Rigoletto in Las Vegas (a rape story), a 19th C Lohengrin (swans anyone?): Re-settings can jar

Gilda (Diana Damrau) and Rigoletto (Zeljoko Lucic) coping inside 1950s be-finned car (Rigoletto at the Met)

Elsa von Brabant (Annette Dasch) and Lohengrin (Jonas Kaufmann) coping among soaked wheat shafts (Lohengrin at La Scala)

Dear friends and readers,

Full disclosure: usually I like re-settings. I have enjoyed each of our local DC Source Theater (director Clara Huber) updatings of Mozart by a rewrite of the libretto and re-staging of the opera. It made the Mozarts more understandable in our terms. Of the few Euro-trash doings of opera I’ve seen (on HD screens), all but one rightly I thought undercut the reactionary nature of the numinous personages in the opera play; Claus Guth’s Don Giovanni turned the providential pattern of Mozart’s play into a story of despairing refuge. I was deeply stirred by the abstract re-staging of Traviata with the acting of Natalie Dessay. But the change has to be genuinely thought out; it cannot be done just to attract a younger audience (as I suspect the new Rigoletto has been) or out of embarrassment (which I think was the reason for resetting Lohengrin out of 10th century raw beasts and crudities). The money motive and the vanity motive have to be downplayed if art is to transcend the realities of its concrete situation and players.

So not all re-settings, no matter how at first allegorically seemingly right (sleazy, mean Vegas for Rigoletto), and physically preferable (primitive swamp, duelling in Lohengrin) work out. For the Rigoletto the altered placing was too specific, called too much attention to moral irritants and absurdities in Verdi’s opera (the Duke “sure a dreamboat“); in Lohengrin the original words referring to things in the 10th century kept were out of whack with the singer’s 19th century clothes & environment. This is the most charitable lesson one can take away from this past week’s two HD operas.

Each time I’ve seen Verdi’s Rigoletto (about 3 before this) I’ve wept copiously as Gilda lays dying and Rigoletto begs her not to leave him all alone, not to die. This time I couldn’t quite; there was something slightly risible about Damrau and Lucic doing their scene over and in the trunk of a 1950s cadillac. I thought to myself they had to practice not to fall off. I had also been jarred into paying attention to the actual happenings of Rigoletto partly because the language had been partly updated.

When Gilda rushes from the duke’s lair where she had been abducted and then seduced into having sex with him, I realized for the first time this was a post-rape scene. If she were a virgin (something the subtitles still insisted upon), it must’ve hurt, there must’ve been coercion. She certainly seemed upset at having been tied up and put into a sarcophagus and dumped into a man’s room. By rights Rigoletto should have rushed her to the police. It will be said that in terms of the re-setting Rigoletto as comedian side-kick of didn’t dare offend duke as casino owner but these were not the terms upon which the man was suffering. Further what an ass she was. Not only she but in the next act, most unlikely Sparafucile’s prostitute-sister, Maddalena (Oksana Volkova) who declared how much she loved this shit Duke (Piotr Beczala):

There seemed something wrong in the fun Piotr Beczala was having as the relaxed Dean Martin type when he was more than a cad; a continual heartless rapist who had ordered the local police to murder a sheik outraged by his daughter’s sexual spoiling. As a 21st century audience we still could have felt for a father whose culture made him take loss of virginity as the equivalent of a young women’s destruction and his shame forever, but then we were being asked to take it as fun, as trivia because the “rat-pack” as the Met introducers and discussions in the intermissions persisted in calling Frank Sinatra and his friends’s famous nightclub life together. The setting had the paradoxical effect of calling attention to the problems in Verdi’s conception. Lost were what made the story despite this ultimately dismissive treatment of women as people moving nonetheless.

What might be a valuable lesson in compassion, a source of identification in our autonomous lives was ridden over. The re-write called Rigoletto a Quasimodo at one point. That’s right. Hugo and then Verdi had made the aging fool a hunch-back, a de-formed disabled man who had taken on a vicious and spiteful carapace partly because of the way he’d been treated by others. Lucic had the slightest high shoulder, the slightest limp, his jester status slightly unfortunately not forgotten by his absurdly brightly-colored variegated sweater:

Rigoletto as usually staged shows a man all alone; the words of the libretto which insist on the unusualness of his having no family around him but Gilda were kept and this condition of isolation, of this one girl being all his home, his security, his peace (usually she is envisaged in a garden apart from the court) was lost. He cries “non lasciarmi”. The Met understandably had kept the original Italian libretto, and not only did Lucic and Damrau sing with exquisite beauty, strength and psychological distraught tragic feeling, they made the Italian come out clearly.

Most crucially, neither of the principles had changed their decades-long understanding of their characters one iota. During the interviews in the last HD performance (the interviews in one HD opera have now become an ad for the upcoming one) Lucic said emphatically his character believed the curse of the wounded father of the first act (in this version an Arab man who Rigoletto mocked by putting a towel on his head); a 16th century man as understood by 2 19th century ones would have. But not a hired comic in a 50s nightclub. Lucic said with overt irony and explicitly as if he had no idea what director, Michael Mayer had been talking about, he was to be “Don Rickles. Jim told me this comic is said to have made laughter out of the most vicious impulses: he would pick and ridicule a customer at one of the nightclub tables in front of everyone else, causing most people there (who comes to such a scene) to laugh derisively. Diana Damrau was even more unable to see any change she could make in her character. In one of her interviews she came close to saying as the best praise she could come up with that new production had not ruined the opera or her character for her.

While I watched I felt that not a lot more than these two central characters be re-thought had needed to be done to make the switch in setting function in some new way. Beczala clearly had made the leap into relaxed cad (as he showed in his interviews too); the use of the chorus girls did have the effect that many say Euro-trash is meant to: it undercut the solemnity with which this pro-elite form usually takes itself and diminished him physically too: the audience could be heard laughing as the girls made these faces, arched their bodies and brushed him with their feathers:

But by the end of the opera and on the way home I realized the the serious core of the piece had been trivialized. The Met people are anything but feminists and it’s the last thing they’d want to do to make the audience take this rape seriously so rather than think about that they decided to take the whole situation as so much gay decadence. What were the lives of Dean Martin (whom one of the courtiers, Marullo, was got up to look like)? I began to wonder if Sammy Davis Junior (whose photo was flashed during intermission) gave to black American causes. Jim assured me Davies quietly had; he had, like Obama, been half-white, in his case Jewish, an outsider on several counts, as he was slightly deformed and small for a man.

I think in the case of Rigoletto we were better off being left alone in quieter staging, abstract, old-fashioned — as Ronald Blum says the best moments were when the principles were on the stage alone; if the terms of what happened were not to be changed, you should not make the setting neon-lit 20th century. If you update it specifically, you must update the meaning of the action too. Some of this was recognized by the audience. The people we were sitting next to agreed with us (and others) that the actor-singer for Sarafucile (Stefan Kocan) was brilliantly effective. Much younger than the rest of the central cast, he really enacted a nasty coarse thug, as ready to kill for money at a moment’s notice as he was filled with a sense of his own rich luxurious elegance:

Having a bartender listen to Rigoletto morose broodings was effective. Maria Zifchak as a egregiously corrupt guardian-Giovanna out of some 1940s comic noir film was funny and effective in the same way Stephanie Blythe as Madame Ulrica had been earlier this year in Un Ballo en Maschera. Maybe they needed to stage the production as a 1940s movie, a reflection of how reality was understood not what any reality had been. I did enjoy those costumes and a couple of the minor performers where an imitation of a star or type as seen in movies was intended.

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Jim said the problem in both cases was in the opera itself.

This certainly felt true as we watched Lohengrin at the West End Cinema (DC movie-house, not far from Foggy Bottom Metro station). This time the action was mythic, and it seemed to me Claus Guth was trying to make sense of its contradictions in modern terms and it just wouldn’t do. This was another opera that would have been better staged as simply and barely as possible.

This photo with a different Elsa (Anja Harteros) comes from a rehearsal shot

At first I thought we were to take the action as Lohengrin or Elsa’s bad dream (see story). There were extras dressed as a young Elsa and her brother (whom she is said to have murdered) wandering about in Act I; at every opportunity Lohengrin was laying on the floor as if asleep. But as things progressed, I could see that wouldn’t work, and eventually the opera became about a wedding night that just went all wrong. Elsa (Annette Dasch) couldn’t adjust to not knowing who her husband Lohengrin (Jonas Kauffman). Well in real life what woman would? As with the Met Rigoletto production the people looked the roles; Kauffman so handsome and Dasch pretty, young, with flowing hair. but this was patently not real life as having them get themselves soaked and also go on about a swan no one had seen (like many another producer Guth just eliminated any attempt at an artificial swan) made clear.

The libretto had not been changed so Guth’s re-staging had nothing to do with the words. In the original play, the second act opens with the evil couple, Friedrich von Telramund (Tomas Tomasson) and his wife, Otrud (Evelyn Herlitzius) in bed together, having just fucked after coming home from some raucous drunken festival. Guth had them sitting at desk, trussed up like modern politicians in suits that were militaristic. Otrud’s outfits reminded me of Hillary Clinton’s pantsuits (while running for president) or Angela Merkel today (the German chancellor). So the parallel with the bad wedding night for the good couple was lost and nothing gained as modern day politicians do not duel with one another so the scene in context made no sense at all:

Watching the sword-fight I was therefore alerted to them being performing singers who were up to this sort of training and gymnastics on a stage.

In other words, if the myth is silly (and misogynistic as the idea is women should be content to obey and know nothing), it doesn’t help to break the suspension of disbelief altogether. During the intermissions I had become reminded that La Scala as an Italian theater and this was opening night and patrons were not altogether pleased that Wagner instead of Verdi had been chosen. If this production failed in the live theater and was at moments ridiculous to the audience in the movie-house it was not the fault of the principles. As Martin kettle (who describes the sets too in the Guardian) says, Kauffman especially has a haunting voice and manner, Evelyn Herlitzius was theatrically effective as an ambitious woman:

Tomasson was a figure out a Michael Haneke movie about rigid Nazis (e.g., The White Ribbon). Again I enjoyed more minor character roles: Rene Pape as a solemn official was what is called luxury casting.

In a sentence: these productions had the effect of pointing up problems in the operas.

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I cannot say I was bored at either production; they were lessons in what one can and cannot do to older operas whose stories or themes have become unacceptable (embarrassing), outdated (the duke rapes Gilda and this is not “rat-pack” amusement) or I fear (in the case of Rigoletto as a disabled person) uncomfortable.

The Lohengrin setting at times was meant to look like a stage, to be self-reflexive (this seems to be a favorite motif this year). My favorite piece of the setting for Rigoletto were the chandeliers: they were exactly the same ludicrous artificial ones as in the real theater, but here the self-reflexivity seemed to me to mock the whole event. They are mechanical and go up and down. It was apparently felt chandeliers could not be done without in the palace the opera house was supposed to be; OTOH, you could not have them too elaborate or get in the way of seeing.

Operas were in the 19th century staged for people with money who wanted to be flattered into thinking themselves as rich and powerful as the people on their political and social stages. I’m all for exposing this worship of rank, wealth, the misogyny, reactionary nonsense, religious stupidities of myths. But it’s not easy to do with intransigent material when you also desire to please and attract an increasingly larger modern audience.

