Late Bernhardt

Late Bernhardt

Her every gesture was a monument.

It wasn’t love she gave. She gave herself

time and again, no less magnificent

each time she died. And that was not the half

of it.

          Nobody’s life is masterpiece

on masterpiece and one is one’s mistakes,

quand même, in which to find such sure release

from what may or may not have been heartaches.

A law unto itself does as it likes,

as exotic as its menagerie

and the reputation it leaves behind,

the imprint that her leaving of it makes

gone far beyond the sort of coquetry

that marries the worst man that it can find.

--

Having said one wasn't going to write poems anymore, it doesn't mean I can't write one if I feel like it.

I think it is 'being a poet' I don't like having once, so many years ago, thought it such a fine thing to be. Certain poets are fine, as are some poems, but it's the others that give it a bad name.

But it's an enjoyable process once you're into it. Do some of the thinking first and don't start until you're ready and then see what happens. They are rarely as good as one hoped but, like this one, they are often not as bad as they might have been.

Perhaps I'll leave it another 18 months before the next one. I don't want to rush it.

Reading and Nothingness

Having finished the excellent Sarah Bernhardt biography on Sunday, I was aware of that rare hiatus one might reach very occasionally in which I have nothing lined up to read next. Plenty to re-read, of course, but only Les Faux-Monnayeurs in French that I bought to look up various phrases in the English to see what Gide had written and the abandoned biography of Delmore Schwartz on the shelf.
So I've asked my colleague if he can bring me something in to borrow - either Simon Schama's History of the Jews or one of his Ali Smith's.
The situation made me feel all existential and Sartrean, experiencing the freedom to choose what to read next but with more than 99.9% of world literature unread by me, I soon found that the free will that we flatter and delude ourselves that we have soon became anguish. Once I have settled on a title to read, I will become a being-for-others as they objectify me as a reader of that book but I have embarked on a course of bad faith by opting out of the decision of what to read next by asking somebody else to provide a book for me.
--

Perhaps I should read a book about librarianship. The latest crisis was presented by the need for the CDs to take up another shelf, with the Beethoven and Brahms Violin Sonatas due. This meant that either the music books or the Shakespeare biography books need to go elsewhere. Even though my presentatiuon on Shakespeare biography was recently well received and qualifies as a minor specialist subject, the music books won by dint of the powerful case that they should be near the music they refer to. So, the Shakespeare biography books are now on the two-seater settee awaiting a more permanent home.

Racetrack Wiseguy back from Ascot

Half a length shy of landing the 14/1 double with Capeland zooming in by 12 lengths, the Professor lands the nap and adds Pym.There are worse places to go for horse racing advice than here.
One can't really lose when so much is corporate hospitality but this time, for once, I didn't get the turf accountants to pay my train fare.
The only time I saw Desert Orchid, he got beat in the Cheltenham Gold Cup, Norton's Coin being obviously the better horse, and now I've added Altior, returned at 1/3 so a few had expensive days out. It must be me.
But the fact is that, not having landed the double, I'm not really back in business and the plus for the year can't be put at risk so we''ll shut up shop until Cheltenham Trials Day in January and see what we can do with 2020.
This one's for Georgie, wherever she may be,

Racetrack Wiseguy at Ascot

I am grateful to the Professor and Corals for a third year at the Ascot November meeting which this year is a bit more special for the Altior-Cyrname showdown. To some of us it seems absurd that Cyrname is officially rated a better horse than Altior but ratings can be like that. This is 2m5f, though, and so far that is Cyrname's territory and we have to trust Altior to stay that far and justify a trip to Kempton on Boxing Day.
It hasn't been all that wise at Racetrack Wiseguy for the last few weeks and I've surrendered a cosy plus position for the 2019 accounts. Thus, this is one last foray into the betting jungle before I literally quit while I'm only just ahead.
Mr. Henderson's horses are in good order, as the Professor will tell you, and so I'll take Call Me Lord to turn up match fit for his seasonal debut and thus be good enough in the 2.40. And, in hope as well as reasonable expectation, I'd like to see Capeland get compensation for the fiasco three weeks ago and it's a shame Bryony can't be there to help because she goes to Haydock for Frodon. I've put them together in a 14/1 double to restore my fortunes or lie low for what remains of the year.
The Prof goes for Valtor in the first which, at 11/8, might be some value but it's not often a Grand National horse reverts to novice hurdles. It might be an easy opportunity but we'll see. I'm not taking the Prof on, the form he's in, and he surely won't be far wrong with his faithful,

Nicky Henderson should a good day with Altior, Pym and Call Me Lord all having excellent chances.

