The Man I Knew Who Did the Most Good

There was a memorial service last weekend at the Hay-Adams here in DC for a man who made a difference. His name was Clarence M. Ditlow and in this town of constantly shifting personalities and revolving-door careers, he stayed at the same job for 43 years. He was a lawyer as well as an engineer who directed the Center for Auto Safety.

Because of Clarence, all of the safety improvements in our automobiles made over the past few decades happened. The auto companies didn't put in airbags or seat belts or a lot of devices you aren't entirely aware of out of the goodness of their hearts. Clarence testified on the Hill, in the states, and on TV and radio so that laws were passed making them make these improvements for safety. He also was responsible for getting many "lemon laws" passed that allow people to go to court to get back the money they paid for a bum car.

He came from an auto dealer family, as Ralph Nader noted in his talk at the service. Clarence understood cars but even more, he understood people and Washington. He did his homework. He knew the records of problems reported to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration better than the people who worked there.

He always kept his cool. The auto lobbyists would show up and scream and yell about how much this or that needed fix was going to cost them. Clarence refused to be provoked. He just went back to his office and did some more research and preparation, because he also went to court against them when he had to.

I wish I had seen Clarence more often or knew more people like him. There never are enough people like him. Nader said Clarence was responsible for saving millions of lives. How many people do you know about whom you can say that? I'd see him now and then at a farmer's market we both stopped at on Saturday mornings and sometimes with Marilyn, now his widow, whom we had known forever, or so it seemed. 

This is someone who will be missed. 

Manchester-by-the-Sea

When we last lived in Massachusetts, I recall visiting the very scenic seaside town of Manchester-by-the-Sea. That, it turns out, was no preparation for the movie of the same name we saw the other day. It takes place in the winter--the off-season--so no beaches, no Fourth-of-July parade, no light-hearted summertime fun.

It's dour, gray, gloomy--you can feel the cold. The performances by the leading players are excellent, especially Casey Affleck, who is not off-screen at all. Cinematic stalwarts like Michelle Williams all don the requisite Bay State accents to good effect. The story, which explores Affleck's facing the responsibility of serving as guardian for his late brother's teenaged son (well played by Lucas Hedges), is fine but the picture turns out to be slow without redeeming value.

The same ground seems to be covered again and again. Affleck's character has shut down emotionally and cannot relate to any of the others because of a major disaster for which he has some responsibility. The plot is believable in the way it proceeds to what turns out to me to be a very reasonable ending.

Without criticizing Affleck, I found myself unable to empathize with his character. In fact, he's behaved in what is so clearly an antisocial manner that I wondered why his brother had continued to rely on him to be the guardian, given that the brother's death, although anticipated, was not sudden.

So is this a good depiction of the working-class society of this kind of New England town, with its many warts on full display? Probably yes, but there's not much to show for all the sturm und drang after two-and-one-quarter hours of immersion. Everyone tends to behave predictably; there's some good use of both flashback and sudden flashes.

But does this picture have the kind of major theme or themes that you expect from what is being heralded as one of the year's best? It didn't seem to have any of that.

The Ironies of the Law

Not mentioned in accounts of Trump's statements calling for prosecution of flag burners is the concurrence of the late Justice Antonin Scalia in Justice Brennan's majority opinion in Texas v. Jackson, the 1989 flag-burning decision. Scalia did not write himself but apparently supported this decision in one of the occasional instances of his libertarian spirit emerging from his usual originalism which generally was synonymous with conservatism. This put him at odds in that court with dissenters Rehnquist and Stevens, both of whom in this instance put patriotism above freedom of expression. 

We also have been invited to review Scalia's majority opinion in D.C. v. Heller, the gun rights decision. I suggest that if you place Scalia's text up against Stevens's dissent, which was the principal dissent in the case, Scalia's analysis of the history of 2nd Amendment interpretation comes up as thin and unconvincing compared to Stevens's solid presentation of more than 200 years of clear understanding that was now being ignored. Some of Scalia's partisans have compared his majority opinion in this case to Breyer's dissent, which called for balancing. I find myself in agreement with the critics of balancing, for Scalia did have that right in arguing that any time a judge calls for use of a balancing test, the balance seems to come out along the lines the judge prefers.

While no one can doubt Scalia's clear conservatism, his libertarian streak makes me feel that the way Supreme Court justices now are selected, especially by conservative, i.e., Republican, presidents, makes it less likely that we will have strong-minded justices who are not bound to one side or one theory. 

Obama's behavior in appointing or trying to appoint justices stands in stark contrast to the GOP practice. He selected Sotomayor and Kagan, who while clearly tending to emerge on the "liberal" side of the bench, are not entirely predictable in their views. Garland, of course, was the perfect nominee from the standpoint of those who want a fair, even-handed justice, who may have tilted slightly toward the progressive side but also whose temperament was tempered by his many years as a Justice Department attorney representing the government.

We are likely to get more predictable appointments like those of Alito or Thomas. Justice O'Connor reportedly was dismayed by Alito's being named to replace her; she sensed he was a doctrinaire conservative but she had precipitated the situation by adhering to the party loyalty rule of retiring during an administration of her party. The most egregious act in Alito's appointment was the appearance before the Judiciary Committee of a legion of Third Circuit judges rounded up by the late Chief Judge of that circuit, Edward Becker, who was an outright Republican even when on the bench.

Now we may get appointments from the somewhat notorious list of judicial conservatives put together by Trump's campaign. Given the partisanship that has now subsumed the process--Clinton and Obama tried to name justices closer to the center, which means that the center has moved rightward as Republicans named solid right-wingers: Breyer and Kagan, for example, are no Brennan or Marshall--we should expect to see judges in lockstep with right-wing opinion being named. 

We are also likely to be stuck with the practice of naming judges to the court rather than some others with legitimate practical experience gained from being legislators or practicing lawyers. O'Connor was the last legislator and Marshall the last justice with a distinguished background in practice.

Back on Broadway

Two shows I caught this holiday weekend--umpteenth revival of The Front Page and Manhattan Theater Club's Heisenberg. Latter is a two-character, minimal set drama about a May-December encounter--she American, he English--with some unexpected twists. Mary Louise Parker, whom I've seen before in Proof, is the extroverted Georgie and Dennis Arndt, the older introverted Alex, who is actually Irish but is essentially British in his manner.

Yes, it concerns uncertainty which is the only connection to the title. But it also tries to open up all kinds of avenues of thought without really opting to follow any of them. To me it was unsatisfying, never seeming to get to the heart of what is going on between the two. Simon Stephens, the playwright, is doodling with the concept and I felt it all came up short.

The Front Page is a cornerstone of the American theatre. Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur caught the romance of the newspaper game in this fast-moving, repartee-filled gem from 1928. There's likely few alive who got to see the legendary Osgood Perkins (father of Anthony of Psycho fame) and Lee Tracy, the original leads.

As a whole, the production is beautiful. The shabby press room of the Chicago Criminal Courts Building and its inhabitants are marvelously presented. John Slattery is the star reporter who is the co-lead, ably supported by the likes of John Goodman, Lewis J. Stadlen, and the still-extant Robert Morse in a delightful, small, but key role.

One review, however, pinpointed the mid-second-act arrival of Nathan Lane as the co-lead, everyone's most iconic man-eating managing editor, Walter Burns, as the moment that sends the play into orbit. And it is. However, that's not to demean the first act and a half, which set the scene in fine fashion.

