The finest moment in Beethoven's Missa Solemnis

(Thoughts from the Masterworks Chorale November 4th performance of Missa Solemnis, where I sing as a bass.)

For me, it came about two-thirds of the way through the Gloria, soon after the Miserere section. Along with the four soloists, we'd already sung a lot of music by that point, some of it at a very fast tempo. And a lot of it at high volume. Then it arrived. The tempo slowed down. The atmosphere suddenly changed. Most of the instruments in the large orchestra were quiet. But I heard the kettle drum pound. The chorus alone sang.

Cum Sancto Spiritu in gloria Dei Patris, amen.

Together with the Holy Spirit, in the glory of God the Father, Amen.

There, in the middle of this driving symphony with a chorus and soloists, we suddenly had a stately march, a procession. As if we were at a coronation, being led by a patriarch or pope. It was beautiful.

---

It was a great experience. Our conductor was Steven Karidoyanes. The four soloists: Barbara Kilduff, soprano, Pamela Delall, mezzo-soprano, Charles Blandy, tenor, and Dana Whiteside, baritone. We had two reviews, one review in the Boston Globe, and one in The Boston Musical Intelligencer.

Some useful notes in "Moonwalking with Einstein"

"Moonwalking with Einstein", by Joshua Foer, (Penguin, 2011)

Foer's account of how he got interested in the world of competitive memory contests, the personalities in that little world, and his journey to becoming the United States memory champion, is readable and has a few interesting insights.

Foer reviews the history of memory techniques (think Homer) and describes the essential importance of these techniques to being an educated person in the past, particularly in the time before mass printing technology. He also includes some topics in current medical research on the workings of our brains, particularly in how we learn. That actions or behaviors that we learned long ago and now take for granted -- such as typing -- can be improved only by intense effort and detailed measurement of progress is not a new insight, but Foer makes some interesting connections to memory. The memory techniques he describes, including the Major system, can be practiced by anyone. In fact, I managed to remember and use a credit card number two weeks after I learned it with the system.

The chilly "Degas and the Nude" exhibit at the MFA

We visited the "Degas and the Nude" exhibit at the Museum of Fine Arts. It's worth reading Sebastian Smee's review in the Boston Globe for the history and background of Degas' work. I never warmed up to Degas, but this sounded like such a big deal, we decided to go.

His young girl ballerinas that are popularly known always struck me as cold, as if the girl subjects were lab specimens. I found the same to be true of all those nudes at the exhibit -- I simply couldn't connect with them. The most interesting paintings were his bordello scenes, probably because of their documentary aspect. What a cruel life.

The young Occupy Boston crowd on the Boston Common

We visited the Boston Common on Monday afternoon, to see the Occupy Boston gathering there. It looked to me as if most of the people there were college-aged, though there certainly were older people, as well some parents with children.

It did not look like many blue collar workers or suburban types were attending. Unless they were like us, and just there to watch. A drummer with a full drum set pounded out a pretty good rhythm for a few people with bullhorns to lead chants. Some of the old chants from the 60s and 70s were revived: "The people, united, will never be divided". Somebody carried a sign that read "Jewish Labor Committee". "End the Fed" was another one. Lots of anti-corporate slogans and chants. Lots of left-wing rhetoric.

No doubt, there are different groups trying to push this movement, and use it for their messages. I can't make out what Occupy Boston and the other branches of the movement are about. Mad at the banks? Mad at corporate executives making millions while laying off 40K a year employees? Mad at high tuition costs? It's all there. And almost everybody can get mad at these things. Maybe that's all there is here -- a place to vent.

Some people regard this as the left version of the Tea Party movement. I don't see that yet. The Tea Party could summarize their messages -- less federal government, less taxes. They targeted politicians to promote and to defeat. That's not true here with the Occupy movement -- at least not yet. How will they affect any change? Won't the whole thing just peter out, once the weather gets colder?

Candide, at the Huntington Thater

We saw the Saturday night, September 24 performance. Some great songs. Has to be, with Bernstein doing the music. The actress who plays Cunegonde, Lauren Molina, has a great voice. There's something purposely uneasy and uncomfortable about the play. After young Candide is expelled from the Baron's castle for loving the Baron's daughter Cunegonde, near the start of the play, he is thrown into a kind of chaotic hell. Unprotected and idealistic, he is press-ganged into the Bulgarian army, is often beaten and threatened with death, and ends up killing a villainous prelate. His youthful idealism and optimism is slowly beaten out of him, though he is stubborn. Something that bothered me about this production (directed by Mary Zimmerman) is that so much of it is farce. Most of the violence is played for comic effect. Was that in the original playbook, or is this the director's interpretation? If the violence, greed, and human malevolence Candide confronts are bits of comedy shtick, then I find it hard to take serously his disillusionment and pain. The actor Geoff Packard has very pleasant tenor voice, but when he despairingly sings, "My world is dust now, and all I loved is dead....", his voice contrasts jarringly with the jokey scenes we've just watched. The play is sort of an academic's delight. Music, romance, death, philosophizing: this is a serious play, not a trivial entertainment. A test will follow.

