What cold little hands...

One more Bjorling clip--I have to, because this one always makes my jaw drop and my eyes water. It's from Act 1 of Puccini's La Boheme, "Che gelida manina," and in this case, I do know what it means--it's the title of this post. Rodolfo, having met Mimi, is now beginning, in that quaint Victorian sense, to make love to her.

This recording comes from 1938, which means it was recorded on 78 rpm records. They have done a superb job of cleaning it up, but still--the power of Bjorling's voice is almost frightening. I used to think Pav was supreme in this aria--but he can't hold a candle to Bjorling. What was it like to hear him live? Soaring. Searing.

Rocking the Dikes

I wanted to put a song here that was the complete opposite of my last post's subject, so I was listening to a YouTube clip of the Who singing "Long Live Rock," where Pete Townshend is so drunk that he almost falls into Keith Moon's drum kit, and Moon laughs his ass off, when I noticed a clip from the same British show--The Old Grey Whistle Test--of a favorite song I had completely forgotten about for decades: "Sylvia" by the Dutch group Focus.

It's coupled with their only U.S. hit, "Hocus Pocus," which features the vocal--what to call them--acrobatics? pyrotechnics? inanities? of Thijs van Leer: let's say "unique vocal stylings." Jan Akkerman, the guitar player, was always more interesting to me.

"The sweet power of music"

In a famous passage in E. M. Forster's Howards End, the Schlegel sisters attend a concert that includes Beethoven's Fifth Symphony. Forster describes Helen's reaction to its third movement as a vision of goblins marching across the world. Thus Forster proves that it is almost impossible to write about music in words or images that can bridge the gap between the spirits hearing the same piece.

In Merchant of Venice, Jessica tells Lorenzo, "I am never merry when I hear sweet music," and he answers, "The reason is your spirits are attentive." Much of this interchange was set to music by Ralph Vaughan Williams, itself a gorgeous work. All this is prelude to a piece I found wandering through the slim pickings of classical fare available on You Tube. I normally would not draw anyone's attention to a recording that is played over a static picture, but the music is so beautiful, and the voices so unforgettable, that I had to. It's Jussi Bjorling, the immortal Swedish tenor, and Robert Merrill, baritone, singing the duet from Bizet's The Pearl Fishers.



I have no idea what they are singing about, nor do I want to know. I want to bask in Bjorling's effortless purity of tone and Merrill's perfect blending with and support of Bjorling. I just want that stream of melody, that "concord of sweet sounds," as Lorenzo calls it, to reach inside me and touch that within me that is immortal. One response to this video on YouTube was, "It's because of stuff like this that I bother trying to stay alive."

Lorenzo says of the music of the spheres:

Such harmony is in immortal souls,
But whilst this muddy vesture of decay
Doth grossly close it in, we cannot hear it.

When listening to this recording, I think I, at least, come pretty close.

P.S. I came across this comment to another video of Bjorling: "The beauty of Jussi Bjorling's voice is the clarity and his annunciation." Well, the word should be "enunciation," but in this case, it's a felix lapsis, a happy slip. The word becomes fleshed by the artist's voice.

Punks

Sitting here with actinic afterimages smoldering in my retinas, miniscule grains of spent gunpowder lining my air passages down to my lungs, and mosquito bites pebbling my thighs and biceps and forehead, I consider the primitive device I used in another vain attempt to discourage those summer pests--the humble punk, which also doubles as a fireworks igniter, and whose pleasant, slightly rancid odor always evokes memories of past summers in me.

I thought about the lowly punk because John Dos Passos mentions it in the first volume of his U.S.A. trilogy, The 42nd Parallel; according to him, young women walking out on a summer's night at the beginning of the twentieth century would place one in their hair to ward off mosquitoes. I found that fascinating--the same device used over one hundred years later, for much the same purpose. It is a unifying object, linking centuries together, and in my own life, linking decades. (The word "punk" with this denotation derives, it is supposed, from a Native American word, first applied to spongy growths on oaks used for tinder.)

A lot more about U.S.A. to come, but just this thought inspired by a summer night with fireworks: words are cement, glue, link, tinder, explosive--all at once.

Through the Eyes of a Child

No, not the Moody Blues--but the events of The Fallen Idol--a 1948 collaboration between writer Graham Greene and director Carol Greene. Their later work together included the iconic The Third Man, but this movie is almost as good, and covers some of the same themes, including perceptions, loyalty between friends, and when that loyalty has to be sacrificed.

