New music – an old idea

Tokaido Road – compelling, haunting musical theatre is created through mime, and song, and photography, the audience entering a visual and sound world that is both Japanese and European, yet also something more than the sum of its parts – something other.

within the circle of your transience – inspired by a phrase from Siegfried Sassoon, a piano trio creates a sound world that is fraught with tension and yet, confusingly but hauntingly, peaceful at the same time.

I heard both these works at their world premières this past week. Tokaido Road is the work of Nicola Lefanu, an established composer; within the circle of your transience is the work of Josephine Stephenson, who is just starting out. Yes, both composers are women, but that’s not what has stayed with me.

I’m not sure I’d heard a ‘world première’ before, let alone two in a week, despite decades of concert going. Which, part from revealing my appalling conservatism, also illustrates how things have changed since the second quarter of the nineteenth century. Back then, performers were often composers (because of the need for new music to showcase their own talent), and, more generally, the vast majority of pieces played would be being heard by their audience for the first time. That’s a simplification, of course, but it does show up the difference between then and now – when it is notoriously hard to get new music programmed, let alone recorded and played on Classic FM.

The irony is that two of the composers I’m writing about, Fanny Hensel (earlier Mendelssohn) and Clara Wieck (later Schumann) were significant figures in this process whereby the music of earlier eras was reified. They helped to create the very canon that would exclude them. (There are other processes going on here, connected with German nationalism, or family loyalties, but the outcome was the same).  As I put it in my book, thinking about the reasons why Clara Schumann stopped composing at the death of her husband, Robert:

To stop composing would do no harm to Clara Schumann’s career in widowhood. Unlike the era in which she had made her name as a child virtuoso, performers were not now, in the 1850s and beyond, expected to play their own compositions. The same went for improvisation. The nature of concerts had changed…with each passing year, Schumann established herself more firmly as an interpreter of the new classical canon, and worked ever harder to make sure that her husband would become part of that canon.

The canon was, of course, male. This added yet another obstacle to the path of female composers over the following century and beyond.

Again and again, while writing this book, I am overwhelmed with admiration for the ways in which individuals overcame those obstacles. Yesterday, I was introduced to another composer – and familiar obstacles. I heard for the first time Rebecca Clarke’s Piano Trio from 1921 played by the Albany Trio at the Royal College of Music (see http://albanypianotrio.com/).  Another time I’ll write about the reasons why going to the RCM was a surprisingly emotional experience for me, but, here, I want simply to celebrate the performance I heard. My heart belongs to the early-modern period, so for me to be blown away by a post-Romantic work was a tribute to the visceral intensity and technical brilliance of the playing which did passionate justice to a work both grand and moving.

This morning, I’ve been finding a bit more about Rebecca Clarke, and those obstacles. Yesterday, it was mentioned that, when the Trio won second prize in a competition, questions were asked. Was Rebecca Clarke a pseudonym? Perhaps s/he was actually Ernest Bloch? How could a woman have created such a formally rigorous yet powerful work? Have a look at http://www.rebeccaclarke.org/ for more stories, including the one about the proposing violin teacher and the violent father.

A friend suggested that writing this book is making me bitter. No, not bitter – just sad, and at times frustrated by the mind-forged manacles and the social mores that prevented (prevent?) women creating music. But that sadness and frustration is simply blown away by performances such as I have heard this week – whether of new work or of forgotten work – and all that remains is joyful appreciation of the composers and their music.

 

What can one do? What can be said?

In the face of a pitiless heaven, in the face of disaster in love, what can one do? What can be said?

Those are not my words or feelings (or at least, not right this minute, though I have had my moments) but the two questions that haunt a beautiful, passionate song by Venetian composer Barbara Strozzi. I heard Che si può fare performed, live, last Friday at the Lumen Arts Centre in London. Soprano Philippa Neaverson was elegantly accompanied by expert lutenist Din Ghani, playing an instrument he himself made.

