That was the only time his singing ever disappointed me. I had grown up on Mengelberg’s historic 1939 version, with the unearthly Willem Ravelli singing Jesus. It took some adjustment to accept Fischer-Dieskau’s more human, less mysterious approach, in that voice that Barthes would later stigmatize as too perfect. But I am not big on dichotomies. He soon became my favorite singer, and still in many ways is.

There was hardly any corner of German art song that he left unexplored. Here he is singing Eisler from the Hollywood Songbook, in a song made familiar by the usual Brechtian suspects in German and by Sting, among others, in English.

He treats it like any other German Lied, trying to give the poetry its due. Brecht might have hated it. Eisler, not so much.

Gene Ravvin and Igor Golyak in The Guest

This splendid little production, which premiered last December at the Boston Playwrights’ Theatre and had a brief run at the Marblehead Little Theatre this past weekend, is a creation of Igor Golyak, artistic director of the Arlekin Players, a Boston-area-based Russian-American troupe. It is performed in Russian.*

The piece is an adaptation of Pushkin’s “Scene from Faust” and “The Stone Guest.” Aside from Gretchen’s song, lifted from Goethe, the lines are all Pushkin’s. But as Golyak conceives it, Don Juan, the protagonist of “The Stone Guest,” becomes yet another incarnation of Faust. This works surprisingly well, or perhaps not so surprisingly – the two damned souls were often associated with each other in Goethe’s and Pushkin’s time, and have been many times since.

For those unfamiliar with Pushkin’s take on the story, his Faust suffers not so much from a thirst for knowledge and experience as from pure ennui, which Mephistopheles (the Demon) tries in vain to alleviate. In a few brief pages of verse, Pushkin creates a sort of negative image of Goethe’s Faust, a soul of frightening vacuity who can only rouse himself to enthusiasm by sentimentalizing his past, in particular his seduction of Gretchen. At the end of the scene, we see his boredom turn murderous.

Enter Don Juan, back from banishment, at the risk of his life, for killing the Commander in a duel. Why has he returned? Out of boredom. Northern women are “like waxen dolls.” He wants to revisit his Spanish haunts. He looks up Laura, his alter ego, and kills her current conquest in a duel, then fixates on Donna Anna, the widow (not the daughter) of the Commander. Disguised as a monk, he courts her at the monastery where she comes daily to pray at the statue that marks her husband’s grave. She permits him to call on her at home, and his conquest of her is imminent when the statue, responding to his invitation, appears at the door. In Arlekin’s production, things are rounded out with the re-appearance, at Juan’s demise, of the Demon from the Faust scene.

In his verve as a seducer, Pushkin’s character owes a lot to Mozart’s Don Giovanni; what Pushkin adds is a certain virtuosity. As many Russian critics have noted, his Juan is essentially an artist. His conquest of Donna Anna, in which, though completely gratuitous, it is essential to him that she know exactly who he is, becomes his masterpiece, and his swan song.

Virtuosity, it is true, doesn’t seem particularly characteristic of Pushkin’s Faust. But in their inner emptiness, the two characters connect well enough. We can believe that a Faust who can have anything he wants, and is still inclined to see love as a salvation, or at least the ultimate distraction, might choose to become this Don Juan. In any case, Pushkin’s verse is so laconic, so suggestive of hidden essences and possible connections between them, that the transformation feels perfectly plausible. And the Arlekin production, in a minimalist black box set with fluid, easily reconfigured elements, has an elegance to match the poetry.

The cast is uniformly excellent. The director plays the Demon (as well as Don Carlos), and Gene Ravvin plays both Faust and Don Juan.

The Guest will be performed again in New York on May 5 at JCC Manhattan, on June 28 at Chelmsford High School,  Chelmsford, Massachusetts, and on September 7 and 8 at the Moscow Art Theatre School in Moscow. Details at the Arlekin site.

*[The performance I attended had occasional English subtitles projected on a screen on stage, but not enough to make the dialogue, or even the gist of the story, clear to anyone who could not follow it aurally (except for Gretchen's song, the subtitles were from my translations). Subtitles for spoken live theater, due to speed and variations in timing of delivery, are fiendishly difficult to do effectively. I don't know if anything more extensive is planned along these lines for the remaining US performances. Those interested in attending them, if they don't know Russian, would do well to read the plays in translation first.]

Cassandra

I began this in the seventies, and just finished it last year. But there is still music to write for it; quite a lot, in fact. It won’t be an opera, though.

I plan to make it the third of three ebook releases, after the Little Tragedies and the second edition of The Woes of Wit. It may be a while before it’s out; I would still like to get more comments on it. I’ve put up a dedicated page in “writings” with more information and some background.

As promised some time back. More on the scene here. Additions made by the filmmaker are noted in the clip description.

Elizabeth O'Reilly, Smith and Ninth from Garnet, 2011. Oil on Panel, 12” X 22”

It’s been nearly four years since I left New York, after fifteen years in Manhattan and close to seven in Brooklyn. For the first year or so I was making monthly trips back, partly for work and partly to ease the pangs of withdrawal. On these trips I found, as other ex-New Yorkers have, that I made better use of the city, in many ways, than I had when I lived there.

