Painting with the Keyboard

This is a review of a concert of the Marlboro Music Festival at the Freer Gallery of Art last month, on March 4.

In conjunction with the exhibition Mr. Whistler's Galleries: Avant-Garde in Victorian London at the Freer (ended April 4), pianist Ieva Jokubaviciute presented works by Franz Schubert, Gabriel Fauré, Claude Debussy, and Frédéric Chopin to a relatively sparse crowd in Meyer Auditorium. Since the Freer Gallery had difficulties arranging this concert with Mme. Jokubaviciute, they had not been able to get an announcement out early, surely a major reason for the less-than-capacity crowd. Before the concert performance itself, Ken Meyers, the Freer Gallery's curator, gave some very interesting introductory remarks, including slides of pictures and their relationship to the music on the program. For example, the opening notes of Schubert's Moments Musicaux, op. 94, D.780 (1823–1827) are scratched into the frame of Whistler's painting Composition in White.

After these comments, Mme. Ieva Jokubaviciute herself came on stage, a rather charming looking, young, blond lady in a copper-colored silk dress with black lace on the outside, thus perfectly matching the stage's back curtain. No ado before she started with Schubert. Bent over the piano like an aged old lady, she came up with a finely played account that didn't quite sound as felt as her facial expressiveness might have indicated. The Moments were indeed masterfully played from memory but did not communicate as much as I imagine they could. Mme. Jokubaviciute's playing the Steinway like a 100-year-old witch on her broomstick, too, was mildly distracting. So was an occasionally occurring muffled, dragging (schleifender) sound of unknown origin. Since the piano's mechanism was still working at the last concert, I am tempted to attribute it to some sort of humming or singing along on the part of the performer. In doing so (if it is the case), she would have picked up a seeming habit of her current teacher, the wonderful and astounding Mr. Richard Goode, whom I suspect of breathing along with some of the Beethoven sonatas in his outstanding recording of the complete cycle.

Available at Amazon: Franz Schubert, Sonata D. 568 and Moments Musicaux, Mitsuko Uchida

Claude Debussy, Preludes, Book I, and L'Isle Joyeuse, Maurizio Pollini

Claude Debussy, Preludes, Books I and II, Walter Gieseking

Chopin, Nocturnes, Maria João Pires

Storming and passionate as the end of these pieces are, it was unfortunate that it literally ended on the wrong note, especially given the excellence that procured that moment in the first place. The applause was surprisingly mild, and the audience curiously noisy with programs, watch alarms, and falling coins. Watch alarms, I wish to point out, are the continued curse of concerts. While most people have accepted that turning one's cell phone off during a performance is a good thing, no one seems to bother or even be aware of their digital watches beeping annoyingly at every full hour—which in most concerts is twice—and slightly spread out among watches being either slow or fast. Perhaps many of the culprits would not even know how to turn this function off: alas, there is a way, and I wish they would find it and forever put an end to these obnoxious interruptions.

Fauré's wonderful Barcarolle no. 6 in E-flat major, op. 70 (1896), is neither heroic—as the most famous preceding work in the same key (Beethoven's Eroica)—nor a sprawling self-glorification in E-flat major like its contemporary piece, the (delicious) Ein Heldenleben (Hero's life) by Richard Strauss. Unfortunately it was over so quick that I could not get my finger on its character in time before it was then immediately taken over by the Nocturne.

The habit of not interrupting consecutive performances of short pieces (of one composer) with applause is an economic one, considering time efficiency, and makes sense in that regard. I could not imagine how annoying it would be if every single one of Chopin's 24 preludes were to be applauded in concert. A nightmare, indeed. It is also true that few things are more mortifying than clapping solely or too early in a classical concert. True, when ignorance of the piece seems to be the cause, it can be quite annoying, and I myself am guilty of huffing with disdain. But really, it isn't all that terrible even then. Moreover, if a piece, a movement, a prelude was absolutely outstanding, why not applaud? It was commonplace in the previous eras to reward (or punish) a successful movement or even moment immediately with audience reaction and furthermore ask for a da capo of entire movements when they had been especially thrilling. Of course, that was in a time when we were not able to go home and listen to any given piece as many times as it would please us, and many audiences reacted to a composition rather than a performance. Still, it is somewhat troubling that applause has now morphed into a curiously stifling social or musical skill, the performance of which is governed by semisecret rules put in place by a self-declared erudite elitist strand of audience. From repertoire to behavior, music halls are more and more turning into museums, a trend that I am not too sure of being a good one for classical music.

