Toward appropriately festive feasting

I dare say I yield to no-one in the annoyance I feel when I look at cooking blogs: all those colourful utensils, long ingredient lists, and gently-lit photographs of unburnt confections are enough to drive me out of the kitchen entirely. But I do like the idea of feasting on feast days, and I can see the argument for celebrating those special days with something apropos (rather than, say, just eating a bag of beef jerky).

Which is why my usual annoyance is moderated when I look at a blog called Catholic Cuisine. The good folks who run it have all the usual photographs of little bowls and clean countertops that you’d expect, but they redeem themselves by coming up with some great feast-day-themed recipes.

For instance, today, for the feast of St. Ignatius of Loyola, they show us how to make Jésuites — little French pastries, it turns out. For tomorrow, which will be the feast of St. Peter in Chains, they are making a kind of pretzel chain.

A few weeks ago, for the feast of the Sacred Heart, they put together a really nice vegetable tray in the shape of the Sacred Heart. Blessed is he who has not seen and yet has believed — but in this case you really ought to see it anyway.

Goldberg Variations: Aria

Bach died on this day in 1750. Here is Daniel Barenboim playing the Aria from the Goldberg Variations. A few years ago, when we had an old piano in the house, I spent a good deal of time trying to learn to play the opening bars of this piece. I never did get very far.

Great moments in opera: Der Rosenkavalier

Richard Strauss made an operatic name for himself with the dark and exotic dramas of Elektra and Salome, with their bloodthirsty heroines and tumultuous scores, so it was, perhaps, a surprise when his next project proved to be a genteel drawing-room opera with music based throughout on the Viennese waltz. Der Rosenkavalier (The Cavalier of the Rose) was a hit nonetheless, and has remained popular in opera houses in the intervening century.

There are four principal roles.  The Marschellin, an older woman, is carrying on an illicit affair with a young man, Octavian; meanwhile, a philandering older man, Baron Ochs, seeks the hand of a young woman, Sophie, in marriage. Over the course of the opera Octavian and Sophie fall in love, and their marriage is contrived with the help of the Marschellin and at the expense of the Baron.

That’s it, in a nutshell, but Strauss and his long-time librettist, Hugo von Hoffmannsthal, have made more of it than a brief plot sketch would suggest. Consider, for instance, the long monologue which the Marschellin sings at the end of Act I; in it, she reflects on growing old, the inevitable passage of time, and mortality. It’s a melancholy monologue, but Strauss has infused it with a delicate, beguiling beauty that resonates graciously in the ear. Here is Kiri Te Kanawa singing it, with English subtitles:

We can hear the same music sung by the wonderful soprano Elizabeth Schwarzkopf here, albeit without English subtitles. Live footage of Schwarzkopf is rare, so this is a treat. If you don’t know, she was one of the greatest Strauss sopranos of the ‘golden age’ of opera recordings in the 1950s and 1960s.

At the end of Act I, immediately prior to the Marschellin’s solitary ruminations we just heard, Baron Ochs had deputized the young Octavian to take a rose to the home of Sophie, presenting it to her on the Baron’s behalf. (Octavian is thus the titular ‘cavalier of the rose’.) At the beginning of Act II he arrives at her home, enters, and presents the gift — except that as he does so, he falls in love with Sophie, and she with him. This is a wonderful scene. The two of them sing a sprightly and ravishingly beautiful duet. Here are Anneliese Rothenberger (Sophie) and Sena Jurinac (Octavian); unfortunately I could not find a clip of this scene with English subtitles. You’ll notice that Octavian’s part is sung by a soprano; apparently it doesn’t prevent his being attractive to Sophie.

Strauss saves the best for last, however. As Act III draws to a close, and all of the machinations of the plot are winding down, he gives us two gorgeous ensemble pieces. The first is a trio, Hab’ mir’s gelobt, sung by the Marschellin, Octavian, and Sophie. This is one of the few triple-soprano pieces that I know of; one might have to go back to baroque opera to find another. Here are Anna Tomowa-Sintow (the Marschellin), Janet Perry (Sophie), and Agnes Baltsa (Octavian) in a 1980s-era Salzburg production, with English subtitles:

This is followed by the opera’s final number: a ravishing duet between Octavian and Sophie, which begins at about the 10 minute mark in the clip above, and is unquestionably one of the opera’s high points.

