May 22, 2013
TT: Snapshot
Benno Moiseiwitsch plays excerpts from Schumann's Fantasiestücke, Op. 12:
(This is the latest in a series of arts-related videos that appear in this space each Monday and Wednesday.)
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TT: Almanac
"I only wanted to suggest to you that self-sacrifice is a passion so overwhelming that beside it even lust and hunger are trifling. It whirls its victim to destruction in the highest affirmation of his personality. The object doesn't matter; it may be worthwhile or it may be worthless. No wine is more intoxicating, no love so shattering, no vice so compelling."
Somerset Maugham, The Razor's Edge
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May 21, 2013
TT: Excelsior!
In 2010 Mrs. T and I moved to Hudson Heights, the highest natural point on the island of Manhattan. To get there from Washington Heights, you have to ascend a steep staircase, and in the spring of 2011 I incorporated it into my daily walk. Nothing could possibly have been better for a middle-aged man of decidedly sedentary habits. Alas, the winter just past was so miserable and prolonged that I fell off the wagon and gave up walking altogether. Today, though, spring returned to New York with so decisive a splash of sunshine that I put on my walking shoes and hit the road again.
I snapped this picture as I stood at the foot of the staircase, preparing to bite the bullet. You'll note the presence of an ambulance from our neighborhood hospital. It wasn't there for me, nor did I need it when I got to the top of the stairs, but it did serve as a pointed reminder of why I walk.
No, it wasn't easy for me to slog up those one hundred and twenty-eight steps after so long a layoff. Nevertheless, I did it--and I plan to do it again tomorrow.
* * *
The Ahmad Jamal Trio plays "Spring Is Here" in 1955:
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TT: The face of Duke
Emily Wunderlich of Gotham Books just sent me the final version of the front cover of Duke: A Life of Duke Ellington. I posted an earlier version a couple of months ago, but the new image is the real thing: Duke will look like this when you see it in bookstores in October.
It was Steven Lasker, the great Ellington scholar-collector, who first showed me this rarely reproduced image and suggested that it would make an ideal cover for Duke, not only because it's so visually striking but because it shows the scar on Ellington's left cheek more clearly than any other photograph I know. Ellington acquired that scar in 1929, not long before he made his sound-film debut in Black and Tan, and in Duke I explain how he got it.
Here's the story, straight from the as-yet-unpublished pages of Duke. It is, if I do say so myself, quite a tale.
* * *
Black and Tan marked--literally--a transition in Ellington's private life. From 1929 on his left cheek bore a prominent crescent-shaped scar that is easily visible in the film's last scene (and in the photograph reproduced on the cover of this book). Though rarely mentioned by journalists, it made fans curious enough that he felt obliged to "explain" its presence in Music Is My Mistress, his autobiography:
I have four stories about it, and it depends on which you like the best. One is a taxicab accident; another is that I slipped and fell on a broken bottle; then there is a jealous woman; and last is Old Heidelberg, where they used to stand toe to toe with a saber in each hand, and slash away. The first man to step back lost the contest, no matter how many times he'd sliced the other. Take your pick.None of Ellington's friends and colleagues was in doubt about which one to pick. In Irving Mills's words, "Women was one of the highlights in his life. He had to have women....He always had a woman, always kept a woman here, kept a woman there, always had somebody." Most men who treat women that way are destined to suffer at their hands sooner or later, if not necessarily in so sensational a fashion as Ellington, whose wife attacked him with a razor when she found out that he was sleeping with another woman.
Who was she? All signs point to Fredi Washington. The costar of Black and Tan had launched her theatrical career in 1922 as a dancer in the chorus of the original production of Eubie Blake's Shuffle Along. Sonny Greer later described her as "the most beautiful woman" he had ever seen. "She had gorgeous skin, perfect features, green eyes, and a great figure. When she smiled, that was it!" Washington was light enough to pass for white but adamantly refused to do so, a decision that made it impossible for her to establish herself in Hollywood, though she appeared with Paul Robeson in Dudley Murphy's 1933 film of Eugene O'Neill's The Emperor Jones (for which her skin was darkened with makeup) and starred in Imitation of Life, a 1934 tearjerker in which she played, with mortifying predictability, a light-skinned black who passed for white.
Ellington never spoke on the record about their romantic involvement, but Washington later admitted to the film historian Donald Bogle that she and Ellington had been lovers: "I just had to accept that he wasn't going to marry me. But I wasn't going to be his mistress." Their relationship was widely known at the time in the entertainment world, enough so that Mercer Ellington could write in his 1979 memoir of "a torrid love affair Pop had with a very talented and beautiful woman, an actress. I think this was a genuine romance, that there was love on both sides, and that it amounted to one of the most serious relationships of his life."
