'I notice when people are married the husband is not so much with his wife as when they are engaged. But perhaps I shall like that better too.'She laughed charmingly.
'You should have whatever you like,' said Grandcourt.
'And nothing that I don't like? - please say that; because I think I dislike what I don't like more than I like what I like,' said Gwendolen, finding herself in the woman's paradise where all her nonsense is adorable. ('Daniel Deronda').
George Eliot continues to impress and the weight of her books is not the least daunting. It's not just for the constant stream of brilliant character observation and generalities, so many of which are as good now as they were 150 years ago, but it is the colossal design of the novel, the 'Tolstoyan' depth and the propriety more authentic than Jane Austen without the over dependence on coincidence and fate in Thomas Hardy. Halfway through Deronda one is still only being properly introduced to characters essential to the tangled web but the most crucial dramas are surely still to come. But when they are over, there is plenty more George Eliot to look forward to.
Books like this were, or would have been, completely wasted on the 19 year old student of Victorian Literature. Whereas in Medicine, Law and any other vocational education, it is useful to study the subject before embarking on a career, in Humanities subjects, it would be preferable for potential students to gain a university place then go out to work for 20 or 30 years and return to their subject at an age when they can appreciate it. Except, of course, times have changed and it's not paid for by a grant any more but by a tautologically repayable loan. I doubt if I'd even go to university now if I thought I was going to have to pay for it so I'm glad that I went when I did even if it was nowhere near as good as it should have been.
--
Two television programmes were of interest over the weekend, not including the documentary on the Dexy's Midnight Runners renaissance, which I enjoyed a lot.
I didn't catch all of Written by Mrs. Bach but it was gripping stuff. Anybody whose manifesto is hiding an intention to abolish the BBC needs to explain where such programmes would be seen if all our broadcasting were commercial and dictated entirely by ratings.
On the basis of some manuscripts and graphological analysis, it is shown that some pieces, like an autograph score of the Goldberg Variations are in the hand of Anna Magdalena. She is known to have been an accomplished musician and it was the Cello Suites, not apparently foremost among the pieces attributed to J.S., that one side of the academic argument were keen to attribute to Mrs. Bach.
A J.S.Bach signature from 1748, not very long before he died, is in far too clear a hand to have been written by one who was by then virtually blind. And then, there needed to be conspiracy theories about missing letters and a portrait of Anna Magdalena that we no longer have and thus, it was suggested, might have been deliberately destroyed as she is systematically removed from history by subsequent Bach's.
I wouldn't want to deny Anna Magdalena any credit she deserves and I don't think J.S. would have either as it seems to have been a happy marriage. But I'm not convinced the Bachs would have anywhere near as interested in authorship issues as we are, either.
Being pre-Romantic, they were less concerned about any cult of the artist, researching biographical detail and relating it to a body of work. For them, it might have mattered less whether a painting was by Caravaggio and thus worth several million pounds but after an expert, some 400 years later, analyses the canvas and brushwork and decides it is only 'school of' Caravaggio and only worth tens of thousands.
They were workmanlike, professional and knew, a bit ahead of their time, that all music, literature and art was there already, it is only a matter of who found it and put their name to it first.
And so, by all means, Anna Magdalena provided some input, quite possibly the 'aria' or main theme for the Goldberg Variations which J.S. then made variations upon, perhaps. But one dreads a whole new industry being set up alongside the Shakespeare authorship debate, which has become a bit of a waste of time, not least because the programme ended with the tantalising suggestion that the work of many other male composers (and I'm afraid most of the repertoire is thought to have been written by men), was really by Mrs. Composer.
Well, okay then, that's 41 symphonies, the operas, concertos and all by Constanza Mozart; The Hebrides Overture, Violin Concerto, 4 symphonies and Elijah by Fanny Mendelssohn, the sister. But Handel never married and there is no record of any romantic attachment for him anywhere. So we need to look harder to re-attribute Messiah.
My sister has no interest in laying claim to any of my poems and, apart from ideas I occasionally took from them, neither did any girlfriend. But you can hardly blame them for that.
--
And then last night I was persuaded by Clemency Burton-Hill's enthusiasm for an exhibition of Stradivarius violins at the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford. Blimey, she said she doesn't play the violin 'seriously' any more but she made a convincing job of being allowed to play a 3 million quid Strad. I didn't realize you had to be that talented to get a show on Radio 3.
The 'Messiah' Strad was only on loan to the Ashmolean on the understanding that it would not be played. It was the one violin that Stradivari kept for himself and never sold. But, as was pointed out to me today, how odd that the best-sounding violin in the world is the one that cannot be played. Surely that one should be played and it's the cheap one in the charity shop that should never be played.
But anyway, I thought I could go and see this rare coming together of so many expensive instruments and looked up the Ashmolean's website. There was no trace of it there and so I searched for 'Ashmolean Stradivarius' and found that the exhibition had been in 2013, the programme was a repeat and there's no point going to Oxford at all.
--
Danny Baker has been in America for his Saturday morning Radio 5 show these last two weeks, borrowing a studio to link up with the BBC from, saying he's there on the making of a film about his life. That can't be true, can it. Such a film wouldn't be made in America. No. But these days I struggle to tell fact from fiction and joke from news item. Googling 'film about Danny Baker's life' does actually bring up a result about a BBC work-in-progress. Let us hope the lily isn't going to be gilded.
But the boy can still produce the goods on occasions. Recently, on the subject of disappointments or let downs, he said, (something like) 'you might have been promised Noel Coward. Hang around a bit, he'll be here soon...
'and then in walks Charlie Drake.'
