An Effin' Hero

How much money was there in the room?

Well, every guest was coughing up $50,000 a plate, and there were—from what you can see in the video—at least twenty people in the room. And if there were thirty, or forty?

Right—so Mitt Romney, the Republican presidential candidate in 2012, was going to walk away from the fundraiser with a million or two bucks in his pocket. And that night he decides to let his guard down—he’s among friends, after all, people who think like him, dress like him and act like him. You know, guys you see on the golf course.

The bartender, of course, or the waitresses or the other people that serve and cook and clean—well, they can be ignored because they don’t have the 50,000 bucks that the rest of us do to spend on a dinner and to meet the next president of the United States, and press the flesh, and get the picture taken. The bartender, the wait staff—they don’t count.

Well, it was a fatal mistake for Mitt Romney. Because the bartender, a husky late-thirties middle class guy from Boston named Scott Prouty, had brought a camera in, and was videotaping the whole thing.

What Mitt said created a firestorm. Mitt wasn’t going concern himself with the 47% of Americans who are always going to vote for Obama because there’s no way to get their votes. They’re victims who think they’re entitled to food and clothes and health care. And on the word “entitled” Mitt’s voice jumps a third (in musical terms) and resonates with all the petulance, the entitlement, the astonished horror of a socialite confronted with a maid asking for a raise.

Especially because those victims, those leeches, don’t know how the rest of the world works, but Mitt does. He’s been to China to see the factory with the attached dormitories, and he’s even been inside one of the dormitories to see the one bathroom for ten rooms, and each bedroom has twelve girls in it, and they’re all saving money, those girls, hoping to get married. Here, he breaks off, and asks his audience—“well, you’ve all seen it, haven’t you?”

Murmurs of assent.

And what about that gate, with the barbed wire fence? How can they imprison those girls?

A good story-teller, he puts in the conflict, the moral uncertainty.

Ahh, but the gate isn’t to keep the girls in, but to keep other girls, girls with no jobs, from trying to sneak in and start to work, hoping to get paid.

This, of course, is familiar ground for liberals. We decry Nike for producing tennis shoes half a world away for $2.75 and then selling them to us at the mall for 85 bucks. Nike, in turn, releases a photo of hundreds of Indonesians thronging in front of a new factory, eager to make 60 cents an hour in a country where the norm is 20 cents.

My answer to this argument?

Buy your shoes at Marshalls. And try not to buy until you really need something—we can’t keep consuming like this.

Well, Mitt had been over there looking at a company then called Global Tech, which made small appliances, and sought customers who were looking to outsource their production.

OK, it’s been two years now since Wal-Mart decided to send me on my way, so I was a little rusty. But what that means, I recalled, is that the Sunbeam toaster you hold in your hands at Wal-Mart is no longer made in Georgia, or wherever it domestically was. Now it’s made in China. But what do you care, because it’s cheap and that’s great because the only job you can get is a waitress / a maid / child care because there are no manufacturing jobs because they’re all over in China and so you’re broke so you gotta buy the product.

That’s our world, now—see?

Well, not everybody’s world, of course. Mitt, when he was CEO of Bain—and also that little holding company in the tax haven of Bermuda, Sankaty High Yield Asset Investors LTD—owned over 10% of Global Tech. And when you put that money down, you’ll want to go over and see how things are run, right?

So Mitt’s gone over to see the company, and to see how the rest of the world works—how Chinese girls will work 10 hours a day for a pittance while Mitt’s own countrymen, well, just about half of them are victims who think the world, or at least the United States government, owes them a living! Hah!

The guy behind the bar doesn’t see it that way. He grew up in Boston, he knows about the rich, the guys with the prep school that leads into Harvard that leads everywhere. He sees a rich guy who decides he wants to be president, so we all better stand back and let him.

And he has it on tape. So is he gonna erase the tape, or put it out there? And if it’s out there, he’d better get ready for some serious flak, because the Republican right is not gonna forgive him.

He checks out the Chinese angle, and comes across David Corn’s article on Global Tech in Mother Jones Magazine. Prouty realizes—Mitt has been lying all throughout the campaign, demanding a retraction from the Washington Post when they said that Bain had bought equity of firms that were devoted to outsourcing production.

Prouty starts losing sleep—hey, why should he stick his neck out, run the risk of losing his job or getting slapped with a law suit, or just having right wing crazies track him down and make his life miserable.

Well, he looks into the mirror one night, and doesn’t like the guy peering back at him. “You’re a coward,” he says, and then goes off resignedly to bed. Between coward and hero there’s an intermediate persona—the reluctant hero.

He contacts Corn, who properly checks it out and at last tells him, he can’t go forward with the story without knowing Prouty’s name. Silence on the line, and then Prouty reveals himself.

As he revealed himself two nights ago, when the rest of the world was looking at a new pope. And sure enough, even as he was speaking, people had found out where he lived, they were milling in front of the house. Prouty has received threats, and has set up a defense fund—he’s had to consult several lawyers.

