When It Comes To Political Melodrama, Virginia Doesn’t Disappoint

Five States have Legislative elections in 2019: Virginia, New Jersey, Kentucky, Mississippi, and Louisiana. All are important; however, only Virginia stands a reasonable shot to flip their Legislature’s majority from R to D, giving the Dems the right to the  redraw the state's congressional and state legislative boundaries and prevent another GOP gerrymander. Just remember the attendant, associated institutional power, for possibly the next 20 years.

Big Deal-- Big Drama.

Republicans have an acute recognition of this fact. They very nearly shattered the Democratic base coalition with their dirty tricks op-- on the first day of Black History Month-- the "February Flim-Flam," which included: accusations of a "racist past," against Governor Ralph Northam, evidenced by racially inflammatory Medical School yearbook photos; followed by: allegations of sexual assault and rape against Lt. Governor Justin Fairfax around 36 hours later; followed by: Attorney General Mark Herring’s necessary disclosure of college-age racial insensitivity, again after an additional approximately 36 hours.

The first week of February was filled with a toxic stew of racial angst and sexual strife. Start the op on Feb. 1st, deny the Virginia Black population even one day of celebrating their heroic Virginia history and heritage; peel off women of all races with hideous accusations of sexual impropriety-- by the only Black Statewide Elected Official-- deny the Dems their 3 top statewide fundraisers; start an internecine squabble amongst a historically loosely bonded cohort of Dem base voters... BINGO!!!

If you’re the GOP, sit back and get some popcorn. Nice job; well done.

BUT, nobody resigned, despite heavy pressure. The coalition is still squabbling, but it’s holding together. Apparently, the law firm tasked with investigating the Northam Medical School "photo," has identified the two subjects, and determined that neither is Ralph Northam... a fly in the ointment, oh my!

Where does that leave all of the breathless "concern trollers" and "virtue signalers" who have been baying for "accountability and resignation?" Don’t know, don’t care.

In the face of this sturm und drang, some Virginia. Dems have remained focused and on task, and need only recruit 14 more House candidates and 4 more state Senate candidates in order to go, "Full Boat"-- 140 for 140-- contesting every race, (100 House and 40 in the Senate ), leaving the Virginia Republican Party zero (0) "freebies" for 2019-- no "walkovers," no "nolo contenderes." If Virginia Dems accomplish this "full ballot mission" by the candidate filing deadline, June 11th, the band should start warming up, Turn Off the Lights.



Democrats only need to flip one state Senate seat, and two seats in the House of Delegates to effectively take over the majority; any more than that is pure gravy. That is if they can hold onto all their gains from 2017.

Democrats don’t have a monopoly on drama in Virginia. In fact, the Virginia Republicans are the reigning rulers of reprobates; it’s not even close. The most recent drama involves Jerry Falwell, Jr. and his wife, and their... very interesting exploits, "ministering" to the needs of young folk... in the, um... hospitality industry-- which subsequently required some "legal consultation" from then-Trump lawyer/fixer Michael Cohen-- very alarming, very salacious and sordid stuff. There may be a lot of campaign contributions being returned or contributed to charity.



Falwell, Jr. has supported politicians throughout Virginia over the years; some are even graduates or patrons of his college, Liberty University. One such candidate is D.J. Jordan, running in Prince William County’s HD 31. Jordan is the GOP’s choice to unseat freshman Delegate Elizabeth Guzmán, who defeated a long-term Republican incumbent in 2017 to become the first Latina to serve in the history of the Virginia Legislature-- and we’re talking about 1600s "House of Burgesses" history. That’s historic. So far, Blue America has endorsed four Virginia legislative candidates, one being Elizabeth Guzmán. That thermometer on the right is for candidates running for state legislatures and we'd appreciate it if you tapped on it and considered contributing to Elizabeth and any of the other candidates on the list.

That win by a Latina over one of their own stalwarts would seem to be too much for the Virginia GOP to abide; so they recruited a Black male, Liberty University grad; dressed him in Blue, placed him against a Blue background, built him a nice website that conveniently neglects to identify his political party, filled his campaign account with large dollar offerings, and sent him out to preach about "infanticide and family values."

Good stuff! Except for Jerry Falwell’s "Pool Boy" buffoonery. D.J. Jordan is going to have some explaining to do; not only a stealth Republican, but, a Liberty University grad to boot; INCONVENIENT!!! We’ll see how it shakes out for him.

Washington Post reported that Falwell Jr. was blaming a "conspiracy" of Republican Party establishment leaders for the leak of Trump's now infamous 2005 "grab-'em-by-the-pussy" video. "We're all sinners," he said in defense of Trump, who had helped him get rid of the pictures that supposedly show him with a male penis-- presumably the pool boy's-- in his mouth. There is also a felching shot that Michael Cohen hasn't discarded and has hidden away. Falwell's fellow charlatan-cum-grifter, James Dobson, founder of Focus on the Family and now host of the show Family Talk also stood by his Trumpanzee endorsement.

Don't forget, back in 2016, a few weeks before election day, the

Falwell, who is president of the nation's largest Christian university, provided one of Trump's first key endorsements from an evangelical leader. Trump's candidacy, however, has divided evangelicals, who have no formal leadership. Some evangelical leaders continued to back Trump after the video leak, while a prominent theologian pulled back his support Sunday and other leaders continued to condemn the nominee.

...In comments made to WABC Radio in New York City, Falwell said he thinks the leak was part of a conspiracy by GOP establishment leaders.

"I think this whole videotape thing was planned, I think it was timed, I think it might have even been a conspiracy among the establishment Republicans who've known about it for weeks and who tried to time it to do the maximum damage to Donald Trump," Falwell told reporter Rita Cosby on her podcast after Sunday night's debate.

