Julius Caesar at the opera

It has been a long time since I’ve posted here. It’s so easy to get distracted by the infinite variety of retired life  …teaching, singing, playing the viol, walking in the Berkeley hills, gardening…

Speaking of infinite variety, I recently saw a wonderful Cleopatra opera: Handel’s Giulio Cesare, produced by West Edge Opera, here in the Bay Area. On the right is West Edge’s publicity picture of Shawnette Sulker as Cleopatra—in the “victory” costume she puts on at the end of the opera as she and Caesar celebrate their love and their joint conquest of her nasty brother Ptolemy. You may remember all that from George Bernard Shaw or (maybe if you’re my age) Elizabeth Taylor.

It’s great to have so many small opera companies in the Bay Area, like West Edge (get the name? …. on the west edge of the continent… but also opera with a western — California — “edge” to it). In my review (read on), I complain about the acoustics in the hall they used (Oakland’s Scottish Rite Hall) — but really, it’s so much better than the big cranky War Memorial Auditorium that San Francisco Opera uses. 

Next month, I wish I could hear SF Opera premier John Adams’ new piece on the same wonderful old story: Antony and Cleopatra. We’ll be out of town, unfortunately.

Despite some gripes, I enjoyed the performance, and maybe even more the chance to study the wonderful score. 

I have not figured out how to embed my reviews (for San Francisco Classical Voice) in this blog, but here’s the link. Let me know what you think about it, if you have time.

I can’t find any videos of this performance, but here’s a clip from the Boston Baroque performance of Giulio Cesare, with Susanna Phillips singing “V’adoro, pupille,” Cleopatra’s stagey seduction piece, with Caesar properly in awe. Thanks to Peter Sykes (shown in the video on the harpsichord) for showing me this!

Enjoy!

Letters from Grandmother

My grandparents Jones lived in the town of Cairo, in southwest Georgia, just north of Talahassee, Florida. Grandfather, Walter C. Jones, was a Methodist minister and pecan nursery grower; grandmother, Martha Melvina Powell (Mellie) Jones, was a homemaker for their five children, including my father.

I recently uncovered a packet of letters from Grandmother to my parents in the 1930s and 40s, giving me a chance to learn more about them from her own words. I’ve pieced together a (fragmentary) history of their lives in a booklet I just finished. 

One letter describes the burning down of their home (no one was hurt) in 1934, written that same night to her Ohio family to assure them that they were safe. Later letters describe their work to find a new place to live and still keep up their income source from farming at their burned out home. 

A letter in 1944 describes the town’s prayers and relief at the news of D-Day. 

 

All the letters are full of daily life, relating the news from Georgia and reflecting on what she hears from my parents in Ohio about their lives. The prices of pecans, the weather (surprisingly cold in the winter, even in southern Georgia), Grandfather’s declining health, church services, family news. 

 

 

I’ve been blessed by the chance to know these grandparents, a grandfather I never met, and a grandmother I saw on one visit in April of 1950, when I was 3 years old. Here’s my record of that visit, with my mother and grandmother.

You can access the booklet I wrote with more photos at the Family History tab on my website.

A Renaissance music theorist in quarantine?

I’m going to be taking an online course on Renaissance music theory starting this week, and the teacher suggested that it would be helpful to look in advance at one of the major theory textbooks from that age, Thomas Morley’s A Plain and Easy Introduction to Practical Music (1597).

Walter Crane’s 1883 version of Morley’s “It was a Lover and his Lass,” from Pan Pipes.

Morley was one of the great composers of that golden age of English music, and a contemporary of Shakespeare. They may have known each other, for Morley wrote a setting of Shakespeare’s song “It was a lover and his lass” (from As You Like It) — a setting still much used in productions. Here it is with Jennifer Ellis Kampani and Voices of Music, redolent with spring and love and birdsong, silly and totally beautiful. 

When I started reading Morley–in an online facsimile of the first edition–I found two remarkable things before even starting the music theory.

First was the dedication of the book “to the most excellent musician, Master William Byrd.” I’ve read hundreds of these Elizabethan dedications, and almost all are sycophantic begging letters to rich and powerful men who probably didn’t give a hoot about music, or poetry, or whatever some poor ink-stained scholar was slaving away about, but who might send a few coins in thanks for seeing his name on a bookstall outside St. Paul’s Cathedral. 

This dedication is different. Although Byrd was by then well-known as a composer, he wasn’t likely to lay down a bunch of money on Morley’s desk. The dedication is a thank-you letter from student to teacher: Morley shows us that he is overwhelmingly grateful for what he has learned from Byrd. There are three sources of our creativity, Morley says: God; our parents; and our teachers. 

Teachers are “those by whose directions the faculties of the reasonable soul be stirred up to enter into contemplation and searching of more than earthly things: whereby we obtain a second being, more to be wished and much more durable than that which any man since the world’s creation hath received of [i.e, from] his parents; causing us to live in the minds of the virtuous, as it were deified to the posterity.” 

