Cardenio

 I keep reading Don Quixote with at least the completion of part 1 as a target while waiting for other titles that are likely to be more exciting. It does seem episodic to the point of the same absurdity as its repetitive episodes but the nature of humour changes - or perhaps it doesn't given that the likes of Some Mothers Do Have 'Em and Last of the Summer Wine extended one joke across lots of episodes.

However, the story of Cardenio, the lost Shakespeare play, is in it and one can see how it might have lent itself to such treatment. I think I once read that the lost play might have also been the putative, also lost, Love's Labours Won but unless Cardenio's story is turned around by further chapters, it won't have been.

 

One needs to be reading a book or else such dreariness as dutiful household chores could be allowed to be one's life but a loud noise in the porch at lunchtime announced an avalanche of post that, once sifted for items of interest, revealed Shostakovich Plays Shostakovich in those inestimable Preludes and Fugues that have been top of the playlist in recent days, as well as Purcell's Dido and Aeneas with Kisten Flagstad and Elizabeth Schwarzkopf, as heard as a question on Face the Music the other week. So, although these are further recordings of pieces I already have on the shelves, they are much more essential than having to create further shelf space for Bruckner, Mahler, Wagner, Korngold and maybe even Vaughan-Williams.

I think it's gonna be a long, long time before I see through that Shostakovich piano music. At the moment, guys and gals, Tatiana Nikolayeva is number one and Top of the Pops and it will be of interest how the composer played his own music with remotely expecting him to be better than she was.

Joseph Tong at Chichester

 Joseph Tong, Chichester Cathedral, October 22

Mars has arrived in Chichester Cathedral, just missing an alignment with Holst's Planets a few weeks ago but Luke Jerram's installation is welcome late rather than never. Try though I might to find connections between it and Joseph Tong's programme of piano music, it's best not to contrive anything too far-fetched.

Schubert's Impromptu, D. 935, would be familiar to many, its variations on the beguiling innocence of its original theme moving through something jazzier, the tragic, minor key, a prettier mood and a recapitulation. Joseph's modulations are subtle and nothing is overdone and that continued into Robert Schumann's Arabesque, op. 18, which was for the most part shadier but still as lush as he often can be.

Ravel's Gaspard de la Nuit was the main feature, based on poems by Bertrand. Immediately more pictorial and 'modern', Ondine is a water nymph, sparkling with the delicacy of Joseph's light touch and balletic, often-crossed hands. In contrast, Le gibet means what it sounds like it should, B flat becoming the most heard note of the day as it represents the tolling bell and the swaying cadaver in a sombre, minimalist poem that surely no language could evoke like music does. Equally atmospheric is Scarbo, but in an entirely different way, still sinister but devilish in its mischievous antics. If Joseph had rated somewhere like 3 on my Richter scale of pianistic extravagance, he demonstrated the capacity to raise it to about 8 in some ff or fff before an ending that came surprisingly quietly.

I don't remember having heard that Ravel before and it was an introduction to be grateful of and, supported by such charm from Schubert and flowing Schumann, we could have been in other worlds although probably not on Mars. You see, I still can't find a satisfactory connection even to end on.

Who Killed Poetry?

 Joseph Epstein- Who Killed Poetry?

I was glad, as so often, to pick up a tip from the internet's foremost literary website, Anecdotal Evidence, and print myself off a copy of this essay.

From 1988, its content doesn't look very original by now but 36 years ago perhaps it was.

In fact, the British and Irish poetry of the 1990's was fine by me. It didn't seem all over to me at all. I was keen, I was active, I wanted to know and I was trying my best. But such attitudes as those of Joseph Epstein, me then and anybody else who proclaims the demise of a whole genre, depends on how old you are, what one was brought up with and admired and the almost inevitable consequence that what follows it won't live up to the wonder of one's first discoveries and infatuations.

