by Peter Cates

Composer Richard Wagner

Richard Wagner

Composer Richard Wagner (1813-1883) was an egomaniac who, as my high school glee club director put it succinctly, knew he was great. His 16-hour Ring of the Niebelungen was premiered at Bayreuth, in Germany, in 1876 and has been produced many times since then. It is a mammoth quartet of four operas – Das Rheingold, Die Walkure, Siegfried and Gotterdammerung; and, depending with whom you speak, it is either a windy, bombastic spectacle of Teutonic screeching, screaming and shrieking or a masterpiece of operatic genius.

After listening off and on for over 40 years, I hold with the masterpiece view but plan to focus on my current favorite of the four, and one which has been a shade less popular than the other three, Siegfried.

The basic premise is simple. The Ring is one that enables its owner to control the world and its owner is the Niebelungen, a dwarf named Alberich who creates the ring, is robbed of it and tries to get it back. The 15 or 16 hours deal with an array of mythological gods and goddesses, giants and good and evil humans in this life/death struggle.

Siegfried is the son of Siegmund and Sieglinde, who fall in love and create this son before they find out they are long lost twin siblings, and becomes a central hero who is eventually killed by the treacherous Hagen , son of the dwarf Alberich.

Other details of this ever thickening plot are too detailed to go into but synopses are available on the Internet.
The opera Siegfried deals with Alberich’s brother Mime, a dwarf who found Siegfried as a child abandoned in the woods after his parents were killed and has been raising him. Unfortunately, Siegfried detests his foster father who meanwhile is plotting to steal the Ring from another thief. As stated earlier, the rest of the story can be enjoyed elsewhere.

The music in this opera has a savage, growling brilliance in its large-sized orchestra with extra brass and percussion and the singing when done well. And for me, the best listening approach is to forget about reading up on the plot ahead of time or follow the scripted libretto; simply let the music happen. It is some of the most piercingly eloquent music to be heard anywhere with a phenomenal range of emotions and dynamics from tenderly soft to climactically exhilarating.

The performance I have been enjoying for a while is a 1949 broadcast from the Vienna State Opera which has been available in a set of three CDs since 2009 (Myto, 00190) and also accessible on YouTube. The recorded sound is very good for its era while the musical cast was one of the finest, in particular tenors Gunther Treptow (1907-1981) as Siegfried, and William Wernigk (1894-1973) as Mime, soprano Gertrude Grob Prandl (1917-1995) as Siegfried’s sweetheart Brunnhilde and baritone Ferdinand Frantz (1906-1959) as Brunnhilde’s father Wotan, who is also King of the gods and temporarily in disguise as the Wanderer.

Maestro Rudolf Moralt (1902-1958) and, for several years music director of the Vienna State Opera, led a very exciting performance.

by Peter Cates

Abbie Huston Evans

Abbie Huston Evans

The 1989 anthology Maine Speaks has a poem from the Bristol native Abbie Huston Evans (1882-1983). Before sharing it, I offer the biographical details on her life provided in the above text, as they give a good maximum summation with minimum paragraphs:

“As a teenager, Evans moved with her family from her native Bristol, an area her mother’s family had settled in 1730, to Camden. She realized she wanted to be a poet when she heard her father read William Wordsworth’s Ode on Some Intimations of Immortality one Sunday in his sermon at the church where he was pastor. Fate set back her plans, however, when she was 18 years old; an illness that threatened her eyesight kept her from reading and writing for ten years. She spent a great deal of her time outdoors, in particular walking the Camden Hills with a young friend who had been her pupil in Sunday school, Edna St. Vincent Millay.

“Evans entered Radcliffe College at 28, and graduated Phi Beta Kappa. She worked as an English teacher, a Red Cross volunteer during World War I, and a social worker among the families of miners and steel-workers. She eventually went back to teaching, in Philadelphia, coming back during the summers to Maine.

“Recognition as a poet came slowly to her. She remained in relative obscurity until the 1960s, when she received an honorary doctorate from Bowdoin College and several poetry prizes. Her Collected Poems, published in honor of her 19th birthday, at which time she was still writing, has received wide acclaim.

“Evans said of the Maine countryside, ‘It’s the kind of place I would have made, had I been God. ‘ She studied the natural world so as to understand the place of the human spirit within it, and to understand the relationship of any small part of it to the universe at large.”