Der Rosenkavalier is over three hours long in performance, and, though the plot is slight, parts of it are truly excellent, as I hope this post has made clear.

Books briefly noted

A few quick notes on books I’ve read over the past few months:

Back to Blood
Tom Wolfe
(Little, Brown, & Co., 2012)
720 p.

Tom Wolfe returned after an hiatus of nearly ten years with this cheerful mess of a novel about life in the city of Miami. It’s a diffuse sort of story, but to the extent that it has a central character that character is Nestor Camacho, a young Cuban-American police officer with an unwitting talent for stirring the racial tensions present just beneath the surface of the city’s life. Unlike Wolfe’s better novels, the central plot of Back to Blood feels disconnected from the social and moral issues that he wants to explore — principally multiculturalism in a modern urban center. Though patchy at times, it is a lively story, told with Wolfe’s usual half-unhinged winsomeness. There is a most regrettable subplot — totally inessential, as it turns out — about pornography addiction; sure, it’s “topical”, but it feels shoehorned in and I, for one, could have really, really done without it. Really.

Bring Up The Bodies
Hilary Mantel
(HarperCollins, 2012)
432 p.

Last year I wrote with mixed impressions of Mantel’s Wolf Hall, which followed Thomas Cromwell’s life from his childhood up to his establishment in the court of Henry VIII. It was from that lofty perch that he presided over Henry’s divorce from Katherine of Aragon and the executions of St. Thomas More and St. John Fisher. This sequel, which, like its predecessor, won the Man Booker Prize, has a tighter focus: the action covers the period 1535-36 and Henry’s waning devotion to Anne Boleyn as his hopes alight upon Jane Seymour. As the title of the book suggests, this volatility in the royal affections results in a bloodbath, including, of course, in the final pages, the execution of Anne herself.

Given that gruesome terminus, it might be perverse to say that I enjoyed this panel of the story, and enjoyed it more than the first, but it is nonetheless true. I objected in Wolf Hall to what I took (and take) to be Mantel’s unjust portrait of More, but here I had no reason to take such offense (perhaps simply because of my own ignorance; I make no special claim for this novel’s historical accuracy). Interestingly, one of the literary aspects of the previous novel that I had praised — namely, the way in which Mantel, through artful use of pronouns, saturated the very grammar of her story with the force of Cromwell’s character — is downplayed in this second volume; there are an abundance of clarificatory “he, Cromwell”s to steady the reader, and this I found a little disappointing. I leave open the possibility, however, that it was done precisely to begin eroding our confidence in his competence and security.

Mantel does seem to be preparing us for his eventual downfall. There is a moment in Bring up the Bodies when his position in the court is suddenly shown to be very precarious indeed, and it comes as something of a shock to realize that even so expert a political animal as Cromwell can find himself outmaneuvered by events. He has the wit to call himself “a man whose only friend is the King of England,” but there is a hard truth behind the jest that will, I expect, be brought into the foreground in the projected next volume. In the meantime, Mantel’s traversal of this much-travelled historical territory makes for engrossing reading.

Ironies of Faith
Anthony Esolen
(ISI, 2007)
420 p.

Irony might be thought to be the special province of post-modern skeptics, who have made much hay with it: cool detachment, hip knowingness, cynical distance. Irony can be, and has been, deployed as a kind of “universal solvent,” an engine of deconstruction. But Anthony Esolen wants to rescue irony from those associations and recover its place — a joyful, enriching, surprising place — at the heart of Christian devotion. In this book he plumbs great Christian literature for ironic themes and presents them for our consideration.

Is it surprising that there should be a place for irony in Christianity? This is a religion that plays endlessly with interchanges of first and last, mighty and lowly, strong and weak; it identifies a little baby with the Creator of all things, and worships as Lord an executed criminal. Esolen wants to stress that deep irony does not arrive from mere cleverness, but is rooted in a problem of knowledge. Irony arises, he argues, when an author reveals to the reader “a stark clash between what a character thinks he knows and what he really knows,” and he finds it pervades the Christian imagination.