Jesus had his disciples and Mr. Henderson has the Professor. None of them do badly out of it.
I'll be hoping for better luck for my gin and tonic this year after the beautiful vision above got brought down in the early stages last time we were there.

Katarzyna Zliminska and Ian Tindale

Katarzyna Zliminska and Ian Tindale, Chichester Cathedral, Nov 19

One could believe it was the peaceable kingdom, not the troubled outpost of Europe under the tormented mind of a  ramshackle Prime Minsiter. As mundane as you like, through the westest part of West Sussex by leisurely bus, there are enough Liberal Democrat boards up to suggest that affluence doesn't inevitably induce selfishness and insularity. If I could do this every day, retirement would be an effortless pleasure.
Beethoven's Violin Sonata no.8 in C begins in some agitation from which melodic lines emerge before the second movement is haunting and songlike moving into waltz time like Mozart in the Palm Court. In the Allegro Vivace, one notices Ian Tindale's efforts on the piano given a more even share of the action with Katarzyna's fluent violin. It was engaging from the beginning and the 'minuet' alerted me early to come back and check out the Beethoven Violin Sonatas and not just no.8 because these days if I'm going to have one, I want them all. Katarzyna isn't particularly showy or flamboyant but concentrates on the job in hand with great musicality and compelling enjoyment.
If Mozart carries forward, always much more than one imagines, into Beethoven then Beethoven carries forward into Brahms but by then there's not much sign of Mozart. Brahms was actually my second composer, having provided the B side to my first ever record purchase, Mozart 40 by Waldo de los Rios, with the slow movement of the second symphony. I've never forgotten it.
The Violin Sonata no.3 in D minor has the same challenge that Brahms faced in following Beethoven but in miniature. It's a great shame that Brahms felt a bit inadequate in his shadow, as did so much of the C19th, which is the collateral damage of such colossal figures.
More strident in its opening, as if needing to make its presence felt, Ian is soon providing gentle rain in the right hand and by the time of the Adagio and the third movement, one wants the broad,
long-lined theme never to be ruined by being taken up by a film or TV soundtrack so we can keep it for ourselves. It is con sentimento and deeply moving. With suggestions of Paganini and a passionate Presto agitato to finish, Brahms has more than stood his ground and Katarzyna and Ian have delivered them both in thrilling style to give us plenty to think about.
Two Miniatures by the great Fritz Kreisler were by way of the encore included on the programme, virtuoso pieces given with panache, Katarzyna reaching the very top of the fingerboard having explored its complete length in the Tamborin Chinois, in which the Chinese references were obvious enough, after La Gitana, which I was not surprised to find translates as 'the gypsy' because 'Jewish' and 'gypsy' were the two words I surreptitiously noted on my envelope during what might have been a medley of what could be short showtunes. And if you're going to play Kreisler you are going to need to be a bit flash.
It was a fine climax to my self-curated mid-November music festival but sadly one must now rest as Chichester has to do all its advent things and it's two months until the next lunchtime concert. I can't say how glad I am that they do them.
Having used the bus this time, one can be out and at the cathedral bus stop for 2.07 to see the 700 come round the corner. Despite all the things we might say about public transport, Chichester's lunchtime concerts even have that in their favour.
And now it's time to see who has recorded those sonatas and who can get them here soonest.

Sweet Letter from Me

Felix Dusquesnel on Sarah Bernhardt, quoted in Robert Gottleib's Sarah, The Life of Sarah Bernhardt,

She wasn't just pretty, she was far more dangerous than that.

It might be best to leave it at that since I'm not halfway it yet but it's been a rewarding discovery prompted by the recent Julian Barnes book without which I would never have known. Although quite how much one can know when so many of the stories exist in very different versions or are dubious is hard to say. Perhaps we can take some small solace in reflecting that there's nothing new about Donald Trump, Boris and Prince Andrew and not being able to believe anything they say. The difference is that Sarah seemed to be somehow on the side of the angels whereas the others clearly aren't.
-
I'm due at Chichester tomorrow for my third concert in four days. That's nothing to complain about but it stretches my reviewing resources to their limited limits.
It strikes me that a concert review should review the performance and a record review something very similar, like the interpretation, since a recording might be made up of a few performances jig-sawed together. One takes the piece as read, as a known thing, and move on from there.
There are a few things to say in music reviews about the musician, their phrasing, tempi and what they do with the piece, the sound, the acoustics, the recording, and how it compares with others. It strikes me that I'm in it for the composer and then the piece rather than the messenger that delivers it. But still I'll keep trying because in the same way that Socrates regarded the 'unexamined life as not worth living', I can't just go to a concert, read a book or listen to a record (films don't really come into it for me) without thinking I need to think about it.
I remember the aesthetician, Colin Lyas, much admired lecturer when I was at Lancaster, saying somewhere that he wasn't a proper aesthete because they should, if on their deathbed, still philosophize about a work rather than just enjoy it whereas he wouldn't, he'd just enjoy it.
I enjoy it alright. Involved in a piece of music, a book of poems, any book or occasionally in a film if I must, is the best place to be but afterwards I'm back with Xanthippe's husband wanting to wonder about it.
What was that all about. How did it work. What was it like, what other things was it like. And, most crucially, was it any good.
While the Stylistics and Criticism course (Lancaster, circa 1979, Geoff Leech and Mick Short) provided 'tools' - as they might be called now- with which to answer the first questions, they said they weren't going to attempt to answer the important, last one.
They didn't know, did they.

