Stephen Sondheim at 80 - BBC Prom concert

Not much scope for the classicist, it would appear, at the BBC promenade concert on 31st July 2010 celebrating the 80th birthday of Stephen Sondheim. To most, Sondheim is a composer of Broadway musicals featuring numbers like “Send in the Clowns”, “Broadway Baby” and “Side by Side by Side”. This view does not take full account of his highly varied output which stretches well beyond the popular stage musical to the Bergman-inspired “A Little Night Music” to the operatic “Sweeney Todd”, the Seurat-based “Sunday in the Park with George” and (for the classicist) versions of Aristophanes and Plautus. Sondheim’s version of Aristophanes’ “The Frogs” is best known for being first performed in the Yale University swimming pool with Meryl Streep and Sigourney Weaver in the chorus. It is not often performed although a CD exists, but the opening fanfare and “Instructions to the Audience” began the evening at the Proms. Simon Russell Beale and Daniel Evans formed a double act calling on the gods to look down on the actors (in both senses), and in a really Aristophanic way combined religious solemnity with informal addresses to the audience, telling us what not to do (sing along, clap in the wrong place, and so on) and particularly to switch off our mobile phones (not something Aristophanes had to worry about). The breezy dialogue and the deceptively simple music gave an idea of what kind of atmosphere might have been created by an Aristophanes comedy where action, song, dance and dialogue would have combined to give the overall effect, much more than the concentration on the text which some Aristophanic study seems to consist of. I have always thought that Aristophanes’ metrical ingenuity and variations greatly influenced W S Gilbert’s verse in the Savoy operas, and these have always been recognised as influencing the lyrics of American musicals. Is there scope for a study of the “Influence of Greek Comedy on the Broadway Musical”?

Then there is the case of Sondheim and Plautus. “A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum” is a conflation of several of Plautus’s usual plots involving a young man in love with a slave girl who turns out to be the free born daughter of the absent master who comes back to be told he cannot enter his own house because it is haunted (but really because the young man in inside with his girl-friend). The central figure is the clever slave who eventually sorts out all the misunderstandings and all ends happily. The featured number here was the patter song “Everybody ought to have a maid” delivered by Simon Russell Beale and Daniel Evans with Julian Ovenden and finally the great Welsh baritone Bryn Terfel, who was last seen on the same stage as Hans Sachs in Wagner’s Meistersinger. (The comedy always comes after a long dose of the serious stuff.)

Sondheim draws on many traditions in his work: fairy tale, film, art, horror story as well as the conventions of musical theatre. But these two examples show that he is fully aware of the origins of his craft which stretch back to the stages of Athens and Italy. I think Aristophanes could well have sat in the audience, tapping out the rhythms and enjoying the show, while thinking at the same time how he could write a piece that would send up Stephen Sondheim something rotten.

Welcome to Thebes

This new play by Moira Buffini is running at London’s National Theatre. It updates a number of Greek stories to modern West Africa, taking on big geopolitical issues with a mainly black cast. Thebes is an unspecified country where civil was has recently ended in the election of Eurydice (Creon’s surviving wife) as president. She is trying amid the ruins of her country to re-establish some kind of civilisation. To help her in this Theseus (Athens’ “first citizen”) is visiting to try to arrange some kind of international aid. The drama thus raises the questions of democracy v. tyranny, women in politics, race (Theseus has white aides), religion (the charismatic warlord Tydeus is possessed by Dionysus), the state v. the individual, child soldiers, and many others. It is perhaps too issue-driven for its own dramatic coherence and it contains enough material for a whole trilogy with a comedy to follow.