Hey, let him tell the story, as reported in a Mother Jones article “Scott Prouty 47% Legal Assistance Fund….

After going public, I've received a flood of physical and legal threats in emails and tweets. People have found my address and have shown up at my door. It's possible I may have to move. And I've had to contact several lawyers and have incurred legal expenses. I might incur more going forward. I always knew that if I talked about this, I could become a target, and I don't want to be melodramatic, but some of the threats I've received do cause me to be concerned for my safety and that of my loved ones.

I appreciate all the support I've received from the beginning—and especially now. Many people have asked how they could help. This is one way. I've also said in interviews that if they would like to show their support they can send donations to the ASPCA and the Institute for Global Labour and Human Rights. These are both groups that I care about.

I'm hoping that I don't need to spend a lot of money on lawyers and security. If people are generous and there are any funds left over after these costs are covered, I would use the remaining money to pay for going back to school. I've been bartending for eight years and I'd like to move forward with a job that lets me help others. If I end up not using these funds for education, I will donate them to the SPCA and IGLHR.

Ummm—Scott?

Scott, honey, you need to face something. You cannot be giving this message about the ASPCA and the Institute for Global Labour and Human Rights.

The right wing crazies are gonna go after you. The guy who organized the fundrasier, according to Mother Jones, is a billionaire who can easily afford the lawyers’ fees that will have you twisting in the wind for years to come. You’re gonna have to come out with a message—simple, clean and direct. Here it is:

They’re after me. They know I helped keep their rich kid out of the White House and they’re furious. And I don’t have any money—what bartender does? So dig into your pockets because the fight didn’t stop, it’s still going on. I need your help.

I know, Scott, you don’t want to say it. You’d rather not say it, but you will, Scott, you will, because you know what, Scott?

You’re a fuckin’ hero. 

Notes from a Machination of the Father of Lies

It may be that I’ve lived in Latin culture too long, that our love of conspiracy theory has seeped into my pores, but I think the whole thing was set up.

We have an ex-pope—the Spanish newspaper El País calls him Papa Interruptus—who, according to the paper just mentioned, was virtually isolated in the Vatican. So who was in charge?

The Curia.

Which has always had a sinister reputation—popes come and go, but the Curia stays. So that means that if you are youngish—30 or 40, you don’t get too close to any one pope, a mistake Ratzinger made with John Paul II. The reason is obvious—when the pope dies, where will you be?

And the Curia, I remember reading, has an interesting history. If it’s byzantine—and it is, there are nine congregations, three courts, 12 pontifical councils, three pontifical commissions, five pontifical academies, plus the Labor Office, and let’s not forget those Swiss Guards!—there’s a reason. The Vatican, you remember, had lots of states for centuries; there had to be a body to administer them. Well, the states are gone, but in the nature of organizations everywhere, the Curia, with all its labyrinthine structure, lives on.

And the pope has always been, well, just a pope. They come and go. So suppose a pope gives an order that you, or your superior, deem not in either the church’s or the Curia’s or your congregation’s best interest? What do you do?

You say yes, of course.

And then you begin the twin processes of doing nothing and inventing reasons for doing nothing. Which apparently was what happened with Ratzinger—whatever he wished to do was instantly agreed to and then ignored.

What flourished was secrecy and espionage, and according to El País, the superstar was Tarcisio Bertone, who headed the Secretary of State. Ironically, it’s his office that is meant to coordinate between all the fiefdoms of the Curia. Instead, rather than uniting, he’s been a divisive force.

Ratzinger’s nature, I suspect, is passive—he’s an introvert, a scholar, a pianist—he’s not an aggressive, take-charge kind of guy. His legacy, according again to El País, will be as head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, not his seven-year papacy. Why? Because he needed a more dominant force—that would be John Paul II—above and behind him. He could administer, but not lead.

Things spiraled down, as things tend to do. Scandal after scandal hit, and Ratzinger retreated more and more. At last, his butler could take it no more and began leaking to the press. The world was reading the dirty secrets, and finally Ratzinger had to tear himself away from the piano and act.

He planned it well. He commissioned the report—the famous secret report that he will hand over to his successor—detailing the problems in the Curia. He knew the only way to cure the Curia—sorry, couldn’t help it—was to resign. By doing so, he would force the entire “cabinet” to resign.

He doesn’t—and no one but me finds this strange—hike back to his native land, to play piano four-hands with his brother. Instead, he is staying in the Vatican with his valet / personal secretary, a man improbably more handsome than George Clooney. Is it the emotional attachment to the secretary, who will spend evenings and nights with the Ratzinger, and then cross the street to work for Francis?

Or is it that Ratzinger can’t leave—he has to stay and clean up his church? Alternatively, he has to stay and protect his back.

I started this post by saying it was a set up—the election after only two days of a pope whom nobody thought, this time around, was in the running. I think word got down—we gotta get somebody new, somebody from the outside, somebody who doesn’t have a checkered past. And that man is the new Pope Francis.