The pop charts never regained the glories of September 1971 for me although it was a long time before they became not even worth knowing about. While I have favourite poets that were born later than me, most of them aren't and it's hard to think of many whose work I'm infatuated with that are more than ten years my junior.

There will, for later generations, be poets, pop artists and all sorts regarded as greater genuises than David Bowie but they won't be able to explain Taylor Swift to me.

Joseph Epstein was born in 1937 and so I can see why he lost his faith before I did. He is a generation older than me but the same thing happened to him except with reference to the poets of a generation earlier.

Who Killed Poetry? looks like a commonplace complaint by now, wondering where are the 'great', 'memorable' poets that there once were, blaming it on 'professionalism', on the proliferation of creative writing degree courses that the UK took in from the USA by osmosis, the inward-looking nature of such an industry and how, because I've been told it's true, graduates from creative writing courses go on to teach creative writing on further such courses. Perhaps one benefit of the collapse of the Blair initiative to have 50% of the population go to university might be that such vague qualifications won't be worth the debt the graduate emerges with and nobody will apply for them.

It happened a long time before that, though, that poetry lost its position as having the same sort of national significance as the test match, the pop charts or Strictly Come Dancing but everything has its day. Simon Armitage is a nice lad doing a fair enough job but it's not his fault he's not the household name that Alfred Tennyson was in his day.

Not all that many people are actually all that bothered about poems these days and it is a downward spiral when not even I am. I didn't mind it being an exclusive club - even a bit elitist if it had to be- while it seemed important to me but it's less and less so and more and more retro.

I'm not taking Joseph Epstein's canon of great poets as mine, we all have our own. And it's hardly likely that we were unlucky enough to be living when all art became moribund and worthless. Yes, the whole universe is said to be ultimately due to become lifeless and sterile once every star has burnt itself out. I can't see there being further Bachs, Beethovens or Mozarts; I don't foresee future poems or painting improving on what's been done but for whatever time is left to our species they will convince themselves they are thrilled with what they are provided with, our stuff will seem hilariously dated, and they will be trapped in exactly the same cage that time puts us in as what we are.

Oh, Babe, What Would You Say

 It is more, I hope, out of curiosity than a sense of duty that I ordered Don Quixote from the library although some years ago someone expressed surprise that such a literatus as I hadn't read it. Well, one can't read everything. In the translation by Edith Grossman in the Vintage edition, it is highly readable, which was my first concern, but as yet, on page 140 out of 940, I've yet to see that the space given to comparisons with Hamlet by Harold Bloom in the Introduction would have occured to me beyond the authors being contemporaries.

The question might always be asked of such large-scale works if they need to be quite so long and Don Quixote probably doesn't, each episode being similar to the one before like separate items in a sitcom series but that might not be entirely Cervantes's fault. He wrote the second part because somebody else had written a continuation of what now stands as only the first half.

I was gladdened to see some lit crit commentary incorporated early doors with the art of poetry translation covered by,

no matter the care they use or the skill they show, they will never achieve the quality the verses had in their first birth,

and, as seems to me regarding prolific artists,

"If there weren't so many...they would be more highly esteemed.",

which might apply to Vivaldi, Scarlatti, Balzac and all those who produced enormous amounts of similar work.

What is not obvious is whether Don Quixote itself would be as highly esteemed if it consisted of fewer words. I feel, by page 140, that I've already got the idea of it but the misadventures might take a different turn later. My main interest is in deciding who the would-be knight errant most resembles in real life, its model being the fashion for such heroes in the pulp fiction of the day. As such, the satire could as easily be directed at science fiction, for example, with its chronic litany of green monsters from faraway galaxies constantly at war with their zapping guns. But the Don is delusional and so one can't help but think of two recent Prime Ministers who had no self-awareness or any conception of their innate foolishness. However, in his dreams of being a genuine knight errant, he also looks like Everyman or at least those I've met who imagined themselves perhaps poets, sportspersons or careerists but had no talent for such things. And it especially reminds me of all those enterprises I've ever undertaken, imagined were within the compass of some gift I had except I didn't have it in the necessary amount. I'll be sticking with the book for a while yet in the hope of being able to say I've read it but even more in the hope that some further depth to it justifies all the writing, and subsequent reading, time it demands.