Mee-ee-ow …

Ellen

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Verdi’s Un ballo en maschera: new HD starkness, with exursis on the roving camera & interviews

Gustavo (Marcelo Alvaraz) and Amelia (Sondra Radvanovsky

So, friends and readers,

They sang their hearts out and acted the parts superbly well. To begin with what what is most memorable, second most and so on: Dimitri Hvorostovsky as the sexually betrayed husband best friend to the king, Count Anckarstrom (Renato), baritone in his role in the third act, was shaking from his controlled hysteria at his wife and decision (just) not to kill her when he’d done his magnificent long aria.

Count Anckarstrom, Renato (Dmitri Hovorostovsky)

Stephanie Blythe as the sybil Ulrica, as her name reveals a Scott like mad prophecy moment turned into the nervous cynical court fortune teller was superb; her entrance in trailing coat and sleuth-woman hat which she then took off they improved on what in the opera has become cliched stuff. She was attention-getting with her pocketbook with its large gold clasp, cigarette and flask (liquor):

Ulrica (Stephanie Blythe), Gustavo, Oscar, Gustavo’s page (Kathleen Kim)

Suddenly I wish I knew what Scott was available in Italian and what the Italian texts were like. The graveyard scene (contradictory as were they all with its Icarus ceiling and white walls):

Amelia, Gustavo, Renato

Act 3 is songfest, from extraordinary alluring thrilling melodies, to ominous choruses. The set as a whole, symbolic on top, walls, including the soprano in a slip falling against a white wall with a single large symbolic object nearby reminded me of Willy Dekker’s Traviata. David Alden was the producer and Saul Steinberg the set designer and they have clearly been influenced by Euro-trash (as it’s called operas) as well as Broadway too.

Stark was the aim, simplify and symbolize the mode.

The opera does have problems. One could say of Mozart’s La Clemenza di Tito there’s more there; they could do this or that. This one is what it is. It feels ungrateful to say that but it’s more dated than Traviata: the complicated plot for example. And the depiction of women’s chastity with the implication that if she had had a full sexual relationship with the king, she would have been abhorrent is deeply anti-women — especially as the opera is ultimately based on a real 18th century king and his court, Gustavus of Sweden who took the wife of his chief supporter and courtier for his mistress. Many plays of the Jacobean era show this was common; other sources show the way a married couple could rise in court was that she become the king’s mistress. They also show inevitably often the “cuckolded” man became humiliated and sometimes killed the wife and/or the king or tried to (e.g., Beaumont and Fletcher’s King and No King). The original, Una vendetta, had political matter which is feebly reflected because of the censorship. At the real court there was a fortune teller, who when she told of the king’s death and it came true, was shunned.

It is true that had Verdi been able to explore some truths about politics at court, this would have been a sizzling important opera. Had he been able at least to present as aspect of where revolutions come from, court coteries, ditto. If we knew something of his preoccupations, something never gone into or rarely during intermissions. As he was not, and they do not, the opera remains contradictory, half-baked partly senseless antics leading nowhere. It feels ungrateful to say this but it should be said. As Clement says in her Opera, or the Undoing of Women or Kerman in his Opera as Drama, the content of the opera matters.

It is what it is, and the Met did its best to make the emotions that are believable effective, resonate. They provided absorbing entertainment through the masque background, costumes, and intermission material.

So I enjoyed it and was glad we went. I really feel it was the first time I truly saw it. I understood it for the first time, the subtitles of course did that, and the staging underlined what was happening inwardly. So for the first time I was roused by the music — having understood the content of the lyrics and what the gestures of actor-singers meant. Sondra Radvanovsky: first time I ever saw her; she effective.

Amelia in her chair Hamlet-like over a skull, Ulrica behind her

During his interview Dmitri Hvorostovsky swaggered and preened, and looked out at the audience and camera instead of at Deborah Voight, but he sang so well and is attractive. The tenor Marcelo Álvarez had a feel for it as an Italian opera, and that’s what it is, complete with comic fishermen, smugglers, men laughing at a cuckold, patriotic choruses. Oscar (Katherine Kim) didn’t make any sense in his white suit with white wings, the job was to provide a coloratura soprano throughout. I’m glad we went even if in insight into the human condition this was the equivalent of a pop melodramatic movie of 1950s TVm a proto-Sopranos.

Middle career Verdi. The soaring of Traviata, Rigoletto (a new production coming up this season), La Forza del Destino, Trovatore. Who can resist these if well done?

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What the roving camera shows before the opera, during the interviews, just afterwards central to experience

It is real fun, an education, fascinating to watch the crews during most of the intermissions. (There are some where there is little for stagehands to do.) The stage is somehow not quite de-mystified. You are in on what’s happening behind the screen. We love that. This time we witnessed (if you were watching a small spat between the chief carpenter, head of the crew, and one of his people protesting apparently against being asked to clean the mirror-glass. Beneath his dignity, not important enough.

It takes hundreds of people to put up the scenes the curtains open up on. You learn a lot about staging as you watch them.

You feel part of the here, now alive aspect of things because the camera shows us the audience. They cannot see us, but we see them.

I can find no shots online of Deborah Voight (soon to be Cassandra in Les Troyens) as hostess for the interviews this time. I didn’t expect to. Nor probably Susan Graham (soon to be Dido in Les Troyens). None of the tech people and crews moving, pulling down, putting up pieces of staging.

The interviews and watching the crew set up the stage are part of what we the movie-house audiences are offered — and cannot be seen by the live people in the house. It adds a lot — pace each hostess’s mantra about how much better it is to be in the house, I’d say from the second tier up it’s not. We are taken to the costume shop, to the dressing rooms, hear taped interviews with composers and directors that can be informative, watch rehearsal sessions.

So a little on these.

Bootleg photo of intermission scene that I found on the Net — possibly by someone using a cell phone

This time, as I say, Deborah Voigt did it; she frequently has (as also Renee Fleming). They are personable and seem comfortable, feel like they are ad-libing, are comfortable and can cope with whatever their interviewees say or do. At one point the camera allowed us to see Deborah chatting with the two people she was about to interview from afar (while we watched the sets set up — and hard physical labor it was too) and I could see she had a teleprompter with the words she was to say facing her. That with its words is usually unseen by movie-house viewers.

The ability to be hostess (or host) takes a very different kind of talent to that of singer-actor within the opera play-world. Sondra Radvanovsky was the hostess I saw for the Otello, whose behavior was so cliched and absurd, so frozen. She could not get herself to react spontaneously enough — or seem to — the interviewed. So as a singer-actress I’d never have identified her as the same person. She certainly didn’t remind me of the stiff cliched inappropriately (for her body) overdressed, over-sexed hostess. Joyce Didonato was marvelous as Sycorax and in the interview done “at sea-level” in this production of her practicing Maria Stuarda promises a stunning performance. She was a very poor hostess, dull, lifeless.

As hostess (or host), you don’t have the mask of “being in your character” and you come out as partly yourself. So no or not-as-much hiding. Since inveighing against Radvanovsky’s super-tight, super-sexy outfit, I’ve since realized that the clothes the host or hostess wears (and jewels the hostess wears) are provided by the Met. There are credits saying Miss so-and-so dressed by. I didn’t know that. So Radvanosky was dressed by the Met that way.

Jim tells me that Radvanosky is said to have a gay following (fans who refer to her as Sondra); this kind of thing is known. Maybe she was dressed that way because of this perceived following. Renee Fleming by contrast has not. I’ve noticed what I’d call snobbery towards Fleming among people who go to opera; they call her vulgar! vulgar. Opera itself, the whole thing, including house is an extravaganza of vulgarity on one level — crass, unashamed revelling in luxury, in the apparatus of wealth: let’s pretend to be aristocrats going to a palace. But I grant Fleming may be is perceived as “wholesome: and her roles and outfits as hostess are all traditionally feminine.

Photo of Fleming from a story telling of how she is gone to for hostess type help

I would believe that the women singers especially have some say in what they are going to wear too. The older ones do have this problem of ideals of youth and real slimness. I’ve been told that Deborah Voigt had the operation where you have your stomach stapled to make herself thin enough to do the heroine role in the Ring. I can see that Radvanosky is still playing sexy young or youngish women. She may feel — as some women do – that dresses that are youthful and tight make her look younger and thinner. I should probably on principle sympathize (feel for “my sisters”), but I’ve a real distaste for clothes that announce people as super-rich and glamorous and my experience is looser things that swirl around your body make you look smaller at least and maybe thinner. But these sort of looser clothes are not glamorous. Those who dress the actress-singer and she collaborating study carefully each choice of clothes.

Deborah Voight is dressed slightly mannishly in suit-like outfits, shoulder-length blonde hair in a flip page-boy.

Telling: the hosts just wear tuxes, much less trouble and yet despite the women having troubles such as I’ve suggested, for the 4 year period we’ve been going I can count on one hand how many times there has been a male host. Three times is all I remember. The first time we went: Thomas Hamsen was personable, handsome, but he never did it again of those I’ve gone to. We have gone to a concert of his at the Carnegie.

Eric Owens, the brilliant black singer who was so marvelous as Alberich in Wagner’s Ring: he seemed embarrassed to do it, determined to come out all sweetness and light, utterly harmless. So he was countering myths about black men — by contrast, let’s recall he had played Alberich using from deep within himself his own felt resentments as an outsider. On the stage as singer he has a mask; not as host.

And once Placido Domingo. He was charming and unashamed in asking for money. I could imagine his pitch at fund-raisers. But he was a bit unusually stiff, watching himself. Too much is riding on the success of these HD productions? more than money perhaps?

Photo of tech crew backstage found on the Net

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To conclude, I had an exchange of email letters with a friend who has been going to these HD operas for about 6 years and (like us) goes to the European operas transmitted by HD. He buys a season ticket to the Met nowadays and this year is going to several operas from La Strada, the Royal Opera House and elsewhere in NYC movie-houses. He wrote: “I have the busiest opera schedule this season I’ve ever had.” He’s even nowadays going to the New York City opera “something I haven’t done in years. Most of this is due to the fact that HD productions are the greatest thing since macaroni.”

Us too. Jim is planning several of these Eurocinemas. We’ll get to see Lohengrin, two more operas with the very handsome Jonas Kauffman, two more with the magnificent Simon Keenleyside. We nowadays go to Opera Lafayette, in summer Castleton in Virginia and Wolf Trap. I seems we hardly have a month without an opera. It’s hard to find time to go to an ordinary movie. And I remember years where we never saw one opera, especially when PBS goes through periods of not doing them — lest they put off an audience who never watch PBS anyway.

I read some in the audience in the Met theater are resentful. They complain they suspect the staging is nowadays done for the movie-houses. (They can see the cameras this year.) Why should they (those who do) pay $300 a seat, when we poor plebs pay $20. This is not the first time technology has made available to many what was once available only to a few. And this has changed what’s available — often with some disadvantages coming in.

I’ve no doubt this new technology and all the new kinds of staging, scenic design, half-Broadway productions will bring in a much bigger traditional audience of classical music lovers, usually older people with time and money to go on weekends and weekdays or evenings. It will bring in younger people too: again and again I see Izzy so charmed by the younger singers in the present productions as well as the more modern operas. She loved The Enchanted Island. Doing so many a year will exert pressure to expand the repertoire into the baroque and modern. It already has. Everyone must really act. The production design must be good and appropriate. All this may cause new 20th and 21st century operas to be mounted, and then more written. These can speak to us the way a Un ballo en maschera can’t.

As to the disadvantages, they have not yet emerged — except the pressure on singers to look conventionally young and beautiful. That was happening already.