“The word got down” implies that Ratzinger said it. It might be, however, that the word got around, meaning that someone under Ratzinger has been speaking.

And what are we left with? A relatively old, theologically conservative man who knows little about the Curia. Also a man who seems able to be in front of people without radiating chills of disapproval, as Ratzinger did (and paradoxically, even more so when he smiled).

And we’re left as well with a mystery. Did the cardinals act to reform the Curia or to re-entrench the Curia?

Speaking as a gay man, I think Ratzinger was a wonderful pope to have. If you wanted an enemy, wouldn’t you want a weak, non-charismatic, isolated pope? John Paul II, in contrast, was a real threat, but Ratzinger?

Whatever Pope Francis might do about cleaning up the Curia and the Vatican Bank, re-filling the pews, reaching out to other religions, and dealing with abusive priests, there’s one thing you can be sure he won’t do.

And that is?

Budge on theological issues. Here’s Wikipedia on his views of homosexuality:

Bergoglio has affirmed church teaching on homosexuality, maintaining that homosexual actions are immoral.[59][60]

He opposes same-sex marriage,[61] and unsuccessfully opposed legislation introduced in 2010 to legalize same-sex marriage in Argentina, calling it a "real and dire anthropological throwback".[62] In a letter to the monasteries of Buenos Aires, he wrote:

"Let's not be naïve, we're not talking about a simple political battle; it is a destructive pretension against the plan of God. We are not talking about a mere bill, but rather a machination of the Father of Lies[63] that seeks to confuse and deceive the children of God."[64]

In this context, Bergoglio is also opposed to adoption by same-sex couples, arguing that it threatened the "identity [...] and the survival of the family: father, mother and children". He stated that "children [...] are discriminated against in advance depriving them of human growth that God would be given to a father and a mother".[65][66]

Ouch….

In an hour’s time I will take some food that Raf has cooked to his mother, who will kiss me, call me m’hijo and then rush to warm the food up. Mamina in turn will show up at the Plaza on Saturday to read more names. My name is on the telephone list on her refrigerator door.

Would she characterize my marriage to her son in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 2008 as “a machination of the Father of Lies?”

I’ll ask her, and let you know…. 

A Forgotten Cello Concerto (Republished)

Note: No new post today as the day got quite complicated…. So here's an older (yet recent) one; I'm happy to say, as an update to this post, that Michael Samis did meet—and actually surpassed— his objective, with still 11 days to go! Wonderful news, indeed!
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OK—here’s the deal. I’m taking a break today from rescuing America from its rising tide of gun violence to take on another, just-as-worthy cause.

Yesterday, I wrote about all the music that should be heard, the composers we should be listening to, the pieces that are never played. In the post, I mentioned Carl Reinecke, whose cello sonata (one of them) I had played and loved.

So I was on to YouTube, this morning, to see if I could hear that sonata, and guess what? In all of YouTube, there is only ONE video of a Reinecke cello sonata, played by what looked to be a German conservatory student (very talented). And no, it wasn’t the one I had played.

YouTube offered me the consolation, however, of the Reinecke cello concerto, and so why not? And Readers, Dear Readers, we’ve got work to do!

“I’m Michael Samis,” the guy starts out, “and tonight I’ll be playing the Reinecke cello concerto with the Gateway Chamber Orchestra…” He then sits down and plays a ravishingly lovely, lyrical theme—just the stuff I remembered from the sonata. He then stopped—a musical coitus interruptus.

OK—I was off. I HAD to hear the rest of that piece. First stop, amazon.com—zip. iTunes—ditto. Google, and I’m back on Michael Samis.

First however, I had checked out Reinecke, who has a career somewhat parallel to yesterday’s man whom time forgot, Hans Gal. Reinecke was born in 1824 as a German but in an area controlled at the time by Denmark. He studies in Leipzig with an impressive triumvirate: Mendelssohn, Schumann, Liszt. He later spends time in Copenhagen as court pianist to Christian VIII, and in 1848 goes to Paris.

In 1851, he becomes a professor in the conservatory of Cologne, and then in 1860 is appointed as conductor of the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra, a post he will occupy for thirty years. While there, he will conduct the premiere of the full seven movements of the German Requiem of Brahms, as well as the premieres of several of Brahms’s chamber works.

He is—one has to admire that 19^th discipline—teaching as well; his students include Grieg, Bruch, Albéniz, and Leoš Janáček.

After retirement, he devotes his time to composition—which he’s been doing in his “free” time all his life. He writes several operas, which are unperformed today, as well as four piano concertos.

And as you will hear Michael explain below, he’s writing in a musical style of the past. German music had evolved—Michael might say devolved—into Wagner and his followers. Reinecke stays in the style of his teachers, Mendelssohn and Schumann. He writes those long, lyric, lush themes and has the dazzling technical displays that leave you breathless.

And nobody wants his music.

He’s old, he’s out of fashion. The cello concerto, written in 1864, may never have been heard in the United States. And then Michael Samis comes along and falls in love with it—it’s the kind of music he’s loved all his life.