-- 

We come here to celebrate good things and mostly avoid derogatory comments about fellow creative types. There is nothing to be gained here by disrespecting others. In a world often apparently fuelled by animosity, I'd like to contribute to that essential part of humanity that makes the most of its good things.

Good things, though, are achieved by the avoidance of bad practice and at some godforsaken early hour this morning I heard what immdiately sounded like the worst line of poetry I'd ever heard,

The Tibetans have 85 words for states of consciousness.

It's from Cows by Selima Hill. It was in Poetry Extra, repeated three times on today's schedule on Radio4Extra in which Dalgit Nagra selected a programme in which Caroline Bird shared some favourites with Roger McGough. You can't get much more Radio 4 than that.

There were a number of poems a bit like Cows that made their points and elicited some sympathy but few appeared to me to have much 'poetry' going on in them. It was more like a workshop on Mindfulness, promoting or exhibiting an awareness of the world but not necessarily through the medium of language as an art form, only using it as a vehicle to advertise the poet's heightened sensitivity that we were invited to admire and thus share.

The poem, and all such work by Selima and her kind, would be widely admired in poetry groups up and down the country and it surely isn't for me to deride that which gives satisfaction to thousands of readers.

But, no, this 15-syllable line lies dead in the water. By all means, poetry doesn't have to rhyme, scan or possibly not even aspire to the condition of music. It often helps if it aspires to some form or discipline but it needs to be, in this website's favourite mantra, 'any good'. We might sympathize with the feelings Selima is expressing and I'm not going to deny that it communicates but there's a lot of such 'poetry' about - all precious and right on and vitue signalling- and it's not what I'm getting out of Elizabeth Bishop.

--

Happily, for once, I picked the winner of Young Musician of the Year and with more confidence than I can muster about horse racing at present. The result might in due course be seen to have foreshadowed a time in which the world's leading classical musicians are mostly called either Wang or Kanneh-Mason, which will suit me very well.

Trio Lalique in Chichester

 Trio Lalique, Chichester Cathedral, October 14

Trio Lalique's programme stood out as a likely highlight of Chichester's Autumn schedule. Heavyweight composers don't come much heavier than Beethoven and Shostakovich, here compared through their first Piano Trios. 

'Heavy' by way of reputation, though, not 'heavy going' like some one could mention. The Beethoven op. 1 no. 1 might not be quite his first work but genius comes ready-made if not yet fully formed. The Allegro sets the predominant tone which is eine kleine Mozartian and 'classical', extending its six-note rising motif through Ilya Kondratiev's tip-toeing piano. Julia Morneweg's cello led the melodic line in the Adagio before the full trio sound was something one could never expect from a disc, especially from the third row. The slow movements of Beethoven's Piano Trios are worthy of special attention, with the Archduke still some way ahead in both time and timelessness and Trio Lalique caught the young man in all his relative innocence. The Scherzo and Presto were flighty exhibitions of dexterity on all three instruments, quickening captivatingly in the violin of Yuri Kalnits to an exuberant ending.

The Shostakovich Trio no. 1, op. 8, is something different entirely. If shorter in length, it is larger in conception. The hero of Russian, if not all, C20th music was 16 when he wrote it but the foundations of his compelling later work are in place. Julia carried a romantic cello line in among the wintry shimmer but Shostakovich is nothing if not restless and there were passages of swarming, high tension before a grandiloquent tutti as the climax. I'm in less of a position to hope for more Shostakovich on our local concert circuit by now because we've had some this year but one can hope that a trend has been set and I'd like to draw the attention of the several fine pianists we have locally to the Preludes and Fugues.

