Thomas Hardy

by Peter Cates

Thomas Hardy

The Man He Killed.

“Had he and I but met
By some old ancient inn,
We should have sat us down to wet
Right many a nipperkin!

“But ranged as infantry,
And staring face to face,
I shot at him as he at me,
And killed him in his place.

“I shot him dead because –
Because he was my foe,
Just so: my foe of course he was:
That’s clear enough; although

“He thought he’d ‘list, perhaps,
Off-hand like- just as I –
Was out of work-had sold his traps –
No other reason why.

“Yes; quaint and curious war is!
You shoot a fellow down
You’d treat if met where any bar is,
Or help to half-a-crown.”

English novelist/poet Thomas Hardy (1840-1928) was quite obsessed by the indifference of the universe to man’s predicament in this life. One feels this thread in such novels as Far From the Madding Crowd, Tess of the D’Urbervilles, and Jude the Obscure and a sense of hopelessness pervades his poem, The Man He Killed, which first appeared in a 1902 issue of Harper’s Weekly. It was written during the Boer War, which lasted from 1899 to 1902, and mirrored Hardy’s sense of war’s irrationality, which increased even more during World War I (Two younger English poets who served in WW I’s trenches, Rupert Brooke (1887-1915) and Siegfried Sassoon (1886-1967) were inspired by Hardy’s poems in writing about their own wartime experiences.).

The unnamed narrator in the poem speculates about what if he and the enemy soldier could have met in a pub and had a beer together – ‘Had he and I but met’, the word ‘but’ slightly intensifying the sadness of war’s actuality. And then the second stanza, ‘But….staring face to face,/I shot at him as he at me,/And killed him in his place.’ For this soldier, it is kill or be killed on the spur of the moment; the backlash of guilt hits him later. ‘I shot him dead because – /Because he was my foe, /Just so…That’s clear enough’ but then ‘although.’ This one word, ‘although’ stinging with remorse and despair.

The last two verses deal with the other possible reasons both soldiers are fighting for their country – ‘was out of work ­ had sold his’ { FISHING?} ‘traps – /No other reason why.’

Finally, Hardy tightens the screws on the impersonal nature of war, of men on their respective sides of the battlefield blowing each other’s brains out and how it is so ‘quaint and curious war is.’

Hardy achieved a poise in this evoking of his outrage at war almost on the same level as Homer in the Iliad and the other Greek tragedians, Aeschylus and Sophocles.

A final note: when Hardy’s novel Jude the Obscure was published in 1895, its depiction of sex and religion was so controversial that several bookstores sold the volume in brown paper bags and one Anglican clergyman destroyed his own copy. Hardy commented years later that, “After these hostile verdicts from the press, its next misfortune was to be burnt by a bishop – probably in his despair at not being able to burn me.”

Our local Colby College Library has one of the finest, world-renowned collection of Thomas Hardy first editions and other memorabilia in its rare book archives, courtesy of a long-time English professor, curator and Hardy scholar, Carl J. Weber (1894-1966).

George Szell

by Peter Cates

George Szell

YouTube has made available an hour long September 1968, interview with the great former conductor of the Cleveland Orchestra, George Szell (1897-1970), who raised that Midwestern group of 100 or more players from an already good level to world class during the 24 years of his leadership from 1946 to his death, due to a combination of heart attack and bone cancer, on July 30, 1970. Back when Time magazine still covered classical music in depth, it devoted a page to Szell’s passing and another to that of Sir John Barbirolli who died the day before Szell. (Interestingly, during the 1930s, Szell had a girlfriend who abandoned him to marry Barbirolli.)

During the course of the interview, originally broadcasted on the BBC with Decca/London record producer, John Culshaw, Szell talks about his childhood as a prodigy on the piano and his concert tours between his home in Vienna, Austria, and London, England. When he was 11 years old. His most vivid memory was shopping in London’s department stores which had far greater numbers of items for sale than those in Vienna. Although he could easily have made a successful career as a pianist, he decided he was too lazy to put in the required hours of daily practicing and would become drawn to conducting. During his youth, he also composed a sizable number of works but decided his own music would never equal that of Bach, Beethoven and Brahms.

When he was 13, he studied for a while with German composer Max Reger (1873-1916) whose own music is tough listening at first but well worth additional hearings. Reger was also very obese and could eat more food than 5 people at a dinner party — a factor that, combined with his alcoholism, may have led to his early death from a heart attack.