It's hard to think that anyone doesn't know this show: Jack Lemmon and Walter Matthau did it in the movies (so did Adolphe Menjou and Pat O'Brian, which takes you back a few more decades). Heck, Howard Hawks re-made it in the late 30s with Cary Grant as the m.e., and Rosalind Russell as His Girl Friday, the star reporter. 

I do vote for Lane as the Walter Burns for the ages. He's absolutely magnificent. And the 88-year-old drama still has plenty of laughs and maybe even a bit of wisdom to convey to us in a very changed era for the newspaper business. 

After the deluge

It was tempting to refer back on election night to Murray Kempton's memorable column in the '50s (I think it was '56) when writing in the late, lamented New York Post of those days about another Republican triumph: Eisenhower over Stevenson. His theme was "Don't tell me things will get better. Yesterday, the sun didn't shine on me, brother." He was taking the occasion to show his profound disappointment. (In retrospect, it's extremely ironic that Eisenhower turned out much better than expected.)

Yes, I wanted Hillary to win, more because the Republicans are always worse every time than they were the last time than because Hillary was so wonderful or even that Trump was so awful. He's a pragmatist, and likes to negotiate deals. The worst thing about his victory is the GOP flotsam and jetsam he brought in with him--tell me that Giuliani, Christie, and Gingrich aren't far worse than Trump any day.

I wish that this disaster for the pollsters would decrease the huge emphasis on polls in all of our news coverage. They blew it, pure and simple. But we will still see them prominently positioned every day because the broadcasters and reporters love a horse race, far easier to cover than discussing serious issues. 

I hope the Dems will shed some of their wimpish behavior and be prepared to fight this time when the usual GOP horrors are put up for the Supreme Court. Cries for unity are ridiculous--coming from McConnell and Ryan who admittedly did everything they could for eight years to frustrate everything Obama aimed to accomplish? And Obama too now talks that unity rot because he's more interested in his legacy than rebuilding the Democratic Party--showing how he blew the midyear elections twice under his watch. 

Chuck Schumer has the rep of being a fighter. Too often, of course, he fights for the interest of Wall St. But he needs to lead his troops effectively. If we get a Clarence Thomas this time, the nomination must be fought all the way--Joe Biden is the culprit for Thomas's making it on the court because the Republicans ran rings around the then-hapless Biden. Make them use the nuclear option. They'll regret it.

Obama disappointed me. He didn't really care about fighting hard. He let the pols write Obamacare and ended up with a mess. He let himself be held up by the two-bit insurance mouthpiece Joe Lieberman and should have denounced that pompous windbag owned by Hartford. In the end, Obama was afraid to push real change. And Hillary failed to give people a reason to back her. She played identity politics and yes, negative campaigning.

I liked Bill Clinton and recognize that when he was running, a Democrat had to look like he wasn't a wild-eyed radical to win. Clinton was a natural politician who related to regular people. Hillary never has been like that. Bill Clinton has done too much to soil his image and made too much easy money to be credible now. I was skeptical of Bernie Sanders but on most things, it turns out he was right. If he had won the nomination, they would have red-baited him but maybe it would've been better to go down that way.

Bezbul's Been Bery Bery Bad

Fortunately, although I enjoy baseball, I've never lived nor died with a team. Perhaps that's something I've missed but I don't expect so. Baseball is a show that offers immense delight, mainly because every game is so different from the previous one. And there's something special still about being in the ballpark.

I've been in many of them. Nats Park is nice, especially because as well-designed as the Orioles' Camden Yards is, Nats Park is the first one that is defiantly not modelled after the Yards. It has its own character. I'm of course a traditionalist in that I despise the constant noise that the teams and leagues now think fans must be deluged under at all times. It was once pleasantly refreshing that the park would be quiet until something excited or something that could be anticipated to be exciting occurred.

Now not only is it always oppressively noisy but you are demanded to clap or toss your cap or stand up or do something. Real fans never needed any of that. I even remember with affection that the "Charge!" call that follows a horn blast was once initiated--in the L.A. Coliseum, I recall, soon after the Dodgers left Brooklyn for L.A.--with a few guys around the stands who blew their own horns, not the P.A. system.

Last night, I attended the third fifth-game of the opening playoff series that the Nats have been in during their existence. As on the earlier occasions, they blew it, helped along by a manager who made the wrong strategic decisions at critical moments. He stuck with Max Scherzer for one batter too long but even worse, brought in two successive ineffective relievers.

Probably not as awful as earlier managers--Davey Johnson and Matt Williams--relying on the clearly shaky Drew Storen to save fifth games in the ninth. Davey had a tendency to freeze and not act when he needed to, and Williams just made one bad move after another, to the point where the excuse that he was a tyro was irrelevant.

Writers have excused the third-base coach for his idiotic decision to send Jason Werth home when he would be out by 30 yards. I would fire him. Those decisions in crucial moments of decisive games are what you hire coaches to make. And to win a playoff series, you can't make mistakes. Being stranded on base is one thing but being sent to your doom by a moronic coaching call is entirely different.

For decades until 1955 the Dodgers seemed to be spooked. In The Year The Yankees Lost the Pennant, a novel that came out in 1954, the character who was the Devil, a Yankee fan naturally, gave a benighted Washington Senators fan the chance to be a young star who would best the Yankees finally. When he scores the winning run despite being turned back to old age by the Devil, who whatever other powers he may have, could not convince an umpire to change his call, the Devil pleads with him to join up again for the Series.

"Without you the Senators can't beat the Dodgers and those Dodgers have never won a World Series," the man in red, played in the musical Damn Yankees by the wonderful Ray Walston, urged. So then in 1955, Next Year finally arrived for Brooklyn, followed two years later by the desertion of America's favorite losers, now winners, to the West Coast. 

The Nats can't blame the Devil this time or the previous two, just themselves, that their managers--like the other two touted strategists this year--Buck Showalter and Bruce Bochy--came up short when it counted.

Columbus

I grew up in an Italian neighborhood and went to Columbus School, so clearly I've been indoctrinated enough so that I'm not inclined to view the Admiral of the Ocean Sea as one of history's greatest villains. But this is a good occasion to consider how we apply what may be more advanced ethical concepts to the persons and events of the past.

My first thought here is that we need to be careful about how quickly we judge according to our contemporary outlook, however accurate or not it may be. As the Holocaust survivors and World War II veterans disappear, will be still harbor suspicions about current-day Germany? Those same vets made most feel that using the atomic bomb saved millions of lives--those of our servicemen who would have died in an invasion of Japan. 

Today some assert that dropping the bomb was a war crime. Others suggest that interning Japanese on the West Coast in 1942 was wrong. Very little consideration is given to the fact that expecting a Japanese invasion was far from out of the question then, nor was it clear that we were going to win World War II in either the Pacific or Europe.

The line that might well be drawn occurred right after World War II at the trial of General Yamashita, the "butcher of Malaya." The general's defense was that Allied--American--success in vanquishing his army led to his loss of direct control and thus allowed atrocities to be committed. His defense was summarily rejected at the war crimes trial in Tokyo, as well as by the interim emperor, Douglas MacArthur, and then by the postwar Supreme Court majority, with only the two most radical justices ever--Murphy and Rutledge, not Black and Douglas--dissenting, citing Tom Paine.

