Books to the Ceiling

Thursday night April 10, I took my friend Helene, a balletomane like myself, to New York City Center to see the Kirov work its magic. The program consisted of scenes from four different ballets: Le Corsaire, Diana and Acteon, Don Quixote, and La Bayadere.

How was it? Superlatives fail me. I don’t have the words, but the poets do. I keeping thinking of two passages in particular:: Romeo’s astonished declaration that “I ne’er saw true beauty till this night;” and the final lines of one of my favorite poems, Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn:” “Beauty is truth, truth beauty, — That is all / Ye know on Earth, and all ye need to know.” Here’s the entire poem:

Thou still unravish’d bride of quietness,
Thou foster-child of Silence and slow Time,
Sylvan historian, who canst thus express
A flowery tale more sweetly than our rhyme:
What leaf-fringed legend haunts about thy shape
Of deities or mortals, or of both,
In Tempe or the dales of Arcady?
What men or gods are these? What maidens loth?
What mad pursuit? What struggle to escape?
What pipes and timbrels? What wild ecstasy?

Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard
Are sweeter, therefore, ye soft pipes, play on,
Not to the sensual ear, but, more endear’d,
Pipe to the spirit ditties of no tone:
Fair youth, beneath the trees, thou canst not leave
Thy song, nor ever can those trees be bare;
Bold Lover, never, never, canst thou kiss,
Though winning near the goal — yet, do not grieve;
She cannot fade, though thou hast not thy bliss,
For ever wilt thou love, and she be fair!

Ah, happy, happy boughs! that cannot shed
Your leaves, nor ever bid the Spring adieu;
And, happy melodist, unwearied,
For ever piping song for ever new,
More happy love! more happy, happy love!
For ever warm and still to be enjoy’d,
For ever panting, and for ever young;
All breathing human passion far above,
That leaves a heart high-sorrowful and cloy’d,
A burning forehead, and a parching tongue.

Who are these coming to the sacrifice?
To what green altar, O mysterious priest,
Lead’st thou that heifer lowing at the skies,
And all her silken flanks with garlands drest?
What little town by river or sea-shore,
Or mountain-built with peaceful citadel,
Is emptied of its folk, this pious morn?
And, little town, thy streets for evermore
Will silent be; and not a soul, to tell
Why thou art desolate, can e’er return.

O Attic shape! fair attitude! with brede
Of marble men and maidens overwrought,
With forest branches and the trodden weed;
Thou, silent form! dost tease us out of thought
As doth eternity. Cold Pastoral!
When old age shall this generation waste,
Thou shalt remain, in midst of other woe
Than ours, a friend to man, to whom thou say’st,
‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty, — that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.’

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As a meditation on the age-old desire to stop cruel time in its tracks, this work, for me, has no equal. I wished very powerfully that the performance we saw that night could be frozen in time, like “the marble men and maidens overwrought” on Keats’s vase. But I will cherish the memory. And there are pictures…

The corps de ballet in the exquisite La Bayadere.

Soloists in La Bayadere

Leonid Sarafanov, whose spectacular leaps and light-as-a-feather landings repeatedly thrilled the audience.* (Here’s a “head shot” of the astounding Sarafanov taken last year. Doesn’t he look as though he’s all of fourteen years old?!)

This photo of Diana Vishneva, taken by Andrea Mohin, appeared in the New York Times on Sunday April 13:

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The music, by turns robust and delicate, was played beautifully by the Orchestra of the Mariinsky Theatre; most of the choreography was done by the great Marius Petipa. Helene and I gazed at the program in awe - such storied names…

Here is the Mariinsky Theatre’s official site. It is very oriented to the here and now - not much in the way of history, except for the acknowledgement, in tiny print, that this is there 225th season. For some interesting background, and great photos of the theater itself, see the Wikipedia entry.

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For a fascinating cultural hisory of Russia, see Natasha’s Dance by Orlando Figes. (I won’t claim to have read through this massive tome; I’ve been using it primarily as a reference work since I purchased it several years ago.)