Since then, I’ve tracked down the song on youtube so as to hear it again – I’m still on a steep learning curve when it comes to Strozzi’s music – but the performances there, with fairly lush orchestration and what seems to me a bit of over-emphasis in the singing, do not match the simple effectiveness of the voice/lute combination, and, of course, could not match the sheer intimacy and intensity of a live performance. I spoke with Philippa afterwards who, by her own admission, is far from being a full-time professional singer. She had chosen Che si può fare in part because it fitted so well with the concert’s theme, Aspects of Love (Strozzi is very good at hopelessness) but also because, as she said, it makes fewer demands on the performer than some of Strozzi’s other works.

The aria is not actually representative of Strozzi’s last three collections of music, published in the later 1650s and then in 1664, which tend to be ever more sophisticated in conception and dramatic in execution. Che si può fare shows that simplicity in the hands of a vastly experienced composer can work its own magic. Strozzi sets the passionate, despairing lyrics over a relentless ground bass, the repetition seeming to embody the impossibility of escape from suffering.

You can find an image of the 1664 edition here http://imslp.org/wiki/Arie,_Op.8_%28Strozzi,_Barbara%29 and the full text of the lyrics here http://barbarastrozzi.blogspot.co.uk/2008/10/opus-8-texts.html. You can listen to the song on youtube here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FCF4SFmIfmk but this is music to hear live, so…

Seek out Strozzi and if she is not to be found, demand her presence on the concert platform!

I sing because I must

Here’s a very old song.

I sing because I must

Chantar m’er de so qu’ien non volria  – I must sing about it, whether I want to or not – is by the Comtessa de Dia, a twelfth-century trobaraitz (female troubadour) from the far south of France. This is the land, bordering Moorish Spain, of the great castles such as Foix, Portiragnes and Puivert, a land of violent persecution in the name of Christian orthodoxy.

 

It’s hard, if not impossible, to disentangle fact from legend when one goes back this far. La Comtessa de Dia is one of the few trobaraitz for whom we have a name, perhaps because she was reputed to be the mistress of one of the most important troubadours of the period, Raimbaut d’Aurenga. The affair may be the stuff of legend, but her music survives, and A chantar m’er de so qu’ieu non volria is a classic of its kind.

For me, thinking about the book, the Comtessa’s music raises the question as to how far back I want or need to go. Hildegard of Bingen, the poster girl (poster nun?) for women composers, or further back, to ninth century Kassia, another nun, this time Orthodox, and in Constantinople? Or earlier still, to Miriam and her tambourine, or perhaps a music-making hetaira (courtesan) of ancient Athens?

Meanwhile, I am getting more and more immersed in my various roles here in Oxford (whether supporting, in a small way, other writers – the absurdly talented students on the Master’s in Creative Writing – or teaching Shakespeare & Co to undergraduates). So, listening to this music, and that of Hensel and the rest, is a good way to keep the flame alive. It helps me remember that I am not just writing a story of creativity against the odds, but trying to honour artistic achievement that reaches across the centuries, if only we would listen for it.

Somewhere else

This is an unashamed and gratuitous trainfest of a post, although I will start by noting the significance of trains to the lives of Fanny Mendelssohn Hensel and Clara Wieck Schumann – and the way in which their experiences illustrate the phenomenal pace of change in the period. Hensel was born in 1805, Wieck only fourteen years later, in 1819.

In 1834, Fanny Hensel can write to her brother, Felix Mendelssohn, with amazement that there might be a ‘new railroad project that could take a person to Dusseldorf in 4 hours‘. Her husband, Wilhelm, travelling in England in 1838, witnessed, excitedly, not only the coronation of Queen Victoria, but also the opening of the Great Western Railway (‘the most complete railroad’) on 4 June. Within a few years, the Hensels are regularly travelling (admittedly fairly short distances) by train, most, if not all of the wonder, gone.