And now Michael has a dream—recording the concerto, as well as the Schumann concerto and various shorter pieces. But to do that he needs…

…sigh…

…do I have to tell you?

Look, if you go on kickstarter.com and donate 100 bucks, you can get a high quality DVD of Michael performing the concerto. For 2000 bucks, you get a 90-minute recital in your home! Hey, the Jones’s are gonna have to work pretty hard to top that.

And the tragic thing?

This guy needs just 8500 bucks. Oh, and if he doesn’t get it—no recording. Kickstart is all or nothing.

I’m in, I’m totally in. Readers, send this to everybody before the next 32 days. Get Michael’s message out there. Twitter and Facebook—this music has gotta be heard.

Long URL: http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/michaelsamis/a-forgotten-cello-concerto?ref=live

Twitter-friendly shortened URL: http://kck.st/ZgH5iP

A great Composer, a terrible Life

The good news today, Dear Reader, is that unless your life is a serious mess, it’s probably a lot better than Geirr Tveitt’s.

“Who’s he?” you may be saying, and if so, relax. I had no idea who he was until Susan mentioned him in a comment left on a post in this blog. Well, when Susan comments, you check it out! And so I found myself listening to one of Tveitt’s compositions, which—sorry, Susan—just missed for me.

Tveitt, 1908-1981, was a Norwegian composer and cultural figure, who studied at the famous conservatory in Leipzig and then in Paris with Honegger and Villa-Lobos, and with—here comes the big name—Nadia Boulanger. So there’s every reason to say, as most commentators do, that his music bears influences of Stravinsky and Bartók.

The other influence is Norwegian folk music, and thus far, that’s what he’s known for. His opus 150 work, 50 Hardanger Tunes for Solo Piano, may be his most famous.

Well, I used the word “influence” a bit too carelessly in that last paragraph. Maybe it’s the long, dark winter days, but there is something about Norwegians—and I’m half of one myself—that makes you think of brooding, somber, just-on-the-edge-of-madness men. These guys tend not to be the life of the party.

And Tveitt, who added an extra “t” to make his name more Norwegian—oh, and changed his first name from Nils to Geirr for the same reason (is this telling you something?)—went a little nutty on the Norwegian thing. He came up with an idea…but wait, let Wikipedia tell you:

Another result of Tveitt's Norse purism was his development of the theory that the modal scales originally were Norwegian, renaming them in honor of Norse gods. He also developed an intricate diatonic theory, which interconnected the modal scales through a system of double leading notes. These ideas were published in his 1937 argument Tonalitätstheorie des parallellen Leittonsystems. Even though most musicologists agree that Tveitt's theories are colored by his personal convictions - his thesis is intelligent, challenging and thought-provoking.

The purism also extended to an interest in an idea in vogue in the 30’s rejecting Christianity and returning to the “heathen” belief in the Norse Gods and their epic struggles against the evil jötunn. Apparently, Tveitt was so obsessed that he thought up his own timeline, based not on the birth of Christ but Leif Ericson’s arrival in Canada.

He got all of this next-to-loonyness from Hans S. Jacobsen, whom some might call a philosopher but others—more accurately, in my view—would call a collaborator. Because remember, this was the 30’s, and there was another group of people, the Nazis, who also had these funny ideas about the Teutonic gods and mythology. And so when the Nazis invaded Norway, Jacobsen became a part of the National Assembly.

Tveitt did not. But his interest in the movement that Jacobsen headed was enough to tar him in the minds of the intellectual / cultural class. Nationalism and purism were out—his music became out of fashion.

Except for the common man—who fell in love with a radio program on folk music that Tveitt co-produced in the 60’s and 70’s. But though he had achieved fame throughout Europe before the war, he was snubbed at home.

Tveitt retreated to the family farm with his scores, which he put in wooden boxes. He retreated as well to that traditional Norwegian curse of depressed men: the bottle, and became an alcoholic. We now move from gloomy to tragic—in 1970 the house burned to the ground, and 80 percent of his manuscripts turned into, and are now to this day, ashes.

Hey, I’d reach for the bottle, too….

He dies in despair in Hardanger, convinced that music will not live on.

Like so much thinking borne of depression and despair, it wasn’t true. Tveitt is increasingly getting heard, and getting played. And the two concertos for Hardanger fiddle show Tveitt at his best. Yes—the Norwegian influence is there. How could it not be, given that the Hardanger fiddle—a violin that has an additional four strings running beneath the fingerboard and under the bridge—is the national folk instrument?

But there’s so much more in his work—a distinct voice, however flavored with the influence of Paris in the 30’s.

Both Tveitt and Grieg are seen as nationalist composers, and both studied in Leipzig and Paris and then came home. That, however, seems to finish off the “compare” side of the “compare and contrast” equation: they had such different fates. Grieg composed little, but all his music remains. Tveitt was apparently prolific, but comparatively little of his music comes down to us. Grieg dies honored and beloved—at least 30,000 people come to the funeral. Tveitt dies in obscurity.