The anthologized poem is Silhouette from 1950. It has a narrative power of exceptional dimensions in its depiction of the combination of acceptance and regret we all might feel at the end when we try to assess our own lives. The rhythms of its stanzas are quite captivating:

“The lamp flared in a quick gust. -“Yet,” I said,
” ‘You’ve had a full life, Sarah. “-“That depends;
” ‘If you mean busy, I suppose so. Yes.
” ‘What with the old folks-and Aunt Jane-and Mandy.’
“She took her basket and got up to go,
“Her hand a gaunt root wrapped about the handle.
“Nothing ever took me off my feet.
“That’s the whole story. -Well,’ she said, ‘good night.’
“I held the lamp to light her down the path.”

by Peter Cates

Lansky

Harvey Keitel

Last night on Amazon prime, I watched the 2021 film Lansky and was quite impressed by one particular quality, the performance of 82-year-old actor Harvey Keitel as the mobster accountant and major Godfather for way too many decades, Meyer Lansky (1902-1983). The story does rehash a lot of info from the many previous depictions of Lansky abounding on films and television and in novels but the script, direction and other production details sustained the interest well also.

The opening begins with Lansky as an old man dying of cancer after smoking four packs of cigarettes a day for 60 years; he is meeting with a journalist, David, in a Miami diner and telling his life story , with the understanding that everything he recounts is to be off the record and not to be published until after the gangster dies.

The movie spans from his boyhood and his rise to power as the figure with a genius level understanding of mathematical odds and his general business sense. It is of course frequently violent; however, one scene stood out in a positive way. During the 1930s, Nazi sympathizers are holding an indoor hate rally in the upper New York City 80s neighborhood of Yorkville. The speaker is screaming antisemitic venom when Lansky and several of his associates show up, and beat the speaker and his cohorts to a bloody pulp.

During World War II, Lansky and the Mob protected the ship-building industry from Nazi spies and saboteurs, using infiltration and enforcement methods that might be considered illegal , and they worked.

The re-enactments of historic events were quite effective. The very good supporting cast included Sam Worthington as the journalist David and John Magardo as the young Meyer Lansky.

Other recommended films with Harvey Keitel are Pulp Fiction, Copland and Taking Sides (dealing with the de-Nazifying investigation of the great German conductor Wilhelm Furtwangler (1886-1954) just after WWII.

Emil von Sauer

Emil von Sauer

In 1938, German pianist Emil von Sauer (1862-1942) collaborated in a recording of the two Piano Concertos of von Sauer’s teacher Franz Liszt (1811-1886) with the Paris Conser­vatory Orchestra led by the Austrian conductor Felix Weingartner (1863-1942) that I have on a reissued LP (Turnabout THS 65098). Critics at the time and since then cared that von Sauer’s nimble fingers at the keyboard had gotten arthritic and sloppy. I can see a few points in these misgivings but, compared to the other brilliant knuckle busters who have recorded these masterpieces, the old pianist played with a poetry, delicacy and inspired musicality matched by the conductor and orchestral players.

These recordings have been reissued on cd and should be accessible on YouTube.

Maestro Weingartner died on May 7, 1942, and what would have been the 109th birthday anniversary of composer Johannes Brahms and the 102nd one of Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky. Von Sauer died 10 days earlier on April 27.

Henrik Ibsen

Henrik Ibsen

Some of the most intensely eloquent reading and theatrical experiences are to be found in the plays of the Norwegian Henrik Ibsen (1828-1906), including Enemy of the People (which the late actor Steve McQueen starred in on Broad­way), Ghosts, Rosmer­sholm, and The Doll’s House. One play that stands out vividly is The Wild Duck which depicts how a lethal combination of honesty, arrogance and self-righteousness leads to the death of a young woman.

Nathaniel Hawthorne

by Peter Cates

Nathaniel Hawthorne

Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804-1864) , whom I hope to discuss more about at a later date, wrote the following about his friend Herman Melville (1819-1891), another true original genius among American writers of the 19th century, when Melville visited him in Southport, England, during the older writer’s years as the American consul in Liverpool from 1853 to 1857, a position he was appointed to by his Bowdoin College classmate and loyal friend, President Franklin Pierce:

“He stayed with us from Tuesday to Thursday; and, on the intervening day, we took a pretty long walk together, and sat down in a hollow among the sand hills (sheltering ourselves from the high, cool wind) and smoked a cigar. Melville, as he always does, began to reason of Providence and futurity, and of everything that lies beyond human ken, and informed me that he had ‘pretty much made up his mind to be annihilated ‘; but still he does not seem to rest in that anticipation; and, I think, will never rest until he gets hold of a definite belief…..He can neither believe, nor be comfortable in his unbelief; and he is too honest and courageous not to try to do one or the other. If he were a religious man, he would be one of the most truly religious and reverential; he has a very high and noble nature, and better worth immortality than most of us….”

Hawthorne conveyed a gripping sense of blackness, of evil, in such classics as The Scarlet Letter, The Minister’s Black Veil and Young Goodman Brown joined by a cynicism as to any hope for humanity.

Herman Melville

Melville concerned himself with a greater range of thematic characterizations-the determination of Bartleby the Scrivener to “prefer not to do” any other tasks but copy documents all day and night in a Wall Street law office, even sleeping there; the admittedly heroic and destructive determination of Captain Ahab to catch the great white whale Moby Dick, who ate his leg; the horrible brooding tensions aboard a slave ship that has been taken over by the slaves in Beneto Cereno; and the hanging of an innocent sailor Billy Budd for defending himself against the lies of a vicious Master of Arms .