By the early 1840s, Clara Schumann, newly married with young children in Leipzig, relied on the railways to keep in touch with her father, who had bitterly opposed her marriage to Robert, and now lived in Dresden. Friedrick Wieck, desperate for a reconciliation with his daughter, tried to encourage her to make the journey by reminding her that she could bring the baby, and not even pay for her. Clara travelled on the first German long distance railway line between the two cities: Leipzig Hauptbahnhof was the largest terminal station in Europe, a hub for central European rail travel. In 1843, Robert Schumann organised a surprise visit for his wife to her mother in Berlin. Marianne had left Clara’s father when her daughter was only four. Clara took her oldest daughter, Marie, still only a toddler, and her account of the journey will be familiar to many parents: ‘It was fortunate that we travelled first class because Marie didn’t sit still for five minutes on the whole trip….’ On arrival, however, Marie was not tired at all. Clara Schumann was exhausted, but then Marie ‘would only get in my bed. I didn’t sleep all night, for there was hardly enough room for one person, let alone two’. Marianne, however, was delighted with the visit.

When Clara and her family moved to Dresden, they lived close to the railway station there, quite a way from the courtly heart of the city, perhaps to enable her getting back to familiar (and more musical) Leipzig. Or perhaps because it was cheaper. Whatever, the approach into Dresden from Leipzig is spectacular, the courtly splendour of the city contrasting with Leipzig’s bourgeious respectability.

Railways, of course, facilitated Clara Schumann’s punishing touring schedule throughout Europe. And, one final cruel twist of railway fate, Robert Schumann died alone, because Clara had gone to the railway station to meet their friend, the violinist, Joseph Joachim. Clara had only just been allowed to see Robert, as he neared death, after years of separation, supposedly for the good of his mental health.

Looking at Dresden station now, it is easy to imagine it filled with steam trains, and Clara and her children (six of them by the time she left the city) travelling between the cities of Saxony and Prussia.

In Florence, a bigger task of historical imagination is needed, to imagine the city without the station of Santa Maria Novella, and instead, to see the streets and piazzas and churches of Francesca Caccini’s seventeenth century neighbourhood. Via Valfonda, where she lived, and owned property, runs beside and beyond the station.

The building of the station in the 1930s destroyed the city end of the street, whilst the coming of the railway itself some hundred years earlier destroyed the more rural sections. In Caccini’s time, the city end of via Gualfonda, as it was known then, had a moderate number of households, some with servants, some even owned by patricians. Further out, towards the Palazzo di Valfonda, it was less urban, and poorer.

Before returning to the gratuitous trainfest, a word about the title to this post. I found them in a poem by Wisława Szymborska – which you can find at http://www.fernuni.de/wbs/mk/szymborska. The poem captures a significantly empty moment at a train station and ends, elusively:

Somewhere else.

Somewhere else.

How these little words ring.

Quite why I love being taken ‘somewhere else’ by train more than any other form of transport I don’t know. I do know, however, a good train when I see one: the Venice to Vienna sleeper.

Just look at that shine! I booked a single berth (never done that before), which, confusingly but happily, was the same price as a triple. God knows why, and bluntly I don’t care, because not only did I get a compartment to myself, but I also got lots of goodie bags (slippers! Wine! A pen!) and a breakfast menu.

Of course, the return journey – Vienna to Rome – in a six-berth compartment, crammed with teenagers (delightful Viennese teenagers, fluent in English of course, and off to Florence to study Italian, but still teenagers), was less perfect. But, even with minimal sleep, there was the huge excitement of waking up to the details of a different landscape – Italy again! ‘somewhere else’ – which is one of the glories of overnight train travel.

And, to close, two images from Sicily.

