Our Kids

Whoever they were, and whatever they thought, it can certainly be said that there were enough of them: 200,000 according to the organizers of the affair, and each and everyone one of them was out there defending the family, since its most recent attack is something called “curriculo de género” and if the Puerto Rican family doesn’t survive this onslaught from the government, well, it won’t be because they didn’t try. There were loud speakers, whistles, vuvuzelas, home-made placards, and some more slick affairs, the most arresting of which was this:

Yes—it means what you think: No Books, Let’s not damage our children.

Because it was all about children—children whose innocence was going to be robbed from them, as you could have heard by going to YouTube and listening to the video published by prporlafamilia.com. Heartbreaking to hear the little voice lisping, “Mami, why are3 they taking away my innocence?” Who could not be affected?

So 200,000 people came to my town to protest this outrage, and shouldn’t I figure out what it is? But it was difficult, since here’s what the secretary of the Department of Education has to say:

Enfatizó que el nuevo currículo y la carta circular sobre perspectiva de género aún no están listas. Asimismo, reiteró que no se comprarán libros porque “es un tema que se incorporará de manera transversal en los ofrecimientos currículares de todos los niveles escolares y se implementará de acuerdo con la edad y el nivel escolar”.

Short translation: the new curriculum and the letter announcing it isn’t ready yet, nor have any books been bought. But that was a problem for the protesters, who had this to show on their website:

Right—so the book is called Nuestra Sexualidad, and supposedly it has pictures that would make a marine blush. True, the book, according to the Department of Education, was meant for the teachers only, and was recalled months after having been distributed…but could anyone seriously believe that lie? Of course not!

So various leaders of various churches herded up the faithful, and they were sent out to clamor for the innocence of their children. And then there was the meeting with the governor, who gave up an hour and a half of his time; one of the organizers of the event, a cardiologist named César Vázquez who is spokesman for Puerto Rico Por la Familia, had neither heart nor stomach for the meeting, and stormed out of the meeting after five minutes, and then announced to the waiting press that the affair had been that most atrocious of things: una falta de respeto,

Well, the governor didn’t think it had been, and claimed that at the end of the meeting, the other members of the groups organizing the march had asked the Gov to take selfies with them, since degenerate and innocence-robbing or not, hey …he still the governor!

The ironic thing is that a number of my Facebook friends were all in support of the affair, since they are evangelicals as well as parents. So I can tell you: These are wonderful people, good people, people who would be appalled at any injustice done from hatred or malice.

Which makes it hard for me, since another Facebook friend had this to say:

Just sub out "education on gender and sexuality" for "gay marriage" and "kids" for "gay people"

Well, yesterday was a hard day for me, since having 200,000 fundamentalist Christians on my doorstep was daunting, and could the computer do any better? Of course not, since I was absorbed reading about the guy in Denmark who killed two people—apparently, according to The New York Times, he wasn’t really radicalized, just pissed off, and isn’t that nice to know!—and then the twenty Christians that ISIS beheaded, and then the 250 Jewish graves that got desecrated in France. Oh, and the day was grey and rainy, which didn’t much help.

Nor did it help when the social networks published the picture below:

Right—the first time I saw it, I found it chilling too, though it was years ago in a Catholic church in a very good neighborhood. Still, just as there are some images that you cannot use, there are certain gestures you cannot make. So half of the Internet was publishing photos of German crowds gesticulating in a similar fashion in the 1940’s, and the other half of the Internet was claiming that only a pervert couldn’t see that they were raising their hands to GOD!

Well, I suppose I brought it on myself—at least partially—since didn’t all of us gay people press the buttons? After all, we were out there marching, raising hell, going off to pour blood on the Reagan White House lawn, doing die-ins. So now the other side, alarmed into activity, is streaming in the streets. Did I expect anything less?