That was truly memorable, not that anything that Chichester lunchtimes ever offer is forgettable, but it made great sense, was immacualtely delivered with Ilya demonstrating remarkable reflexes in turning over his sheet music at moments of high drama and there was nowhere I'd rather have been. That is what makes these event essential.

The Arden Hamlet and other stories

Chichester's Oxfam bookshop had a copy of the Arden Hamlet whereas I had no such free-standing edition of this play of all plays and so now I have.

Even William Empson, the great footnoter, would envy Harold Jenkins whose 574-page book devotes 260 to the play, where half of each is taken up with small print below, the Introduction being 160 pages and the Longer Notes amounting to 153. And for the most part it is 'more matter with less art'. I thought I knew plenty about Hamlet having once counted about 30 productions of it but some of the greatness of some great things lies in their bottomless quality.

The potential for scholarship is helped in no small part by the need to establish which text we are reading and why with the First Quarto being understood to be made of partially remembered parts taken from actors, the second from the 'foul papers' in which Shakespeare might have blotted lines but copyists, compositors and editors are more usually made culpable and the Folio being what those editors decided to go with. The murky world of the supernatural, the feigned madness, the nocturnal action and all the uncertainties of a 400-year old text are only made more elusive by not having an autograph manuscript certified by the author as his finalised version but in due course we have an artwork to scrutinize.

It had come to my notice already that the revenge theme is not only doubled by Laertes being set up to take revenge on Hamlet for the unwitting murder of his father, Polonius, but is trebled by the whole play being framed by the revenge of Fortinbras on Denmark for the defeat of his father by King Hamlet thirty years earlier. However, in a play constructed so much around 'doublings', Reynaldo is sent to France to spy on Laertes in the same way as Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are employed to fathom what Hamlet is up to, which only augments the atmosphere of suspicion, paranoia and counter-espionage that government in any age is, perhaps necessarily, obsessed with.

That thirty year gap specifically puts Hamlet's age at thirty which is compatible with a dilettante prince with not much more to do than wile away time at university and read 'words, words, words'. That it doesn't seem entirely consistent with one referred to as 'young', Harold Jenkins links in any such possible inconsistencies with the early characterisation of Fortinbras as hot-headed compared to the dignified commander he is presented as in the end as,

a kind of consistency Shakespeare hadn't bothered to supply, 

which looks like the sort of thing one can be excused if you are Shakespeare but wouldn't be in most others.

Jenkins is persuasive in interpreting,

that it is Hamlet that rejects Ophelia's love and not she his,

which is entirely consistent with Hamlet's disgust at the ways of the world, the 'contagion', the 'sterile promontory' he sees it as and, in one of the more important-looking sources, the melancholy of Timothy Bright's Treatise of Melancholy (1586) in which the world, like Denmark, is perceived as a prison. The disgust at procreation, Gertrude's lustful 'incest' with Claudius and all the Get thee to a nunnery diatribe might even, for some biographers, be a clue to Shakespeare's own misogyny. It could be tempting to associate one who was so gifted with words to have a compensating downside in some sort of personality disorder, as could have been the case with Mozart's and Beethoven's inordinate capacities for music but social misfit tendencies. However, if Hamlet is seen as prevaricating, lacking purpose and prone to moodiness, 

the contrast with Laertes is not one by which Hamlet is disparaged,

mostly because,

both meet their deaths because Hamlet is too magnanimous to 'peruse the foils', Laertes mean enough to take advantage of it.

It is in the Murder of Gonzago that poison poured into the ear is where the unlikely murder method comes from but the real life precedent was rumoured to be the murder of the Duke of Urbino in 1538. 

If Shakespeare always found wonderful names for even such minor characters as Moth, Bushy, Bagot, Tybalt and Bottom, the various sources and significances of those in Hamlet are all covered here and most of what one needs to know for a much fuller appreciation than that most of us had to be awarded an 'Advanced Level' qualification many, many years ago. 