For the classicist the interest is in the use of mythological figures in the modern setting. All the characters have Greek names which fit their character role. One of Theseus’ (white) aides is called Talthybia after the tragic message-carrying figure; one of the child-soldiers is named after one of the Furies (Megaera) who she tells us she represents; some cabinet ministers are named after the Muses, while others are called Strife (Eris, chief of police) and Force (Bia). The main characters (Eurydice, Theseus, Antigone, Ismene and Tiresias) are recognisably derived from their equivalents in Athenian tragedy. The emphasis from the author and the production team seems to be on the recreation of ancient myth in a modern setting, but there is also a large input from Greek literature as well. Sophocles’ Antigone is the main narrative line and it follows the story closely: Polynices’ body is found and lies bloodily to the side of the stage throughout. Eurydice (standing in for her dead husband Creon) forbids its burial in an autocratic decree at odds with her democratic credentials. Antigone (the “mad one”) decides to bury the body, while Ismene (the “nice one”) agonises over whether to help her. After a very tense scene in which one the black child-soldiers is shot by a white security guard, Eurydice changes her mind and the two victims of the violence are buried together. Buffini chooses not to make this motivate the final section of the play where Theseus changes his mind and decides to help the tottering state of Thebes, but it becomes just one of a number of highly-charged scenes racing the action forward. This pushes things on at a furious pace but does not allow the dramatic conflicts to linger and come to a slow climax. Instead she turns to another tragedy, Euripides Hippolytus, for the event that makes Theseus see things differently. He has been in touch by mobile phone with things at home and the events familiar to National Theatre audiences from last year’s highly successful Phèdre have been taking place off-stage. With extra extended references to Euripides’ Bacchai as well as Aeschylus’s Eumenides this is a rich mix of tragic themes. Even Aristophanes gets a look in with reminiscences of his Lysistrata in the takeover of government by women.

For all its serious themes, it is a very funny play with some excellent lines, but perhaps sometimes it appears as if Aristophanes had contributed extra jokes to a Sophocles script. At one point a character says to Antigone and Ismene “… and as for your motherf…ing father!” The Athenian festival of Dionysus knew better to keep tragedy and comedy firmly separated.

With strong performances from all the large committed cast, pacy direction and an atmospheric set this production shows how the old Greek stories can be used creatively to speak to each generation afresh. The dialogue with the Greeks continues to be lively, with that competitive edge which shows how the moderns can attempt to go one better. As Theseus says in the play “Tragedy shows us how to live”.

Italian Renaissance Drawings

The British Museum has brought together a stunning collection of drawings by all the big names of Italian renaissance art: Leonardo, Michelangelo, Botticelli, Verrocchio, Raphael and many others. With informative displays and videos about the technique and materials of drawing including the manufacture of paper, this is an exemplary exhibition. This drawing of Raffaellino del Garbo (left) shows the risen Christ based on Roman copies of Greek originals of the god Bacchus (right).

The explanation label beside this drawing says that Italian renaissance artists did not slavishly copy Classical models, but used them to spark their creativity. They engaged with these Greek and Roman predecessors in a dialogue, often with a competitive edge. That comment, overturning years of prejudice about the dead hand of classicism on contemporary art, seems to me sum excellently what Classicists are seeking to do in making the Classical world in all its facets (languages, literatures, art, history and so on) available to each new generation. How refreshing to be thought of “engaging in a dialogue with a competitive edge” with our classical models rather than the usual dreary assumptions of dryness, pedantry and outmoded ideas. Top marks to the exhibition and the curator Hugo Chapman.

Semele/Salome

Semele/Salome

Which young female heroine asks a powerful male figure to grant her whatever she wishes? The granting of this favour then leads to her destruction. By a curious juxtaposition we had tickets for two operas on consecutive nights which provided two answers to this question. Handel’s Semele asks Jupiter to appear to her as a god, and Richard Strauss’s Salome asks Herod to give her whatever she wants in return for performing a dance before him. Semele as a mortal cannot withstand the sight of Jupiter and is burnt up, while Salome wants John the Baptist’s head on a silver charger, which Herod egged on by his wife Herodias, Salome’s mother, gives her. Herod is so repulsed by her favour that he orders her death. Handel is comic and amusing where Strauss is violent and shocking. (What would it be like to have Handel’s Salome and Strauss’s Semele? Could Handel be as striking and could Strauss be as light?) This was my second Semele of the year, with the same conductor and orchestra (Christophe Rousset and the Talens Lyriques) but was a very different affair to the earlier Chinese production in Brussels (see earlier post in September 2009). The singing here was much stronger with Danielle De Niese and Vivica Genaux in the roles of Semele and Ino/Juno, but without the theatrical production by David McVicar from Paris in the concert version I saw at the Barbican in London. Here the comedy was more apparent with Ovid’s rather ditzy heroine causing her own downfall by her vanity (De Niese making the most of her mirror aria “If I persist in gazing”). David McVicar was also responsible for the production of Salome at the Royal Opera Covent Garden. Here the strength of his vision made the lack of it at the Barbican all the more apparent. Set in the grim kitchen area of a swanky restaurant the violence and raw emotion was always there just under the surface and even in the bloody final scene was never overdone or indulgent. The figure of the naked executioner emerging covered in blood from the cistern with John the Baptist’s head is one of the strongest stage images I have seen. With Angela Denoke’s soprano soaring over the orchestra this scene packs a shocking punch, with Salome cradling the severed head in her lap like Agave with Pentheus’s head in Euripides’ Bacchae. It is not often that a biblical story can rival the mythical power of a Greek myth, but Oscar Wilde in his original play saw the potential of this episode to produce a new kind of Greek tragedy. Both pieces are based on strong literary texts: Congreve’s Semele and Wilde’s Salome. The surtitles projected to clarify the sung texts carried their own richness unusual in the librettos of operas. The highly contrasting treatments of two broadly similar stories show how classical myth can supply the raw ingredients for art which can be served up in different ways according to taste.