I suppose not. But now I’m thinking that it’s time to move on, time for the next big fight, time to declare that the fight for marriage equality has been won, and that we, as gay people, need to look to what is and has always been more important. And at the risk of sounding evangelical, that’s our…

…kids.

Yes, since every one of those 200,000 people out there yesterday has kids, nephews, nieces, grandchildren…and what is their reaction going to be when one of those kids comes home and tells his mother / father / uncle or aunt that he or she is gay? Why am I not hearing the sound of champagne bottles popping?

Which is why, somehow, the news that this Chinese film has had more than one hundred million views is particularly cheering. Here’s what David Badash had to say:

"Homosexuality was decriminalized in China in 1997, and in the early 2000's it was removed from the list of mental illnesses," THR (The Hollywood Reporter) writes. "But there is a deeply held Chinese belief that children are required to marry and bear offspring to continue the family line, which means homosexuality is still heavily stigmatized. Because of this, the Chinese New Year family gathering can be a harrowing experience for gays and lesbians."

Well, we all came out, and it wasn’t easy, but it was worth it. Now we have a harder job in front of us, since it’s too easy to dismiss 200,000 people as religious crazies. Even if they were, what would it matter? The gay community has to realize: Those 200,000 people are raising—some of them…

…our kids. 

On the Licit Use of Jacuzzis

It constituted absolutely fraudulent—and possibly criminal—use of a Jacuzzi, and if my own level of stress hadn’t long past crossed—OK, limped across—the finishing line of impending insanity and death, I would have complained to the manager of the hotel about it.

We were in St. Thomas, where we had fled to escape a street festival—which was actually an invasion of 500,000 youngsters who were getting drunker by the hour. Since two years ago Mr. Fernández had been the target of a rum bottle flung by a group of these youths—I was still retrieving bits of it the following December, on those rare occasions when I decided to clean—it became clear: Retreat was the sensible alternative. And however expensive taking a forced vacation might be, the alternative was worse.

So we were in a Jacuzzi in St. Thomas, soaking the year 2014 away: We had lost a beloved cat, we had both been ill for a quarter of the year with the chikungunya, and we seemingly had settled into the lowest part of the U of happiness—our fifties, when worries about aging parents, about impending retirement, about errant children, make this the least happy decade of life. We had, in short, utterly earned a life pass to the Jacuzzi, even if we never again faced an unpleasant moment for the rest of our lives. And so the hot water was blasting away at muscles that made the cables of the Golden Gate Bridge look limp, when a very nice couple from Minnesota—Mary Jane and Allen—joined us in the Jacuzzi.

Joan Didion once wrote that hotels were social constructs, by which she meant that anybody who was staying at the hotel—and who could be paying to do so—would be perfectly fine to watch your stuff—or even your kids—on the beach as you threw yourself in the water. True, the gentleman in the red t-shirt with the news in white: “Mr. President, I built my business?” I didn’t have to, and certainly didn’t want to, spend time with him, but that wasn’t the point. And that was? That however much he wasn’t, there was a way that he was, one of us.

So hotels offer the possibility, or rather, the function like a kind of debutante ball for potential friends: Everybody there was eligible and we got to choose. And so the couple who joined us very quickly climbed onto the A list, since all of a sudden, and with no coordination, we have begun to present ourselves as husband and husband, and correct diplomatically those who call us “friends,” or “partners,” or whatever is less offensive to more conservative ideologies.

Has anyone ever written about the dayliness of discrimination? Probably not, since my computer had to be taught “dayliness,” and since it doesn’t know that discrimination is seldom a gale, but too often a leaking faucet. Which means that the first time we stayed in a country inn in Puerto Rico, over twenty years ago, we were both nervous: Would they let us in? Would it be a problem, two gay men in a room? Would other guests stare, whisper, leave the room? We breathed a sigh of relief  when no eyebrows were raised.

