Carmen
. . . is one of my favourite operas, as it is for much of the opera-going world. The problem with most operas, in fact by my reckoning probably every other opera but Carmen and The Marriage of Figaro, is the libretto. Some librettos work (or can be ignored) better than others but most of them are pretty ghastly–perhaps especially to the eye of a professional writer.* I’ve told you many times that Verdi is my favourite opera composer** but his librettists should have been bricklayers or ditch-diggers. No, probably not bricklayers: bricklaying requires an immediate, three-dimensional logic. And there is a special circle of hell for the librettist of Puccini’s Turandot.
But Carmen is a devastatingly well-told piece of musical theatre. You can not like it or not like the music but you can’t (say I) fault it for being gloriously and effectively what it is. There is, however, one huge and frequently terminal problem with staging it, which is the role of Carmen herself. The Marriage of Figaro is an ensemble piece; Carmen the opera stands or falls on Carmen the singing actress, and most of those who have tried aren’t quite up to it.*** I don’t think I’ve ever seen an entirely satisfactory production.† The one that comes nearest, which if there are any other Carmen-lovers reading this I will probably be pilloried for, was the movie version with Julia Migenes-Johnson and Placido Domingo. Well, Domingo–! He probably has done something badly in his long career, but I haven’t heard it. And Migenes-Johnson, while she got a lot of bad press at the time for silliness††, I thought had very much the right attitude: Carmen is not a subtle character, and too much artistic anguish denatures her.
I grew up with the Rise Stevens recording, but the first one that I bought for myself and that made Carmen mine was the Marilyn Horne/James McCracken/Leonard Bernstein recording. I don’t know if that was the first one to use dialogue (as Bizet wrote it) instead of recitative (as was done to it after Bizet’s death to make it a more proper opera) but it was the first one I’d heard and this jolted it into a whole new, more intense, more believable focus for me. And as the professor teaching my opera class in college pointed out, the scene between Zuniga and Carmen doesn’t work if they’re singing anyway. Zuniga has arrested her for cutting another woman with a knife, and is demanding she explain herself. She responds by singing ‘Tra la la la’. It’s thrillingly insolent. Or is to anyone who has ever been pulled over for speeding and longed to be rude††† but had something to lose, ie a driving license, and therefore applied self-restraint. Carmen is a loose cannon (and it’s all going to catch horribly up with her in about two hours) but meanwhile there’s a splendid catharsis in watching her cheeking the fuzz and getting away with hell.
It may be just as well I never saw Marilyn Horne on stage as Carmen: it would absolutely have broken my heart if she couldn’t pull it off. I think she might’ve–but I admit that the recording is very, ahem, American. I’m not the biggest fan of Bernstein, and subtlety is not his strong suit either, and even in Carmen there’s a limit to how much in-your-faceness is a good idea. His Carmen is all pretty much in primary colours, although the primary colours are really excellent–especially Horne’s amazing voice. I bought it for Horne, on whom I was already besotted. The dialogue was a revelation, and the other revelation was Don Jose. Rise Stevens’ Jose was Jan Peerce and . . . well, he got through his lines. You don’t buy the Stevens Carmen for Jan Peerce. But Don Jose in his way is as crucial as Carmen herself: you need to believe in that insanity of love. I never believed in it with Peerce; he was there because the plot needed him to be there. Just as using dialogue instead of recitative is a cliché now, so is Jose as a barely-reined-in madman; but McCracken’s Jose was the first I’d heard to bring that off. Whereupon the inevitability of the last scene of the last act becomes real tragedy rather than the sticky end of a woman who always was going to go to the bad–and of a man who conceivably might not have if he hadn’t met her.
One of the things that the performance we saw the other night got better than I’ve ever seen it done before is the relationship between Jose and Micaela. Micaela is the good girl, who has stayed home looking after Jose’s mum while Jose is off being a soldier after he killed a bloke in a bar brawl [foreshadowing alert]. She comes on a few times and sings a couple of extremely pretty arias, and is basically The Ingénue with knobs on. It tends to be a pretty thankless role. But the woman who sang it the other night (Kate Royal) not only had a gorgeous rich silky voice, with much more character than ingénue voices usually have, but as an actress she had presence. You don’t sit there thinking ‘yes, I can see why he ran off with the first wild gypsy who threw a flower at him, to get away from this awful little sap,’ you sit there thinking, ‘my god, if he’d actually married her, poor volatile weakling that he is, she might very well have kept him in line’. He might have had a life. Which gives what does happen a whole extra dimension of pity and waste.
