Les Contes d'Hoffmann, Jacques Offenbach

Photo from fanfaire.com

I got to see the 2014/2015 Met Season HD Live restaging of their 2009 production directed by Bartlett Sher. Tales of Hoffmann is, for reasons that are not entirely clear to me, one of my favorite operas. There's a lot of catchy music, of course - how fabulous is the Barcarolle?! - but it's also just a dark, dark intriguing story, and because Offenbach died before completing the opera, there are numerous versions in existence.

I liked that this production restored the order of the episodes - Antonia (Act III), Gulietta (Act IV) - which makes so much more sense to me as a story-telling arc. I have a soft-spot for Victorian/Edwardian, and thus Steam-Punk by extension, and I liked these elements in the production. Unfortunately, I had recently seen Steam-Punk done so much better in the National Theater production of Frankenstein (which was fabulous) and even the 2014/2015 Met production of Un Ballo in Maschera (which was fabulous).

And it didn't feel consistent throughout - I suppose it wouldn't have to be since the Olympia, Antonia, and Gulietta are virtually stand-alone - but the stylistic departures bothered me. I still don't understand why Olympia looked like she had been lifted from Candyland, or, more importantly, why there were more than one of her. Act III had a completely different feel than the zaniness of Act II, and I can only describe Act IV as Victoria Secret-meets-Louis-the-Fourteenth. Unfortunately, we had already done scantily clad women pretty thoroughly in Act II (where I don't think they belong), so by Act IV it was just scraping the bottom of the barrel.

The most intriguing part for me was the Muse/Niklausse, sung both in 2009 and 2014 by mezzo Kate Lindsey. The recording I'm used to is the 1981 Domingo, which does not include an introduction by the Muse (THAT makes a huge difference, story-wise!). The Met production goes further by adding stage-business that suggests/makes clear that the Muse as Niklausse intends to partner up with the villain of the piece in order to thwart Hoffmann's attempts at finding any happiness through love, a decidedly darker version of this already grim opera. I thought that was fascinating, but insufficiently supported, and relied mostly on the singers acting between the lines.

I also found the ending intriguing. I miss the beautiful lines I'm used to where the Muse reveals herself and says, "Hoffmann, I love you," but there was a lot of new libretto I hadn't heard before - and I so wish I could quote it, but I'm relying on my memory of the subtitles here! - where the Muse told Hoffmann he could take the ashes of his dead loves and transform them into art. I've mangled it, but that was the sense, and I've discovered through writing that sometimes I'm able to look back over my whole life and realize it's all just raw material to be transformed, the good and bad.

Voyage Out, Virginia Woolf

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I had read “A Room of One’s Own” recently, but this was my first Woolf novel in a long time, and eye-opening. Some of the same questions that drive “A Room of One’s Own”—the assumed socially inferior relation of men to women resulting in limited access to education, the female “helpmeet” role in marriage, and reduced personal freedom—show up here. The characters discuss friendship, love, marriage, and wonder about how happy others are. There is an open question of whether it is possible for a man and a woman to understand each other, and even how far it is possible for members of the same sex to meaningfully connect. Each of the characters seems to be inarticulately searching for a way to bridge a divide, mostly without success. One of the most interesting of these is Terence Hewet’s meditation on the gap between love and marriage: he is sure that he is in love with Rachel Vinacre, but not sure he wants to marry her.

                It would take someone more familiar with Woolf to analyze her perspective on these big questions about longing for intimacy—the characters in the book seem to take running starts and present different angle each time. My sense, watching them, is that, whether in friendship or love, human beings have a strong impulse to secure and possess the companionship of this or that person—so as to be understood? To not face life alone? Simply for the pleasure of being around someone who brings out the best in us? But I think the intensity of love, to be in the other’s presence, to obtain confirmation one is loved in return, is proportional to one’s drive to capture and hold, which in turn can probably be traced back to deeper beliefs and fears about life and oneself. Once the other is “secure” however (mutual expressions of affection exchanged or a more binding engagement created), the drive lets up, and then one is left to contemplate the necessarily imperfect human being, friend or spouse, to whom one has bound oneself.