Prince William County is rapidly becoming a Democratic stronghold, much like it’s neighbor to the North; Fairfax County. In 2014, the district went for Gillespie (R) over Warner (D), narrowly, in the U.S. Senate race. But it's been all blue since then. In 2016, Hillary beat Trump in the district, 51-44%. The following year Democrats swept-- Herring (D) beat Adams for AG, 56-44%; Fairfax beat Vogel for Lt. Governor, 56-44% and Northam beat Gillespie 56-43% for Governor. Last year, voters in HD-31 gave Kaine (D) a fat 59-39% win over Trumpist reactionary Corey Stewart. And of course-- sweetest of all-- was that Elizabeth Guzmán ousted GOP incumbent Scott Lingamfelter 15,466 (54.1%) to 12,658 (44.2%).

And, by the way, other sleazy, corrupted politicians will have to answer for their Falwell associations as this story evolves... and they won’t all be Virginians, will they?

Pericles, from Act I, Scene I-- Pericles, Prince of Tyre by William Shakespeare:

Great king,
Few love to hear the sins they love to act;
'Twould braid yourself too near for me to tell it.
Who has a book of all that monarchs do,
He's more secure to keep it shut than shown:
For vice repeated is like the wandering wind.
Blows dust in other's eyes, to spread itself;
And yet the end of all is bought thus dear,
The breath is gone, and the sore eyes see clear:
To stop the air would hurt them. The blind mole casts
Copp'd hills towards heaven, to tell the earth is throng'd
By man's oppression; and the poor worm doth die for't.
Kings are earth's gods; in vice their law's
their will;
And if Jove stray, who dares say Jove doth ill?
It is enough you know; and it is fit,
What being more known grows worse, to smother it.
All love the womb that their first being bred,
Then give my tongue like leave to love my head.

One more little tiny thing. Is the biggest political scandal of the year being hushed up because the media doesn't like asserting that a white conservative man of stature-- Falwell, Jr.-- is a sex maniac who bought the services for a 21 year old pool boy? Almost $5 million dollars of Church money-- spent on buying a gay "hotel" (whore house). This is an amazing story! You've got to watch this whole video:

Trump's Newest Trial Balloon Is REALLY Embarrassing-- And Could Actually Get Him Impeached

You'll have to ask Nancy Ohanian if they came out of the sewer or leave via the sewer

Rudy Giuliani is kind of a lawyer... but that isn't the job he has in the Trump defense team. Trump hired him as a publicist-- someone to get his boss ink and lots of chatter on TV and in social media. So yesterday, for example, Rudy was on Fox and Friends early in the morning saying that he'd been "looking in the federal code trying to find collusion as a crime. Collusion is not a crime," he insisted. The Fox peanut gallery goons on the coach agreed. So is the trial balloon for the new defense, "Yeah, I colluded with Putin to steal the election, but show me where that's a crime?" From Fox, Giuliani scurried-- through the sewer system-- to CNN... where he was even funnier-- on a colloquial and Shakespearean sense of "funny." First off, the 32 minute ramble referred to a "very nasty" link between Mueller and Señor T and Mueller. Trump has been bitching about a 2011 dispute around Mueller quitting and getting his money back from one of the crooked Trumpanzee golf resorts-- this one in Sterling, Virginia.

But yesterday's target was former Trump fixer (a Trump "lawyer," the way Giuliani is a Trump "lawyer") Michael Cohen. "You’ve got a really bad guy here," he asserted. "He was shaking people down for money, he was lying about what was on a tape and manipulating, doctoring tapes... I didn’t know any of that. George Washington didn’t know Benedict Arnold was a traitor."

Warming up to the inner Guiliani, he called Cohen a "scumbag" and noted that Trump "turned out to have a close friend betray him, like Iago betrayed Othello, like Brutus put the last knife into Caesar. It happens in life, that you get double-crossed.




Obviously Giuliani was admitting on CNN that two days before the infamous Trump Tower meeting with every Russian spy in the New York City metropolitan area to get "dirt" on Hillary, there was a so-called "planning meeting" to prepare for that meeting. OK, Rudy said that planning meeting included Trumpanzee Jr., Kushner-in-law (I wonder if he knows perjury is a serious crime), Manafort, Rick Gates and "others." And, lookie-lookie, the date of that meeting, June 7, was the very day that Trumpazee, Sr. teased the upcoming speech that never happened, where he promised an arenaful of drooling fans that he would reveal explosive new information on the Clintons in a few days. Someone must have screamed at poor befuddled Rudy for fucking-up the narrative and exposing the lies because he immiatekly ran back to Fox to say he didn't say what he said and meant to say that there was no planning session and then named all the colluders who weren't colluding. Except Rick Gates has been spilling the beans to Mueller for months so I'm sure at least the prosecutors were laughing their asses off as Rudy ran back and forth between Fox and CNN trying to clean up his own mess.

As writer and theater director Isaac Butler pointed out, Giuliani’s Shakespearean allusions don’t quite work.

Brutus and Iago both betray close friends, but they are not otherwise alike. Brutus was motivated by idealism, believing that Caesar was a would-be dictator who would destroy the Roman Republic. Iago, by contrast, was motivated by pure envy and spite. Giuliani’s own speculations about Cohen’s motives (that the lawyer was stung by not getting a White House job and jealous of the president’s children) does follow a pattern close to Iago.

But in any case, these analogies do little credit to Trump. If Cohen is Brutus or Iago then Trump is Caesar or Othello. Which means Trump is either an aspiring tyrant or he’s so foolish that he can easily be manipulated into self-destruction by an underling.

John Oliver is kind of Shakespearan, right?

It's Not Fair To Call Politicians Morons Just Because They Disagree With You... Unless They ARE Morons

Most politicians are too cagey to submit to the kind of standardized testing they've forced on students and are trying to force on teachers. So is there any objective way to measure a politician's intelligence (beyond just his or her record of accomplishment)? Probably not. BUT the Sunlight Foundation just conducted an interesting experiment that is somewhat helpful in measuring politicians' intelligence-- at least as much as intelligence can be correlated to the ability to communicate in formal speech. It may not be definitive in helping explain, for example, why Paul Ryan is as fixated as an adolescent fan boy on tawdry, low-grade novelist Ayn Rand, or why he keeps coming up with deranged proposals, couched in "serious" Madison Avenue-speak, to wreck America's social fabric, but the test shows him at a 9th grade level, which... well, make a lot of sense to anyone who has followed Paul Ryan's politics. He's been able to hoodwink the Beltway media-- much of which is at a 6th grade level-- but Ryan is a clown and has always been a clown. He sounds "intelligent" to the same kind of people who buy into the hype that Newt Gingrich and Rich Nixon are legitimate intellectuals. They're not and neither is Ryan.