The world does sanctimoniously single out Israeli occupation of the West Bank for condemnation, but who but extreme partisans would defend Netanyahu's behavior toward expanding settlements and his attempt to interfere in U.S. politics. The world has seemed to ignore genocide in Rwanda and Sudan, but not in the Balkans, perhaps because both Serbs and Bosnian Muslims qualified as white.

And last but not least in terms of a loss for hypocrisy, the murders in the Charleston church seemed to turn the tide against the Southern revisionism that successfully depicted the antebellum South as a land of chivalry and happy slavery. The Jeff Davis Highway and J.E.B. Stuart High School across the river in Virginia may be renamed. We may finally escape the image created by Gone With the Wind and Birth of a Nation (1915 film, that is).

Third Party Practice

There's rarely much to be gained from supporting a third-party candidate for President. Despite his recent efforts to shed the appellation "spoiler," Ralph Nader did cost Al Gore the 1980 election. Ross Perot, in contrast, aided Bill Clinton's victory by drawing more from the Republican side. Neither ever had a realistic chance of winning on his own.

But now we are presented with Gary Johnson, former governor of New Mexico, who has outdone some other egregious candidates in his gaffes regarding basic foreign policy familiarity. You don't have to be a policy maven or wonk to be able to respond to simple questions about international leaders and the situation in Aleppo. Not to know what either is strikes me as ludicrous in a serious candidate.

This lacklustre performance merely emphasizes the danger in supporting candidates who only can play that spoiler role. Yes, at least one of our major-party candidates is a disaster, but that does not excuse assuming a righteous, above-it-all attitude justifying voting for someone who has no chance except to possibly flip the election result.

I suppose where I'm going is to say that a protest vote is fine if it really doesn't make a difference, but it made a difference in 2000, especially with a Supreme Court jumping into politics with a ruling that defiantly proclaimed it was not a precedent. It could well make a difference in certain key states this time. This is no year to throw away your vote.

Double Feature

This Saturday, we went to a one-man show, Satchmo at the Waldorf, presented by the Mosaic Theatre Company at the Atlas Theater on H St., NE, DC. It's been extended through this coming weekend and Craig Wallace, who plays Satchmo, as well as his manager, Joe Glaser, and the younger musical jazz star, Miles Davis, is absolutely outstanding.

This takes place in Louis Armstrong's dressing room when he was playing the great venue, the Empire Room at the Waldorf, a few months before his death at 71. The conflicts that raged within him, as he had become the most famous trumpeter in the world by pleasing white audiences are all articulated as he recalls his starting out and his coming of age. Davis and the younger jazz musicians see him as an Uncle Tom because he smiles and plays pop hits to please his fans.

His conflict with his late manager, whose financial dealings left Armstrong much less well-off than he should have been, come to the fore as well, although the explanation that emerges is a good dramatic turn in the play. It's 85 good minutes in the theater--very enjoyable.

Then we went to the Nationals Park to attend Opera in the Outfield--all right, we sat in the third-base line stands to have at least the backing of a seat--where they did a live transmission of Washington National Opera's ongoing Marriage of Figaro from Kennedy Center. Traditional but pleasant production, with excellent performance by Alicia Majeska as the Countess. Everyone else makes up a fine ensemble, with the notable presence of Elizabeth Bishop, Fricka in last year's Ring, in the minor role of Marcellina.

Figaro, from the Beaumarchais play and written in the 1790s by Mozart and DaPonte, caries forth the story of the clever servant who first helped Count Almaviva win Rosina in The Barber of Seville, which precedes Marriage in time although the opera was not written until the 1820s by Rossini. But this opera--one of the oldest in the repertoire--is still revolutionary. As with Cosi fan tutte, the women outwit the men and in this one, the servants are always a step ahead of the master. 

The music is glorious and was well conducted by James Gaffigan. In some ways this was one of the most enjoyable presentations of this major opera that I've seen. The four acts were combined into two and the show still ran 3 1/2 hours but who was noticing? Not I. 

Once I went with our work group to see this during my first overseas court project in Vilnius, Lithuania, at a beautiful modern opera house. My hosts wanted to leave at the end of Act III for a special reception but the opera company, as often occurs in these productions, ran Act III and Act IV together so I quietly mentioned to one of the rest of the group (mostly non-opera types) that Act III just ended and saw his face fall, since it was clearly going to be impossible to get a large group out in the middle of the performance.

Never did make it to the reception but the coffee bar at the opera during intermission had the thickest, most wonderful hot chocolate I've ever tasted.

Of Such Stuff That Dreams Are Made On

The Tempest is usually categorized as one of Shakespeare's "late comedies," which possess the comic label only in the most limited definition of a comedy as a play with a happy ending. The other one in that category that immediately comes to mind is The Winter's Tale, and everything in that except for the usually unconvincing ending is far from happy.

When done well, however, I find The Tempest to be among the most wonderful of Shakespeare's plays. It contains a wistfulness that makes you think he was truly beginning to see the end of his road and wanted to resolve a whole lot of themes. Yesterday's matinee at the Shakespeare Theatre Company in D.C., which we attended, was done very well. Patrick Page, the Prospero, had a strong, deep voice that exuded the authority Prospero must exercise. Sara Topham moved across the proscenium on harness as a more playful Ariel than usual, adding to the spirited atmosphere as a more feminine Ariel--sometimes I think the part was Shakespeare's venture into creating a unisex role.

Veterans Ted van Griethuysen as Gonzalo and Edward Gero as Alonso were both authoritative, and Rachel Mewbron a delightful Miranda who seemed to use the stage as her climbing wall. Liam Craig and Dave Quay rendered the clowns--Trinculo and Stephano--far more effectively than others I've seen, succeeding in maintaining the delicate balance these fairly large but challenging roles demand.

There was a large ensemble of players who were ostensibly islanders--I found some of their processioning somewhat superfluous but not at all diminishing to the play. Clifton Duncan did as much as can be done with the role that makes The Tempest a "problem play" of the Merchant of Venice or Taming of the Shrew variety. His role as a supposedly undeserving native who is oppressed into servitude by the otherwise beneficent Prospero who forgives all the nobles who deprived the latter of his dukedom and presumably does the same for Caliban--although he never actually says so. Caliban of course is given that great line: "You taught me language; and my profit on't/ Is, I know how to curse./ The red plague rid you/ For learning me your language!" So once again Shakespeare puts in just enough to make one feel that he has not imagined Caliban as nothing but a stereotyped "native" (i.e., black) villain.

But the overall spirit of forgiveness that Prospero applies to all the characters--deserving and mostly undeserving, while slowly encouraging the instant lovers, Ferdinand and Miranda, does envelop the play and convey that glimpse of what the playwright was feeling as he finished one of his last plays. "O brave new world" indeed and yes, it was a superb few hours in the theater before "Our revels now have ended".

U. of Chicago Hits Home

"Political correctness" has too often provided an opportunity--real or imagined--for right-wingers to attack academe and other perceived leftist or minority groups but in recent years, the whole approach taken to restrict debate or enable it to be shut out has gone too far.