But other than going off on a tangent, there was also the exhibit of Mr. Whistler's paintings to see, very conveniently left open late so that the audience was able to stroll through this lovingly and beautifully arranged recreation of Whistler's exhibitions during the intermission. Whistler's watercolor "nocturnes," evocative miniatures that were the link between the Fauré and the Chopin that was to follow, are brilliant tiny masterpieces that send a clear message that size does not matter, at least not when it comes to art. They are very abstract, damp, moody pictures in the convenient format of 12 x 12 inches. Many of the paintings, sketches, etchings, etc., spend most of their time in the vaults, because they are rather delicate. That the exhibition showed them for over a month was unprecedented.

Debussy called the audience back to duty, however, with the bubbly and droplike Brouillards (Fog) prelude from Book II (1913). Ably played, they brought my best response to Debussy's music out in me. Wonderfully turned inward, suddenly revealing themselves from behind a façade that can, at times, be difficult to look beyond. The rather famous Les sons et les parfums tournent dans l'air du soir (Sounds and smells whirl in the evening air) prelude from Book I (1904–10) sounded like a Keith Jarrett recital. (Is this particular one perhaps more famous because, after putting the standard Debussy CD in, it is the first and only piece that is listened to with the necessary amount of concentration and attention?)

In Des pas sur la neige (Footprints in the snow), the birds of Debussy's musical language started to come out. Mme. Jokubaviciute seemed most comfortable in these preludes and outdid herself. L'Isle Joyeuse (The joyous island) and La fille aux cheveux de lin (The girl with the flaxen hair) were the two other Debussy selections she played. After this enormously enjoyable and arousing part of the concert, she could hardly have done any wrong. Especially not with Chopin nocturnes, which are some of the most obviously fitting pieces for the exhibition. The 1841 C minor nocturne, rather than sedating creatures of the night, would wake up every neighbor up and down the street, but music and performance of such quality could well have had none of them mind being woken up. It was this second half of the concert where Ieva Jokubaviciute really seemed to wake up and enjoy herself. Ballade no. 3 in A-flat major, op. 47, composed in the same year, was delivered with a good deal of "oomph" and then went on to sprinkle notes all over the piano, as the young pianist tickled a few out of the keyboard, hunched as she was above the key, and came back to the pulsing theme that reared its head regularly as it went. It was a great end to a concert that improved dramatically in communication after the first half and shall very much hold a special place among the many great concerts that have taken place at the Freer Gallery so far.

Nabucco from the Met

This is a commentary on the live radio broadcast of Verdi's Nabucco on April 10 from the Metropolitan Opera.

Nabucco is usually described as Giuseppe Verdi's first big operatic success, and while it has some strong and memorable moments, it is also pretty flimsy at points. Although it has been quite popular in Europe, this opera has not really been a part of the standard repertory in the United States. (Tellingly, although Nabucco received its American premiere in 1848, only six years after it was first performed in Milan, at the old Astor Place Opera House in New York, it was not performed at the Met until 1960.) The Met's matinee performance was excellent, especially the Met chorus, which is featured so prominently in this opera. The overture that begins it all is fun listening, for something that is almost ludicrously basic, by comparison with later pieces for orchestra in opera, which is not really fair. For the most part, the overture gives us a foretaste of music from the big choral scenes, which are the real highlights of this opera. The scene opens on one of those scenes, with the chorus in the Temple of Solomon in Jerusalem, as the Babylonians attack (recounted in one form in the Old Testament, in 4 Kings 25; the other Biblical book related to the history of the Jews in Babylon is Daniel, written by a prophet during the Babylonian Captivity: see The Historical Nabucco, from the Met). The Met chorus has developed a reputation for accurate and beautiful sound, which was certainly on display here.