Edna, Ellington's wife, was no more forthcoming than Duke, saying only that she was "hurt, bad hurt when the breakup came" and referring to the affair in an interview published in Ebony in 1959 with an obliqueness worthy of her wayward husband: "Ellington thought I should have been more understanding of him....Any young girl who plans to marry a man in public life--a man who belongs to the public--should try to understand as much about the demands of show business first and not be like I was." In point of fact, though, her lack of "understanding" extended to slashing her husband's face. That she did so is certain, but nothing else is definitely known about the assault. "Something happened between [Ellington] and his wife and he's been terrible with women ever since," Lawrence Brown said. "I mean, like he's always trying to make somebody's wife, because somebody made his wife and they got in such a fight, that slash he has on the side of his face, she cut him while he was sleeping, with a razor."
Brown was a presumptively biased witness, since he later married Fredi, becoming one of a number of Ellington sidemen (five, Mercer claimed) who took up with their boss's ex-girlfriends at one time or another. But Barney Bigard also testified that the Ellingtons were mutually unfaithful, describing Edna's boyfriend as "quite a figure in the music world." Regarding the act itself, an unnamed "close friend" of Ellington told a biographer that Edna had vowed to "spoil those pretty looks" before cutting him, a secondhand account that is obviously unverifiable but nonetheless sounds believable....
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TT: Lookback
From 2005:
Somewhere along the way, I muttered the all-too-familiar mantra of the busy New Yorker returned from a brief visit to elsewhere: It isn't worth it. You might as well stay home. Only I knew better. Even when you leave town on business, as I did this past weekend, at least you're somewhere else. No, it's not a vacation, but it's different, a stick of dynamite that blasts you out of your accustomed ways of doing things. Instead of dining on the Upper West Side and hailing a cab at exactly 7:20, I visit unfamiliar restaurants, sleep in unfamiliar beds, see actors I've never seen before, meet and greet new faces. I come home refreshed and inspired...and then I sit down at the kitchen table and start tearing open envelopes.Read the whole thing here.
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TT: Almanac
"I saw a tall man, evidently an Englishman, come in with a young rough. He had the long, washed-out face with thinning wavy hair of the British intellectual and evidently suffered from the delusion common to many that when you are abroad no one you know at home can possibly recognize you."
Somerset Maugham, The Razor's Edge
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May 20, 2013
TT: In the beginning
When Mrs. T and I went to see Francis Poulenc's Dialogues of the Carmelites at the Metropolitan Opera last week, the program contained a New York City Ballet ad that was illustrated by a still photograph of the finale from George Balanchine's The Four Temperaments, a ballet choreographed in 1946 to a score that Balanchine had commissioned six years earlier from Paul Hindemith. No sooner did my eye fall on the page than my mind filled with memories. I think that The Four Ts (as it is known to dancers and dance buffs) is the greatest of all ballets, and one of the greatest works of art of any kind, in any genre. I've seen it more often than any other ballet, and I've never done so without seeing new things in it.
I love what Jerome Robbins said about the coda of The Four Temperaments: "At the end, where there are those great soaring lifts, I always feel as if I am watching some momentous departure--like interplanetary travellers taking their leave of the world." This is what I wrote about the same moment in All in the Dances, my Balanchine biography: "To me, it is as if I have beheld the working out of a fearsomely complex equation whose triumphant solution causes the universe to explode into being."
If seeing a ballet can change your life, then The Four Temperaments changed mine. In the fall of 1987 I saw a PBS documentary about Balanchine that contained excerpts from several of his ballets, including a lengthy sequence from "Melancholic," the second section of The Four Temperaments. I was so fascinated by it--as I had already been fascinated by what Arlene Croce wrote about Balanchine in her New Yorker dance reviews--that I resolved to see for myself what his works looked like in the theater.
What followed was an instantaneous conversion: I bought a cheap seat for a New York City Ballet performance a few weeks later, and before the year was out, I was hanging out with dance critics and writing about dance for the late, lamented New Dance Review. Who would have thought that seventeen years later, I would write a Balanchine biography? Life is full of unimaginable surprises.
New York City Ballet taped a performance of The Four Temperaments for PBS in 1977, and it has since been released on home video. But Smalltown, U.S.A., was far beyond the reach of public television in 1977, and so I had to wait another decade before discovering Balanchine. I sometimes wonder what my life would have been like had I seen The Four Ts on TV when I was eleven years old.