And this Jose (Brandon Jovanovich) was excellent. He’s a big guy, for a wonder–tenors tend to be short and round and to not give the impression that you’d be worried if you met them in a dark alley: there’s a lot of disbelief-suspension necessary in opera, I’m afraid–and he carries himself well. When he was twitchy you saw the guy on the tube or in the supermarket who gave you the jumps for no good reason. And when he was threatening . . . he was threatening. And with this, yes, he had the voice–another big warm rich voice–and you believed in him, believed in the arc of the character, from the stiff young ex-priest candidate at the beginning to the fatal monomania of his despair at the end.
And then there was Carmen (Tania Kross). She was not bad, she was actually pretty good . . . but that’s been my point from the beginning: pretty good won’t do for Carmen. As a supporting character she’d shine–she might even dazzle–but as Carmen she’s a nice kids’ pony at the Grand National. This young woman has the voice and the delivery, and she’s perky and sassy and she moves well . . . but she has no thread of charisma and very little dangerous sexy slinkiness. I’ve said that subtlety is wasted on Carmen (well, I think it is) but you do need resonance. This is a big character; she dominates the other girls in the cigarette factory, she dominates the band of smugglers . . . and she dominates Don Jose. And this girl . . . looks like someone you’d like to have living next door. (You would not want Carmen living next door.) She has a friendly warm smile and a good head-toss, and I bet she has a great sense of humour. Although she badly needs some counselling on her choice of boyfriends. This was something else that I thought was brought out well in this production: Carmen has two girlfriends. I don’t know if I am simply in the mood to be thinking about the importance of friendship but I was very struck by what seemed to me to be presented as the genuine relationship among these three women. They mean it when they worry about her, when they warn her. They’re going to miss her and mourn her, and blame themselves for not doing more, even though there was nothing to be done.
I liked this staging–it was clever and attractive and mostly blissfully straightforward. There were some nice bits of stage business, like the big burly workman carrying endless crates up a flight of stairs outside the tobacco factory; and Escamillo’s girlfriend getting seriously put out at his eyeing up Carmen. Carmen is such an old war horse that directors sometimes think they have to do something new and cranky and splashy and whatever. I hate new and cranky and splashy and whatever. I want my operas–not just Carmen–gorgeous to listen to, and gorgeous to look at would be nice (bleak and barren can also be gorgeous when appropriate) but at least not painfully distracting or totally off the wall. I did think having Micaela be the person who finds Jose and Carmen at the very end was stupid and if the scene up till that moment hadn’t been so strong would have seriously unbalanced it–and it stank of ‘director having intuitive moment he misidentifies as brilliant’. I also diverged with this staging’s somewhat strained attempts to be ‘earthy’. Mostly it looked like a lot of polite middle-class people trying to act uncouth: Micaela’s first appearance, when she’s looking for Jose and is felt up by the soldiers, I found particularly stiff, unconvincing and unpleasant. This was one of the things that this Carmen got rather well–you could imagine her character being a happy little slut, the problem being the little part.
But . . . finally I’m not sure anyone can bring the role of Carmen off. There are people like that–and there are actors who can perform those characters–but not many of them have fabulous dark mezzo-soprano voices. Maybe Rise Stevens. Maybe Maria Callas. And speaking of the arc of the character, this Carmen did that well. When the mood changes between the end of the scene at Lillias Pastia’s tavern and the beginning of the scene on the mountain (which is usually the end of the second and the beginning of the third act, but not always: Carmen the opera has been roughed around kind of a lot), Carmen changed too. She lays out her cards–‘toujours la mort’–and she knows what she’s looking at. And she’s angry at Jose, angry at him for ruining her fun, for being what he is–while she’s what she is. What the two of them most deeply share is poor impulse control.
What I perhaps most admire about this production in hindsight is the last scene: the final confrontation between Carmen and Jose. Carmen at least knows what’s coming–she positively goads him to kill her–she torments him in a way that harks back to her tormenting him in the first act, teasing him to look at her, to pay attention to her, to love her. And Jose is a man on the brink; he has nothing left except Carmen, and she doesn’t want him. This Carmen and this Jose got this spot on. I knew what was going to happen, of course–and since I know the music I even knew when it was going to happen–and I was still sitting on the edge of my seat.