Now, the school I've always regarded as America's most truly intellectual university--the University of Chicago--has sent out a letter to entering freshmen by its dean, eschewing such artificial barriers as "safe space" and "trigger warnings." In part, the letter stated:

"The letter, signed by John Ellison, the dean of students, states that the university does not support so-called 'trigger warnings,' nor does it cancel controversial campus speakers or condone the creation of intellectual safe spaces where individuals can retreat from ideas and perspectives at odds with their own.

"...Critics of perceived political correctness run amok have hailed the letter as a necessary corrective to a culture of oversensitivity on campuses.

"An editorial in the Chicago Tribune praised the letter as 'refreshingly direct,' applauding its commitment to the marketplace of ideas, the implicit endorsement of democratic freedoms, and the sheer feistiness.

"But defenders of trigger warnings and safe spaces have ripped the letter, saying its statements actually undermine the commitment to academic freedom cited as their motivation..."

My reaction is that it's about time someone in academe showed this kind of gumption to stand up for the kind of unrestricted free speech we were accustomed to having when I was in college. The whole point of going to a great university or a small liberal arts college is to expose your own thinking to the greatest minds as well as all kinds of opinions and attitudes that may be contrary to your own thoughts or views. 

Right-wing types have called for banning Huckleberry Finn and other classics and they found themselves joined by leftists offended by use of dialect and offensive terms commonly used in mid-America in the mid-1800s. Whenever some parent demands that a school board eliminate something controversial from the curriculum or reading list, my instant reaction is that that's exactly the book students should be reading to test their minds.

Given that students read far too little today--in this age of cell phones and video games--the idea that they need to be cosseted and protected by trigger warnings is ludicrous. They just need to read more--a lot more.

A Forgotten Opera

In today's Times, a Critic's Notebook that featured reviews of two productions at Glimmerglass--Sweeney Todd, the musical, and The Crucible, the opera based on Arthur Miller's play--ended with a quick dismissal of Bard Festival's revival of Mascagni's Iris ("genuine obscurity"), which it compared to The Crucible ("a relative rarity").  

Even by opera standards, the plot as described is beyond the usual limits and sounds totally wild: the heroine is "a simple girl who is abducted and imprisoned in a brothel, where she commits suicide after being cursed by her father."  But I found myself wondering if at least some of Mascagni's likely limited musical talent that generated the resoundingly successful  one-act Cavalleria Rusticana could have produced at least some attracting music. 

Admittedly, there's little basis for assuming anything very encouraging. Years ago, I attended a Washington Opera performance of Mascagni's L'Amico Fritz, which had absolutely nothing in common with Cavalleria.  First of all, in terms of defying expectations, Mascagni, who ended his life (he lived until 1945--he wrote both Iris and Cavalleria, as well as Fritz, in the 1890s) espousing fascism in an effort to win patronage from Mussolini, wrote in Fritz a story set in some hitherto unknown Jewish rural setting that features one oft-performed duet (the "Cherry Song") between a landowner and his servant girl. There's even a rabbi in the cast--a baritone.

My assumption is that Iris has even fewer memorable musical moments than Fritz, but it apparently is performed now and then in Italian opera houses. There's a relatively recent recording starring Luciano Pavarotti and Mirella Freni. And then I consulted the Met's archives, which disclose that between 1907 and 1931, the opera was performed 16 times, with the first performance featuring no less than Enrico Caruso, Emma Eames, and Antonio Scotti. The last, in 1931, was almost as impressive: Beniamino Gigli, Elizabeth Rethberg, and Ezio Pinza!

We probably should discount those casts a bit because the Met in those years was blessed with a seeemingly endless supply of world-class singers. And there's surely no evidence to suggest that Mascagni had a hidden hit here. Some authorities have contended that his partner for the ages, Ruggiero Leoncavallo, composer of I Pagliacci,  the "Pag" with which "Cav" is inevitably paired by opera houses everywhere, was really the bad-luck bearer, in that he wrote some perfectly good operas such as a La Boheme, that soon after it debuted, found itself challenged--and defeated in terms of quality and popularity--by Puccini's masterpiece.

Perhaps we have Puccini to thank even for this revival of Iris, because Leon Botstein entitled the summer festival at Bard at which it was performed "Puccini and His World."

The Latest LeCarre

The history of translating John LeCarre novels to the screen--either to the movies or to TV--has been unusual. There were the great BBC tv series productions of Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy and Smiley's People with Alec Guinness as a masterful Smiley and fantastic support by Ian Bannen, Ian Richardson, Roy Bland, and many others, with Sian Phillips turning up at the very end as Anne. More recently, there was a good movie of Tinker, Tailor with Gary Oldman playing Smiley. And we should not forget the great performance by Richard Burton as Alec Leamas in The Spy Who Came in From the Cold quite a few years ago.

There've been others but I haven't seen them. Yesterday I saw the latest, Our Kind of Traitor, another in the post-Cold War LeCarre novels. It's now commonplace to say that LeCarre has never recovered from the end of the Cold War but actually, his imagination on display for all these years does him credit. This time he gets one of his innocents--civilians who find themselves ensnared in the doings of LeCarre's undercover world--a couple, actually, who find themselves trying to help a desperate Russian who has somehow ended up on the wrong side of the Russian mafia.

At least the powers that be in Whitehall and the Circus do ask the right questions, viz., what is Britain doing getting mixed up with a Russian money launderer anyway? I confess that apart from Ewan McGregor as the innocent professor and Damian Lewis as the MI-6 agent, I recognized none of the British cast. Having admitted my ignorance, let me now say that they are all, including the familar face of Stellan Skarsgard, often seen as a Russian or Scandinavian, terrific.

The film as a whole is a good spy adventure and has the usual intrigue at all levels. The in-fighting and efforts to right old wrongs within the "Service" remain the most compelling aspects of the plot, even more than the flight to get away from the Russian mafia goons. I don't think LeCarre suffers so much from the end of the Cold War as a difficulty in coming up with the great canvases of the Smiley days, including the novel of those days that was likely too long and too complex to make a great film: The Honourable Schoolboy.

Surprising Jane Austen

There’s not much worth seeing on the big screen this summer. Or so it would seem. Occasional gems like Genius, previously lauded here. But last weekend, I caught a feature which is close to ending its limited-release distribution: Love and Friendship, directed by Whit Stillman.

This delightful romp is based on a Jane Austen novella, Lady Susan, and features Kate Beckinsale and a wonderful crew of British actors, with Stephen Fry and Chloe Sevigny the best known but appearing in modest cameo roles. The intrigue Austen was so expert in capturing concerns a widowed lady’s machinations to find a new husband for herself and a first one for her unmarried daughter in order to insure that they both have means of support in Georgian society (18^th century England) where fortunes, country houses, and city residences were all solely within the control of well-off men.

Lady Susan is a schemer par excellence, and given the varied motivations but often equally meretricious circles in which she travels, we end up being more sympathetic to her as a lovable sinner than otherwise might be the situation. The director has done a clever job of familiarizing us with the diverse cast of characters and their motivations by presenting them in old-fashioned panels at the start, categorized both by their location—usually, which country house where they are located—and relationship.

We often forget that Jane Austen was writing in the early days of the development of the English novel. She was influenced by the very first novelists—Richardson and Fielding—and began in the style used then: epistolary, or a novel in letters. This novella was one of her first works, although not published for many years, and was written in that style.