Ellen

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Found in Translations: I didn’t fall asleep over my book after all

It is plausible that no translation, however good it may be, can have any significance as regards the original — Walter Benjamin, “The Task of the Translator,” Illuminations

One must distrust the almost-the-same (sodium is the same as potassium, but with sodium nothing would have happened), the practically identical, the approximate, the or-even, all surrogates and all patchwork — Primo Levi, “Potassium,” The Periodic Table

Eugene Atget (1857-1927), The Petit Trianon

Dear friends and readers,

My theme: I’ve returned to an old love to do a new project: French-to-English and back again translations in the 18th century. I begin with Walter Benjamin and my own experiences, then cover Beebee’s book, Clary on the continent, Prevost’s different Clevelands, and various different telling individual cases (different Tom Joneses, Radcliffe’s translators); I end on Renato Poggioli’s “The Added Artificer” which deserves to be much better known.

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I have a hard time remembering when I was not fascinated by translations. I think it began back in high school when at age 16 I read a probably poor translation into English of Victor Hugo’s Hunchback of Notre-Dame. I loved the book and wanted to know more about it, and especially I wanted to read it in French. Later on somehow reading a book in one language and then reading the same book in another gave me an experience of two weirdly interdependent books and thus worlds. When I was in college, I took French for all the years I could, extending my non-major following of it with one-credit courses: such courses met twice a week, but for one and one-half hours of sheer talk in French allowed using our books. We’d take turns using its conversations. Then in graduate school, I took a course in Italian over one summer to fulfill the language requirement (one had to pass two tests in two languages), and just loved the language, again enjoyed so much lining up a text in Italian aligned with its source or target text in English.

Anne Finch when young

During the 1980s I re-taught myself to read French and read French novels, and then for over 20 years starting the middle 1980s I taught myself to read and to translate Italian and translated Vittoria Colonna and Veronica Gambara’s poetry and then wrote an essay on Anne Finch’s translations out of the Italian though the French. Just what I had done at first for Colonna (and what I’ve done since for a poem by Elsa Morante I found in the original Italian with French text facing it).

So when over the past week I dropped one of my projects for this fall term, the paper on Paranoia and Infamy, I naturally turned to the proposal I wanted to send to Chawton, and was happy, even eager to reread some of my books on translation (Lawrence Venuti, The Translator’s Invisibility, The Scandals of Translation, Sherry Simon’s Gender in Translation). Did you know that over 90% of translations into the world are transations into English? how little translators are paid? How women’s writing begins in translation, how they express themselves through its covering medium?

I discovered my old folders filled with essays on translation, some read, some not read, and books and essays just on translation in the 18th century, the 19th and more recently.

Charlotte Smith by George Romney (1792)

My idea was Charlotte Smith’s translation of Prevost’s Manon Lescaut, or some study of intermediary texts between her later novels and Prevost and Rousseau, but to tell the truth I was not sure I could find something to extrapolate out of a tight narrow comparison. I do have Isabelle de Montolieu’s translation of one of Smith’s Solitary Wanderer’s Tale (Corisande de Beauvilliers, and all of M. Montagne’s (whoever he is) French translation of Smith’s Ethelinde, or the Recluse of the Lake, which I also own in English. And of course Montolieu’s translation of Sense and Sensibility (with her preface) and soon will have her translation of Persuasion.

So I went about to look for previous work on individual books I’d done. I’ve now remembered my careful comparative reading of the opening of Radcliffe’s Udolpho with Victorine de Chastenay’s translation of the same text into French, something of Chastenay’s life (she was imprisoned during the terror and lost family members and emerged somewhat shattered and depressed, and various essays on 18th century translations of classics (Riccoboni and Davaux’s Tom Jones, a French and a Dutch translation of Prevost’s Cleveland contrasted to the French texts) and of course Prevost’s Clarisse.

Victorine de Chastenay (translator into French of Radcliffe’s Udolpho)

And I’ve read away and reminded myself of what I once knew. So, I spent Tuesday I spent yesterday reading translation studies and then how women in particular use translation: how the earliest women writers began (felt they had license) by translating, how it works to free, a way to express what is otherwise forbidden (that’s how I see Smith’s translation of Manon Lescaut), a way of declaring love and wanting to share (Chastenay’s Udolpho).

Jean-Antoine Watteau, unnamed shepherdess

I read Mirella Agorni’s poignant, The Voice of the ‘Translatress’: From Aphra Behn to Elizabeth Carter Author, The Yearbook of English Studies, 28 (1998 Eighteenth-Century Lexis and Lexicography): 181-95, and I compared a literal translation of Ovid’s Oenone to Paris with Aphra Behn’s translation/adaptation. In her case (as is not uncommon among men as well as women) she did not have any Latin, so someone gave her an intermediary crib. Behn turned the poem into erotica — on behalf of Oenone, a nobody. Since reading Germaine Greer’s persuasive debunking of all the myths growing up around Aphra Behn, including that she was an aristocrat (born on wrong side of blanket), supported herself sheerly by her playwriting (when it seems rather she combined being men’s mistresses with playwriting and verse, including translations, and pop novellas), I can see why she’d identify with Oenone.

Behn is worth remembering and this unashamed revelling in idyllic
pastoral too. Some of her most moving verses defend her as a translatress:

I by a double right thy Bounties claim,
Both from my Sex, and in Apollo’Ns ame:
Let me with Sappha and Orinda
Oh ever sacred Nymph, adorn’d by thee;
And give my Verses Immortality.

Jane Austen died declaring her immortality in defiance against everyone spending their afternoon so trivially.

‘Oh! subjects rebellious! Oh Venta depraved
When once we are buried you think we are gone
But behold me immortal!

*******************

The Abbe Prevost (1697-1763) translated all Richardson and Frances Sheridan’s Sidney Biddulph

Speaking very generally, as the century progressed and the novel achieved more respect, translations became more ostensibly faithful. Paradoxically at the same time (especially if you are working on the literal old model that a good translation is a sort of excellent crib — rather like those who go to movies and critique a film adaptation by how “literally” like it seemed to them to the book), translations became more creative. You can see how the author expressed her or himself through the medium.

Some of the best general essays written thus far on translation are general philosophical ones. A particularly rich one is by Walter Benjamin, “The Task of the Translator”. He opens with what may seem a strange idea: “It is plausible that no translation, however good it may be, can have any significance as regards the original.” The analysis in defense of this is brilliant and rich with ideas. One train of argument suggests that any translation is about the encounter of the two languages and two cultures. I find this to be so in my experience of translation. I don’t own the words I use and must use the words of my time and culture and watch them interact with the words and cultural assumptions and whole world view of the other language — French or Italian. He says the desire to translate comes partly from a love of a certain language. Again I know this is so.

Lovelace just before the rape: Simon Brett’s late 20th century illustrations for the Folio Society edition

I reread some of Beebee’s Clarissa on the Continent, about 18th century to modern translations of Clarissa — and abridgements. I know now the Broadveiw edition provides a new edition of the 3rd edition of Clarissa, thus replacing the now out-of-print 4 volume Everyman.

Beebee’s book includes a close reading of two contemporary translations of Clarissa: Prevost and Michaelis’s. He compares these two texts to Richardson’s 1st and 3rd editions of Clarissa (which are themselves different, though both think they must Frenchify the text from the point of view of French taste and ethics). Beebee teaches us how to read translations. He has a chapter where he surveys later translations and abridgements. Particularly of interest to me was Dallas’s abridgement as Trollope wrote a critique of that; it was the book 19th century readers knew Clarissa. After Dallas when some 19th century person says she’s read Clary it’s probably Dallas’s Clary.

In last chapter of Beebee’s book he compares Sherburn’s 1970s and Burrell’s 1950s abridgements. Most of the time today Clarissa is read in an abridgement in the US. In France they read Prevost’s translation (quite different in a number of ways from Richardson); in the US when I was in college (1960s) we read Burrell’s abridgement for Modern Library; the last decade or so students read Sherburn’s abridgement for Rinehart. Margaret Doody has a long article lambasting Sherburn (by the way).

I had been really delighted to come across for the first time ever a close reading and discussion of Burrell. I was not sure of his full name. His edition had never been acknowledged or described in print as far as I knew. I had read Doody and Stuber’s exposure of Sherburn’s abridgement as a far too personal, rigid, a narrow take with interjections by Sherburn (!), but never came across any commentary on Burrell.

Lovelace attacking Clarisssa (Simon Brett again)

It was Burrell’s abridgement of Clarissa that I first read at age 18-19 and was riveted by. I had the not uncommon experience of not being able to put the book down, of being gripped to read on and on into the wee hours of the dawn. The most vivid memory I had though was of disappointment; somehow or other I had missed the rape. I still remember hunting around the text the following morning (after a little sleep) and not finding it. Later false memories began to tell me I had found it later, but now I realize that in fact I must’ve read the rape for the first time in the Everyman reprint of Richardson’s 3rd edition.

Well, guess what? Burrell omitted it! He censored out the scene. It was in the Everyman I realized that Lovelace raped Clarissa in front of the other women; there I first read the famous passage where Clary says she will be his, just give her a bit of time right here, right now.

Nonetheless, I believe that Burrell’s edition influenced me & strongly; Burrell produces a romantic (vexed word I know, but I’m trying to use it in the common sense way of overwrought individualistic emotionalism and rebellion) text. Burrell will omit much surrounding matter here and there which qualifies Clarissa’s subjective interpretations and outcries. I’ve never read Sherburn so didn’t realize he actually interjects his own interpretation and sometimes himself imitates Lovelace — falls into Lovelace’s vein. Beebee shows how both men cut the book in ways which erase some of the worst aspects of Lovelace’s character. Reading them, though, against Richardson’s books teaches us what was most deeply meant to be expressed in the original — especially after you have studied a variety of translation and adaptations.

Final duel (Brett)

I probably loved Clarissa, was more grabbed by it in Burrell’s edition than I would have been in Richardson’s whole text. Burrell omitted much of the long fourth volume, especially all the Job passages and the gruesome and to me egregiously spiteful nasty dramatizations of the deaths of wicked people. He kept Lovelace’s agon, time at the assembly ball, the lead-up to the duel. (See how vicious the Deity can get; watch out is my gut response to these Burrell thought them in bad taste.) Burrell also turned Clary into a pre-Byronic heroine and softened the presentation of Lovelace.

So I was at long last vindicated. 40 years later I learned I didn’t miss the rape after all. I had not fallen asleep over my book.

*********************

Samuel Palmer (1805-81), A Dream in the Appenines (1864)

Some of the best studies I read yesterday were about the clash between cultures, languages, created worlds through languages though having the same literal stories and denotative word content, and even syntax (at times). You do have to read more than one language to do translation studies and as the central hegemonic languages in the 18th century for new literary movements were French and English, these are the languages most studies are in. I went into Annie Cointre, Alain Lautel and Annie Rivera’s La Traduction
romanesque au XVIII siecle, especially a long essay on Prevost’s
Cleveland — in French and English and Dutch versions. It brings home so many issues, including the way history was more valued than fiction and historians paid more, how this book applied to a naive desire to read history made easy and salacious (as in our time). This was by Ellen Ruth Moerman.

Abbe Prevost reading Manon Lescaut aloud to group of admirer (1856 painting by Joseph Caraud)

To do a translation study you must do book history. Prevost had several translators; his book came out in more than one edition and it was censored differently in different countries. The Dutch translator was quite content to translate anti-Catholic church commentary, but the Catholic French one was not. All of them stigmatize the Quakers (everyone dislikes quakers because people resent general non-conformity with the larger group). Then Prevost wanted partly to delude his British audience into thinking his book was really a history, really written first in English and had the English copy published before the French. There are two different prefaces: one published in English opens with a solemn discourse on the uses of history; the other in French is more tongue-in-cheek and he defends himself for writing a preface (what is this hypocrisy that prefaces are to be apologized for; they are needed) and insinuates if you enjoyed the Man of Quality, you’ll find him in this book again.