Proses

When I was first learning Latin, prose composition was regarded by us students as completely old-fashioned and a waste of time. The way we were taught to compose into Latin from English was rigid and prescriptive and seemed to us young radicals as pointless. We wanted to get to grips with sexual ambiguities in Ovid and Propertius, and in the state propaganda underneath the text of the Aeneid. We didn’t want to have to churn out reams of Ciceronian prose, and Cicero was right out as well: a pompous old windbag, in our opinion. Just as with many opinions these have now run their course and can be seen as symptomatic of their time. Some of our attitudes have been developed and vindicated and have become mainstream thinking, and I find Cicero much less of a windbag these days and a much more interesting rounded character. Yet I begin to wonder if we were right about prose composition. Certainly the way we were taught seemed to make even more rigid the grammatical rules of certain books. Any attempt to break the sentence structures as laid down in Hillard and Botting (or was it North and Hillard?) was greeted with scorn and multiple underlinings in red ink, and any protest that Tacitus actually uses that construction on a number of occasions was regarded as a serious challenge to authority. But then that was the Zeitgeist: authority and challenge; but the rendering of prose as optional in final examinations and even in Oxford entry was taken as a kind of token victory. I am still not sure if my refusal to do the prose paper at Oxford entrance was serious folly or brave individualism. Anyway the examiners did not have much idea of what to do with the alternatives set instead: to have offered them was enough. I was able to take Greek Sculpture instead of prose composition at Oxford, which is surely justification enough.
And yet I am now not convinced that my principled opposition to proses was the right decision. Now I am quite pleased to be required to compose a letter or document in Latin that will allow a little individual expression and the opportunity to put down in a few elegant Latin phrases exactly what is required. In the European Schools this is sometimes a good solution to the otherwise laborious necessity of having to issue a document to Latin teachers of many linguistic origins in a language that a) they will understand and b) not be offended by. Never underestimate the susceptibility of certain nationalities to object to being addressed in one language rather than another.
So my position today is rather that composing in Latin is a creative act, a vehicle for the transmission of ideas in a pleasing form. There is a pleasure to be had from finding an exact equivalent and in using the clearest idiom or construction. Familiarity with the great prose authors is a necessity of course, but trying to imitate them is a form of literary criticism and one which teaches you a lot about the text you are trying to read. The art of parody may be much closer to prose composition than we think. Good parody plays with a well known text and even pokes fun at it. But a good parody will always contain a knowing appreciation of the author in question. Think of all the wonderful parodies of Shakespeare, by practising poets and writers. They are not written out of contempt or slavish imitation, but out of playful admiration and respect. As many other aspects of twentieth century Classics, the teaching of proses became rigid and paid too much attention to its own made-up rules. By emphasising the creative and aesthetic elements of composition could we possibly revive it? I recently came across a copy of Bradley’s Arnold Latin Prose Composition (a volume I cheerfully hurled across the room several times as a student) and found it immensely balanced, informative and encouraging. In looking for the mot juste it was very useful. Should we Classicists start to revive the practice: not as mechanical translations but as free composition or ironic parodies?