But he attracts devotees. His ballet, Baldur’s Dreams, was “tediously” (in Wikipedia’s words) restored—it literally arose from the ashes. Another piece, Morild for solo piano, was recently reclaimed after a recording by Tveitt was found of it. And though the sheet music was gone, an American musicologist sat down, listened to the piece, and wrote down the notes, as if taking dictation. Yup, some guys can do that.

I wrote before that the first piece I heard left me, well, breathful.

But, the piece below?

Anybody seen my inhaler?

Lullaby in the Gas Chamber

Two images stay in my mind, as I think of the story.

First image—two men alone, whispering all throughout the night in a darkened train car rolling through Germany. One of the men, named Kurt Gerstein, is German, an engineer, and an SS officer.

Or was he? Certainly, yes—he rose to become Head of Technical Disinfection Services—the name some bureaucrat devised to describe the wholesale and systematic slaughter by gas of the Jews, gypsies, developmentally disabled, leftists, homosexuals. According to Wikipedia, on August 17, 1942, Gerstein witnessed the murder of 3,000 victims in Belzec; the next day he travelled to Treblinka, where he saw a massive pile of clothing and underwear.

But Gerstein has a backstory—as the kids now call it—that suggests he wasn’t completely an SS member. Like Ratzinger, Gerstein had a family member—in this case a sister-in-law—taken away and murdered by the Nazis under the euthanasia policy for the mentally ill. A devout member of a Protestant Evangelical group, the Confessing Church, Gerstein decided to join the SS to “see things from the inside,” try to change policy, and denounce privately what crimes were being committed.

And so by chance on August 20, 1942, a day after leaving Treblinka, he met on the train a Swede, though not just any Swede. Göran von Otter was a diplomat serving in Berlin at the time. As von Otter will write after the war, Gerstein was horrified by the mass gassing he had seen, and begged von Otter to get the news across to the Allies.

“Yeah, right,” you may be saying. “A convenient thing to be saying, as a war criminal after the atrocity had ended. How many similar songs were sung by greater—actually lesser—than he?”

But there’s every reason to believe it was true. Von Otter at any rate did tell his superiors, wrote a report, and waited for the action that never came. Gerstein also went to the Vatican, approaching people who were in contact with Pope Pius XII and describing the atrocities he had seen. He was met with similar silence and shrugs of the shoulder.

Whatever Gerstein whispered to the diplomat in that darkened train car, it haunted von Otter for years. Yes, he had written a letter defending Gerstein when he was being tried as a war criminal. But the letter had arrived too late to help; Gerstein had been found guilty, and chose to kill himself in prison days after the conviction.

Second image—a woman shepherding a group of children into the gas chambers of Auschwitz. While walking into the chambers, she sang them a lullaby she had written and sung often in Theresienstadt, where she had been a nurse in the children’s infirmary.

The woman, Ilse Weber, was a Jew, a writer, and a poet, as well as a musician and—it’s clear—a fine composer. In short, a very talented woman who finds herself among a very talented group of people.

Whether by chance or design, Theresienstadt had a large group of intellectuals, artists, musicians, and composers. My guess is that it was chance—all the musicians had their instruments confiscated on arrival. But the Red Cross, alerted to the situation, made a stink. So the Nazis—always keen to seize on a good public relations scheme—decided to give the instruments back, start up four orchestras and a theater group, and then film it all. A happy camp of smiling Jewish intellectuals and cultural figures—and look, here they are, playing Beethoven! Did I say “public relations,” a couple of sentences back? Sorry—propaganda.

And so Ilse, a German who had married a Czech and was living in Prague with her husband and two children, found herself in Thereseinstadt, though not before first sending one of her children to Sweden in the care of a diplomat (no—not von Otter; that only happens in the movies….) She had been interested in kids all her life—she had written a popular children’s book, so it was natural that she became a nurse in the infirmary.

Natural as well that she wrote a lullaby, which you can hear below. And then, her family already split once, she had to make a “Sophie’s choice.” Her husband would be sent to Auschwitz—she decided, yes, to go with him and bring the remaining son as well. The family would not be separated again.

She must have known, but she covered it up, she was strong for the children, she comforted them and sang the lullaby as the gas hissed through jets, filled the room, choked the kids, their eyes small ponds of terror and fear. She was bigger, had a slower metabolism, the gas would have taken longer to affect her than the children. She may have been there with the children dead all around her, still singing, still calming them, still lulling them to sleep. And then she would have died.

Her husband survived her by thirty years, reports Wikipedia.

“We must never forget,” says Anne Sofie von Otter, who is, as you will have guessed, the daughter of the diplomat, Göran von Otter, mentioned above. And it was after she had recorded the disc that she realized—it wasn’t just about no forgetting. She was paying a debt of her father’s, who had regretted never being able to help Gerstein on time.