Melville concluded Billy Budd with a poem depicting Billy’s remains buried deep in the ocean with his wrists still bound by ‘darbies’, otherwise known as handcuffs, when he is executed by the British navy:

“But me they’ll lash in hammock, drop me deep.
Fathoms down, fathoms down, how I’ll dream fast asleep.
I feel it stealing now. Sentry, are you there?
Just ease these darbies at the wrist,
And roll me over fair!
I am sleepy, and the oozy weeds about me twist.”

President Richard Nixon, left, and H. R. Haldeman

by Peter Cates

The Haldeman Diaries

The Haldeman Diaries, a massive book of almost 700 pages, was issued by Putnam a year after the death of H.R. Haldeman (1926-1993) who served as Chief of Staff for former President Richard Nixon for four years before being quietly pressured to resign by his boss in the spring of 1973 during the Watergate scandal.

He ran a very zero tolerance tight ship and was a genius of efficiency and a consummate workaholic, putting in 48-hour work weeks, and loyally being Nixon’s hatchet man. I first became aware of him in 1970 after reading a Sunday Parade magazine puff piece, portraying him as hard working and Mister Geniality.

About a month before Haldeman resigned, Newsweek did a more thorough and quite fascinating cover story on him. It reported his Medusa stare at erring underlings, his having more access to Nixon than any other human being on earth (which included Nixon’s wife Pat and daughters Tricia Cox and Julie Eisenhower), his having little interest in music, art and literature, and his complete devotion to his wife and two children, although spending very little time with them during the White House years.

His marine-style crew cut aptly conveyed his quite authoritative command of everything that went on at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, only doing Nixon’s bidding. Absolutely nobody got to see the president in the Oval Office without Haldeman’s approval; calling him the pit bull at the door is an understatement.

The Diaries came about after Nixon appointed him as the second top man at the White House, as recounted by the author in his own preface:

“Robert Rutland, a close personal friend and eminent Presidential scholar, urged me to record faithfully in a journal the major events of each day and my thoughts regarding them. He believed that this had never been done by someone working so closely with the President. At least my ‘diaries’ would provide a fascinating account for my children and grandchildren; more importantly, they could prove to be an invaluable asset to historians and scholars.”

Haldeman hit the nail on the head with that last statement.

Nixon was often referred to as Tricky Dick but quite a number of presidents have played dirty including the notorious FDR (Franklin Delano Roosevelt), while Nixon’s predecessor LBJ (Lyndon Baines Johnson) was complimented by a labor union leader as “no slouch either.”

The September 9, 1970, entry in the Diaries amidst a ruthless political campaign against the Democrats conveys Nixon’s personality here – “Really wants to play the conservative trend and hang the opponents as left-wing radical liberals. Said to say, ‘Our opponents are not bad men, they are sincere, dedicated, radicals. They honestly believe in the liberal left.’ And force them on the defensive.”

Haldeman’s earlier best seller The Ends of Power is also highly recommended.

William MacEwan

William MacEwan

I rec­ent­ly found a 78 among my piles of records by a singer I had never heard of before, tenor William MacEwan (1871-1943) performing The Old Rugged Cross in a very good 1927 English Columbia recording that sold 250,000 copies worldwide by 1933 while sheet music sales totaled 20 million by World War II.

Max von Sydow

Max von Sydow

A powerful piece of acting is that of Max von Sydow, in the 1975 film Three Days of the Condor, portraying the assassin Joubert staring into the abyss just before he leads two other killers on a murder spree against seven CIA researchers in a quiet New York City office. He also comments on the peace and comfort of having no conscience to Robert Redford’s character.

Robert PT Coffin’s essay Kennebec Crystals continued

More from Robert PT Coffin’s essay Kennebec Crystals about Maine’s winter ice industry:

“And down in New York and Philadelphia prosperous citizens were getting down their ice cream freezers. Children in Richmond and children under the shadow of the Blue Ridge were running starry-eyed behind high carts with letters frosted and dripping with icicles. The letters on those carts spelled ‘Kennebec Ice.’ Further south, the crystals of Maine touched the fruit of the Caribbees. Far down off the Horn and up the other side, ships with bones bred in Maine forests carried the Maine treasure to the Pacific. Trains plowed through the dusty cornlands of Nebraska and on to the Rockies, carrying Maine ice. And a whole nation knew the clear taste of the Kennebec. Half the world, too, England and France, and Holland.

“But all that was in the twilight days of wooden ships, when Maine women still kept their neat houses moving around the world. That was when the wizards had not wakened new secrets out of electricity and steel. That was in the eighties and nineties.”

Concluding paragraphs next week.