The logistics of mounting an opera with so many choral numbers were embarrassingly revealed, however, at the end of the second scene in Part 3, when the sound of the Met chorus shuffling offstage came across on the radio in disturbing clarity. It's a pity that Verdi could not have had a number for the Italian banda, which he was not able to banish from his operas until later in his career, play a rousing number at that point to cover the noise. Verdi did write some music in Nabucco for the banda, that often ragtag group of local band players who demanded to play on stage in operas in many Italian cities in the 19th century. (If you want to know what this group probably looked and sounded like, you can get a good idea from The Godfather [1972], where a banda plays at the wedding of Michael Corleone in Sicily, and in The Godfather, Part II [1974], in the funeral procession of Vito Andolini's father in one of the flashback sequences.) The much more talented Met form of the banda appeared as required in Nabucco in the third scene of Part 4, as Fenena and the other condemned Hebrews were brought in for punishment. At least Verdi tried to make it part of the action.

While the choral parts of Nabucco are certainly important, I should not give the impression that there are not demanding solo roles in this opera. In fact, Abigaille, a slave child who has been raised by Nebuchadnezzar as his own daughter, is one of the great roles for dramatic soprano in the Italian repertory. In the Met production, Andrea Gruber turns in a spectacular performance, at least from the sound that came over the radio. This was my first time hearing Ms. Gruber sing (she sang the same role at the Met last season), and if this performance is any indication, we may expect much excellent work from her. In her big scenes in Part 2 and Part 3, where Abigaille has a remarkable and lengthy duet with her adoptive father (especially in "Deh perdona"), Ms. Gruber's voice was gripping in its dramatic power. The role of Nabucco was handled with great pathos by the distinguished Leo Nucci, who has just turned 62. Incredibly, Nabucco in Part 3, the cruel oppressor rendered insane by God's curse, is one of the more sympathetic roles that Verdi created for baritone. The way that Mr. Nucci sang it, who could not have pity on this crazy old man, treated so cruelly by the slave girl he adopted? Welsh tenor Gwyn Hughes Jones also gave an excellent performance as Ismaele, the Israelite in love with Nabucco's birth daughter, Fenena. He and mezzo soprano Marina Domashenko, as Fenena, sang very well together in the ensemble "S'appressa gl'istanti," at the moment of awestruck horror at Nabucco's blasphemy at the end of Part 2.

Of course, the highlight of the opera is a famous choral piece in Part 3, scene 4, where the chorus of the Hebrews, working in slavery on the banks of the Euphrates in Babylon, sings "Va, pensiero" (Go, thought, on golden wings). As Verdi, in a probably dramatically exaggerated retelling (see the opening quote here), put it, when he first received the libretto, the book fell open to the the page with the words of this chorus on it, and he became obsessed with the story. As has been famously recounted many times, the citizens of Milan at the premiere at La Scala in 1842 (and at subsequent performances in other cities) heard in the lament of the enslaved Hebrews and their yearning for freedom the perfect historical echo of their own subjugation to the Austrians and the longing for a unified and free Italy. As a result, this chorus became a sort of fight song for the political movement toward Italian unification, the Risorgimento, and is even now in many ways the unofficial national anthem of Italy. I will never forget, during a visit to Rome, hearing my cab driver sing the entire chorus from memory when I asked him a question about it. Opera is still in the blood of the Italians. (For more information, see Verdi, Và pensiero, and the Risorgimento, from the Met.) A more recent and ignominious fate for this famous chorus was to be named Anthem of the International Freedom Movement by the Schiller Institute here in Washington, D.C. (founded by the wife of Lyndon LaRouche: yeah, that Lyndon LaRouche.)