Final Demands - Frederic Raphael

This is the final part of a series of three books chronicling the lives of Cambridge graduates from the 1950s to the recent past. Adam Morris first appears in The Glittering Prizes as a young undergraduate who becomes a writer in literary London. Fame and Fortune continues the careers of the group of students through their working lives which culminate in this last series as they reach the beginnings of old age. Frederic Raphael was a brilliant classicist at Charterhouse (an English public school; the English public school?) and began Classics at Cambridge before switching (as you are allowed, even encouraged, to do at Cambridge) to Philosophy. Classics, however, continues to play an important role in his writing and he one of the few writers who include Latin and Greek literature seriously, without condescension, as a major part of European literature. He is one of the most European of writers in English, drawing for his inspiration on a wide range of authors of all languages into which he draws the Classical authors as a matter of course. For the classicist interested in how the subject is portrayed in a modern novel the figure of Adam Morris’s daughter Rachael is the most involving. She is a young classicist who surprisingly goes to California with Bill Bourne, also a classicist and one of Adam’s Cambridge contemporaries. Her work on Catullus is well received, although Adam takes a little of the credit for himself; but he should be ashamed of himself for the muddled line of poem 51 on page 185. It should read identidem te (not et) and the line ends after te. Can he really be quoting the text of a JRS article? Or is FR having an elaborate game with us here? Is Adam supposed to be so well-read that he can misquote Catullus? Not with the text in front of him, surely. Nevertheless it is a pleasure to have a young, female and pretty cool character given Latin literature as her subject in a modern novel.
The reviewers all recognise that Adam is a thinly veiled autobiographical version of Raphael himself: the polished wit, the long-windedness, the Jewishness, the prickliness. He is not always a likeable character, but I guess he is not meant to be. Hearing Tom Conti from the BBC television and radio versions say the words in your head, however, makes him a more real person than just the words off the page.
Reviewers are less forthcoming about the basis for the other characters. So who are they based on? Is Bill Bourne based on John Sullivan who worked on Martial and Petronius, as Bill did? Sullivan did, I think, die relatively young, but did he also run into trouble with the black faculty for alleged racism? Adam gets embroiled in a Black Athena-type argument at Bill’s memorial gathering in Los Angeles. As for the others: is Joyce Hadleigh drawn from Joan Bakewell? Is Alan Parks Clive James? Or could he be David Frost? Is Samuel Marcus Cohen George Steiner? Is there a website devoted to this kind of pointless but intriguing speculation?

What a Carve Up!

The theme for the set text for Latin at the European Baccalaureate in 2011 will be Virgil Aeneid 6 and the Descent to the Underworld. My colleagues and I have been looking for passages from European art and literature to accompany the Virgil and to give an idea of the use of this theme in later periods. We came up with the usual suspects: Dante, Milton, Sartre, but a French colleague said she had been reading a novel by an English writer whose title I didn’t recognise. The author, Jonathan Coe, I had read, but this particular work was a puzzle. In the end it turned out that the title is What a Carve Up! which defeated the French translator who had to make do with “Testament à l'anglaise”. The title refers to an old film starring Sid James and Kenneth Connor which is woven into the novel in original ways, that combine comic horror with social satire of Britain in the 1980s. The passage (page 94-5, Penguin edition) which relates to the underworld is a scene where the narrator goes down into the tunnels of the London Tube system for a dreadful journey. (A sort of Descent into the Underground.) There is embedded into the text a line of Latin: perque leves populos simulacraque functa sepulchro (Ovid Metamorphoses 10. 14) which is unusual in a modern English novel, where writers often wish to conceal their learning for fear of putting off readers by a show of perceived elitism. Nothing much more is made of this at the time, but slowly through the book other allusions begin to appear to the myth of Orpheus. The narrator meets a young painter, Phoebe, whose work he unwittingly misunderstands and which she then destroys. These paintings are an interpretation of the Orpheus and Eurydice story and the theme of the search for the past by a descent into Hell becomes clearer step by step as the novel progresses. Though not slavishly following the outline of the mythical story, it becomes clear that Michael (the writer and narrator) bears some resemblance to an Orpheus figure and Phoebe has elements of Eurydice. She repeatedly urges him at the end of the book: “Don’t look back.” As a result the scene of the katabasis earlier on is not a casual classical reference but an integral part of the novel’s structure. A quick trawl through some of the reviews of this novel do not appear to have picked up on this Orpheus reference although one or two did make a connection to Cocteau’s film of the Orpheus tale. The author, Jonathan Coe, makes wide use of film in all his work and may have been thinking of Orpheus through Cocteau, but the inclusion of the line of Ovid seems to indicate a wish to go further back to the original myth. Or at least to Ovid’s version of it. So I was introduced to this accomplished postmodern piece of English literature by a French colleague to include in a collection of Latin texts. The European School is often full of surprises like this. At the same time I found I was introducing, by way of the same process, my German colleagues to the writing of Max Sebald, who wrote in German but is perhaps better known in England. He also has a key passage in Austerlitz featuring a descent into Hades by way of Liverpool Street railway station. There must be something about London train stations that makes writers think of Hell. I can’t imagine what it is.