It was a good evening. I’m glad we went. Happy Other Anniversary to us. I hope we go again next year. But I admit I would like to see a blast-me-off-my-feet Carmen before I get too old to care.
* * *
*I may have told you this before, that Peter and I entirely revised the libretto of Don Pasquale, one night, on the walk back from the theatre. Ours worked a lot better too although without Donizetti around to help, revising the music to fit might have been tricky. And we’ve tweaked quite a few more. It amazes me really that Peter has sat through as many operas as he has, being married to me and having the old-fashioned gentleman thing of feeling that husbands are supposed to accompany their wives to evening parties. The music doesn’t do much for him so he has no defense against the awfulness of the plots. He has made a few rules over the years, usually arising from bitter experience: no Handel. No Wagner. No Britten. He would probably have been bored witless by The Coronation of Poppea–whereupon Monteverdi would have been added to the list^; the only reason I think Gluck is not on it is that I’ve never managed to take him to one. The ENO did an Orfeo ed Eurydice a few years ago–I’ve only ever seen it once, with a touring opera a long time ago–but the reviews were not friendly, and included the damning news that the chorus of the dead appear naked. The reviewers were not polite about this, and I wouldn’t be either, and Gluck’s Orfeo is also on my top ten. So we didn’t go. Sniff.
^ Although as I think about it he survived Monteverdi’s L’Orfeo not that many years ago. That’s the one where after our hero loses Eurydice a second time the sky opens and his dad says, oh, never mind the mortal frail, come on up here and hang out with us immortals. You can write a song about her if it makes you feel better.
** Much as I adore Mozart, the stories the librettos tell for both Cosi and Zauberflote make me seriously nuts and nearly ruin the music for me. I cope by being as unfamiliar with the librettos as possible, and listening fixedly to the music.
*** There’s a similar problem with Verdi’s Otello. Having lambasted Verdi’s librettists, Boito is by far the best of the bunch, and Otello works pretty well–allowing for the unconvincing enigma that Iago always is.^ I think Iago works better in the opera, in the first place because I would^^ and in the second place because you do have the music, and can therefore get away with a he’s-like-that-because-the-plot-says-he-is character more easily. This makes Iago, mysteriously, easier to play–from this audience member’s viewpoint anyway–if you have the singing voice, you can do it. Otello, however, has to possess real authority–real presence–and the whole walking Coke machine with ad lib arm waving does not work.
^ Remember I am not a Shakespeare fan.
^^ Although I pretty much loathe Falstaff, for the same plot revoltingness reasons that I don’t get along with Cosi fan tutte and Die Zauberflote
† I would kill^ to have seen Rise Stevens in her heyday. If anyone ever hears of a film recording please tell me. (Yes, I already have the audio. Of course.)
^ Well . . . a few slugs, a mosquito or two . . .
†† Yes, honing your knife on the inside of your thigh isn’t going to sharpen the blade much but, you know, metaphor . . .
††† As I did when I was pulled over by a Maine state cop for going 67 in a 65 mph zone.
Glyndebourne, II
I’ve lived in this country eighteen years, I’m an opera nut*, and up until last year I’d never been to Glyndebourne. It’s not even as if it’s in Yorkshire or something–it’s only about two hours away. This is like being horse mad, living two hours away from the Spanish Riding School and never going there either.** But it’s desperately expensive and desperately elite, and I’m a little twitchy about the rich, who are different, and a four hour commute is still four hours. And for the first decade or so we were going to London a lot, and were (comparative) habitués at the ENO.