Another famous and more poetic Babylonian passage from the Bible is one of the psalms (see the text below, compared with the text of the chorus). The first two verses of that psalm were set in an extraordinary motet by Giovanni da Palestrina, Super flumina Babylonis, which we usually sing at the National Shrine at some point during Lent. The story is particularly poignant for musicians, and I can certainly understand how the Israelites in captivity would hang up their instruments on the willows and refuse to sing for their oppressors. In a Talmudic commentary, I have also read that the Hebrews cut the fingers from their hands rather than play for the Babylonians. In Verdi's chorus, by contrast, the Hebrews seem to long to play and sing of Jerusalem, even asking their harps why they hang silently from the willows, and Verdi gives them a singable tune with a functional harmonic covering to do it. (Just as important to the psalm, but left out of both Palestrina's motet and Verdi's chorus, is the demand for vengeance, up to and including the horrible cry for infanticide in the ninth verse.) At least one member of the audience at this Saturday matinee appreciated the historical background of "Va, pensiero," yelling out in that moment between the final note and the first burst of long applause, in a strong New York accent (Brooklyn? the Bronx?), "Viva l'Italia!"

Nabucco, text by Temistocle Solera Va, pensiero, sull'ali dorate, Va, ti posa sui clivi, sui colli Ove olezzano tepide e molli L'aure dolci del suolo natal! Del Giordano le rive saluta, Di Sïon le torri atterrate... Oh mia patria sì bella e perduta! Oh membranza sì cara e fatal! Arpa d'ór dei fatidici vati Perchè muta dal salice pendi? Le memorie nel petto raccendi, Ci favella del tempo che fu! O simìle di Solima ai fati Traggi un suono di crudo lamento, O t'ispiri il Signore un concento Che ne infonda al patire virtù!

English translation Go, thought, on golden wings, Go, alight on the cliffs, on the hills, Where are wafting, warm and gentle, The sweet breezes of our native soil. Greet the Jordan's bank, The fallen towers of Zion.... Oh, my fatherland—so beautiful and so lost! Oh, remembrance so dear and fatal. Harp of gold of the prophet bards, Why do you hang silent from the willow? Rekindle the memories in our breast That speak to us of the time that was! O harp, like Solomon to the fates, Draw a sound of harsh lamentation May the Lord inspire in you an accord Which might infuse our suffering with virtue.

Psalm 136: SUPER FLUMINA BABYLONIS 1 Upon the rivers of Babylon, there we sat and wept: when we remembered Sion: 2 On the willows in the midst thereof we hung up our instruments. 3 For there they that led us into captivity required of us the words of songs. And they that carried us away, said: Sing ye to us a hymn of the songs of Sion. 4 How shall we sing the song of the Lord in a strange land? 5 If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, let my right hand be forgotten. 6 Let my tongue cleave to my jaws, if I do not remember thee: If I make not Jerusalem the beginning of my joy. 7 Remember, O Lord, the children of Edom, in the day of Jerusalem: Who say: Rase it, rase it, even to the foundation thereof. 8 O daughter of Babylon, miserable: blessed shall he be who shall repay thee thy payment which thou hast paid us. 9 Blessed be he that shall take and dash thy little ones against the rock.

You have one more chance to tune in to the Met broadcast, the fourth part of Wagner's Ring cycle, Götterdämmerung, on April 23. After that, for lack of funding, it will probably cease to exist.

Gallo-Roman Mosaics Discovered in Besançon

I have been trying to cover little-reported European arts news from my reading of European (especially French) newspapers and watching the French television news. For some reason, archeological discoveries have been at the top of my list (see the posts on the excavation of the early Christian basilica in Arles from November 20 and on a 5th-century basilica excavated in Marseilles on January 21). There is a recent article that also caught my attention, on an excavation with extensive mosaics in the old city of Besançon. Here is my translation of a large section of the article:

Translated from Le mystère des mosaïques gallo-romaines de Besançon (The mystery of Besançon's Gallo-Roman mosaics, April 17) by Marie-Guy Baron in Le Figaro The more the excavation proceeds the more it reveals. Besançon's rich Gallo-Roman building, currently being uncovered inside the majestic loop of the Doubs, which continues to produce archeological treasures at the foot of the town's citadel, emerges from the millennia without yielding anything about itself. But its exceptional mosaics are speaking, and their sumptuousness reveals a part of its secret. The mystery is not in the dating. Undertaken by a team from the Institut national de recherches archéologiques préventives (INRAP, National Institute for Preventive Archeological Research) under the direction of the regional leadership for cultural affairs in the Franche-Comté, initiated because of the work on an underground gymnasium at Lumière Middle School in the course of being renovated, the excavations make clear their time period. Of the site's 3,000 square meters (32292 square feet), nearly 2,500 square meters (26910 square feet) have been examined in their uppermost level and several occupations are evident: believed to belong to the Flavian period (end of the 1st or beginning of the 2nd century AD), the building was reconstructed in the course of the second half of the 2nd century. That's not too shabby, even if Claudine Munier, the team leader, fumes over not having found the inscription of any date. It is the building's unusual floorplan that raises questions. The presence of gardens and especially of a peristyle make one think of a domus, or patrician residence. But the dimension of the vast rooms and their odd arrangement, with large open hallways at all places to reach them, seem strange. Unable to determine the building's function, we might call it a scola, a local organization tied to all sorts of activities, from amphitheater games to business meetings, which are logical theories for a site along a transport axis like the Doubs. And images of aquatic motifs support it. So, there it is, the scola is the fashionable theory. The "icing on the cake," as Jean-Pierre Darmon, mosaic specialist from the CNRS, puts it, allows us to put in place what could not be identified. However, this is only a quasi-certainty: there is still the matter of reception halls belonging to a public, semipublic, or private building. This is indicated by the large area of the rooms, the constant presence of spaces for traffic, and the richness of the decoration, with its painted surfaces, its colonnades, and especially its mosaics. The structure includes three large rooms at the ground floor level decorated with these very homogeneous mosaics. The most striking, of almost 200 square meters (2152.8 square feet), was partially excavated in 1973 underneath a neighboring street in the vicinity of the Lumière school. It has a central medallion showing Neptune on his chariot surrounded by coffers with geometric and floral themes. Those that have just been brought to light, inside the school, represent a total of, the one, 65 square meters (699.66 square feet) and, the other, 85 square meters (914.94 square feet). The first is also a carpet of coffers with similar geometric patterns and its central medallion depicts the Aegis, Athena's shield ornamented with Medusa's head in its protective function. [...] In the style of the "typically Gallo-Roman" motifs, Jean-Pierre Darmon sees the likely involvement of Italians mosaicists. The only question is whether they came directly to the center of this already active city, which had been occupied since the neolithic period, or if they came by way of the Narbonne region, whose footprint he thinks he recognizes. At least this may have been the work of an itinerant workshop. The artistry represents "the summit of geometric decorative art, in particular in the mastery of the organization of space and in the delicacy of the tesserae," numbering from 140 to 300 per square decimeter (1.55 square inches) for Neptune, according to the specialist. But also in the imaginative quality of these elaborate borders, these plantlike scroll patterns, these braids with two or three strands, these check-patterns of upright and inverted T's in alternation, and these previously unknown motifs of double winged caducei, symbol of Hermes, god of business and thieves, among other things. On the other hand, the largest tesserae and the least elegant craftsmanship of the face of Medusa indicate a lesser figural skill. [...] This excavation of 2,600 days, where 15 people are working, must be concluded by November 1. It promises other discoveries at lower levels that might shed light on the Gallic period or even earlier eras. While we wait, these splendid mosaics, moving in their present state even while disrupted by waves from the seeping in of the nearby Doubs, will soon be restored by Evelyne Chantriaux and her mosaic workshop in Saint-Romain-en-Gal. Then they will be studied and will be the focus, one hopes, of publication and public exhibition. Domus of a nouveau riche Gallo-Roman, meeting hall of ambitious merchants, or building with a powerful public role, archeological science will no doubt tell us one day.

