May 16, 2023 Poetry Primrose for X By Fanny Howe London buses moving. Licensed under CCO 2.0, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons. William Blake once wrote to a friend that he conversed with the Spiritual Sun on Primrose Hill. Today his words saying as much are carved on the stone curb atop the grassy knoll where the Druid Order has gathered for the Autumn Equinox since the poet’s times, and today still do. For the Druids, the primrose wards off evil and holds the keys to heaven (in German the cowslip primrose is appropriately called Himmelschlüsselchen). For herbalists it is a sedative, pain reliever, and salve. It keeps depression at bay. The primrose is the flower of youth, love, lust and sweetness, rebirth and poetry. Eating one can manifest fairies. In Albion it is among the first blooms of spring. The “rathe Primrose” is the opening flower Milton notes to strew upon the “laureate hearse” of Lycidas. “Primrose for X” opens with Fanny Howe “tracking Blake on Primrose Hill” and twelve quatrains later ends with her on a high-speed train that “raced away from London / and Blake’s theophanies.” What she finds in the lyric interim are no golden pillars of Jerusalem or celebrity sets. No St. Paul’s Cathedral, Shard, or Wharf highlight the skyline as they do for visitors in relief on the metal panoramic sign at 66.7 meters high. Here the “unsteady skyline” is “like a graph that measures / markets, snails and heartbeats”—one of many instances in Fanny Howe’s poetry of her in-dwelling similization of the world around us, as if these comparative truths always existed as air to breathe. Meanings break free with snails and “shucked” at the end of the line that contrasts the brain with the “slippery” heart that also slips across the stanza. And how the vital heart monitor beats with the little line’s cadence “How am I still here / at every thump?”—the question posed to herself or Thou of her own life’s longevity answered by the steady pulse of spirit-touched heart, along with doubt’s silence. Read More
May 15, 2023 History The Dress Diary of Mrs. Anne Sykes By Kate Strasdin “Anna. Three dresses when in mourning for her mother. 1845.” Photograph by Kate Strasdin. In January 2016 I was given an extraordinary gift. Underneath brown paper that had softened with age and molded to the shape of the object within, I discovered a treasure almost two centuries old that revealed the life of one woman and her broader network of family and friends. It was a book, a ledger of sorts, covered in a bright magenta silk that was frayed along the edge so that a glimpse of its marbled cover was just visible. The shape of the book had distorted—it was narrow at the spine but expanded at the right edge to accommodate the contents, reminding me of my mum’s old recipe book, which had swelled over the years as newspaper cuttings and handwritten notes were added. This book, measuring some twelve and a half inches long by eight and a half inches across, contained pale blue pages, which were unlined and unmarked. As I carefully opened the front cover and looked at the first page, my breath caught: this was indeed a marvel. Carefully pasted in place were four pieces of fabric, three of them framed in decorative waxed borders—these were scraps of silk important enough to have been memorialized. Accompanying each piece of cloth was a small handwritten note inked in neat copperplate, including a name and a date: 1838. Read More
May 12, 2023 On Music Opera Week By Sophie Haigney Metropolitan Opera House. Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons, Licensed under CCO 4.0. In Ben Lerner’s Leaving the Atocha Station, the narrator, Adam, goes to the Prado every morning to stand in front of the Flemish painter Rogier van der Weyden’s The Descent from the Cross. On one particular morning, another man is standing in his place, looking at the painting, and this man suddenly bursts into tears. Adam is irritated and confused: “I had long worried that I was incapable of having a profound experience of art and I had trouble believing that anyone had, at least anyone I knew.” I too have worried about this; a painting has never moved me to tears. A poem has never changed my life. This is why the opera came to me as a surprise—both my love of it and the fact that, the first time I saw La Bohème, I cried through the whole fourth act. The pathos! I was deeply moved by the tragic story and by the register of the musical spectacle, but it was something more primal, too. Here was an art form that seemed not to shy from melodrama but move into its absolute depths, and then transcend and transform them. I love opera not as an expert, or even as an informed connoisseur. I love it as an amateur, a near-total beginner. And despite its reputation, I think opera is surprisingly accessible, in part because of its absolute embrace and elevation of human feeling. I’m sure that as I spend more time in the Family Circle seats at the Met, I will learn more, and I might even become discerning. But for now I am going for pure pleasure. This week, we’re publishing a series of pieces on opera. Colm Tóibín shares a letter to his mother, written from the moment when he fell in love with opera; Nancy Lemannconsiders the contenders for the greatest Don Giovanni of all time; Andrew Martin recounts a visit to Nixon in China; Adam Kirsch comes to the defense of Faust. Plus, two reviews of recent opera productions, a piece adapted from Patrick Mackie’s Mozart in Motion, a dispatch from our poetry editor, and a behind-the-scenes look at the making of Michael Bazzett’s poem in our Spring issue. Sophie Haigney is web editor of the Review.