*For more terrific portraits of ballet dancers, see Gene Schiavone’s site.

This is the scariest, most formidable Macbeth imaginable. The play begins, in a sense, before it begins, with a lengthy announcement, presumably from the management. The announcer’s spiel is cut short in a way that theatergoers will not soon forget. (I will say no more about this, in case you are lucky enough to have tickets.)

Extreme stagecraft was employed in this production. Sudden loud noises, abrupt appearances and disappearances, blindingly bright strobe lights - and buckets of blood. In the capable hands of directors Teller (of Penn and Teller fame) and Aaron Posner, these elements intensified the focus on Shakespeare’s language and on the anguish of the characters. A collective “Ah!” seemingly arose from the packed house on many occasions. I felt as though I were watching the prototype of tragedy, reduced to its most laserlike capacity to terrify.

Ian Merrill Peakes as Macbeth is transfixed by “a dagger of the mind.”

The acting is first rate. I admit to a prejudice where Shakespeare performances are concerned: I prefer the actors’ speech to have a British inflection. These were American actors, so they spoke American English. After the first five minutes or so, it ceased to matter. I was mesmerized and stayed that way, right to the end.

As this most inexorable of tragedies unfolded, certain lines of dialog seemed to leap out and hang in the air. Many of them were uttered by that archetype of bad influence, Lady Macbeth:

“The raven himself is hoarse / That croaks the fatal entrance of Duncan / Under my battlements.

“We fail!/ But screw your courage to the sticking place / And we’ll not fail.

“Look like the innocent flower / But be the serpent under’t.

There she is, giving her hapless husband lessons on how to be evil! But of course all of it catches up with her and overpowers her in the famous sleepwalking scene in Act Five. Here she plaintively voices her amazement:

“Yet who would have thought the old man to have had so much blood in him?”

And finally, this line, which for some unaccountable reason chilled me to the bone: “The Thane of Fife had a wife; where is she now?”

Ian Merrill Peakes, with Kate Eastwood Norris as Lady Macbeth

The play’s most famous speech is uttered by Macbeth himself, when he hears of his wife’s death:

Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,
To the last syllable of recorded time;
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player,
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,
And then is heard no more. It is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.

These may be the most despairing, nihilistic lines Shakespeare ever wrote.

In Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human, Harold Bloom observes: “Macbeth suffers intensely from knowing that he does evil, and that he must go on doing ever worse.” Later in the same paragraph: “He scarcely is conscious of an ambition, desire, or wish before he sees himself on the other side or shore, already having performed the crime that equivocally fulfills ambition. Macbeth terrifies us partly because that aspect of our imagination is so frightening: it seems to make us murderers, thieves, usurpers, and rapists.”

I think Bloom is saying that because Macbeth seems at first to be a decent sort - decent in the way we like to think ourselves as being decent - that his swift descent into an infamous kind of Hell seems to exemplify a fate that could befall any one of us. Perhaps this accounts for the claustrophobic unease of the viewer caught up in the play’s precipitous downward trajectory.

“By the pricking of my thumbs, / Something wicked this way comes.” The three witches, truly gruesome hags, were played by male actors. The witches are more often referred to as the the weird sisters. In Shakespeare After All, Marjorie Garber tells us that “Wyrd is the Old English word for “fate,” and these are, in a way,classical witches as well as Scottish or Celtic ones, Fates as well as Norns. The Three Fates of Greek mythology were said to spin, apportion, and cut the thread of man’s life. But the Macbeth witches are not merely mythological beings, nor merely historical targets of vilification, and superstition; on the stage, and on the page, they have a persuasive psychological reality of their own.”

The run for the Folger’s production of Macbeth has been extended; tickets are currently almost impossible to get. People are advertising for them on Craigslist. I’m not surprised.

