Favorites of 2021: Recordings

My favorite recordings first heard in the past twelve months, in chronological order by composer:

Byrd 1588: Psalmes, Sonets & Songs of sadnes and pietie
Grace Davidson (soprano), Martha McLorinan (mezzo-soprano), and Nicholas Todd (tenor), with Alamire vocal ensemble and Fretwork viol consort; David Skinner, director. Inventa INV1006

The falcon is a symbol of conversion to the "old faith," Catholicism. Image by Julian Hindson. Image source: Presto Music

1588 was a momentous year for England. In late July the Spanish Armada was defeated by a combination of poor weather, poor strategy, and English attacks. Just the year before, the Catholic Mary, Queen of Scots, had been executed for her collusion in the Babington Plot to overthrow the Protestant Queen Elizabeth I and install herself as monarch, backed by an invading Spanish army. So 1588 might seem a curious time for William Byrd, a composer with known Catholic sympathies, to publish a song collection. Particularly one containing the song "Why do I use my paper, ink and pen?" which sets a poem by Henry Walpole mourning the martyrdom of Jesuit missionary Edmund Campion, who was hanged, drawn and quartered for sedition in 1581.

Although Byrd was a recusant who was fined for refusing to attend services of the Church of England, he retained Elizabeth's support from the time of his appointment to the Gentlemen of the Chapel Royal in 1572 until her death in 1603. In 1575 he and Thomas Tallis were granted a royal patent for the printing and marketing of part-music, and the 1588 collection Psalmes, Sonets & songs of sadnes and pietie was issued under that monopoly. It contains 35 vocal works in five parts. Many were originally written for domestic performance by a solo singer accompanied by a consort of four viols; for their publication in Psalmes Byrd texted the instrumental parts so that the songs could be performed by a soloist ('first singing part') plus four voices. Perhaps Byrd thought by arranging the songs for voices only he would increase their potential market. If so, his strategy worked: the publication went through several editions in his lifetime.

This is the first recording of all the numbers in the collection. Alamire director David Skinner wisely elected to vary the texture by performing 18 of the songs using a vocal soloist accompanied by viols, as Byrd originally composed them. Another 13 songs are performed by voices only, as issued in the published collection, and four are performed by viols alone.

Also in the interests of variety, Skinner changed the published order of the songs and split the collection into two separate programs. Each of the two discs of this recording opens with a group of psalms, followed by a selection of the love sonnets and pastorals, then a smaller group of songs of sadness and piety; each disc concludes with one of the two funeral songs lamenting the death of the poet and courtier Sir Philip Sidney, who died in battle against the Spanish forces in the Netherlands in 1586. So that every number could fit onto two discs, Skinner has also shortened some of the psalms; for example, the two songs drawn from the lengthy Psalm 119 have had verses cut so that their total performance time is about five minutes, rather than 20. I share Skinner's view that these changes enhance the collection's listenability at only a minor cost to its completeness.

The result is a recording of quiet beauty, inviting contemplation. Byrd's gift for melody is often apparent; it's very clear why "Lullaby, my sweet little baby" (on disc 1) was so popular that the entire collection become known as "Byrd's Lullabys." But his many compositional felicities are best appreciated by following along with the provided texts. The soloists, both vocal and instrumental, are very good, and the voices of Alamire are both individually distinctive and well-blended. The performances were recorded, fittingly, in the lovely acoustic of All Saints, a fourteenth-century church on the grounds of the Holdenby estate once owned by one of Byrd's supporters at Elizabeth's court, Sir Christopher Hatton.

"Ambitious love hath forced me to aspire":

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t6sbstNwmX8

Ambitious love hath forced me to aspire the beauties rare which do adorn thy face. Thy modest life yet bridles my desire, whose severe law doth promise me no grace. But what? May love live under any law? No, no. His power exceedeth man's conceit of which the Gods themselves stand in awe for on his frown, a thousand torments weight. Proceed then in this desperate enterprise, with good advise, and follow love, thy guide, that leads thee to thy wished Paradise. Thy climbing thoughts, this comfort take with all, that if it be thy foul disgrace to slide thy brave attempt shall yet excuse thy fall.

Royal Handel
Eva Zaïcik (mezzo-soprano) with Le Consort. Alpha ALPHA662

Image source: Presto Music

From 1720 to 1728 George Frideric Handel was the principal composer and musical director for London's Royal Academy of Opera. The Royal Academy was a group of aristocratic shareholders who each invested at least £200 to commission new opera seria from Europe's leading composers, including not only Handel but also Attilio Ariosti and Giovanni Bononcini. And in his additional role as Master of the Orchestra Handel was responsible for engaging the vocal soloists and musicians for the company.

During this time Handel wrote some of his greatest operas, including Giulio Cesare in Egitto (Julius Caesar in Egypt), Tamerlano (Tamerlaine), and Rodelinda, all first performed in the twelve months between February 1724 and February 1725. Arias from those operas have been recorded many times; although this recording does include one stirring aria from Giulio Cesare, it has a welcome focus on lesser-known operas by Handel and the other two composers.

Eva Zaïcik has a rich, rounded mezzo-soprano that is especially luscious in the slower arias, but she can also fleetly negotiate coloratura passages. Le Consort is less than a third of the size of Handel's Royal Academy orchestra, but what it sacrifices in richness of sound it makes up for in transparency of textures and responsiveness to the music and the singer. A very rewarding recital, as you can hear in "Stille amare" (Bitter drops [of poison]) from Tolomeo, Re d'Egitto (Ptolemy, Ruler of Egypt):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6qfqnP0j8lQ

Stille amare, già vi sento tutte in seno, la morte a chiamar; già vi sento smorzare il tormento, già vi sento tornarmi a bear.

Bitter drops, already I feel you within my breast, summoning death; already I feel you ease my torment, already I feel you return me to joy.

La Francesina: Handel's Nightingale
Sophie Junker (soprano) with Le Concert de l'Hostel Dieu; Franck-Emmanuel Comte, director. Aparte AP233

Image source: Presto Music

La Francesina—"the little Frenchwoman"—was born Élisabeth Duparc. As a young woman she travelled to Italy for operatic training, and appeared onstage in Florence and other Tuscan cities. In 1736—Handel scholar Winton Dean thinks she may have been 20 or 21, but it's possible she was a year or three older—she came to London, probably after being talent-scouted by Nicola Porpora, musical director of the Opera of the Nobility. The Opera of the Nobility had been founded in 1733 in opposition to Handel's company, reflecting a political split between the Prince of Wales and his father King George II. In the Opera of the Nobility La Francesina sang with the castrato Farinelli, the greatest opera star in the world.

It's perhaps no coincidence that the company employing the greatest opera star in the world went bankrupt by the end of the 1736-37 season. La Francesina then joined Handel's company, and performed with him in opera and oratorio for the next decade. She was described by Charles Burney has having a "natural warble, and agility of voice," a "spirited manner," and "lark-like execution" which "Handel seems to have great pleasure in displaying." [1] For good reason: judging from the parts he wrote for her she was a very skilled singer. Those parts include Romilda in Serse (1738), the title roles in Deidamia (1741), Semele (1744), and L'Allegro in L'Allegro, il Penseroso ed il Moderato (1742), and a revised version of the aria "Rejoice greatly" in Messiah (1742).

Sophie Junker is a young Belgian soprano, and this her first solo recording. To my ear her singing is not always perfect, but it is passionate, exciting, and expressive. We had the good fortune to see Sophie Junker in concert with Sherezade Panthaki accompanied by Voices of Music, one of my Favorite Concerts of 2019; I wrote then that "Junker was a voice new to us and a wonderful discovery." That excellent first impression is amply confirmed by this new recording.

Romilda's "Nè men con l'ombre d'infedeltà" from Serse:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w7IGumccAxE

Nè men con l'ombre d'infedeltà voglio tradire l'anima mia; e se'l mio bene suo mal si fè, incolpi amore, non gelosia.

Not even with a shadow of infidelity Would I betray my beloved; And if harm should befall my dearest one, Let love, not jealousy, be to blame.

Almira and Antiochus und Stratonica
Soloists with the Boston Early Music Festival Orchestra; Paul O'Dette and Stephen Stubbs, directors. CPO 555205-2 and CPO 555369-2

Image source: Boston Early Music Festival

These two operas are grouped together because they are both of high quality and they are linked historically: they were both written for the Hamburg Opera in the first decade of the 1700s. Almira (1705) was the first opera composed by the 19-year-old Georg Friedrich Händel (later Anglicized to George Frideric Handel), while Antiochus and Stratonica (1708) was the second opera by the 25-year-old Christoph Graupner, who had come to Hamburg just after Händel's departure (perhaps no coincidence).

Both operas feature complicated plots providing plenty of opportunity for emotional outpourings, include both comic and serious characters, and provide a mix of German, Italian, and French musical elements. And both are given excellent performances by the forces of the Boston Early Music Festival.