An Education and Latin A Level

An Education

This film starring Carey Mulligan as the 16 year old schoolgirl who has an affair with an older man in the early 1960s has been receiving a lot of notice with awards, good reviews and Oscar nominations. It is always difficult when you know the period and background to a film through personal experience to avoid criticising the details but in this film there are too many mistakes and misjudgements to ignore, especially when you compare the original brief memoir by Lynn Barber on which it is based. (You can read it here: http://www.guardian.co.uk/culture/2009/jun/07/lynn-barber-virginity-relationships
It is easy to forgive the fact that the film places the concert to which the girl Jenny is taken in St John’s Smith Square. I remember that this church was converted to a concert hall only in 1969, well after the time in which the action takes place. Unimportant perhaps, but shouldn’t somebody have checked? When she finally receives her acceptance from Oxford (the chance of which she initially abandons to marry the unsuitable lover) it is addressed to her by the University of Oxford. Didn’t anyone involved on the script know that admission to Oxford is only through a college? The business with C S Lewis and the supposed visit to him in Oxford is set up to be unmasked as a falsehood, but it is highly unlikely that the girl would have read The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe at her age. Though it was published it was never very popular with young readers in the early 1950s when she was growing up. The film is also very vague about the Oxford entrance exams which we had to sit after A levels. In fact Jenny gets her A levels and at first withdraws from the entrance examinations. Only on the intervention of her father is she allowed back to take them. What is really annoying though is the way Latin is set up to the representative symbol of the old fashioned nature of her school. This is not the case in the memoir, where Latin is mentioned only as her weakest subject (not surprising as then Latin A level was a difficult subject). In fact in the memoir Lynn Barber mentions the fact that (mirabile dictu, as she says) she got the top grade in it as well top grades as expected in English and French. Latin was required as entrance to English at Oxford at that time and indeed first year English undergraduates had to take a Latin paper. The fictional persona of Lynn Barber in the film is very unlikely to have scorned Latin at A level, and may well have enjoyed it. She may have found it challenging, we all did, but the memoir shows she is proud of her final result. This default denigration of Latin is all to prevalent in English culture where to succeed at something difficult is seen as being a mark of a lack of sophistication. English is fine, French with all that existentialism is a sign of being cool. Why is reading the classic texts of European literature regarded as being a bit odd by English writers and intellectuals? Can it be that it is a bit too much like hard work?
Complaints aside, An Education is a remarkable piece of work, beautifully acted and painstakingly set in its period (visually, at least, but perhaps others are screaming equally loudly that the model of car being driven went out of production before the film’s setting). It is very thought-provoking about the time, especially for anyone who was at school then. Carey Mulligan deserves her Oscar nomination. But why couldn’t they be more careful over the details?