The 1997 BBC Tom Jones understood how important Fielding’s presence can be in the novel for the reader who wants over self-conscious wit, self-reflexive mockery

Two essays on the translations of Tom Jones, one by Kristina Taivalkoski-Shilove and another by Annie Rivara (on Riccoboni’s Amelie)
very worth while. It was fascinating to discover that the freer early translation by La Place was the Tom Jones most French readers knew and preferred; that it was a labor of love Davaux did when he translated faithfully and carefully and included all the opening narrator chapters. In the 20th century Tom Jones is reprinted in popular editions without these opening chapters. For me the book is ruined; much of the deep pleasure comes from the presence of the narrator. But apparently not for a mass readership who are said to lose “interest.” Amelia was not popular, and Riccoboni’s choice to do it came out of her deep engagement with its story of unhappiness in years of marriage.

From Christopher Cave I was delighted to learn that Andre Morellet, humane philosophe who translated Beccario’s treatise demonstrating that torture turns up no valid information translated Radcliffe’s Italian. He found in her a congenial reformist spirit, but he continually rationalized her prose. She produces a super-abundance of description which cannot depict reality so many experiences are piled into one. He choses a line of description that’s clear and readily pictured. What makes for her original depth psychologically and pictorially vanishes. It’s true you can’t make fun of her text and it’s no longer what some find tedious. I just love myself getting lost in labyrinths with endless doors and locks.

Piranesi, I Carceri (opaque)

Piranesci, I Carceri (clarified)

And I spent time with my old love, Renato Poggioli’s “The Added Artificer” (in a marvelous anthology put together by Reuben Brower, On Translation). Like Venuti, he shows that a translation is another text, and one that is creative in a different way. The translator (like an illustrator) can transcend the first text by transposing another personality into the key of his or her own. You strive after self-expression by looking into a pool of art. Instead of a translation being pouring new wine into an old or previously extant bottle, the translator is taking older wine and making a new bottle with it. The translator is herself a living vessel saturated with a sparkling spirit and recreates the container someone with whom he or she has an affinity has given a previous embodiment to. A good translation may be read for itself, without comparing it to the original work.

Eugene Atget, Grand Trianon, Pavillion de Musique (1923-24)

Ellen

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This year’s Woody Allen: To Rome With Love

Antonio (Alessandro Tiberi) a young husband cut off from his wife, and Anna aka Milly (Penelope Cruz), a prostitute who has substituted for her (2012 To Rome with Love)

Dear friends and readers,

This year’s Woody Allen, To Rome With Love is a pleasing film. It’s cheerful yet melancholy; we are presented with a array of artificial stereotyped couples who play musical chairs among themselves and other characters in scenes of mortification, confusion, anxiety, distress such that I was continually either uncomfortable and or worried what would happen to one or another of them. The central paradigm which repeats over and over is of a character in a situation or saying something which ought to be and is shameful which few around them recognize, and they themselves only intermittently. It seems this is a good thing too or none of us’d survive.

On a searingly hot afternoon to sit in a cool dark theater and watch his cameramen take loving shots of familiar older streets, houses, and stairs in Rome (he must have paid a lot for the Spanish steps), as these paradigms dissolve into the person coping the film manages to convey a world-weary odd relief. The situations become a kind of game, fun even (see the nerve this character has, what that character gets to do or see), and yet incident after incident seems to have roots in a curious despair. The couples all return to those they started out with because they might as well, and anyway life’s chances will surely now and then once again give give all of us an opportunity to fuck, walk, cook, eat and drink with, someone else momentarily more interesting.

Monica (Ellen Page) and Jack (Jesse Eisenberg) trying to cook up a gourmet meal together before they go off to a car to betray Sally, Jack’s live-in girlfriend and Monica’s best friend

It’s not the best Woody Allen film I’ve ever seen, and I’m not going to patiently go through the four sets of couples, two lone male confidants and wise advisor, and one lone female and whore, and their stories. Certainly it’s better than last year’s Midnight in Paris which I thought ludicrously over-praised. Like that, it’s an aging male’s wet dream. Jim often says he cannot understand how it is that when he reads many a male book or sees a male film it’s just filled with these females beautiful or not who are dying to jump into bed with all the males in sight, and when they do, are ever so ecstatically pleased. He seems to be on the wrong planet or these females are on another street from those he walks. It just never happens to him and he’s just like other males. How can this be? This is a film filled with such women. And it’s not really fun when people you are attached to are sexually or otherwise unfaithful.

The real Milly (Alessandra Mastronardi) near going off to bed with the famous actor Luca Salta (Antonio Albanese) she’s just met because she got lost (her cell phone fell through a street grate)

A gesture is made to remember the depression engulfing much of the world’s people when Woody’s daughter’s fiancee, Michelangelo (Flavio Parenti) sticks up for the importance of unions. But mostly everyone is rich and untroubled about how to pay for anything. When Woody nags, tempts, maneuvers his prospective son-in-law’s father into singing operatically in a shower on stage in front of mass crowds at opera houses because only when he sings naked in a shower does his voice soar, there is not a smidgin of difficulty making this happen. A young architect said to be living according to idealistic goals with a female studying for a degree live in a bounteous flat on a lovely little corridor of a street with tons of free time.

Jack buying vegetables and flowers with live-in girlfriend Sally (Greta Gerwig)

All somehow detached. The reviews of the opera Woody puts on describe him in Italian as an “imbecile” and in character Woody reads this aloud. Because he knows no Italian he is chuffed. Allen also comments self-reflexively on his own film, its internal audiences and maybe us watching it all.

Judy Davis as Phyllis, Woody’s wry patient wife, spending life by his side

He has made some great films recently: genuinely satiric and grave ones, Vick, Christina, Barcelona and You will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger. This one seems in some sequences an attempt to get back to his early films with their wacky sequences of events that don’t make logical or realistic sense but are hilarious. The spirit somehow is not high enough to make these moments come off.

John wisely advising Jack with the coliseum in the background

What’s here instead is a kind of witty wry self-dialogue. Woody is there himself and as two other men. Alec Baldwin as John plays a sold-out aging architect who has made tons of money building soulless stadiums and buildings and he takes to following our young architect, Jack, around and telling him from several points of view what a fool Jack’s making of himself, how Monica is a liar, a phony, a poser, pretending to know great literature when he knows famous lines, and when at the close of the film she deserts him without a second’s thought because a role in a play has come through Baldwin nearly says, “what did I say?” Jack returns to Sally and Alec goes back to the street corner where he and Jack first met and walks on his way.

As Leopoldo, Roberto Benigni plays a man made senselessly famous for several weeks, each of his daily doings and small acts made subjects for intense reporting, famous because he’s famous and during much of the movie seeming to try to escape the wild noisy argumentative Italian crowds, though not here

With Monica Nappo as his wife whose runs in her stockings are oo-ed over

He too has a Woody-Allen surrogate, male accompaniment who tells him when he is lonely after the world moves on: it’s better to be miserable and a celebrity than miserable and invisible (or some such words). At least then you didn’t have to wait on line.

Don’t go expecting a lot, just two hours or so of inspiriting humane entertainment. Woody is clearly for us all enjoying enjoying what there is to enjoy from life as far as we can and feels for all those mortified by the laughter and dumb applause of audiences — they, we are as imbecile as he has become. He may have put himself into the movie because he looks so feeble. The father of his prospective son-in-law whom Woody tries to rescue for an opera career is a mortician and fictional Woody keeps telling Phyllis how he has these dreams of death and she keeps saying, nonsense, nonsense lots of time left. (Still he hates “turbulence” periods in planes.) The singing mortician is wiser than his tempter and at the close of the film returns to his niche in his family group in the world.

As I say do all the characters return to where they are comfortable when they started out, e.g., the young couple leaves Rome where they had hoped for some splendid promotion. Antonio just couldn’t hack the pretenses wanted. He doesn’t like football. Anna has her compliant customers (the creme de la creme of society) waiting morning, noon, and night — as I say this is fantasy. The weakest point was the young heterosexual glamor couple, Woody’s supposed daughter, Hayley (Alison Pill) and her fiancee, Michelangelo (not Michael but Mickel) who we began with:

But they are soon put at the margins. You can almost measure the success of an Allen film by where this fatuous normative blond and her escort are in the film (they are central to Midnight in Paris and Matchpoint). I think of them as the wooden romance couple at the center of Walter Scott’s fiction and never can understand why Allen finds it necessary to pander by keeping them among the presences in his films.

When I remember back to the great films by Allen in the past (Love and Death, Stardust Memories, Purple Rose of Cairo, Annie Hall come to mind) I realize we were not bothered by this fake normativeness because Allen was the hero. He is too old now, even too old to pass as this heroine’s father, and he knows it.

I didn’t go with Izzy; she is not drawn to Allen (though she liked the Gemma Jones film). My neighbor from across the street and I have become friends and we went together. She is a woman near my age, and it did seem to me most of the people in the audience (however full) were older people. Woody is winding down and he does make a better film when he has a different type of male than himself (say Javier Bardem) or genuinely believable woman at the center.

Ellen

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Foremother Poet: Matilde Blind (1841-96)

Mathilde Blind (1872) by Lucy Madox Brown (1843-94), chalks on grey paper

Dear friends and readers,

Frances Wilson’s summary of Mathilde Blind’s life in her review of Angela Thirkell’s book which tells the story of the four women-as-partners in Ford Madox Brown’s life, the last of which was Mathilde Blind, is unbeatable for vivacity and concision:

Mathilde was raised in Germany by an overbearing revolutionary stepfather who knew Karl Marx; her brother shot himself after failing to assassinate Bismark. In her own first attempt at revolt, Mathilde was expelled from school for atheism. A feminist, journalist, critic, poet, translator, novelist and biographer, she was a fabulously beautiful wild card (and most likely a lesbian) who shared with Madox Brown an interest in radical politics. She lived as a friend with the artist and his wife on and off for 20 years, until Emma’s death in 1890. Because none of their letters survives we cannot know the true nature of the relationship between Mathilde and Madox Brown; Thirlwell concludes that it “was probably not physical in the full sense”, but contained “a special erotic charge”. But had Mathilde felt any physical passion for Madox Brown, she seems the type to have expressed it. Mathilde is not only the most interesting of Madox Brown’s loves, she was also probably the most interesting woman in London at that time.