A seven-year-old boy is friends with a butler, who is having a clandestine romance with a younger woman. Almost all the events of the movie are seen through this boy's eyes, and it is up to us to interpret what is happening--and what the boy thinks is happening. (As David Lodge points out in an essay accompanying the film, Greene probably picked up this twist from Henry James's novel What Maisie Knew.) The boy is played with remarkable skill by Bobby Henrey, and the butler is nicely underplayed by Ralph Richardson. The set--a five-level replication of a foreign embassy in London--allows Reed all kinds of shots showing the boy as an observer, and his judicious use of Dutch angles (those askew, out-of-plumb shots) is more effective, I think, than his flamboyant use of them in The Third Man.

The still shows the wealth of acting talent that Reed worked with--Jack Hawkins, Richardson, Bernard Lee, Henrey, and Denis O'Dea. Criterion's remastering is characteristically meticulous: during Henrey's nightmarish odyssey through London streets, each cobblestone, each brick, shines with reflected light. It's almost a rehearsal for Holly Martins's vertiguous chase of Harry Lime through Vienna's fitfully illuminated streets. Supposedly, Greene liked this movie even better than The Third Man, and I can see why.

Japan Confidential

A popular singer and an artist, staying at a resort, have their pictures taken together on the balcony of the singer's room and are accused of engaging in a torrid affair by a scandal sheet. They sue the rag. "Ripped from today's headlines"? No--it's the plot of Akira Kurosawa's 1950 movie, Scandal.

This sort of story, of course, was going on in the U.S. too, particularly with Confidential magazine, lawsuits against it eventually putting it out of business. It's fascinating to see it happening in Japan as well. In fact, they did not even have an equivalent for the word "scandal": they use the English word. The entire movie is about the influence of the West on Japan, after five years of Occupation.

Takashi Shimura (to the right in the still) plays the alcoholic lawyer who approaches the artist (played by a young-looking Toshiro Mifune) to sue the magazine, Amour (its title is another example of Western inroads). He has a daughter who is suffering from T.B., and the prelude to the climax of the movie occurs at Christmas, when Mifune brings a fully decorated Christmas tree for the daughter on the back of his motorcycle (when the neighborhood kids ask him who he is, he replies, "Santa Krausis!") When Shimura comes home drunk that night, his daughter is being serenaded by the singer (with Mifune on organ) performing "Silent Night." He runs out to a tavern, Mifune following, where a band is playing "Buttons and Bows," and later on, the entire tavern joins together in a drunken chorus of "Auld Lang Syne." Is all this Westernization good or bad? As far as the possibility of "scandal" goes, yes. Does this mean the same for Christmas and New Year's?

Four months later, Rashomon debuted, and Japanese cinema became widely known in the Western world. Mifune and Kurosawa would go on to one of the greatest collaborations in the history of cinema (Seven Samurai, Throne of Blood, High and Low, Yojimbo, Red Beard), but this early movie shows that the influence of the West, while inspiring in its cinematic aspect, also brought dangers to Japan for which they had no words to express.

A Semi-Janeite

Needing fiction in another vein after chewing on Pynchon and before climbing Dos Passos, I just finished Persuasion, Jane Austen's last novel, which I wanted to like more than I did. It has most of Austen's virtues: the poeticizing of everyday emotions; the ironic eye for the missed communication, the misinterpreted glance; the sure control of point-of-view and free indirect discourse, letting the reader use her intelligence to discern the truth; and as an added bonus, an awareness of global events beyond the English village that is her usual territory. In this case, it is the British Navy, which Austen was intimately familiar with, as far as possible for a woman of her time, since her brother eventually became an admiral.

It's a short novel, but even so, the climax does seem delayed, and when it finally comes, the curtain falls even more quickly after it than in her other novels. We know her main characters will get together: it's the how that is of infinite interest in Austen. I enjoy Austen most when her characters realize each other's love because they are acting unselfishly or disinterestedly, such as happens in Emma. Anne Elliott in Persuasion is so perfect, acts so rightly almost all of the time, that no real suspense builds over whether she and Captain Wentworth will get together. Perhaps Austen's health affected her writing. Still, I think her art would have expanded had she lived; some people bemoan Mozart's early death, but I think Austen was the more grievous loss.

I am not a full "Janeite," as her followers call themselves, and I do not read all her books annually, as, supposedly, E. M. Forster and Angus Wilson did. But I hate when she is called a "miniaturist" who worked in a constricted field with a limited cast of characters--employing "a fine brush on ivory." Her field was the human heart, which is infinite in its depths and heights--or at least to each of us it is.