But then we kind of slowed down on the trips to London, and then recently I developed a bad case of hellhounds.*** Meanwhile even getting tickets to Glyndebourne has become more and more difficult, never mind good tickets, and I don’t want to bother if I can’t have a good seat. And then Peter found out, last year, that his neighbours at the mews are subscribers.† And as subscribers they’re eligible to buy more tickets than they ever do. Furthermore the brief Glyndebourne season includes the end of July. Our wedding anniversary is the beginning of January; our Other Anniversary is the end of July. It celebrates the day that I picked Peter up at the Bangor, Maine airport for a no-big-deal weekend of keeping this eccentric and rather terrifying Englishman amused. I assumed I would survive the experience. I was not expecting that I would see Peter walk through the airport door and think, oops. It was Some Enchanted Evening except with tripping over stuff and saying the wrong thing. I can’t remember if I spilled any food on him that weekend or not. Probably. Fortunately more or less the same thing was happening to Peter, so he didn’t notice.††
We celebrate both anniversaries, usually in the dinner out with lashings of champagne category. But thanks to hellhounds I’ve kind of given up on holidays for the moment . . . and in fact it was Glyndebourne last year which inadvertently ushered in that regime. A year ago I was still pretending whatever it was was something hellhounds would grow out of (although I’d already spent kind of a lot of money trying to find out what it was, that they were going to grow out of) and I was also trying to find a reliable overnight dog sitter.††† After various failures I hit on the plan of hiring someone from one of these national house- and pet-sitting companies. Their, um, operatives, have heaps of experience etc and while they cost a freaking fortune, at least there’s no tricky negotiating as with a friend of a friend, and you can just tell them what you want and how you want them to do it. First operative, first overnight away from home, I went to a homeopathy seminar in London, and it all went beautifully. Hellhounds even ate for her.
So Peter and I got all excited and decided to take a tiny holiday, two or three days, as part of going to the opera. (And hope that the hellhounds’ chronicity didn’t come on them at the wrong moment.) The same sitter wasn’t available, so–ever paranoid, but this is exactly the sort of experience that makes you paranoid–I asked for someone who could come one night before I’d be leaving my precious (and peculiar) hellhounds with them for several nights. I disliked the new guy on sight . . . well. The company paid for the actual physical damage to the house he did, but they did so without ever really admitting that he’d done it, and said gaily that he was one of their best and oldest and most loyal employees, that nothing like this had ever happened before, they just couldn’t imagine, and of course they would continue to use him. ‡ And they gave me to understand that they were doing me a big favour letting me cancel the longer booking at the last minute. So much for the professional national firm idea.
Which left me/us with seven days before my first experience of Glyndebourne‡‡ to figure out what we were going to do. It was Peter who came up with the idea of a car with a driver. Peter drives very little any more and I don’t like driving much, and there’s always the possibility of the ME falling on me. And, as Peter said, if I can’t go on holiday we’re saving all this money and we can spend it on a kind of short intense one evening holiday. So that’s what we did.
And it worked so well we did it again this year. Last year it was sheeting and cold; this year was Best Hot Frock weather, and, just by the way, going by taxi was worth it alone for the fact that the taxi was air conditioned.‡‡‡
And I guess I’ll tell you about Carmen tomorrow night.
* * *
* at a fairly hoi polloi level. Yes, I do Strauss and Wagner–Monteverdi^ and Gluck–Britten, even Janacek. I’m still a Verdi girl at heart.^^
^ As I write this, the Glyndebourne production of The Coronation of Poppea in its semi-staged Proms version is playing on Radio Three. Poppea is the one this year I really wanted to see–I’ve seen dozens of Carmens and never a Poppea–but its run was over with too early. There are rules about important celebrations.
^^ Yes, of course, Mozart and Rossini and Donizetti and Bizet and Gounod and Tchaikovsky and Bellini and and and and. I’m just choosing a few that aren’t the dead centre of the canon. Oh, and I don’t love Fidelio. Sue me.
** If it were the Spanish Riding School, I’d've gone. And the one time we were in Vienna–for Peter to win a literary prize–it was closed. I bought the t shirt however. Sigh. Which I never wear, however, because it is a Totemic Object.
*** I spoke too soon about last night. They’ve been off all day today. SIGH.
† My little commoner’s heart beats faster.
†† Knowing Peter, as I now do very well, he almost certainly spilled food on me. But I don’t remember. QED.
††† Kennels are problematic because the overwhelming majority of kennels’ insurance companies demand that dogs be vaccinated every year. I have no intention of vaccinating the hellhounds every year. The thing that really infuriates me is that if you get a kennel employee in a neck lock, they will often admit that they’ve read the articles and they know that annual vaccination is not only unnecessary but a positive danger to the dogs’ health . . . but that’s just the way it is! Arrrrrrrgh!
‡ I’m still wondering what he had on the president of the company.
‡‡ Yes! Peter had been a number of times before me!
‡‡‡ Which our elderly but faithful VW Golf is not. I thought we might be coming to the end with Wolfgang, his last check up: there was something very weird going on with the steering. Turned out to be nothing worse than bent wheel rims. I really must learn to drive on the road.
