Books briefly noted: ancient and medieval

Today, quick notes on a few books that crossed my bed-stand lately:

Making Medieval Manuscripts
Christopher de Hamel
(Bodleian, 2018)
176 p.

Here is a wonderful book for those with an interest in things medieval. I have quite a few books on or about medieval manuscripts — mostly coffee table books on illuminated manuscripts — but here is the first book I have seen devoted to explaining how those manuscripts were made. Christopher de Hamel is a Cambridge fellow with long experience working with these manuscripts, and recently won wide praise for his book Meetings with Remarkable Manuscripts, a great, thick book that I borrowed from the library but returned unread on account of its great thickness. The present volume, however, which is a re-working of his 1992 book Scribes and Illuminators, is invitingly thin and generously ornamented with pictures. It was a quick and fascinating read.

Hamel starts at the beginning — with dead sheep — and explains the process by which parchment was made from the skins. He gives the recipes for medieval ink, and talks about the process of planning the layout of books, as well as the arduous task of actually writing or copying them. We learn a little about the economics of book production. The central section of the book is devoted to the art of illumination: how drawings were planned, how pigments were made, the order in which pictures were coloured, the process by which gold leaf was produced and laid onto the page. Finally he describes how pages were sewn together and bound into codices. The book gives one a renewed appreciation not only for the beauty of the finished books, but also simply for the many volumes which we have inherited from ancient and medieval times, each one of which was produced with great labour. Hamel writing is clear and genial, and his obvious affection for his subject is evident. The book is handsomely produced on glossy paper and filled, as already mentioned, with beautiful and instructive pictures.

***

Warfare in Medieval Manuscripts
Pamela Porter
(British Library, 2000)
128 p.

While I would stop short of claiming to have a positive desire to fight in a medieval war, I think it is still legitimate to point out that a certain romance attaches to the figure of the medieval warrior: the armour, the banners, the tents, the parlays, the horses, the valour, and the heraldry must, in justice, be considered alongside the spear in the torso and the arrow in the eye for a fully rounded picture. This little book provides a brief overview of the conditions and tactics of medieval warfare. We learn about knights and the chivalric tradition, military training, weapons and armour, siege tactics, battle formations, and, in the later middle ages, technological advances such as gun-powdered weapons that sufficiently altered military affairs that a new age of warfare could be said to have begun.

But only, by my estimate, one-quarter of the book is text. The rest is filled out with manuscript illuminations depicting one or another aspect of warfare, and these pictures are the principal attraction of the book, for they are wonderful — all the more so after reading Hamel’s book above and having, therefore, a fresh appreciation for the difficulty with which those illuminations were made. A preponderance of the pictures appear to have been taken from English and French manuscripts — at least, it is very often that the two armies depicted are the English and the French — which makes sense given that they were curated from the British Library’s collection. Although the book is not large (just 6 inches on a side, roughly) the reproductions are of high quality and the colours are vivid. Recommended to students of military history and lovers of medieval art.

***

Practical Theology
Spiritual Direction from St Thomas Aquinas
Peter Kreeft
(Ignatius, 2014)
400 p.

Kreeft had a good idea: highlight within St Thomas’ voluminous writings a set of topics that could be of interest to ordinary (non-philosopher) Christians, add commentary to explain or elaborate Thomas’ points, and then staple them all together. The book includes over 350 of these topics, typically one per page. They range from broadly pastoral topics (“Why God doesn’t give us enough grace to overcome sin”) to moral reflections (“How unbelief is a sin”; “Why wealth can’t make you happy”) to catechesis (“What the Eucharist signifies”). There is plenty of philosophy too (“Knowing God by analogy”; “The importance of reason in morality”). Each treatment is short enough that the book could serve as a kind of daily devotional reader, and this was how I approached it. St Thomas’ writings are incredibly rich, seeming sometimes to be a reservoir for the accumulated wisdom of our whole religious and cultural tradition, and Kreeft’s selections are judicious, even if the treatments are sometimes cursory.

***

Ancient Warfare
A Very Short Introduction
Harry Sidebottom
(Oxford, 2004)
165 p.

By ‘ancient’ is meant, for the most part, Greco-Roman. Sidebottom casts quite a wide net for a short book: war in ancient art, war as a metaphor and conceptual framework in ancient society, motives and justifications for war, and techniques for waging war. He includes an interesting though brief discussion of the development of our just war tradition: Greeks made limited contributions, but Cicero in his Republic specified basic conditions for commencing a war, while some Stoics (Epictetus and Dio Chrysostom) denied that any war could be just, even when fought in self-defence. Soldiery was frowned on by early Christians, not only because soldiers were the pointy-end of the Imperial stick wielded against them, but because soldiers were obligated to uphold the cult of the Emperor; it is telling that in early Christianity the image of the spiritual athlete predominates over that of the spiritual soldier.

The most interesting chapter to me was on the conditions of ancient warfare “on the ground”: what soldiers wore and carried, how they fought in formation, how commands were given, the basic shape of naval warfare, the techniques of siege warfare. Least interesting were the author’s occasional nods at matters in academic vogue (“war was strongly gendered in classical antiquity”). The book as a whole advances an argument about the nature of “the Western way of war”; generally I think that brief, introductory volumes meant for beginners are poor venues for proposing pet theories, but perhaps the publisher thought differently.

Felix Thomas

A very happy Feast of the Angelic Doctor to all!

Felix Thomas, Doctor Ecclesiæ,
lumen mundi, splendor Italiæ,
candens virgo flore munditiæ,
bina gaudet corona gloriæ.

Blessed Thomas, Doctor of the Church,
light of the World, splendour of Italy,
a virgin shining in the flower of his purity,
rejoices in his twofold crown of glory.

A decade of films for Catholics

It’s the end of the 2010s, and film buffs the world over are compiling lists of “Best Films of the Decade”. I’m making my own, in fact, but I’ve a number of films still to see before I’m ready to post it here.