My last neighborhood was Carroll Gardens. For several years, weather permitting, I had walked my son to his school on the edge of Park Slope, through Gowanus. We used to sometimes see a woman in a floppy hat standing by one of the bridges over the canal, painting at an easel. It was during the week, and she didn’t look like a Sunday painter anyway, nor were the banks of the Gowanus a place you would expect to find one.

One thing I had never done enough of, not since my early years in New York, was go to galleries. On my trips back I started doing that again. I became aware of a number of contemporary painters of a more or less realist bent, seriously devoted to plein air painting, cityscapes, and other such long-unfashionable pursuits. Many of them exhibited at George Billis in Chelsea. I got a sort of crash course in all this from Maureen Mullarkey, herself a fine painter, whose website Studio Matters introduced a handful of them to me, and who told me about the centrality in this connection of the Spanish painter Antonio López García, whom I had not heard of before.

So it was that I finally found out who the Gowanus painter was. It was Elizabeth O’Reilly, an Irish-born artist long resident in Brooklyn. I arranged to visit her studio, and was very much taken by everything I saw, from sketches and miniature collages to somewhat larger-scale watercolors and oils. The fact that many of the scenes she painted were so familiar – some of them literally “in my back yard” – didn’t hurt, but their appeal went beyond that (and she doesn’t only paint Brooklyn).

The twentieth-century obsession with abstraction is still very present in the new cityscape art. It’s not something these artists choose to ignore. Their art is not naïve, though in a certain sense – a good one – you might at times be tempted to call it that. The industrial wasteland, the old panorama of urban decay, can have a surprising freshness. O’Reilly goes pretty far in that direction, while at the same time being among the most abstract, with drastically simplified shapes and large blocks of color cunningly arranged to give the very minimum necessary for identifying a scene, an object, or a place. I was reminded of Milton Avery, whose work I especially sought out in galleries when I first moved to New York. O’Reilly seemed to acknowledge the connection. His work, like hers, had often been called “lovely,” and not always in a complimentary way.

One could certainly imagine that to the first Manhattan exiles, the homesteading hipsters who starting moving into the neighborhood in the seventies and eighties, not to mention to people born and bred there, these glowing, almost ethereal icons of their “mean streets,” the polluted waters and the decaying buildings, might seem a little unreal. But to one who lived in the neighborhood in the first decade of the twenty-first century, lived in it as it was then and not as it had been or as one remembered it, what they capture seems real enough. There was a kind of promise in the air, that had less to do with optimism or hopes for the future than with a simple recovery of the capacity to see. The old edge was not gone, but had receded a bit. Things didn’t look quite so stark or unequivocal. You were constantly being surprised with the wildest juxtapositions. It was no longer clear what era we were living in, or where it was all going. The flowers that peeked out from around rusting girders and crumbling concrete might carry a message of uplift, or they might have a more tangled meaning. Or none at all. On all such matters, O’Reilly’s art is endlessly suggestive, and perfectly laconic. And yes, it is lovely as well.

For current or upcoming exhibits of Elizabeth O’Reilly’s work, check George Billis Gallery or the artist’s own website.

The late Lou Harrison was known for his interest in non-Western musical traditions, but his own music is rather selective in its susceptibility to “exotic” influences: it has very marked predilections and is anything but a bland multicultural hodge-podge. I had not known, however, about this piece, or that his interests extended to Cantemir and Ottoman music. It makes sense, though; he was always a melodist above all, and loved the kinds of elaborate, sinuous, metrically complex, and intonationally subtle melodies characteristic of the whole makam tradition, the kind that some say (he would have said) have been lost or made impossible in Western classical music through its obsession with harmony.

Dimitrie Cantemir (1673-1723) himself was a fascinating figure, bound to appeal to anyone interested in the crossing, or blurring, of cultural boundaries. His father was Prince of Moldavia, a position that he himself briefly held twice during his lifetime. The bulk of it was spent in exile, first at the Ottoman court, which had at the time a certain cultural openness to counterbalance its intolerance of local autonomy (Moldavia was then under Ottoman rule), and later, after taking Peter the Great’s side in the Russo-Turkish war, in Russia.

He was a polymath and knew many languages, Latin and Greek as well as Turkish, Romanian, Russian and a half-dozen others, and wrote books in several. The work for which he was best known in the West was a history of the Ottoman empire, written in Latin. He wrote what is considered the first novel in Romanian. But it is for his musical work that he is mostly remembered in Turkey. He wrote a famous theoretical treatise on music, composed a number of pieces of his own, and invented a notation that preserved not only them, but hundreds of other pieces of Ottoman court music for posterity.

His children were notable figures in Russian history. Maria, his daughter, was a great beauty, courted by Peter the Great himself, by whom she reportedly had a child, and Antioch, his son, who shared his father’s broad education and skill in languages, had an important influence on the development of Russian poetry, both through his verse satires and in his contribution to the understanding and practice of Russian versification. He spent time in London and Paris as a diplomat, and his contacts there no doubt contributed to his father’s fame as a historian.

This will be the first in a series of ebooks to be offered here. To come: a new translation of the Agamemnon of Aeschylus, and a second edition of my 1992 translation of Griboyedov’s The Woes of Wit.

The translation of Mozart and Salieri will continue to be separately available as a free download.

Check back here for updates.