This is Ragusa, which, for some people, is significant because it’s where they film the TV series Montalbano. Indeed, the restaurant where we had lunch advertises itself as one of the places where the fictional policeman eats, life confusingly imitating art. But, for me, the wonder of Ragusa is the railway line which reaches the city, despite its position on top of a hill – actually two hills, and two cities, but that’s Sicily. My map gave me an almost overwhelming thrill when I realised how the engineers had solved the problem of reaching Ragusa. The train has to go through a tunnel which almost completes a circle as it climbs ever higher. Oh my goodness. So, I will have to go back to Sicily, if only for that train ride.

In the mean time, I will have to make do with the Cotswold line. I took my bike on the train on Saturday, and had a delightful cycle through pristine villages, complete with classic car rally, a church group out for a group ride, and . the maybushes in bloom.

It was not the same.

My final image was snatched on my last expedition out from Palermo. I’d been up to the hills above Cefalu, where Sicily gets as close to looking like a poor-man’s Tuscany as it ever does. As it turned out, and as I should have predicted – see my last post – the bus which I had been told to take to get home again didn’t actually go back to Cefalu (from whence I had a return ticket for the train back to Palermo, along the beautiful north coast). So the bus driver came up with a plan, dropping me off at an unsignposted junction, and pointing me along a somewhat desolate-looking main road. He told me there was a railway station a few hundred metres on the left. He was right. There was: Campofelice. The name was not apposite. But from Campofelice I took my last Sicily train, and the railway gods gave me one final treat. An announcement came, instructing the handful of waiting passengers (passengers, not customers….) that we had to move to the other platform. Which meant crossing the tracks. Which is, for me, one of the most exciting, if shortest, journeys that a person can make.

 

Return

Back in Oxford, and it’s not been a soft landing. I’m not sure how it could have been, since I’ve been in such a privileged position, focusing on one thing, writing, and with the attitude that almost everything else is SEP.* Now, it’s back to the pleasures and pains of owning a home (boiler check this morning, electrician on Tuesday, shall I go on? No…); the pleasures and complications of extended family life (both my daughters moved back in while I was away – yes, I know, I should have changed the locks, but that seemed a little harsh. Only joking, my lovelies); and being back in the familiar but exhausting business of juggling different professional roles, whether teaching Shakespeare or directing Creative Writing programmes or reviewing book manuscripts for publishers. Oh, and next week, I’m giving a lecture for the Friends of Milton’s Cottage at the Mercers’ Hall in London, fittingly on ‘Milton in Italy’ – he had well over a year in the peninsula, funded by his Dad – and he had the time of his life. You can find out more about the event in London here – do note the reference to a generous reception after the lecture, hosted by the Mercers’ Company.

http://renaissance-events.blogspot.co.uk/2014/03/3rd-annual-milton-lecture.html

But, it’s good to be home. Spring in England, even in the rain, is a special time

– witness the bluebells in Harcourt Arboretum – and I’m really looking forward to my trip up to the city next week. Sometimes one doesn’t have to travel very far to get a sense of living history, and I’ve found, in my limited experience, that the Livery Companies of the City of London provide an almost direct line to the past. And I have, at last, got a recording of Fanny Hensel’s Reise Album, the pieces she wrote while, or immediately, after her own transformatory trip to Italy in 1839-40 – almost exactly 200 years after Milton’s journey there. You can find some of the music here – http://www.allmusic.com/album/fanny-hensel-italian-journey-album-mw0001855771 – with a helpful bit of commentary, and some rather harsh things to say about the quality of the performances.

I’m only just getting to know the CD, but already find the Capriccio wonderful, with clear links to Hensel’s masterpiece, Das Jahr. If ever I needed motivation as a writer, then listening to this music, hidden for so long, provides it.