In the meantime I’d like to write about the ten films from 2010-2019 that meant the most to me as a Catholic. These are not “Catholic films” in a straightforward sense, but rather “films that could be reasonably thought to be of special interest to Catholics”, or something along those lines, whether because of their themes or subject matter or setting or characters or whatever. Some are focused specifically on Catholicism, some are about Christianity more generally, and some are of wider scope. A few are off the beaten track. Some are about clergy and religious, some not. Some were made by Catholics, some not. Three were made by Terrence Malick, who is not a Catholic, but who is the preeminent Christian filmmaker working today. Few would be appropriate for a parish movie night, but all, I think, are very good films.

By way of prelude, let me run through some candidate films that, for one reason or another, didn’t make my list.

Regrets

These may have had an outside chance of making the list if I’d seen them:

We Have a Pope (2011); The Letters (2015); The Young Messiah (2016); Chosen: Custody of the Eyes (2017); Pope Francis: A Man of his Word (2018); The Apparition (2018); By the Grace of God (2019); The Two Popes (2019); Corpus Christi (2019).

Worst Catholic film of the decade:

Jeannette: The Childhood of Joan of Arc (Bruno Dumont, 2017) — A prog-rock musical in which Joan alternates between mumbo-jumbo theological speculations and vigorous head-banging in wilderness landscapes. If that sounds bizarrely intriguing, you’ve fallen into the selfsame trap that I did. It is a truly horrendous film, almost unendurable, with absurd choreography and terrible (emphasis on terrible) music, but so committed to its freaky premise that it merits wary acknowledgement. Watch the trailer if you dare!

Honourable mentions: films worth seeing

The Keepers (2017): A Netflix documentary about an investigation into the 1960’s murder of a Baltimore nun that uncovers long-concealed evidence of a predator priest; a good case study in how the establishment — police, lawyers, and the Church — obstructed rather than promoted justice for the victims.

The Way (2010): Martin Sheen walks the Camino!

Lady Bird (2017): Most everybody loved this film; I liked it alright. Lady Bird has a complicated relationship to her Catholic faith, but it means something to her, even if she can’t quite articulate it. A plausible portrait of how many half-lapsed Catholics experience the faith.

The Innocents (2016):  Set in Poland in the months after WWII, as the Allies are cleaning up and the Soviets are moving in, the film centers on a convent of cloistered nuns who have suffered horribly in the waning days of the war, and on a young French nurse who befriends and assists them. A compelling story about how good can come from terrible evil.

Runners-up: films hard to exclude from the Top 10

The Irishman (Martin Scorsese, 2019): A stately, melancholic mobster picture that reckons, as Scorsese’s films have not always done, with the toll evil takes on the soul. Of interest to Catholics, I think, specifically for the final act, in which the Church, a loving mother, tries to coax a heart of flesh from a heart of stone.

***

Le Fils de Joseph (Eugène Green, 2016): A weird and winsome tale about a young man in modern France who finds his life bursting with Biblical motifs at every turn; very funny and quite possibly seriously mystical. There’s nothing quite like it; one scene, in particular, rends the veil.

***

Brooklyn (John Crowley, 2015): A film I love on many grounds, I include it here not because it’s especially theological — it is not — but because it gives us an attractive portrait of Irish Catholic parish life in New York in the 1950s, a world that has almost completely vanished in the meantime.

***

To the Wonder (Terrence Malick, 2012): Presenting us with two contrasting visions of love, one founded on romantic feeling, intense and spontaneous, and another founded on commitment, tenacious and steadfast, Malick invites us to consider which is more attractive, more fruitful, and more likely to bring happiness. Though not the first Malick film I would recommend to someone unfamiliar with his work — it is elliptical and elusive, with many narrative gaps and almost no on-screen dialogue — it is an incredibly beautiful film that is finally, I think, a loving address to “the love that loves us”.

*****

And now, without further ado, my top ten:

10. Silence
(Martin Scorsese, 2016)

An agonizing and vexing film that nonetheless deserves to be in a conversation about great religious films, Scorsese’s long-meditated adaptation of Shusaku Endo’s novel follows two Portuguese Jesuit missionaries to sixteenth-century Japan, where they are tasked with confirming or refuting rumours that one of their Jesuit brothers has apostatized. Captured by the violently anti-Christian and anti-European political powers, the two undergo horrendous suffering alongside the Christians they are trying to serve. It’s a film about faith under terrible strain, about the heroic sacrifices made by Christian missionaries, about what we owe to God, about living with doubt, and about how we discern God’s presence, or absence. As with the book, most of the vexation is packed into a climactic scene that nearly but, arguably, not quite ruins the whole thing.

***

9. First Reformed
(Paul Schrader, 2017)

Paul Schrader is best known as a screenwriter for Martin Scorsese (Taxi Driver, Raging Bull), and is also the author of a minor classic of film criticism (Transcendental Style in Film). These strands, and others, including his Reformed Christian upbringing, come together in this film in which a middle-aged clergyman, Reverend Toller, played with weary sympathy by Ethan Hawke, presides over an historic, but moribund, Dutch Reformed parish. His congregation is so small that First Reformed’s day-to-day operations, including Reverend Toller’s own salary, are paid for by Abundant Life, a friendly evangelical mega-church down the road. First Reformed is preparing to celebrate its 250th anniversary, and Toller is beset by troubles, both personal and political.

While it’s not a specifically Catholic film — all the Christians on screen are Protestants of one kind or another — I suppose it’s on this list just because it’s too well-made to pass over in silence, and its concerns about the temptation to see politics as a substitute for faith, or the hazardous byways we can be tempted down in our search for meaning in life, are of wide application. Schrader has described the film as a tribute to his best loved filmmakers, and one can catch the influence of Bergman and especially Bresson, whose country priest is never far away. It takes a wild turn in the final act, so wild that it will confound many viewers, but still very much worth seeing.