May 12, 2023 The Review’s Review The Review’s Review: Don Carlo and the Abuse of Power By Krithika Varagur Cardinal Fernando Niño de Guevara, El Greco. Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons. Don Carlo is the kind of opera that has gone out of fashion. I cruised through half-empty rows when I saw it last fall, just days after attending a packed-to-vibrating weeknight production of The Hours – the two-act opera adaptation of a 1998 novel and its 2002 film adaptation. Verdi’s four-hour-long political tragedy, set during the Spanish Inquisition in the sixteenth century, feels more like eating your operatic vegetables. Its place in the canon was actually secured by the Met, whose onetime general manager Rudolf Bing fished it out to open the 1950 season. Based largely on a historical play by Friedrich Schiller, Don Carlo imagines a backstory to some real events in the life of Carlos, Prince of Asturias, who was briefly engaged to Elisabeth of Valois before she instead married his father, King Philip II of Spain. Schiller invented an anachronistic friend for Carlos: Rodrigo, Marquis of Posa, who distracts the heartsick prince with the political cause of Flemish independence. Meanwhile, Philip, bitter and paranoid over his loveless marriage, contemplates getting rid of his son and his treacherous friend with counsel from the blind and ruthless leader of the Inquisition. Read More
May 12, 2023 The Review’s Review The Review’s Review: Emma Bovary at the Opera By Ann Manov Lucie de Lammermoore. Victor Coindre, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. My first memory of opera is Bugs Bunny or maybe The Pink Panther Show: those Saturday-morning cartoons where the fat lady sings and shatters a glass. Much later I began to date a man who had been to hundreds of opera performances (a fact I found not only shocking but literally unbelievable) and so I went from watching no operas to almost one a month. The one I’ve enjoyed the most by far was the Met’s spring 2022 production of Gaetano Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor, staged in a town in the depressed Rust Belt. I had already read about Lucia: it’s the opera that inspires Emma Bovary to cheat on her husband (again, and more dramatically). And yet I didn’t know anything about its plot, because Flaubert doesn’t describe it; the opera serves merely to connect Emma to her younger self, the pretty country girl who had had bigger dreams than a failure of a husband and a cad of an (ex-)lover. At the opera, Flaubert writes, “d’insaissibles pensées” come over her: “elusive thoughts,” uncapturable thoughts, incomprehensible thoughts. What’s coming over her is fantasy. Nabokov said about Emma Bovary that she was the quintessential “bad reader,” the one who reads “emotionally, in a shallow juvenile manner, putting herself in this or that female character’s place”: above all, in the place of Lucia di Lammermoor, the tragic sister of a warlord, kept from the man she loves, who slaughters her husband on their wedding night in a crazed delirium and herself dies. But to read Madame Bovary as purely reprobative seems to me cold to the point of insanity; as Flaubert said, of course, “Madame Bovary, c’est moi.” We are all fantasists, incomplete and incoherent actors in search of a character, and who can blame or even fail to admire Emma: so moved by art that she too will destroy her life for a fantasy of love, and die. Read More
May 12, 2023 On Music Faust and the Risk of Desire By Adam Kirsch Faust and Mephistopheles. Painting by Anton Kaulbach, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons. I first discovered opera in 1991, when my tenth-grade English teacher killed a couple of class periods by showing the movie Amadeus. The bits it contained of The Magic Flute and Don Giovanni were seductive enough to send me to the nearest outpost of the Wherehouse, a California record-store chain, where the classical and opera section was an afterthought. When I compare it to the contemporary infinity of Spotify, however, the limited selection now seems a kind of blessing: with so little to choose from, it was impossible to feel overwhelmed. It was also an advantage not to have anyone telling me which operas were great and which were passé. Not until much later, for instance, would I learn that by the nineties, Gounod’s Faust was already a century past its prime. It debuted in Paris in 1859 and quickly became a worldwide hit, especially in the U.S., where it was chosen to inaugurate the newly founded Metropolitan Opera in 1883. But in time, Faust’s blockbuster status made it a byword for middlebrow entertainment, a bit like The Phantom of the Opera today. When Edith Wharton set the first chapter of The Age of Innocence at a performance of Faust, it was a way of critiquing the provincialism of 1870s New York from the vantage point of 1920. For instance, Wharton pokes fun at the fact that the opera, originally written in French, is sung in Italian, the language Americans were used to hearing in the opera house at the time. Read More