The book ranges widely, with chapters devoted to Dante, Shakespeare, Dickens, Spenser, Dostoyevsky, Hopkins, Tolkien, and many others. Some authors — Francois Mauriac and Alessandro Manzoni, for instance — I am not familiar with, and I confess I skipped over those chapters; I’ll return to them when the time comes. There is a very fine closing chapter devoted to the anonymous medieval poem “Pearl”, which Esolen calls “the greatest religious lyric in English”. It is indeed a superb poem, and this is the best and most accessible introduction to it that I have seen.

Literary criticism is not really my thing, but I found this book rewarding nonetheless, not so much for its ironic insights — irony is not really my thing either, I must admit — but for its thoughtful exploration of literary works that are deeper and richer than my reading can plumb. This is literary criticism born of love and informed by a long tradition of moral reflection. It is a very worthwhile book.

Favourite philosophers

Philosophy Bites is a long-running podcast which features brief discussions with academic philosophers about particular topics: Roger Scruton, for instance, on “the sacred”, or Martha Nussbaum on “the humanities”, and so forth. I don’t listen to it regularly, mostly because I do not usually recognize the names of the interlocutors (and, when I do, it is sometimes a deterrent).

Trolling through their archive recently, I did find an interesting “special edition” of the podcast in which they asked a number of philosophy professors a simple question: “Who is your favourite philosopher, and why?” I did not count the number of respondents, but there must have been roughly 100, enough for a few patterns to emerge in the answers.

To my surprise, the name cited most frequently was David Hume; he was praised for being “a good writer” — rare enough among philosophers, it is true — and for being “just plain right” and even for being “a good cook”.  Second was Aristotle. In a lower tier, but still with quite a few admirers, were Nietzsche, Wittgenstein, Mill, and Kant. Nobody picked a medieval philosopher, and I was astounded that only one person named Plato.

Now, almost all of those interviewed were from American and British universities, well inside the Anglosphere, where philosophy is dominated by the analytic tradition. That might partly account for the popularity of Wittgenstein. Both Hume and Aristotle are, in a sense, “naturalistic” philosophers, intent on close observation and modest speculation, both of which qualities suit the traditional orientation of analytic philosophy toward the sciences, so that might go some distance to accounting for their high standing.

But it would be even more interesting, in light of this informal poll, to see a parallel set of responses from philosophers working in Europe. My suspicion is that the responses would be quite different: less Hume, for instance, and more Plato. But I bet that both Nietzsche and Kant would survive the channel crossing.

As for my own favourite philosopher: I’m not really sure. As I discovered some years ago while reading Copleston’s big history of philosophy, I am basically out of sympathy with most modern philosophy, from Descartes on down. I would name Plato or Aristotle — or, since he is to some extent a synthesis of the two, Aquinas. But I am not sufficiently well-educated in philosophy to be able to name a favourite with confidence.

Around and about

A few things worth noting:

• Today is the anniversary of the death of William Byrd in 1623. Let’s hear his luminous setting of Ave Verum Corpus, sung here by the Tallis Scholars: 
• Maclin Horton has some good commentary on the recent Hobby Lobby decision from the US Supreme Court, here and here.
• North of the border, we’ve had our own, politer brand of cultural politics to contend with. Our Golden Boy decided, out of the blue, to bar pro-life candidates from the Liberal party and to crack the party whip on the backs of those already elected to Parliament. Raymond de Souza’s blunt criticism of those who have buckled under this mistreatment is sobering but very much to the point.
• Also from Maclin Horton: somebody at Salon woke up and realized that Pope Francis might not be the Great White Hope that some thought he was. Instead, he’s a “sexist, nun-hating, poverty-perpetuating, pedophile-protecting homophobe”. That’s as clueless an assessment as its opposite was, but it is nonetheless oddly refreshing to hear it.
• Andy Whitman has high praise for Joe Henry’s latest album, Invisible Hour. Maybe this will be the Joe Henry record that finally wins me over? Andy sure makes it sound great.