***

8. Kreuzweg 
(Dietrich Brüggemann, 2014)

Brüggemann’s searing Kreuzweg (Stations of the Cross) follows a young woman preparing for Confirmation in a schismatic Catholic sect. A variety of factors have made life difficult for her, and she wants to offer her suffering to God as a sacrifice for the good of others, but, in this as in so many other matters, teenaged judgment is deficient. Brüggemann structures the whole film around the fourteen traditional Stations of the Cross, and commits to filming each of the stations in one static shot — almost, and in that ‘almost’ lies at least a few cinematic delights.

The film wrestles with the hazards encountered by any group that struggles to retain its own nature and culture in the midst of a hostile, or even merely different, culture. The issue is not about whether these Catholics are right to resist the larger culture — this film grants the truth of what they believe — but about how difficult it can be: fraught with loneliness and isolation, and beset by risks of imbalance and fanaticism. It’s an austere but potent film that explores religious faith, friendship, and family life using intentionally minimal means, and it has a terrific ending. Of all the films on this list, this is the one most open to an anti-Catholic interpretation, but my view is that it doesn’t force us into that corner. (I’ve written at more length about the film at Light on Dark Water.)

***

7. Ida
(Paweł Pawlikowski, 2013)

Set in Poland about a decade after World War II, this quiet film follows a young woman, Ida, who, having been raised in a convent, is preparing to take her vows to religious life. For reasons that are not explained — maybe just as a courtesy, or maybe to test her vocation, or because she knows more than she lets on? — Ida’s Mother Superior sends her out of the convent to meet her only surviving relative, an aunt. The two seem to have little in common, but together they embark on a journey to find the graves of Ida’s parents, who had been killed in the war. In so doing, Ida is exposed for the first time to life outside the convent, and to the opportunities and temptations it presents. For a while the film seems like it might be pitching a simple tale of a naive girl who wises up and escapes from the narrow to the broad path, but it takes an unexpected turn that complicates that story considerably.

The film has been gorgeously shot in black and white, and the director, Paweł Pawlikowski, frames his shots such that the action usually occupies only the lower part of the frame; there is a hovering emptiness — or perhaps a fullness — above, as though there were figures hovering there whom we were just too dull to perceive. Apart from whatever thematic value this might have, it adds something distinctive to the film’s aesthetic qualities. It’s a beautiful, quiet, and tender picture. It won the ‘Best Foreign Language Film’ at the Oscars in 2015.

***

6. Calvary
(John Michael McDonagh, 2014)

Another film that contends with the plague of sexual abuse in the Church, Calvary introduces us to a priest in a rural Irish parish who faces, in a very personal way, the painful fallout of the sins of his brother priests. Brendan Gleeson is superb as the priest — a man of substance, feeling, intelligence, experience, and genuine faith — and the theological aspects of the film are richly developed as, over the course of one week, Gleeson’s priest relives, in his own life, the Passion of Christ. Were St Paul a film reviewer, he might describe it as a portrait of a Christian man, under extraordinary circumstances, being conformed to the image of Christ. Lavishly vulgar and unflinchingly violent, it could nonetheless be defensible Holy Week viewing.

***

5. Knight of Cups
(Terrence Malick, 2015)

A high-wire act of extended cinematic metaphor, Knight of Cups follows Rick, a Hollywood screenwriter, who has lost the thread of his life’s meaning and who must, he faintly recalls, recover it. He lives in forgetfulness, sunk in sensual pleasures and self-gratification, chasing after wind, restless and unsatisfied. It is the story of Pilgrim’s Progress, and our pilgrim must escape life’s hazards and temptations in order to set out for the celestial city.

It’s one of Malick’s most difficult films, stylistically. There is little dialogue, intermittent and often fragmentary voiceover, pervasive symbolism, little conventional acting, multi-layered sound, and discontinuous editing. Images wash over the viewer according to a logic that is difficult to discern; we experience it “under the similitude of a dream”.  And it is gorgeous to look at.

Malick aimed, I think, to capture that universal sense that we are summoned to something higher, that in this world, beautiful as it is, we are exiled from our true native land. To a significant extent he succeeded. It is about all of us, about the quest which each of us must undertake to shake off our slumber, to leave the pomp and empty promises of the world in order to climb the dry and dusty mountain where God dwells.

***

4. A Religiosa Portuguesa
(Eugène Green, 2009)

St Augustine said, “My love is my weight.” It is my love that carries me through the world; it is my love that determines where I will go, and where I will end up. The risk is that we can love the wrong things, or love the right things in the wrong way, and end up where we do not want to be. This is the condition of Julie, the lead character in A Religiosa Portuguesa (The Portuguese Nun), as it is your condition and mine.

Julie is a French actress who is in Lisbon making a film. She has a series of mostly ephemeral romantic entanglements with men, but at night she is drawn to a candle-lit church where a young nun sits quietly before the tabernacle. When she finally speaks to the nun, who is already, in a way, her second self (for Julie is playing a nun in her film), she encounters a kindred soul of depth and understanding. What the nun, Sister Joana, says to her is essentially the Gospel: to find one’s life one must lose it; unless a seed falls into the ground and dies, it brings forth no life; love means giving oneself away until there is nothing left, and only then does one find happiness. How many films even try to address a question like, “How can I receive God’s love?” and how many fewer can do so without being trite?

What is wonderful is that this elevated spiritual drama fits comfortably into a movie with a sense of humour, and the frank religiosity of much of the film, which might be too on-the-nose from a more conventional filmmaker, is rendered strange by Green’s suite of distinctive directorial tics such that it slips past our defences.

I have cheated slightly; the film was originally released in 2009, but did not premiere in North America until 2010.

***

3. Of Gods and Men
(Xavier Beauvois, 2010)

Based on the true story of nine Cistercian monks who were caught in the crosshairs of Algerian jihadists in the mid-1990s, this is a moving portrait of true Christian martyrdom, which makes such a striking contrast with what is called martyrdom by jihadists. The film focuses on the monks’ earnest and sometimes agonizing deliberations about whether to stay or to leave the country as the violence around them increases, and the screenwriter has allowed not only considerations of safety and human solidarity to complicate the decision, but the monks also wrestle with the nature of the monastic vocation and the demands of Christian discipleship. Few and far between are films in which sound and serious Christian theology has been integrated so naturally into an intensely dramatic and emotionally compelling story. Considered specifically cinematically, this is perhaps leaning to the pedestrian side, but it is a film of high moral beauty. It won the Grand Prix at Cannes in 2010.