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Addendum, March 11: I meant to mention Thomas De Quincey’s tremendously insightful essay, “On the Knocking at the Gate in Macbeth,” first published in 1823. In this passage, De Quincey describes the moments that follow Duncan’s murder:

“Here, as I have said, the retiring of the human heart and the
entrance of the fiendish heart was to be expressed and made sensible.
Another world has stepped in; and the murderers are taken out of the region
of human things, human purposes, human desires. They are transfigured: Lady
Macbeth is “unsexed;” Macbeth has forgot that he was born of woman; both
are conformed to the image of devils; and the world of devils is suddenly
revealed. But how shall this be conveyed and made palpable? In order that a
new world may step in, this world must for a time disappear. The murderers,
and the murder, must be insulated–cut off by an immeasurable gulph
from the ordinary tide and succession of human affairs–locked up and
sequestered in some deep recess; we must be made sensible that the world
of ordinary life is suddenly arrested–laid asleep–tranced–racked into
a dread armistice: time must be annihilated; relation to things without
abolished; and all must pass self-withdrawn into a deep syncope and
suspension of earthly passion. Hence it is, that when the deed is done,
when the work of darkness is perfect, then the world of darkness passes
away like a pageantry in the clouds: the knocking at the gate is heard; and
it makes known audibly that the reaction has commenced: the human has made
its reflux upon the fiendish; the pulses of life are beginning to beat
again; and the re-establishment of the goings-on of the world in which we
live, first makes us profoundly sensible of the awful parenthesis that had
suspended them.

Last night we attended a performance by the U.S. Army Field Band. The Field Band has four separate components; on this occasion, it was the turn of the concert band to strut their stuff. And did they ever!

Imaginative and varied programming was one of the chief pleasures of this concert. First, we all stood and joined the players and their conductor Lieutenant Colonel Beth T.M. Steele in singing the National Anthem. This is not a moment to be lightly glossed over; I surprised myself by tearing up. Lieut. Colonel Steele then welcomed us warmly and introduced the evening’s guest conductor, Dr. Mallory Thompson of Northwestern University.

          [Lieutenant Colonel Beth T.M. Steele, left, and Dr. Mallory Thompson]

The concert got under way with two short pieces by Aaron Copland: An Outdoor Overture and Variations on a Shaker Melody. Of course, it’s hard to go wrong with Copland; even harder to go wrong with that strangely irresistible little Shaker tune. I first heard it on Judy Collins’ Whales & Nightingales . It was the penultimate selection on the album and was followed by a memorable performance of Amazing Grace, in which Judy began by singing a capella and was then joined by a choir. For decades, those two pieces have been inseparable in my musical memory: both immensely moving, in entirely different ways.

The third selection was the Concertino, op.107 by Cecile Chaminade, a piece for flute and orchestra. We were informed that our soloist, Marissa Plank, a junior at Charlottesville High School in Virginia, was the winner of a Young Artist Competition recently held in the mid-Atlantic region. Then on to the stage strides an absolute vision of blonde loveliness in a knockout red dress. “Wow!” I exclaimed involuntarily. “You mean she can play an instrument too?” Can she ever! The Concertino is a showpiece for the flute and a real challenge as well, studded with swooping melodic lines, trills, and numerous other embellishments. It was a delight, and Marissa Plank breezed through as though it were a walk in the park. A bravura performance!

The second half of the program consisted of Bach’s famous Toccata and fugue in D minor, transcribed for wind band by Donald Husberger, and the Symphony in B-flat by Paul Hindemith. If Chaminade’s Concertino was a showcase for the solo flute, the Bach was a showcase for the entire ensemble. The rich sonorities achieved by these wonderful musicians were thrilling! At the conclusion of this splendid performance, Dr. Thompson spoke to us briefly.

“Did you hear the organ?” she asked. “There was no organ! That’s what truly great intonation can achieve.”

My only objection to the Toccata and Fugue is that it ended too soon. I wanted them to play it again!