*“The Somebody Else’s Problem field is much simpler and more effective, and what’s more can be run for over a hundred years on a single torch battery. This is because it relies on people’s natural disposition not to see anything they don’t want to, weren’t expecting, or can’t explain.” (Douglas Adams, Life, the Universe and Everything)

The heart is not for sale

This image, of the fish market, has stayed with me from my trip to Venice, some weeks ago. My first morning in the city, I tried, and for the moment failed, to visit the church of Santa Sofia in Cannaregio, where Barbara Strozzi – father incerto, mother perhaps a courtesan, certainly a servant – was baptised back in 1619. Strozzi didn’t just live and write music in the shadow of the courtesan. She was a courtesan. (Well, actually, as ever, it’s bit more complicated than that, but it will all be explained in chapter two. Probably.) Cannaregio was Strozzi’s territory. She lived and worked in the neighbourhood, plying her two trades, music and sex.

So, when I turned from Santa Sofia, and looked across the Grand Canal to the Pescheria’s red awnings, the words I saw scrawled there seemed to speak across the centuries. I think the words mean, in Venetian dialect, that ‘the heart is not for sale’. Brave, defiant words but they don’t carry much weight in Venice now, and they certainly didn’t for Strozzi.

It’s impossible to wander around Venice without beginning to question one’s own sense of time and space. (It’s also impossible to write about Venice without stumbling over clichés). My grip on reality was not helped by running into a film crew

recreating a vision of fifteenth century (?) Venice nor was it helped by seeing young naval officers lined up in their finery, a triumphant expression of la bella figura, overlooked by the lion of St Mark. It was hard to imagine them at war.

Fortunately, reality can always be restored with an aperitivo. Go to the square of San Giacomo dell’ Orio, look for ‘Al Prosecco’ – but don’t have prosecco, have one of the well-kept, beautifully-served big northern Italian reds, and watch a more mundane world go by. In a city where you can pay an awful lot for terrible food, you can enjoy a plate of lovely cheeses, complemented by home-made chutney, for, well, still a lot more than Palermo, but it is Venice. Kids play football, people talk, buy groceries at the Co-op. When I briefly lived in Venice, this was ‘my’ bar, and I am still very, very fond of it and its owners.

I stopped off there before taking the night train to Vienna. A glass of nebbiolo, a plate of cheese and salad, a few minutes of ordinary life, Venetian style, and I was ready to say goodbye, at least for a while, to Strozzi and her city.

Fanny Hensel as you’ve never seen her before

Although there are many portraits of Fanny Hensel, there is none of her as composer – no portrait which places her at the keyboard, or shows her musician’s hands, or captures her as she dreams of her next sonata. (Funnily enough, there are quite a few of her brother….)

But, as it turns out, the Queen of England herself owns a picture in which Fanny Hensel can be seen, complete with her musician hands.

The picture is ‘Song of Praise’ and the painter is Fanny’s husband, Wilhelm, the man who encouraged her every step of the way in her quest to compose, who wanted her to publish her music, who could not bear her death.Wilhelm used Fanny as the model for the figure of Miriam. (Her sister, Rebecka, is also in the picture). He then went to London to see the Queen, the newly crowned Victoria, who was delighted with ‘Song of Praise’, but did not wish to offend British artists by buying a Prussian’s work. Wilhelm bided his time, and then, a few years later, presented the work as a gift to Victoria. In return, Queen Victoria gave him jewels, specifically for his own real-life ‘Miriam’.

Fanny, back in Berlin, was somewhat embarrassed: when would she wear such fine things? She may, somewhere, also have been uncomfortable about the linking of her own name so publicly with that of the Jewish Miriam. Her ambivalence about her Jewish heritage, or perhaps her desire for the issue to disappear, is visible in her response to the posthumous publication of the profoundly anti-semitic letters of her one-time teacher Theodor Zelter, who had spent years being polite to the Mendelssohns’ face whilst spreading poison behind their backs. Zelter displays prejudice and ill-will in equal measure. Fanny response is telling, however.‘It’s said of me that I play like a man, and I have to thank either God or Zelter that this remark is not followed by any of the unseemly observations [ie the anti-semitic comments] with which the book is blessed’. Fanny seems to think it is better to be insulted for a lack of femininity than it is for being a Jew. She may have a point in the Prussia of her time.