Dulce et Decorum

The new British poet laureate, Carol Ann Duffy, has recently published a poem to commemorate the deaths of the last survivors of the First World War trenches:
Last Post Carol Ann Duffy
In all my dreams, before my helpless sight,
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.
If poetry could tell it backwards, true, begin
that moment shrapnel scythed you to the stinking mud . . .
but you get up, amazed, watch bled bad blood
run upwards from the slime into its wounds;
see lines and lines of British boys rewind
back to their trenches, kiss the photographs from home —
mothers, sweethearts, sisters, younger brothers
not entering the story now
to die and die and die.
Dulce — No — Decorum — No — Pro patria mori.
You walk away.
You walk away; drop your gun (fixed bayonet)
like all your mates do too —
Harry, Tommy, Wilfred, Edward, Bert —
and light a cigarette.
There’s coffee in the square,
warm French bread
and all those thousands dead
are shaking dried mud from their hair
and queuing up for home. Freshly alive,
a lad plays Tipperary to the crowd, released
from History; the glistening, healthy horses fit for heroes, kings.
You lean against a wall,
your several million lives still possible
and crammed with love, work, children, talent, English beer, good food.
You see the poet tuck away his pocket-book and smile.
If poetry could truly tell it backwards,
then it would.
At its heart this poem quotes Wilfred Owen in turn quoting Horace from his poem Dulce et Decorum Est. Perhaps more about this later: is Duffy being fair to Horace by wrenching him so far out of context and so far away from what he may really have meant? But for the moment a question of pronunciation. How should the Latin in this poem be pronounced? There is an audio recording of the poet herself reading her poem in which she pronounces “dulce” as if it were Italian (doolchay). Where has this pronunciation come from? Is it because of Catholic Latin where schools and churches perhaps founded by Italian orders used this sound in their services? Almost certainly Owen himself would have said in the old English pronunciation of Latin dulce (dulcie), as in the girl’s name, with a soft “c” pronounced as “s”. He would probably not have used the pronuntiatio restituta as used in Latin teaching in most European countries today dulce with a hard “c” (dulke) unless he was taught Latin by a particularly radical young teacher. Rather he would have used the current English style which had been used for many years, until recent scholarship had established that this pronunciation was inauthentic. The battle over this change in sound lasted for many years until the last of those taught the old pronunciation had died out. The British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan was apparently one of the last survivors who persistently stuck to the old pronunciation until the end of his life in 1986. Owen’s Latin was apparently fairly minimal and he could not go beyond the basics when he was engaged as a private tutor to a family in France. In the end what sound should be adopted here in this new poem? An authentic or restored pronunciation would be understood by modern listeners with a basic knowledge of Latin; the traditional English pronunciation would be historically accurate, reflecting the usage of the poet who is being quoted (Owen, not Horace). But certainly not an Italian style which makes Wilfred Owen sound either like a Catholic priest trained in Rome or a waiter asking what you would like after your pasta.

Paul Delvaux and the Ancient World

Paul Delvaux was one of the Belgian surrealists best known for his Sleeping Venus pictures and his railway stations. He was for a long time resident in our part of Brussels (Watermael-Boitsfort) and you can sometimes see a background to his paintings as you go around the commune. He was particularly fond of Watermael station which turns up in several works. A small exhibition at the Musee Royale in Brussels is devoted to the influence on him from antiquity. He studied (as many young Belgians still do) Latin and Greek at school and he testifies to the impact the Iliad and the Odyssey made on him. He visited Italy and Greece in the late thirties and then in the fifties when travel to such exotic places was not easy. The open spaces of Pompeii and Herculaneum appear often as backgrounds to the moonlit settings of his female nudes, giving them dream-like quality. His female figures (often recalling the waxwork Sleeping Venus he saw exhibited in Brussels) are inspired by classical sculpture in their simple elegance but are unnervingly modern in their just not quite realistic depiction. Placing a porcelain-skinned female nude before a deserted Greek temple at night he achieves a disturbing nightmarish quality. He makes use of the figure of Venus as a signature to many paintings, but he also uses mythology in, for example, his Pygmalion which reverses the usual story. This use of the ancient world for visual inspiration from the material remains seems to anticipate one of our modern approaches to Classics: Delvaux discovered the power of the stories in school, and then he then went on trips to most rewarding sites to see for himself. In the exhibition there are sketches he did on site from Paestum, Pompeii and Herculaneum, and also from Olympia and Athens. He made sketches of the sculptures from the temple of Zeus at Olympia when they were scarcely known to a wider public. All these influences consequently find their way into his surrealist images transformed by his imagination into an entirely new vision of what are now familiar images. His view of the classical world is not the philological, text-based image often portrayed in critical comment by administrators wishing to show off their modernity by dismissing Classics: this is how the early introduction to the ancient world can work on the imagination of a creative artist who can absorb these ideas and aspects to change the way we look at ourselves.