Szell remembered Reger playing piano music with astounding delicacy and beauty. He also remembered him flinging around four letter words and asking young Szell to go in the hallway while he told dirty jokes to the older students.

At 19, Szell started working with composer/conductor Richard Strauss (1864-1949) at the Dresden Opera House. He told of two tendencies whenever Strauss conducted, whether it was the latter’s own music such as Salome or Don Juan, or Beethoven’s 5th Symphony. He would give a performance that was out of this world or be totally bored, looking at his watch with one hand and conducting with the other.

When Szell was negotiating with the Cleveland Orchestra board for his working terms as music director, he demanded autonomy with the hiring and firing of players and longer working seasons. Interviewer Culshaw, who had already been a friend of several years standing, jokingly commented of working with the conductor for the first time in a recording session in 1948 and of Szell’s reputation as a holy terror. Szell laughed in commenting that it was partially exaggerated. However, he did concede that players in Cleveland who were thinking they were set for life experienced a rude awakening when he demanded high standards because a conductor can’t have the nicest personality and build a world class orchestra at the same time.

Many Szell recordings and broadcasts can be heard via internet sources such as YouTube and Spotify. For beginning collectors, I would recommend the 1964 Mahler 4th Symphony, a recording of which I have worn out at least two copies, and the late ‘60s Brahms 2 Piano Concertos with Rudolf Serkin, both available inexpensively on compact disc.

Giacomo Puccini

by Peter Cates

Puccini

La Boheme

Arturo Toscanini conducting the NBC Symphony, chorus and soloists; RCA Victor, LM-6006, 2 LPs, from the radio broadcasts of February 3 and 10, 1946.

The inventor of the phonograph, Thomas Edison (1847-1931), was often accused of either being tone deaf or having no taste for music, two beliefs I consider to be mainly rubbish. He personally spearheaded a wide range of music on his cy­linder and flat disc record catalogs, that included popular singers, dance orchestras, country fiddlers, hymns, and operatic selections. With respect to the latter, he considered the opera La Boheme his favorite one of all and stated that the world is a better place because of its existence.

Giacomo Puccini (1858-1924) based La Boheme on Scenes of Bohemian Life by the French writer, Henri Murger (1822-1861), an episodic novel based on the lives of starving writers and artists living in Paris, including Murger’s before he achieved fame and fortune with this book. Puccini’s friend, Arturo Toscanini (1867-1957), conducted the February 1, 1896, world premiere at the Regio Theater in Turin, Italy, and it was mildly successful, unlike later productions in which it caught on with the public, who took it to their hearts and continue to do so.

Arturo Toscanini

Fifty years after the premiere, Toscanini conducted this NBC radio broadcast, in which its four acts were split be­tween two Sun­days. It featured tenor Jan Peerce (1904-1984) as the poet Ro­­dolpho and soprano Licia Albanese (1909-2014) as the seamstress Mimi, with whom Rodolpho falls in love. Peerce was more gifted as a dramatic tenor but I feel his lyrical singing here was among the best I have heard in this role, right up there with Caruso, Jussi Bjoreling, Nicolai Gedda, Pavarotti etc.

Licia Albanese did her best singing in lyric roles and her Mimi was simply special.
The supporting cast, chorus and orchestra, under Toscanini’s divinely inspired leadership (with his constant, endearing, very audible humming), all performed as if their lives depended on it. Toscanini was notorious for his temper tantrums in rehearsals, often caused by wrong notes and the failure of the singers and instrumentalists to bring the same level of emotion he felt. What especially sets this Boheme apart from the other great ones was the vivid clarity of the orchestral details and their contribution to the vocal beauty.

To sum up, if there was one opera I would recommend for beginners, it’s this one.

Quote from the Maine writer/naturalist Henry Beston (1888-1968) in his 1948 book, Northern Farm, evoking the wondrous beauty sometimes found in the night sky: “It was the middle of the evening and in the north over a lonely farm, a great darkness of the forest, and one distant light, the dipper, stood on its handle, each star radiant in the blue and empty space about the pole.”

by Peter Cates

Memories of Grandma

I am going to try something different this week but tie it into earlier reading, listening and viewing experiences, sharing a few memories of my grandmother, Annabelle Ingraham Cates (1888-1974).

Grammie Cates was born and brought up in the coastal village of Rockport, Maine, to Enos and Marian Ingraham. In 1906, she rode the narrow gauge to East Vassalboro where several kinfolks on her mother’s side had been residing already for 25 years, and she took a teaching job at the one room Perley Schoolhouse, one of about 20 such buildings in the Vassalboro territory, back during the years when teacher certification requirements were pretty well non-existent.