In Almira, the Queen of Castile (Emöke Baráth) must fulfill the deathbed wish of her father and marry the son of the royal counselor Consalvo (Christian Immler). However, Almira loves her secretary Fernando (Colin Balzer), whose birth is obscure. Consalvo's son Osman (Zachary Wilder) is loved by the Princess Edilia (Amanda Forsythe); but, ambitious to be elevated to the monarchy by marrying Almira, Osman abandons Edilia. Matters are further complicated by rivals for the affections of both Almira and Osman, and Consalvo's own romantic aspirations. And then it turns out that Consalvo had another son, believed lost at sea. . .

Amanda Forsythe as Princess Edilia performing "Schönste Rosen und Narcissen" from Act I of Almira:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F2SKgk4ChfE

Schönste Rosen und Narcissen, lasst in eurer Wunderpracht mich das Bild von Osman küssen, welches mich verliebt gemacht. Hohe Linden, die ihr grünet und zu holde Schatten dienet, seid bemüht, in den Zweigen mir zu zeigen, ob der Hoffnung edle Blüth’ wird dereinst mein Leid versüssen?

Lovely roses and narcissus, Amid your wonderful splendour let me kiss the image of Osman, which made me fall in love. Tall lindens, as you come into leaf and make sweet shade, might you strive in your branches to show me whether the noble bud of hope will sweeten my sorrow one day?

Antiochus und Stratonica has a double helping of forbidden love. King Seleucus (Harry van der Kamp), recently widowed, has married the much younger Stratonica (Hana Blažíková). His son Antiochus (Christian Immler) is stricken with love for his beautiful stepmother, but rather than dishonor his family, sickens and wastes away. The handsome doctor Hesychius (Jesse Blumberg) is called in, and it doesn't take him long to diagnose the cause of Antiochus' suffering. Meanwhile, the sorceress Mirtenia (Sunhae Im) has fallen in love with the royal treasurer Demetrius (Aaron Sheehan), who is inconveniently married to Ellenia (Sherezade Panthaki). It's not a comfortable position to be in when there's a sorceress who wishes you didn't exist. . .

Seleucus' "Zu den Wolcken" (Up to the clouds):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f5Bxg1CZPB8

Zu den Wolcken, zu den Sternen, laß ich meine Seufftzer gehn. Himmel ja, durch viele Thränen, und durch Sehnen wird man dich erweichet sehn!

Up to the clouds, up to the stars, I send my sighs. Yes, O heaven, through many tears and through yearning your heart will be softened!

La Grotta di Trofonio and Armida
Soloists with Les Talens Lyriques; Christophe Rousset, director. Ambroisie AMB9986 and Aparté AP244

Image source: Presto Music

Beginning in 2005 with La Grotta di Trofonio (The Cave of Trophonius, 1785), Les Talens Lyriques director Christophe Rousset has embarked on a project to reclaim Antonio Salieri's operas from neglect and disregard. So far he has recorded five complete operas, and the results have been revelatory. Far from the mediocrity portrayed in Peter Shaffer's play and screenplay Amadeus, Salieri has been revealed as a gifted and highly original composer.

And it has become abundantly clear that Mozart and his librettist Lorenzo Da Ponte borrowed musical and dramatic ideas from Salieri. As I wrote in my post on Salieri's La scuola de' gelosi (1778), Mozart and Salieri: The School of Jealousy, "Salieri may not have been Mozart, but being Salieri was more than sufficient." (La scuola de' gelosi was an Honorable Mention in my Favorites of 2019: Recordings.)

Each of these operas offers its own rewards (and distinctive sound-world). La Grotta di Trofonio is an opera buffa featuring two sisters, the serious Ofelia (Raffaella Milanesi) and the light-hearted Dori (Marie Arnet), and their temperamentally matched lovers Artemidoro (Nikolai Schukoff) and Plistene (Mario Cassi). Walking in the woods one day the two men enter the cave of the magician Trofonio (Carlo Lepore) and emerge with their personalities switched, triggering a series of comic misunderstandings and mis-timed attempts to match up each couple's personalities again. (Mozart and Da Ponte borrowed extensively from La Grotta for Cosi fan tutte (1790).)

"Di questo bosco ombroso" (In this shady forest), Artemidoro's Act I aria about finding peace and tranquillity in solitude:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fA0IRhZyC88

Di questo bosco ombroso al solitario aspetto un placido reposo d'insolito diletto tatto m'inonda il cor. La cheta solitudine a un'alma filosofica quant'è più cara, e amabile, che di città lo strepito e d'affolato popolo l'incomodo clamor!

In this shady forest the solitude brings a peaceful repose of rare delight that touches my heart. The quiet and solitude to a philosophical soul are more dear, and appealing, than the noise of the city and the crowds of people who make such a distracting clamor!

Armida (1771) is a magic opera based on Torquato Tasso's epic Gerusalemme Liberata (Jerusalem Delivered), a source previously used by different authors for libretti set by Lully (Armide, 1686), Handel (Rinaldo, 1711), and Jommelli (Armida Abbandonata, 1770); Armida operas would later be written by Gluck (1777), Haydn (1784), Rossini (1817), and Dvořák (1904).

In Salieri's opera (libretto by Marco Coltellini) Saracen sorceress Armida (sung by Lenneke Ruiten) is using her supernatural powers against the Christian army besieging Jerusalem. She captures the valiant knight Rinaldo (Florie Valiquette) and brings him to her magic island. There she falls in love with him and uses her powers (whether erotic or magical is not specified) to make him love her and forget his martial duties. As the opera opens, Rinaldo's companion Ubaldo (Ashley Riches) arrives on Armida's island in an attempted rescue (or should that be "rescue?"). Using his magic shield and wand Ubaldo is able to defeat the infernal beings defending the island; he's also able to resist the equally dangerous allurements of Armida's handmaidens, led by Ismene (Teresa Iervolino). But can Rinaldo defend himself against Armida's tears?

Armida moves swiftly through its three acts (which take just over two hours to perform). Under Rousset's direction the music is highly effective at evoking both the darkness and sensuous pleasure of Armida's island, and the cast is uniformly excellent. Beautifully produced by Aparté in a hardbound case (like a miniature book) with essays, images, and the full text in four languages, the CD version is a strong argument for the continued production of physical media.

"Qui'l regno è del contento," a love duet for Armida and Rinaldo from the beginning of Act II:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e7fh9lJDWZI

Armida, Rinaldo Qui'l regno è del contento la sede del piacer. Rinaldo Fresch'ombre e verdi sponde, cui bagna un rio d'argento c'invitano a goder. Par che la terra e l'onde spirino un dolce ardor, sembra che fin d'amor mormori il vento. Armida, Rinaldo Qui'l regno è del contento la sede del piacer. Armida Folle chi della vita passa il breve momento in torbidi pensier. Che val l'età fiorita, che val ricchezza ed or, se cambia un van timor tutto in tormento? Armida, Rinaldo Prezioso è il tempo, e lieve, facciamone tesor, la vita è un cammin breve, spargiamolo di fior.

Armida, Rinaldo Here happiness reigns, this is the seat of pleasure. Rinaldo Refreshing shade and verdant banks, bathed by a silver stream, invite us to enjoyment. The land and the sea inspire a sweet ardour, even the winds seem to murmur words of love. Armida, Rinaldo Here happiness reigns, this is the seat of pleasure. Armida Foolish are they who spend life's brief moments in troubled thoughts. What's the use of being young, what's the use of gold and riches, if vain fear turns everything into torment? Armida, Rinaldo Time is precious and fleeting, so let us treasure it; life's path is short, so let us strew it with flowers.

After Silence
Voces8: Eleonore Cockerham and Andrea Haines (soprano), Katie Jeffries-Harris and Barnaby Smith (alto), Blake Morgan and Euan Williamson (tenor), Christopher Moore and Jonathan Pacey (bass); Barnaby Smith, director. Voces8 Records VCM129

Image source: Presto Music

"After silence, that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music." —Aldous Huxley

For us this has been the year of Voces8. After being introduced to this (chiefly) a capella group via YouTube by a good friend and colleague, I sought out their latest album After Silence and learned about the streamed concert series they had begun sponsoring, Live from London, which will feature heavily in my next Favorites of 2021 post.

What is immediately apparent with Voces8 is the way their flawless intonation and perfect unison combine to make an exquisitely blended sound. Dissonances, especially, are so impeccably tuned that they will send shivers up your spine.

Eric Whitacre's "A Boy and a Girl," a version of "Los Novios" by the Mexican poet Octavio Paz as translated by Muriel Rukeyser:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GLoncQ9Euik

A Boy and a Girl Stretched out on the grass, a boy and a girl. Savoring their oranges, giving their kisses like waves exchanging foam. Stretched out on the beach, a boy and a girl. Savoring their limes, giving their kisses like clouds exchanging foam. Stretched out underground, a boy and a girl. Saying nothing, never kissing, giving silence for silence.

Los Novios Tendidos en la yerba una muchacha y un muchacho. Comen naranjas, cambian besos como las olas cambian sus espumas. Tendido en la playa una muchacha y un muchacho. Comen limones, cambian besos como las nubes cambian espumas. Tendidos bajo tierra una muchacha y un muchacho. No dicen nada, no se besan, cambian silencio por silencio.

Their sound is especially effective in the intimate, mournful and devotional works that are at the heart of their repertory and which make up the core of this double CD set. After Silence includes works spanning the 16th through the 21st centuries (many of the contemporary pieces specifically commissioned by the group), and is divided into four parts: Remembrance, Devotion, Redemption, and Elemental. The album may have been planned as a celebration of the 15th anniversary of Voces8, but it's hard not to read it also as a response to the pandemic: many of the pieces included address the pain of separation and irrevocable loss.

Philip Stopford's setting of "Lully, Lulla, Lullay," filmed in St Stephen's Walbrook Church, London:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-7qYeZcOioI

Lully, lulla, lully, lulla By by, lully lullay Lully, lulla, thou little tiny child By by, lully lullay O sisters too, How may we do For to preserve this day This poor youngling, For whom we sing, By by, lully lullay? Herod, the king, In his raging, Chargèd he hath this day His men of might, In his own sight, All young children to slay. That woe is me, Poor child for thee! And ever morn and day, For thy parting Neither say nor sing By by, lully lullay

Other Favorites of 2021:

• Streamed performances
• Live performance
• Movies
• Books

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1. Charles Burney, A General History of Music, Volume the Second, Chapter VI: The Origin of the Italian Opera in England, and its Progress there during the present Century, 1789.

Favorites of 2021: Movies

Rock Hudson and Jane Wyman in Douglas Sirk's All That Heaven Allows (1955). Image source: Criterion.com

This past year I found myself rewatching films I'd first seen years or decades ago. I do this a good deal in most years, but this year it seemed as though rewatched films were a larger proportion of my viewing. So at the end of my list of favorite films first seen in the past twelve months I've added a couple ringers: movies that I first watched decades ago, but which on re-viewing I felt deserved a place on my favorites list. 

In ascending chronological order by year of release:

Nightmare Alley (1947). Screenplay by Jules Furthman, based on the novel by William Lindsay Gresham; directed by Edmund Goulding.

Coleen Gray (as Molly performing in her stage persona "Electra") in Nightmare Alley.

Stan Carlisle (Tyrone Power, playing against his usual romantic-hero type) is a carny, drifting along and looking for a hustle. Trading on his good looks, he seduces the sideshow psychic Zeena (Joan Blondell). When her husband Pete dies (an accident that Stan has a hand in), Zeena enlists Stan as a partner in her act and teaches him the secret communication code that makes her seem clairvoyant. Once he learns the code, Stan and his (younger, prettier) lover Molly (Coleen Gray) leave the carnival and head for the big city to make their fortune with an upscale nightclub act.

Unfortunately for Stan, "consulting psychologist" Lilith (Helen Walker, with tightly coiffed/repressed hair) comes to the nightclub one night. Soon they've formed a partnership: Lilith feeds Stan information from therapy sessions with her wealthy clients, enabling him to extort ever-increasing sums of money from them by pretending to commune with the spirits of their long-lost loved ones. But "psychic" Stan doesn't see that he's the one being conned. . .

The carnival sequences are authentically seedy, in part because a real carnival was rented and installed on the backlot. Screenwriter Jules Furthman (To Have and Have Not, The Big Sleep) had to tone down many aspects of Gresham's novel, thanks to the Production Code, but the movie is still remarkably dark. Power gives an excellent performance as Stan, a guy for whom no scam, however successful, is ever quite enough, and whose fall leads him to make a desperate choice. Equally courageous is Joan Blondell, whose Zeena is a once-beautiful woman whose face and body are beginning to show the effects of her hard life. And Helen Walker makes a coolly calculating femme fatale, as she would in the next film on my favorites list.

Impact (1949). Screenplay by Dorothy Reid and Jay Dratler, directed by Arthur Lubin.

Helen Walker (as Irene Williams) in Impact.

San Francisco auto magnate Walter Williams (Brian Donleavy) dies in a fiery crash on a mountain road. Or at least that's the way it looks. Just before the crash, though, Williams was assaulted by a hitchhiker, shoved unconscious off a cliff and left for dead. Instead it was his passenger who was behind the wheel when Williams' speeding car plunged off the twisting road in the dark and exploded in flames, burning the driver's body beyond recognition.

When Williams returns to consciousness he's dazed. He crawls back up to the road and climbs into the back of a moving van that had stopped at the accident scene. Unnoticed by the movers as they drive off, the next day he wakes up with a splitting headache as they pull into a small town in Idaho. There he discovers the news of his "death" and a dawning realization: his wife Irene (Helen Walker) and the "cousin" she'd asked him to give a lift to (Tony Barrett) had plotted to murder him. And that insight leads inevitably to the conclusion that they must have been lovers.

In Idaho Williams meets the owner of a struggling gas-station, the war widow Marsha Peters (Ella Raines), and—his former life shattered—decides to stay on and help her as "Bill Walter." Eventually, though, he reveals his true identity, and at Marsha's urging returns to the Bay Area to clear his wife of murder charges in his "death"—only to find himself arrested, accused by Irene of killing her lover. Now Marsha must race against time to try to prove his innocence. . .

Impact offers some nice twists on the noir formula: instead of the Good Wife versus the seductive Other Woman, this time it's the seductive Bad Wife who (twice!) tries to do away with her husband, and the good Other Woman who tries to save him. The movie's chief attractions are the adversaries in that battle: the striking Ella Raines (of Hail the Conquering Hero), and Helen Walker, once again playing an ice-cold femme fatale with chilling effectiveness.

Love Me or Leave Me (1955). Screenplay by Daniel Fuchs and Isobel Lennart; directed by Charles Vidor.

Doris Day (as Ruth Etting) wearing a Helen Rose creation in Love Me or Leave Me.

The story of a nightclub singer's rise to stardom and marriage to a controlling, violent man may have attracted its star Doris Day because of the parallels to her own life. Singing hopeful Ruth Etting (Day) is spotted in a 10-cents-a-dance joint by Chicago gangster Martin Snyder (James Cagney). Snyder aggressively takes charge of Ruth's career, strong-arming Ruth's way into a job singing a warm-up jingle for a male headliner, and then engineering the headliner's no-show so that Ruth can go on in his place. A radio show follows, the Ziegfeld Follies are soon calling, and Ruth becomes the toast of Broadway—but she still somehow manages to keep Snyder at arm's length. Snyder's frustration and jealousy are further inflamed by Ruth's musical director Johnny Alderman (Cameron Mitchell), who has made no secret of his attraction to her. Ruth returns Johnny's feelings, but her career is tied to Snyder. Snyder ultimately coerces Ruth into marriage, resulting in misery for all three.

Day, dressed in a series of glamorous Helen Rose gowns, surprises by playing Ruth as a woman whose sweet appearance conceals a will of steel: she knows what she wants and goes after it, even at the cost of her own happiness. Cagney gives a fiercely driven performance as Snyder, the intensity of whose passion for Ruth is never enough to evoke responsive feelings in her. Cagney manages to make Snyder sympathetic in his inability to help himself despite his recognition of the hopelessness of his situation.

In addition to the strong script and performances, Day sings a dozen standards, including the title track, "Ten Cents A Dance," "Mean to Me," "I'll Never Stop Loving You," "You Made Me Love You," and a lush, emotionally freighted version of "Never Look Back":

https://youtu.be/rpdO0HFQ23c?t=2

All That Heaven Allows (1955). Screenplay by Peg Fenwick after a story by Edna L. Lee and Harry Lee; directed by Douglas Sirk.

Rock Hudson (as Ron Kirby) and Jane Wyman (as Cary Scott) in All That Heaven Allows.

Cary Scott (Jane Wyman) is a well-off widow in a New England town whose life revolves around her country-club friends and her college-age children. Passion is missing—until she meets Ron Kirby (Rock Hudson), a much younger arborist (Hudson was actually only 7 years younger than Wyman, but Ron is supposed to be 15 years younger than Cary). Ron lives "simply" (in a gorgeously renovated old mill that would cost several decades of my salary) and invites Cary to dinner with his carefree bohemian friends; soon they are falling in love.

But Cary's country-club set is disapproving, and both her son and her daughter react badly (neither of them thinks it's appropriate for their middle-aged mother to be interested in love and sex). Her son actually buys her a TV set for company; in a brilliant reverse-angle shot she sees herself reflected in the screen as if trapped within it. Will Cary be able to summon the emotional strength to find happiness with Ron, or will she conform to the expectations of her neighbors and the wishes of her children and remain walled up alive in her comfortable tomb?

All That Heaven Allows is stunningly filmed in deeply saturated Technicolor by Sirk and cinematographer Russell Metty. The screen is flooded with gorgeous reds and golds when she and Ron embrace, and conversely when they are separated the winter landscape seems drained of color; Cary is often placed behind window frames as if behind prison bars. Sirk's use of shadows is as visually evocative as in a black and white film.

Portrait of a Lady on Fire (Portrait de la jeune fille en feu, 2019). Written and directed by Céline Sciamma.

Noémie Merlant (as Marianne) and Adèle Haenel (as Héloïse) in Portrait of a Lady on Fire. Image source: UCSD Guardian

Beautifully photographed and delicately understated, Céline Sciamma's film focuses on the impossible and doubly forbidden love between the artist Marianne and her aristocratic subject Héloïse. Their love is impossible because, as Héloïse's companion (and secretly the painter of her portrait), Marianne is essentially a high-status servant in the household of the Countess, Héloïse's mother. Their love is doubly forbidden because it is both homoerotic and adulterous: Héloïse's marriage has been contracted and is imminent; Marianne has been hired to paint her wedding portrait.

Portrait of a Lady on Fire could not have been designed to be more enticing to us with its 18th-century setting, scenic locations, elegant interiors, lovely clothes, simmering erotic tension, hopeless love, passionate Vivaldi, intelligent script, and appealing actors (Noémie Merlant as Marianne and Adèle Haenel as Héloïse). What more could we ask for?

Ringers:

The Lady Eve (1941). Written and directed by Preston Sturges.

Barbara Stanwyck (as the Lady Eve) and Henry Fonda (as Charles Pike) in The Lady Eve.

The Lady Eve is the quintessential Sturges comedy. Charles Pike (Henry Fonda), heir to the "Pike's Pale Ale" fortune, is returning to New York from a snake-hunting expedition to the Amazon. On board the same ocean liner are Jean Harrington (Barbara Stanwyck) and "Colonel" Harry (Charles Coburn), a father-daughter team of card sharps planning to fleece him and the other rich passengers along the way. Charles, who has been in paradise and is bringing home a snake, is about to fall.

The Lady Eve is the best of Sturges' movies, which is saying a great deal, and has one of the cleverest, funniest closing scenes in all American movie comedy. This was the peak experience of our home Preston Sturges film festival this year. If you've never seen it, viewing is highly recommended, and if (like me) you have seen it before, a rewatch is in order.

Oh! What a Lovely War (1969). Screenplay by Len Deighton (uncredited), based on the stage musical Oh, What a Lovely War! developed by Joan Littlewood's Theatre Workshop; directed by Richard Attenborough.

This post will be published on Veterans' Day in the U.S., commemorating the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month of 1918, the moment when fighting was halted on the Western Front in World War I. That nearly 3,000 men were killed on that same day in the hours before the official cessation of hostilities is one more example of the horrific waste of life in that conflict, which resulted in the deaths of millions of soldiers and civilians, and permanent injury or disability to millions more.

Oh! What A Lovely War is a savage satire of the blunders and lies that led to and sustained the First World War. The home front, where brass bands play, musical hall stars exhort men to join up, and the appalling casualties are posted like cricket scores, is represented by Brighton Palace Pier; the battle front is depicted in all its muddy death-dealing horror. 

You'll recognize virtually every notable British stage and screen actor of the time, including Dirk Bogarde (The Servant), Edward Fox (The Day of the Jackal), John Gielgud (Secret Agent), Ian Holm (Dreamchild), Laurence Olivier (Rebecca), Michael Redgrave (The Lady Vanishes) and his daughter Vanessa (Mary, Queen of Scots), Ralph Richardson (The Holly and the Ivy), Maggie Smith (The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie), and Susannah York (Tom Jones)—and if you have a sharper eye than mine you may spot Jane Seymour (Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman) as a chorus girl. I first saw this when I was about 16, and the final shot has stayed with me ever since. The film was made around the time of the fiftieth anniversary of the end of the war, but its message seems aimed as well at the brutal campaign the U.S. was then waging in Vietnam. Oh! What A Lovely War will only lose its impact when working-class young men are no longer sent off to die in meaningless conflicts by rich old men who direct the carnage from a safe distance—which is to say, never.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ynEWZF1bkLQ

Honorable mentions:

Cluny Brown (1946). Screenplay by Samuel Hoffenstein and Elizabeth Reinhardt, based on the novel by Margery Sharp; directed by Ernst Lubitsch.

Helen Walker (as the Honorable Betty Cream) in Cluny Brown.

The final film completed by Ernst Lubitsch before his death, Cluny Brown features his trademark lightness of touch as well as typically risqué dialogue, this time featuring plumbing as a metaphor for sex.

As the plumber-heroine Cluny, Jennifer Jones displays an unsuspected flair for comedy and a British accent that often vanishes completely, while as Adam Belinski, a penniless Czech refugee from the Nazis, Charles Boyer offers his usual suavity. Helen Walker (of Nightmare Alley and Impact) plays the Honorable Betty Cream, the presumptive fiancée of Andrew (Peter Lawford), an upper-crust son and heir. Betty and Andrew have had a row, and over the course of a country-house weekend Cluny (a maid/plumber) and Adam (a houseguest) present romantic complications for the couple, and each other. Andrew is sincere but a bit dim, while Betty is self-possessed, coolly witty, and gets some of the better lines.

Cluny Brown may not rank with Lubitsch's greatest work—for that you'll need to watch Trouble in Paradise—but it is a charming and affectionate send-up of British manners and mores, and its oppositions are never simple ones. It makes me wonder why both Jennifer Jones and Helen Walker didn't get to play more comic roles.

Les Liaisons Dangereuses 1960 (1959), screenplay adapted from the novel by Pierre Choderlos de Laclos by Roger Vailland, Roger Vadim and Claude Brulé; directed by Vadim.

Les Liaisons Dangereuses 1960 could almost be mistaken as a product of the French New Wave. An updating of Pierre Choderlos de Laclos' 1782 novel in letters of aristocratic libertinage to the milieu of the Parisian haute-bourgeoisie in the late 1950s, Vadim's film seems to have been explicitly modelled on Louis Malle's Ascenseur pour l'échafaud (Elevator to the Gallows, 1958). Like Malle's film, Liaisons is shot in black and white, stars Jeanne Moreau, and is set to a superb jazz soundtrack (by Thelonious Monk and Art Blakey & the Jazz Messengers in Liaisons, by Miles Davis in Ascenseur).

Valmont (Gérard Philippe) and Juliette (Moreau), a well-off married couple, have agreed to sleep with other people, but have also pledged to be completely honest with each other; they have vowed "not to accept the lies that degrade other couples." But their apparent openness devolves into an intra-marital power struggle that brings disaster to everyone whose lives they touch, including the teenaged Cécile Volanges (Jeanne Valérie), her fiancé Jerry Court (Nicholas Vogel), her college-student lover Danceny (Jean-Louis Trintignant), and the devoted wife Madame de Tourvel (Annette Vadim).

The updating of the novel works surprisingly well. To the novel's letters the film adds phone calls, tape recordings, and telegrams; most of the translations required by the temporal leap forward by nearly two centuries maintain the spirit of the original. Some "modern" touches don't work so well, however. There's a scene where a jazz band (Art Blakey's Jazz Messengers) sends women into an orgiastic frenzy of dancing, like something out of Joseph March's The Wild Party (1928). And Vadim gives a smarmy introduction to the film in which he Explains It All To Us; one of its more memorable lines concerns "young women freed from sex-related social constraints and that burst open, buoyantly, like ripe fruits."

Vadim's appalling introduction aside, Les Liaisons Dangereuses 1960 largely succeeds on its own terms: it's sleek and chic and has excellent leads in Philipe and Moreau, who are flattered by the gorgeous black-and-white photography of Marcel Grignon. But, like the novel, it could have been a blistering critique of gendered power relations. That would have required, though, some self-critical reflection on the part of Vadim, whose later career (he wrote and directed Barbarella (1968), among other films) demonstrates that he forever remained a prisoner of the idea that women's sexual freedom should primarily benefit men.

Other Favorites of 2021:

• Streamed performances
• Live performance
• Recordings
• Books

Favorites of 2021: Books

Reality keeps outstripping invention these days, so it may come as no surprise that I found that 2021 was not a great year for fiction. In any case, I found fewer favorites among my reading (both fiction and non-) than usual. My apologies for the truncated lists that follows. My favorites, as always drawn from books first read (but not necessarily first published) in the past twelve months, in the order in which they were encountered:

FICTION

Emily Eden: The Semi-Attached Couple and The Semi-Detached House (Dial Press/Virago, 1979) Emily Eden was born in the year the 21-year-old Jane Austen began writing Pride and Prejudice, and died in the year the 49-year-old George Eliot began writing Middlemarch. As this chronology suggests, Eden is a bridge between the fictional worlds of Austen and Eliot. Her witty, ironic style echoes Austen, while her fictional themes of unhappy marriages and the social constraints on women anticipate those of Eliot and other late Victorian writers such as Anthony Trollope and Elizabeth Gaskell. In The Semi-Attached Couple (1859), Lord Teviot marries local beauty Helen Beaufort, but the marriage is not a success. He is short-tempered and jealous, and she is quick to take offense. They seem to willfully misunderstand one another. In her portrait of their union Eden anticipates Eliot's dissection of the mismatched marriages of Dorothea Brooke and Casaubon or Lydgate and Rosamond Vincy. Yes, I knew Helen from her childhood, and had thought that such a gentle, gay creature could never be touched by the cares and griefs that fall on the common herd. . .Why was she to escape? I do not wish to be cynical; but if a stone is thrown into our garden, is it not sure to knock off the head of our most valuable tulip? If a cup of coffee is to be spilled, does it not make a point of falling on our richest brocade gown? If we do lose our reticule, does not the misfortune occur on the only day on which we had left our purse in it? (Vol. I, Ch. I) But unlike in Middlemarch, the central marriage in The Semi-Detached Couple does not end in the death of one of the partners or with the couple chained together endlessly in mutual misery. Instead, like Austen, Emily Eden enables her characters to find happiness at last: ". . .give them time and opportunity, and there is no saying whether the warm heart will not soften and conquer the hard one at last." (Vol. II, Ch. VI) The Semi-Detached House (1860) was written decades before The Semi-Attached Couple, but then left in a drawer for 30 years until the success of the latter enabled the earlier manuscript to be dusted off and published. The novel's heroine is Blanche, Lady Chester, who, while her husband is away on a diplomatic mission, takes the abode of the title during her pregnancy (a word that never occurs in the novel; you have to read carefully not to be surprised when she goes into labor). "Semi-detached" means, in the way of all real-estate listings, completely attached, and Blanche is at first concerned about the proximity of her plebeian next-door neighbors, the Hopkinsons. But she is soon chastened when she learns of the dangers of prejudice and comes to know of the Hopkinsons' decency, generosity, and goodness. As I wrote in my post about the Virago Modern Classics omnibus edition of the novels, "Emily Eden's fiction features scenes of marital disharmony, class snobbery, political chicanery, and financial fraudulence, but it is not primarily for their plots that her novels deserve to be read. Instead, it is her witty and ironic narrative voice that makes her seem to speak to us so vividly."

 

Daphne du Maurier: My Cousin Rachel (Gollancz, 1951) For many years I uncritically dismissed Daphne du Maurier's fiction (without, of course, bothering to read any of it). But I discovered that her fiction is far from escapist; instead, often for the women in her novels there is no escape. My Cousin Rachel (1951) is another of du Maurier's under-celebrated works. It is set sometime in the first half of the 19th century (there are no trains or telegrams, only carriages and letters). The 24-year-old Philip has inherited the estate of his cousin and guardian Ambrose, who died in Italy after marrying his young Anglo-Italian cousin Rachel. The beautiful Rachel, left penniless by the terms of Ambrose's will, comes to England to meet Philip. Do her gestures of affection merely express her gratitude for Philip's increasingly extravagant gifts and financial support, or is she manipulating him to try to gain control over the estate? Philip finds himself torn between his suspicions of Rachel's complicity in his guardian's death and his increasingly ardent feelings:  . . .every day, haunted still by doubt, I ask myself a question which I cannot answer. Was Rachel innocent or guilty?. . .How soft and gentle her name sounds when I whisper it. It lingers on the tongue, insidious and slow, almost like poison, which is apt indeed. It passes from the tongue to the parched lips, and from the lips back to the heart. And the heart controls the body, and the mind also. Shall I be free of it one day?. . .Perhaps, when all is said and done, I shall have no wish to be free. (Chapter One) My Cousin Rachel is a novel of doublings, recapitulations, and the haunting of the living by the dead. These are recurrent themes in du Maurier's fiction, along with the unbridgeable gulf of understanding between men and women and the misapprehensions and jealousies which that gulf inspires. This is hardly the stance of a writer of "escapist women's romance"; as critic Nina Auerbach writes, "I was, and remain, enthralled by Daphne du Maurier because of her antiromantic refusal to satisfy predictable desires."

 

Honoré de Balzac: Père Goriot (Penguin, 1951, translated by Marion Ayton Crawford) Père is a seemingly simple word to translate: it means "Father." And indeed, late Victorian translator Ellen Marriage renders the title of Balzac's novel as Father Goriot. [1] But that makes the title character sound like a priest, which assuredly he is not. Marion Ayton Crawford, translator of the first Penguin edition, rendered the title as Old Goriot, which captures the sense of dismissive familiarity which can be suggested by "Père," but misses the crucial implication that the character is in a literal sense a father. Olivia McCannon, the translator of the new Penguin edition (2011), Englishes the title as Old Man Goriot, which is even more chummy than Old Goriot but also elides his central paternal role. Perhaps the best choice is made by those translators who leave it in the original. Père Goriot, a former merchant, lives in poverty in the Paris boarding house of the penny-pinching Madame Vauquer. Goriot has transferred all of his substantial wealth (earned by profiteering on flour in periods of food scarcity during the Revolution) to his two daughters, who have married well, if not wisely. The daughters, now the Countess de Restaud and the Baroness de Nucingen, refuse to acknowledge their father openly (though they are not above appealing to him privately to cover their debts and those of their feckless lovers, which he does at great personal sacrifice). A second narrative concerns Eugène Rastignac, a young law student from the provinces who also lives at Madame Vauquer's. After encountering the alluring world of Parisian high society he is determined to enter it, even after he learns what's required to do so: large sums of money, promotion by a fashionable and well-connected woman, and a ruthless determination to use and discard others for his own advantage. Unfortunately for Rastignac, there are men far more ruthless than he is who have no scruples about twisting his ambitions to their own ends. Père Goriot was published about halfway through what became Balzac's 90-plus novel series La Comédie humaine. It contains some extended (and effective) melodramatic scenes, and some sensationalistic elements (such as a criminal kingpin living in disguise in the same boarding house, whose funds and cynicism are both seemingly unlimited). But fundamentally Père Goriot conveys the insight, a decade before Marx and Engels, that in a capitalist society the social and emotional bonds between people are reduced to a cash nexus. As Engels wrote in The Condition of the Working Class in England (1845), ". . .the social war, the war of each against all, is here [in great cities] openly declared. . .People regard each other only as useful objects; each exploits the other, and the end of it all is, that the stronger treads the weaker under foot." [2] Or, as Balzac puts it, . . .Rastignac. . .saw Paris spread out below on both banks of the winding Seine. . .there lay the splendid world that he had wished to gain. He eyed that humming hive with a look that foretold its despoilation, as if he already felt on his lips the sweetness of its honey, and said with superb defiance, 'It's war between us now!'

Honorable mentions

In a different year, either or both of these novels might have made it into my Favorites list. Generally for a book to be a favorite it doesn't have to be flawless, but I have to think that I might want to re-read it someday; neither of these books ultimately met that criterion.

Shirley Jackson: The Haunting of Hill House (Viking, 1959) ". . .the uncanny is nothing else than a hidden, familiar thing that has undergone repression and then emerged from it. . ." —Sigmund Freud, "The 'Uncanny'" [3] Like Freud, Shirley Jackson locates the uncanny in the return of the repressed. Eleanor Vance is a shy, lonely woman who spent her teens and twenties as a caregiver for her disabled mother, for whose recent death she feels an ineradicable guilt. When Eleanor is invited to spend a few weeks at Hill House as part of a group that will be investigating paranormal phenomena—the house is rumored to be haunted—she eagerly seizes on the chance to break out of her stultifying routines. Besides Eleanor and Dr. John Montague, who is leading the investigation, only two other people wind up coming to the house. They are Theodora, an artist who lives in Greenwich Village with her partner (whose sex is never specified), and Luke Sanderson, the nephew and heir of the owner of Hill House. The house has a history of unexplained deaths and suicides, and it's not long before strange things start happening: doors shut by themselves; the guests repeatedly get lost in the mazelike first floor trying to find their way to the dining room, as though walls and doors are shifting locations; everyone feels a barrier of bitterly cold air outside the nursery; and Eleanor senses a repulsive smell that prevents her from entering the library. On the second night, after Theodora has painted Eleanor's toenails red (an intimate act with a hint of sex) and everyone has gone to bed, Eleanor hears the voice of her dead mother calling her. She flees in panic to Theodora's room, where the two women cower together as an unseen force crashes against the door. The next morning the ambiguous words "HELP ELEANOR COME HOME" are found scrawled in a hallway. More terrifying and inexplicable things happen, both to Eleanor alone and to others when they are with her. Despite her fear, she feels strangely drawn to the house, and to the library, where a suicide occurred. In The Haunting of Hill House Jackson effectively creates an eerie atmosphere. But if the weird phenomena are all in Eleanor's mind, no one else should experience them. And if the phenomena are somehow external manifestations of Eleanor's psychosexual conflicts, then everyone in the house should experience them. While that's true of some of the phenomena, some are felt, seen, heard, or smelled only by Eleanor, and some are experienced only by other members of the group. Which leads to the conclusion that the house is "really" haunted, and contains some malevolent force—perhaps the misogynistic spirit of its first owner Hugh Crain—that acts selectively on the inhabitants, but mainly targets women (and especially Eleanor). Your full enjoyment of the book may depend on how willing you are to suspend disbelief and accept this implication. The novel has been filmed several times. If you're looking for Halloween or All Souls' Day viewing, the first version, The Haunting (1963), features Julie Harris as Eleanor and Claire Bloom as Theodora, and was directed by Robert Wise as a change of pace between his duties on West Side Story and The Sound of Music.

 

Kazuo Ishiguro: Klara and the Sun (Knopf, 2021) In an interview with The Guardian Kazuo Ishiguro once said, "I tend to write the same book over and over, or at least, I take the same subject I took last time out and refine it, or do a slightly different take on it." That subject is our partial and distorted perspective on ourselves and our world. In an Ishiguro novel the reader's understanding slowly and almost imperceptibly diverges from those of the main characters, until we know more about them and their situation than they do. The main character in Klara and the Sun is a solar-powered android, or AF (Artificial Friend). Klara, although she has remained on display unsold until her model is slightly outdated, is finally chosen as a companion by Josie, a young girl suffering from a life-threatening illness. Through Klara's eyes we gradually learn more about what has caused Josie's condition and why, in this near-future world, many children are reliant on AFs. We also recognize the irony that Klara is kinder, less judgmental and more selfless than her human owners. My favorite of Ishiguro's novels is The Unconsoled, a strange, dreamlike work in which a classical pianist is supposed to give a concert but can never quite make it to the stage. Klara and the Sun is not as richly imaginative as that novel, nor does it quite achieve the pathos of Never Let Me Go (which has a similar near-future setting) or provide quite as keen a sense of growing dismay as An Artist of the Floating World or Remains of the Day. Still, in a year where much of the fiction I read was disappointing, Ishiguro's measured, precise prose and daring choice to write from the point of view of a non-human consciousness offered many pleasures. Speaking of disappointing fiction. . .

Biggest disappointment

Maggie O'Farrell: Hamnet (Knopf, 2020) Maggie O'Farrell's novel about Shakespeare's son has been highly, not to say extravagantly, praised. It won prizes (the 2020 National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction and the 2020 Women's Prize for Fiction, whose jury called it "truly great") and was named to many "best fiction of the year" lists, including those of the New York Times, The Guardian, and LitHub. Hamnet's cover blurbs call it "a thing of shimmering wonder" (David Mitchell), "beautifully imagined and written" (Claire Tomalin), "finely written" (Sarah Moss), full of "flawless sentences" (Emma Donoghue), or "one of the best novels I've ever read" (Mary Beth Keane). I seem to be in a minority of one: I found O'Farrell's writing at times unwittingly anachronistic ("epicentre" was coined in the 19th century), dully repetitious (the word "noise" is used eight times in the first six pages), disconcertingly inconsistent (on a hot windless summer day a fire is left burning untended in an empty house and the drapes—a rare thing in 16th-century England—are moving in the non-existent breeze), or simply wrong (a sigh involves an exhalation, not an inhalation). And all of these examples (and more) come from the very first chapter. For me details matter, especially in historical fiction, and most especially when they are so carefully established and emphasized by the author. And as regular readers know (see my comment on Michael Chabon twice bungling the Celsius temperature scale in The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay), I'm one of those unfortunates for whom lapses like the ones I've listed are so grating they render imaginative entry into O'Farrell's fictional world impossible.

NONFICTION

Margaret Forster: Daphne Du Maurier: The Secret Life of the Renowned Storyteller (Doubleday, 1993) Daphne du Maurier came from a famous family. Her grandfather George du Maurier wrote the hugely popular novel Trilby (1894), in which the manipulative (and literally hypnotic) musician Svengali transforms the working-class Trilby O'Ferrall into a star singer. Daphne's aunt, Sylvia Llewelyn Davies, was an artist and the mother of the five boys who inspired J.M. Barrie's Peter Pan (1904). Her father, Gerald du Maurier, was a theatrical manager and actor who played the dual role of Captain Hook and the father of the Darling children in the première performance of Barrie's play. Gerald and his actress wife Muriel had three daughters; Daphne was the middle child. Although her parents were highly self-involved, Daphne adored her father and sensed (or was told) that he had really wanted a boy. Perhaps this contributed to her feeling that she had a dual nature that was both female and male. Forster was given access to Daphne's intimate letters, and her groundbreaking biography was the first to reveal the extent of Daphne's same-sex attractions. In 1947 Daphne had sailed to America with Ellen Doubleday, the wife of her American publisher Nelson Doubleday, to defend herself in a plagiarism case brought against her novel Rebecca (1938). In a letter written to Ellen after Daphne had returned to England, she explained that as a child she had imagined herself "never being a little girl. Always being a little boy. And growing up with a boy's mind and a boy's heart. . .so that at eighteen this half-breed fell in love, as a boy would, with someone quite twelve years older than himself who was French and had all the understanding in the world, and he loved her in every conceivable way." This first love was Fernande Yvon, a teacher at Daphne's boarding school in the mid-1920s. "And then the boy realised he had to grow up and not be a boy any longer, so he turned into a girl, and not an unattractive one at that, and the boy was locked in a box forever." At age 25 in 1932 Daphne had married army officer Frederick Browning, and the couple had three children. But 15 years later at Daphne's first sight of Ellen, the boy inside her had escaped once more: she felt like "a boy of eighteen all over again with nervous hands and a beating heart, incurably romantic and wanting to throw a cloak before his lady's feet." In court the plaintiff's lawyer had called Daphne a liar, and she thought "this was so very perceptive of him. . .my life has been one long lie as far back as I can remember." Ellen could not reciprocate Daphne's love. (A later trip the two women took together to Italy did not end well; after "one kiss which lasted about forty seconds" Ellen tearfully reiterated to Daphne her inability to feel more than friendship for her.) But in the fall of 1948 Daphne met the married actress Gertrude Lawrence, for whom she had written the starring role in September Tide (a play that heterosexualized her love for Ellen). The two women embarked on passionate affair. Forster's biography is not only revelatory about Daphne's life, it is insightful about her work and provides a rich context for the harrowing masterpieces Rebecca, My Cousin Rachel (which also draws on her feelings for Ellen), and "The Birds." The biography is also vividly written, perhaps because Forster herself was a novelist; 1965's Georgy Girl was made into a successful film whose title song was a hit for The Seekers. In 2007 the biography was itself made into the faithful and evocative film Daphne, directed by Clare Beavan and starring Geraldine Somerville as Daphne, Elizabeth McGovern as Ellen Doubleday, and Janet McTeer as Gertrude Lawrence—also recommended.

 

Victoria Sweet: God's Hotel: A Doctor, A Hospital, and A Pilgrimage to the Heart of Medicine (Riverhead Books, 2012) While writing her doctoral thesis on Hildegard of Bingen, the 12th-century visionary and healer, Victoria Sweet worked as a physician at San Francisco's Laguna Honda Hospital ("God's Hotel"). Laguna Honda is a long-term care facility for the indigent with chronic or recurring health issues; Sweet calls it "the last almshouse." Her time there enabled her to integrate her work as a doctor and her research in medical history into a practice she calls "slow medicine" (the title of another of her books). Patients were often sent to Laguna Honda after receiving hurried emergency room treatment elsewhere, and as Sweet reports, they had frequently been given mistaken diagnoses and were taking incorrect or overprescribed medications. Seeing the patients over days and weeks rather than minutes, observing closely, and listening carefully to what they had to say about their own conditions allowed Sweet and the other doctors at Laguna Honda time "to think, to read, to consult, to catch their mistakes." It is a kind of medicine that is as much art and intuition as science, but, as evidenced by the many compelling stories Sweet tells, can be highly effective even, or perhaps especially, in difficult or intractable cases. Many thanks to the good friend who read this in his book group and immediately realized that both I and my partner would love it. He was right.

Honorable mentions

Joan Schenkar: The Talented Miss Highsmith: The Secret Life and Serious Art of Patricia Highsmith (St. Martin's, 2010) Like Daphne du Maurier, Patricia Highsmith wrote books that were too popular to be taken seriously by literary gatekeepers during her lifetime. Her novels won many awards for crime and mystery writing, but no National Book Awards, National Book Critics' Circle Awards, or Pulitzer Prizes—nor even, so far as I am aware, any nominations. Joan Schenkar's thoroughly researched and well-written biography convincingly advances a claim that Highsmith's work, as the subtitle has it, is not only popular but "serious art." Despite her relative neglect by the literary establishment, Highsmith's writing met with immediate success. Her first novel, Strangers On A Train (1950), was made into a film by Alfred Hitchcock (his company paid her $7500 for the film option, roughly equivalent to ten times that amount today). Her second novel, The Price of Salt (1952), was published under the pseudonym Claire Morgan due to its lesbian theme (an affair between Therese, a young woman trying to make her way in New York, and Carol, an older woman going through a divorce and a custody battle over her young daughter); by 1958 it had sold over a half-million copies, and by 1963 had more than a million copies in print. Her fourth novel, The Talented Mr. Ripley (1955), inaugurated the series of Ripley novels which has sustained her reputation ever since. [4] Schenkar is an nigh-ideal biographer of Highsmith: she knew Highsmith personally and was a later participant the Manhattan lesbian culture that helped to shape her. Schenkar is also an engaging and inventive writer: she organizes the book thematically, rather than chronologically, which seems an especially fruitful approach to the life and work of a writer obsessed with doubles, repetitions, and recurrences. But the problem with Schenkar's biography is that Highsmith could be thoughtless as a friend, completely careless of the feelings and sensibilities of those around her, utterly lacking in generosity, and thoroughly nasty when drunk (and she was drunk pretty much all the time). To her credit Schenkar does not try to gloss over how unpleasant Highsmith could be. But it becomes tiresome to read example after example of Highsmith's incorrigible behavior, and ultimately it's difficult to enjoy spending 700 pages in her company.

 

Olivia Laing: To the River: A Journey Beneath the Surface (Canongate, 2012) To the River is Olivia Laing's account of her solo trek tracing the entire course of the River Ouse, from its headwaters near Haywards Heath in southeastern England to the English Channel at Newhaven, midway between Brighton and Eastbourne. (Ouse is pronounced, we learn, like "ooze," not like "douse.") It's not a long journey, perhaps 30 miles (roughly 50 kilometers), but the river's meandering course passes through a landscape rich in both beauty and history. The history that Laing recounts is fascinating. In 1264 the Battle of Lewes, pitting the armies of barons led by Simon de Montfort against that of the autocratic King Henry III and his son Prince Edward, was fought in the hills, fields and marshes surrounding the village of Lewes. After great loss of life on both sides, the barons defeated King Henry and forced him to make concessions (at least temporarily). In 1912 the fossil remains of the "missing link" between ape and man were found by amateur archaeologist Charles Dawson in gravel beds near Piltdown. Alas, in 1953 Piltdown Man was definitively exposed as a hoax; Dawson had combined human and orangutan bones to construct his "missing link." Also in 1912, Virginia Woolf and her husband Leonard rented Asham House in Beddingham, about a two miles southeast of Lewes. In 1919 they bought the Round House (actually an octagonal former windmill) down the narrow Pipe Passage from the High Street in Lewes, and then within a year sold it to buy the larger Monk's House in Rodmell, about 3 miles south by road. They split their time between Monk's House and London until 1940, when they moved permanently into Monk's House to avoid the Blitz (bombing destroyed both their London homes). It was from Monk's House on 28 March 1941 that a despairing Virginia, suffering from the deep depression that she'd periodically experienced throughout her adult life, walked down to the Ouse, filled the pockets of her coat with stones, and waded into the river until she was in water over her head. Leonard found her suicide note later that day; her body was found three weeks later about a mile downstream. Laing's prose, though, is not quite as compelling when she's describing the landscape. She falls into the nature-writer convention of providing long lists of the common names of the flora and fauna she observes as a substitute for description. That's fine if you have the wildflowers of Sussex committed to memory, but if not, it's meaningless. And when she tries to write poetically the effect can sometimes seem overdone. Which is why, despite the engaging history it retells, Laing's book did not finally make my list of favorites.

 

Geoff Dyer: Out of Sheer Rage: Wrestling With D.H. Lawrence (North Point Press, 1998) The cover of the hardback edition of Out of Sheer Rage boasts a blurb from no less an eminence than John Berger:  "The kind of book that gives literary criticism a bad name. Hilarious!" It's certainly the funniest book you'll ever read about D.H. Lawrence, who was notably humorless. Although it's not actually a book about Lawrence, thankfully—if it had been, I doubt I ever would have read it. Instead it's a book about being unable to write a book about Lawrence, due variously to distractedness, a tendency to procrastination, and a compulsive need to visit locations associated with Lawrence, combined with a neurotic avoidance of any person or text that would serve as a primary source about Lawrence. To give you the flavor (and test your tolerance for Dyer's approach), here is a characteristic passage from late in the book: Writers suffer more from the flu than other people and I suffer more from the flu than other writers. If you're going out to an office or a factory every day then there's always a holiday element in being sick. You might not feel great but you are at least having a few days at home: it's a rest, a chance to watch afternoon telly. Whereas writers are home all day anyway; they can watch all the afternoon telly they want. What the flu does is stop them working—so there is, albeit in heavily diluted form, a sense of being on some kind of holiday. Whereas for me, even when I was feeling a hundred per cent I rarely got down to any work. I could be in the best of health and all I did was mope around, shuffle around in my slippers, wait for the early-evening news. In terms of what I got up to on a daily basis there was next to no difference between my healthy routine and my flu routine. Basically, I realised when I was laid up with flu, I lived each day as though I was laid up with the flu even when I didn't have flu. Having flu made no difference—except that I felt terrible. As well as feeling terrible from the flu I also felt terrible about the way I squandered my flu-less days—and by squandering my flu-less days I also made the days when I had flu even worse because if I had stuck to a rigid work schedule I could at least have enjoyed flu as a relief from work. As it was, having flu was simply an intensification of everyday misery; all flu did, I realised, was render bearable misery unbearable. But in retrospect even this unbearable misery—I've said it before and I might well say it again—turns out to have been bearable. Life is bearable even when it's unbearable: that is what is so terrible, that is the unbearable thing about it. Except for many people, life isn't bearable when it's unbearable. Perhaps because I read Out of Sheer Rage right after reading about Virginia Woolf's suicide in To the River, I was sensitized to the position of privilege that Dyer is writing from. He lives in London and Paris, but relocates to Rome to move in with his girlfriend; they later travel to paradisical Greek islands (which eventually pall) and to Taos, New Mexico. Nice work if you can afford not to do it. Into this non-narrative Dyer inserts (so to speak) graphic and gratuitous descriptions of the sex he's having with his girlfriend. Perhaps in this book it's intended as a Lady Chatterley's Lover allusion, but since similar scenes occur in every book of Dyer's I've read, no matter what the subject, I have to conclude that he includes them to prove something to himself or to his readers. In any case, for this reader the sex scenes were unnecessary and unwelcome. The book is filled with ironic paradoxes like the one quoted above, but in my view Dyer makes that move a time or two or three too often. His grasping for excuses not to get on with writing about Lawrence eventually becomes predictable, and so loses comic impact. Perhaps he was hoping that, as with a Monty Python routine, if he described his self-constructed impediments often enough the fact that repetition had drained them of humor would actually make them funny again. Alas, for me it never reached that condition of secondary hilarity. But there's certainly enough primary hilarity in the first part of the book to make it worth including here, despite everything I've outlined above.

Biggest disappointment:

Victoria Wilson: A Life of Barbara Stanwyck: Steel-True, 1907-1940 (Simon and Schuster, 2013.) Barbara Stanwyck led a life that seems almost as improbable as the plot of a Hollywood movie. Born Ruby Stevens and orphaned by the time she was four, she grew up in foster homes and with overburdened relatives. By age fourteen she was working as a chorus girl in New York nightclubs, and before she was 20 had begun appearing in movies. Her first films were not successful, but her husband Frank Fay paid for a screen test that convinced director Frank Capra to cast her in Ladies of Leisure (1930). After it did well at the box office, Stanwyck went on to appear in a series of Pre-Code films now considered classics. And instead of fading in the late 1930s, like many other Pre-Code actresses, Stanwyck appeared in films directed by King Vidor, Cecil B. DeMille, and Preston Sturges. She would go on to star in films directed by Capra (again—they made five films together), Billy Wilder, Howard Hawks, Fritz Lang and Douglas Sirk, becoming one of Hollywood's highest-paid stars. This material would seem to require little effort on the part of a biographer to maintain the reader's avid interest. But Victoria Wilson's A Life of Barbara Stanwyck: Steel True, 1907-1940 is such a mess it's hard to know where to begin. It offers page after page (nearly 900 of them) of runaway research, poor writing and sloppy editing. (Ironically, Wilson is a senior editor at Alfred Knopf.) Wilson seems to have no sense of the significant—or even relevant—detail, and no idea what to leave out. Amid all the dross Wilson does manage to record a few insights about Stanwyck's film work, but they are buried in such a mass of undifferentiated detail that they lose impact. Steel-True reads like a first draft that went straight to the printer; the book would be twice as good if it were half as long. Is there no such thing as a copy editor any more? One also quails at the thought of the second volume to come, covering her remaining 48 films and television career. Wilson takes about 800 pages to cover the years 1927-1940; at that rate she has about 3000 pages to go before her biography will be complete. The time required to read Wilson's recounting of Stanwyck's life would be far more profitably spent watching Stanwyck's movies instead.

Other Favorites of 2021:

• Streamed performances
• Live performance
• Recordings
• Movies

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1. Is "Ellen Marriage" her mother's bitter joke: "Hell in marriage"?
2. Friedrich Engels, "The Great Towns," from The Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844, translated by Florence Kelley Wischnewetzky, George Allen & Unwin, 1892. https://gutenberg.org/ebooks/17306.
3. Sigmund Freud, "The Uncanny." Translated by Alix Strachey. First published in Imago, Band V, 1919. https://web.mit.edu/allanmc/www/freud1.pdf
4. $7500 film option for Strangers On A Train: Donald Spoto, The Dark Side of Genius: The Life of Alfred Hitchcock, Ballantine Books, 1984, p. 341. Sales of The Price of Salt:  Yvonne Keller, "Pulp Politics: Strategies of Vision in Pro-Lesbian Pulp Novels, 1955-1965," in Patricia Juliana Smith, ed. The Queer Sixties, Routledge, 2013, p. 2.
   