So, we saunter on regardless and if my reviews become more like diary entries padded out with weather reports or sundry, circumstantial anecdote, as they can be, so be it. By all means, if ever I review anything of yours and I omit to mention the bit you thought was best about it and say it reminds me of something that happened in 1975, I apologize in advance.

That quote about Sarah above almost made me want to write a poem but after not much thought I realized it might be a tame affair compared to the real thing and the restraint I've shown for 18 months now is a much more admirable achievement than any half-baked lines I might produce in celebration of someone I can only read about.    

Box&Fir - Fairest Isles

Box&Fir, Fairest Isles, St. Mary's, Fratton, Nov 17th

Rogers Covey-Crump was a part of the Hilliard Ensemble and Gothic Voices, among many other things. The Gothic Voices album, The Castle of Fair Welcome, was one of the first 'early music' albums I bought and it is one of the select group of records that was updated to CD from LP, so good that I paid for it twice.
This programme of songs and music from around 1800 is closer to our time but still quaint. The light tenor voice is augmented by Ian Gammie's gentle guitar and the decorative flute of Jenny Thomas in songs of both forlorn and requited love, mourning and carpe diem. Towards the end, Rogers is revealed as percussionist when he brings out a tambourine but most of the action is in the subtle shading and nuances of the pacific.
Sometimes in Welsh, these are traditional folk tunes and similar, Tommy Moore being a composer of some of them including the optimistic When Time who steals our years away that Box&Fir ended with. 
In Cadair Idris,
It's good to have song, it's good to have money,
But I can't love anything without her

while with Ar Hyd y Nos I realized my Welsh was better than I thought and I immediately translated it as All Through the Night as Jenny played variations on the familiar theme.
So, this was the pop music of Beethoven's time, songs that Keats might have known, Romanticism of a tender disposition before it got out of hand. It was a welcome Sunday afternoon pleasure.
Once, some 45 years ago, a friend of a friend said my Steeleye Span LP was refreshing after all his tearaway Ten Years After. In the same way, Box&Fir are the closest thing to sparkling water in music that I've heard for quite some time. 

Portsmouth Choral Union

Portsmouth Choral Union/Southern Pro Musica/David Gostick, Mozart and Michael Haydn, St. Mary's, Fratton, Nov 16th.

As the preview note said, Mozart's Solemn Vespers don't sound very solemn. It's as if some sense of the word has been lost in translation but I've always thought the Requiem was quite playful, too. He brings light into darkness and often his happiness is tinged with sadness.
In this version, the choral sections are punctuated by sinfonias not unlike Eine  Kleine Nachtmusik, which gave Southern Pro Musica more than just a supporting role to the singers and they did it with clarity and dexterity.
The Laudate Dominum is an obvious pick for any 'Mozart Masterpieces' disc even if it would be a big box-set if it had to include them all. Late stand-in Luci Briginshaw delivered it superbly in all its glow before the climactic Magnificat. On a day when a stand-in tenor was also required, the programme was very fashionably rendered 'fake news' but the Choral Union did well to find Luci and Chris Huggon for repertoire which not everybody might be familiar with.
If Joseph Haydn, for all his tremendous worth, isn't quite Mozart, then Michael Haydn isn't quite Joseph, some might say, which is a shame on the evidence of his spirited Requiem. Although the younger brother, he sounds more 'baroque' than his 'classical' superstar sibling. Perhaps we shouldn't be so surprised at how uplifting and death-defying Christian composers were as they celebrate the better place that not everybody believes in any more. The insistent trumpets, rarely moving away from their emphatic one note riff, signify something glorious. Hugo Herman-Wilson carried forward his fine tone from the Vespers and Eleanor Dann completed an impressive quartet of soloists, however ad hoc they were on the night.
The Requiem's sweeping opening might have something of the Pergolesi Stabat Mater about it and expands into something quite flamboyant with the Choral Union making their customary well-organized, swelling sound.
Portsmouth has more of this sort of thing than it might reasonably expect and I wouldn't want any of those that put in the work to provide it to think there weren't a few of us that appreciate it.
You can find out when and where on this very useful website, https://musicinportsmouth.co.uk/ 
I'm glad I looked. Rogers Covey-Crump is there tomorrow afternoon so I might have to go back.