An actor's apology for Stalin

My Russia, by Peter Ustinov (Little, Brown, 1983). Beautifully designed in a larger format, with many prints, illustrations, and photographs. 

Not sure I should spend the time on this. Ordinarily, I would not buy such an odd book, or post about it. Ustinov was an actor, not a historian, and he did not grow up in Russia. He has no professional expertise as a historian or historical analyst. But we had seen him in a few movies that we enjoyed, so I bought it at Bryn Mawr Vasser used book store. The book is a breezy history of Russia, with a concentration on the cold war period. It's Ustinov's idiosyncratic take on Russian history.

What is perhaps worthwhile is that he represents Russians as I think many of them would like to be represented. He emphasizes that this is a country and a people that has forever had to defend itself against foreign threats -- the Mongols, the Swedes, the Germans, the Poles, Napolean, the Turks, the Chinese, the Japanese, the Germans again, and finally the United States and NATO. A country with a border that big naturally has a lot of neighbors, many of them with aggressive designs. That long, difficult and distant border shaped the behavior of the czars and of the Politburo.

He interprets many of the Soviet Union's actions in WW II and the cold war as reasonable behavior in light of Russian history. He doesn't get very specific. But this leads him to make some odd rationalizations, even suggesting that Stalin's pact with Hitler at the start of World War II was simply a way to buy time and prepare for when the German armies would invade the Soviet Union itself. There is nothing in the book about the Gulag Archipelago, although he wrote the book long after Solzhenitsyn's A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. Ustinov writes about Stalin's crimes involving "thousands" as opposed to the millions of dead. There's almost nothing about the domination of Eastern Europe following the war, or the oppressive clampdown on its own population for most of the twentieth century until the Soviet Union's demise. Ustinov comes across as a remote, sympathetic apologist for the old regime.

Wish we had not paid for Rent

Rent, at the New Repertory Theater in Watertown This was painful to sit through. It was hard to understand the screamed lyrics, and most of what I could hear was pretty thin. I don't know La Boheme to understand the reference to it, but it struck me as odd to call the characters poor. They were slumming, which is much different from being poor. I can't summarize the story because I'm not sure what it was. The program book indicates that much of the romance around this show involves the untimely death of Jonathan Larson, the show's creator, from an aneurysm just before it opened in 1996. There were a few decent songs, powerfully sung, Roger's One Song Glory, Seasons of Love, I'll Cover You. But I found a lot of this musical obnoxious. And I hate seeing naked people on stage.

Travels with Ian Frazier in Siberia

Travels in Siberia, by Ian Frazier (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2010)

Frazier's account of several trips he made through Russian Siberia, from the 90s to 2005. He confesses that he is "infected with a love of Russia". The main narrative of the book is about an interesting six week road trip in a Renault van with two Russian guides, Sergei, the chief guide, and Volodya. There's a fair amount of humor as Frazier deals with Siberian roads, restrooms, mosquitos, beautiful Russian women in stiletto heels, and trash. Frazier himself is a somewhat nervous type who at first seems an unlikely candidate to rough it for three thousand miles in a small van, and his hopeless confrontations with the increasingly irritated and bossy Sergei give us some moments of real hilarity. Driving through the endless taiga forest day after day can drive even the most amiable companions a little crazy. 

Along the way, Frazier meets businessmen, academics, local historians. They're impressive, energetic people. The academicians seem well informed and current. But aside from them, I was struck by the ramshackle nature of most peoples' lives and the haphazard way things worked. Decaying cities and towns, horrible roads that sometimes ended and then resumed, a bureaucracy that depended on bribes. He noted some isolated improvement on his return trips after Russian oil money had been spread around.

A big part of the pleasure of reading this book is the Russian and Siberian history he introduces. From Ghengis Khan to the Decembrist revolutionaries to Stalin's Gulag, Frazier demonstrates that Russian history is for him a consuming passion. Surprising for what is basically a book of amiable travel writing: there are twenty five pages of notes and a seven page bibliography!

