moral justification (otherwise what is it but voyeurism towards the suffering of others?), he begs that he not be left to wander in a barren dream. Barren suggests sterility; the poet is asking that this bitter-sweet Shakespearian fruit will bear fruit in him. He's not necessarily asking not to be in a dream, just not in one that is barren. Dreams can be fructifying. Dreams are a poetic source common to both Shakespeare & Romance. & Romance, in a purged & renovated form, makes something of a reappearance in the final lines. The poet asks to be reborn after he is consumed, using the image of the Phoenix, the mythological bird whose immortality came from emerging newborn from the fire in which, after his allotted centuries have passed, he consumes himself. & though the phoenix appears frequently in Shakespeare, it is also the sort of mythological & allegorical creature that populates the Faerie Queene. & in a closing suggestion of Spenser, the final line is not in the usual five-beat line of a sonnet, but, as in the so-called Spenserian stanza invented for the Faerie Queene, a six-beat line. Turning from Romance to plunge himself once more into the harrowing world King Lear will, the poet hopes, allow him to turn as he wishes (at my desire) to a new, more urgent sort of Romance.

I took this poem from the Penguin Classics edition of The Complete Poems of Keats.