Glyndebourne
We’re just back from Glyndebourne
where we are in the second year of a new tradition of going to Glyndebourne for our Other Anniversary the end of July. This year we saw Carmen
http://www.glyndebourne.com/operas/carmen/
and it’s one a.m. and I’m wrecked and I’ll tell you all about it tomorrow.
PS: Hellhounds ate about three-quarters of their supper for the dog minder, which is very good going for hellhounds. They were also here alone for ten hours–minus about an hour’s minder break, including a walk up to Third House and some assisted rioting–and while they greeted me with decent enthusiasm they are well into their standard late evening hairy bolster imitation and evidence no sign of trauma whatsoever. What if this were PROGRESS?? I would really like to see Vaughan Williams’ Riders to the Sea at the ENO* this autumn.
PPS: Happy Birthday to Blackbear, and I hope you had as much fun as we did.
* English National Opera.
What’s a Little Sugar Syrup Among Friends
This is the sort of dessert optimistically described as ‘healthy’ because it has a lot of fruit juice in it. Uh huh. It also has a lot of sugar syrup in it. Everyone know how to make sugar syrup? Equal parts sugar and water. Boil. Stir it a few times till the sugar finishes dissolving, take it off the heat, cool. Sugar syrup. Now you’re ready to make sorbet. You can just cruise your kitchen or the nearest fruit stand for anything that takes your fancy. Knock yourself out. Roughly speaking you’ll want half and half sugar syrup and fruit juice but it varies VERY VERY WIDELY depending on the sweetness of the fruit and how tart you like your sorbet. I, being an extremist, like it both very sweet and very tart: some people add water to their mixtures to moderate them a little. Feh. Or possibly Fie. What the pre-frozen solution tastes like is your guide–if you like it melted, you’ll like it icy–but before you rush to the tap, or the nearest bottle of this month’s mineral water*, remember that freezing will make the taste of the finished product a lot less powerful. The other slightly mysterious aspect of creating the perfect sorbet** is that if you’re using a sweet fruit–peaches, say–you don’t just use less sugar syrup, you add something like lemon juice. But I’m out of practise. I used to still-freeze stuff pretty often back in Maine, and I also had an old-fashioned hand-crank machine which was very cute and atmospheric and so on but was also a lot of work. Peter and I had a brief spasm of trying to learn to make sorbet after the wine sorbet we used to buy at the local deli went bust.*** I’ll be trying wine sorbet here soon. But meanwhile, I give you:
Lime Cranberry Sorbet
¾ c lime juice. I also grated the zest off one lime. I think it took eight limes: mingy little things, limes
¾ c cranberry-apple juice. Which is to say cranberry with enough apple so you can drink it. So-called cranberry juice is up the wazoo with sugar syrup equivalents
1 ½ c sugar syrup
Slosh it all around together so it’s evenly mixed, and pitch it into your ice cream maker. Mine, you have to turn it on first so the paddle is going before the juice hits the floor. I’m sure you could still-freeze it too, which only involves pouring it into an ice cube tray or trays and finding space for them, flat and level, in your freezer, and then taking them out occasionally and giving them a stir so they freeze into sorbet and not pack ice. Note however if you’re using an ice-cream maker that your sorbet will come out of the brief freezing process not knowing what hit it, and you’re better off to get it into your proper freezer immediately and keep it there for a few hours till its world stops spinning and it gets used to being a chilly solid. Which is why I made mine last night. If you eat it straight from the churn it’ll melt again with astonishing swiftness. I remember that from my old hand-crank freezer. I guess the pioneers had to eat their sorbet fast.
* * *
* I drink mineral water. But the fashion-accessory aspect gets on my single remaining nerve.
** When did we stop calling the stuff sherbet? The British have some excuse, they have a disgusting fizzy sweet called sherbet, but even my American cookbooks call it sorbet these days which makes me feel like I should be drinking tea with my little finger curled while singing^ Noel Coward.^^
^ Not exactly while. You know what I mean.
^^Now there’s a thought. Singing Noel Coward, I mean. Furthermore, he sang his own stuff and had a fairly terrible voice. I’m now collecting examples of successful performers with awful voices: additional points for successful performers with awful voices singing their own stuff. Guess why.