The book has a serious vein running through it. Frazier is interested in the past of a place, particularly an unhappy, tragic past, and how that past is treated in the present. Siberia has been a place of exile, suffering, and mass death. Not surprisingly, Frazier finds Russians more comfortable talking about the two hundred year old Decembrist revolution as opposed to the sixty year old Gulag work camps (which are now hard to find empty hulks).


Although I haven't been to Russia, I hope to go someday. Having read and loved Solzhenitsyin, Tolstoy, Chekhov, and Dostoyevsky, I can understand his Russia love.

Richard III at the Huntington -- a pleasingly unrepentent psychopath all the way to the end

There was a lot I didn't like in the Propeller Company's performance of Richard III yesterday at the Huntington Theater. But there was so much I liked that I think the play was the best theater we saw at the Huntington all season. Richard Clothier is so unpredictable as Richard, snapping from straight soliloquies to slapstick humor, that he upsets our ability to understand him. He's scary.

The play seems to be set in a Victorian-era asylum, with white-masked characters resembling orderlies moving people and props quickly around the stage (those orderlies also sang Elizabethan tunes beautifully).

The direction chose to depend on speed, sacrificing the audience's ability to follow some nuances, and I liked that. One noisy murder after another pretty much tells us what's going on, and the workings of evil mind that's behind all the blood and pain is there to see.

It's an all male cast. This didn't work for me, or Marilyn, or our friends. The men who played the female characters were not made up as women, other than the dresses they wore. The effect was bizarre, and made me notice the incongruity.

The odd touches of slapstick obscured some scenes. I know that Shakespeare sprinkles comedy throughout, but this was over the top at times. The two murderers who kill poor Clarence in his cell are buffoons, okay, but as I remember them, at least one has genuine pangs of conscience. But that's lost in their Abbot and Costello routine.

What's a chainsaw doing in Victorian England? There's no good explanation for that. Never mind that Shakespeare inserted malapropisms in his plays.

Why did Tyrrell's soliloquy get axed? I was disappointed. Unlike the two clowns who kill Clarence, Tyrell is a fully thinking adult criminal. We lost out on his remorse and horror.

Yet, the energy of this production overcomes its flaws. It's worth seeing.

A reply to Jeff Jacoby's column -- can Hitler be explained?

Jeff Jacoby, a columnist for the Boston Globe, writes the following in his May 1, 2011 column, A demon gone, but evil remains:

"The destruction of European Jewry stands alone because it was not a means to any end. The 'Final Solution' was an end in itself. Jews were not murdered by the millions in the context of a struggle for power or land or wealth. There was no political or economic rationale for wiping out the Jews; they had nothing the Nazis coveted, and Germany gained nothing by their deaths."

I don't disagree, but that explanation is not enough -- it leaves Hitler's motives as mysterious and circular: he hated the Jewish people because, well, he hated the Jewish people. The scope of Hitler's and the Nazis' evil is hard to comprehend, and I know there is ultimately no conclusive explanation for it. (How can you fully explain why the gas chambers kept working even as the liberating Russian and American armies approached within sight?)

Yet, the historian Richard J. Evans, in his Third Reich trilogy, devotes many pages to showing why Hitler and the Nazis behaved as they did.There are two arguments that I think clarify Jacoby's thoughts.

One is that Hitler, like many Germans of that era, believed that Jews were indeed animated by an unswerving drive to dominate and destroy the German people. Evans shows that many Germans believed the "stab-in-the-back" conspiracy stories of Germany's Jews colluding to rob the German armies of their deserved victory in World War I, instead leading to their devastating defeat and years of chaos. Hitler saw the mass murders of Stalin and the communist Russian state as the work of the Jewish people. Totalitarianism and Jewish life were one and the same to him, and Nazi propaganda frequently referred to Russians as simply pawns of Jewish interests. Hitler mission, as he saw it, was to defend Germany from this menace, to destroy it before it destroyed Germany.

These were insane delusions, but delusions Hitler and millions of Germans believed.

Secondly, Nazi Germany's rise to power and conduct of the war was under-financed from the start, and depended on the takeover of resources, labor, and money of the conquered or massacred populations. Robbing and confiscating the businesses and money of Germany's and Europe's Jews was part of a wider policy. The German armies consumed all the resources of the Jews they captured, going so far as to retrieve the gold fillings of their victims' teeth, or melting down family silverware.

So I think it's not enough, as Jacoby implies, to say that Hitler acted out of a demonic antisemitism. It's more convincing to me to say that he acted on a paranoic delusion that Jews were actively working to destroy what he saw as the Aryan race. Jacoby's column comes close to mystifying and obscuring the tangible goals and motives that the Nazis had set out for themselves. And I think that should be corrected.