Instead, they proceeded with the Hindemith Symphony, with which I was unfamiliar. This work offered some great solo opportunities for these outstanding musicians, and I appreciated it from that standpoint. But I didn’t love the piece itself. Part of the problem, at least for me, was that came right after the Bach. Call me old-fashioned: the Bach gave me goosebumps; the Hindemith didn’t. (I very much like another piece by this composer, Metamorphosis on Themes of Carl Maria von Weber. I probably need to listen to the Symphony in B-flat again.; my husband assures me that it is considered a classic work for wind bands.)

The band played “Start and Stripes Forever” as an encore. In the course of this performance, the audience was treated to a really special variation: four band members and Marissa Plank stepped out front and center to play the famous piccolo part in this beloved march tune. Five piccolos for Sousa’s famous March!

Like October’s powerhouse performance of Mendelssohn’s Elijah, this concert was presented at the Rouse Theater, which is about fifteen minutes from our house. This is a small auditorium with marvelous acoustics, a great venue for this kind of music-making.

You can find out more about the U.S. Army Field Band at their site; you can also be apprised of their performance schedule by placing yourself on their e-mail list.

The Folger Theatre in Washington D.C. has begun its 2007-2008 season with As You Like It. I was privileged to attend this past Sunday’s performance. It was the first time I’ve ever seen this play, and the experience reinforced my belief that in order to fully appreciate Shakespeare’s genius, you must both read and see the plays.

This production starred Amanda Quaid as Rosalind and Noel Velez as Orlando. I say “starred,” but to me, it was great acting - and good chemistry - on the part of the entire ensemble that made the production work. The supporting cast was truly excellent. The review in the Washington Post was generally favorable, with a few reservations, not necessarily shared by me. I don’t have the critical skills or knowledge to evaluate theatrical productions; I tend merely to be very grateful to be there and to be both entertained and enlightened, as I was on Sunday. Favorite moments: When Amiens (Jon Reynolds) and one of the shepherds sang “Under the greenwood tree.” I had tears in my eyes, not sure why. (”Tears, idle tears, I know not what they mean…”) Also almost any scene featuring Touchstone. The role was played by actress Sarah Marshall; her comic turns and impeccable timing alone would have been worth the price of admission!

One of the many joys of attending a Shakespeare play is hearing phrases and expressions that you’ve heard all your life. For instance, Celia (Miriam Silverman) exclaims, “Well said: that was laid on with a trowel.” ( Act I, Scene II) And then there is the pleasure of hearing old friends in context, like the famous “All the world’s a stage” disquisition, delivered with a sort of bemused wonder by Jacques (Joseph Marcell).

Other favorite quotes:

“O, how full of briers is this working-day world!” (Rosalind, Act I, Scene III)

“Beauty provoketh thieves sooner than gold.” (Rosalind, Act I, Scene III)

“Blow, blow, thou winter wind, / Thou art not so unkind / As man’s ingratitude.” (sung by Amiens, Act II, Scene VII)

“When a man’s verses cannot be understood, nor a man’s good wit seconded with the forward child, understanding, it strikes a man more dead than a great reckoning in a little room.” (Touchstone, Act II, Scene III) I have read that the “reckoning” alluded in that line might be an oblique reference to the murder of Christopher Marlowe. Hearing it, even spoken in jest, I broke out in goose flesh!

“Come woo me, woo me - for now I am in a holiday humour and like enough to consent.” (Rosalind, Act IV, Scene I)

“But O, how bitter a thing it is to look into happiness through another man’s eyes.” (Orlando, Act V, Scene II)

“Do you not know I am a woman? When I think, I must speak.” (Rosalind, Act III, Scene II). I hadn’t heard these lines before, but Rosalind/Quaid delivered them with just the right emphasis, causing the audience to burst into laughter!

And my own favorite favorite passage, spoken by Duke Senior in Act II, Scene I, as he celebrates the conditions of his exile in the forest of Arden:

“And this our life, exempt from public haunt, / Finds tongues in trees, books in running brooks, / Sermons in stones, / And good in everything.”

To this Amiens adds, simply: “I would not change it.”

Indeed not.