Right—so that weekend a month ago in St. Thomas? Well, we wrote down “husband,” as each other’s relation to the other, and never imagined that it would be a problem. And there’s something more: People are more clued in, and don’t jump in to impose friendship or any other relationship on us. So we spent the weekend gently cluing in the world, and guess what? Nobody had a panic attack.

Least of all the couple from Minnesota, mentioned above, who remarked that they had gotten married in Minnesota after nine years of living together, since weddings? Well, who could take seriously a 23-year kid in a rented tuxedo who was making the ludicrous promise to love and obey to an equally clueless—and ridiculously clad—girl? But in Minnesota, after the marriage ban was lifted, an amazing diversity of ages, races, families came out and were desperate finally to legalize their relationships. And so, said Mary Jane, the very thing that was supposed to decimate the institution of marriage had actually strengthened it. And they had gotten married, and their relationship was different, and better, somehow. And was that the case with us?

The morning of our arrival to St. Thomas, I had awoken in San Juan tense, irritable, anxious about not having a printed boarding pass, worried about the cats, and utterly exhausted, since the sheer effort of getting away seemed enormous. So my reaction to Raf, when he enquired why there were never enough white socks? It was entirely unspoken, and for those of you married, you can skip the next paragraph:

There are never enough white socks—and thanks ever so much for pointing out this appalling if not horrific situation, since I will definitely add that to the urgent list of matters that I alone attend to—since there is only one person who washes white socks, and that is the person who overlooks the white socks that you take off and throw all over the place and that person washes only those which are in the hamper with the whites. So if you would like, I can take time away from cutting the weed trees with a hand saw in the back balcony, thereby offending a woman with considerable resources and clout, and go running around the apartment in search of little errant white socks!

Full disclosure—I am the one who throws my socks around.

Which isn’t the point. And the point is that, while I savored my response greatly, I also savored it privately. And so when Mary Jane asked: Had marriage changed our relationship, and for the better? Both of us looked at the other—one of those long looks that you have in relationships, in which you know your answer, and wonder about the others.

“Yes,” we said in unison.

And so we talked: Mary Jane is a writer and activist, and they both had travelled to Wisconsin, to protest with thousands of others the Walker administration’s attack on unions. Nor was Mary Jane limited to just activism, she also knew immediately about the totally bizarre things that immigrants or the sons thereof got up to, presumably to whittle away the endless Wisconsin winters.

“Oh, you mean like the Dickeyville Grotto?”

How could I have forgotten?

“Why didn’t you ever take me there?” cried Mr. Fernández, appalled at my treason. Why not—who could not want to see this:

Even better, this, with its almost Victorian zeal for self-and-other-improvement:

Yes, under the Papal flag and the American Flag are embedded—according to the website…

…in stone, mortar and bright colored objects-collected materials from all over the world. These include colored glass, gems, antique heirlooms of pottery or porcelain, stalagmites and stalactites, sea shells, starfish, petrified sea urchins and fossils, and a variety of corals, amber glass, agate, quartz, ores, such as iron, copper and lead, fool's gold, rock crystals, onyx, amethyst and coal, petrified wood and moss…

…the telling and teaching words, “religion” and “patriotism,” the two concepts which the venerable Father Mathias Wernerus held dear.

And Wernerus would be? Well, in a letter quoted in the website, he signs off as “the Builder:” Here’s what he has to say:

It is about five years now that this work was started. Many reasons urged me to put up 'Religion in stone and Patriotism in Stone.' The main reason why it was done I could not reveal. The last day will tell you more about that. I can only say that Almighty God and his Blessed Mother, in whose honor we worked, blessed us in such a way that 'we built better than we knew.' Thanks to His almost visible blessing from Heaven, we made the formerly unknown village the point of attraction for countless thousands of people. God's wonderful material collected from all parts of the world has been piled up in such a way that it appeals to rich and poor, to educated and uneducated, to men, women and children alike. Future generations will still enjoy the fruit of our labor and will bless the man that conceived and built this thing. Thanks be to God."

Well, it was a not-so-subtle message to protestant Americans: Catholics can be just as patriotic as the rest of the country, and according to Wikipedia, the Grotto (always capitalizes in the official website, so it seems wrong not to here as well) attracts 40,000 to 60,000 people a year. Among which might have been Raf and I, but it was often a good idea to use a bit of judgment about where to take Mr. Fernández, since he had seriously been on the verge of social disaster at the informal musicale I had taken him to, at the gracious home of a friend.

It was an event I remember frequently, since I am on most days playing Bach suites in the Poet’s Passage, and what if I am playing at the level at which the lady—those decades ago—sang her Schubert lied? Because she “dressed” it, not for the opera, but rather in the way my uncle dressed turkeys. And here, flown directly in from the Internet, is a description of that process:

1 Cut the wings at the first joint. ...

2 Cut the tail right at the base but above the gland. ...

3 Cut the feet at the joint. ...

4 Remove the head at the neck. ...

5 Remove the insides. ...

6 Separate the liver, heart and gizzard from the innards. ...

7 Remove the crop. ...

Save the tail feathers.

All of this can be seen in glorious detail at the website of Georgia Pellegrini, and for anyone wondering why you should save the tail feathers? Georgina has the answer!

They are awfully purty. They make a nice headdress for cocktail parties.

See more at: http://georgiapellegrini.com/2011/04/19/blog/field-dress-turkey/#sthash.hmk2y9L3.dpuf  :

OK—so the singer at the musicale had removed the heart, gizzards, and liver from the innards of her Schubert song, and fortunately, we were at the back of the room—or maybe it had become the salon—since we had made the fatal mistake of looking at each, not in the way we had looked at each when Mary Jane had asked, had getting married changed our relationship? And had we wondered not at our own but the others answer?

No, we were young, we were in love, and it was apparent what was in our four eyes: rampaging and nearly-impossible-to-suppress hilarity. So the singer warbled and wobbled from one flat, shrill note to the next, and her accompanist was a model of solemnity as he stumbled his way through the score: At one point they became badly disengaged in the process, and glared at each with apparent annoyance.

It’s a kind of torture, wanting to laugh and not being able to, and the only other thing to be done about it was:

1.     NOT look at the other

2.     NOT breathe

3.     Pray for deliverance

So with that behind us, I was going to take Mr. Fernández to Dickeyville? To look at things like this, about which there is this description:

Visitors from far and near again and again told the builder that the flower pots that stand on either side of the Holy Ghost Church are some of the most beautiful they have ever seen.

So we sat, Mary Jane and Allen and my ungrottoed but anyway still-my-husband and I and were both in Wisconsin and in the Jacuzzi, where two or three of us had every right to be. Because I don’t know about Mary Jane, but Allen?

…stay tuned!  

A Wisconsin Teacher of the Year Sends Scott Walker to the Principal's Office….

I recently got an email from a dear friend--suffering greatly in my home state of Wisconsin--who asked help in getting a message out: Here's a letter from a Wisconsin teacher lambasting the current governor of Wisconsin.

An Open Letter to Governor Walker
Published February 9, 2015 Alumni Voices , Education in the news 47 Comments
Tags: Claudia Felske, Scott Walker

Dear Governor Walker: 

I was both surprised and bewildered last week when I saw a news clip of you stumping in Iowa about Megan Sampson, whom you called “The Outstanding Teacher of the Year in my State.” This was baffling to me since in 2010, I was named Wisconsin High School Teacher of the Year (Maureen Look-Ainsworth, Middle School Teacher of the Year; Peggy Wuenstel, Special Services Teacher of the Year; and Michael Brinnen, Elementary Teacher of the Year). In a most humbling ceremony, we were each surprised at our respective schools by State Superintendent Tony Evers and later honored at the State Capital as the Wisconsin Teachers of the Year. 

And so, as one of the bonafide 2010-2011 Wisconsin Teachers of the Year, I feel the need to engage in one of the most valuable skills we teach our students, critical analysis. 

Verified by multiple news sources, it turns out that Megan Sampson did win an award in 2010, but it was the Nancy Hoefs Memorial Award given by a relatively small organization of Wisconsin English teachers (WCTE) for “an outstanding first year teacher of language arts.” She was one of less than a dozen teachers across the state who self-nominated for this award. 

You failed to mention these details as you used Sampson’s lay-off from her first year teaching position as an opportunity to bash Wisconsin schools on the national stage. You blamed the seniority system for Sampson’s lay-off when, in good conscience, you should have done some serious soul searching and placed the blame squarely on your systematic defunding of public education to the tune of $2.6 billion that you cut from school districts, state aid to localities, the UW-System and technical colleges. 

This Wisconsin Teacher of the Year would like to clarify precisely what you’ve done for education. 

2010-2011 was a surreal school year to be named Teacher of the Year as that was the year your passage of Act 10 marked the exodus of thousands of outstanding veteran teachers from the profession they love and marked the beginning of an extreme strain on our ability to continue providing the excellent public education Wisconsin has always been known for. 

And what have you done lately? In just the past month, it seems you have once again actively declared war on education in your own state: 

1. You’ve directed the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction to devise content exams that would certify anyone with a degree to become a certified teacher. The ramifications of this move are nothing short of catastrophic and would grossly diminish what data has repeatedly shown to be the single most important factor in student learning: the quality of the classroom teacher. Allowing someone to teach without any training in HOW to teach, in effective pedagogy, in student behavior, brain research, motivation, and classroom management is akin to allowing someone who says “I’m not a doctor, but I play one on t.v.” to give you a heart transplant. 

2. Continuing your bellicose streak (war is war, right?) you cut to the jugular by proposing a 13% across-the-board budget cut from the Wisconsin University System, our cornerstone of higher education, the source of much of our skilled and educated workforce, the center for research and development for our state. Aside from clearly being anti-education, this move is clearly anti-growth. 

3. Psychological warfare has been your most recent tactic when you attempted to (and later tried to blame it on a clerical error) revise “The Wisconsin Idea” the sacred credo of the UW system articulated over a century ago. You sought to omit mention of public service and improving the human condition (you do realize that as Governor, you are considered a public servant?) You also tried to delete the phrase: “Basic to every purpose of the system is the search for truth.” Truth. Hmm…I guess I shouldn’t be surprised about that one. 

Your tenure as Governor has demonstrated nothing less than a systematic attempt to dismantle public education, the cornerstone of democracy and the ladder of social mobility for any society. 

How our paths have diverged from that August afternoon in 1986. True story: it was freshman orientation just outside Memorial Union. We were two of a couple thousand new Marquette University freshman wistful about what our futures held. Four years later, I graduated from Marquette and later became Wisconsin High School Teacher of the Year. You never graduated, and you became the Governor of the State of Wisconsin bent on dismantling public education. Ironic, isn’t it? Situational irony at its best. I’d laugh if its ramifications weren’t so utterly destructive for the state of Wisconsin. 

Sincerely, 

Claudia Klein Felske
2010-2011 Wisconsin High School Teacher of the Year 
Marquette University Class of 1990 
https://marquetteeducator.wordpress.com/2015/02/09/an-open-letter-to-governor-walker/

The Saddest Man in the Room

It was a day of contrasts. There was the blessed relief—though come to think of it, what relief is anything less than blessed?—of having nothing more to do than sit in the ophthalmologist’s office, ignore the television, and read a book. Remember that? There was a time, before the machete of productivity lanced into my life, when I could read for hours on end. Now? I can only do it when held hostage by a plane or an appointment.

Then it was come home and face the problem of the day: Is there anything in the world that needs my attention? The pope is busy off settling the issue of the Ukraine: Shouldn’t I, decades younger, be sorting out world hunger?

It’s perhaps what I’ve come to believe is Christmas lag, this feeling that for three months—this is Puerto Rico, Mister—I have stopped my life and played at being jolly, and that comes at a price. Because now, when I have to get back to work (which is all I really wanted, anyway) I have no energy, I feel cheated and depleted, and all I want to do is look at the ocean and not think.

Which could have been why I was pondering the old pope, whom I hectored and scolded and drove—well, for a pope—into early retirement. Had I been fair to the man? Would my father, still setting standards two decades after his death, have approved? Shouldn’t I let them man speak?

So I went off to the café, since I thought whatever coffee I consumed would need to be of professional strength and quality, and since I feared I might need some social pressure to keep the expletives reasonably in cheek (in both senses).

And so I left the apartment, and began counting after the third gay couple passed my gate: In all, there were seven couples, with me trotting behind the last and grinning. Why? Because on the other side of the street, there were streams of straight couples—right off the Disney cruiser—going the other direction. Oh, and with their heads directed rigidly forward. Presumably, they had checked out the local, or rather imported, fauna, and were going back to the ship, thank you very much.

So I found myself in the café, one gay men among many gay men, since one thing gay men do well is sniff out the unusual, the quaint, the quirky, the offbeat… and that, of course, set me thinking. How do we do that? Does gaydar have an app that triggers alerts? Had all the gay men instantly connected electronically and social networkedly? Had the most popular posted on Instagram, or whatever it is?

So everybody was being fabulous, but the aging queen in the corner? Listening to the—perhaps—only interview Ratzinger (as he then was) ever gave in English. Time to be fair: He can do what I cannot in either English or Spanish, though I did have to wonder for three or four minutes what all this “doctrine of the face” was all about. Which then made me wonder: Where did English get its “th” sound (Yes, Educated Readers, I know that technically it’s a phoneme….) if not from German? Well, well, another thing I didn’t know.

So I listened to the man, and found him intelligent and occasionally charming. As well, deeply conservative and—I hate to use this word, but here goes—intellectualized.

How easy it would be to say that he was out of touch—even three or four years before he had become pope. His point—a valid one—was that he was much more in touch than the rest of us.

There’s the two thousand year history of the church, for one thing, and that, for someone rigorously trained in theology, is not a heritage to be tossed lightly away. And then I remember an interview about Ratzinger by Hans Küng, who said that Ratzinger had once been liberal, and had worked on Vatican II. So what had happened? In 1968 or so, the student movement had rocked the universities of Europe, and taken over classrooms. And Ratzinger, with his carefully planned and researched lectures, was no longer Herr Profesor, of whatever his title was. Instead, his lecture hall was infested with unwashed, longhaired youth, all demanding… well, whatever it was they were demanding.

It wasn’t an easy time for the men who had spent decades being groomed for and buying into a system that had seemingly held for decades, if not centuries. Küng dealt with it, continued his intellectual liberalism, and went on to challenge the concept of papal infallibility. Ratzinger withdrew, and became increasingly more conservative.

Nothing about his life could have been easy. He was a German surrounded by Italians; he was a professor put to do a bureaucrat’s work; he was defending the century’s old traditions, theology, and moral teachings of the church. And the rest of the world?

I gazed on them, these gay men in their 20’s, and tried to resist the impulse to think that they had come on their freedom too easily, that they had gotten off too lightly, and also that they had been cheated.

“I don’t wish that you were straight, it’s just that your life would have been so much easier,” once said my mother, and who could blame her? She must have worried, on sleepless nights, if I had gone to a gay bar, met the wrong guy, and ended up assaulted or dead in a back alley. It happened to a guy I knew. And it happened a lot in the 50’s, when my mother would have been in her 30’s.

Then it was time to worry: San Juan is fine, and two guys holding hands? Well, the occasional raised eyebrow doesn’t inflict much pain. But St. Lucia? God forbid, Jamaica? It occurred to me to run down to the pier, and suggest to the captain of the ship that he sail away from San Juan every evening at five PM, leisurely cruise around Puerto Rico a few times during the night, and then re-dock in San Juan for the next seven days.

Ratzinger was then attributing the priest abuse scandals to—well, I’ll make it short. We are all sinners, and that’s the thing about Christianity. If Christ could eat with sinners, we’re all called upon to acknowledge our own sins, and the clergy is no less immune. Oh, and then there’s that moral relativism thing.

And so I looked at Ratzinger, and looked at the gay men, and looked at myself. What had we all paid, and what had we all gotten?

Well, I had thought about my mother’s statement at the time, and had told her: Being gay forged some elements in my character that came in handy later. I moved to Puerto Rico and was and am an outsider. Rather, I have learned to make a place, and allow others to make a place for me, in which I can be comfortable. Living in the shaded area of the Venn diagram? Being gay helped with that.

Or fighting what seemed like a battle on all sides to get my mother to her death? Well, telling the CEO—or rather one of his executives—of Walmart that I was gay (and knowing perfectly well that my own officemates would be talking about it as well) made that possible.

Of the rest of the men in the café? I can’t be sure. I can only tell you this: Ratzinger, with his discipline, his intellect, and what I suspect has been his sacrifice seemed the saddest man in the room.     

       

(Then, to make the contrasts all the greater, I came upon this….)

When Good Doesn't Have to be Great

It’s seems somehow like a Monday thing—to consider all of the works over which men and women have toiled, struggled, suffered over. And the result? Obscurity, or worse, to be remembered as “charming” or “delightful” or as the precursor of somebody or something great.

I think this way because of Jacques Offenbach, who has, evidently, achieved enough pull that Microsoft word recognizes him. And you, Educated Reader, will too—but how much have we heard of him? There are two or three melodies—that damned cancan, and the barcarolle from Tales of Hoffman, which I saw in a Metropolitan Opera Live Broadcast, and which prompts all this speculation.

After all, whose interest could not be piqued by the director’s statement that Offenbach had been a double outcast, since he had been born the son of a Jewish Cantor in Prussia: Since he spent the majority of his life in France, he fought for acceptance. His solution? Well, according to the director, he tried sleeping his way through influential ladies. Reneé Fleming—momentarily nonplussed—admitted that it was a time-honored strategy.

The article in Wikipedia on Offenbach’s life—which takes as long for you to read as it did for Offenbach to live—mentions several affairs, but also says that Offenbach’s marriage was a long and happy one. But all throughout the article, there is an underlying melancholy, an ache that no matter what artistic or financial success Offenbach achieved never stopped hurting. What is it? Simply put, he was never quite top drawer.

And nothing is more painful than the fact that he was trying, finally, to put aside the lighter works, the operettas, the opéra comique or the opera bouffe, and if you’re not familiar with the terms? No worries, since they both refer to something not quite serious, not intending to greatness. The are opera’s equivalent of a cold, delicious Chablis drunk on a summer picnic, but not the clarets or the cabernets accompanying a hearty meal.

So Offenbach, who composed nearly a hundred operas of this sort, waited until the end of his life to set out to be something more serious, something great. And that was the opera I saw last Saturday, The Tales of Hoffman. So did it work, this one serious work that Offenbach never lived to complete, much less to see?

To me, yes. The opera is long, but my interest never flagged, and the music was in many parts ravishing. One critic, Tim Ashley, has this to say:

"Stylistically, the opera reveals a remarkable amalgam of French and German influences … Weberian chorales preface Hoffmann's narrative. Olympia delivers a big coloratura aria straight out of French grand opera, while Antonia sings herself to death to music reminiscent of Schubert."^[38]

Is it just me, or does anyone else feel that critics, when they compare composers, are subtly giving the message: This guy is derivative? Has anyone ever compared Bach to his contemporaries Biber and Buxtehude? Of course not.