Insights into the lives of ordinary Germans in the Third Reich

On Richard Evans's great and very readable three volume history: the Coming of the Third Reich, the Third Reich in Power, and the Third Reich at War, Penguin, 2003 to 2008.

I'm now at the start of the Third Reich at War.

Sprinkled throughout these three books are depictions of the lives of ordinary Germans, often as excerpts from their journals and diaries. They're wonderfully revealing, and offer some relief from the detailed, ominous, and terrible public events. I particularly appreciate when Evans follows the same person over a span of years.

Here is an excerpt from the first volume, The Coming of the Third Reich, from Victor Klemperer's journal. Klemperer is a professor of French literature, and a veteran of the first World War. He was Jewish, but his wife was not (a situation that placed him in a somewhat less abused category with Nazi bureaucrats). He writes here about the financial chaos of Germany in 1920:

Germany is collapsing in an eerie, step-by-step manner...the dollar stands at over 800 million, it stands every day at 300 million more than the previous day. All that's not just what you read in the paper, but has an immediate impact on one's own life. How long will we still have something to eat? Where will we next have to tighten our belts?

We hear more from Klemperer and others throughout. In the second volume, The Third Reich in Power, the Klemperers feel the strain of Nazi rule and its steady invasion of their lives.Evans summarizes:

Living outside town, the Klemperers escape the violence of 9-10 November 1938 [Kristallnacht], but on 11 November two policemen subjected their house to a through search (allegedly for hidden weapons): Klemperer's wartime saber was discovered in the attic and he was taken into custody. Although he was treated courteously and released after a few hours without being charged, it was nevertheless a considerable shock.

Not all these excerpts are from the victims of the Nazis. We also read from the letters of Germans who supported and loved Hitler, or at least held ambiguous feelings about him and did not oppose him. Here are some lines from The Third Reich in Power, discussing a Hamburg schoolteacher, Louise Solmitz catching her first sight of Hitler.

"I shall never forget the moment when he drove past us in his brown uniform, performing the Hitler salute in his own personal way...the enthusiasm of the crowd blazed up to the heavens..." She went home, trying to digest the 'great moments I had just lived through".

And later in the same volume.

Yet even she found the Nazi boycott of Jewish shops carried out on 1 April 1933 a cause for concern, "a bitter April Fool's joke". "Our entire soul," she complained, "was oriented towards the rise of Germany, not towards this." Nevertheless, she reflected, at least the Eastern European Jews were no longer in evidence ("the underworld creatures from East Galicia really do seem to have disappeared for the moment").

The quotes and excerpts express turmoil and anxiety, a constant sense of insecurity.

I've enjoyed reading these books. One thing I might wish for is more of a journalistic perspective from the outside world. Because Evans's focus is the workings of Hitler and the Nazis as seen within Germany, we don't see a wider perspective very often. There are only occasional hints at what foreign newspapers and leaders are saying about the events in Germany. I would have liked more of that. After all, the entire world was consumed with the war started by Hitler. But it's a small criticism.

Hysteria, at the Nora Theater -- high comedy, darkness, and the Three Stooges

Hysteria, a play by Terry Johnson, performed by the Nora Theater Company, January 30, 2011. Directed by Daniel Gidron. An excellent, restrained performance by Richard Snee, as Sigmund Freud. And there's an intense, hot performance by Stacy Fisher, as Jessica.
 
This is a comic takeoff on what might have happened when Sigmund Freud met Salvador Dali, in 1938, at Freud's London home (he had just escaped Austria, following the Nazi takeover). There are many funny moments, as when Freud talks about Jung as "that lunatic", and tries to get the intrusive Jessica out of his study. There's good chemistry between the two, like an elderly grandfather sparring with his agile, brilliant granddaughter.

Jessica has darker motives for being there than we understand, at first. She wants a kind of revenge, she wants Freud to recant. She doesn't exactly blame him for the sad death of her mother (one of his patients years ago), but she wants him to confess he was wrong about his theories, that what Jessica's mother suffered from was real, not just a result of her hysterical imagination, that she was, in fact, raped by her father. This would be pretty hard to bear without the comedy, but the comedy veers uneasily into slapstick. The character of Salvador Dali was a bit too bufoonish for me, reminding me of Manuel in John Cleese's old Fawlty Towers series. In fact, there seemed to be a lot of John Cleese in this comedy, which isn't a bad thing.

Despite the embarrassing moments (we had to endure a completely naked young actress on the stage, for reasons none of us could make out except that, well, it was Freud up there on stage), we came away having enjoyed the play. I'm going to have to finally read Civilization and its Discontents.