Departure and arrival: Handel and Graupner in Hamburg

Antonio Belluci, Antiochus and Stratonice, ca. 1700. Image source: Wikimedia Commons

In the fall of 1706, 23-year-old Christoph Graupner was rescued from an impending law career by the timely arrival in Leipzig of the invading army of King Karl XII of Sweden. A conflict over the Polish succession determined Graupner's fate: Karl supported Stanisław Leszczyński against Augustus II (the Strong), King of Poland and Elector of Saxony, where Leipzig was located. Abandoning his legal studies at the University of Leipzig he fled to the free city of Hamburg, where he took up a position as the harpsichordist for the public opera house.

Music was Graupner's first love. Before shifting to jurisprudence, he had studied at the renowned Thomasschule in Leipzig for eight years. And his choice of Hamburg was clearly not random. For an aspiring musician and composer, Hamburg was full of opportunities. Its opera house was one of the largest in Europe, and there was a constant demand for new works. And the musical possibilities at the Hamburg Opera had recently expanded because one of its most promising young composers had just departed for Italy: a 21-year-old named Georg Friederich Händel.

Almira, Queen of Castile

Cover of the Boston Early Music Festival recording of Almira. Image source: Presto Music

Händel's first composition for the Hamburg Opera, entitled Der in Krohnen erlangte Glücks-Wechsel, oder Almira, Königin von Castilien (Fortune Changed by a Crown, or Almira, Queen of Castile), had been staged the year before. Händel had played in the opera orchestra since his arrival in the city as an 18-year-old in 1703. He had started out as one of the second or third violins, and in his first rehearsals had pretended as a joke that he couldn't keep time. But his true skills were soon apparent, and by 1705 he had become the orchestra's harpsichordist and leader.

The commission for Almira had arisen because the chief composer for the Opera, Reinhard Keiser, had run himself into debt and had left the city to avoid his creditors. Händel was given a libretto that Keiser had already set and which followed a pattern common for opera in the cosmopolitan port city of Hamburg. The libretto was mainly in German, but it incorporated some Italian-language arias and French-style dance scenes. And although opera in Italy was increasing divided into works that were either entirely dramatic (opera seria, "serious opera") or comedic (opera buffa, "comic opera"), in Germany the two genres were still mixed: high-born characters expressing elevated sentiments were followed in the next scene by crowd-pleasing comedic characters drawn from popular theater who commented on and parodied the actions of their social betters.

Title page of the libretto of Händel's Der in Krohnen erlangte Glücks-Wechsel, oder Almira, Königin von Castilien. Image source: Wikimedia Commons

The action of Almira is complicated. The title character, the newly crowned queen of Castile, secretly loves her secretary Fernando, although his birth is obscure. Her father's deathbed wish is for her to marry a son of her counselor Consalvo; his only surviving son is named Osman. Osman is ambitious of being elevated to the monarchy by marrying Almira, but is in love with the Princess Edilia. She returns his love, but has a rival, the Princess Bellante. Bellante in turn is being pursued by Consalvo. Meanwhile Almira is also being pursued by Raymondo, the disguised king of Mauretania. And Consalvo has another son who is believed to have been lost at sea. . .It required something like five hours, with intermissions, to untangle all the love-knots.

Almira has many familiar touches, including the first version of the melody Händel would later reuse in his Roman oratorio Il trionfo del Tempo e del Disinganno (The triumph of Time and Disillusionment, 1707) as "Lascia la spina, cogli la rosa" (Leave the thorn, pluck the rose) and in his first London opera Rinaldo (1711) as "Lascia ch’io pianga" (Leave me to weep). It is in the plaintive arias for the sopranos that Almira is most distinctively Handelian, as can be heard in Edilia's "Schönste Rosen und Narzissen" (Lovely roses and narcissus):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F2SKgk4ChfE&list=PLZYGiV3Y1tsIgttLHG4FeD2fZJMs3HrSM&index=2

The singer is Amanda Forsythe as Princess Edilia in the 2013 stage production of the Boston Early Music Festival. A superb studio recording by the ensemble was released in 2017 on the CPO label. In addition to Forsythe it features Emöke Baráth (soprano) as Queen Almira, Colin Balzer (tenor) as Fernando, Christian Immler (baritone) as Consalvo, Zachary Wilder (tenor) as Osman, Jesse Blumberg (baritone) as Raymondo, and Teresa Wakim (soprano) as Princess Bellante; it is available on the Boston Early Music Festival website. We can only hope that a full-length video of the fully staged opera will be released someday.

Almira was a major hit. Keiser, perhaps catching wind of Händel's success, returned to Hamburg during the following season. Händel's new opera Nero (now lost) was being staged, but it was replaced by Keiser's setting of the same libretto. Perhaps concluding that Hamburg wasn't big enough for both of them, Händel accepted an invitation from a member of the Medici family to go to Italy. After four years in Venice, Florence, and Rome, he was appointed Kapellmeister to Georg Ludwig, the Elector of Hanover, who would become Britain's King George I just a few years later. Händel/Handel preceded King Georg/George to London and established Italian opera there; much of the rest of the story you probably know. If not, please see my post on Jane Glover's Handel in London.

Antiochus and Stratonica

Cover of the Boston Early Music Festival recording of Antiochus und Stratonica. Image source: Presto Music

Coming to Hamburg just after Händel's departure, Graupner seized the moment. Only months after his arrival Graupner's opera Dido, Königin von Carthago (Dido, Queen of Carthage) was produced. Following the latest Italian trends, Graupner included only serious characters in his tragedy, which ends with a double suicide (and a marriage, of course). But the lack of comedy did not meet with the Hamburg public's approval, and Dido was a flop.

Undeterred, Graupner quickly wrote another opera for the following season: L’amore ammalato, Die kränkende Liebe, oder Antiochus und Stratonica (Love-sickness, or Antiochus and Stratonica, 1708). He made sure to include a comic character, Negrodorus, who is introduced at the very beginning of the opera (he has the second aria) and appears in comic interludes throughout. In Act I he sings, "No matter how lovely the opera, / if Harlequin doesn't play his part, / it won't succeed!" Graupner and his librettist Barthold Feind had learned their lesson.

Title page of the libretto for Graupner's L’amore ammalato, Die kränkende Liebe, oder Antiochus und Stratonica. Image source: Wikimedia Commons

Antiochus features two thwarted loves. The first is the love of the sorceress Mirtenia for Demetrius, the royal treasurer, who is inconveniently married to Ellenia. The second is the love of Antiochus for Stratonica, who is inconveniently married to Antiochus's father King Seleucus. Seleucus, recently widowed, has married the much younger Stratonica, and his son Antiochus is stricken with love for his stepmother. But although his love sickens Antiochus and drives him mad, no one dies in this opera. (Another lesson learned?) Instead, Seleucus eventually recognizes that he should not stand between Antiochus and Stratonica, while Demetrius is reconciled to his wife Ellenia, and Mirtenia is united with Hesychius, the doctor who diagnosed the only cure for Antiochus' suffering.

Antiochus is filled with inventive orchestral writing and attractive melodies, such as Seleucus' melancholy aria of unwelcome recognition, "Zu den Wolcken" (Among the clouds):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f5Bxg1CZPB8

The singer is Harry van der Kamp from the excellent 2020 recording of Antiochus and Stratonica by the Boston Early Music Festival soloists and orchestra, which is also available on the Boston Early Music Festival website. In addition to van der Kamp it features Christian Immler (baritone) as Antiochus, Hana Blažíková (soprano) as Stratonica, Sunhae Im (soprano) as Mirtenia, Sherezade Panthaki (soprano) as Ellenia, Aaron Sheehan (tenor) as Demetrius, Jesse Blumberg (baritone) as Hesychius, and Jan Kobow (tenor) as Negrodorus.

Graupner would go on to write three more operas over the next two seasons, plus possibly contribute arias to three of Keiser's operas (alas, only Dido and Antiochus and Stratonica have survived). But in 1709 Graupner got an offer he couldn't refuse: to become the vice-Kapellmeister in the court of Ernst Ludwig, Landgrave of Hesse-Darmstadt. When the aged Kapellmeister Wolfgang Carl Briegel died three years later, Graupner was given his position.

Postscript: The best man

Graupner is virtually unknown today in comparison to other musicians and composers of his era. But it's not for lack of talent: "Zu den Wolcken," for example, would not be out of place in a Bach cantanta.

In 1723 the position of Thomaskantor, the head of musical instruction at Graupner's alma mater, the Thomasschule in Leipzig, became vacant. After Telemann withdrew from consideration Graupner applied. But when the Landgrave suddenly remembered to pay his back salary and gave him a big raise, Graupner declined the offered position and remained where he was. The Leipzig town council grudgingly awarded the position instead to their third choice, Johann Sebastian Bach, deciding that "since the best could not be obtained, a mediocre candidate would have to be accepted." [1]

The mediocre Bach would go on to write nearly 300 church cantatas. For the court of the Landgrave, where he remained until his death at age 77, Graupner would compose more than 1400. On the evidence of Antiochus and Stratonica there is a lot of wonderful music by Graupner remaining to be discovered and performed.

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1. Jörg Jacobi, "Rediscovery of a youthful masterpiece," booklet essay, Antiochus and Stratonica, Boston Early Music Festival recording, 2020.