To me, there is something both fitting and deeply ironic about Fanny’s memorialisation in the British Royal collection as Jewish Miriam, the older sister of two famous brothers Aaron and Moses. Miriam was born in Egypt at a time of slavery for the Jewish people, but, with her brothers, would lead the Jews from Egypt to their promised land. She remains a contested figure in Jewish thinking. Not all would agree with this summary of her life from a current, conservative Jewish website, with its due deference to traditional gender roles:

Like the true mother in Israel that she was, she undoubtedly devoted her time to the women and children, and did not otherwise take part in public life. On one occasion however, she made an exception. [Immediately after the miraculous crossing of the Red Sea] Moses and all the people broke into song in praise of G-d, singing the well-known “Song at the Sea”. Then was Miriam also inspired with the spirit of G-d, and she took a timbrel in her hand and led the women dancing with timbrels. And Miriam repeated for them the refrain, “Sing unto G-d, for He has triumphed greatly; horse and rider He cast into the sea.

As is only too evident from my blog posts, I am a huge Hensel fan. To me (if not to her….and, if I’m honest, only to me when I’ve had a glass or three of wine) she will always now be the poster girl for female Jewish warrior composers. What’s not to like?

With regard to copyright, I am clearly less frightened of my own Queen than I am of Google (see my blog about Clara Schumann and that google doodle) but if your Majesty, or indeed your Majesty’s lawyers, are reading this, then please be assured that this blog is for educational purposes and for educational purposes only. Oh yes.

In search of Fanny Hensel: the two chairs of Berlin

My Adventure in the Valley of the Pig was followed by a week travelling around Germany, which proved just as  vertiginous, psychologically rather than physically. Don’t look back: it’s hard not to when you are a Beer in Berlin. But that’s another story. After stalking Clara Schumann in Leipzig and Dresden – and that’s another story as well – it was time to find Fanny Hensel in Berlin. My reading had already alerted me to the myriad ways in which Hensel is hidden from us: by her brother’s magnificence; by anti-semitism; by philo-semitism; by the values and focus of traditional music history, in its insistence on the symphony and opera as the markers of greatness. Berlin made me aware of other factors. For example, Hensel was at her creative height during a period that the history books (and the German history museum) are simply not that interested in  – no battles, no revolutions, just the political stagnation and social conservatism of the Biedermeier era. My visit also brought home to me the Communist regime’s completion of the work begun by the Nazis in removing the Mendelssohns from Berlin’s history. It also revealed that Leipzig’s music heritage industry has been more assiduous than Berlin’s, at least when it comes to Felix Mendelssohn. The impressive, and recently opened, Mendelssohn-Haus is in Leipzig – here’s Felix’s music room –

is a beautiful (and beautifully restored) building. The staircase alone is worth the entrance fee. To listen to music in the salon on a Sunday morning was a hugely evocative experience. It brought home the ways in which this kind of music making – which lay at the heart of Fanny Hensel’s musical life – blurred boundaries between private and public spheres, between professional and amateur, between men and women. (The Schumanns had a very similar room in their first married home in Leipzig, in the newly built Inselstrasse. I didn’t get quite the same sense there, perhaps because I didn’t listen to music, merely looked at and took photographs of empty chairs in an elegant room).

Nothing similar exists for Fanny, or indeed for Felix, in Berlin. It took time and effort to track down the location of Fanny Hensel’s grave, despite the fact that she is buried next to her brother (and husband). I found http://englishmaninberlin.wordpress.com/2010/07/17/the-cemeteries-at-mehringdamm/ to be very helpful.The cemetery walls are hardly inviting:

I had naively assumed that Felix would be quite the celebrity in his native city. Although it is now true that by the mayor’s orders the Mendelssohn family plot will be maintained, and never allowed to reach the state of neglect, or worse, it suffered during the Nazi and then Communist years, it is also true that the city’s history still looms large over the gravestones.  The Christian cemetery in which the newly-minted Lutheran Mendelssohns lie was heavily bombed in World War Two, and then bisected by the Wall. In fact, it now seems to me remarkable that the gravestones exist at all:

Fanny’s is the largest, second from the right. If you look carefully at the close-up you will see that there are two phrases of music from her final composition, Bergeslust.