Congress now speaks at almost a full grade level lower than it did just seven years ago, with the most conservative members of Congress speaking on average at the lowest grade level, according to a new Sunlight Foundation analysis of the Congressional Record using Capitol Words.

Of course, what some might interpret as a dumbing down of Congress, others will see as more effective communications. And lawmakers of both parties still speak above the heads of the average American, who reads at between an 8th and 9th grade level.

Today’s Congress speaks at about a 10.6 grade level, down from 11.5 in 2005. By comparison, the U.S. Constitution is written at a 17.8 grade level, the Federalist Papers at a 17.1 grade level, and the Declaration of Independence at a 15.1 grade level. The Gettysburg Address comes in at an 11.2 grade level and Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech is at a 9.4 grade level. Most major newspapers are written at between an 11th and 14th grade level.

All these analyses use the Flesch-Kincaid test, which produces the 'reads at a n-th grade level' terminology that is likely familiar to many readers. At its core, Flesch-Kincaid equates higher grade levels with longer words and longer sentences. It is important to understand the limitations of this metric: it tells us nothing about the clarity or correctness of a passage of text. But although an admittedly crude tool, Flesch-Kincaid can nonetheless provide insights into how different legislators speak, and how Congressional speech has been changing. ...Overall, the complexity of speech in the Congressional Record has declined steadily since 2005, with the drop among Republicans slightly outpacing that for Democrats.

You can look at the entire chart here but here are the 10 worst performing Members of Congress.


As you can see, all of them are Republicans and most of them are teabaggers and freshmen. The only senior congressmember in the lot is Todd Akin of Missouri who has a well-earned reputation as one of Congress' dimmest bulbs. The GOP is running him for Senate this year. Ryan performed at a 9.66 level, the 55th worst of the entire 530 people analyzed in Congress. He was fractionally better than Ted Poe, a lunatic fringe Texas backbencher and birther who has been asked to keep quiet and not embarrass the party with any more rambling quotations from his idol, KKK founder Nathan Bedford Forrest, and to stop trying to force Christian prayers on all military casualties regardless of their own religion or their families' preferences. So, Ryan's a tiny fraction smarter than that.

Amanda Terkel wrote up the study for HuffPo Monday and concludes that members of Congress are now talking, on average, at the level of high school sophomores, a precipitous decline due almost entirely to the GOP teabagger freshman class. The lowest score, of course, went to South Carolina teabagger Mick Mulvaney, considered a joke even among Republican staffers, who is the only Member of Congress who speaks on a level below an average 8th grader. Mulvaney is more of a doofus than Michele Bachmann (9.52), Aaron Schock's boyfriend Adam Kinzinger (8.99), John Bircher Paul Broun (9.30), Lynn "Mr. 10 Commandments" Westmoreland (9.54), dog-lover Steve King (10.14) or Congress' dumbest closet case, Patrick McHenry (10.21). Even raging homophobic imbecile Virginia Foxx beat him with a 10.68!

Anyway, back to Amanda at HuffPo. After examining the data, she came to the same conclusion I did-- and anyone would have to: "The members speaking at the lowest grade levels tend to be freshmen Republicans."

Before 2005, Republicans spoke, on average, at a slightly higher grade level than Democrats. Since then, Democrats have been slightly higher.

Sunlight did not reach a definitive conclusion on why lawmakers' speech patterns have become simpler over time, although Drutman wrote in a blog post, "Perhaps it reflects lawmakers speaking more in talking points, and increasingly packaging their floor speeches for YouTube. Gone, perhaps, are the golden days when legislators spoke to persuade each other, thoughtfully wrestled with complex policy trade-offs, and regularly quoted Shakespeare."

So now we get a freak show like Ted Poe quoting the founder of the KKK instead. Wouldn't you rather hear Paul Ryan coming out with something this based on his understanding of Hamlet:

Neither a borrower nor a lender be; For loan oft loses both itself and friend, and borrowing dulls the edge of husbandry... As my mentor Ayn has explained This above all: to thine own self be true.

Sunday Classics: Who can resist the "elaborate" and "extravagant" song of the high-flying lark?

"[Larks] have more elaborate calls than most birds, and often extravagant songs given in display flight. These melodious sounds (to human ears), combined with a willingness to expand into anthropogenic habitats -- as long as these are not too intensively managed -- have ensured larks a prominent place in literature and music, especially the Skylark in northern Europe and the Crested Lark and Calandra Lark in southern Europe." -- Wikipedia. Pictured above: a skylark.

"Hark, hark! the lark at heaven's gate sings,
And Phoebus 'gins arise,
His steeds to water at those springs
On chaliced flowers that lies;
And winking Mary-buds begin
To ope their golden eyes:
With every thing that pretty is,
My lady sweet, arise:
Arise, arise."

-- Cloten's song from Cymbeline, Act II, Scene 3

In the first 2:32 of the clip, tenor Fritz Wunderlich sings the first stanza of "Horch', die Lerche singt im Hain," the German rendering of Shakespeare's "Hark, hark! the lark" which Otto Nicolai gave to the love-besotted young Fenton in his Merry Wives of Windsor. The clip continues with the duet between Fenton and the object of his affections, Anna Reich (the young Edith Mathis), from EMI's lovely 1962 recording of the complete opera conducted by Robert Heger. You'll notice that in the course of the duet Fenton sings his lark song again!

by Ken

Not much to look at is our little friend the lark.