Her perceptions of the way the different characters behave are filled with plenteous use of irony and wit. It is not at all surprising that as is usually the case in her works, the women almost always have a far more penetrating insight into both character and what is actually occurring than the men, who while ostensibly totally in charge of matters relating to fame and fortune, are frequently clueless as to the machinations going on around them.

All of this is beautifully portrayed in this marvelous film. Many parts of it, and certainly many lines, are completely irresistible.

Two Geniuses

The movie, Genius, which we saw tonight, refers in its title to the writer Thomas Wolfe, author of Look Homeward, Angel and Of Time and the River. His other two novels, The Web and the Rock, and You Can't Go Home Again, were published posthumously. I haven't read any of them. The movie has made me intent on reading Wolfe, though, although I'm not yet sure which novel it will be.

Wolfe wrote long, very long. The movie is about how a great literary editor, Maxwell Perkins at Scribner's, recognized Wolfe's genius--he had previously discovered Fitzgerald and Hemingway--and in a torturous process taking months and then years, edited Wolfe's more-than-1000-page products to more accommodating 600+ pages each. They got great reviews and the second novel was a best seller.

The movie depicts Wolfe's tumultuous, regrettably short life and focuses mostly on his relationship with Perkins, who had five daughters and was a rather strait-laced Puritan type who commuted to New Canaan, Conn. Much controversy still exists over whether Perkins's editing did Wolfe justice. Wolfe himself did abandon Perkins, apparently resenting the frequent attribution of credit to the editor. The prolific late literary scholar, Matthew Bruccoli, brought out the unedited version of Look Homeward, Angel in 2000, claiming that it better presented Wolfe's true genius.

Whether Perkins was Wolfe's savior or weakened his style, Wolfe doubtless suffered more from his posthumous editor, Edward Aswell of Harper & Brothers, to whom Wolfe delivered his last two novels before dying at Johns Hopkins in 1938. Aswell, it now appears from more recent scholarship, savaged Wolfe's very rough drafts and worse, inserted much of his own text into the novels. Wolfe's work has declined in popularity, it has been noted, although in 1958, Look Homeward, Angel was adapted for Broadway and played 564 performances and won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama.

All this aside, the movie is terrific. Colin Firth captures Perkins's personality as Jude Law does Wolfe's. The actresses Nicole Kidman as Wolfe's lover, Aline Bernstein, and Laura Linney as Perkins's wife, also add to the delight of the picture. Much of it was shot in Britain--in Manchester and at Pinewood and Shepperton, the two huge British movie factories. While the film does show the real train gates at Grand Central, incidentally, when they proceed past them to the platform, they are showing us, it would appear, some British train shed, perhaps Manchester's, but not the real inside of Grand Central's platforms. Just a train buff talking.

A Mezzo for All Time

I'm tempted to travel out to Santa Fe this summer, yes, for the opera, and yes, even though we managed to make it out there to the opera for the first time last summer. It was delightful even though none of the operas were perfect. Just watching the sun set over the mountains behind the main stage is enough reason to want to go back soon.

But this summer they are reviving Samuel Barber's Vanessa, the rare modern opera that has been revived quite a few times since its 1958 premiere at the Met. Now one prime reason I'd like to see this opera would not be satisfied by a trip to Santa Fe, but probably not by any place else either. Rosalind Elias, long-time adornment of the Met's mezzo roster, created the role of Erika, which she played to Eleanor Steber's title soprano role. It's of more than mild interest that the title role was written with Callas in mind, only the diva turned it down, saying Elias's mezzo part was better!

Ms. Elias is likely the only principal connected with that premiere almost 60 years ago who is still extant. She was interviewed by Opera magazine in its July issue and the story was a delight. As a very young singer, she lucked out by being offered a major role in a new production--a new opera, no less. And she dared to tell the imperious Rudolf Bing, then the Met's general manager, that she thought she should have an aria written for her part as well.

Bing was known to cater to singers he liked and clearly she was one of them. He called Barber right then and said, "Sam, Rosalind is here and has something to ask you." And lo and behold, the great Samuel Barber wrote one for her, a good one too: "Must the winter come so soon?" which has become a recital hall staple. Elias remains the sole Erika in Met history, having sung the role in each revival. She has also sung the role of the Baroness, originated by the wonderful Regina Resnik.

Elias was always lucky, it seems. In the 60s, she sang Zerlina, the first mezzo to do so at the Met since the 1880s, with Elisabeth Schwarzkopf no less, who was getting on and not in good form, and who almost freaked Elias out, until Geraint Evans took Elias by the hand to get her away from the legend's problems. 

It's wonderful to recall that Elias starred in the first Met performance I ever attended--a student performance of Carmen in 1958, when I was in junior high and went on a school excursion to the old house on 39th Street. Just being in the amazing old building was exciting and now I realize what a trouper Elias was and why Bing must have liked her--here she is singing student performances, albeit of the opera with the greatest mezzo role, while in the same season singing the premiere of Vanessa.

Barber's opera, with libretto by Gian-Carlo Menotti, is now revived enough to be more than a curiosity. Should I be unable to make it to Santa Fe this summer, it's being done in the late fall at the Wexford Festival in Ireland.

12 Innings and a Requiem

Didn't intend to bracket these two events together but so it goes. Wednesday afternoon into the evening (as it turned out) was getaway day against the Cubs for the Nats, each club leading its division and the Wrigleys boasting the best record in baseball. We had taken the opener, dropped the middle encounter, and now needed the 3rd to make up for losing all four back in Chitown last month.

Strange game in that Strasburg gave up a solo homer in the top of the first and then Nats came back in the bottom of that inning with a score from third on a wild pitch. Then no score until the Nats put it together in the bottom of the 8th to lead by a bare 2-1 going into the 9th where the bullpen promptly gave away two to give the visitors the lead. 

Key steal in the bottom of the 9th set up a Ramos RBI to tie and off we went into extra innings. Another exchange of runs brought us into the 12th and after Michael A. Taylor got on, 37-year-old Jayson Werth smacked one off the right/center field wall to set off the speedy Taylor around the bases from first to score the walk-off winner.

By the 8th, of course, the starting pitchers were gone and it was effectively a whole new ball game, played by tired players waiting to get out of town--in the case of the Nats, to the Coast for series against the Padres and Dodgers, and then the Brewers, coming home eventually to face the ill-performing Mets, who still present the best pitching staff in the majors.

But Friday night we were at Strathmore, definitely the nicest music hall in town with the best acoustics, to hear Marin Alsop lead the Baltimore Symphony in Verdi's Requiem, which I'd never heard before. It was a marvelous performance, with the Choral Arts Society serving as the massive chorus and our friend Phyllis Kaye's friend Elizabeth Bishop singing beautifully in the mezzo role. Actually, all the singers were terrific and the orchestra overwhelming.

Given that it was Verdi, there was plenty of operatic sturm und drang. All in all, a nice week, proving that that other Baltimorean, Mencken, may not been right in scorning opera in English as being as sensible as baseball in Italian--here we had a requiem in Latin and baseball in the many lingos spoken by today's diverse crew of players. Actually the game wouldn't have been complete without an umpire chucking Rendon out after he protested a called third strike in whatever language such outbursts occur these days.

End of the World

You might feel, after the 5 1/2 hours of Twilight of the Gods, or Goetterdaemerrung [literally, "getting darker of the gods"], the 4th and last opera in Wagner's Ring of the Nibelung, that it ends in this fine Washington National Opera production with a whimper not a bang. The production of course is non-traditional, and is itself a critique of the detritus and destruction left by our modern industrial society, so dealing with Wagner's stage directions for the final scene are going to be difficult in any case.