***

2. A Hidden Life
(Terrence Malick, 2019)

Another true tale of martyrdom, and even more intense than the last. Malick sweeps us into the world of St Radegund, a tiny village high in the Austrian Alps, where Franz Jägerstätter and his wife, Fani, are raising their young family, safe, they hope, from the infernal terror raging below. But it is not to be: in time the tentacles of the state snake up into St Radegund and Franz, like everyone else in the village, is made to decide and declare his allegiances.

I cannot think of another film that plays out so decisively against the horizon of the good — here is a man facing a specifically moral decision, and the course he chooses has no advantages to recommend it apart from the transcendental one: it is good. Franz must be incomprehensible to those who believe goodness is something subjective or conventional or confined to a world of immanence (and so it has proved). It is, despite its earthy textures and grounded characters, a film of the spirit that sees people — by implication, you and me — as spiritual beings governed by laws higher than those of nature or state. It is a grand cinematic exhortation.

What most surprised me about A Hidden Life was its emotional power. We expect Malick’s films to be overwhelmingly beautiful marriages of sight and sound — and that holds true here — but at the heart of this film is another marriage, Franz and Fani’s marriage, that is so richly developed that it gives this film a warm, beating heart Malick’s films have not always had. I think of the moment when Fani realizes that Franz has not just been expressing reservations, but intends to allow himself to be swallowed by the evil maw snapping at them, rather than commit an injustice. We feel the agony that either destroys love or forges from it something adamantine.

By any measure a luminous achievement, I believe A Hidden Life has to be given serious consideration in the conversation about which of Malick’s films is his second best.

***

1. The Tree of Life
(Terrence Malick, 2011)

No surprises here. One need only reason out the syllogism: (A) The Tree of Life is the greatest film of the decade of interest to human beings; (B) Catholics are human beings; and therefore (C) The Tree of Life is the greatest film of the decade of interest to Catholics. QED.

I’ve now seen it seven or eight times, and its beauties do not fade. Its mercies are new every morning. Certain images illuminate my imagination: a mother kissing her sleeping child, a stained-glass Christ, a dance in the air, a child swimming toward the light, a field of sunflowers, a little foot cupped by a father’s hands. Malick’s deep dive into memory has left its mark on me — or in me.

It is not possible to say in short compass just what The Tree of Life is doing — I have written about the film at greater length here and here — but I treasure it, in part, for realizing on screen the secret inner life in which a boy awakens to the world and plunges into mystery, a mystery inhabited by a hidden but alluring God. It is a work of wonder.

***

I’d be happy to hear about good films that I ought to have considered, or to hear reasons why I ought not to have bestowed my praise as I have.

Wodehouse: Uncle Fred in the Springtime

Uncle Fred in the Springtime
P.G. Wodehouse
(Overlook, 2004) [1939]
275 p. Second reading.

Europe stood poised on the brink of war when Wodehouse, with characteristic prescience, penned this discerning novel of false identities, high-stakes gambling, domestic strife, and oversized pigs in bathrooms.

Once again, Blandings Castle becomes Grand Central Station as a host of characters descend upon it seeking one thing or another: one wants money to pay off a debt, another needs funds to start an onion soup bar, another must charm a fiancée’s grouchy uncle, one is a hired spy, and Uncle Fred — well, Uncle Fred is just looking for a good time.

I defy anyone to summarize the plot, which is unusually complicated even by Wodehousian standards, with an impressive tangle of overlapping and intersecting machinations driving it forward. More than once, eggs are thrown at those who sing “Loch Lomond”. Serene above the fray is the majestic form of the Empress of Blandings, ingesting a bar of soap, a froth of bubbles ornamenting her snout.

The central character in the book is Frederick Altamont Cornwallis Twistleton, 5th Earl of Ickenham — Uncle Fred to us. He had made one previous appearance in Wodehouse’s world, in a short story, but this was the first novel to feature him, and a fine creation he is: dauntless in difficult corners, a shameless and creative liar, and always eager for mischief.

I was cheered to find that several characters from the Jeeves novels made fleeting appearances in this one, most notably the eminent loony-doctor Sir Roderick Glossop, whom Uncle Fred spent much of the novel impersonating.

All in all, it’s a very entertaining book. I have a certain affection for it because it was one of the first, and may have been the actual first, Wodehouse novels I ever read. I don’t remember why I chose it at the time; probably I just happened to see this nice edition for sale and thought it would be as good a place to start as any, which was at least partly true: with Wodehouse, starting anywhere is better than not starting at all.

Webster: The Duchess of Malfi

The Duchess of Malfi
John Webster
(Bloomsbury Methuen, 2014) [c.1613]
192 p.

This is auspicious. Almost my first steps off the beaten trail in seventeenth century drama have turned up a play that seems an outright masterpiece.

**

The Duchess is a young widow. She falls in love with a man below her social class, and marries him in secret. Meanwhile her brothers, anxious to avoid just such a demeaning connection, forbid her to remarry. When the marriage is eventually discovered, violence erupts, and, as in Shakespeare’s tragedies, the play ends with the stage littered with bodies.

The play has wonderful characters. The Duchess herself is a strong and noble character, winsome and beautiful, and the arc she follows from admirably strong woman to tragic heroine over the course of the play is wonderfully handled. Her elder brother, a Cardinal, is a fine model of the worldly and corrupt Renaissance churchman (and not only of the Renaissance!). Her younger brother, Ferdinand, is a piece of work: prone to fits of violent emotion, there is something unsettlingly carnal and possessive about his guarding the Duchess against remarriage. The Duchess’ secret husband, Antonio, is open-mannered and honest, a man whose entry into the Duchess’ orbit puts one in mind of a lamb going to slaughter.