Some years ago, I guess it was, I was hooked up to a project with someone who wanted some classical music for a particular use. I went at it with gusto, and soon had put together a list of short pieces I thought would be highly recognizable and appealing. Of course I didn't stop there. Soon I was putting pieces together in miniature suites, built around all kinds of themes: waltzes, marches, polkas, fanfares, Americana. Since I was making up my own rules as I went, it wasn't long before the concept had grown to sets of three or even four pieces totaling 15-20 minutes. I had a grand time swapping pieces in and out, and especially swapping performances in and out. Since the whole thing was being done digitally, I was limited to things I had on CD and could rip into MP3 form -- the first time I had ever used iTunes.

Of course all the excitement was happening in my head. As proud as I was of my little lists, which I was sure would be so much better than what narrow expectation the client had in mind, it turned out that the client didn't give a damn about any of it. Nevertheless, I was able to provide assistance with the client's own choice, and most important, I got paid. And I have to say, I had worlds of fun playing with all these wonderful little pieces -- and even occasional not-so-little ones. Once I had expanded the overall time frame to 15-20 minutes, as I recall, I was able to do a Brahms group that included the slow movement of the Brahms Double Concerto (which all these years later found its way into the first of the series of Sunday Classics Brahms pieces), and I remember trying to find a performance of the Scherzo of the Beethoven Ninth Symphony that sounded OK in MP3 form.

More recently I had occasion to be thinking again about some sort of very basic classical-music programming, and I thought of those old lists. Eventually I found a printout of one version of them, but the music files must have been on a different computer, and I had to re-create them. It was a great opportunity to redo the whole project, actually, and I was startled by how dramatically my CD holdings had grown in the intervening years. Drawing just on my own collection, I almost always had much better choices available. Well, that too exceeded the interest level of the prospective host -- by about 100 percent.

I think that version too is on the wrong computer, but it doesn't matter much, since the music files would be useless as long as I can't figure out how to incorporate audio files into our format. But I suddenly found myself thinking about one of my favorite groupings, which I called something like "Three Larks."

Now, it's not as if there's a vast literature of lark-inspired music. Setting aside Schubert, who had a veritable exaltation ( the applicable collective term, according to Wikipedia) of larks flit through his songs, including a setting of "Horch', horch', die Lerche" itself (not a major Schubert song, but there's a socko performance by the irresistible Richard Tauber from the film Blossom Time, in which he played Schubert), there are three musical specimens of larkdom that have little in common except that they're all spectacularly and effusively beautiful -- "extravagant songs in display flight" indeed.

WIKIPEDIA ON THE SKYLARK

The Skylark is 16 to 18 cm long. It is a bird of open farmland and heath, known throughout its range for the song of the male, which is delivered in hovering flight from heights of 50 to 100 m, when the singing bird may appear as just a dot in the sky from the ground. The song generally lasts 2 to 3 minutes, but it tends to last longer later in the season. The male has broader wings than the female. This adaptation for more efficient hovering flight may have evolved because of female Skylarks' preference for males that sing and hover for longer periods and so demonstrate that they are likely to have good overall fitness.

Note that Fenton's ravishing aria from Nicolai's Merry Wives of Windsor, at 2 1/2 minutes, is of perfect skylark length. (Note too that this isn't our first encounter with this opera. The magical Overture was one of our prime specimens of "comfort music.") Where Nicolai makes excellent use of the flute to suggest the lark's "hovering flight," our other larkmasters, Franz Josef Haydn and Ralph Vaughan Williams, turned to the violin.

The Lindsay Quartet plays the first movement of Haydn's Lark Quartet.

This opening movement of Haydn's Lark Quartet -- or, more properly, the Quartet in D major, Op. 64, No. 5 -- is another of those pieces that I'm prone to obsess over, and listen to 10 or 20 or 30 times in a row. It begins with a trompe l'oreille piece of musical misdirection of which Haydn was a master. For nearly a full eight bars, the second violin, viola, and cello announce what sounds like an almost childishly simple, bouncy main theme.

(The simplicity, by the way, is deceptive. Sample some of the many amateur performances posted on YouTube, and you'll discover quickly that what looks so simple on the page can be excruciatingly difficult to execute with seemingly effortless ease. I think it's wonderful that all these young people are trying to play the piece, and I'll bet they're all having fun making their fingers and bow arms produce something that recognizably resembles its. I just don't understand why they would wish to make their not-very-successful efforts public.)

But then, off the downbeat of that eighth bar, the heretofore-silent first violin slips in and takes larklike flight in a seemingly free-form melody that seems unrelated to the tune that the rest of the quartet has sounded -- except that it isn't. That bouncy opening theme continues as both a countertheme and a perfect accompaniment to the lark's song.

Dutch violinist Janine Jansen (25 at the time) is the soloist in The Lark Ascending at the July 2003 "Nation's Favourite" Prom, with the BBC Concert Orchestra conducted by Barry Wordsworth. (The second half of the piece is here.)

"Romance for violin and orchestra" is Ralph Vaughan Williams' formal designation for this haunting pastoral meditation inspired by George Meredith's poem "The Lark Ascending," with the solo violin of course representing the flight of the lark. The piece is roughly 15 minutes of some of the most sheerly beautiful music I know. There's no question that the image of the lark's song fired VW's imagination, and I really don't know anything quite like his Lark, by him or anyone else. It's a glorious piece to listen to in a darkened room when you're in need of a mind relaxer, but it can also be a wonderful tool for focusing your attention.

The Lark was written in 1914 and revised in 1920. The composer could be fairly cranky over attempts to link his works to historical events. In response to a critic's suggestion that his conflict-ridden Sixth Symphony, begun in 1944 (which is to say the year before World War II ended) and completed in 1947, was his "War Symphony," he objected, "It never occurs to these people that a man might just want to write a piece of music." And so he would perhaps have downplayed the coincidence that the two versions of The Lark bracket World War I.