I hope all our teachers hear such praise of their work! 

William Byrd (1540-1623)   (I could not find a contemporary portrait of Morley)

The second thing that struck me was Morley’s description of the writing of the book. He began the project as a way to keep busy during an enforced quarantine: “the solitary life I lead [led?] (being compelled to keep at home) caused me be glad to find anything wherein to keep myself exercised for the benefit of my country.” 

 

I don’t know precisely when Morley was compelled to keep at home, nor why (and being myself compelled to keep at home, I can’t get to the library to find out more)– but with a publication date of 1597, I’m guessing that it might have been the plague that ravaged London in 1592-93. 

The theaters were closed, and Shakespeare turned from writing plays to writing poems (such as Venus and Adonis), and dedicated them to rich aristocrats. 

Concerts were canceled, and Morley turned to writing a treatise about music theory. 

Endearingly, he tells us that he sees it seemed like a lovely idea at first. Theoretically lovely. But it became something of a nightmare, as he was forced to dig through dozens of other theorists in a vain attempt to sort out their contradictory axioms about music. 

“If I had, before I began it, imagined half the pains and labor which it cost me, I would sooner have been persuaded to anything, than to have taken in hand such a tedious piece of work, like unto a great sea, which the further I entered into, the more I saw before me unpassed.” 

I know the feeling! 

A Donne poem about sheltering in place

John Donne, a contemporary of Shakespeare, grew up in a crowded and often plague-riddled London. He surely knew well what it was like to shelter in a tiny set of rooms while the watchmen ensured that no one was out on the street except for essential services. 

Being unemployed much of his early life, Donne presumably did not count as “essential.” Decades later, he became respectable and was Dean of St. Paul’s Cathedral, where his preaching attracted thousands and was a major part of the cultural life of the city. But this is earlier . . . 

This wonderful painting shows Donne as a young man, full of the fashionable “melancholy” attitude (in modern terms, “Goth” or “emo,” maybe?). Hamlet might have looked like this. 

One way to try to make a career, for a brilliant but not well-connected young man, was to write poetry, and particularly love poetry. And at the end of the Elizabethan era, the more outrageous the poetry, the more it would be read aloud by other young gents looking for positions, and copied out and handed around, and maybe eventually some patron would be interested in how smart you were, and give you a job. 

 

It might have worked for Donne: he wrote a lot of flashy, wonderful poems, and got quite a name for himself. And he got a position as secretary (that was an important job at the time: the “keeper of secrets”) to Sir Thomas Egerton, the queen’s Lord Keeper of the Great Seal. But Donne blew it: he fell in love with Egerton’s niece, Ann More (a descendant of Sir (Saint) Thomas More), and secretly married her. 

This was a marriage WAY over Donne’s social status. Ann’s father and uncle made sure there were consequences. One poor friend who signed as witness to the marriage was thrown in jail. Donne was fired, and he and Ann and their many children moved to the country and laid low for a decade. 

“John Donne, Ann Donne, Un-Done,” he supposedly wrote.

Sir Thomas Egerton--
apparently not a man to mess with.
No picture of Ann More is known.

Donne’s early poems were often erotic, sometimes misogynistic in the manner of young male poets of the age, always cheeky and irreverent. (He’s also famous for his later, passionately devout “Holy Sonnets”). He doubted everything — and this in a period where you needed to profess your faith regularly, in God, king, church, law . . .  

The poem I’m bringing in to this post, “The Sun Rising,” openly mocks the supposed hierarchies of Renaissance thought– that the sun is the most noble thing in the natural world, that the king is wise, that education is important, that living IN the world is a crucial duty of every ambitious young man. It essentially postulates that sheltering at home is the most noble thing anyone can do, far more important than the distractions of the world outside. . 

 

Imagine a wood-paneled Tudor room, with a small lead-paned window, perhaps a writing table covered with an oriental rug, and strewn with manuscripts and books and maps– and in one corner, a big four-poster bed with curtains. In the bed, a couple. The time: dawn; the sun begins to shine through the window, and eventually to penetrate the embroidered bed-curtains; the poet wakes up.

The poem comes from the Poetry Foundation website.

This is a Tudor bedroom, probably fancier than Donne’s, that was in the collection of the Victoria and Albert museum, and is now in a house in Cumbria, northern England. From an article in The Guardian. 

  • The sun is supposed to “rule” all our lives. Here it’s “unruly.” The seasons are not for lovers!
  • Morning, out there in the world, is full of reluctant workers–schoolboys and apprentices, farmers, courtiers forced to hunt with the king at dawn. 
  • The world is full of multiplicity, but love is “all alike,” undifferentiated by season or region or time. People in the world, dependent on time’s divisions into hours, days, and months, are beggars, dressed in “the rags of time.”
  • If the sun represents the world of busy clock-watching activity, let’s show how trivial that world is. 
  • Blink, and you disappear! (but I won’t because I love to look… at her).
  • Go on, spin your way around the world, busy sun (as long as you don’t bother us) and –tomorrow, not today! — report on the East Indies (spices) and the West Indies (silver and gold), and the kings of all the empires around the world. You’ll confess: they are right here, in this bed! (Donne surely knew how ludicrous was the picture of all those kings in one bed, like something from Alice in Wonderland.)