On Felix’s smaller gravestone (two to the left) there is a quotation from the New Testament. I found it touching that whoever – perhaps her husband, Wilhelm? – commissioned Fanny’s memorial wanted to honour her first and foremost as a composer.

What money there is for the Mendelssohn heritage industry in Berlin has focused on the wider family. To my surprise, there was a small, and securely locked up, building near the Mendelssohn graves. It is hardly well-advertised. Peering through the window, I could see information panels, providing the history of numerous Mendelssohn family members. Earlier, I had visited the tucked away Mendelssohn-Remise in Jagerstrasse, also not exactly overwhelmed with visitors, in a building that once housed the Mendelssohn family’s banking business. The charming and well-informed woman who greeted us, and saved me from embarrassment at my lack of German – she was an American by birth, from a town in Delaware which she said we would not have heard of, and she was right – provided a useful briefing about the exhibition which provides a detailed insight into the street, and the Mendelssohn bankers. There are occasional glimpses of the Mendelssohn women – including, unnervingly, a photo of Rebecka Beer, which is the name, or part of it, of my older daughter – and the importance of music to the family is acknowledged in the weekly concerts, and the presence of a grand piano in the middle of the exhibition space.

To one side, two antique chairs sit facing each other. On closer inspection, they are the beginning (and, currently, the end) of an attempt to re-create Fanny Hensel’s music study, a room captured in all its detail in watercolour and pencil soon after her death.

The picture is evocative in itself: a creative space bereft of its creative artist. The same motive that led me to seek out Fanny Hensel’s tombstone (believe me, not something I usually do) also prompted an equally rare moment of pointless fantasy when faced with those two chairs. If I were rich, I thought, I’d create a memorial to Fanny Hensel. Perhaps not a static re-creation of her room, although simply putting that together would reveal so much about the texture of her life and work, but something to honour her. The moment passed. Does the world need another recreation of another nineteenth-century room? Maybe not. Perhaps to play and hear her music, rather than to source her furniture, is a better way to honour the composer Fanny Hensel.

The shadow of the cortigiana

I love a night at the opera. Opera houses reveal the particular quality of a city despite or because of their similarities (gold, staircases, red velvet, gold, over-priced sparkling wine, jewellery on display, gold). Palermo’s opera house is vertiginous, with the boxes, which dominate, rising sheer from the floor in tier upon tier. Up in the gods, and that means very, very high up – it’s not called Teatro Massimo for nothing – the audience were as interested in each other as in the performance. The acoustic was disorienting: one could only hear the clapping of the people immediately around one, but the singing – especially the excellent Julianna Di Giacomo – came across loud and clear.

I do not love opera, however. The Teatro Massimo’s Otello, in a somewhat self-conscious yet old-fashioned production, didn’t change my mind. Admittedly, the tale of a military hero turned wife-killer is not the ideal entertainment when one is writing a book about the stifling of women’s creativity. Desdemona is not actually stifled in Verdi’s version: she’s strangled. The shadow of the courtesan (or cortigiana…) looms large and proves deadly. One of the most painful moments in the opera comes when Otello appears, momentarily, to realise that he is wrong about his wife’s infidelity. Having publicly humiliated her, thrown her to the ground, he reaches out to Desdemona. She hopes, we hope, for a reprieve but it is a feint. With vicious sarcasm, Othello brands his wife a whore (‘Che? non sei forse una vil cortigiana?’) and justifies himself as her killer. (Shakespeare has: ‘I cry you mercy, then:/I took you for that cunning whore of Venice/That married with Othello.’)