It took The Lark a surprisingly long time to catch on with the public, but by now it has become almost inescapable. One curiosity of its history with the public is that it has tended to s-t-r-e-t-c-h over time. The very pleasing performance begun in our clip runs up toward the 16-minute vicinity. When Sir Adrian Boult, probably the conductor most closely associated with Vaughan Williams, recorded the piece in 1952, it took him 13:20; when he recorded it again in 1967, it expanded to 14:42. On the whole this seems reasonable. As audiences became more familiar with it, it's likely that they accepted and even welcomed more leisurely traversals. It only becomes a problem if The Lark Ascending begins to turn into The Lark Wallowing.

One last thought about our three musical larks: The unfortunately not-terribly-long-lived Nicolai (1810-1849) would certainly have known Haydn's Lark Quartet, and Vaughan Williams would have been familiar with both Haydn's lark and Nicolai's. Can this be heard in the music?

FINAL ORNITHOLOGICAL NOTE

According to Wikipedia, North America is lark-challenged. The only lark we have is the shore lark (pictured above), which for reasons unknown to me we choose to call the horned lark.

Our horned lark is apparently not highly thought of amongst the lark family. "Vocalizations are high-pitched, lisping or tinkling, and weak. The song, given in flight as is common among larks, consists of a few chips followed by a warbling, ascending trill." Oh well, I suppose it's better than nothing.


QUICK HITS: OUR LARKS
SING ON RECORDS

Haydn: Lark Quartet

The Lark has always been one of the most popular of Haydn's quartets, though perhaps more as a novelty item than as one of the great Haydn quartets, which it undoubtedly is. Played by competent professionals, it's a hard piece to spoil, which makes choosing a recording a lot easier.

Partly it depends what kind of lark you're imagining. The Lindsays, in our clip, give a performance of the first movement that by today's standards is brisk, though not as brisk as was once common -- as in a wonderful live performance by the Hungarian Quartet recorded at U.S.C. in 1951, included in Music and Arts' rewarding eight-CD compendium of "Historical Recordings and Public Performances" by the Hungarian. There is a Lindsay performanceavailable, in a two-CD collection of "Six Popular String Quartets" by Haydn, but I'm not a big Lindsay fan. For a performance along these lines, if you're prepared to invest in a lot of Haydn, I would suggest DG's lovely seven-CD set of the Amadeus Quartetrecordings of Haydn's Opp. 51, 54, 55, 64, 71, 74.

As with Vaughan Williams' lark, Haydn's seems to have become a slower flier over the years, conrtrary to the general trend toward faster tempos in Haydn fast movements. (In addition to slower tempos, modern performances of the first movement of the Lark have been lengthened by standard inclusion of the repeat, once rarely observed.)

At a slower tempo you need really unanimous ensemble and a first violinist who can really make our lark sing. I don't think it's coincidence that I'm offering two (more!) performances by Hungarian quartets and one by a Czech quartet.

The complete Haydn quartets have now been traversed a number of times on records. For me the most flavorful series is the one by the veteran Tatrai Quartet on Hungaroton, and I have no hesitation in recommending the two-CD set of all six Op. 64 quartets. At budget price, the Kodaly Quartet's disc of Op. 64, Nos. 4-6, is an excellent buy.

Unfortunately, I can't find a current listing for the recording I was going to suggest as my favorite from this round of relistening: a Praga CD by the Prazak Quartet containing richly songful performances of the Lark Haydn's Op. 20, No. 6, and Op. 76, No. 3 (the great Emperor).

Nicolai: The Merry Wives of Windsor

A midprice reissue of the highly recommendable Heger/EMI Merry Wives with Wunderlich and Mathis (with Gottlob Frick as Falstaff) seems to be available from some sources. The less flavorful mid-'70s East-West German coproduction (originally issued here on DG), decently enough conducted by Bernhard Klee, with Kurt Moll as Falstaff, is available at midprice (with a libretto in German only)
on Berlin Classics.
I wonder if anyone can count how many CD anthologies of EMI's Wunderlich material his "Horch', die Lerche" has been included in. I've got the generously packed (154 minutes) two-CD Very Best of Fritz Wunderlich, which includes both Fenton's aria (both stanzas!) and the Anna-Fenton duet.

Vaughan Williams: The Lark Ascending

EMI has assembled a wonderful CDof shorter Vaughan Williams works from the "Indian summer" of the career of Sir Adrian Boult (1889-1983), his late 70s and 80s, when he became a one-man recording industry. This Lark Ascending, with New Philharmonia concertmaster Hugh Bean as soloist, was recorded as the LP filler for Sir Adrian's stereo recording of VW's Sixth Symphony, and this is still the way The Lark plays in my head. However, you can't go wrong with the rival Decca VW anthologyconducted by Neville Marriner, with his longtime collaborator Iona Brown as soloist in The Lark.

As it happens, I don't have the stereo Boult version on CD. I listen happily, though, to André Previn's recording (filling out his Telarc VW London Symphony) and Andrew Davis's (available in a reissue of its original coupling, with the VW Sixth Symphony and Thomas Tallis Fantasia). Warning note: If you think you might have any interest in acquiring Sir Andrew's really outstanding cycle of the Vaughan Williams symphonies and other major orchestral works -- and if you care about VW, you should be interested -- watch for the Teldec boxed set. I don't find any current listing for it, except via download, but it was available for some time at fairly modest price.

If you're foolish enough to begin acquiring the individual Davis CDs, trust me, when it comes to the final one, comprising Symphonies Nos. 3 and 7 (the Pastoral and the Sinfonia Antartica), which apparently had virtually no circulation before the first boxed set came out, you won't find it. This is how record companies reward customer loyalty, in this case the loyalty of customers who patiently supported the series, disc by disc, as they were being made. As I write, there's a copy of the Pastoral-Antartica coupling on offer at Amazon.com for a mere $80.71. Um, no thanks.


SUNDAY CLASSICS POSTS

The updated list is here.