Mr. B, as his dancers called him, has been on my mind ever since I reviewed Richard Nelson's Nikolai and the Others, in which Michael Cerveris, one of my favorite actors, plays the choreographer. I had various problems with the script, but none with Cerveris, and watching him on stage filled me with an overwhelming desire to see Balanchine's choreography in the theater again.
Mrs. T, sad to say, has seen next to no Balanchine--we met after my duties as a drama critic made it difficult for me to attend dance performances--and so I checked the NYCB calendar and saw that the company will be dancing three of the best ones, Concerto Barocco, Stravinsky Violin Concerto, and Stars and Stripes on June 9. We'll be there.
Would that The Four Ts were on the bill, but this program will do quite nicely, especially since Barocco was the first dance that I saw on that fateful night in 1987 when I made Mr. B's acquaintance. It'll be nice to see it again, and nicer still to introduce it to Mrs. T. All pleasures are better when they're shared.
* * *
Choreography by Balanchine, Part One, originally telecast on PBS in 1977. The works performed are Tzigane, an excerpt from Divertimento No. 15, and The Four Temperaments:
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TT: Just because
Donald Wolfit and Hildegarde Knef in a scene from Svengali, the 1954 film version of George Du Maurier's novel, written and directed by Noel Langley:
(This is the latest in a series of arts-related videos that appear in this space each Monday and Wednesday.)
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TT: Almanac
"The author should shut his mouth when his work opens its mouth."
Friedrich Nietzsche, Mixed Opinions and Maxims (courtesy of Alex Ross)
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May 17, 2013
TT: "Thus I turn my back"
Today's Wall Street Journal drama column is devoted in its entirety to a Washington show, the Shakespeare Theatre Company's new production of Coriolanus. Here's a excerpt.
* * *
Why has "Coriolanus" never been popular? It's only been mounted once on Broadway--in 1938. The last time that I reviewed a production in this space was eight years ago. Yet connoisseurs need no reminding of the immense stature of Shakespeare's most explicitly political play. T.S. Eliot ranked "Coriolanus" above "Hamlet," calling it "Shakespeare's most assured artistic success." A man I know who used to work for one of America's best-known politicians claims that it's one of only two pieces of literary art that tells the whole truth about politics (the other, he says, is "All the King's Men"). And if you should be lucky enough to see Shakespeare Theatre Company's new production, directed by David Muse and featuring a towering performance by Patrick Page, you'll come away wondering why it doesn't get done regularly by every drama company in America....
Mr. Muse has opted for a modified modern-dress staging ("suits and swords," in his neat phrase) that eschews cheap political point-making. He's gunning for bigger game. He understands that "Coriolanus" is not about any particular politician, or any particular war: Its real subject is pride. Is there room in a democracy for an aristocrat like Coriolanus who refuses to play the popularity game? Or is it his duty to don the hypocrite's mask in order to serve the greater good? Shakespeare leaves it to us to decide, and so does Mr. Muse.
All of which brings us to Mr. Page, who is known on Broadway as a specialist in villainy. In recent seasons he's done the dirty in "Cyrano de Bergerac," "A Man for All Seasons" and "Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark," in which he played, of all things, the Green Goblin. But he's no second banana: Mr. Page is one of this country's leading classical actors, and in "Coriolanus" he shows you everything he's got, starting with a resplendent bass voice so well placed that he can fill the theater with a whisper, then make your seat shake. He is, in the very best sense of the word, an old-fashioned actor who has no fear of the grand gesture....
* * *
Read the whole thing here.
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TT: Almanac
"Of all the cants that are canted in this world, though the cant of hypocrites may be the worst, the cant of criticism is the most tormenting."
Laurence Sterne, Tristram Shandy
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May 16, 2013
TT: In the mirror
Gotham Books sent me the "first-pass pages" of Duke: A Life of Duke Ellington yesterday afternoon. Translated into English, that means a two-inch stack of photocopied pages containing the typeset text of Duke, fully designed and copyedited but as yet uncorrected by me. You may have heard these pages referred to as "page proofs," a term that I'm still in the habit of using.
No matter how many books you've seen through the press, you always feel a surge of excitement when you get your first look at a set of your own page proofs. (I actually got weak in the knees when I opened the envelope.) Until that moment, you don't know what the text of your book will look like to the people who read it. Then, in an instant, it becomes real--and fresh.
In my case, I spent so much time painstakingly editing and polishing the manuscript of Duke that it eventually went dead on me: I could still follow the text sentence by sentence, but I lost my ability to hear how it sounded. Now that the book is finally set in type, it's come back to life again.
I stayed up late last night reading the page proofs of Duke, and I liked what I read. Needless to say, it helped that they look so good--Elke Sigal's typographical design is flat-out gorgeous, and I'm no less happy with the illustrations--but I'll admit to being equally pleased with the text, at least for now.
