Mark the Music, 2

So in class on Thursday – yes, I’m attending another weird cultural stuff class, about Ancient Greek thinkers and writers, on the same rationale that that Superintendent Kirk explains in Busman’s Honeymoon –

‘I like to do a bit o’ reading in my off-duty,’ admitted Mr Kirk, bashfully. ‘It mellows the mind.’ He sat down. ‘I often think as the rowtine of police dooty may tend to narrow a man and make him a bit hard, if you take my meaning. When I find that happening, I say to myself, what you need, Sam Kirk, is contact with a Great Mind or so, after supper. Reading maketh a full man—’

‘Conference a ready man,’ said Harriet.

‘And writing an exact man,’ said the Superintendent. ‘Mind that, Joe Sellon, and see you let me have them notes so as they can be read to make sense.’

‘Francis Bacon,’ said Peter, a trifle belatedly. ‘Mr Kirk, you’re a man after my own heart.’

And yes, of course, that reminds me of my first interaction with Ted Buttrey, when I was there for a job interview and didn’t even know who he was, but he declaimed at me

However entrancing it is to wander unchecked through a garden of bright images…

and there was clearly only one possible reply, even if I didn’t know the context, so I went with

…are we not enticing your mind from another subject of almost equal importance?

and a lifelong friendship was formed.

Anyway, I was in class on Thursday and Harley mentioned the “Mark the Music” speech from Merchant of Venice, because it really does tie in to just about everything, including (as previously mentioned) series 10 of Doctor Who (“You understand the universe, you see it and you grasp it, but you’ve never learned to hear the music.”). And one of the students noted that they hadn’t known until recently that that speech had been set to music by Vaughan Williams, and that their choir was singing it on Saturday. And they did. And it was magnificent. All of it.

I mean, I’d never heard of Christopher Smart, and such music of Benjamin Britten I had heard I hadn’t much liked, but their combination in Rejoice in the Lamb – I mean, I might be one of the least religious people I know, and this still had me spellbound:

For H is a spirit
And therefore he is God
For K is king
And therefore he is God
For L is love
And therefore he is God
For M is musick
And therefore he is God
And therefore he is God

For the instruments are by their rhimes,
For the shawm rhimes are lawn fawn and the like.
For the shawm rhimes are moon boon and the like.
For the harp rhimes are sing ring and the like.
For the harp rhimes are ring string and the like.
For the cymbal rhimes are bell well and the like.
For the cymbal rhimes are toll soul and the like.
For the flute rhimes are tooth youth and the like.
For the flute rhimes are suit moot and the like.
For the bassoon rhimes are pass class and the like.
For the dulcimer rhimes are grace place and the like.
For the clarinet rhimes are clean seen and the like.
For the trumpet rhimes are sound bound and the like.

For the trumpet of God is a blessed intelligence
And so are all the instruments in Heav’n
For God the Father Almighty plays upon the harp
Of stupendous magnitude and melody.

For at that time malignity ceases
And the devils themselves are at peace.
For this time is perceptible to man
By a remarkable stillness and serenity of soul.

Hallelujah, hallelujah,
Hallelujah before the heart of God
And from the hand of the artist inimitable,
And from the echo of the heavenly harp
In sweetness magnifical and mighty
Hallelujah, hallelujah, hallelujah.

And … there is so much. Not least, yes,

“One time, you were going to give a lecture on quantum physics. You talked about poetry.”
“Poetry, physics, same thing.”
“How is it the same?”
“Because of the rhymes.’

But also, in “For at that time malignity ceases / And the devils themselves are at peace”, the echo/reminder of Sarastro's song from act 2 of the Magic Flute:

In diesen heil’gen Hallen,
Kennt man die Rache nicht.
Und ist ein Mensch gefallen,
Führt Liebe ihn zur Pflicht.
Dann wandelt er an Freundes Hand
Vergnügt und froh ins beßre Land.

Within these hallowed halls
Nobody knows revenge.
And if a person should fall,
Love will guide them to duty.
Then they go on hand in hand with a frend,
Cheerful and happy into a better land.

In diesen heil’gen Mauern,
Wo Mensch den Menschen liebt,
Kann kein Verräter lauern,
Weil man dem Feind vergibt.
Wen solche Lehren nicht erfreun,
Verdienet nicht ein Mensch zu sein.

Within these hallowed walls,
Where human loves the human,
No traitor can lurk,
Because we forgive the enemy.
Whomever these lessons do not please,
Deserves not to be a human being.

(And, yes, okay, “Verdienet nicht ein Mensch zu sein” is harsher than “And the devils themselves are at peace”, but still, the earlier bits of the song ring to me at least in the same spirit. And I went looking for a recording, because the vocals do a lot better than my halting translation at conveying it, and there's a Joyce diDonato masterclass on the aria, so watching that next.)