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Sunday Classics: Verdi looks evil square in the face

Josephine Barstow is Lady Macbeth at Glyndebourne in 1972, with Rae Woodland as the Gentlewoman (quite fine, by the way) and Brian Donlan as the Doctor, directed by Michael Hadjimischev, conducted by John Pritchard.

not included in the clip
DOCTOR: We've waited two nights in vain.
GENTLEWOMAN: Tonight she will appear.
DOCTOR: What has she spoken of in her sleep?
GENTLEWOMAN: I don't dare repeat it to a living soul . . .
Here she is!
[Lady Macbeth enters slowly, walking in her sleep. She carries a candle.]
DOCTOR: She carries a light in her hand?
GENTLEWOMAN: The lamp she always has by her bed.
clip begins
DOCTOR: Oh, how her eyes sparkle!
GENTLEWOMAN: Yet she doesn't see.
[Lady Macbeth puts the candle down and rubs her hands, making the gesture of washing them.]
DOCTOR: Why does she rub her hands?
GENTLEWOMAN: She thinks she's washing them.
[0:50] LADY MACBETH: A spot, and here this other . . .
Go, I tell you, o accursed one!
One . . . two . . . this is the hour!
You tremble? . . . You don't dare go in?
[1:45] A warrior, so cowardly?
Oh, shame! Come now, hurry.
Who could have imagined
in that old man so much blood?
Who could have imagined so much blood?
[2:49] DOCTOR: What is she saying?
[2:54] LADY MACBETH: The Thane of Fife,
now wasn't he a husband and father?
What happened to him?
GENTLEWOMAN, DOCTOR: Oh, terror!
[3:18] LADY MACBETH: And will I never be able
to clean these hands?
No, I will never be able to clean them.
[3:46] GENTLEWOMAN, DOCTOR: Oh, terror!
[3:50] LADY MACBETH: Of human blood
it still smells here . . . All of Arabia
with its perfumes
can't sweeten this little hand. Alas!
[4:54] DOCTOR: She's sighing?
[4:58] LADY MACBETH: Put on your night clothes.
Now go wash yourself.
Banquo is dead, and from the grave
one who has died cannot rise again.
[5:45] DOCTOR: This again?
[5:52] LADY MACBETH: To bed, to bed.
[Barstow instead anticipates the line "Somone's knocking"]
What's done can't be undone.
Someone's knocking . . . Let's go, Macbeth!
Don't let your pallor accuse you!
[6:33] GENTLEWOMAN, DOCTOR: Oh, terror!
[6:34] LADY MACBETH: Someone's knocking . . . Let's go, Macbeth!
Don't let your pallor accuse you!
[7:09] Let's go, Macbeth! [repeated several times] Let's go!

"Open, Hell, thy mouth, and swallow
all creation in thy womb."

-- the rousted inhabitants of Macbeth's castle, responding to news of the murder of the king, near the end of Act I of Verdi's Macbeth

"This is the excellent foppery of the world, that when we are sick in fortune, often the surfeit of our own behavior, we make guilty of our disasters the sun, the moon, and the stars: as if we were villains by necessity, fools by heavenly compulsion, knaves, thieves, and treachers, by spherical predominance, drunkards, liars, and adulterers by an enforced obedience of planetary influence, and all that we are evil in, by a divine thrusting on. An admirable evasion of whoremaster man, to lay his goatish disposition to the charge of a star!"

-- Edmund (alone), in King Lear, Act I, Scene 2

by Ken

When people learn that the first version of Verdi's Macbeth -- the first of his eventual three Shakespeare operas -- was unsuccessful, and that the composer subsequently revised it, they tend to think that the opera's strengths trace back to the revision. In fact, while the composer did make some improvements, most of the opera as we know it traces back to the original version. I would have to guess that audiences weren't ready for it.

There was nothing new about operatic adaptations of Shakespeare. But the notion of a Shakespeare-based opera that could stand alongside its source material -- that was an idea that wasn't taken seriously, except perhaps by Verdi. And so I suspect what was noticed primarily in the operatic Macbeth was the tried-and-true conventions of Italian opera, with fixings like choruses of witches and jolly murderers.

Verdi was prepared to believe that he had failed with Macbeth, but the one criticism that he wouldn't accept was that he didn't "understand" Shakespeare. All his life he had the complete works at his fingertips. They were a part of him, and it's clear that they both mirrored and shaped the way he looked at the world.

Lady Macbeth's Sleepwalking Scene was brilliantly and shockingly imagined by Shakespeare, starting with that image implanted in Lady M's deranged mind that (a) she has these spots on her hands, and (b) she can somehow order them away. ("Out, damned spot!") This is surely a case, though, where even Shakespeare would have acknowledged that the material benefits from, almost requires the resources of an operatic master. The mad scene as realized by Verdi is unquestionably one of the supreme set pieces in the theatrical literature.


IN WHICH I FLEE FROM KING LEAR

I don't need an excuse for thinking about or listening to or watching Verdi's Macbeth, but this time I got to it by an unexpected path.

I've had the 2008 Royal Shakespeare Company production of King Lear -- directed by Trevor Nunn, with Sir Ian McKellan as Lear -- on my DVR for ages now, waiting for some hypothetical time when I could summon both the concentration and the nerve to look at it. Assuming the thing didn't just get wiped from the hard drive over time, as so often happens with really serious TV stuff I record because I know I really ought to look at it, the best-case scenario for me here was that it would turn out to be crummy, as so many of these latter-day British Shakespeare productions do. Then I could just erase it and get on with life, and not have to deal with a play that just plain gives me the willies. The view of human nature it presents is way too persuasively bleak for convenient swallowing.

Maybe it was the heat, but yesterday, having whittled the backlog on the DVR down to manageable size, and polished off the stuff I really wanted to see, I looked at some of the Lear, and unfortunately it's not crap. And fairly quickly, by the time we got to the newly ascendant royal daughters Goneril and Regan plotting against their father on the ground that what was just so capriciously given could be just as capriciously taken away, the play was having its usual effect on me: making me want to flee.

Not, let me stress, because of defects or lack of believability in the play itself. Quite the contrary: It's way too brilliantly and believably written. By this point, of course, the illegitimate Edmund has not only laid (and sprung) but explained the trap he has set for his hapless half-brother Edgar, and the remarkable speech I've quoted above could sail straight into the 21st century -- he could be talking to Rachel Maddow about the activities of the Family.