But perhaps the play’s greatest character is Bosola, a servant of the Cardinal who begins by spying on the Duchess and ends drenched in blood. His deeds are evil, but he has doubts and misgivings about them that flower into tragic regret. He is one of those rare birds: a sympathetic villain. Here, for example, is his speech at the death of the Duchess:

BOSOLA.  O, she’s gone again! there the cords of life broke.
O sacred innocence, that sweetly sleeps
On turtles’ feathers, whilst a guilty conscience
Is a black register wherein is writ
All our good deeds and bad, a perspective
That shows us hell!  That we cannot be suffer’d
To do good when we have a mind to it!
This is manly sorrow;
These tears, I am very certain, never grew
In my mother’s milk.  My estate is sunk
Below the degree of fear:  where were
These penitent fountains while she was living?
O, they were frozen up!  Here is a sight
As direful to my soul as is the sword
Unto a wretch hath slain his father.
(IV, 2)

It is a great moment: the villain weeps at the state of his own soul. And it is a great speech too, seeming to burst from him in a moment of passion and moral clarity.

I remarked when I read a few of Ben Jonson’s plays that the poetry seemed world’s away from Shakespearean verse. Not so in this play; on the contrary, I was again and again reminded of the Bard. Here, for example, is an exchange between the Duchess and her brothers in the first Act, in which the Duchess says she’ll not remarry, and the brothers, for their own reasons, doubt her:

DUCHESS.                          Will you hear me?  I’ll never marry.
CARDINAL.           So most widows say;  But commonly that motion lasts no longer
Than the turning of an hour-glass:  the funeral sermon
And it end both together.
FERDINAND.                 Now hear me:
You live in a rank pasture, here, i’ the court;
There is a kind of honey-dew that’s deadly;
‘T will poison your fame; look to ‘t.  Be not cunning;
For they whose faces do belie their hearts
Are witches ere they arrive at twenty years,
Ay, and give the devil suck.
DUCHESS.  This is terrible good counsel.
FERDINAND.  Hypocrisy is woven of a fine small thread,
Subtler than Vulcan’s engine: yet, believe ‘t,
Your darkest actions, nay, your privat’st thoughts,
Will come to light.
CARDINAL.            You may flatter yourself,
And take your own choice; privately be married
Under the eaves of night——
FERDINAND.                  Think ‘t the best voyage
That e’er you made; like the irregular crab,
Which, though ‘t goes backward, thinks that it goes right
Because it goes its own way:  but observe,
Such weddings may more properly be said
To be executed than celebrated.
(I, 3)

Even just from this short segment, we have three well-delineated characters with definite points of view. We have neat concision (“The funeral sermon / And it end both together.”), a memorable simile (the crab), an aphorism (“For they whose faces…”), and some delightful wordplay (the last two lines). It is very good poetry and very good drama, and to me, at least, it feels quite close to the verse Shakespeare wrote.

One difference, though, between the two is that Webster’s characters (in this play) generally have short speeches; as a rule, no one character holds the stage for very long. The few exceptions to this tendency are interesting though. In this one, for example, the Duchess tells a moralistic fable to illustrate the fickleness of worldly judgments of rank and worth:

DUCHESS.  I prithee, who is greatest?  Can you tell?
Sad tales befit my woe:  I’ll tell you one.
A salmon, as she swam unto the sea.
Met with a dog-fish, who encounters her
With this rough language; ‘Why art thou so bold
To mix thyself with our high state of floods,
Being no eminent courtier, but one
That for the calmest and fresh time o’ th’ year
Dost live in shallow rivers, rank’st thyself
With silly smelts and shrimps?  And darest thou
Pass by our dog-ship without reverence?’
‘O,’ quoth the salmon, ‘sister, be at peace:
Thank Jupiter we both have pass’d the net!
Our value never can be truly known,
Till in the fisher’s basket we be shown:
I’ th’ market then my price may be the higher,
Even when I am nearest to the cook and fire.’
So to great men the moral may be stretched;
Men oft are valu’d high, when they’re most wretched.—
But come, whither you please.  I am arm’d ‘gainst misery;
Bent to all sways of the oppressor’s will:
There’s no deep valley but near some great hill.
(III, 5)

**

It would be an interesting exercise (which I’m sure has been done) to go through the play cataloguing references to death. My guess is that it is saturated. Death lurks from behind curtains and casts its shadow from the footlights before eventually assaulting and conquering the stage. Here’s one example, spoken by the play’s truest and gentlest man as he stands in the ruins of a church:

ANTONIO.       I do love these ancient ruins.
We never tread upon them but we set
Our foot upon some reverend history;
And, questionless, here in this open court,
Which now lies naked to the injuries
Of stormy weather, some men lie interr’d
Lov’d the church so well, and gave so largely to ‘t,
They thought it should have canopied their bones
Till dooms-day.  But all things have their end;
Churches and cities, which have diseases like to men,
Must have like death that we have.
(V, 3)

But though death snatches away most of the principal characters by the end of the final Act, the very last speech, by Bosola, rescues the play from mere despair and destruction by pointing up a larger moral:

These wretched eminent things
Leave no more fame behind ’em, than should one
Fall in a frost, and leave his print in snow;
As soon as the sun shines, it ever melts,
Both form and matter.  I have ever thought
Nature doth nothing so great for great men
As when she’s pleas’d to make them lords of truth:
Integrity of life is fame’s best friend,
Which nobly, beyond death, shall crown the end.
(V, 5)

Alas, but few of these characters can claim that crown!

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The play premiered at Blackfriars in London, and played also at the Globe Theatre. Apparently it was one of the first English plays to be performed indoors, with lighting effects. (One scene takes place in complete darkness.) So, at least, was the claim made by the producers of a filmed stage performance that I had the benefit of seeing, and which I highly recommend.

It might be that The Duchess of Malfi is not quite up to Shakespearean tragic standards, but I’d need to spend more time with it before I’d be confident about that. In the meantime, it has been an altogether marvellous discovery for me.

A sketch of Samuel Johnson

Boswell gave us this generous portrait of his friend in The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides (1785):

It may not be superfluous here to attempt a sketch of him. Let my readers then remember that he was a sincere and zealous Christian, of high Church of England and monarchical principles, which he would not tamely suffer to be questioned; steady and inflexible in maintaining the obligations of piety and virtue, both from a regard to the order of society, and from a veneration for the Great Source of all order; correct, nay stern in his taste; hard to please, and easily offended, impetuous and irritable in his temper, but of a most humane and benevolent heart; having a mind stored with a vast and various collection of learning and knowledge, which he communicated with peculiar perspicuity and force, in rich and choice expression.

He united a most logical head with a most fertile imagination, which gave him an extraordinary advantage in arguing; for he could reason close or wide, as he saw best for the moment. He could, when he chose it, be the greatest sophist that ever wielded a weapon in the schools of declamation; but he indulged this only in conversation; for he owned he sometimes talked for victory; he was too conscientious to make errour permanent and pernicious, by deliberately writing it. He was conscious of his superiority. He loved praise when it was brought to him; but was too proud to seek for it. He was somewhat susceptible of flattery.

His mind was so full of imagery, that he might have been perpetually a poet. It has been often remarked, that in his poetical pieces, which it is to be regretted are so few, because so excellent, his style is easier than in his prose. There is deception in this: it is not easier, but better suited to the dignity of verse; as one may dance with grace, whose motions, in ordinary walking—in the common step—are awkward.

He had a constitutional melancholy, the clouds of which darkened the brightness of his fancy, and gave a gloomy cast to his whole course of thinking: yet, though grave and awful in his deportment, when he thought it necessary or proper, he frequently indulged himself in pleasantry and sportive sallies. He was prone to superstition, but not to credulity. Though his imagination might incline him to a belief of the marvellous, and the mysterious, his vigorous reason examined the evidence with jealousy.

He had a loud voice, and a slow deliberate utterance, which no doubt gave some additional weight to the sterling metal of his conversation.

Favourites of 2019: Popular music

I didn’t spend a huge amount of time listening to pop music this year, but I did hear some things that I liked. Today I’m gathering them together in this post.

The only full record that really won my admiration this year was the latest instalment in Dylan’s on-going Bootleg Series. Travelin’ Thru consists mostly of outtakes from the John Wesley Harding sessions — one of Dylan’s underrated masterpieces — and some material from Nashville Skyline and a bunch of songs he recorded with Johnny Cash. For the most part it is excellent stuff. In the Cash sessions Dylan is wearing his Nashville Skyline voice, and sounds like a feather-weight next to Cash, but it is still a pleasure to hear the two of them singing Gospel standards and their own songs together.

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Apart from that, I’ve just picked ten or so songs that I particularly liked this year.

The singer whom I’m most happy to have discovered is Tyler Childers, whom I first heard on his country record Country Squire. He’s the real deal. His songwriting is inconsistent; he puts me in mind of that girl in the nursery rhyme who had a curl right in the middle of her forehead: when he is good he is very, very good, but when he is bad he is horrid.

Here is something good: “Country Squire”, from his most recent record. Put on your Merle Haggard boots.

And here’s an older song, “Lady May”, which is more rooted in the English folk tradition.

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When Leonard Cohen died in 2016 he left behind vocal tracks for some unfinished songs, and this year saw the release of Thanks for the Dance, on which a set of those songs have been completed by his friends and family. It’s a haunting record, as you might expect, and darker than his most recent records. There are some really good things on it, including this song, “It’s Torn”:

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My sister introduced me to Brandi Carlile’s song “The Mother”. I’m not sure what’s going on with the “fight the power” material in the final verse, unless she means “fight the principalities, and powers, and rules of the darkness of this world”, in which case I’m on board, but this is a really touching song for those of us with a daughter named Evangeline:

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Buddy and Julie Miller put out another duet album this year, and it’s quite good, as you’d expect. My heart strings were plucked by this little love song, “Til the Stardust Comes Apart”:

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Two cover songs caught my ear. The first was Robby Hecht’s version of Jackson Browne’s “Two of Me, Two of You”. I am knocked over by the songwriting.

So terribly sad, but so beautiful. Just to be safe, maybe it’s best to go back up and listen to Buddy and Julie again.

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The second cover song was Audrey Assad’s version of Mumford & Son’s “Sigh No More”, which she put on her most recent EP, Peace. No YouTube, so I’m going to just embed this unsatisfactory excerpt from Spotify:

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But my single favourite song of the year was “Gloria”, from The Lumineers. I don’t know what it’s about — a lady with a drinking problem, by the sounds of it — but I found its stripped-down ebullience irresistible.

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Anything I should make a point of hearing?

Musical anniversaries in 2020

Every year I like to plan a few listening projects around composers who will be marking significant birthdays and memorials in the year ahead. From a very thorough list (Thanks again, Osbert) I have culled the following set:

Memorials

10 years

• Henryk Gorecki

100 years

• Max Bruch

250 years

• Giuseppe Tartini

400 years

• Thomas Campion

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Birthdays

50 years

• Eric Whitacre

150 years

• Louis Vierne
• Franz Lehar
• Leopold Godowsky
• Charles Tournemire

200 years

• Henri Vieuxtemps

250 years

• Beethoven

350 years

• Antonio Caldara

550 years

• Bartolomeo Tromboncino
• Antoine de Fevin
• Francisco de Penalosa

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Some of these are fairly minor composers whose work I’d nonetheless like to know a little better — or at all. Into this category go Vierne and Tournemire, two organ composers whose music I know but little, as well as Vieuxtemps and Caldara. One shouldn’t need an excuse to listen again to Campion’s wonderful songs, but 2020 gives us a good one. And of course it will be cheering to celebrate the birthday of Bartolomeo Tromboncino, the man with the best name in the entire history of music.

The 800 pound gorilla is Beethoven’s 250th birthday. Expect an avalanche as every record label in the business tries to get in on the fun. I’ll be doing my part to mark the occasion; I’ve planned a big listening project focused — one can’t do everything — on the symphonies, piano sonatas, piano concertos, cello sonatas, string quartets, and Missa solemnis. I plan to listen to Andras Schiff’s lectures on the piano sonatas, and I’ll be reading Joseph Kerman’s book on the string quartets as I work my way through those marvellous pieces. I sometimes weary of Beethoven, but I’ve girded up my loins and I’m looking forward to this year-long immersion in his music.

Jazz enthusiasts will be marking the 100th birthdays of both Charlie Parker and Dave Brubeck this year, but I mention this only in passing.

Here is Daniel Barenboim playing Beethoven’s Piano Sonata No.1:

Favourites of 2019: Music

It was a very good year in music, with dozens of excellent recordings crossing my path. Of the many good things I heard, I’d like to highlight today the ten records that meant the most to me, offering, at the same time, my very sincere thanks to the musicians who brought them to life.

Proceeding in chronological order:

Tinctoris: Secret Consolations
Le Miroir de Musique, Baptiste Romain
(Ricercar, 2017)

Johannes Tinctoris is best remembered as a late medieval music theorist, but he composed as well, and his pieces show up from time to time on recordings, usually as bon bons ornamenting the music of others. It was nice, therefore, to see the French ensemble Le Miroir de Musique (whose name is a reference to one of Tinctoris’ treatises) devoting an entire album to exploring his music. We get a mix of instrumental and vocal pieces, some sacred and some secular. It’s not an especially cohesive programme, but it’s tied together by the intimate, small-scale feel of the music-making. Most worthy of note is Tinctoris’ Missa sine nomine (the “no name” Mass); it is, hands down, one of the most beautiful things I heard all year, and earned this fine recording a place on this list.

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Cueurs desolez
Carlos Mena, Iñaki Alberdi
(IBS, 2019)

Josquin: Adieu mes Amours
Dulces Exuviae
(Ricercar, 2019)

Some years ago Carlos Mena — the world’s greatest countertenor, in my books — made a record in which he sang adaptations, for solo voice and instrumental accompaniment, of Victoria’s polyphonic masterpieces. This approach, following historical precedents, involved plucking one of the vocal lines from the polyphonic web, and had the effect of highlighting the incredible beauty of the line within an intimate setting. I loved it then, and my admiration has not flagged in the meantime.

He’s returned to this idea on this new record, made with accordianist Iñaki Alberdi, though this time the lucky recipient of the treatment is Josquin Desprez. Best to listen sitting down, because your knees are likely to buckle at the sheer beauty of it. Mena’s voice is still as creamy and pure as ever it was, and the music, of course, is exquisite — mostly. The catch on this record is that Josquin’s music is interlarded with several pieces by modern composers. Your mileage may vary; mine was poor.

If the thought of picking daisies in a minefield doesn’t appeal, there was another record this year in many respects similar but without the risk. On Adieu Mes Amours the duo Dulces Exuviae also focus on Josquin, also adapting him for solo voice and accompaniment (this time lute). Baritone Romain Bockler isn’t Carlos Mena — who is? — so this record doesn’t soar into the seventh heaven as the previous one does, but neither does it descend to the eighth circle, and it is superbly enjoyable on its own merits. Taken together, these two records make a fantastic Josquinian double-bill.

Here are Mena and Alberdi with the closing section of Josquin’s Inviolata:

And here are Dulces Exuviae singing his In te Domine speravi:

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Dowland: First Booke of Songes
Grace Davidson, David Miller
(Signum, 2018)

Dowland’s songes have a certaine delicious melancholie aire, and they can be sunge in a melancholie waye, and to wonderful effect, but to my ear they worke even better when the voice is brighte and cheeringe. The contraste between the luxurious sorrowe of the sentiments and the beautiful, sunny claritie of the voice heightens the artistic effect. On these groundes, this recital by Grace Davidson is splendide. She is a British singere who has sunge for yeares with ace British choirs: the Tallis Scholares, Tenebrae, and The Sixteene, and she is blessed with a voice that is pure and cleare, like freshe water, or a strucke bell (but not at alle like a strucke bell in freshe water). This recital puts me in minde of that marvellous disc Emma Kirkby made yeares ago of the same songes, and that is highe praise indeed. I cannot recall when laste I enjoyed a collection of Dowland’s songes as muche as I have enjoyed this one, and I hope she makes a recordinge of the other bookes too.

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Cardoso: Requiem
Cupertinos, Luis Toscano
(Hyperion, 2018)

Manuel Cardoso, who lived from 1566-1650, is one of a relatively small stable of Portuguese composers whose work has caught the ear of the wider music-loving world. His music turns up here and there, and I have a few discs in my collection devoted to him, but none of them makes a more convincing case than this one from Cupertinos, a young Portuguese choir who have taken the polyphony of their native land as their specialty. The centrepiece of the programme is Cardoso’s Requiem, which, though perhaps not in the very top tier of settings of the funeral Mass (an exalted realm inhabited by Faure, Mozart, Ockeghem, and Gregory), is nonetheless very beautiful, and is here given a lush, poised treatment. We also get to hear a Magnificat and a variety of shorter motets. Even more attractive than the repertoire, fine as it is, is the quality of the singing and the sound, which together vault this recording into a distinguished class. Cupertinos is a small (10 voices) choir and they sing with breathtaking clarity and transparency; you can hear everything, top to bottom. This disc won Gramophone’s “Early Music” award this year, and quite justly. I look forward to hearing more from this choir.