Within three years, she met and fell in love with Benjamin Harold Cates, married him and gave birth to 12 children, after her cousin, Lena Upham, told her, “He was a good catch.”

A longer bio will have to wait for another day so as to cut to the chase.

Despite her very busy life of being a wife, mother, homemaker, and chief disciplinarian with her not always angelic kiddos, she did find time to read. And the book that sticks out most vividly is her humongous Modern Library copy of the collected writings of that narrative genius, Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804-1864), which she read and re-read thoroughly from cover to cover. It included his four novels, The House of the Seven Gables, Blithedle Romance, Scarlet Letter and Marble Faun, of which, again, more another week. I remember her keeping it on a kitchen bureau for easy reach.

More about music. The first record that sticks out in the memories was Nelson Eddy’s 1948 Columbia LP of Stephen Foster songs – examples being Old Folks At Home, Camptown Races, Oh Susanna – which for my money is still one of the best collections of that early American composer (1826-1864) who, after several years of fame and fortune, would die as an alcoholic in poverty in New York City with just 37 cents in his wallet.

Grammie had a Columbia LP changer with a very heavy tonearm, a needle that was rarely replaced and a hookup through the expensive Dumont TV set with tremendous sound.

A mid-’60s Christmas present for her was an anthology of Ray Charles hits including Georgia On My Mind and Hit the Road, Jack! She was quite captivated by his sense of swinging while singing.

My grandmother’s favorite movie may have been the 1965 Sound of Music, which she, myself and other family members first saw during Christmas vacation of that year at the Westbrook cinema, where it stayed and made money for at least a year. Within the month, a cousin talked her into joining the RCA Victor Record Club, where new members could get five LPs for 99 cents, provided they purchased five more at list price. She purchased 10 copies of the RCA Victor Sound­track of the Sound of Music, kept one for herself and gave the other nine for birthday presents.

She introduced me to her favorite TV show, Wagon Train, during the spring of 1959, and was a big fan of its star, Ward Bond.

Giuseppe Verdi

by Peter Cates

Verdi

Rigoletto

Walter Goehr conducting the Netherlands Philharmonic Orchestra, Chorus and soloists; The Opera Society, Inc.; M111-OP9; 2 ten-inch lps, recorded early-to-mid ‘50s.

Verdi’s Rigoletto, along with Aida, and La Traviata, are arguably his three most popular operas. It is also the only opera I have seen in any Met productions, once in their 1966 touring appearance at Cony High School, locally in Augusta, and in 2007 at the Lincoln Center stage in New York City (The pair of $25 tickets my daughter purchased had us sitting in the top row of the highest balcony where we could touch the ceiling standing up and everybody on the stage below were tiny ants.).

It received its 1851 world premiere in Venice and was composed in 40 days. The plot involves a depraved womanizer, the Duke of Mantua; his evil court jester, Rigoletto; and Gilda, the one decent person in this trio. A summary of the original Victor Hugo story line can be easily googled and is classic operatic melodrama and tragedy. The musical numbers include the immortal Questa o Quella and La Donna e Mobile for the Duke of Mantua tenor and the exquisite Caro Nome for Gilda’s soprano.

Soprano Hedda Heusser and tenor Paul Conrad are far from household names but they sang beautifully, and the underrated conductor, Walter Goehr, led a very good performance. The Opera Society, Musical Masterpiece Society and its parent label Concert Hall were mail order record labels, along with another subsidiary Jazztone, and I have found sizable numbers of their releases at yard sales and thrift shops.

I am not sure if this performance is on YouTube but others are, for those interested listeners. It is also a very good beginner opera for the adventurous.

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I started watching Netflix’s Narco this past weekend and am already on episode eight of the first season. The series dramatizes the career of the evil Pedro Escobar (1949-1993) whose criminal empire reigned over Columbia with terror until his just death in 1993 and of a fictitious DEA agent, Steve Murphy, whose narration provides historical context. Wagner Moura’s Escobar and Boyd Holbrooke’s Murphy are very well acted with a superb supporting cast, documentary footage of the last 50 years is interspersed and the production logistics are pulled off magnificently.

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I recently posted a selection by a native poet, Grenville Mellen. Here are the four quite nicely worded opening lines of his impassioned The True Glory of America:

“Italia’s vales and fountains,
Though beautiful ye be,
I love my soaring mountains
And forests more than ye.”