I have not been able to find images or other information about this excavation. If any readers have any more information, please let me know. You can look at some images of similar mosaics until that happens. There is one tiny image in this article on the excavation from France 2 and another in this article from France 3.

UPDATE:
Cronaca has linked to this post, with information on another story on these mosaics, including a nice photograph.

Stars and Strings

For dedicated lovers of chamber music, Washington, D.C., is a veritable Mecca. Many cities have impressive events of chamber music that fly slightly below the mainstream cultural radar, but I dare say that few if any have as many—and as many free—such events as does Washington, D.C. At the National Gallery of Art, the Library of Congress, various Smithsonian institutions (notably the Freer Gallery), the National Academy of Sciences, the Phillips Collection, and the Corcoran Gallery, the worlds who's who of string quartets polish door knobs. To name but a few of the worthy contributions to what is otherwise not the most culturally savvy town in the country, enthusiasts were able to enjoy the Zehetmayer, Juilliard, Talich, Mendelssohn, Debussy, Bartók, Kodály, Ysaÿe, Brodsky, Chilingirian, and Takács Quartets. On April 2, it was the Leipzig String Quartet that provided small-scale, high-strung excellence to the Coolidge Auditorium in the Library of Congress.

The program featured Mendelssohn (String Quartet in F minor, op. 80), Charles Ives (String Quartet no. 1, "From the Salvation Army") for the "never play last piece," and the perennial crowd-pleaser, one of the most beautiful pieces of chamber music in the repertoire, the Brahms Clarinet Quintet in B minor, op. 115. The quartet took to the Mendelssohn and elicited a rather strange, raspy, buzzing sound—surprisingly hollow, eerie almost—especially from the cello. The four Germans were finely animated and ever so gently amusing to look at, with violist Ivo Bauer being the exception to the former and cause for the latter. Stiff as this petite man played on his instrument, he looked as though he had swallowed a broomstick. In Matthias Moosdorf's hands, the cello shrunk considerably in size, overshadowed by a huge frame as his is.

Accounting for the difference in acoustics from the different venue and my different position relative to the players, I still wanted to think that I could detect a difference of tone and character in all instruments from the fine versions the Bartók Quartet spoiled our ears with on March 21 at the National Gallery of Art (see the Ionarts review on March 24). The Mendelssohn itself was amiably played, animated, and technically flawless. The wonderfully driving second movement (Allegro assai) that is an absolute highlight of string quartet writing, too, was superb—with lower marks only for the oddly flat, perhaps shallow sound that I could well have imagined a bit richer and more buttery, without taking away from the necessary agility in this four-movement lament composed by Mendelssohn in response to the death of his beloved sister. (The complete Mendelssohn String Quartets with the admirable Ysaÿe String Quartet in the budget-priced Universal/Decca Trio series is my highly serviceable copy that brings me much joy, when the memories of this concert wear thin, though the Leipzig String Quartet has also recorded his entire work.) In the Adagio, the tone of the instruments, including the cello, seemed to matter less, if at all. Either the instruments warmed up, or more likely, my ears did, or perhaps the musicians themselves.

==>> Continue reading this review.

That's Good Reading: Fully Credited Links

From the Department of Francophilia, an article (<<Je n'ai jamais vu Nougaro sans un livre>> ["I never saw Nougaro without a book"], April 13) in Le Figaro is an hommage to recently deceased French singer Claude Nougaro by his friend, the writer Christian Laborde. I like two things about this article. First, the image of someone "with his nose always in a book" is not a negative one in France; in fact, it is a compliment to Nougaro.

I never saw Claude Nougaro without a book within arm's reach, a book resting on a table, next to the Botot water bottle, on the rear seat of his car, or carried in the little suitcase he took on tour.

I've seen French politicians photographed on television with their copy of Montaigne or Rabelais in hand while on vacation. Fake or not, the message is that bibliophilia is an admirable quality. Second, I love that he praises Nougaro for his love or words and a command of language:

To a journalist who asked him if song was a "minor art," Claude Nougaro responded, "Minor, but a deep miner! Allow me to fall back on the charcoal of language and suck the marrow out of words to make emeralds."

Jim Harrison, Legends of the Fall (1979) Available at Amazon

Mark Sarvas at The Elegant Variation had a post about Jim Harrison on April 13 and his recent contribution of fiction to The New Yorker (in the March 29 issue, Father Daughter). I grew up in Harrison's home, the great state of Michigan, and got to know some of his fiction and poetry in high school there and at Michigan State University, where Harrison was a student. For the fiction, I think his book of three novellas, Legends of the Fall, is superb, although the cover of the current printing is marred by an image of that execrable cinematic blunder adapted from one of the stories (in part by Harrison himself), of the same title and which gets no link. (Another of these novellas, "Revenge," was adapted as a less offensive but ultimately missable movie.) I have also read and enjoyed Farmer (1976). For poetry, I recommend the elegiac Theory and Practice of Rivers (1989) and Letters to Yesenin (1970). Considering the large number of books Harrison has now published, and which I have not really done very well at keeping up with, I think there are remarkably few failures, which is a sign of this writer's prodigious talents. I have to say that I do not read more than the first few paragraphs of the fiction piece in almost every issue of The New Yorker. If a short story does not pull me in within a half-page, I am likely to lose all interest in investing the time to finish it. This was not the case with Harrison's story, which I read without noticing that Harrison's name on the first page. I thought something seemed familiar about the style, a suspicion that was confirmed when I turned back to learn the author's name.

In this 1998 interview with Jonathan Miles for Salon, Harrison tried to explain his scintillating celebrity in France:

The French have quite a tradition of interest in American literature. You know, it was the French that busted Faulkner open. And they like somewhat rural American fiction. They don't need to read New York fiction—they already know that. It's the landscape and the setting that they've long been interested in. They don't have that there—that enormous space—and they have a much more homogeneous social life. They like the stew that America is. . . . They will accept [lush language] in a way that it's hard to get accepted in America. They're not so grotesquely plot-oriented. Even if you look in their literature—try reading Proust and looking for a plot line.

The French are very sophisticated in a literary sense, but they aren't lit majors. They're just people—butchers, actresses, actual bakers. They're not in the lit game or the lit industry. I think it's interesting what someone there said to me once—it's something that I hadn't thought before, and it startled me. He told me that (the French) read me because in my fiction you have the life of relative action but also the life of the mind. In so much fiction we have one or the other, but never both. We tend to try to separate them.

I can't possibly add anything to those words. Go read.

Special Concert at the National Shrine

The Choir of the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception, including yours truly, will be joined by the Orchestra of the 17th Century this Sunday for a special concert on the Octave Day of Easter (April 18, at 7 pm) in the Basilica's Crypt Church. The program will include chants, organ improvisations, instrumental canzone by Gabrieli and Priuli, and the following choral repertory: William Byrd, Ave verum corpus; Felice Anerio, Christus factus est; Gregor Aichinger, Regina caeli; Giovanni da Palestrina, Sicut cervus and Salvator mundi; Luca Marenzio, Jubilate deo (à 8); and Claudio Monteverdi, Cantate domino and Adoramus te Christe. If you enjoy sacred music from the 16th and 17th centuries, you will have the chance to hear it in the superb acoustics of the Crypt Church.

Naughty Little Beaver

Simone de Beauvoir The Second Sex (1949) Letters to Nelson Algren (from BBC Online) Simone de Beauvoir Web site (Suzanne Roy)

Sometimes I think that private correspondence should remain just that—private. This is nowhere truer than with that most personal type of correspondence, the love letter. You used to be able to believe in certain truths in the world of literature, and one of them was that Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir were the ideal intellectual couple. They were both devastatingly and elegantly intelligent, and they were meant to be together forever in the Café de Flore, although they never married, which would have been a shameful concession to the bourgeoisie. Then we learned a few years ago that le Castor, or the Beaver, as de Beauvoir was nicknamed, had carried on a secret and obsessive love affair with an American writer from Chicago named Nelson Algren. In an article (Simone de Beauvoir: Ces lettres qui ébranlent un mythe [Simone de Beauvoir: those letters that shake up a myth], April 15) in Le Point, Jacques-Pierre Amette reviews a new edition of some of de Beauvoir's letters. Now it turns out that our naughty little Castor was also intimately involved with Jacques-Laurent Bost, who was Sartre's brilliant student, from 1937 to 1940. Here is my translation of an excerpt from the article:

Beauvoir repeats on every line, "I am going crazy thinking about you." Wow! I challenge any reader not to fall in love with this honest-seeming young woman, with the face bathed by some sort of interior dignity. Any man would have wanted to walk out of the Rhumerie on the arm of this pretty professor "all torn up with the desire to see you," as she wrote. For the whole story, we learn that it was September 21, 1939, that she bought a turban, which became her mythological symbol. We remain stunned at the way the feeling of love makes her storytelling talent pour out on nothing and frees her personality. . . . She had drunk the magic potion. She goes crazy over Picon-cassis, faces, meetings, uniquely, it seems, for the happiness of speaking to "little Bost" and helping him, reassuring him, supporting him, distracting him, saving him from his military nightmare. So, we ask ourselves a question: how could she have bound herself so strongly, officially speaking, to this Sartre who described sexuality only as a sickness. . . . What a poorly matched couple! How could she live with this "spectacle-ish" little man, with the lawyer's metallic voice, the rumpled blue suit, obsessed with crabs, homosexuals, with the roots, the mud of being, the Heideggerish jam, while she was so full of verve, fire, boldness, and freshness? What a mystery...

You can read a short excerpt of the letters: Beauvoir et Bost: L'amour secret du Castor (Le Nouvel Observateur, April 15, by Serge Lafaurie).

Museum for Hire

A large selection of art from the Museum of Modern Art's collection is on temporary display in Berlin (Das MoMA in Berlin, until September 19). (This was first reported on Ionarts on March 16, thanks to Heather Mathews at Hem|mungen.) A new article (Das MoMA in Berlin: Friede, Freude, Warteschlange [The MoMA in Berlin: Peace, Joy, Lines], April 14) by Christiane Wolters in Der Spiegel reports that record-breaking crowds are making the MoMA show the most popular public destination in Berlin right now (I'm trying to imagine this happening in Washington: for an Impressionist show, I could see it, but for a selection of works from the Centre Pompidou?). According to the article, the line at its peak winds around the building several times, and the wait just to get in is as much as four or five hours. For safety reasons, no more than 1,000 people may be in the exhibit space at the same time, which means that around 5,000 people per day are able to see the show. Musicians have begun to set up at various points along the line, to entertain those waiting, and there is even a physical therapist who has been leading the crowds in stretching exercises to keep limber.

There is also an older article (MoMAnia in Berlin: "Verlassen Sie sich darauf, es wird voll", February 18) by Michael Kröger, which has a selection of 12 artworks in the show. The cost of bringing the art from New York to Berlin—and only to Berlin—is significant, although the exact amount has been kept from public knowledge. The Verein der Freunde der Nationalgalerie (Society of friends of the national gallery) has underwritten the budget, with the demand that the show must make enough money to pay for itself, which it looks like it will.

Isabelle de Pommereau, in an article (Libraries that loan Picassos, not Grishams, April 9) in the Christian Science Monitor, reports on the existence of artotheken, libraries that lend art works to people's homes, in Germany. Well, if you had just been reading Ionarts regularly, you would have known that two months ago (see post on February 2 and followup post on February 13). Let's keep up, people!