VERDI'S STRUGGLES WITH KING LEAR

As it happens, as everyone with a cursory knowledge of the life and work of Verdi knows, there is a link between the composer and King Lear. The play was so close to his heart that he struggled for decades to make an opera of it, having commissioned first Salvatore Cammarano (the librettist of Il Trovatore) and then, when Cammarano died without completing the task, Antonio Somma (the librettist of A Masked Ball, and the most "literary" of his pre-Boito librettists) to produce a Lear libretto, eventually extracting two versions from Somma.

While some of the music composed for Lear wound up in other operas, we actually get some prefiguring of what he would have done with the material way back in his first successful opera, Nabucco, where both Lear's problematic relationships with his daughters and Gloucester's relationships with his two sons, one illegitmate and one legitimate, are shadowed in King Nebuchadnezzar's relationships with his two daughters, and of course in his descent into and emergence from madness.

In the end, I suspect King Lear itself defeated Verdi. For one thing, it would have required a far savvier adaptation than what he could expect from Somma. But even when, late in life -- at a time when he considered himself finally retired from composing for the stage -- Verdi happened upon his greatest librettist, Arrigo Boito, and allowed himself to be talked into undertaking a Shakespeare collaboration, it wasn't Lear he turned to but the much more manageable Othello. It's been suggested that Shakespeare's Othello was already an Italian opera, whereas Lear . . . well, there are things in it I'm sure he knew he could render operatically, but others I think he came to understand he couldn't.

WHAT VERDI SAID TO MASCAGNI ABOUT LEAR

Wikipedia, in a brief entry on Re Lear, passes on this anecdote provided by the composer of Cavalleria rusticana:

The Re Lear project kept haunting Verdi to the end of his life. In 1896, he offered his Lear material to Pietro Mascagni, who asked, "Maestro, why didn't you put it into music?" According to Mascagni, "Softly and slowly he replied, 'The scene in which King Lear finds himself on the heath scared me.'"

I'm prepared to believe that Verdi said this, but I also don't believe it for a second. I think Lear on the heath would have been second-nature for him. It's a scene that's inherently operatic to begin with, and the kind of challenge to which he rose with distinction his whole career, again starting with Nabucco's madness. I don't know if Verdi was kidding Mascagni or himself, but I don't think this is at all the sort of problem in the Lear material that stumped him.

One thing about the Lear material that I can't imagine would have daunted Verdi is the bleak view of human nature, and in particular the problem of human evil. This was so close to his heart that it had been appearing in his operas back to, well, Nabucco. It was surely one of his points of closest identification with the plays of Shakespeare.


THE PROBLEM OF EVIL

Just as with Shakespeare, the general ascendancy of evil wasn't Verdi's entire outlook on human nature. Perhaps the composer's most remarkable artistic achievement is that as he approached the age of 80, in his second Shakespeare collaboration with Boito, Falstaff, he was able to imagine the aspects of human nature he cherished triumphing over the darkness. Who would have imagined that he had that much hopefulness to pour into the children, Nannetta and Fenton, for whom he showed such affection in Falstaff?

No creative artist valued decency and virtue more than Verdi, and yet in most of his operas they take a terrible beating. Perhaps because he so valued the goodness that can be embedded in the human soul, it must have caused him particular pain to see as clearly as he did how much horror lies there, and how unequal the battle between them is.

All of which made the Macbeths, well, Verdi's kind of people. I wonder whether I'm the only one who, on first encounter with the play, at a young and relative innocent age, thought that Macbeth himself wasn't so bad, except for being easily manipulated, and that the real villain was the ambitious Lady Macbeth. Of course that isn't the case at all. You don't have to look very closely to see that he wants all those good things prophesied by the witches just as badly as she does. It isn't even the case that he's unwilling to do the things that she is to get them. The principal difference -- and boy, is this 21st-century -- is that she sees no difference between wanting those things and being entitled to those things, even if it means some incidental messiness along the way, whereas he keeps being held back by silly moral compunctions.


Pay no attention to the production (Met, 2008), which is a travesty. (I assume the guilty parties are already safely executed.) Macduff (Dimitris Pittas), under orders from the king, has come to wake him. Banquo (John Relyea) meanwhile reflects on the ominousness of the night. Macduff returns so shaken he is literally unable to say what he has seen. While Banquo goes inside, Macduff summons the sleeping inhabitants of the castle, crying "crime" and "treason." Banquo returns, declaring [2:13], "Oh, we lost ones," and is barely able to report [2:24]:

"E morto . . . assassinato . . . il re Duncano."
("He's dead . . . murdered . . . King Duncan.")

A seemingly endless, crescendo-ing timpani roll [2:34] finally erupts [2:39] in a thundering ensemble:

"Open, Hell, thy mouth, and swallow
all creation in thy womb."

If this moment is even adequately performed, it is for me as horrible, unprocessable a moment as can happen on a stage. For each of those castle inhabitants -- or anyway all but two of them -- something literally unimaginable has been announced. The king has been murdered in his bed in the safety of the castle of his most loyal nobleman.

The closest analogy I can think of was hearing the news that President Kennedy had been shot, but even that doesn't match this, first because my first assumption, in the absence of any better information, was that he was shot but would surely recover, and second because after all, he was traveling in a motorcade out in the open, and thus within range of any deranged person. (Many of the most obvious instances of tidings that exceed our imaginative powers, like catastrophic hurricanes and earthquakes and tsunamis, aren't analogous either, precisely because they're natural rather than man-made disasters.)

Or I think of the 9/11 attack on the World Trade Center, but again, the first news I heard was that a plane had flown into one of the towers, and naturally my mind processed that into something "manageable" -- a small private plane that I imagined was going to do some serious damage to the part of the building it hit, not to mention the damage from falling debris. And then, because we had only a couple of barely accessible windows in our office that faced south toward the Twin Towers, I didn't see either of them collapse. I did, however, see the faces of people who had just seen the second tower collapse, and that was pretty mind-blowing.