Versatile, intelligent, always looking for the new and unexplored, Anne Sofie von Otter decided to record some of the music composed at Thereseinstadt, and was joined by other musicians, equally gifted.

In the end, it backfired—that little plan to give instruments and pen and paper to the musicians and composers of Thereseinstadt. Even today, the story inspires people to write music on the theme; the Oratorio Terezin, by Canadian composer Ruth Fazal had its first US performance in 2007.

When I started this post, I hadn’t yet checked out the story of Ilse Weber, so a third image hadn’t yet formed. Willi Weber, Ilse’s husband, standing and looking through chain link fence as his wife and child go to the gas chambers. She is singing her lullaby, or perhaps another song, the children are clustered around her, her small son is clasping her hand.

I had thought that Willi had the worst deal of all—better it would be to be Ilse. But many survivors of the camps reported that the experience taught them the value, the precious, unimaginable value of life.

Willi—I pray you had thirty years of life, not…

…thirty years of grief.

A Norwegian Song Cycle

First scenario—I tell you that I’m taking you to the symphony tonight, and that we’ll be hearing some Beethoven. What are your chances of guessing what we’ll hear?

Not very good, I’m afraid—besides the nine symphonies and the five piano concerti and the violin and triple concerti, there are roughly half a dozen other orchestral works, mainly overtures.

Second scenario—I tell you that I’m taking you to the symphony tonight, and that we’ll be hearing some Grieg. And here, you’ll very likely be able to pin it down in the first three guesses. It’ll be the piano concerto, Peer Gynt, or possibly the Holberg Suite. Unless you’ve got a conductor willing to scrounge into the forgotten corners of Grieg’s repertoire, that’s all you’re likely to hear.

So Grieg falls into that enigmatic category—you might call it famous but not well known. He certainly has his place in the pantheon, but only for a handful of works. And given that he died at age 64, shouldn’t we know more music of his? He had to have been doing something other than writing merely three pieces in nearly half a century of creative life.

Yes and no. He wasn’t a very healthy man; a lung condition he picked up at age 17 plagued him most of his life. He was also a conductor, and worked for many years with the Bergen Philharmonic Orchestra, for which he served as music director from 1880 – 1882. But he was unusual for his time in not producing a symphony, except for an early work that he suppressed.

He was, said one commentator, a man of little works, almost a miniaturist. He struggled even to produce a string quartet, although he came up a creditable one—Debussy, not an easy man to please, thought highly of it.

He got around, this man from Norway who studied in Leipzig, disliked the rigidity of the system, and went back to his native land. He met Liszt, who was impressed with him (and sight-read the famous piano concerto and invented a reduction of the orchestral score—they were giants on the earth, some of those guys…). He also met Tchaikovsky, and was struck by how sad he was.

You could—perhaps fancifully—say that he met me this morning on the daily trot, when I was cruising my iPod for something new to listen to. It’s a discipline for me, now—how much new music can I listen to? For years, I was buying CDs of interesting music that I never found time to listen to. Well, now’s the time.

And so it had been with a CD of Grieg’s songs, as sung by Anne Sofie von Otter. And instantly I was struck by the rich harmonies, the deftness of the piano part, the freshness of the music.

What I didn’t know was that I was listening to a song cycle, indeed the only song cycle that Grieg ever wrote. And what, you ask, is a song cycle? A musical form that crops up with Beethoven and is still going on—a group of songs that are meant to be performed together, often because they are telling a story, or are thematically linked. And the 19^th century was a sort of golden age for the song cycle: Schubert with his Winterreise and  Die schöne Müllerin; Schumann with Liederkreis, Dichterliebe, Frauenenliebe und Leben.

Grieg wrote the song cycle Haugtussa over a three-year period, and mind you, the work only lasts 25 minutes. But it was worth it; Grieg later wrote that it was his best effort in song. Sadly, though, in the YouTube clip below, we’re missing the one crucial component of a song cycle—the lyrics themselves.

So here is what will have to suffice, a brief description of the work from Wikipedia:

Haugtussa opens and ends with the nature mysticism of "The Enticement" and "At the Brook". The second extended stage includes the two melancholic portraits "Veslemøy" and "Hurtful Day". Between them the climax is reached in the central love songs "The Tryst" and "Love", which have a cheerful, pastoral approach, and approached and transitioned from in, respectively, "Blueberry Slope" and "Kidlings' Dance". The main character, the Veslemøy, is a shepherd girl who has abilities that others do not have and therefore can not find a place for her personality in rural communities. She turns to nature for answers to her desires and questions. During the course of the text she falls in love with the boy Jon, and "Hurtful Day" describes her feelings when she is deceived by him. In the last song, "At the Brook", which is often compared with the last song of Franz Schubert's Die schöne Müllerin or Robert Schumann's Dichterliebe,[4] she seeks refuge by a mountain brook, musically represented by a rhythmic figure on the piano. From verse to verse, Grieg gradually changes this passage using different harmonizations.

