Handel, Haydn, Ginsburg - I Wept In The Vortex
Monday, August 19, 2013
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| Rebecca Stewart at the Willard Hotel |
In the past I have failed to write blogs on the day’s date to the point where I can be two or three days behind. Then, to catch up, I must sit down and write them all at once. Now I have a problem in the opposite direction, I am ahead of myself. I am writing tonight, Saturday, August 17 (my eldest granddaughter was 16 today) but the blog will have Monday’s date.
I am not sure how long ago it was but I
know it happened on a Saturday. I remember I was driving on Marine Way perhaps to shoot an assignment
for Canadian Pacific Limited in New
Westminster. I was so enthralled by the woman being
interviewed that I stopped the car to listen.
It was Saturday Afternoon at the Opera on
CBC Radio. The station was broadcasting live from the
Metropolitan Opera in New York. It was long ago enough that the sponsor was Texaco. The woman being interviewed, a lover of opera, was Associate Justice of the Supreme Court (the American one) Ruth Bader Ginsburg.
Metropolitan Opera in New York. It was long ago enough that the sponsor was Texaco. The woman being interviewed, a lover of opera, was Associate Justice of the Supreme Court (the American one) Ruth Bader Ginsburg.
The interviewer asked her how it happened that
she became an avid fan of opera. It seems that Ginsburg was a young lawyer on a
very difficult case she did not know she could win. She was staying in the
venerable Washington DC hotel, The Willard.
One of the stories about The Willard, which
is now not considered accurate, is that the term lobbying originated there. The
hotel was a favourite of President Ulysses S. Grant. He went there to enjoy a
cigar and brandy. The
political wheelers and dealers, who frequented the hotel's lobby, were there to access Grant. They tried to buy the president drinks in an attempt to
influence his political decisions.
Preoccupied about
her case she summoned the elevator after she left her room. When the elevator doors
opened, she was facing Maria Callas holding a toy poodle. Ginsburg said of the
incident, “I knew I was going to win my case, then and there.” Asked which of
her favourite operas featured a lawyer she answered, “Johan Strauss’s Die
Fledermaus.” But she added (and I am sure there was a twinkle in her eye when
she did so), “The lawyer is so inept that his client is given an even worse
sentence.”
Tonight as I
write this I miss my old friend Abraham Rogatnick who died three years ago. A
few years before that, he and my friend Graham Walker came for Saturday lunch.
After lunch we retired to the living room to listen to a live Met performance
of Handel’s Giulio Cesare. We were glued to our sofas and we got up only for
needed trips to the guest bathroom. It was so much fun to listen to that opera
together.
Today Handel’s Rinaldo
(1711) was the featured Handel opera but not at the Met. It was a Lyric Opera
of Chicago production with countertenor David Daniels. What is amazing is
that 30 years ago people wrote about Handel operas but they were never
performed. Explanations for this cited length and the difficulty in finding
countertenors for the lead parts. Little by little beautiful arias like the
soprano aria Lascia ch'io pianga (Let me weep) and others from other Handel
operas began to hit the mainstream in solo performances.
Today was Rebecca’s
birthday so I spent the day preparing a meal for the evening. It was wonderful
to listen to the live performance on my little transistor radio in the kitchen while
the good living room sound system, crept in from the hall. I missed Rogatnick
but I knew the Walker
was by his radio at home.
The family
viewing of John Boorman’s 1973 fantasy film Zardoz with Charlotte Rampling and Sean
Connery was a complete fiasco. Rebecca had all kinds of snide comments on
Connery’s extra long sideburns and his red diaper-like shorts. When Charlotte
Rampling began to explain the role of the penis in human reproduction, Hilary,
my daughter and the mother of Rebecca and Lauren, 11, told me that the film was
not appropriate for an eleven-year old. I turned off the DVD player and we
retired to the garden with Rosemary’s big cat, Casi-Casi.
I took the
Stewarts home. In the car I played my favourite Haydn symphony, Symphony 22
which has the most unusual steady sounding (it mesmerizes) first movement Adagio. The Adagio is described by my Wikipedia as follows:
The first movement
is the highlight of the symphony and features horns answered by cors anglais
over a walking bass line. The violins play with mutes. H. C. Robbins Landon
calls it "surely one of the settecento's supremely original
concepts". Played with all the indicated repeats, it lasts about 10
minutes, almost half the duration of the symphony as a whole.
The work is scored
for two cor anglais (English horns), two horns, and strings. The use of the cor
anglais in place of the (related, but higher-pitched) oboe is more than
unusual; indeed McVeigh (2009:386) suggests that it is "the only symphony
in the entire history of the genre to use this scoring". The horns play a
prominent role in all but the second movement, and Haydn's choice of E flat
major may have been dictated by the fact that the valveless horns of the time
sounded best when played as E flat instruments (that is, with E flat crooks
inserted).
My copy of the
symphony features an unusually dressed and handsome Pinchas Zukerman.
I mentioned the
unusual aspect of the symphony to the Stewarts but I believe I will have to
wait a few more years before any of them respond to the music of Handel or
Haydn.
The significance
of today Saturday is best said by Rebecca who in facebook wrote:
Sweet I can learn
to drive now. Good luck everybody.