I’ve chosen her also because I found her poems in a book which choses unusual poets, provides a strong biography, and gives a lengthier selection than usual, Virginia Blain’s Victorian Women Poets: An Annotated Anthology. Blind’s are strong, passionate, electrifyingly descriptive and intelligently feminist, socialist. To begin with,

Manchester by Night

O’ER this huge town, rife with intestine wars,
Whence as from monstrous sacrificial shrines
Pillars of smoke climb heavenward, Night inclines
Black brows majestical with glimmering stars.
Her dewy silence soothes life’s angry jars:
And like a mother’s wan white face, who pines
Above her children’s turbulent ways, so shines
The moon athwart the narrow cloudy bars.
Now toiling multitudes that hustling crush
Each other in the fateful strife for breath,
And, hounded on by diverse hungers, rush
Across the prostrate ones that groan beneath,
Are swathed within the universal hush,
As life exchanges semblances with death.
[1881]

A Winter Landscape

ALL night, all day, in dizzy, downward flight,
     Fell the wild-whirling, vague, chaotic snow,
     Till every landmark of the earth below,
Trees, moorlands, roads, and each familiar sight
Were blotted out by the bewildering white.
     And winds, now shrieking loud, now whimpering low,
     Seemed lamentations for the world-old woe
That death must swallow life, and darkness light.
But all at once the rack was blown away,
     The snowstorm hushing ended in a sigh;
     Then like a flame the crescent moon on high
Leaped forth among the planets; pure as they,
Earth vied in whiteness with the Milky Way:
     Herself a star beneath the starry sky.
[1889]

She felt herself an internal exile; someone exiled from the rest of her society by virtue of her inner self. Towards the end of her life she wrote in her Commonplace book “I have been an exile in this world. Without a God, without a country, without a family.” Her series of love lyrics, published in The Ascent of Man (a Darwinian perspective made optimistic) is called Love in Exile. It begins:

1

THou walkest with me as the spirit-light
     Of the hushed moon, high o’er a snowy hill,
Walks with the houseless traveller all the night,
     When trees are tongueless and when mute the rill.
Moon of my soul, 0 phantasm of delight,
     Thou walkest with me still.

The vestal flame of quenchless memory burns
     In my soul’s sanctuary. Yea, still for thee
My bitter heart hath yearned, as moonward yearns
     Each separate wave-pulse of the clamorous sea:
My Moon of love, to whom for ever turns
     The life that aches through me.

She was deeply active on behalf of impoverished women and prostitutes, and her purview included non-western women. Blind’s poem “Mourning Women” describes, then addresses, the Muslim women of Egypt (from the volume Birds of Passage: Songs of the Orient
and Occident [1895],

Mourning Women.

ALL veiled in black, with faces hid from sight,
     Crouching together in the jolting cart,
     What forms are these that pass alone, apart,
In abject apathy to life’s delight?
The motley crowd, fantastically bright,
     Shifts gorgeous through each dazzling street and mart;
     Only these sisters of the suffering heart
Strike discords in this symphony of light.

Most wretched women! whom your prophet dooms
     To take love’s penalties without its prize!
Yes; you shall bear the unborn in your wombs,
     And water dusty death with streaming eyes,
And, wailing, beat your breasts among the tombs;
     &But souls ye have none fit for Paradise.

Samuel Fildes (1843-1927), Applicants for Admission to a Casual Ward (1874)

Many many more poems at Matilde Blind (1841-96)

*******************

As to a more extended view of her life, I don’t mean to suggest she lived a solitary or at all reclusive existence. She’s much better known for her political and social activities. Her father had been a Jewish banker and she was born in Mannheim, Germany, but when he died and her mother remarried, the revolutionary leader, Karl Blind, the family moved to Paris, and from there to England where Matilde was educated at a London girls’ school. She tried to again admission to university lectures and her failure fired her first enthusiasm for women’s education. When she died, she bequeathed her estate to Newham College, Cambridge, to found a scholarship for women.

Her first poems were dedicated to Giuseppe Mazzini, and she supported the Italian revolutionaries; she was influenced by and admired Elizaabeth Barrett Browning and George Eliot, about whom she wrote yet another life (1883). Shelley, Byron inspired her. Two poems show her time in Scotland, one set in the Hebrides deals with religious questions from an atheist angle (The Prophecy of St Oran, 1881). The Heather on Fire (1886) is about the shameful Highland clearances, razed villages, people driven cruelly into further absymal poverty and emigration. There is no false romance here: we see the “agonizing plight of a crippled old woman whom no-one removed from her home before” it was set on fire; we see the people herded onto beaches to set sail for Canada. The scope, sincerity, intensity and authentic concern made her poems admired. She was no favorite with critics; her poems were not designed for male readers. Her fallen woman poem of a prostitute dying in a hospital was seen as distasteful. The pains of childbirth were not their concern. But Arthur Symons did published a full Poetical Works in 1900.

John Everett Millais (1829-96), Blow blow though winter wind (a Scotland scene)

As to her prose writing, she admired Mary Wollstonecraft, wrote an article on her (1878) and herself spent her life as an independent woman. She traveled widely in Europe and Egypt and through Scotland, published translations from Goethe, and wrote a life of the French revolutionary, Madame Roland (1886), and (her most famous work today) translated the extraordinary Journal of Marie Bashkirseff (1890), herself a fine artist. Her one experimental novel, Tarantella: A Romance is online (18805). To sum up her social existence as seen by others, confident, generous, she had circles of friends in the arts (especially the Pre-Raphaelites), knew the radical novelists, Mona Caird, was friends with Eleanor Marx. Blain says that Blind loved to give “‘literary dinners’ in rooms in well-chosen hotels.”

Lucy Madox Brown, The Duet (1870), watercolor on paper

See wikipedia and recent articles:

S. Brown, “‘A Still and Mute-Born Vision’: Locating Mathilde Blind’s
Reproductive Poetics,” Essays and Studies 56( 2003): 123-144.

James Diedrick, “‘My Love is a Force That Will Force you to Care’:
Subversive Sexuality in Mathilde Blind’s Dramatic Monologues.”
Victorian Poetry 40.4 (2002) 359-386.

James Diedrick, “A Pioneering Female Aesthete: Mathilde Blind in the
Dark Blue.” The Victorian Periodicals Review 36.6 (2003): 210-241.

Christine Sutphin, “Human Tigresses, Fractious Angels, and Nursery Saints:
Augusta Webster’s A Castaway and Victorian Discourses on Prostitution and
Women’s Sexuality.” Victorian Poetry 38.4 (2000) 511-532

As to Lucy, as will have been seen she succumbed to romantic pictures of actors playing Shakespeare. But then these sold. But she also wrote a book, on Mary Shelley and it’s online.

I thank my good friend, Fran, for helping me find some of the above material and filling me in on her knowledge of Blind from Fran’s childhood in Lancaster and now life in southern Germany.

I had begun to place my foremother poet blogs over on Austen Reveries where they have mounted up to 18, as under the sign of a central women writer (who also wrote verse); but this one I felt really was not a life which can be placed with Austen as a gravatar, example. For the other (25) foremother poets on this blog, see the archive here.

Ellen

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Willy Dekker’s La Traviata; or, The Courtesan. A cross between Jane Campion & Samuel Beckett

courtesan. n. a prostitute, especially one with wealthy or upper class clients (Oxford Concise Dictionary). n. a woman of the town [courtisane. Fr.] Shakespeare (Johnson’s Dictionary)

Also: from traviare. v. to be lost, wandering, travail, travel, astray (Concise Cambridge Italian Dictionary)

Nightmare parody as dreamt, seen, experienced by Alfredo

Dear friends and readers,

I’ve been writing altogether too frequently about prostitutes lately: from trafficking to The Rise of the English Actress, from arguments about how or whether to help prostitutes to suspect individuals and another night in the life of Roman Polanski, it seems hard to leave the topic.

And now Willy Dekker’s La Traviata at the Met directed with HD camera transmission in mind, featuring Natalie Dessay and Matthew Polenzani (to whom much of the power of the experience is owed), is undoubtedly the most memorable, striking, & contemporary production of an opera I’ve seen since Claus Guth’s Don Giovanni at Salzburg. To speak metaphorically, it seemed at first the La Traviata characters has gotten lost in some minimalist Samuel Beckett play: instead of a tree, we had a clock, instead of a dirt road, a highly uncomfortable couch, instead of a horizon, a bending wall with a overlooking roof.

Dessay in her white slip by the clock, her rich flowered robe fallen and forgotten

But then as I saw this crowd of greedy men grabbing at our heroine, assailing her, tossing her about on stone couches, making her their puppet, I was reminded of Jane Campion’s take on Henry James’s Portrait of a Lady. Isabel Archer was destroyed by this hard devouring and (paradoxically) scornful adulation too.

Dessay thrust above the horde, arms thrusting champagne bottles outward

What is it with Salzburg — as that’s where the Dekker & Guth premiered — what electric current from a core of contemporary brilliance is running through this place? The production has been making the rounds of opera houses since 2005, and everyone apparently “knows” the script is based on partly autobiographical novel by Dumas, La Dame aux Camelias, which has been filmed and retold many times, and this version provides the capable singer with an opportunity to deliver the most moving of performances (see, e.g., The NYTimes and Minnesota Radio).

I just loved the set. Very demanding. You are just out there singing with no distractions beyond what is meaningful.

And I was swept away by Verdi’s music. It rocks, you sway within from it. Exhilarating, mysterious (as a song in this one tells us), thrilling. The music of this part of his oeuvre makes your body move, it’s irresistible the rhythms and harmonies. Two others just the same: Rigoletto. La Forza del Destino.

So what can I add beyond what I’ve already said: If the purpose was to make an unsentimental Traviata, to wrest this cliche from false tears, Dekker and Company managed it by hitting truer emotions. Bold and simple through and through: black-on-white for everyone but Dessay against an often royal blue background:

The nerve was to bring out the underlying realities of the original Dumas by transgressive parody. The traditional ballet became a muscular man naked to the waist, putting on Dessay’s red dress, and cavorting about the stage with all the men, making gross sexual gestures (see above). Where Alfredo once left the stage, now he was there to be teased, bullied, mocked, banged about:

— or was this a nightmare? The last act was just inspired. I was near or in tears, holding them back, stunned with emotion (though often not for the specific situation in front of me but rather the emotions themselves which I’ve felt in other situations). Our heroine was no longer emoting from a bed but walking about dazed, now grief-stricken, mad with depresson, then lit with sudden crazed hope (which hope alerted even the dim Alfredo that she was not going to last), all activity, trying this, demanding that (to go to church, to go out, to be forgiven, with plans for the future), letter in hand:

Polenzani as Alfredo sang exquisitely beautifully and his acting almost as good as Robert Alagna (Don Jose in the Met HD Carmen). He was more subtle than Dessay:

And his voice was stronger and more moving: his arias were like prayers to joy. Jim said that technically Dessay wasn’t up to it: her voice rasped at the end, the middle register was lacking. Well, if so, it made her singing all the more effective at the close, her destruction more believable.

For me the only failure was Dmitri Hvorostovsky as the father; I felt he was stiff, wooden, not acting at all. Jim suggested that he was impassive because he was directed to do that by Willy: he was supposed to be the relentless male, refusing to engage in what was in front of him.

Well, I’ve read the story and the father is supposed to be intensely emotional too — he wants to go to bed with her (maybe he does). But do see the comments below where people felt otherwise and liked Dmitri’s singing and stance, and I agree that making this male a stone figure reinforces the idea of a sweeping dismissal of this woman as a human being who counts. No all that counts is the “pure” daughter for whose advantageous marriage (monetarily, for prestige) Violetta is to be cast away. (Castaway was a Victorian term for prostitute).

A fine production to end a season which included a similarly (humane, sensitive) transformed Faustus (Marina Poplavskaya has played Violetta in other stagings of this production).

Deborah Voight was again our “hostess” (replete with commercials I have to admit) and told the movie-house audience that we could go over to facebook and offer our views or go to Twitter #metfaves & register our favorites for this year. I looked at my blogs & discovered after all I’ve written separate blogs on the HD operas from the Met only 13 times over 3 years (plus 1). It seems more because I write about HD operas from Europe which we’ve seen in movie-houses in DC, and operas we’ve seen at Glimmerglass & Castleton (see operas). So I can’t remember (separate out) what I saw so very accurately even this year but this is what I tweeted (with the 129 characters enlarged a bit for coherence): Luca Pisaroni as Caliban & Leporello. Marina Poplavskaya as Marguerite and Dessayas Violetta and Renee Fleming as Rodelina. Favorite productions: Traviata, Faustus, Enchanted Island, Don Giovanni. Then I came back and added another: Joyce Didonato as Sycorax, Danielle de Niese as Ariel. As will be seen after all I’m not gone on the Wagners, nor those with Nebtrebko. I too (like many people today) find myself drawn to baritones & deeper-voiced males than the tenors and yet except for Simon Keelyside I don’t remember their names. I did like Andreas Scholl, but I had to look up his name and remember him basically as the man who sang Rodelina as the countertenor who partnered my favorite diva Renee Fleming.

