“We live and negotiate with the people; if their conversation be troublesome to us, if we disdain to apply ourselves to mean and vulgar souls (and the mean and vulgar are often as regular as those of the finest thread, and all wisdom is folly that does not accommodate itself to the common ignorance), we must no more intermeddle either with other men’s affairs or our own; for business, both public and private, has to do with these people.”

Michel de Montaigne, “Of Three Commerces” (trans. Charles Cotton)

Sarah Connolly, Christopher Hogwood, and the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment perform “When I am laid in earth,” from Henry Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas. This production was staged by Wayne MacGregor at Covent Garden in 2009:

(This is the latest in a series of arts-related videos that appear in this space each Monday, Wednesday, and Friday)

“Music, uniquely among the arts, is both completely abstract and profoundly emotional. It has no power to represent anything particular or external, but it has a unique power to express inner states or feelings. Music can pierce the heart directly; it needs no mediation. One does not have to know anything about Dido and Aeneas to be moved by her lament for him; anyone who has ever lost someone knows what Dido is expressing. And there is, finally, a deep and mysterious paradox here, for while such music makes one experience pain and grief more intensely, it brings solace and consolation at the same time.”

Oliver Sacks, “Lamentations: Music, Madness and Melancholia” (courtesy of Maria Popova)

From 2006:

Art doesn’t have to be true to life to be good, but when a work of art is true to your life, it strikes a special chord. On occasion music has this effect on me: I can think of any number of pieces that appear to embody my feelings about the world so precisely that I feel as though I might have written them. Much of Aaron Copland’s music has that effect on me, as does the streetlights-at-dusk melancholy of “Goodbye Pork Pie Hat,” Mingus’ elegy for Lester Young.

My guess is that most people are more likely to respond in this way to works of art that make use of words, and in particular to movies, which at their best are capable of creating an impression of reality so total as to be overwhelming. For my part, though, I haven’t seen many movies that seemed true in any significant way to my personal experience. Only three spring to mind, and two of them, not surprisingly, are about music….

Read the whole thing here.

SALLY FIELD: “Don’t you know you can’t fight city hall?”

JAMES GARNER: “You can wrestle ’em.”

Harriet Frank, Jr., and Irving Ravetch, screenplay for Murphy’s Romance

A very rare kinescope of the NBC Opera telecast of scenes from Benjamin Britten’s Billy Budd, originally telecast on October 19, 1952. The title role is sung by Theodor Uppman, who appeared in the opera’s original 1951 production. Andrew McKinley plays Captain Vere and Leon Lishner plays Claggart. The performance was conducted by Peter Herman Adler and the telecast was directed by Kirk Browning:

(This is the latest in a series of arts-related videos that appear in this space each Monday, Wednesday, and Friday)

“Much good has been shown me and much evil, and the good has never been perfect. There is always some flaw in it, some defect, some imperfection in the divine image, some fault in the angelic song, some stammer in the divine speech.”

E.M. Forster and Eric Crozier, libretto for Benjamin Britten’s Billy Budd (adapted from Herman Melville’s novella)

In today’s Wall Street Journal drama column I review a Massachusetts production of The Pirates of Penzance. Here’s an excerpt.

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Rejoice greatly! John Rando and Joshua Bergasse, whose 2013 Barrington Stage revival of “On the Town” moved to Broadway the following year and ran for 368 performances, have joined forces again: Barrington Stage has reunited the best of all possible director-choreographer teams for a rumbustious production of “The Pirates of Penzance” that is strongly cast, delightfully designed and whizzingly well-staged. It’s no less worthy of a New York transfer than “On the Town,” and I wouldn’t be surprised if one is in the works.

Should this “Pirates” make it to Broadway, it’ll be none too soon. The comic operettas of Gilbert and Sullivan are not-so-distant ancestors of the modern-day American musical, yet they’re rarely revived in this country by professional theater troupes. I’ve reviewed just two productions in the past 13 years, and it’s been three decades since an operetta by G & S (as they’re known to their avid fans) was last mounted on Broadway. It is, alas, all too easy to see why. Not only is “The Mikado,” their masterpiece, now widely regarded as politically incorrect, but Sullivan wrote his scores for classically trained singers, meaning that when the operettas do get done professionally, it increasingly tends to be by opera companies like Chicago’s Lyric Opera….

This helps to explain why only one G & S operetta has had a long commercial run on Broadway. In 1980, the Public Theater commissioned William Elliott to revise “The Pirates of Penzance” to make Sullivan’s score more suitable for performance by musical-comedy actors and Broadway-sized pit bands. The resulting production, which starred Kevin Kline and Linda Ronstadt, opened to immensely successful effect in Central Park, then played for two years on Broadway, after which it was filmed. No other G & S production has reached a larger audience.

It stands to reason, then, that Barrington Stage should have opted to produce Elliott’s version of “Pirates” in its 520-seat mainstage theater. Beowulf Borritt’s comic-strip set features a runway that juts straight out into the auditorium—the mainmast of the ship on which the first act takes place dead center in the house—and Mr. Rando has filled both aisles to overflowing with actors. The effect is noisily intimate: If you’re sitting on the aisle or in one of the two stage boxes, you’re more than likely to have pirates in your face at one time or another, and you might even get pulled out of your seat to take part in the action. Mr. Rando, a recognized master of slapstick, keeps the energy level vaultingly high, and Mr. Bergasse’s choreography is irresistibly ludicrous….

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Read the whole thing here.

The finale from the Public Theater’s 1980 Central Park production of The Pirates of Penzance, directed by Wilford Leach and starring Kevin Kline, Linda Ronstadt, and George Rose: