Chasing a Novel….

OK—I’ve read James Patterson, who tells me that I should lie to myself. I should tell myself that the novel I intend to write in National Novel Writing Month (abbreviated NaNoWriMo) is gonna be great, gonna sell a zillion copies, gonna make the 50 Shades of Grey lady look like a piker. And Patterson should know, because he holds the Guinness Book of Records for the most bestsellers on The New York Times list.

For the stuff that I want to do, I’m fairly disciplined—no surprise there, right? Which means that my house is a mess, but I write each day. So the discipline isn’t the problem—it’s the imagination.

Of which I have none….

Consider it—there is a couple three tables down from me at the café where I write. Shouldn’t I be able to think of a story, shouldn’t I be able to weave a tale, just from the slump of his shoulders, or the fact that she is looking at her phone, not at him.

They argued last night, of course. The same argument they’ve been having for a month: he wants them to have a baby, she doesn’t.

“I had enough SHIT FROM MY MOTHER,” she screamed at him. “I don’t want to do that to anyone. And my therapist says I’m not ready.”

“You’re never ready,” he said, trying to be reasonable. ‘Christ,’ he thought, ‘if only she could hear herself…’

“Maybe in a year,” she said.

“Said that last year…”

“Look, Jim, I just want time for us to be together as a couple. Too many couples have children and then they’re parents, not couples. And then they end up in thirty years not really knowing each other….”

‘She’s so beautiful,’ he thinks, ‘why don’t I believe her?’

‘The problem started after her mother visited,’ he thought. ‘She was so simple, so sweet before her mother came. It’s like all the mistrust and suspicion got dumped onto her. Christ, just because your mother had a rotten divorce, do you have to spoil your own marriage?’ 

He turned over in bed and feigned sleep.

It was his fault—he’d always had this thing for younger women. And now, here he was, in his third marriage to a girl in her early twenties. And he? Forties, still good looking, hair graying at the temples, but look…time runs out for men as well as women. It may be more psychological than biological, as it is for women, but it’s still there. He doesn’t want to be in his fifties with a newborn crying in the middle of the night. But he could handle it now.

Now, he looks at her, absorbed in her phone. He sees the way her earring falls from her earlobe, and remembers the thrill, the first time he had whispered, “I love you,” into that ear.

“Let’s not fight again,” he says. It seems as simple as that.

She tenses, and thinks that the issue will never go away, never get settled. It will end her marriage, as it ended her mother’s. Although that was another woman, not the kid thing. Would Jim stray? Had he already? Or did he have some lined up, someone in the wings?

“It’s not like I want to fight,” she says. Is he putting all this on her, again?

“Then let’s not….”

She gives him a wary smile, and looks back down at her phone.

“Michelle texted me—they’re at the Butterfly People, about to have lunch. You want to join them?”

He doesn’t like either Michelle or her partner, and he hates the pretension of the Butterfly People. But the silence between them? Wouldn’t it be better to have anything else but that?

“Sure,” he says, and tries to look happy about it.

She stands up, reaches for her purse, brushing her husband’s hand in the process; he was about to give it to her. The touch seems as fragile, as fleeting as the relationship itself.

She moves away, ahead of her husband, pushes the door to the café open, and steps into the street. She doesn’t know: in a week she will miss her period, in a month, Jason will be born.

Now then—can we tweet this to Patterson?

Fourth Shade of Grey—When Opera Isn't Sung

OK—there are some times when opera is not sung, but played. There’s the overture, for example, which starts the opera and which does a couple of things. First of all, it gets people to their seats, if not to stop talking (the tradition had been to ignore the overture and just keep chatting—hint, don’t try it today…). It introduces the themes, perhaps, as well as sets the mood. Finally, it’s just traditional.

Any orchestral music played at any other point in the opera gets called something else. Often, it will be called a prelude, sometimes an intermezzo, perhaps a dance like a waltz or polonaise. And here again, the idea is to set the mood and introduce the themes that will be heard—and sung—later.

So James, in 50 Shades of Grey, has the heroine listening at one point to the Prelude to the first act of La traviata. And it’s typical Verdi—tuneful, cheerful, and sticky. Get ready, you may be whistling this all week.  

Nice, hunh? Right—nothing substantial, but there's a place in the world for light and pleasant. 

But if you want heavy, I can give you heavy. In fact, Richard Wagner mines heavy like Reynolds mines aluminum. And here, I gotta come out—Wagner is one composer that makes me want to run screaming out of the opera hall. Nor am I alone—Clara Schumann wrote that the opera from which the clip below is taken “was the most repugnant thing I have heard or seen in all my life.” And a young Richard Strauss said that the opera, Tristan und Isolde, "would kill a cat and would turn rocks into scrambled eggs from fear of [its] hideous discords.”

