Maupassant and other Other Stories

 

It's 47 years since we 'did' Maupassant for 'A' level with Mr. N.J. 'Bunny' Burrows, Gloucester's kindly answer to Mr. Chips. What easy-going and yet very rewarding days they were. In those lessons, at least. Not quite so much the laborious and entirely unenlightening periods we spent reading Racine with a teacher completely unsuited to teaching.

I have returned to Maupassant in the interim but nowhere near as much as I should have. Now in receipt of A Parisian Affair and Other Stories, I'm already looking forward to the rest of the 34 stories and then, perhaps, finding as many as possible of the rest of the 330. Some enthusiasms burn themselves out but The Complete Bach isn't doing so, all the other top, top echelon artists refuse to fade and I reckon Maupassant, as was to be expected, belongs with them.

I suppose I thought I'd been there, done that and put a tick against him but that's not how it should work. More and more, reading and music is entirely for pleasure and for its own sake, not a matter of dutiful 'bucket list' accumulation. I have no intention of going into Wagner opera, any further into Bruckner, I saw War and Peace on telly and am more likely to re-read Anna Karenina than read that. I doubt if I'll spend much more time with Ezra Pound. I know I don't get on well with C18th poetry - Dryden and Pope, or Edmund Spenser but Damascean moments can happen. All those people are highly thought-of in places and if I were to come across an encouraging insight, you never know.

But it looks like I'm well set up for reading with Maupassant.

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I'd also be well set up vis a vis Buxtehude's BuxWV199, as below, if I could find a recording of it with the special cymbalstern effect on it but You Tube doesn't seem to have such a thing. As Dr. David Price explained, not many organs, especially in England, have such a stop. He must have thought I was fixated on such a detail but it made all the difference, to me. 

It led me to realize that in recent years, locally, I've heard things in concert that I might never hear again - that aren't available for love nor money. And by now one isn't used to such deprivation. One assumes it is an unalienable human right to have whatever music, literature or painting at the click of a computer button. And, also, I'd quite like to find some even better stuff that's not even been written.

There's a need, in my very spoilt and over-privileged life, for a CD curated by me of things that I want preserved- on my record shelves if on nobody else's. I'll probably compile the list of them next job. I'd publish it here except there would inevitably be somebody not included who I wouldn't want to offend and so I might not do that.