There’s more of course – the moment when Desdemona forces out her last words, when we all think she is dead. She must, she will, she does, perform perfect, compliant femininity, to the extent that she claims to have killed herself, so as to cover for Otello. And don’t get me started on the kiss motif, the way in which violence to women becomes eroticised. (Which reminds me of a stupendous example of academic pettiness. Suzanne Cusick, the wonderful biographer of Francesca Caccini, had to put up with a colleague playing the kiss motif over and over again while she was trying to prepare her university’s first ever course on women and music.)

Yes, it’s all there in Shakespeare, but somehow the potential ambiguities in theatre are ironed out in opera, and we are left with a simple plot, lavish spectacle, and luscious music. (What’s not to like, I hear someone say….)

I do realise that if one removes beautifully sung violence, or erotically charged death, from opera then there’s not much left. And, for the record, Nero and Poppea’s ‘Pur ti miro’ at the end of L’Incoronazione di Poppea is stunning. So good, that I happily forget that they are both psychopaths, and that their expressions of ‘love’ are utterly implausible.

And maybe that’s the point: Poppea is not structured to be naturalistic. Opera and theatre performances in the seventeenth century, and beyond, had women playing men (breeches roles), boys playing women (on the English stage), and in the case of Poppea, a castrato playing Nero. This kind of thing at least makes one think about the gender categories we use to label, and to hurt, people.

But, as I said above, I don’t like opera. My night at the opera was, however, wonderful: walking out of the gloriously over the top Teatro Massimo, strolling through the alleyways of Palermo, grabbing something really good to eat, and all within five minutes walk of home. It would be nice to go again.

And just to show how mellow I am about it all, here’s a picture of Desdemona and her loving husband. She’s not dead yet.

Love conquers all things except poverty and toothache

I should have remembered The Wisdom of Mae West before writing my last post, which was, I now realise, a product of severe toothache. And lack of sleep. And strong painkillers. Not to mention a little bit of medicinal grappa. Hardly the state of mind and body needed for sympathy with what has been called ‘the most feted romantic love story in the history of Western music’. 

I’ve learned a lot in the past week. My Italian dentistry vocabulary has expanded spectacularly. I am an expert on all aspects of root canal treatment. I now know you can’t buy codeine from a pharmacist in Italy, that antibiotics are absurdly cheap here, and paracetamol is ridiculously expensive. My new best friend, il dentista (see? fluent), thinks it something to do with the church’s attitude to pain. He was joking. I think. The pharmacist suggested I bring some British paracetamol with me next time, and she’ll swap it for antibiotics. We’d both be rich. She was joking. I think.

And so, back to Clara Schumann. Without toothache. And damn it, I still don’t get it. What’s ‘romantic’ about living with a husband who is suffering from severe mental illness? What’s ‘romantic’ about that husband preventing you from doing what you do because he sees his work as of more value than your own? Why is it a ‘love story’ to get pregnant every eighteen months? And yet, and yet, as my lovely wise cousin (almost as wise as Mae West) pointed out, some people just thrive on being carers, and that is the role that Robert offered Clara on a plate, from the very start. He, knowing his mental instability even then, asks Clara: ‘Just love me a lot, do you hear – I ask a lot because I give a lot […] Your radiant image, however, shines through all the darkness, and I can bear things more easily.’

And Robert did love her. And he saw how hard it was for her. The phrases that touch me most come from Robert, writing in their joint marriage diary. He’s writing about and to Clara. (Marie and Elise were the couple’s two daughters). Robert’s words capture his wife’s spirit – the energy he so loved, needed and occasionally feared:

Clara is now setting her songs and several piano pieces in order. She wants always to move forward but Marie is grasping her dress on the one side, Elise also creates much to do, and the husband sits deep in thoughts of ‘Peri’ [Robert’s oratorio]. So, forward, always forward through joy and sorrow, my Clara, and love me always as you have always loved me.

Forward, always forward through joy and sorrow. That’s Clara Schumann for me.

  Marie and Elise are at the back….