To be sure, I doubt that Ellington himself would have cared for the book. He was far too secretive to appreciate a biography that told the truth about his complicated life. As I wrote in the prologue to Duke:
The rage, the humiliation, the unbridled sensuality: All were kept far from prying eyes. His fans saw only what he wished them to see, and nothing more. So did his colleagues. "I think all the musicians should get together one certain day and get down on their knees and thank Duke," said Miles Davis. Yet to Ellington's own musicians, he was a riddle without an answer, an unknowable man who hid behind a high wall of ornate utterances and flowery compliments that grew higher as he grew older.Still, I like to think that Ellington might at least have appreciated the fact that I took his life and work with the utmost seriousness, and tried to write about them in a way that mirrors, however dimly, the beauty of his music.
Can I make Duke even better? Maybe--but not for long. I have two weeks to make my final corrections to the text. After that, I'm done. It's time.
UPDATE: I started correcting the page proofs this afternoon, and the first thing I saw was a mixed metaphor...on the third page. It's going to be a long day.
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TT: So you want to see a show?
Here's my list of recommended Broadway, off-Broadway, and out-of-town shows, updated weekly. In all cases, I gave these shows favorable reviews (if sometimes qualifiedly so) in The Wall Street Journal when they opened. For more information, click on the title.
BROADWAY:
• Annie (musical, G, reviewed here)
• Matilda (musical, G, all performances sold out last week, reviewed here)
• The Nance (play with music, PG-13, extended through Aug. 11, reviewed here)
• Once (musical, G/PG-13, most performances sold out last week, reviewed here)
• The Trip to Bountiful (drama, G, extended through Sept. 1, reviewed here)
• Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike (comedy, PG-13, remounting of off-Broadway production, extended through July 28, original production reviewed here)OFF BROADWAY:
• Avenue Q (musical, R, adult subject matter and one show-stopping scene of puppet-on-puppet sex, reviewed here)
• The Fantasticks (musical, G, suitable for children capable of enjoying a love story, reviewed here)CLOSING NEXT WEEK OFF BROADWAY:
• Women of Will (Shakespearean lecture-recital, G/PG-13, closes May 26, reviewed here)CLOSING NEXT WEEK IN CHICAGO:
• Pal Joey (musical, PG-13, closing May 26, reviewed here)CLOSING SUNDAY IN CHICAGO:
• Woman in Mind (serious comedy, PG-13, reviewed here)CLOSING SUNDAY IN WESTPORT, CONN.:
• The Dining Room (serious comedy, PG-13, reviewed here)CLOSING SUNDAY ON BROADWAY:
• Orphans (drama, PG-13, reviewed here)Posted at 12:00 AM | permalink | email this entry
TT: Almanac
"Criticism is a study by which men grow important and formidable at very small expense."
Samuel Johnson, The Idler (June 9, 1759)
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May 15, 2013
TT: Snapshot
"The Cat Concerto," directed by Bill Hanna and Joe Barbera, released in 1947:
(This is the latest in a series of arts-related videos that appear in this space each Monday and Wednesday.)
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TT: Almanac
"It is meat and drink to me to see a clown."
William Shakespeare, As You Like It
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May 14, 2013
TT: Eyeroller
Yes, I read SkyMall whenever I fly, and on my last flight I ran across this listing for a product described as "The Wordsmith's Manual Typewriter":
This is the manual typewriter that recalls the thoughtful, well-written correspondence of yesteryear. Devoid of technological crutches such as spellcheck and deletion, each of its 44 keys requires a firm, purposeful stroke for a steady click-clacking cadence that encourages the patient, considered sentiment of a wordsmith who thinks before writing. It faithfully reproduces the eclectic printed impressions of its forebears--variable kerning, subtly ghosted letters, and nuanced baseline shifts--imparting unique, personal character to every letter or verse of poetry.So you, too, can now purchase a Retro-Ironic Manual Typewriter for just $199.95!
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TT: Lookback
From 2006:
I had a nightmare in Chicago last weekend, a few hours after seeing a performance of Gore Vidal's The Best Man, in which one of the characters tells an old friend that he's dying. A couple of weeks before that, I'd seen Breaker Morant, a movie that ends with an explicitly gory firing-squad scene, and in between I had occasion to chat with a friend about Dialogues of the Carmelites, the Poulenc opera whose climax is a procession to the guillotine by a group of nuns who have been condemned to death by a revolutionary tribunal. All these experiences somehow became scrambled in my head, and I dreamed that I was watching a long line of nuns who were being led one by one into an adjacent room, where an unseen executioner shot them to death. At some point in the dream, I realized that I was standing in the same line...Read the whole thing here.