                One of the things I found most interesting about Voyage Out is what I feel sure is a silent conversation with E.M. Forrester’s Room with a View published in 1908. Both novels focus on the English abroad, where they form tiny enclaves in which their manners and rules seem arbitrary and bizarre against the native backdrop. There is also the sense in both books, I think, that travel changes people, particularly the young and receptive. There are many parallels between Woolf’s Rachel and Forrester’s Lucy Honeychurch—the impressionable ingénues whose education is unfinished until they fall in love. There are even a parallel “kiss scenes” which set both heroines spinning off on new trajectories, but in Forrester, this is positive and life-affirming, and in Woolf, the event is disconcerting, destabilizing, even disgusting. As a woman, Woolf has a much more ambiguous view of love and marriage in her society, which was both in some sense the fulfillment and the end of a woman’s individual life. There is a brilliant passage in which Woolf says of a newly engaged couple:

“From this they went on to compare their more serious tastes, or rather Susan ascertained what Arthur cared about, and professed herself very fond of the same thing.”

                I still like Forrester better—there is a sweetness about Lucy entirely lacking in the character of Rachel, who I found self-centered, jaded, and capricious. Incapable, really, of taking a genuine interest in others around her because she is so absorbed by her own impatient, intensely moody reflections. As a whole, I found Voyage Out ungainly: a set of characters is introduced on board ship, only to be replaced by a larger set of characters once they settle in South America, and the perspective hops so many times that it is difficult for me to say what or even whom the novel is about, although life is like that too. I have to give Woolf tremendous credit for mentally inhabiting so many different perspectives. She has a remarkable gift for language and description—I found myself many time thinking of the disturbing vibrancy of a Van Gogh landscape—and I appreciate the multiple perspectives and focus on subjective experience. There is a passage at the end in which Rachel is feverish which in its sensitivity to inner experience is easily comparable to Proust:

“…Rachel woke to find herself in the midst of one of those interminable nights which do not end at twelve, but go on into the double figures—thirteen, fourteen, and so on until they reach the twenties, and then the thirties, and then the forties.”

                I’m still not sure how to read the relationship between Hewet and Rachel, which must be central to the book. There are sections, particularly as they wander through the Amazonian rain forest and profess their love that reminded me of Wagner’s Tristan & Iseult: an almost choking surfeit of passion, a fantastical merging of identities. The rest of “Voyage Out” was so hard-headed about marriage and the possibility of lasting happiness in human relationships that I didn’t know if this was meant to be read from a distance by the reader, watching two characters naïvely swim about in their own projected dreams, or whether this really was Woolf’s own version of a really happy couple in love, if only they can keep hold of it. The book was published in 1915, and Woolf was married in 1912, which left me wondering about how her experience of love and marriage was worked into the novel.

 

Of Mice and Men, John Steinbeck

http://www.broadway.com/shows/mice-and-men/

I got to see Fathom Events' film version of this Broadway stage play of Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men. This is another classic I read in high school and got nothing out of, except that I remember it turning my stomach. It's a good thing to come back to later in life, because you can't help but respond to a classic differently with more life experience.

I had a keen appreciation this time for what a tightly constructed piece it is, a tragedy akin to Oedipus: once the setting has been established and the main characters introduced, there is an feeling of inevitability. Lennie, pure as his motives often are, is a time bomb, and because George cares about him, he will be dragged down in the tragedy when it happens.

But this time, instead of seeing it essentially as a human tragedy, I was conscious of it as a social tragedy. This is what happens when there is no social "safety" net, no provision for mental health care. And people are perpetually poor, scraping by at a subsistence level with few alternatives. Any infirmity, illness, old age, leads to death, as Candy the aging farm-hand recognizes. Old dogs are shot, runts of the litter are drowned, and people don't fare much better.

The director of the Broadway production, Anna D. Shapiro, talked about the piece during an intermission clip. She emphasized the illusory nature of what I would call the "pioneer" promise: work hard, you'll get ahead, own something of your own and escape poverty and endless work. Steinbeck saw this was a false hope for most, but Shapiro says he offers something in its place: human connection. What makes George and Lennie different, they keep telling themselves, is that they look out for each other in a environment where most men live only for themselves.

I think the key, though, is that they have a plan, even if it is a pie-in-the-sky hope, that gives them something to work for and save towards. The other men they describe as being not like them are solitary, yes, but also seem to be living transitory lives: make money, blow it in a weekend, repeat - always at a subsistence level. I am persuaded by Viktor Frankl's analysis of human experience in Man's Search for Meaning, where he identifies a sense of purpose as being critical to human thriving. It seems to be easier, for some reason I haven't figured out, to care about a future when you have human connections, like George and Lennie, but I don't think human connection is required.

I want to say this delicately, because it is controversial, but I believe the crucial piece is the goal of the farm (or whatever the equivalent is), even if the goal is next to impossible, more than having a human bond. They both reinforce each other, and life without either is certainly less than optimal, but I think purpose takes priority.