I did feel I had participated in a long opera season, including a development of habits (bringing my New York Style Cream Soda, my books), recognitions as when the same people sitting in the same areas of the auditorium over the year. Very satisfying.

We’ve picked out 9 of the 12 for next year that we must see. At $20 a seat, a ten minute drive at most away, it can’t be beat.

Ellen

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The HD Enchanted Island: Opera mash-up

Caliban (Luca Pisaroni) in the midst of a nightmare

Dear friends and readers,

From the Baroque period we have had opera seria and opera buffa. Now we have opera mash-up. The Met is attempting to dignify their daring creation with a pedigree by using the word “pasticcio.” Not only in opera, but on the legitimate and not-so-legitimate stage long 18th century stage (1660-1815), adaptations, free-wheeling and close, re-combinations of old plays abridged with non-dramatic genres like pastorals, clever mocking farces, and parodies were part of the on-going repertoire. And The Enchanted Island consists of a number of da capo exit arias: as my husband, Jim (knowledgeable in the area of opera) told me:

Opera seria is this rigid opera genre which consists mostly of da capo exit arias; that is, the aria ends as it began and then the character leaves the stage. There is some variation, not much. So in Rodelinda, we had that marvelous duet (Renee Fleming and Andreas Scholler as Rodelinda and Bertarido), but there is just the one. All else da capa. Enchanted Island had a number of da capo exit arias, but they mixed in a whole bunch of stuff that was not from opera and from musical compositions there was music from oratorios, contatae, even a coronation anthem (Neptune’s song was Zadoc a coronation anthem by Handel, written for George II and used ever since). So we do not get this sense of rigidity …

And the Met has a website which tells you where the original music from many of the parts come from so you can (if you wish) discover the original context and see how it’s been transposed.

Ariel is also Puck directing traffic among the confused lovers in the wood

However, as Jim suggests this is just one aspect of this entertainment. The Met has people in it who want to do the Baroque repertoire and they were permitted to do it if all was done that could be done to defy the basics of its strict music forms.

So, the story or plot-design was lifted from two different plays by Shakespeare, not so much as originally conceived by him, but as seen through Restoration and 18th century adaptations: this was a Tempest as seen through the salacious and titillating perspective of Dryden and Davenant and his Midsummer Night’s Dream), into which was imported the four lovers and their forest scenes from Shakespeare’s Midsummer Night’s Dream. Jeremy Sams, librettist, and Julian Crouch, director and set designer, were not content to stay with 18th century re-writes: Sycorax (sung by Joyce DiDonato) who does appear in the 18th century renditions, has become the true heroine of the story: Prospero (sung by countertenor, David Daniels) is not Shakespeare’s more or less exemplary alter ego, victim of his own goodness at the hands of an amoral cynical brother, but someone who took over Sycorax’s island and has oppressed and controlled her (somehow — don’t press this too far) ever since. She herself is a loving mother.

Sycorax listening to Caliban’s angry grief

Prospero and Sycorax are made into faintly into an Oberon v Titania pair with the right being on Sycorax’s side as the less powerful figure.

Prospero (David Daniels) and Sycorax (Joyce Didonato)

Joyce Diddonato had the last bow at the end, even though the concluding da capo aria of Act I was Prospero’s (who tells us how he has done wrong) and the epilogue was spoken by Prospero: Shakespeare’s famous good bye speech: “Now our revels are ended.”

Thus this early 21st century creation brought home how adult and frank and playful sexually was Baroque & early to mid-18thc theatre. Cross-dressing, transvestites, continual breaching gender stereotypes: Dryden and all the 18th century writers who followed him re-did Shakespeare they did “sex” him up, make things titillating and salacious that in Shakespeare’s version remain restrained (or austere, grave, serious). There was a kind of mockery of enthrallment in heterosexual stories, especially in the thankless part of Miranda (automatically falls in love with whatever young man is put in front of her, inanely idealistic), which made me wonder had I been missing this in Shakespeare’s plays (after all from his sonnets we know he was bisexual). People interested in the early modern to 18th century from any aspect would learn by seeing this.

Helena’s outfit and its part origin

There were archetypes from novels well after the later 17th century: Luca Pisaroni played Caliban was as a wrenchingly moving re-creation of Quasimodo (he has a crooked back, is disabled mentally, mocked as ugly to his considerable emotional pain), not so much from Hugo but the famous poignant Charles Laughton’s embodiment from the 1930s film. I literally cried at Sycorax’s aria over Caliban’s grief when Helena rejects him. Tears coming down my face. The Met site tells us the music sung was a plaintive song by the Virgin Mary over Christ. The lyrics and situation transpose to a modern situation where the mother would do whatever she could do spare her child, but can do nothing. The whole sequence of Caliban’s nightmare (expressed through nightmare figures dancing) was to me the high point of Enchanted Island (and people who’ve written to me said this was true for them too). I was aware he was not singing; his acting out of anguish was enough.

Costume design came from the later 17th through 18th century: Danielle de Niese at the close had a costumed modeled on Louis XIV as Apollo, somewhat modified by memories of the high plums of headdresses by aristocratic women of the later 18th century (as seen in the recent movie based on Georgiana Spenser’s life, The Duchess, and the 1999 BBC mini-series, Lennox sisters in Aristocrats).

Danielle de Niese as Ariel taking her bow (how a person can be seen as achieving her liberty in that outfit is beyond me — to me such a costume is ironic; she is encased in hierarchies)

Allusions to the US as seen in the 18th century (a Tiepolo ceiling) abounded, but also as seen today: De Niese said she thought of Tinkerbell, the Mermaids hanging from the sky each time Neptune (Placido Domingo) made an entrance, were straight from Disney.

Dialogue — the funny remarks referred to in the interviews Deborah Voigt conducted between acts — came right out of today’s pop US & UK culture. Where one of the imported young men from MND, Demetrius (Paul Appleny), didn’t want to take “no” for “no” from Miranda, Lysander (Eliot Madore), the other, said something like “he said that last time” or ‘he always says that.” Going down to the bottom of the sea, Ariel wore a scuba-diving outfit that looked like something out of Flash Gordon (or Star Wars).

Along with Sams and Julian Crouch, a central creator was Phelim McDermott, all 3 all gay Brits; they had more than little help from a man expert in Baroque, William Christie, who chose rarely done music by Handel, Vivaldi, Rameau, Purcella and lesser known composers, Campra, Rebel. The sensibility was gay, toned down. The extravagance was camp. This was “in your face” opera. The three men said they decided not to do anything moderate. They would concede no apologies. Opera is meant to be over-the-top and that’s what they were.

The Met as a group or team also simply want to sell their work and help operas reach a wider and younger audience. The hype of the interviews, the filming of staging backstage is all part of this. They must also outside the standard repertoire: you cannot keep doing the same 40 operas over and over in movie screens around the world, and new operas are not written very often. They were after a younger audience too. The singer chosen for the six young lovers were young handsome and/or beautiful and intended to please those who would not identify with aging divas and tenors close up. Helena was especially physically lovely; Hermia singer very moving (every time Shakespeare words used the production became much better and she was given mostly Shakespeare’s words), Lysander drop-dead beautiful in the Rufus Sewell mode. I could see Izzy was very taken by hijinks of the five in the forest.

I did find the girlish Ferdinand (very high counter-tenor, Anthony Roth Costanzo) downright embarrassing: his voice was very high and he was dressed like Ronald Colman as Rupert Hentzau when we first see him in Prisoner of Zenda (Ruritania, Knighthood was in Flower stuff). He was the only one of the six lovers altogether to wear an 18th century white wig; all the others had their own “natural” well, cascading and rich hair. Why he was so stigmatized, set apart I could not tell. (In film adaptations of older works, the older men and characters meant to be disliked regularly have wigs or heavy make-up; all the males meant to be entrancing wear their own hair. Ditto for the actresses.) The young woman doing Miranda was daffy. Maybe that had something to do with it, but as I say it’s foolish to try to find reasons for much that one saw literally. Often the makers were simply adding on whatever they could think of to amuse or dazzle.

One of several storms from the first act

I confess that by the end of Act 1 I was ambivalent: I felt I had not been moved; I recognized the Baroque proscenium stage, that the front of the stage was lined with shells (18th century stage used such forms to keep the candles in), but all the artifice, including the cardboard like ship going down in a computerized tempest just reminded me of how unreal what I was watching was. Ariel’s “duhs” and funny mock magic were amusing, but I didn’t like what I took to be making fun of Caliban in act 1; I am often turned off by over-luxurious, over-produced operas and prefer people sitting on chairs singing their hearts out so I can see how the music pieces relate to one another and really engage with the music and characters as somehow real enough.

But I was won over. I was turned round even to being deeply moved, admiration, enjoyment, respect by the end of Act 2. I’ve found this true of other later 20th-21stc staged productions: they start slow; Act 1 develops the situation to the point where in Act 2 we may engage deeply with what happens to this set-up situation, place, characters. That partly happened here. Mostly my engagement came from the Sycorax and Caliban matter. And the second half had far more lines from Shakespeare.

The four lovers waking from their dream spell

I cannot say I liked the long-drawn out triumphant happiness of all the characters at the ending: it’s tedious, repetitive, negates for me what went before. I’m told that is what you find in Baroque operas. But a couple of months ago, Jim and I went to the West End Cinema in DC to see Don Giovanni (Peter Mattrei the singer) from the Teatro alla Scala. Marvelously cynical and it ended almost immediately after Giovanni is pulled undergrown by the man who would have been his father-in-law had he married Donna Anna (Ann Netrebko). All we see is Leporello (Bryn Terfel) seeking a new place. Since this is patently a 21st century work, there is no need for this Busby-Berkeley let’s get everyone on stage beaming at the audience close. But then I did say this was kind of gay game.

I realize I’ve not talked much about the actual singing or music. The movie-theater I was in had the sound too high at times, but FWIW, I thought the singing of Daniels as Prospero effective, Didonato as Sycorax moving. It was ensemble and mostly no one but else but De Niese (marvelous) as Ariel emerged. It was more I was aware of the humor or sadness as I listened. The four lovers when first seen are singing a song about the pleasures they anticipate (over and over) and the innocent words become salacious; often the words seem ironically juxtaposed to the music provided or scene itself. We are not really scared ever or awed.

Claire (Helena) is someone often seen in secondary roles at the Met

I do hope there were not so many castrati as these Baroque productions suggest. Izzy says yes though especially in the Catholic Church. How cruel economic desperation and the search for prestige makes people.

See the Classical Review, the New York Times review and Clever Concoction from Yahoo.

Don’t miss it.

Ariel failing to blow on her shell

Ellen

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In which I tell of a disappointment and how I’m overcoming it: Radcliffe replaces Trollope

“‘Is it the poorhouse, yer honor?’”, Rod Walter’s illustrations: Storytelling through Pictures for Castle Richmond

or?

