{"id":82568,"date":"2015-02-10T16:59:31","date_gmt":"2015-02-10T21:59:31","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=82568"},"modified":"2015-02-10T17:06:48","modified_gmt":"2015-02-10T22:06:48","slug":"a-beautiful-friendship","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2015\/02\/10\/a-beautiful-friendship\/","title":{"rendered":"A Beautiful Friendship"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/EwSiZ9nNWkg?rel=0\" width=\"600\" height=\"450\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen=\"allowfullscreen\"><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>In a nod to the recent Grammy Awards, allow me to pay tribute to a record that was nominated in 1963, in the category of\u00a0Best Documentary or Spoken Word Recording (Other than Comedy). That record is\u00a0<em>Enoch Arden<\/em>, Op. 38, TrV. 181, performed by Glenn Gould and Claude Rains.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>Most people probably know Claude Rains best as the<em>\u00a0<\/em>blithely unscrupulous Captain Renault in\u00a0<em>Casablanca<\/em>, or maybe as the gleefully unscrupulous Prince John in\u00a0<em>The Adventures of Robin Hood,\u00a0<\/em>or even as a wholly unscrupulous senator in\u00a0<em>Mr. Smith Goes to Washington.<\/em>\u00a0No question, Rains brought particular \u00e9lan to a certain kind of villain\u2014yet nowhere did he commit as fully to a performance as to\u00a0<em>Enoch Arden<\/em>. <!--more--><\/p>\n<p><em>Enoch Arden<\/em>\u00a0was written explicitly for narrator and piano; it\u2019s a setting by Richard Strauss of Tennyson\u2019s narrative poem. Tennyson wrote \u201cEnoch Arden,\u201d<em>\u00a0<\/em>a sort of Odysseus story<em>,<\/em> in 1864, while he was England\u2019s poet laureate. The eponymous hero is shipwrecked on a desert island for ten years, and given up for dead; when he returns home, it\u2019s to find his wife happily remarried to his best friend, and one of his children dead. Enoch Arden cannot bear to destroy their lives, and so keeps his identity a secret and dies of a broken heart.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>Needless to say, the resulting musical adaptation is dramatic. While it\u2019s not generally considered one of Strauss\u2019s most distinguished works, it was a hit at the time of its writing, when such musical melodramas were enjoying a vogue. Indeed, the entire piece is a dizzy immersion in Victoriana.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>Which is part of what makes the Rains-Gould recording so wonderful.\u00a0Both artists are unmistakably themselves: you never forget for one moment that you&#8217;re listening to Rains\u2019s plummy voice or Gould&#8217;s emphatic phrasing, yet the whole thing is incredibly old-fashioned. And there\u2019s not an iota of irony about it; both are <em>f<em>ully <\/em><\/em>committed. What I\u2019m trying to say is that the 1963 Glenn Gould\u2013Claude Rains recording of Strauss\u2019s\u00a0<em>Enoch Arden<\/em>\u00a0is both a triumph of high camp and a genuinely moving, passionate performance by two great artists, and I insist you\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=EwSiZ9nNWkg\" target=\"_blank\">listen to it<\/a>\u00a0this instant.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>No one was under the illusion this would appeal to the general public. Only two thousand\u00a0copies were pressed. And yet, there have been many subsequent versions of the piece: most recently, by\u00a0Patrick Stewart\u00a0and\u00a0Emanuel Ax\u00a0in 2007. As for the 1936 Grammys, <em>Enoch Arden<\/em> lost out to\u00a0<em>The Story-Teller: A Session With Charles Laughton.\u00a0<\/em>And given that the latter includes superlative readings of Shaw, Plato, and Margaret O\u2019Brien, it\u2019s hard to feel as though the forces of philistinism won out.<\/p>\n<p><em>Sadie Stein is contributing editor of <\/em>The Paris Review<em>, and the <\/em>Daily<em>\u2019s correspondent.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>In a nod to the recent Grammy Awards, allow me to pay tribute to a record that was nominated in 1963, in the category of\u00a0Best Documentary or Spoken Word Recording (Other than Comedy). That record is\u00a0Enoch Arden, Op. 38, TrV. 181, performed by Glenn Gould and Claude Rains.\u00a0 Most people probably know Claude Rains best [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":178,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[13115],"tags":[639,5227,336,16988,16986,10459,16989,46,14627,16987,16418,12941],"class_list":["post-82568","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-our-daily-correspondent","tag-acting","tag-audio","tag-classical-music","tag-claude-rains","tag-enoch-arden","tag-glenn-gould","tag-grammys","tag-music","tag-recordings","tag-richard-strauss","tag-spoken-word","tag-tennyson"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO Premium plugin v25.4 (Yoast SEO v25.4) - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>Listen: \u201cEnoch Arden,\u201d a Melodrama for Narrator and Piano<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"The 1963 Glenn Gould\u2013Claude Rains recording of Strauss&#039;s \u201cEnoch Arden\u201d is both a triumph of high camp and a genuinely moving, passionate performance.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2015\/02\/10\/a-beautiful-friendship\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"A Beautiful Friendship by Sadie Stein\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"February 10, 2015 \u2013 In a nod to the recent Grammy Awards, allow me to pay tribute to a record that was nominated in 1963, in the category of\u00a0Best Documentary or Spoken Word\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" 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