This theme of false promises, the carrot in front of the donkey's nose, resonated with me because I think Americans, by in large, buy into an updated version of the same myth: anyone can "succeed" or "get ahead" through hard work. Only it often doesn't work out, and there is an implicit, nasty Puritanical reverse: people who are not "succeeding" must not be working hard enough.

Cranford, Elizabeth Gaskell

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I'm a big fan of Elizabeth Gaskell's North & South and Wives & Daughters. I have to admit, Cranford left me nonplused. Gaskell wrote and published these episodes of life among spinsters and widows in an English town as a serial in a magazine, and they do not quite hold together enough to be read together as a short novel.

 

There is some insight, some light comedy (mostly in the beginning and the end when the waggish, good-natured men are about). I think the best I can say, however, is that I give Gaskell credit for taking a character like Miss Matty who would otherwise be sidelined and treating her with the depth and sensitivity usually reserved for a main character. It's a bit like if Austen had written Emma from the perspective of Miss Bates...

E.M. Forster Short Stories, Aspects of the Novel

Short Stories

I am a huge fan of E.M. Forster’s novels, in particular Howard’s End, which I think is one of the more perfect books I have ever read. I’ve been catching up on his short stories, written (mostly?) early in his career, the most striking of which is his surprising foray into Science Fiction with “The Machine Stops.” You don’t think of the author of A Room with a View as having written Science Fiction, but there it is: Forster’s thought experiment into a future state of humanity where people have isolated themselves in honeycomb cells beneath the surface of the earth where all their needs are met by the press of a button. The inhabitants amuse themselves by giving and listening to lectures. There is a scathing critique of the academic veneration of citing sources, the more the better, as one’s authority:

Those who still wanted to know what the earth was like had after all only to listen to some gramophone, or to look into some cinematophote. And even the lecturers acquiesced when they found that a lecture on the sea was none the less stimulating when compiled out of other lectures that had already been delivered on the same subject. "Beware of first- hand ideas!" exclaimed one of the most advanced of them. "First-hand ideas do not really exist. They are but the physical impressions produced by live and fear, and on this gross foundation who could erect a philosophy? Let your ideas be second-hand, and if possible tenth-hand, for then they will be far removed from that disturbing element - direct observation. Do not learn anything about this subject of mine - the French Revolution. Learn instead what I think that Enicharmon thought Urizen thought Gutch thought Ho-Yung thought Chi-Bo-Sing thought LafcadioHearn thought Carlyle thought Mirabeau said about the French Revolution. Through the medium of these ten great minds, the blood that was shed at Paris and the windows that were broken at Versailles will be clarified to an idea which you may employ most profitably in your daily lives. But be sure that the intermediates are many and varied, for in history one authority exists to counteract another. Urizen must counteract the scepticism of Ho-Yung and Enicharmon, I must myself counteract the impetuosity of Gutch. You who listen to me are in a better position to judge about the French Revolution than I am. Your descendants will be even in a better position than you, for they will learn what you think I think, and yet another intermediate will be added to the chain…

It is essentially an argument against the tendency of the intellect to prize abstraction over real experience, which comes out in other Forster short stories and his early novels, such as Longest Journey and A Room with a View, although here he handles the same theme with more subtly. Unfortunately D.H. Lawrence was starting to write not long after, and he takes this idea of the primacy of physical experience to a degree that would have appalled Forster’s more refined sensibilities. Stephen in Longest Journey, to me, reads like a prototype sketch for Oliver Mellors in Lady Chatterly’s Lover. The problem I have with it is that I think the premise is essentially flawed, in the same way that I have little patience with Tolstoy’s veneration of the peasant life (contrast this with the peasant woman who has taken on the characteristics of the animals she has tended all her life in Flaubert’s Madam Bovary). I can appreciate that Forster and Lawrence were reacting to a repressed culture they found stultifying, but I don’t believe that living close to the land, sleeping out at night under the stars, or running naked through the woods, make for an ideal, thriving, happy man. It may be vivifying and get the fidgets out if you have spent too much of your life in an English drawing room, but I think the emphasis on bodily experience ought to be balancing, rather than a way of being an end in itself.