Even more damning is this quote, again from the Wikipedia article on Offenbach:

Debussy, Bizet, Mussorgsky and Rimsky-Korsakov loved Offenbach's operettas.^[191] Debussy rated them higher than The Tales of Hoffmann: "The one work in which [Offenbach] tried to be serious met with no success."^{[n 28]} A London critic wrote, on Offenbach's death:

I somewhere read that some of Offenbach's latest work shows him to be capable of more ambitious work. I, for one, am glad he did what he did, and only wish he had done more of the same.^[195]

Ouch!

And so Offenbach remains a musical hung jury, which is, perhaps, more than most composers attain. A hugely popular work of the 19^th century is…well, here’s a screen shot:

If the Internet hadn’t decided to take a lunch break, I could have opened the page with the citation that forty-two thousand people attended the performance at the Crystal Palace of this memorable work, which had artificial flames, though real firemen. Oh, and the collaborator on this endeavor? Guy named Barnum….

So where is the great Jullien’s work? As you can see: Box 179, item 044. If Offenbach isn’t quite top drawer, at least he’s not in a box.

And so it was a melancholy Monday morning, since one thing led to another: A fatal Internet tendency. There was Offenbach’s cello concerto, the Grand “Concerto Militare,” about which I was suspicious, since the cello can be many things, but military? But ever true to my bloggerly obligations, I can tell you that it is perfect music to listen to while doing something else, like ironing or washing the dishes. In fact, the Internet has returned, rubbing its belly and burping surreptitiously, so I’m now listening to the end of the first movement. Lovely in parts, but would I ever learn it? Nah—it’s both too virtuosic and too light to make it worth it.

Well, in the mood I was in, could I resist the sidebar luring me with “unpopular cello concerti?” If it had been “forgotten,” I might have stayed away, but unpopular? As an adolescent, I was a scrawny, six-footed creature that always sported a face always adorned with pimples, so “unpopular?” Struck a chord….

So there I was with a concerto I might play, by the—yes—forgotten-if-not-unpopular Joseph Joachim Raff, about which the poster of the clip (and why do I suspect that this is lifted from Wikipedia? Bad habit, guys!) has to say:

Joachim was largely self-taught in music, studying the subject while working as a schoolmaster in Schmerikon, Schwyz and Rapperswil. He sent some of his piano compositions to Felix Mendelssohn who recommended them to Breitkopf & Härtel for publication. They were published in 1844 and received a favourable review in Robert Schumann's journal, the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik, which prompted Raff to go to Zürich and take up composition full-time.

And then—this is the blogger’s life—came the real surprise, since it turned out that Dvorak, whose concerto for cello is the Everest in the repertoire, had written an earlier concerto for cello, though it exists only as a cello / piano version, and the orchestration has been done by various people, and the versions remain controversial. And so I was confronted with another version of failure: The ugly duckling, or the homely girl who never gets taken to the concert hall. Though various people have, most notably and recently the British cellist Steven Isserlis. Here’s what David Smith had to say in the British website prestoclassical:

The work’s reputation has probably suffered from being compared to its sibling (whose emotional punch it indeed cannot quite match), but considered as a work in its own right it is a compelling musical experience in which Dvořák’s gift for melody is abundantly evident.

Here, as I write this, Carlos the pirate has transmogrified as Carlos the trompe l’oeil specialist, since this is what he has spent most of five days creating:

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                         

Nice, isn’t it? And in a month’s time, Carlos will take it down, and the work will be remembered by some, forgotten by most, and Carlos? Well, he will have gone onto the next big project, and presumably be as happy as he currently is. He’s humming now, as he works; he’ll be humming as he dismantles what took hours to create.

And the rest of us? I suspect we’ll keep on fearing the critic, the real voice of today or the imagined voice of tomorrow, the voice that tells us that there is one tier, and one tier only that matters, and that we—as much as we fight it, as much as we dispute it—well…

…we haven’t made it.