I played and sang There Is A Tavern in the Town for poor abused Oisin today. Well, sort of. I kept losing my place–Tavern is one of the handful of pieces I have memorised, so breaking down is a bit spectacular–and at one point started to laugh, only a trifle hysterically, and had to stop for that. I did eventually stagger all the way through it. Oisin got that bland, soothing look and used his Understanding Teacher Voice which I know is always bad news, although I daresay it’s better than a clout up longside the head. He says I can carry a tune and that all I need is to be audible. Well, yes. (Or, possibly, no.) I never had much voice and it’s gone paralytic with disuse. I realised a few days ago that the real reason I tend to revert to chest voice at the piano is so I can hear myself over the piano, even my own kindly tactful upright. It’s much worse with Oisin’s baby grand, especially if you’re frenziedly whacking at it. Out walking the dogs I have no competition and I’m standing up. How do I get myself into these things?? However it’s too late now.
So, hands up anyone who knew that Benjamin Britten had done an arrangement of Little Musgrave and Lady Barnard? I turned up several references to this and began trying to hunt it down. There follows at least three different editions of ‘The Complete Folk Song Arrangements of Benjamin Britten’, all three declaring sixty-one songs. Two of them offer complete playlists . . . the lists are different, and neither of them includes Little Musgrave. Clear days on the sheet music front. And the only Britten Little Musgrave I can find is scored for tenor, baritone and bass. Well, that’s helpful. I’ve sicced Oisin on the problem, but if TBB is all I can get, TBB I’ll take, and rearrange it, gorblimey it. Which I think is what I’m about to do with Gypsy Rover. I haven’t decided yet whether to order Best Gruesome+ Irish Songs of All Time and Beyond or not, to have something to arrange from, or whether just to sit down and pick it out with one finger and go from there. The former would be the better bet if I want the result recognisable, but I’m not sure recognisable is necessary.
Meanwhile . . . Song II is really beginning to look like something. It’s almost scary. I wrote the music for the extra verse this week–I’d thought I could repeat the music for the first verse for the third but it doesn’t work, so then I got all clever. Not that I meant to, but this music writing schtick is more and more like story writing: it ain’t up to you, honey, so don’t get any ideas above your station; you do what you’re told.++ There’s now a progression from the mildly minor of the beginning to the unmitigatedly bleak of the end. More notes too. And more Strange Chords. One of the things that does make me feel like I’m not entirely wasting my time (let alone Oisin’s) is that the comments Oisin makes are usually the rational, articulate versions of things I’ve been groping toward.+++ For example, this week he wanted to talk about the tonal centre. The . . . uh? I’ve mostly stuck to whatever it is that it is–Dorian mode, more or less–but it wasn’t till this week and the third verse that it began to feel a little unvarying. Oisin suggested I might try transposing a section, and what about a little introduction or interlude? Right. Yes. And for my next trick. . . .
And speaking of entries where most of the action is in the footnotes.
+ Did you know that There Is a Tavern counts as an Irish folk song? I kind of want to say, what’s that person been drinking, but what do I know?
++ Although the poor music muse must be having a heck of a time getting through to me. She’s saying to the story muse, you think you’ve got problems. . . .
+++ See: music muse’s problems
*** And then the deli went bust
Music matters
I got the petrol.*
I got the hat.
I haven’t missed any laboratory samples today.
I extruded another couple of pages of PEGASUS despite the fact that Peter’s daughter was here for lunch and I spent a certain amount of time discussing the iniquities of publishing with her.**
And now I’m back at the keyboard. No, I mean the piano keyboard.
Oisin said, of my D minor with no B flat, that I can perfectly well compose in Dorian–is it Dorian?–mode if I want to. And then ran through about seventeen other modes for me, their names, ranks, serial numbers, and overt and clandestine relations to the other sixteen. I caught maybe 1/657th of this. Maybe. But at least I can stop worrying about the B flat.
I’ve finally got most of Song II set–yes, it takes me forever. As I keep saying, it’s ALL a learning curve at the moment.*** And I’ll play the same three bars, let’s say–the one I’m poking with a pencil, and the ones on either side for continuity–twenty times, trying to decide if this is what I want, and then as soon as I change or add something I have to play it another twenty times. And I may have to do this all over again tomorrow, when it doesn’t sound right any more. And even when it sounds nice, there’s still the question of whether it’s the right nice. Is it the right nice for this particular poem? Life was easier with the Sonatina-ette, when I had only myself to please. I don’t mean Peter, I mean the poem. Adding the left hand changes everything so dramatically, and sometimes the right hand wants to thicken up a little too. You have to make all these decisions about which way you’re going (Dorian mode? D minor? –E minor? I slide around a bit. Composing as a game of snakes and ladders) and what you want your resonances to be.