Most of Forster’s short stories center around bright young hero/heroines who look like precursors to Ricky Elliot and (more importantly) Lucy Honeychurch for whom there is an in-breaking of some fantastical experience (usually from classical mythology, but it could be a celestial omnibus, or stepping through a hedge into Eden) that is impossible to communicate to their straight-laced, traditional world. The stories are interesting as thought-experiments, but I find them less powerful than his later novels in which contact with others (of a different culture, or class) is the “alien” element that jars the sensitive person out of complacency. In the short stories the protagonists seem unable to reconcile the different worlds and fall back in on themselves, so to speak. In the novels, the protagonists are changed and forced to make new choices that reverberate throughout their social surroundings. 

Aspects of the Novel

I greatly enjoyed reading Forster’s 1927 lectures on English literature, now collected under the heading, Aspects of the Novel. Like most of Forster’s writing, the tone is elegant and witty in a way that makes you go back and read sentences again, and it is a marvelously enjoyable read for this alone. Forster has a unique approach – at least one I haven’t seen before – in which he asks his audience to temporarily forget historicity and imagine all the authors of English literature seated at a round table, writing side-by-side at the same time. He then selects and compares unlikely “pairs” (Samuel Richardson and Henry James, H.G. Wells and Charles Dickens, Lawrence Sterne and Virginia Woolf), quoting a paragraph from each to show similarities that apparently transcend period setting. I found Forster’s discussion of the uses of “flat” and “round” characters and his distinction between “story” and “plot” to be interesting. He is also very good at articulating what it is about certain novelists that one senses by gut: why Jane Austen is brilliant, why Dostoevsky’s writing has more depth than George Eliot’s.

One curious piece is his brief discussion of Proust’s work, the final volume of which had yet to be translated and released at the time of the lectures. He mentions that some people expected it would finally, stunningly, tie up all the loose ends and draw together the themes of the previous books, but Forster (correctly) prognosticates “…it will be surprising if we have to revise our opinion of the whole book. The book [as a whole] is chaotic, ill-constructed, it has and will have no external shape; and yet it hangs together because it is stitched internally, because it contains rhythms.”

Link to Amazon

Forster’s Biography

I recently finished Wendy Moffat’s biography (2011) of E.M. Forster, which was fascinating. Forster strikes me as such a beautiful person, even though he struggled with his repressive background and emerging homosexual identity. Many other people would have been warped by this, but Forster managed to come out somehow as an exceptional gentle, clear-headed, thoughtful person. He was able to translate his own yearnings for authenticity (what Moffat calls “the tug-of-war between propriety and personal freedom”) into Lucy, and Margaret, and, of course, Maurice. He was passionate about connecting with other people, particularly those of a different class or race. Writing to his Muslim Indian friend Masood about World War I, he said, “All one can do in this world of maniacs is to pick up the poor tortured broken people and try to mend them” (Moffat, A Great Unrecorded Life: A New Life of E.M. Forster, p 125).

One of the most fascinating things to me about Forster is that he wrote practically everything he is known for (except Maurice, which was published posthumously due to its content) by the time he was 30, with Passage to India following 14 years later, but he lived into his early 90s, so most of his biography is not, in fact, about his writing, even though he is best known as a writer, which makes for an interesting story. My own sense is that, as Mr. Beebe says, "If Miss Honeychurch ever takes to live as she plays [the piano], it will be very exciting both for us and for her” (A Room with a View, Ch. 3), and that Forster found a way to do just that.

Scarlet Letter, Nathaniel Hawthorne

      Inspired by the revelatory sensation of discovering Gatsby again, I went back to another high school American Lit. classic in the hopes that it would resonate with me as an adult in a way that it did not as a teenager: no such luck. Whereas with Gatsby I had remembered only a fuzzy sense of a plot and most colorful characters, I remembered practically everything in Scarlet Letter: the story, all the characters, even many of the chapter titles, and it didn’t ring any new bells for me, except, perhaps, for a more mature (if grudging) empathy with the burden of a bad conscience and trials of parenting.