What’s good about the clip? It has the wonderful Swedish mezzo-soprano Anne Sofie von Otter singing at her best, and that “best” is nearly unbeatable. And how fortunate we are that von Otter is Swedish, and can thus sing in a language most other singers wouldn’t tackle.

Which leads me, perhaps, to the last strike against Grieg—he’s Norwegian, he’s identified as a nationalist composer, and ever so slightly looked down on. However much the piano concerto gets played, among musical snobs—and you don’t have to be told that snobbery is rampant in classical music, do you?—Grieg isn’t considered in the absolute top drawer.

But listening to this song cycle, I think he is….

Twinkling Puerto Rican Stars

Well, it was a day Franny got into me, or rather behind me, forcing me out of bed and then after the morning coffee out the door. I had to go hear, she thought, a bunch of kids from 47 Puerto Rican high schools recite from memory a poem in English. The winner of the competition would be sent to Washington DC to represent Puerto Rico in the national competition, which comprises all the fifty states plus the US Virgin Islands and Puerto Rico.

Poetry Out Loud, it’s called, and it was only started in 2006. It got to Puerto Rico in 2008, and there were only eight schools participating. Now, it’s 47, and not just in the metropolitan area—it’s all over the island.

Across the nation, the program, which is sponsored by the National Endowment for the Arts and the Poetry Foundation, draws in 365,000 participants annually. On the island, the program is jointly sponsored by the Department of Education and the Institute of Puerto Rican Culture.

Well, it would be something to see—what would Puerto Rican kids choose to read? Would it differ significantly from the poems gringos chose, or does adolescence carry the day, trump all, shatter the cultural / language barriers.

I was also curious—for many of these kids, English is a second language. How will they navigate Shakespearean English? What about the accent, the intonation? Not for nothing was my mantra “333 jewelry thieves” at Wal-Mart. If you can manage the “th” and the voiced consonants of “V” and “Z” (plus get a good “L” which for many Puerto Ricans is an “R”) you have the basic artillery. But how well can you fire it off?

I’m sorry to say that I can’t completely tell you. The contest was to begin at 9, it actually began at 9:30. A long video from last year’s competition was shown. The Director of the Institute of Puerto Rican Culture was introduced and spoke highly important words about culture (she also, by the way, referred to the contest taking place this morning as the “national” contest and then went on to give her best wishes to the winner who would represent Puerto Rico in the—also—“national” contest. Even poetry is no refuge for ideology….) At this point, we were introduced to the head of the English Department of the Department of Education, who also assured us that culture was important, and then went on to quote a bit of Dickinson—a nice touch.

It was now 10:15, and we had yet to introduce the judges—who came out solemnly as their various academic and professional achievements were listed. So that took some time, since one of them could barely walk, and nearly catapulted down the stairs from the stage.

This left us free to hear the rules of the competition—no pictures with flash, no applause between poems, no cell phones except on vibrate. These rules had to be repeated three times in both English and Spanish, since—well, it’s generally a good idea. We do many things very well in Puerto Rico, but there are times when our zeal, our zest has to be reined in. Otherwise, Mamita will burst onto the stage after her child recites, hug the child, beam at the audience, stand proudly and pose with the child while all 70 uncles / brothers / sisters / aunts / grandparents take pictures and then post on Facebook. Remember—we gotta get out of here by three o’clock.

It took me back, somehow, to the spelling bees that the State Journal used to sponsor. The parents in the audience, nervous for their kids, almost more nervous than the kids themselves. The cameras , the teachers and officials—my own mouth was dry, my palms sweaty, just seeing it.

Well, it was 10:40 by the time the first child stepped foot on stage—with a solid, creditable job of “Alone,” by Edgar Allan Poe. You’ll know it, of course:

From childhood's hour I have not been


As others were; I have not seen


As others saw; I could not bring

My passions from a common spring.

Well, I understand that—what teenager is not feeling that’s he’s never been as others are? But I was jolted indeed when the next teenager stepped out, and announced that she would recite “Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star.”

Is this real—I thought? Are we all seriously going to sit and listen to “Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star?” Somebody is going to start giggling—I had an obvious candidate in mind, and was preparing to dash out the theater—and this kid is gonna be sunk. And what sadistic teacher / mentor suggested this awful choice to this kid? What had she ever done to warrant this? Look, I don’t like kids myself, but neither do I think they should be treated cruelly.

Well, we sat there and took it—we parents and teachers and sibling and interested others. And she got through it, and nobody giggled, and I thought that even on an island where the inexplicable happens with astonishing regularity, I had just seen something wonderfully strange.

It was later, at home, that I wondered—is there something I’ve missed in Twinkle? Are there literary merits, wonderful nuances, subtleties and shades of meaning that I’ve been unaware of? Is it just me?

Well, I looked it up, and if there’s anything there, I can’t find it. But it was a thing to hear, on a Saturday morning in the Santurce sector of San Juan, Puerto Rico.

Alas, it was now close to eleven—I had to get home, eat something, and then go off to the Plaza, to read the portion of 30,000 names allotted for today.