Yes, there’ll be more about the concert, very likely, but, quite apart from the obvious what did Azirapahale (or Crowley) (or Twelve for that matter) make of Christopher Smart, and the delight going back and re-reading bits of that – I mean, “sweetness magnifical and mighty”! O si sic omnia! Okay, maybe not omnia, maybe it is a special occasion thing – as Flanders and Swann note, “if all of these words come into common use, we’ll have nothing left for special occasions!” – but, yes. Having the option of language a bit more like this for special occasions seems like it would be a very good thing.

A masterclass and two Turandots (and a couple of Macbeths)

So I watched the Joyce DiDonato masterclass on In diesen Heil’gen Hallen. And great gobs of it demanded to be transcribed.

“The story I was trying to tell was … I’m mad, but I’m not mad, … but I wasn’t very compassionate towards her.”
“But is the music compassionate or not?”
“It is, it’s very very warm. It’s very … I mean, E major is a very bright key, so it’s … very embracing and kind of positive, and all the words as well.”
“All the words. I mean, it’s poetry. If we could all find a place like that, right?”

“Unless opera … unless it’s really really real, your intention, unless it’s fully committed, unless it’s excellent, opera is the stupidest worst thing in the world. … It deserves to die away if it’s anything but that. … Unless it is everything it has no sense to exist. And especially in today’s day and world where we’re quite consumed with reality … if opera’s mediocre, it doesn’t deserve to have a ten million dollar production. Why? There’s too many other things that that money can do for people. For humanity. But, when it’s this, it’s priceless. … Because you’re showing us the way to humanity. You’re showing us how to open hearts. That’s priceless. … But if you’re following this quest for humanity for truth for authenticity for giving your all. By your giving your all, you allow us to experience our all. You allow us to at least aspire to that. – This is all taking for granted that the technical work is being done. We can’t get here until the technical work is at a certain level … – But this is what we’re aspiring to. All of a sudden it didn’t seem like you were singing, you weren’t presenting anything. You could have sung ten more verses of that if you had something to say, in each one of those, you were thinking about her, how this could help her, not how do I sound, it was serving a purpose …

“And change those questions. She was a brat, younger, you didn’t like her, and now it’s your duty to help her, but you don’t like it.

In diesen Heil’gen Hallen

… and then she looks at you with those eyes, and you melt. It can change, in an instant.”

“And all of a sudden, Sarastro, we care about him. I wish my Dad was like that.” [Inevitable editorial insertion: Reader, mine was.]

“See her. See her. If you see her, I mean really see her, we will see her as well. And every aria like this, it’s a duet. There’s no arias – hardly any arias. Porgi amor is an aria. Non so più is a duet. Cara speme is a duet. In diesen Heil’gen – duet. There’s somebody else in the imagination. So you have to supply that character as well. … You have to create that like Star Wars hologram kind of thing right in front of you, and if you’re really there, we’ll get it.”

“But if it’s not specific, if you don’t really see it …

“If you see it, we see … that’s the magic of theatre, that’s the extraordinary thing that we’re a part of … point being, if you see it, we believe it. This aria can melt hearts if it’s so pure and necessary for her. You are the voice of enlightenment. It’s necessary for the world today. And if you take it that seriously, and that specifically, and nothing generic – did you feel the energy in the room when you finished … people almost didn’t want to breathe – that’s what we want to create. And you can’t fake it. And you can’t manufacture it. But if it’s real. Not everybody will get. But some will. And they need it.”

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I’ve seen two Turandots recently. Both vocally amazing. But one got, and brought, the rest of that, and the other didn’t. And yes, the first one was still vocally amazing. But it didn’t grab the heartstrings and twist, hard. And I kind of do agree that that has to be the point of the thing, if it has a point, at least for me. (I enjoy music but don’t know much about it, so it is very likely that someone steeped in musical knowledge has an entirely different experience of the thing. But for me, as a lay member of the audience, this is the thing that makes it work.)


ETA: To be fair, the first company’s subsequent Rusalka was a revelation and the best version of it that I’ve ever seen.

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And yes, this is also one of the main themes of John Barton’s Playing Shakespeare, where he repeatedly points out that one of the key things – yes, there are other things, technique is important too, but one of the key things to make Shakespeare live instead of being what has sometimes felt to me like “teleprompter Shakespeare”, where the actors are apparently reading the words of an internal teleprompter rather than thinking or feeling them – that the actor needs to do to make Shakespeare come alive is to really, really, need those words, fresh-mint them in the moment because no other words will do.

And that makes up part of the different between a teleprompter Macbeth and the one with Simon Russell Beale and Emma Fielding at the Almeida in 2005, and Fielding said “I have given suck” and there’s this sudden horrified silence between them and you know that they had a child, that it died, and that they vowed they would never speak of it again, and that Lady Macbeth is deliberately breaking that oath to convey to Macbeth how important this is. And that moment, those handful of seconds, have stuck with me for 14 years. And to people who wonder what is the point of Shakespeare, as others wonder what is the point of opera, I guess my answer is the same: that. Those moments where, if it’s done well, it shows how to open hearts, and how everything can change in an instant.