Christian Wilhelm Dietrich (1712-74), Landscape with Bridge

Gentle readers, good friends,

I’m afraid I have another rejection from the Victorian &/or Trollope academic scholars to tell about. My proposal for a coming NVSA conference in spring 2001, a highly original book history type, with much new material never discussed before, was curtly dismissed. I did think of publishing it, but decided against it (however anyone interested may ask and I’ll be glad to share it). For now I’ll just put the proposal online:

“’Where did it come from?’”: extra-diegetic storytelling in the illustrations for Anthony Trollope’s novels

It grew out of my interest in book illustration and Chapter 6 of my book, Trollope on the Net, based on a study of nearly 500 original illustration to Trollope’s novels. Thoroughly snubbed is what I’ve been by some of these people (Mark Turner was the only academic scholar to review my book; it was beneath Margaret Markwick’s notice in her recent book), and I’ve found the Victorian conferences to be generally cold, heavily careerist events, with the luncheons nearly unendurable. Individuals in the MLA Victorian sessions are sometimes courteous and friendly and at the Exeter Conference I made a few friends among the less competitive, the male and non-university people, and I’ve had a few publications beyond my book on Trollope (essays, reviews), and really made numerous Net friends, but generally speaking as far as human fellowship is concerned where “le monde” is watching, where I’ve been thus far I’ve found the scholars accept no one who is not working the conventional trajectory they did and have.

So, for now, I’ll give up. My paper on film adaptations of Trollope’s novels is due to be published in a sadly butchered state (when I see what it is, I’ll rewrite my good paper and send it to Literature and Film Quarterly and tell more here on this blog about this fractured experience) and maybe eventually I’ll return to Trollope by way of Sharp book history sessions; for now, the idea of promoting Trollope as a great writer, important central voice, a person who also encouraged remarkable illustrations for his books, goes nowhere.

Instead I’ll delve more yet in my 18th century studies. I’ve really become as thorough an 18th century scholar as I have because the people in the area have welcomed me as a fellow scholar (if not equivalent institutionally successful person), starting with my Ph.D. advisor, Robert Adams Day (who encouraged me to write my dissertation on Richardson’s Clarissa and offered to be my advisor), to about 11 years ago when a couple of male 18th century scholars on C18-l invited me to come give a paper on their panel on my website at 2 18th conferences, and people were so friendly.

To offset the irritation and hurt as well as find another place to go and enjoy a conference in the spring, Jim encouraged me to contact another small 18th century society group I’ve never been to before: South Central. It’s in North Caroline, not far, and during days I won’t be teaching, and the topic something analogous, and of real interest to me: prospects and panoramas in the long 18th century, vistas. This weekend I’ll bet getting up a proposal for panoramas and/or prospects, i.e., visions in Ann Radcliffe’s Mysteries of Udolpho (a work of poetic genius I still love after all this time and stands up for another read).

It’s an old idea that Radcliffe is rich in picturesque and sublime scenery and influenced by the painters and books of engravings like Gilpin. What I’ve wanted to develop comes out of Beatrice Battaglia’s work, Paesaggi e misteri: Riscoprire Ann Radcliffe, and a volume of Rivista interdisipliare di studi romantcii) she edited, La questione Romantica — this last connects Austen to the romantics too. Battaglia’s books are too little known and really brilliant; I’ve almost only got just to summarize and tell of what’s in her central sections of this book and I’d be adding to the knowledge of and respect due Radcliffe’s art. I would examine the relationship between her visionary descriptions and individual picturesque and sublime artists — especially Gilpin in England and Vernet in France, through the medium of a intensely subjective presence interacting with what’s gazed upon, and her original fantasy re-creation of Venice (preceding and teaching Byron, James and all her successors).

Pietro Fragiacomo (1856-1922), Piazza San Marco (1899)

Of which much more anon, gentle readers,

Ellen

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Donizetti’s Anna Bolena on HD at the movies

Henry VIII (Ildar Abdrazakov) and Anna (Anna Trebenko)

The historical Anne Boleyn (artist unknown)

Dear friends and readers,

Well the season started. Jim has bought tickets for the 3 of us for all but two of the Met-by-HD operas, and one of these Izzy is going to see on her own. We are planning on three operas-by-HD from Europe and two ballets. Two of these events we do enjoy will be around Xmas time.

I was especially interested to see Donizett’s Anna Bolena because I used to study the Renaissance and among the first books I ever read of the adult kind were biographies of Renaissance queens. I began with Henri IV’s mother, Jeanne d’Albret. I spent 20 years translating the poetry of two Renaissance women. I love to read about their life-writing. And I find the numinous archetypal ones to be central in women’s imaginative lives. I once wrote a review of a book of essays one of which was on these compensatory glamorized victims — who include Mary Stuart, Queens of Scots, Marie Antoinette, recently Marilyn Monroe, Princess Diana. There will be more of these she-tragedy queens in the HD opera repertoire over the next couple of years.

They are perpetually presented as powerful and perpetually die young after allowing their bodies to be exploited … in European art the Catholic and sexually transgressive Mary Stuart, Queen of Scots, a political failure, and probably an accomplice to murder, was depicted as a model of exemplary femininity while (as her rival), the Protestant and apparently chaste Elizabeth I, successful on her own behalf, and an effective powerful leader on England’s behalf, was depicted as a seething sexually frustrated Machiavellian. Like Arbella Stuart and Lady Jane Grey (the first imprisoned for many years went mad, the second beheaded when very young), Mary Stuart’s life could fit a stereotype which presented images of beautiful women coerced into renouncing power while they continued to wield it. Mary’s regalia of power endowed erotic interactions in which a beautiful woman submitted, resigned herself or despaired, with glamorized importance.

Once upon a time Elizabeth Tudor was too clearly powerful to be assimilated into such compensatory iconographies of victimhood. Her learning and unmarried state, which the majority of her audience would not identify with, were ostracized, and she became a grim projection of the miseries of unsubmissive women who do not aim to be loving wives. Nowadays she’s being turned into a sentimental icon of frustration. The flexibility and incongruities of these myths reveals the “normative” demand for female de-sexualization, domesticity, and submission or harsh punishment.

This is where Anne Boleyn fits and today as Miriam Burstein has shown (“The fictional afterlife of Anne Boleyn: how to do things with the Queen, 1901-2006.” CLIO 37.1 (2007), she is common figure in sentimental romance.

Anna Trebenko as Anna as this mysterious romance archetype

So how did this opera fit in? This Anna was a dignified angry saint; Trebenko played her as driven by despair at the close. Nonetheless as whole, as the NYTimes review had it, the play just won’t do. Especially debilitating and tedious was the character of Giovanna Seymour, supposed to be without ambition, just loving the king – and the queen. Ekaterina Gubanova as the tiresomely improbable remorseful Jane was dull. They could have cut some of her arias. She had no insight into the ambivalent feelings such a lady-in-waiting might have felt and acted upon. Myself I think she must’ve been one of these women without self-advocacy, never allowed to enact any.

Ippolito Pindamonte was the librettist. He was an Italian romantic poet something in the tradition of Byron and knew Scott’s novels very well. Well it was his play that Felice Romani turned into an opera. Felice Romani wrote many of the librettos for operas in this era. This was the first of Donizetti’s operas to be a hit, and it might be the “tragedy she-queen” who once lived, the world historical Figure, but it might also be the Pindemonte’s original play was better than most.

The opera as opera was much better than a Washington Post reviewer had it (the writer enjoyed the derision). Beautifully (stunningly consistently) sung by Anna Trebenko (Anna B), but if I was moved (I was) it was partly from remembering a real woman had suffered the terror of beheading.

Anna Bolena (Trebenko) and her ladies

Ildar Abdrazakov acted well a “mad” Henry, nasty, spiteful, vengeful, disdainful of this low woman he made a queen, he made some sense of the role, and while Stephen Costello probably didn’t read Scott, intuitively he recreated a Waverly hero.

Ricardo Percy (Steven Costello) and Anna (Trebenko)

Torture (doubtless done) was included by the costuming of Smeaton sung and acted well by Tamara Mumford. IN history Anne was accused of having a sexual affair with Smeaton. This has ever reminded me of how the court of these unrestricted monarchies is like a harem; the women are all available to the Master; any male around risks castration in some form, here it was beheading.

Smeaton asks for pardon (for having broken under torture)

The sets as prison were very good, the man who sung Hervey, a small part, important: to me today what stands out is how everyone around Henry let him get away with it. Why not update the play with some action. As it opened Henry was trying to get at Jane’s vagina by pulling up her gown. It made that scene more believable.

Still the truth is the sentimentality of the piece is not all that different from a costume drama I watched last night: a great crew of British actors doing Any Human Heart, nor the way everything is attributed to “love”. Nothing venal, petty, trivializing; no one acting for ambition, power, revenge. It should irritate anyone who knows about the Bolyen clan, how they climbed high as fringe court people, how the family pushed Anne and later Jane Boleyn — to hear Anne Boleyn spoken of as powerful.

I find it remarkable to notice that the conversation in the intermission was about the historical figures. People quoted the old rhyme about Henry VIII and his six wives. They half-discussed what little they knew about the era — next to or nothing. Not in any serious way, half-joking I suppose. The historical background or pretense of it helped put the experience across. The Met tried to latch onto that by hiring a costumer who regularly (for years) has been making costumes for Shakespeare’s plays. Her cosumes were beautiful. Often black (as they were in the era), sombre, heavy yet luxurious, giving the performers just the right gravitas. She said she studied Holbein’s paintings closely.

Good and serious books to read include: Retha Warnke, The Rise and Fall of Anne Boleyn (excellent in every way); Julia Fox’s Jane Boleyn: The True Story of the infamous [the publisher gets to choose a title] Lady Rochford. For examples of recent romancing: Margaret Campbell Barnes, Brief Gaudy Hour [addressed to her husband no less] and Philippa Gregory’s The Other Boleyn Girl.

Jane Boleyn, also beheaded, by Hans Holbein the Younger.

You hear the costume designer talk and look at her costumes in the recorded interviews that are now regularly at the center of these operas. They are popular. I love watching the crew put together and pull apart sets. I came across an article which said the Met’s funding from private donors was 182 million this year (or had gone up that amount since last!). Gelbe, the manager who promoted and then went through with these HD broadcasts, is now vindicated. In our local theater the auditorium was sold out.

Ellen

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Foremother poet: A. Mary F. Robinson Darmesterer Duclaux (1857-1944)

Sunset near Naples (c 1785), Joseph Wright of Derby (1734-97) [serves as cover illustration for Anne Radcliffe's Sicilian Romance]

Dear friends and readers,

A. Mary F. Robinson Darmester Duclaux, lyricist, ballad-writer, translator, sybil, wrote of Italy in a Vernon Lee sort of vein during one part of her long career, lived in France, her prose book is a study of Emily Bronte. When I first wrote a foremother poet posting to Wom-po in 2006, the implicit praise for the poetry involved prompted a series of protests from women poets on that listserv at the time, and in response a cogent passionate defense by Annie Finch of this type of feminine (“female poetess”) poetry. This week when I put the same few poems on Wom-po, the poems attracted curious questions and sympathetic interest.

The reader will find that Robinson is a consciously egalitarian poet, identifying as a woman and a poet of the people (of ballads, folksongs) and her defense of her lyrical bent is formal poetry is especially a woman’s province. Those discussing her in anthologies rarely reprint her poems about women: I have two here, “The Scapegoat” and “The Wise-Woman.” One shows her to have been a reading girl and then woman (“Bookworm”). reminding me of Logan Pearsall Smith’s comment: “Some people say that life is the thing, but I much prefer reading.”

