Terry Teachout on the arts in New York City
“The larger revelation of the transcendent gifts of Mozart is a crying need in our present condition of dubious culture and civilisation. His spirit, more than that of any other composer, is made of that stuff which can provide the most telling and efficacious antidote to the chaotic thought and action of a blatant age.”
Thomas Beecham, program note, 1937 (quoted in John Lucas, Thomas Beecham: An Obsession with Music)
The original theatrical trailer for The Heiress, William Wyler’s 1949 screen version of the 1947 stage adaptation by Ruth and Augustus Goetz of Henry James’ Washington Square, starring Olivia de Havilland, Montgomery Clift, and Ralph Richardson:
(This is the latest in a series of arts-related videos that appear in this space each Monday, Wednesday, and Friday)
“Then the mixture was to be stirred to the tune of perpetual motion and served, under pain of being rejected with disgust, with the time-honoured bread-sauce of the happy ending.”
Henry James, preface to Theatricals: Second Series
Twelve years ago I ate my Thanksgiving dinner at Good Enough to Eat and pretended to be content in my singleton’s solitude, refusing to admit that my heart was sick in more ways than one. Three weeks later I called an ambulance for myself, and the woman who is now my beloved wife showed up in my hospital room two days later. We’ve been together ever since—but today we’re fifteen hundred miles apart.
Mrs. T is up in Vermont with her family. As for me, I’m dining with Bill Hayes and Sue Ellen Beryl, the married couple who jointly run Palm Beach Dramaworks, where Billy and Me will be opening two weeks from now. To be sure, Bill and Sue Ellen are far more than mere colleagues: I love them both dearly, and will take much comfort in sharing their family’s dinner. But it’s been a long time, longer than I can remember, since Mrs. T and I were last apart on Thanksgiving, and to say that I miss her is to greatly understate the case.
I am one of those fortunate sons who had a happy childhood full of warmly remembered holidays, and who for that reason have come to find those same holidays increasingly difficult in middle age. As I wrote in this space after my mother died in 2012:
Most of us outlive our parents, and once we do, the winter holidays become, among many other things, a reminder of what we’ve lost. Perhaps those who had unhappy childhoods feel differently, but when I was a boy, the holidays were always a time of shadowless delight. Throughout my youth and long past it, my mother’s family, which was both large and close, gathered at my grandmother’s house to celebrate Thanksgiving and Christmas Eve at groaning tables full of savory goodies. Now those days are gone.
What makes this difficult season tolerable, as I wrote in 2012, is “the strong and enduring joy that Mrs. T and I, against all odds, have found in one another in the middle of our lives. We have much to be thankful for, and we know it.” That, of course, makes it harder still for me to be so far away from my life’s companion, though it also heightens my already-intense awareness of the great good fortune that brought the two of us together in an indifferent universe where chance is in the saddle and rides mankind. The fact that we are physically separated today does not weaken in the least the tie that binds us.
For this—forever—much thanks.
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:
• The Band’s Visit (musical, PG-13, all shows sold out last week, reviewed here)
• Dear Evan Hansen (musical, PG-13, all shows sold out last week, reviewed here)
• Hamilton (musical, PG-13, Broadway transfer of off-Broadway production, all shows sold out last week, reviewed here)
OFF BROADWAY:
• The Home Place (drama, PG-13, extended through Dec. 17, reviewed here)
• Pride and Prejudice (comedy, G, remounting of Hudson Valley Shakespeare Festival production, extended through Jan. 6, original production reviewed here)
CLOSING SOON OFF BROADWAY:
• The Portuguese Kid (comedy, PG-13, closes Dec. 10, reviewed here)
“I dare say, to concluded, that whenever, in quest, as I have noted, of the amusing, I have invoked the horrific, I have invoked it, in such air as that of ‘The Turn of the Screw,’ that of ‘The Jolly Corner,’ that of ‘The Friends of the Friends,’ that of ‘Sir Edmund Orme,’ that of ‘The Real Right Thing,’ in earnest aversion to waste and from the sense that in art economy is always beauty.”
Henry James, preface to “The Altar of the Dead”
George Avakian’s contribution to the history of jazz was significant beyond reckoning. He produced the first true jazz album in 1940, while he was still an undergraduate at Yale. He quarried Columbia Records’ back catalogue to create the first major-label series of jazz reissues, starting with King Louis, a album of classic 78 sides by Louis Armstrong, to whom he eventually became personally close. By the Fifties he had emerged as a record producer of supreme importance, working with such artists as Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Miles Davis, Tony Bennett, Dave Brubeck, Paul Desmond, Erroll Garner, Benny Goodman, Gerry Mulligan, and Sonny Rollins.
As Avakian’s career wound down, he evolved into an elder statesman of the music he loved, the man to whom you went in order to turn back time and find out what it had been like to work with the greats. I spent many hours interviewing him in preparation for the writing of Pops and Duke and found him to be utterly genial, wonderfully discursive, and the nicest of men with whom to spend time.
George remained so vital for so long that it was hard to grasp that he had been born in 1919, just two years after the Original Dixieland Jazz Band cut the first jazz recordings. The notion that he, too, would someday die was all but unimaginable, and when I learned that he finally left us this morning, I found it hard to believe. Fortunately, his musical legacy is permanent. No non-musician, not even John Hammond, has left a deeper mark on the world of jazz, and none was loved more dearly. I shall always miss him.
* * *
Ricky Riccardi, the great Louis Armstrong scholar, pays heartfelt tribute to Avakian here.
Marc Myers’ obituary is here.
Joe Williams and the Count Basie Orchestra perform “Baby, Won’t You Please Come Home” on The Kraft Music Hall. The host is Milton Berle. This episode was originally telecast by NBC on March 18, 1959:
(This is the latest in a series of arts-related videos that appear in this space each Monday, Wednesday, and Friday)