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Bach: Partitas Nos.4 and 6
Anton Batagov
(Melodiya, 2017)

There may be no composer whose music stands up better to adaptation and experiment than Bach. Play his music on an accordion, or transcribe it for string quartet, or share it out to a group of saxophonists and it still sounds pretty good. Push it here, pull it there, and it bounces back. The Russian pianist Anton Batagov (of venerable age) has evidently become interested in what happens when you pull, and pull, and pull. On this recording he plays Bach at roughly half the normal speed, stretching each of these two partitas for piano out to nearly an hour in length! He thus stakes out an extremal point in Bach interpretation. And, perhaps to the surprise of nobody, the result is pretty great. I, at least, have kept coming back to Batagov’s Bach all year as a meditative, ruminative remedy, a gracious shelter from the hurly-burly, an entrancing slow-motion dance. There is so much going on in Bach’s music that playing it ritardandissimo actually allows for a different register of appreciation, and, somewhere deep down, I think I am also dreaming that if it were slowed down by a further factor of three or four, maybe I could play it myself? A fantasy brought tantalizingly near.

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Johann Sebastian Bach
Víkingur Ólafsson
(Deutsche Grammophon, 2018)

I was initially wary of the flashy young Icelandic pianist Víkingur Ólafsson. He had a big contract with Deutsche Grammophon, who (these days) often seem more interested in style than substance, and his past musical projects have been with folks like Bjork and Philip Glass, which didn’t inspire confidence. However, when this record won BBC Music Magazine’s “Record of the Year” honours last year, I ventured to give it a try. It is terrific! Ólafsson is his own man, but he belongs to the Glenn Gould school of pianism: fleet pacing, staccato tone, and perfect rhythmic precision. He plays with tremendous momentum and a playfulness that suits Bach’s counterpoint admirably. The programme is also worthy of comment, for it appears at first to be a dog’s breakfast: we get the whole of the Aria variata (BWV 989) and the Concerto in G minor (BWV 974), but beyond that it’s a mixture of preludes and fugues, chorales, inventions and sinfonias, and individual movements of other works — Bach as pastiche. But on acquaintance this Bach Collage (heh) has been thoughtfully put together, flowing nicely from one step to the next, and adding up to a satisfying immersion in Bach’s art. DG’s sound far outstrips anything that Gould ever had. It’s a truly exceptional Bach recital.

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Bruckner: Symphony No.9
Manfred Honeck, Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra
(Reference, 2019)

You might not expect Steel Town to be a bastion of high culture, but Manfred Honeck and the PSO are stellar together. A few years ago I cheered their recording of two Beethoven warhorses, and this year it’s Bruckner’s mighty Ninth. I have over a dozen versions in my collection, but this one vaults to the top of the heap (where it shares space, cheek by jowl, with Gunter Wand and the Stuttgart RSO). The pacing is excellent — a little brisker in the immense final adagio than is typical, but it works fine. As has been the case in all the recordings from this orchestra in recent years, the sound engineering is spectacular: the strings are majestic and the brass is searing. To be played loudly.

It’s hard to excerpt Bruckner symphonies, but here is the shortest movement. Give it one minute and you’ll be hooked:

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Einsamkeit: Songs by Mahler
Marianne Beate Kielland, Nils Anders Mortensen
(LAWQ, 2018)

The title means something like “loneliness”, and I suppose it is apt, though these wonderful songs have a much broader emotional range. Marianne Beate Kielland sings the big three cycles: the Ruckert-Lieder, the Kindertotenlieder, and the Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen, all of which have been recorded hundreds of times, usually in full orchestral dress, but often enough, as here, in a piano reduction. What is special about this disc is the singing: Kielland has a modestly sized voice, very well suited to the chamber-scale intimacy of these settings, and she sings with intelligence, feeling, and great beauty. The proof, as they say, is in the pudding: I’ve returned to this disc many times over the year under the allure of that voice, and I consider this one of the most interesting and enchanting presentations of these inexhaustible songs known to me. A treasured discovery.

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Messiaen: L’Ascension
Paavo Järvi, Tonholle-Orchester Zürich
(Alpha, 2019)

Messiaen’s orchestral music is marvellous in its variety and strangeness: great, luscious blocks of sound, amazing tone colours, exotic percussion, and spine-tingling harmonies aplenty. It is sometimes played in a broadly majestic manner, shimmering but soft-edged. Not here. On this disc it fairly crackles with electricity: attacks are tight and crisp, the complicated rhythms are precisely executed, and the sound, though perhaps slightly on the dry side, is full and immediate. I’ve never heard Messiaen presented with so much energy, and even ferocity, and I really like it. The centrepiece of the Tonholle-Orchester of Zürich’s programme is the mighty L’Ascension (which I think of as an organ piece, but I’ve now learned the organ version is a derivative from this orchestral original), and it is joined by several other pieces from the 1930s, Les Offrandes oubliées and Le Tombeau resplendissant, and then rounded out by one of his last pieces, Un sourire. Recommended listening for lovers of Messiaen, but only when wearing rubber-soled shoes.

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Weinberg: Symphonies
Mirga Gražinytė-Tyla, City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra
Gidon Kremer, Kremerata Baltica
(Deutsche Grammophon, 2019)

2019 marked the centenary of the birth of Mieczyslaw Weinberg, a composer whose music I have come to love over the past 10 years as it has finally found a hearing in the West. Quite a few labels put out recordings of Weinberg’s music to mark the occasion, and notable among them was Deutsche Grammophon, which thereby became the first of the major labels to devote attention to this wonderful composer. And they did a good job of it too: the young conductor Mirga Gražinytė-Tyla, with Weinberg champion Gidon Kremer as sidekick, give us excellent performances of an early symphony (No.2, written in 1946) and a late (No.21, written in 1991). The Symphony No.2 is one of my favourite of Weinberg’s orchestral works; written for strings only, it is tightly argued, inventive, and brimming with unimpeachable musicality. The later symphony is a tougher nut to crack; about an hour long, it sprawls across six movements, and even features an extended solo for soprano voice — which, thrillingly and capably, Gražinytė-Tyla sings herself. Both symphonies are plausibly meditations on the Holocaust, for the first was written immediately after the war, a war in which the Nazi machine claimed the lives of Weinberg’s entire family, and the second, subtitled “Kaddish”, is as close as Weinberg ever came to writing a religious work, dedicating it to the victims of the Warsaw Ghetto. It is fascinating music that has richly rewarded the attention I gave it this year.

Here is the final movement of the Symphony No.2:

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