Maybe it's too big for 'A' level, as Ulysses or Ezra Pound might also be. Of all the essential lines learnt in order to cite in the exam, to show we'd read it, I don't remember 'Hyperion to a satyr' being one of them but that might be more pertinent to what Hamlet means, more than 'something is rotten in the state of Denmark'. By now it seems that humanity was still a bit too ready to flatter itself that it lay halfway between gods and animal instincts.

But, in the end, presented with so much chapter and verse, I feel retrospectively a bit robbed. It was possibly at my unsuccessful interview to do English at Exeter University that I was asked what Hamlet was about, then. 

Harold Jenkins, given the monumental responsibility of editing the Arden Hamlet, concludes that it is,

the intermingling of good and evil in all life.

That's not far from what I said but it wasn't good enough for Exeter and I had to take the long hike to Lancaster which wasn't at the time credited with the high achievement it has been in recent years. Week 1 was given over to 'how to write a sentence' or some such given thing, such were their doubts about their intake. But that train has long gone. I'd like to think that the Chichester Oxfam shop continues to fill in some bits I missed. 

They didn't have a Don Quixote last week but that is an Autumn project, now ordered from the Library in the hope I can do 800 pages before it needs renewing. And also, The Scapegoat by Lucy Hughes-Hallett, the story of George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham, Portsmouth's most eminent murder victim. It does begin to look as though one drawback of being privileged is that people will try to kill you and sometimes succeed.

Imma Setiadi & Nigel Clayton at Chichester

 Imma Setiadi & Nigel Clayton, Chichester Cathedral, October 1

Chichester Cathedral has been marking the 150th anniversary of Gustav Holst whose ashes are interred in the north transept, not least with this piano duet performance of The Planets in an arrangement by Vally Lasker, Nora Day and Holst himself. In those far off days when the record collection took up a lot less space, my cassette of Pictures at an Exhibition had Ravel's orchestration on one side and the original Mussorgsky piano version on the other and I gradually came to prefer the piano. So, how would such a Planets come across after a lifetime of familiarity with the sound of the full score. 

There is a danger with well-known music that we don't listen as closely because we know what's going to happen but a different arrangement makes it fresh. Nigel played the lower half of the keyboard with Imma on the high notes, the menace of Mars becoming thunderous with so many notes, many of which are the same one. Our perception of these planets has altered with more being discovered about them and to give Mars its due, it's almost certainly the most hospitable outside of our own.

Venus is all tranquil serenity without persuading me to take a holiday there and twinkled into the distance and Mercury was indeed quicksilver in Imma's graceful hands.

Jupiter is in many ways the big, show-stopping number shining forth with brilliant light before its magnificent tune benefits from being purely itself without add-on associations of patriotism or rugby union. Before that chimed in heartily I thought it was taken in quick tempo but it's been some years since I heard it.

The best of the 'poetry', for me, comes in the more remote, outer planets. Saturn is stooped, rheumatic and perhaps plagued with memories before Imma and Nigel make the final passage lilt with what must be restfulness. Uranus is the magician and his magic is performed with a similar energy to that heard in The Sorcerer's Apprentice and in what was a series of fast-slow or loud-quiet contrasts, Neptune was suitably aquatic while billed as 'mystic' but also mistier and mistier towards a beautifully handled long-lingering finish that, gladly, was respected with some moments of silence before the appreciative applause.

What we will never know is with what bleakness Holst might have gone further into the outskirts of the solar system with Pluto but that wild and lonely place, having only been found since was subsequently relegated from proper planetary status and so The Planets has been restored to completeness. 

The piano duet version certainly works and Imma and Nigel make a fine interpretation of it. In some ways the orchestration makes Neptune spookier but it's hard to say that Mars or Jupiter are any less strident played by four hands and I'm at pains not to say 'reduced to' four hands because there's nothing about it that sounds reduced. On a most rewarding day, we could visit Holst's last resting place and maybe reflect that if you are to be mostly remembered for one blockbuster popular classic, it's best that it's one of such imagination and variety.