He called for the Rhine to overflow its banks and the world, especially Valhalla, home of the gods, to crumble. I've seen at least three previous productions of this opera, two of them quite traditional, and they only could approximate those demanding orders. I do remember getting a charge out of buildings coming down, either onstage at the Met or Covent Garden in London. Brunnhilde brings about the redemption of the world as she rides her horse, Grane, into the flames of the fire started to burn Siegfried's funeral pyre. The Rhinemaidens drag the chief villain, Hagen, to his death by drowning as his final cry warns everyone else to keep their hands off the Ring.

The staging of this scene was not too close to any of those overwhelming objectives: no overflow, no crumbling buildings, and no horse. So to me, it fell a bit flat although I enjoy seeing new conceptions of most operas, including The Ring operas. And this cavil should not obscure my conclusion that Francesca Zambello's production (co-produced with San Francisco Opera) is the best-staged Ring I've ever seen.

Catherine Foster was a glorious Brunnhilde and Daniel Branna a fine Siegfried, as well as Eric Halvorson playing Hagen as well as anyone I've seen.The other singers were also excellent, in their acting as well, including Jacqueline Echols as a Rhinemaiden and she was the Forest Bird in the preceding opera, Siegfried, and Jamie Barton, an up-and-comer who was one of the Norns as well as one of the Rhinemaidens. She won the Met national auditions a few years ago.

Hearing the leitmotifs, or themes, associated with each of the characters or ideas or moods makes these operas as wonderful musically as they are. The most famed leitmotifs are Siegfried's, Valhalla, the Valkyries', the Sword, the Ring, the Spear, the Nibelungs, and Siegfried's Horn Call and Funeral March, the last a great orchestral piece itself from Goetterdaemerrung as well as Siegfried's Rhine Journey in the first act.

One unusual aspect was that the first acts of these last two operas, which tend to be slow, as is the first act of Die Walkure, the second opera, played very well and held my attention dramatically as well as musically, although one very accomplished musician whom I ran into at this last opera pointed out that drama is not a terribly strong point in these operas, even if they are often referred to as music-dramas. The final acts of the last two operas instead seemed to drag a bit, despite their rather dramatic content: Siegfried's awakening Brunnhilde from her deep sleep in Siegfried and the death of Siegfried and subsequent end of the world as we know it in tonight's opera.

And lastly, one judge friend I encountered suggested that the big problem of the opera tetralogy and for Wotan, the king of the gods and the main character in the first three operas, is lawyers. Wotan somehow had made all kinds of treaties and contracts that are imprinted in runic letters on his spear and these circumscribe his ability to take actions as he sees everything leading toward the end of the world as he knows it.

Dragons and Compacters

You don't usually hear even passionate Wagnerites carry on about the third opera in The Ring of the Nibelung: Siegfried. This is a long opera without much of the excitement of Die Walkure and the amazing music in the final opera, Goetterdaemmerung. But Francesca Zambello's amazing production for Washington National Opera injected some energy into this often-lagging interlude--if you can call a 5 1/2 hour opera an interlude.

We first meet Siegfried, the hero of heroes but also a classic Wagner innocent, in what looks to be a beat-up trailer he is inhabiting with Mime, the dwarf who for reasons unclear was the one who raised him after his parents were gone: Siegmund in the great battle with Hunding that was the start of the downfall of the gods, and Sieglinde, after giving birth to Siegfried. He is rightly suspicious of Mime, who is only caring for him so that when he fights Fafner, now a dragon, and recovers the ring and its accoutrements, Mime will be on hand to relieve the not-so-smart Siegfried of the spoils.

But the only characters whose plotting is more unsuccessful than Wotan's or the gods' generally are the Nibelungs, the dwarves. Alberich stole the Rheingold, forged the ring, lost it through trickery to Wotan and Loge, and still turns up in this opera aiming to get it back. Mime, too, is short-sighted. These characters, as it happens, also are perhaps one of the most serious pieces of evidence that looms, albeit unclearly, of Wagner's anti-Semitism at work. His descriptions of them as ugly, misshapen, greedy, less than human--even in the somewhat cleaned-up surtitles, does for a moment make you think you are hearing Der Sturmer brought to life. And add to that their role as the thief of the sacred Rheingold and using it to forge a ring that will enable them to rule the world.

But no one has ever said that Wagner is an unmitigated blessing. I do think too of Deems Taylor's short chronicle--The Monster--of all the miserable aspects of his personality and his behavior and then the inspired conclusion that the glory of his music means that everything in the indictment doesn't really matter.

Zambello's envisioning of the dragon as a huge trash compacter is superb, and when Siegfried kills the dragon and Fafner, now returned to his original status as a giant, falls out and has a death scene, you start to sympathize for the not-so-smart giant, who craved the gold when Wotan refused to yield the beauteous Freia to him, and is now dying as the last of his race.

The forest bird whose chattering Siegfried understands after tasting the dragon's blood is played in a charming manner by Jacqueline Echols. In my vinyl recording of the Ring, no less than Joan Sutherland played the role. Wotan's encounters in the last act with Erda and Siegfried were also better than I had recalled from previous productions--the old Met traditional production of the late 20th century by Otto Schenck and the recent cumbersome mechanical one by Robert LePage.

The singing quality has been high throughout but the biggest disappointment to me after what had been an amazingly enjoyable Siegfried was the famed last scene where the title character finally reaches Brunnhilde after charging through the ring of fire (not seen). Usually the tenor is exhausted from his hours of singing while the soprano is fresh as she has been waiting all this time. After the famous laugh line by Siegfried: "This is not a man!", the scene really dragged. Brunnhilde obviously needs some time to awaken after 18 years asleep but coming after all this anticipation, the scene fails to live up to expectations.

A Blazing Valkyrie

It's not stretching things too much to suggest that Die Walkure (The Valkyrie) is Wagner's greatest opera. Some might hold out for Tristan und Isolde, with its deathless love music in the famed love-death (Liebestod) but I would hold with Die Walkure as overall the most satisfying and exciting of Wagner's several music-dramas that have continued to hold the stage in the more than a century since his death.

The opera proceeds through three full acts, getting better with each one. The opener features Sieglinde unhappily married to Hunding, and suddenly aware that there is a world out there--romantic as well as pleasant--with the arrival of the stranger "Wehwalt" who turns out to be her long-lost twin brother, Siegmund. The two siblings, known as the Volsungs, are also pawns in Wotan's great plan to recover the ring and the power to run the world with which it ostensibly endows its holder.

Hunding is revealed as a rustic brute which makes somewhat short-sighted the defense of marriage with which Wotan's wife, the goddess Fricka, assails the chief of the gods when she demands that Hunding be triumphant in the ensuing sword fight with Siegmund. Wotan and his warrior-daughter Brunnhilde, who leads the Valkyries who bring the heroes to Valhalla upin their battlefield demise, of course see Siegmund as the hero who deserves to win against Fricka's upholder of marriages, even unhappy ones, and much less the rights of a domestic violence offender. Fricka also has this old-fashioned distaste for the incest in which Siegmund and Sieglinde have engaged.