To be fair, the conductor Bruno Walter said, “So there I sat in the topmost gallery of the Berlin Opera House, and from the first sound of the cellos my heart contracted spasmodically... Never before has my soul been deluged with such floods of sound and passion, never had my heart been consumed by such yearning and sublime bliss... A new epoch had begun: Wagner was my god, and I wanted to become his prophet.”

So there are two camps on Wagner, and very few people who are neutral. Oh, and be sure to eat a full meal before embarking on a performance of any opera Wagner wrote, because after hours five hours of sturm und drang, you’ll emerge famished if you haven’t. Granted, as Mr. Fernández once said, there are beautiful moments in the opera—and hours in between them.

Here, at any rate, is the prelude from the first act of Tristan und Isolde—you be the judge.

Sometimes, for apparently no reason, the people in the opera decide, “hey, let’s dance!” In fact, it was the tradition in the Paris Opera that every opera also had to have a ballet. So Gounod, in his opera Faust, decided to stick a ballet into the last act; in the ballet Faust, having sold his soul to the devil, is presented a series of visions of a particularly ghoulish nature. And though it is often omitted—Faust is an expensive opera to mount, and throwing a ballet into it seriously ups the tab—it adds a lot to the opera.   

The final two pieces are right on the border of terminal sweetness. The first, Massenet’s Meditation from the opera Thaïs, is frequently hauled out as an encore piece, as it clearly is here. The second piece, the Intermezzo from Cavalleria rusticana is also frequently performed as a concert piece.

Second Shade of Grey—Bach Transcriptions for Piano

The second shade of grey takes us to the father, or perhaps mother, of it all, Johann Sebastian Bach. And it takes us, specifically, to his lyric, or song-like side.

It’s a good way to know Bach, to start to understand him. Because yes, he can be the most cerebral, the most theoretical of composers; he’s a composer that every mathematician loves. But make no mistake about it, he’s also a composer who is surprisingly song-like, who can just deliver up a beautiful melody, something you’ll sing all day.

He was also a guy who was a church musician, so he knew how to serve up, and then dress up, a simple hymn. But let’s go back.

He was born in 1685 in Eisenach, a town in Germany, into a family of musicians. His father was director of the musicians in the town, all his uncles were professional musicians. One of them, Johann Cristoph Bach, took Bach in at age ten when his father died (his mother had died eight months earlier), and introduced him to the organ. Bach then attended the St. Michael’s School in Lüneburg, graduated, and then obtained a position as a court musician in the chapel of Duke Ernst of Weimar. He did that for a few years, grew a bit dissatisfied and decided to take a hike.

Literally—he walked 250 miles to go see one of the finest composers of the day, Dieterich Buxtehude in the northern town of Lübeck. Right, that went well enough, and Bach might have been Buxtehude’s successor, but there was a little catch: he had to marry Buxtehude’s daughter—it was a bit like a fairy tale, or at any rate a package deal.

So Bach, presumably again by foot, married his second cousin, and hoofed it to Mülhausen, where he spent a couple of years. In 1708, Bach returned to Weimar, where he began a long career of composing, as well as directing the musicians of the ducal court. He next moved to Köthen, where his employer is a Calvinist; here Bach would write most of his secular compositions. Finally, in 1723, he was appointed director of music in two important churches in Leipzig, which had an important university.

Bach stayed in Leipzig all his life, and progressively went blind. He had an eye surgery that was completely unsuccessful, came down with pneumonia, and died in 1750.

Bach was prolific in two senses; biologically, he had two wives and twenty children, several of whom became important composers in their own right; musically, he wrote 300 cantatas, 2 passions, 2 oratorios, orchestral suites, 6 Brandenburg concerti, and a huge amount of keyboard music.

In fact, the only thing he didn’t do was compose an opera, as Handel, his exact contemporary, would do. Nor did he, like Handel, travel extensively, either to Italy or to London. Though well known in his lifetime, he wasn’t not particularly celebrated as a composer, but instead as an organist. The fame came later, when Mendelssohn, most conspicuously, champions Bach’s compositions.

Right—that’s the man. What about the music?

Well, here James chooses a lovely song, written by the Italian composer Alessandro Marcello. Originally, it was part of Marcello’s oboe concerto—Bach freely borrows it, and transcribes it for piano. Have a listen:

Transcriptions were popular in the 19^th century—everyone had a piano, everyone wanted to take a nice choral or orchestral piece and play it at home, in the evening, on the piano. And so lots of Bach’s best tunes got transcribed. And Bach himself borrowed liberally from his fellow composer, as they did from him. Here’s another famous song, Bist du bei Mir, which Bach lifted from the composer, Gottfried Heinrich Stölzel:



Bist du bei Mir, in fact, is song expressing the melancholy sentiment: “if you are with me, I will go gladly to my death; oh, what a pleasant end it would be, for your hands to be the last things my faithful eyes were to see, as they close my lids to rest….” Or words to that effect. And as you can hear, it’s a knockout.