When it isn’t what I want, then I have to try and figure out what is. I have at least started singing the notes I’m hearing in my head and can’t find on the keyboard. Oisin suggested this months ago. I’m slow. Well, yes, I am slow. That’s what this is about. But–with Oisin playing it–Song II did sound a lot more like what I think I have in mind than it did last week. Although it also occurred to me this week that there’s a question of playability. When your fingers end up plaited you may wish to reconsider. I asked Oisin about this but he said you can think about playability a little, but not very much: if it sounds good, there is a way to play it. If it’s impossible to play there may be something else you want to look at. He can play Song II. I . . . it also occurred to me this week if I’m going to play it it needs to be . . . what’s the polite word for ‘simpleminded’?
Oisin keeps saying, as we toil through my somewhat note-shaped smudges†, this is very interesting. It’s not what I would do, but . . . which rouses in me an almost irresistible desire to laugh. I realise he’s being encouraging–and he is being encouraging–but, pardon me, the man’s been a professional musician for thirty years or more, including composing music for TV and I think films occasionally . . . and I’m not doing what he would do? Well knock me down with a feather and call me cuckoo.
Meanwhile we still have this singing thing to master.†† I’ve widened my field of disaster and have started singing††† along when I play things like Believe Me If All Those Endearing Young Charms and The Ash Grove. And yesterday I also took a deep breath and asked Oisin if he could bear it if I came in some week and played and sang let’s say, There Is a Tavern in the Town, which is arguably my signature tune till I learn Rondo alla Turca‡, all in the interests of getting used to this playing and singing thing. My bad self is having a crisis about the singing. I have enough trouble with the (*&^%$£”!!!!!! notes! My best interpretations with, like, dynamics, tend to be at midnight when I’ve had a glass or two of champagne and am feeling unwontedly loose and cheerful. The idea of loading singing onto the poor tired overburdened camel of daylight and sobriety . . . but I’m the one wants to set poems. And I’m the one thought it would be cute to set some of my husband’s poems. The rest follows with a horrible inevitability.
Oisin said yes way too quickly. All teachers have a sadistic streak, right? It’s how they cope.
Brief moment of contact with the real world: Hillary Clinton has conceded. I see that she has to, but I’m really sorry. I don’t like Obama; I like him less now than I did six months ago. I think he’s charmed by his own charm, and his self-satisfaction is growing like the Blob. And I don’t think he’s going to have a clue about running the country, if he gets that far, because he may not, especially if too many Democrats have thoughts similar to these. Oh, I’ll still vote for him‡‡; I’d vote for a water buffalo before I’d vote for a Republican. It’s not that Clinton is perfect or even Superwoman‡‡‡, but I think she’d make a better job of the presidency. And I also think way too much of this campaign was won and lost by media spin, and the media decided a long time ago not to like Clinton. They have some good reasons for this, but also some bad ones, and I cynically think the tipping point is that she doesn’t do warm and fuzzy. Obama does.
* * *
* It cost fifty eight pounds to fill the tank. >insert manifestations of blinding outrage here< Words are failing me; I can’t think of any way of expressing myself that doesn’t involve blood. Thunder would be good too. Granted, it’s a diesel car, but I can remember screaming when we hit the thirty pound barrier.
** She’s a publisher.
*** The kind of learning curve with claws like a panther, a buck like a wild horse, and a sudden sideways sprint like a hellhound.
† Pentimento was never so pathetic
†† Well I don’t know about master. Make small lurching runs at, maybe.
††† Well . . . bellowing. I can sometimes convince myself to sing in head-voice when I’m out walking hellhounds. As soon as I get back to the piano it sinks into my chest and stays there. I sound like a bad amateur-theatrics version of a music-hall turn. On a rough night. Can you heckle yourself?
‡ Which has no lyrics
‡‡ Although I have a grim theory that nobody counts absentee ballots. They go straight into landfill.
‡‡‡ Or even Abigail Bartlet