All these sordid plot elements have implications for the end of the world, no less--das ende, as Wotan intones when he is at his most despondent. Wagner never lets any little piece of his stories go to waste. Wotan in the second act--gazing at the skyscrapers from his high-tower corporate aerie, possibly in Manhattan--is beset with his desire to go with Brunnhilde and favor the hero they both love and then the argument from Fricka to uphold society and propriety (sounds for a moment like George M. Cohan's Marie in his song Mary).

As usual with Wotan's big decisions--in the pre-performance lecture, the dramaturg of the San Francisco Opera informed us that there is a special leitmotif in the Ring for major decisions--he probably gets this one wrong too, just as he failed to heed Erda's prophecy in Das Rhenigold and return the ring and gold to the Rhinemaidens. Here his conceding to Fricka alienates Brunnhilde who defies him and tries to help Siegmund win, after which he must disown her and punish her by placing her within a ring of fire for the first man, presumably heroic, to recover her, now no longer a god.

Through all of this we hear the perhaps too-well-known Ride of the Valkyries but also the always magnificent Wotan's Farewell and the fire music. Beginning with the last part of Act One, the opera becomes exciting and the tension and drive proceed at a high pitch, rarely stopping and never letting you lose your compelling attraction to and interest in the stage proceedings as well as the music. By Act Three, you are totally enraptured by the themes and the acting and the whole experience, much as the megalomaniacal genius Wagner surely intended.

Wagner was a showman and his ideas permit all kinds of staging--traditional, as in the old Met Otto Schenck production to this contemporary or 20th century version set in deteriorating industrial locations as well as corporate boardrooms, all clearly facades for a society that has been corrupted. Patrice Chereau, with Pierre Boulez on the podium, launched this kind of production years ago at the Wagner shrine, Bayreuth, and Francesca Zambello has refined it for the Washington National Opera, where she tested out the first two operas some years back and then the full cycle in San Francisco, the co-producer.

Alan Held was a strong Wotan, without some of the range that makes the leading character more enthralling, while Catherine Foster, for whom the great Christine Goerke filled in last week, was a fine, spirited Brunnhilde. Elizabeth Bishop, a friend of a good friend of ours, was a fine strong Fricka, Meagan Miller and Christopher Ventris gave adequate dimension to the Sieglinde and Siegmund roles.

The First Pot of Gold

Even Wagnerites don't always take Das Rheingold as seriously as the three massive operas which follow it in the Ring tetralogy: Die Walkure, Siegfried, and Goetterdaemerrung. First of all, unlike the others which tend to run towards four or even more than five hours (some productions come close to six), the first opera of the four runs barely over 2 1/12 hours. Of course, it's four scenes are now often performed without intermission, so it does become its own kind of challenge.

But this opera has lots of exposition, more story than sustained singing--no major songs, no Ride of the Valkyries. But tonight at Kennedy Center, we saw it as the first in the second Ring cycle that Washington National Opera is presenting over a three-week span. And the staging, the orchestra, and the singers were absolutely magnificent.

Wagner's music is the supreme ingredient--exciting, compelling, even at times subdued and enticingly seductive. Conductor Philippe Auguin deserved the rave reviews he and the orchestra received for the first cycle. This opera introduces all the leitmotifs--the musical themes that Wagner associates with ideas as well as characters. There's one for the Rhine, for Valhalla, for each of the main characters, and this time, I couldn't help noticing the strains of the fire music that will end Die Walkure but which is associated with Loge, who is a principal character only in Das Rheingold, and is the god of fire summoned by Wotan near the end of Act III tomorrow night, 

Loge, here a demigod who does not share the heedlessness of the privileged gods, provides the element of trickery that Wotan requires to recover the Rhine gold from the dwarf Alberich. His status was higher in the Norse version of the same Germanic legends Wagner drew on: he always appears as a tricky character, rarely to be trusted. Here he saves the gods' bacon and you end up respecting him more than them.

Wotan also receives his first prophecy from Erda, the earth goddess, who warns him about wanting to hold on to the ring. We will see, of course, that his grand plan comes undone, at times by his own limitations of imagination. The gods in Wagner are far from being omnipotent nor omniscient in these operas.

This was a wonderful opening and I'm looking forward to the three longer but fuller evenings, beginning with tomorrow's Die Walkure, with its three acts that get progressively better and each contains so many marvelous musical moments.

Eye in the Sky

Was convinced to see a new movie, Eye in the Sky, about use of drones in third-world countries, featuring Helen Mirren as a British air force colonel hell-bent on taking out terrorists she's been tracking for several years. She runs into the need for clearance by higher-ups--civilians--both Americans and Brits, who are concerned to greater or lesser degrees about collateral killing of uninvolved civilians.

Performances are excellent--Alan Rickman's last playing the British general who has to meet with the Attorney General, the Foreign Ministry rep, and other high-level types, and Barkhad Abdi, who played the lead pirate in Captain Phillips, as an on-the-ground agent of the Brits. The scene in Somalia--where it was filmed--is classic third-world, with a sympathetic local's uninvolved presence near the house where the terrorists are meeting keeping everyone involved in deciding whether to order the drone strike on tenterhooks.

It is a thriller in that it keeps you on the edge of your seat. Rickman's voice is a treasure. Richard McCabe as the U.K. Attorney General seemed the perfect British bureaucrat. There also are good flash scenes with the British Foreign Secretary and U.S Secretary of State. 

The ethical issues are compelling as well. The participants mull how the likely death of a sympathetic local character matches up with the far greater number who would perish if the two suicide bombers at the meeting in Somalia escape the drone strike to commit their acts of terror in shopping malls. 

The whole experience makes you realize if you didn't already how you can be tracked so easily and so effectively. So all in all, this was both an entertaining and sobering film to see.

Opening Day in Cricket...er, Baseball

This is opening week in baseball--and I'm planning to be at Opening Day late Thursday afternoon in DC and perhaps attend the Orioles tonight (Weds) in Baltimore. Weather forecast is good for tonight, not so good for Thursday.

While waiting for the season to start, and as I happened to be in Sri Lanka on a consulting trip focused on improving caseflow management there, I was able to follow the major world cricket tournament then going on in India. The matches were carried on TV there and this cricket format--called T20--generally runs about 3 1/2 hours, which is very quick for cricket and may explain its increased popularity. West Indies, a great cricket power in the 1970s and 1980s, managed to oust home team India in the semis, and the always underrated English managed to muddle through and then trounced New Zealand in the other semi.

So here's the final--West Indies, which these days has lots of solid hitting (back in the old days they were also powerful bowlers, i.e., pitchers, with five men on their squad who looked and acted like Bob Gibson, the great St. Louis pitcher), versus England, with a bunch of guys who weren't great at anything but managed to win a lot during the tournament.

The setting: one of the classic cricket venues--Eden Gardens in Kolkata, nee Calcutta. Used to squeeze upwards of 200,000 in but figure that only could've happened if the home team had made it to the finals. They renovated the place a few years ago, and stated capacity went  down from 150,000 to 66,000. Whatever, the place was packed and they were screaming.

England was put in to bat first--in this match, West Indies won the coin toss and usually it's preferred to go last since you then know what total you need to catch up to win. The English are very workmanlike, they don't miss catches (for outs, or wickets as the term has it) and they're good at seizing opportunities. They have two men in the middle of their batting order who seem to do well together (remember, two are up at bat at one time, one at each end). With one of them doing very well, they managed to get at total of 155 runs, which is ok but not great. 