There’s more, much more, and it’s all well worth exploring. I will, more fully, in my other blog, Words on Musick. But it’s a beautiful spring day, in New York City. All of the flowering tree—the crab apples, the cherry trees, the redbud—are in full bloom. Time to turn from sonic loveliness to visual delight!
But I send you one last clip—a piano transcription of “Sheep may Safely Graze.”

The First Shade of Grey

Right, I have not read the trilogy, and I’ll be honest, I’m a little peeved about it all. Here this woman, E.L. James, sits down one day and writes a series of books, beginning with Fifty Shades of Grey. And boom, the next day she’s a multimillionaire, she’s famous, she’s on top of the New York Times Bestseller List for a zillion weeks.

Marc, right down here in little San Juan?

Iguanas has sold about six copies.

Look, I knew that would happen. It shouldn’t rankle, but it does; I should rise above it, content in knowing that I produced a book that, if not read, at least is well-written. James’s work has not been uniformly well-received. But who knows? Maybe they’re great; books that are popular more often than not are also good.

So, as penance, I offer the following; it appears that James has done a good deed: she’s introduced a whole bunch of people to classical music. So much so that there’s even an album out of the music about which she wrote. (As well, there appears to be a movie or movies in the making….) OK, so that’s worth checking out, right?

Well, Amazon has the CD, and there are fifteen tracks, fifteen really great pieces of music. So let’s spend time with each track, look at the composer, and explore a bit more his work or the work of his contemporaries.

Right—track number 1, the Flower Duet from Lakmé, by Léo Delibes.

Well, it’s sufficiently obscure that the computer didn’t know “Lakmé”—that old red squiggle—but did recognize Delibes. Why?

He was big in the 19^th century, where, according to Wikipedia, he influenced guys like Saint-Saëns, Debussy, and Tchaikovsky. Actually, Tchaikovsky thought Delibes was greater than Brahms, though Tchaikovsky also had a bee in his bonnet about the composer; he called Brahms a “gift-less bastard.” But Tchaikovsky went on to say, about a ballet that no one, to my knowledge sees or listens to, “... what charm, what wealth of melody! It brought me to shame, for had I known of this music, I would have never written Swan Lake."

OK—so who was Delibes? French, 1836-1891, the son of a postman, the great-uncle of the Spanish writer Miguel Delibes. He studied at the Paris Conservatory under Adolphe Adam, who, like Delibes, principally composed for the theater and ballet. (Adam, by the way, wrote O Holy Night, the Christmas carol that gets trotted out regularly….)

And Delibes follows in his teacher’s footsteps, writing ballet scores for Coppélia and Sylvia. But he also wrote an opera, Lakmé, which is a rich, atmospheric setting of an Oriental tale. And it’s from Lakmé that James takes her first selection, the Flower Duet, or Dome epais le jasmine. Right—so what’s it all about?

Ummm—look, let’s be real. There are some operas that are less about the plot than the atmosphere. I saw Lakmé years ago, read the synopsis, rubbed my eyes, and tried the synopsis again. Then I decided—it’s better not to know. Sit back, look at the costumes, enjoy the music, admire the set. But don’t try to make anything of the libretto.

Briefly, however, Lakmé, daughter of the high priest of a sacred Brahmin temple, and her servant Mallika are left behind at the river while the men go to perform mysterious rites in the temple. See? This stuff happens in a certain kind of opera. So they amuse themselves gathering flowers…..

Juicy little stuff, hunh? Well, in my mind this duet is paired with another duet, just as beautiful, just as lush, and with a libretto just as silly. Oh, and also by a French composer of the 19^th century, Georges Bizet, whose most famous work is the opera Carmen. But he also wrote another opera, The Pearl Fishers, or Les pêcheurs de perles.

Here again, the libretto isn’t the most substantial part of the opera—it’s about two men, good friends, whose friendship is threatened by their love of the same woman. And in this famous aria, Au fond du temple saint, we are once again at a temple, and the men are swearing eternal friendship.

Both pieces are just on the edge, dangerously close to being maudlin and sentimental and overblown. Look, I never seek it out, I never get up in the morning and say, “hey, why don’t I listen to Au fond or the flower duet….”

But if they come upon me, in a concert or a television program?

I just love the stuff….