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TT: Almanac
"What most people relish is hardly music; it is rather a drowsy reverie relieved by nervous thrills."
George Santayana, The Life of Reason
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May 13, 2013
TT: The persistence of memory
Nowadays I review so many plays and musicals, both in New York and elsewhere, that it's growing more and more difficult for me to find the time to attend live performances of any other kind. Mrs. T, who loves music as much as I do but prefers to hear it in person, frequently expresses wistful regret at this state of affairs, so I decided to take her to the opera--and not just any opera, either, but the Metropolitan Opera's revival of John Dexter's 1977 production of Francis Poulenc's Dialogues of the Carmelites.
Dexter's Dialogues is one of the greatest stage productions of any kind, operatic or otherwise, that I've had the good fortune to see in my entire theatergoing life. Mrs. T saw it once, a quarter-century ago. (This was the performance that she saw.) I've seen it twice, most recently in 2002. When I suggested that we go again, she squealed with delight.
I blush to admit that the last time I went to the Met--or, indeed, to any performance of an opera not written by me--was in 2009, when I saw Puccini's Trittico. One of the stars of that production was Patricia Racette, the soprano who created the role of Leslie Crosbie in The Letter, my first operatic collaboration with Paul Moravec. Pat, as it happens, is also in the Met's revival of Dlalogues. When I saw the opera there in 2002, she played Blanche, a young woman from an aristocratic family who joins a Carmelite convent whose nuns are guillotined at the height of the French Revolution. This time around she played Madame Lidoine, the convent's newly elected prioress.
Pat was born in 1965, nine years after me. I saw her perform for the first time in 1998, when she replaced Renée Fleming (who in turn had replaced Angela Gheorghiu) in Franco Zeffirelli's then-new Met production of La Traviata. I reviewed that performance for the New York Daily News, and flung my hat as far into the air as I could:
Racette is no airheaded coloratura canary, but an outstandingly gifted singing actress who uses her bright, vibrant voice as an instrument of high drama. She caught the hectic desperation just below the surface of the forced gaiety of "Sempre libera," and moved boldly from the black despair of "Addio del passato" to the heart-tearing false hope of the death scene. The wild cheering at evening's end was fully deserved: Rarely has an American soprano made so much of so great an opportunity.While I have a reasonably active imagination, it never occurred to me that night that I would write an opera of my own for Pat eleven years later. Even then I was more than old enough to know that life is full of surprises, but that particular surprise was far beyond my power to conceive.
Now that I have two opera libretti under my belt and a third one in the works, it seemed appropriate to be sitting again in the Metropolitan Opera House, watching Pat assume a new, more mature role in Dialogues. To be sure, it was also sobering--a reminder of my own advancing age--but I don't think it's such a bad thing to be forced on occasion to reflect on such matters. No, I'm not as young as I used to be, but I'm still kicking, and the surprises, at least so far, keep on coming.
As for Dialogues of the Carmelites, I find the Met's production to be as moving today as I did in 1994 and 2002. In 2004 I saw yet another production, this one by the New York City Opera, and blogged about it no less enthusiastically. Nine years later the opera itself means even more to me, if possible, just as Poulenc's music continues to grow closer to my heart. I wrote about him in The Wall Street Journal a few months ago, and what I said then still goes:
Poulenc himself aspired to being nothing more than (as he put it) "an almost great composer." What he ended up being was France's last indisputably major classical composer, a full-fledged master who was capable of effortlessly expressing the full range of human emotion without lapsing into empty grandiloquence. If that doesn't make him great, then the word means nothing.
What I love best about his music is the way in which, like so many other French masters, it says serious things in a seemingly light way. Dialogues is like that. It is, of course, deadly serious, but the score is never heavy in tone, not even at the very end. Here as always, Poulenc says what he has to say with elegance and lucidity, and his grave reflections on a horrific tragedy are all the more touching for it.
It amused me, by the way, to note that the Met performed Götterdämmerung earlier that same day. Whatever you may think of the music of Richard Wagner, I somehow doubt that the words "light," "elegance," or "lucidity" are likely to figure prominently in your thoughts. Wagner is, I know, a greater master than Poulenc, but I don't think that matters in the least. It is Poulenc who speaks most powerfully to me, and I'm glad that it was Poulenc who welcomed Mrs. T and me back to the Met after too long an absence.
* * *
The finale of John Dexter's Metropolitan Opera production of Dialogues of the Carmelites, telecast on PBS in 1987. The role of Blanche is sung by Maria Ewing:
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