Julian Barnes - The Man in the Red Coat

Julian Barnes, The Man in the Red Coat (Jonathan Cape)

La Belle Epoque wasn't known as such until the Second World War. Such things have to be retrospective but it depends what they mean by 'belle'.
The Man in the Red Coat is Samuel Pozzi, surgeon, gynaecologist and ahead of his time. Julian Barnes brings together an account of the fin de siecle and after around this central character without it being biography as such. Luminaries like Oscar, Sarah Bernhardt, Proust, Maupassant and Gide are minor characters but we hear more about closer associates like Robert de Montesquiou and the abominable Jean Lorrain who, 'like a vulture',
fed off calumnies and filth peddled by salon-goers' servants, by kept women and fashionable pimps. Imagine the gurgling flow of the sewer outlet from a hospital.
It takes some doing to bring an elegant writer like Barnes to call you a 'special kind of maniac'.

Attitudes might have changed in the hundred years or more since but in an age that celebrated and tried very hard at decadence in certain circles,
sex, even in its more variant manifestations, can become normative, and therefore bourgeoise.
Impotence might be playfully parlayed into a statement of revolt against the despised bourgeoisie, and further evidence of the aesthete's superiority.
I'm a little bit perturbed to say that I at least understand what they meant.

In what is really a very long essay, Barnes covers the absurd machismo of duelling, the equal and opposite tradition of dandyism and finds a few opportunities to compare French and English (rather than British) culture.
When Louis Gregori fires two shots at Dreyfuss he is subsequently acquitted, Frenchly, on the grounds that he was not shooting at  Dreyfuss but the 'idea of Dreyfusism'. The absence of the idea of 'crime passionel' in English law, by which murderers can be acquitted - perhaps we call it 'limited responsibility'- is another conspicuous difference but it mattered more when guns were easy to acquire and scandal and 'honour' were such big business.
Docteur Charcot, who studied la maladie des tics, allowed his assistant, Dr. Gilles de la Tourette, to put his name to the condition which wasn't Tourette's last piece of dubious good fortune. As bullets appear to fly around Paris on any given pretext, Tourette is shot in the neck by a patient who claimed his hynotism had caused her to lose all her willpower and develop a split personality, but he survives.
The idea elsewhere that duelling somehow prepared France for more successful campaigns after recent humiliations is not supported by the low percentage of bullets that hit any part of their targets and lodge themselves in furniture instead.

But Pozzi, however he is perceived as progressive, innovative and successful in his surgery, is also a great seducer of his patients, and his marriage doesn't benefit from that and the journals of his daughter, Catherine, show her as damaged. Montesquiou's significance is probably now more as the model for Baron de Charlus in Proust than what he is remembered for beyond the pages of avid Barnesian Francophilia. But, as Barnes points out, in an ending that might seem too contrived in a novel, the guns and surgery and offended masculinity of la belle epoque come together in a neat denouement. Pozzi is shot by a patient, Maurice Machu ( ! ), that he has been treating for varicose veins of the scrotum and has suffered from erectile dysfunction which is deemed to be Pozzi's fault.
It's funny and horrible. It is French but not in the good way that so many French things, from Saint Emilion and Pauillac to Albert Camus and Depardieu films, are. As you'd expect from Julian Barnes, it is immaculately done, well judged and a pleasure to read. He finishes with a brief Author's Note, dated London, May 2019, despairing at the referendum result and how, in a longer perspective than usual, England has not been able to engage with Europe and, as they understand us all the better, we understand them less and less. But it's no good telling me and the rest of them maligned as the liberal, intellectual elite that. We know. And it's not a line of reasoning that's going to reach out and persuade non-Barnesians of its merit.

One great by product of books is how one leads to another and this first led to the ordering of a biography of Sarah Bernhardt. Not because she had a leg amputated which was preserved but then it transpired that somebody threw out the wrong leg in a clear out and sic transit such glorious relics.
I am also reminded that one project I have lined up for the endless days of forthcoming retirement from the office job is going back to Proust after 35 years or more, starting again, and getting beyond page 1200 this time, which might be incentive enough to keep on turning up at the office. I'm joking, of course.