But the handful of kids that I had heard today told me something. There’s a wonderful spirit, a wonderful naturalness in the people, and the kids of Puerto Rico. They were nervous, of course. But something in the air, in the spontaneity, in the emotional lifeblood of Puerto Rico comes through despite the dry mouth, sweaty palms, butterflies in the stomach.

Get ready, DC—you may have a surprise!

Macondo Redux

Well, a simple reading of the New Day, the preeminent newspaper of Puerto Rico, tells the story.

We’re screwed.

This morning at 12:30 three hundred federal agents of the Bureau of Prisons entered the federal prison here—the first operation of its kind. They literally went cell by cell, confiscating everything from drugs to cell phones to homemade weapons.

The prison, according to the New Day, has been without contact from the outside world since the murder of Osvaldo Albarati—no calls out, not by cellular phones, and not by landlines. Visits have also been suspended.

It all started a week or so ago when Albarati, a prison official, got killed driving home from work one night. It was a clear execution—21 bullets shot into his car, the paid assassins speeding away. And nobody had much doubt who had paid for the killing—two inmates who were directing the drug cartels from behind bars. For this they needed cell phones, which the prison official had found and confiscated. So the inmates got together and paid to send a message to any other honest guy in the prison system who might think about doing his job.

Things are a little different, here in Puerto Rico.

“The inmates are in control of the prison,” a friend who is a doctor and who was hired to give medical services in the prison system told me. “They even control who can be held in the prison. That’s because each prison has a gang associated with it, a gang that operates inside and outside the prison. And a member of an opposite gang will be killed in days. So the prisoners vet the incoming convict, and the prison administration listens. They have to.”

It appears that this mentality is lost on the Feds, though, and the prisoners, as reported by the New Day, were a little stunned by the severity and thoroughness of the search.

The situation of the prisoners running the prison all started in the late seventies, when a guy named Carlos Torres-Irriarte—OK, call him by his nickname, La Sombra—decided to form a little group to protest abusive prison officials and abusive gang activity. And La Sombra must have been a charismatic man, because very soon the Ñetas had gained control of the biggest prison on the island, Oso Blanco, or polar bear.

Well, you don’t go places without stepping on a few toes, which in this case was—of course—the rival gang. So that gang—called  “Group 27,” or “The Insects”—decided to kill Irriarte, which they did, with the help of a prison guard.

Or was it just the rival gang? Irriarte, it seems, had come down hard on one thing—no drugs. And soon after his death, the Ñetas had cornered the market on drugs.

They also had a little score to settle with their rivals, so they tunneled for days to reach the leader of the Insects, a guy nicknamed Manota. Then, according to street legend, various body parts were sent to family members, gang leaders, and interested others.

Here’s Wikipedia on what happened next:

The news soared and the media depicted the story as a hostile takeover. Used to their advantage, they used the media coverage as a means to send out messages to other members in different prisons across the island. Their message was clear: They wanted justice and they meant business. They warned the administration and let them know that if their needs weren't met about improving the living situations within the facilities, there would be bloodshed and an all out war. By the middle of 1984, their numbers multiplied excessively. They took over 7 major prison facilities across the island and ruled them with an iron fist.

Well, well—what else is going on in Puerto Rico? Well, the New Day has been looking at the tax returns of our senators and legislators, and comparing them to the financial statements they are required to file. And guess what? The legislators are far more able to make laws than follow them—some serious discrepancies came up. How is it that a senator making over 80,000 dollars a year—the third highest salary on any legislature in the states—only got around to paying 12 dollars in taxes? The matter is under investigation.

And it’s a shame that the legislators aren’t paying their taxes, because we are, frankly, broke. So broke that we can’t pay the 100 million owed to government employees for unused sick leave—and that isn’t making the police and the teachers (the two largest groups affected) happy. Yes, it’s true that the government workers have some nice perks—not the least of which is the thirty days of vacation, the eighteen days of sick leave, and the twenty holidays. Uncharitable minds—perhaps warped by having worked in private enterprise—call this excessive.

So the governor has declared…well, what has he declared? It’s a little uncertain—if he can find the money, he’ll pay; if not, well, he’s not gonna issue checks with insufficient funds. So people will have to wait.

Oh, except for the judicial and the—you were waiting for this, right?—legislative branches.

They’ll get paid.

In Germany, the situation is serious but never critical; in Austria, the situation is critical but never serious.

And Puerto Rico weighs in on the side of Austria. The island is busying itself with chismes de la farándula or jetset gossip. Will our local bombshell Maripily—rumored to have more on the outside than in the penthouse—be on People’s Most Beautiful list? And what about the Lady of Fire, Olga Tañón? Will her newest song take off?

I leave you with this story—perhaps true—of García Marquez, who was once asked why he didn’t write about Puerto Rico.

“They didn’t believe me when I created Macondo,” he said, “just imagine what they’d say if I wrote about Puerto Rico!”