The Macbeth folks, however, have to absorb in one fell swoop the news that the king has been murdered in a bed where he should have been as safe as anyplace on earth.


A BACKWARDS "FORWARD PROGRESSION"

I'm trying to suggest that there are things so horrible our minds are literally incapable of processing them raw, and that Verdi has here given us a blood-curdling dramatization of one. But note that it takes a beat -- the awful seconds while the only sound is that horrible timpani cresecendo -- before the assembled inhabitants can give voice to their horror, and while the "Schiudi, inferno" chorus is close to unfiltered horror, it is in fact already filtered, and these people, totally understandably, have done what our minds always do in such situations: deflect, rationalize, reduce the horror to some kind of manageable form.

In fact, the closest we have to unfiltered responses are Macduff's initial inability even to say what he has seen, and then Banquo's "O noi perduti ("Oh, we lost ones"). At that point it's all over, we're done for, in hell with the jaws closing behind us. Contrary to what they say, life does not go on. But of course life does go on. And the sane mind knows how to protect its sanity.

What Verdi has done through the rest of this scene fills me with awe, and horror. We have what appears to be a progression of ensemble building. From the "Schiudi, inferno" ouburst, the crowd organizes itself into a basically unaccompanied ensemble [3:36} in which a quartet made up of Lady Macbeth, Macbeth, the Gentlewoman, and Macduff beseeches God, and each of its phrases is immediately echoed by the others. This finally builds [5:11] to a climax, at which point the orchestra enters [5:26], and the scene continues to "build" to its conclusion.

Now certainly there is a clear progression in articulateness and musical sophistication as this whole scene unfolds. But in emotional terms, it's not a "buildup"; it's the exact opposite, a shutdown, a sealing shut of unprocessable reality and emotional havoc.


THE MURDER OF BANQUO

Now, the Macbeths still have one more loose end to deal with, and the scene of the murder of Banquo, including the great bass aria "Come dal ciel precipita," with a stark contrast between the chorus of those jolly murderers I mentioned early and Banquo's own premonition, traveling alone with his small son, knowing that they are both likely targets of his once-trusted comrade-in-arms, that the oppressive night reminds of that other horrible night:

"On a night like this they stabbed
Duncan, my lord."

I wish we could spend time on this scene, and wish I could offer you a performance worthy of it, but here at least is a decently sung one by Paul Plishka, from San Francisco's Opera in the Park, 1984, conducted by Kurt Herbert Adler.


QUICK HITS: SHAKESPEARE'S LEAR AND
VERDI'S MACBETH ON HOME AUDIO-VIDEO

The McKellan-Nunn-RSC King Lear is available on DVD from PBS Home Video. Since I still haven't gotten through Act I, and have the distinct feeling that the production isn't going to add up to that much, I'm not recommending, just noting.

As for Verdi's Macbeth, it would be impossible to talk about recordings without mentioning Maria Callas, even though she never actually recorded Lady Macbeth. We do, however, have the broadcast recording of her 1952 La Scala performance(with Enzo Mascherini as Macbeth, Victor de Sabata conducting), and good stereo studio recordings of three excerpts including the Sleepwalking Scene (unfortunately the stripped-down version, starting at Una macchia and omitting the commentaries of the Gentlewoman and Doctor).

(Amazon, by the way, offers a 99-cent MP3 downloadof the 1952 La Scala Sleepwalking Scene, and in the interest of reporting to you, I blew the 99 cents on it. This "song" also starts at "Una macchia," though you'd think one of the virtues of having the scene from a performance of the complete opera should be having the whole scene, starting with the orchestral introduction and including the preceding dialogue of the Gentlewoman and Doctor; while you can download the complete opera, it doesn't appear that you can download this "song" in addition to the Sleepwalking Scene. More important, I had forgotten how fast the Scala Sleepwalking Scene is. Whew! I'm afraid you'll still need the 1958 studio excerpts. I can't imagine how many other CDs they may be on, but I have them on an EMI CD called Verdi Arias, Vol. I, which seems to be out of print but also seems readily and inexpensively findable.)

Callas should have been the Lady Macbeth of the first commercial recording of Macbeth, made as late as 1959 in conjunction with, shockingly, the Met's first-ever production of the opera. But something went very wrong between Callas and Met GM Rudolf Bing in the advance preparations (there's endless he-said, she-said reporting and speculation, but as far as I know, we still don't really know what went wrong), and she was fired, or maybe quit. RCA went ahead with the recording, with Leonard Warren and Callas's replacement, Leonie Rysanek, Erich Leinsdorf conducting.

For all its faults, the RCA recordingwould still be my co-first pick in combination with the second Macbeth recording, the first of Decca's three, with Giuseppe Taddei and Birgit Nilsson, Thomas Schippers conducting (currently unavailable, but worth watching for, though not at the $31.99 being asked on Amazon.com). Put the two together and add in the Callas material, and I think you've got a decent start on this difficult opera.

At the risk of further complicating the Macbeth situation, there's a widely circulated 1970 Vienna State Opera performance beautifully conducted by Karl Böhm (a distinguished Verdian; it's often forgotten that he conducted the premiere of the Zeffirelli Otelllo production at the Met, and very beautifully) in which Christa Ludwig sings a gleaming Lady Macbeth. I'm less crazy Sherrill Milnes's Macbeth, but Karl Ridderbusch, though not especially Italianate in sound, is an outstanding Banquo. (I have the Foyer CD edition, which is in excellent stereo sound. I don't know this one, but I would definitely avoid the Opera d'Oro editions; all the operatic recordings of theirs I've heard are sonically inferior. There is now an apparently "official" editionon Orfeo -- awfully expensive, though.)

Okay, put a gun to my head for a more readily available version, and I guess I could recommend the EMI recordingdecently conducted by Riccardo Muti, with an outstanding Lady Macbeth by Fiorenza Cossotto.

Among the video Macbeths, the 1972 Glyndebourne production with Josephine Barstow and Kostas Paskalis seems to me the clear choice, perhaps the only possible choice despite what appears to be a fairly crowded field.


SUNDAY CLASSICS POSTS

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