West Indies came in to bat and they started out terribly, losing three of their best hitters very quickly. One man came in and seemed to steady them, gradually building up runs but slowly (as if he were playing a five-day game). They tend to be carefree and hit away but here he was being cautious--very English, not West Indian! He stayed in for the rest of the match--no one else was great for W.I. but he had a few big hits and at the very end they were about 20 runs behind with 10 balls left to hit. This means they needed some big hits--which get you 4 or 6 runs each-- and they had not had many. 

So a new bowler comes in for England and pitches to a man who hadn't done much hitting and he sends a powerful shot over the boundary--equivalent of a home run; this gets him six runs.

Then he does it again on the next pitch!

Then he does it a third time on the next! This one ties the score.

And finally he does it yet once more, on the fourth straight pitch and they win! This was like ending a game by hitting four straight homers--and of course, it was a walk-off too!

They actually had two balls left that they didn't need (and to recall the famous cricket phrase, both batsmen were "not out"--that is, left standing at the end--).

As you can imagine, the West Indians went crazy--for most of the match, it looked like they would lose but the commentators kept saying that these guys could explode at any time--so they did, at just the right time! Thrilling finish!

Spain's Hold on Our Outlook

Today's New York Times had two major articles devoted to the Spanish Civil War. To me, this merely demonstrates that this regional conflict of the late '30s (1936-39) still plays a major part in the way we think about politics, war, government, and yes, lost causes. The first piece was a review of Adam Hochschild's new book, Spain in Our Hearts, which explores how we still must reckon with the influence of this particular conflict.

As the reviewer, Dwight Garner, notes, just on the artistic side, this war produced two of the greatest works of literature: Hemingway's novel, For Whom the Bell Tolls, and George Orwell's memoir, Homage to Catalonia.  The Spanish Civil War, of course, was where Orwell must have acquired his deep hatred of both Fascism and Communism. He fought for the Loyalists (Republicans), who, when not fighting the Nationalists, Franco's side backed by Hitler and Mussolini, were resisting being dominated by their major supporters, Stalin's Comintern. Orwell was no sunshine soldier: he suffered injuries in combat in Spain that likely helped shorten his life.

But if there is any magnificent and totally sobering artistic legacy of this war, it is, of course, Picasso's incredible huge mural, Guernica, depicting the carpet-bombing of a Spanish city by Franco's forces, but perhaps the most all-encompassing depiction of the horrors of war. This was produced by surely the preeminent painter of the 20th Century, who also sympathized all his life with the Communists, despite the wealth his art provided him, probably because he never forgot that the Communists supported the democratic government when no other great powers, not Britain, France, or the U.S., came to its aid. Not only would he not return to his native Spain while Franco ruled, but he kept Guernica at the Museum of Modern Art in  New York until Spain eventually returned to democracy after Franco's death.

Thus there has always been something highly romantic about the brave volunteers who went to Spain on their own dime and put their lives in danger on behalf of an idea, that of the world's powers, only the Soviet Union was supporting. The Americans formed the American Lincoln Brigade, and last year, the last veteran of that noble cadre, died at age 100. Today he was memorialized by none other than John McCain in the Times, who respected Dwight Berg, who never renounced his Communism, for fighting for what he believed in on the side of the good guys in Spain.

It was good to see McCain behaving again like the maverick he was until he toed the party line to get himself nominated for President by the Republicans in 2008. In the 1950s, the Abraham Lincoln Brigade vets were not treated so kindly by Lincoln's GOP. The McCarthyites hounded them as Communists, whether or not they were such and, more important, whether or not it mattered in terms of their fighting in Spain. Many of them ended up fighting the Stalinists as fervently as they waged war against Franco.

The reason the memory of this unsplendid little war will never die was best expressed, perhaps, by Albert Camus, from whose words Hochschild took the title of his book: 

"Men of my generation have had Spain in our hearts. It was there that they learned … that one can be right and yet be beaten, that force can vanquish spirit and that there are times when courage is not rewarded."

La Favorite

It had been several years since I had last attended the Washington Concert Opera, a group that performs operatic rarities in concert format (the singers stand in front of the orchestra with their parts on music stands, with the chorus behind the orchestra) at George Washington University's Lisner Auditorium. In the past, I've seen wonderful performances by this group, including the great Bellini opera, Norma, which has since been fully staged by the Washington National Opera.

This performance featured Donizetti's La Favorite, which I had not previously heard in any form. It is traditional opera, not comedy, and was written for the Paris Opera after Donizetti had left Naples. He had been writing an opera on a similar theme there but grew disgusted with the censorship he was encountering. The controversy likely related to the title character, who is the mistress of the King of Spain. The king's maintaining this relationship results in the opera in the Pope's threatening to excommunicate the king.

The opera became popular in Paris and has been performed there more than 600 times at the Opera. But it has languished somewhat in the 20th and 21st centuries, possibly because the soprano's role is really meant for a mezzo, and except for Carmen, most operas don't feature leading roles for mezzos. This situation resulted from the "relationship" between the intendant of the Paris Opera and a leading soprano, whose voice was more in the mezzo range, and who did not, not surprisingly, want to sing trills or coloratura at all.

Thus the opera has no significant coloratura or trills, unlike Donizetti's most famous pieces, Lucia di Lammermoor and L'Elisir d'Amore.  Donizetti was the last of the great bel canto composers, who emphasized this kind of :beautiful singing" and he turned out something like 60 or 70 operas -- the exact number is unclear because, Broadway-style, he cannibalized some scores to create others.

The opera had some very enjoyable arias for mezzo, tenor, and bass. The bass was John Relyea, who is known and a superb singer, with a lovely deep tone. The soprano was Kate Lindsey, an up-and-coming soprano, who did full justice to her role. The tenor was younger, Roderick Bills, and improved markedly as he warmed up.

The opera begins and ends in the monastery that the tenor is first joining, but then leaves when he is entranced by seeing a beautiful "angel", i.e., woman, in church. He is invited by her to her palace but she does not disclose that she is the mistress to the king. The young man is somewhat clueless since he is spirited off the island where this palace stands upon word that the king is arriving.

The father superior of the monastery turns up at the court to threaten the king with excommunication per a papal bull if the king does not give up his adulterous relationship. The libretto also threatens that the nation's churches would be closed under an interdict. Kings were not about to resist these thunderbolts from the Bishop of Rome, so the king is delighted when the young man, who has received a military commission by intervention of the mistress, wins a major battle and saves the king's throne.

The king now offers the mistress--sans identifying her as such--to the young man, now the triumphant general. All seems fine, as the young man is also given a title as a marquis. But in the hour before the rapidly-scheduled wedding, the chorus of courtiers (a la Rigoletto's "vile race of courtiers") taunts the young man with his prospective loss of honor should he proceed with this marriage.

He decides his honor is more vital than his love, so he takes off to rejoin the monastery, she follows him, and the tragic ending follows.

Ridiculous operatic plot but some delightful music and fine singing. After Eve Queler revived the opera some years ago in New York, the Met picked it up and cast Shirley Verrett, Sherrill Milnes, and Alfredo Kraus in its production, which sounds formidable. My conclusion was that hearing it in concert version was amazingly appropriate; little would have been added by full staging.