Here are my favorites by her, which I found in Angela Leighton and Margaret Reynolds’s Victorian Women Poets: An Anthology. I chose her originally because I so loved the few lyrics that I found in this anthology; since then I’ve discovered that there is not one poem by her in Chadwyck-Healey nor available online on the Internet; you can read her at length only if you buy one of the recent facsimile reprints of her books of poetry (and they are not inexpensive). So here is a blog filled with her poetry, where I retell her life briefly and cite anthologies which include and essays on her.

The Sibyl

Behold, the old earth is young again!
The blackthorn whitens in the rain,
The flowers come baffling wind and hail,
The gay, wild nightingale
Cries out his heat in wood and vale.
(And in my heart there rises too
          A dim free longing
For some delight I never knew!)

O Spring, thou art a subtle thing,
Wiser than we, thou Sibyl, Spring!
Thy tresses blown across our face
In Life’s mid-race
Remind us of some holier place –
(And unawares the dullest find
          A new religion
That all their doubts have left behind

From Tuscan Olives

“Seven Rispetti”

V

At Lucca, for the autumn festival,
          The streets are tulip-gay; but you and I
Forgot them, seeing over church and wall
          Guinigi’s tower i’the black-and-blue sky.

A stem of delicate rose against the blue;
And on the top two lonely olives grew,
Crowning the tower, far from the hills, alone;
As on our risen love our lives are grown.

VI:

Who would have thought we should stand again together,
          Here, with the convent a crown of towers above us;
Here, mid the sere-wooded hills and wintry weather;
          Here, where the olives bend down and seem to love us;

Here, where the fruit-laden olives half remember
All that began in their shadow last November;
Here, where we knew we must part, must part and sever;
Here, where we know we shall love for aye and ever.

John Singer Sergeant (1856-1925), A Boating Party (1889)

The Bookworm

The whole day long I sit and read
          Of days when men were men indeed
          And women knightlier far:
I fight with Joan of Arc; I fall
With Talbot; from my castle-wall
          I watch the guiding star …

But when at last the twilight falls
And hangs about the book-lined walls
          And creeps across the page,
Then the enchantment goes, and I
Close up my volumes with a sigh
          To greet a narrower age.

Home through the pearly dusk I go
And watch the London lamplight glow
          Far off in wavering lines:
A pale grey world with primrose gleams,
And in the West a cloud that seems
          My distant Appenines.

O Life! so full to truths to teach,
Of secrets I shall never reach,
          O world of Here and Now;
Forgive, forgive me, if a voice,
A ghost, a memory be my choice
          And more to me than Thou!

Here are some of her longer poignant despairing pieces on behalf of fellow women.

The Scapegoat

She lived in the hovel alone, the beautiful child.
          Alas, that it should have been so!
But her father died of the drink, and the sons were wild,              And where was the girl to go?

Her brothers left her alone in the lonely hut.
          Ah, it was dreary at night
When the wind whistled right thro’ the door that never would shut
          And sent her sobbing with fright.

She never had slept alone; when the stifling room
          Held her, brothers, father – all.
Ah, better their violence, better their threats, than the gloom
          That now hung close as a pall!

When the hard day’s washing was done, it was sweeter to stand
          Hearkening praises and vows,
To feel her cold fingers kept warm in a sheltering hand,              Than crouch in the desolate house.

Ah, me! she was only a child; and yet so aware
          Of the shame which follows on sin.
A poor, lost, terrified child! she stept in the snare,                  Knowing the toils she was in.

Yet, now, when I watch her pass with a heavy reel,              Shouting her villainous song,
It is only pity or shame, do you think, that I feel
          For the infinite sorrow and wrong?

With a sick, strange wonder I ask, Who shall answer the sin,
          Thou, lover, brothers of thine?
Or he who left standing thy hovel to perish in?
          Or I, who gave no sign?

The Wise-Woman

In the last low cottage in Blackthorn Lane
          The Wise-woman lives alone;
The broken thatch lets in the rain,
The glass is shattered in every pane
          With stones the boys have thrown.

For who would not throw stones at a witch?
          Take any safe revenge
For the father’s lameness, the mother’s stitch,
The sheep that died on its back in a ditch,
          And the mildewed corn in the grange?

Only be sure to be out of sight
          Of the witch’s baleful eye!
So the stones, for the most, are thrown at night,
Then a scuffle of feet, a hurry of fright -
          How fast those urchins fly!

The witch’s garden is run to weeds,
          Never a phlox or a rose,
But infamous growths her brewing needs,
Or slimy mosses the rank soil breeds,
          Or tares such as no man sows.

This is the house. Lift up the latch ­–
          Faugh, the smoke and the smell!
A broken bench, some rags that catch
The drip of the rain from the broken thatch
          ­Are these the wages of Hell?

The witch – who wonders? – is bent with cramp.
          Satan himself cannot cure her,
For the beaten floor is oozing damp,
And the moon, through the roof, might serve for a lamp,              Only a rushlight’s surer.

And here some night she will die alone,
          When the cramp clutches tight at her heart,
Let her cry in her anguish, and sob, and moan,
The tenderest woman the village has known
          Would shudder – but keep apart.

May she die in her bed! A likelier chance
          Were the dog’s death, drowned in the pond.
The witch when she passes it looks askance:
They ducked her once, when the horse bit Nance;
          She remembers, and looks beyond.

For then she had perished in very truth,
          But the Squire’s son, home from college,    Rushed to the rescue, himself forsooth
Plunged after the witch. – Yes, I like the youth
          For all his new-fangled knowledge.

How he stormed at the cowards! What a rage
          Heroic flashed in his eyes!
But many a struggle and many an age
Must pass ere the same broad heritage
          Be given the fools and the wise.

‘Cowards!’ he cried. He was lord of the land
          He was mighty to them, and rich.
They let him rant; but on either hand
They shrank from the devil’s unseen brand
          On the sallow face of the witch.

They let him rant; but, deep in his heart,
          Each thought of some thing of his own Wounded or hurt by the Wise-woman’s art;
Some friend estranged, or some lover apart.
          Their hearts grew cold as stone.

And the Heir spoke on, in his eager youth,
          His blue eyes full of flame;
And he claspt the witch, as he spoke of the Truth;
And the dead, cold Past; and of Love and of Ruth ­
          But their hearts were still the same,

Till at last – ‘For the sake of Christ who died,
          Mother, forgive them,’ he said.
‘Come, let us kneel, let us pray!’ he cried …
But horror-stricken, aghast, from his side
          The witch broke loose and fled!

Fled right fast from the brave amends
          He would make her then and there;
From the chance that Heaven so seldom sends
To turn our bitterest foes to friends, -
          Fled, at the name of a prayer!

Poor lad, he stared so, amazed and grieved.
          He had argued half an hour;
And yet the beldam herself believed,
No less than the villagers she deceived,
          In her own unholy power!

Though surely a witch should know very well
          ’Tis the lie for which she will burn.
She must have learned that the deepest spell
Her art includes could ne’er compel
          A quart of cream to turn.

And why, knowing this, should one sell one’s soul
          To gain such a life as hers -
The life of the bat and the burrowing mole ­
To gain no vision and no control,
          Not even the power to curse?

‘Tis strange, and a riddle still in my mind
          To-day as well as then.
There’s never an answer I could find Unless -
0 folly of humankind!
          O vanity born with men!

Rather it may be than merely remain
          A woman poor and old,
No longer like to be courted again
For the sallow face deep lined with pain,
          Or the heart grown sad and cold.

Such bitter souls may there be, I think,
          So craving the power that slips,
Rather than lose it, they would drink
The waters of Hell, and lie at the brink
          Of the grave, with eager lips.

They sooner would, than slip from sight,
          Meet every eye askance;
Sooner be counted an imp of the night,
Sooner live on as a curse and a blight
          Than just be forgotten?

                    Perchance

Marianne Von Werefkin (1870-1938), Woman with a Lantern

And last:

Selva Oscura

In a wood
          Far away,
Thrushes brood,
          Ravens prey,
Eagles circle overhead,
Through the boughs a bird drops dead.

Wild and high,
          The angry wind
Wanders by
          And cannot find
Any limit to the wood
Full of cries and solitude.

**************************

Helen Allingham (1848-1926), Santa Maria Salute (1901-2)

A. Mary F. Robinson died two years before I was born. She was born in Leamington, England, and spent her childhood at home, educating herself through reading in her father’s library. He was an architect’s daughter and grew up among respected literary people (knew Robert Browning, Oscar Wilde); it’s said that she decided that instead of having a coming out ball at age 18, she had a book of poetry published. She did go to school, in Brussels, 1870, and then studied in Italy and at University College, London. She published a study of Emily Bronte in 1883. Emily Dickinson wrote of Robinson’s study that it was “more electirc far than anything since Jane Eyre.” She and Vernon Lee may have been lovers — they were at least close friends.

She lived through the worst of World War Two apparently utterly devastated by what she saw.

She married as well, a French scholar and professor of Persian, James Darmesteter; they translated one another’s work, and tried to bring about an alliance of French and British culture. She lived in Paris where she is described as having a salon (so are other women). She did translations from Greek. When her husband died in 1894, she did not return to England, but rather remarried, this time a French scientist, Emile Duclaux, and stayed in France. He died in 1904 and she continued to write until nearly the end of World War II.

It seems she remained close much of her life with her sister, Mabel, a year younger than she was. Her Images and Meditations published 1923 was dedicated to “to Mabel, Only Sister, Dearest Friend.”

Pietro Fragiacomo (1856-1922), Inverno [Winter, Venice]

Most of her poems are set in Italy, Venice frequently.. Some show a power of authoritative argument (“Darwinism”) but I have preferred the lyrics and deeply melancholy enigmatic pieces. She defended her love of ballads, and said it was a “special woman’s form,” valuable for an authenticity of experience.

We women have a privilege in these matters … We have always been the prime makers of ballads and love songs, of anonymous snatches and screeds of popular song. We meet together no longer on Mayday, as of old in Provence, to set the fashion in tensos and sonnets. But some old wife or other, crooning over her fire of sticks, in Scotland, or the Val d’Aosta, in Roumania or Gascony, is probably at the beginning of of most romantic ballads …

Fruit Stall Near Venice, Helen Allingham (again)

Beyond Leighton and Reynolds’s Victorian Women Poets, one may read her poetry in The Collected Poems, Lyrical and Narrative of Mary Robinson (Madame Duclaux), London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1902, and British Women Poets of the 19th Century, edd. Margaret Randolph Higonnet (who also prefers the sequences of lyrics). There’s her Emily Bronte in the Eminent Women series, London.

Writing on Robinson includes M. Lynda Ely, “Not a Song to Sell: Re-presenting A. Mary F. Robinson,” Victorian Poetry, 38:8 (2000):94-108; Emily Harrington, “The Strain of Sympathy: A. Mary F. Robinson, The New Arcadia, and Vernon Lee,” Nineteenth Century Literature, 61:1 (2006):66-98.

John Singer Sergeant (1856-1925), Vernon Lee (1881)

From her Love without Wings (“Eight Songs”):

VI:

Ah me, do you remember still
          The garden where we strolled together,
The empty groves, the little hill
          Starred o’er with pale Italian heather? …

VIII:

…
Long blessed days of love and wakening thguht,
          All, all are dead;
Nothing endures we did, nothing we wrought,
          Nothing we said.

But once I dreamed I sat and sang with you
          On Ida’s hill.
There, in the echoes of my life, we two
          Are singing still.

Ellen

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