     I think one of the challenges of Scarlet Letter is that I am here in the 21^st century, reading Hawthorne’s work from the 19^th, about events that are supposed to have taken place in the 17^th, and sexual mores have changed so much between each time period. I have trouble relating to Hawthorne’s sense of justice that the lovers must endlessly suffer in life, and I find Hawthorne’s depiction of his characters, particularly Hester’s positive conviction that God has forgiven her, anachronistic to the Puritan society she inhabits. Simply leaving the New England community that has ostracized her seems like a sensible thing to do, both in the beginning when Hester first contemplates it, and then at the end, when Hester and Arthur make plans to go away, and although Hawthorne gives multiple explanations as to why not in the first case and invents a plot-point in the second, it feels like the author forcing them to stay put for the sake of his story, rather than something integral that comes out of the characters. There is one thread at the end of Hawthorne’s long justification for Hester’s inaction – the suggestion that perhaps she wants to stay close to where her lover is, even though there will be nothing more between them – and I think he might have developed this into something more: a tragic sense of being tied to things we know are not good for us? But it’s only a whiff, and one of the most surprising things to me about Scarlet Letter is how cold the protagonists are (interiorly, to each other), even though Hawthorne drops phrases like “passionate nature”. I suppose this is to make each of them more admirable, but self-control can only be appreciated by an outside observer when it shows signs of cracking. Perhaps Hester and Dimsdale worked for a 19^th century reader. I find Hester proud, Dimsdale weak, and both of them masochistic and self-indulgent in their determination to dwell on and shape their lives around one past event, even if it was A Big Sin. But there I am in the 21^st century: move on. Think about other people. Get over yourselves.

     Not that Hawthorne will let them, since almost all of the events of the book are centered around the appearance of the letter A. I am not a big fan of motifs, “leit” or heavy, in literature, and this is one of the heaviest… In general, I find the use of recurring images or phrases somewhat lazy: instead of finding multiple ways to circle around the same thought or theme, the author merely plugs in the symbolic element with little variation. What I can appreciate is that Hawthorne is trying to set up a world in which whatever these characters do, they are haunted by their conscience. Even if they wanted to forget, the people around them, even Nature, or Chance, conspire to make this impossible, but it is painfully unsubtle, and at the cost of maintaining genuine interest in the story. The reader is rarely, if ever, driven to ask, “What happens next?” because we are already assured it will be yet another plot-isolated vignette in which little Pearl annoyingly makes or points out the letter A. On the other hand, a really good novel, I think, would have had a strong character-driven plot containing elements of suspense or mystery (who is Roger Chillingsworth? What is he up to?) and the adultery theme could have appeared throughout as a sort of secondary plot-line or recurring image.

     Hawthorne makes a strong (and welcome) case for the role of the “wounded-healer” in Dimsdale and later in Hester, who both seem able to reach people at a deeper level because of their own consciousness of sinfulness. I don’t know how to take the ending suggestion, then, that a future prophetess, without sin, should herald in a new age:

“Women, more especially,—in the continually recurring trials of wounded, wasted, wronged, misplaced, or erring and sinful passion,—or with the dreary burden of a heart unyielded, because unvalued and unsought,—came to Hester’s cottage, demanding why they were so wretched, and what the remedy! Hester comforted and counselled them, as best she might. She assured them, too, of her firm belief, that, at some brighter period, when the world should have grown ripe for it, in Heaven’s own time, a new truth would be revealed, in order to establish the whole relation between man and woman on a surer ground of mutual happiness. Earlier in life, Hester had vainly imagined that she herself might be the destined prophetess, but had long since recognized the impossibility that any mission of divine and mysterious truth should be confided to a woman stained with sin, bowed down with shame, or even burdened with a life-long sorrow. The angel and apostle of the coming revelation must be a woman, indeed, but lofty, pure, and beautiful; and wise; moreover, not through dusky grief, but the ethereal medium of joy; and showing how sacred love should make us happy, by the truest test of a life successful to such an end!” – Ch. 24

No doubt someone else has a better understand of this than I do; it leaves me mystified, and seems to undercut the sober reality of the book in which no one leads a wholly blameless life and those most conscious of the fact are best able to minister to their neighbors. 

     I did find “The Custom House” prologue interesting (and mildly amusing) this time around. I thought what he had to say about being a writer with a job was interesting: it’s good for a writer to have a job because it exposes you to other people and habits; on the other hand, it’s bad because your brain atrophies. When he goes on to say he only works 3 ½ hours at the custom house, my sympathy wanes severely. There is also a Paul Ryan-esque rant about government jobs making people soft, which reminded me of reading Thoreau’s “Civil Disobedience” recently and being struck by how “Tea Party” they both sound. The same grievances and arguments (why should a community feel itself obligated to help individuals who should, in theory, be able to help themselves) have been around for a long time in American history.

     I sighed and closed the book on Scarlet Letter wistfully thinking instead of a quote from a novel I would rather have been reading, E.M. Forester’s A Room with a View:

"Leave them alone," Mr. Emerson begged the chaplain, of whom he stood in no awe. "Do we find happiness so often that we should turn it off the box when it happens to sit there?” – Ch. 6