Donne knew the Copernican theory that the earth travels around the sun — very recently promulgated, with enormous controversy (think Galileo and the Inquisition) — but he chooses to stick with the old Ptolemaic system since it makes for such a “busy” sun. 

Notice how proud Donne the poet seems to be about writing this poem, how prominent are its intricate meter and rhyme. The form of the stanza, repeated exactly three times, is not only complicated, but also NEW, invented as it were on the spot, a matrix of lines of 4, 6, 8, and 10 syllables, in a rhyming pattern of a b b a   c d c d  ee.

“Stanza” in Italian literally means “room.” Each of these little rooms is a place unto itself, a little shelter from the world. Here’s the last room:

  • all states, all princes: all that complicated, intricate diplomacy that preoccupied Early Modern Europe as it does us, all compressed, transferred to the lovers. 
  • “Nothing else is” — one of the greatest hyperboles in poetry. “Nothing” is the recurring word in Shakespeare’s King Lear, perhaps written and staged about the same time as this poem, but here Lear’s bleak existential nihilism becomes an astounding, confident, joyful feat of the imagination. 
  • The pedantic, unruly sun–berated at the start of the poem–is now tenderly cared for by the poet and his lover: you have nothing else to do but to warm us, so come in. The bed-curtains are pulled back. . .

What is at the center, the earth or the sun? Well, neither: this bed is the center. The circumference, the “sphere” (we would say “orbit”) is this room. 

Nothing else is. What a way to imagine sheltering. 

Amarilli, mia bella

“Amarilli, mia bella” is a lovely song with music by Giulio Caccini and words by Alessandro Guarini. It became not only one of the most popular solo madrigals of 17th-century but also a chestnut in modern vocal pedagogy.

Let’s start with a performance; here’s local (i.e., Bay Area) soprano Phoebe Rosquist singing it with Voices of Music co-director David Tayler on the lute: 

      Amarilli, mia bella, 
Non credi, o del mio cor dolce desio,
     D’esser tu l’amor mio?
Credilo pur: e se timor t’assale,
     Prendi questo mio strale,
Aprimi il petto e vedrai scritto in core: 
    Amarilli e mio amore.

I hope you recognize the song. It might be familiar because it is one of the songs in the G. Schirmer yellow-cover volume of 24 Italian Songs, used and abused for decades by beginning vocal students. 

A tiny lyric like this is a challenge to translate: compressed, idiomatic, full of emotion, and at the same time, well aware of the over-the-top nature of its imagery: opening up the heart to find a certification of his love. 

Here’s what I did with it. 

    Amaryllis, my beauty,
my heart-throb: don’t you believe
    that I love you?
Well, believe it; and if you’re not sure,
    take this scalpel
and open my chest: written on my heart,
    you’ll see: “I love Amaryllis.”

I know, they didn’t say “heart-throb” in the 16th century, but they did talk a lot about the heart (cor in Italian). And a “scalpel”? in the Italian, he offers her a strale, the point of an arrow; I thought the scalpel would be a more modernly “pointed” metaphor. Some research tells me that they had scalpels as long back as the Greeks, though I’m sure they didn’t yet have open-heart surgery. Certainly not of the test-my-love kind.

When it was published in 1602, the song had already had an big career, if we can believe the composer Caccini. He asserts in the preface to his show-off volume, Le nuove musiche (“new music”), that he had earlier refrained from publishing his songs, even though they’d been around for two decades, because he “esteemed them but little.” Well, maybe; we see these kinds of self-deprecating remarks in countless prefaces of the day (and now). 

He deftly turns to self-congratulation:

It seemed to me these pieces of mine had been honored enough–indeed, more than they deserved–by being constantly performed by the most famous singers of Italy, male and female, and by other noble persons who are lovers of the profession.

[The quotes are from the musicologist Tim Carter, in his article “Caccini’s ‘Amarilli, mia bella:’ Some Questions (And a Few Answers)”]

Wow: lots of renditions. . . across the country. . . sung by the top professional singers . . . and by amateurs  . . . and not just any amateurs–nobles!

So why publish? ah, he says, because my friends “forced (and also urged)” me! 

Moreover, he says, he was annoyed at seeing his songs get overused (“circulating tattered and torn”) and over-ornamented. He complained: “I see vocal crescendos and decrescendos, esclamazioni [long notes diminishing and coming back], tremolos and trills, and other embellishments of good singing style used indiscriminately.” Like a bad rendition of the National Anthem at the ball park, I guess.

So, he hopes that printing his songs will establish authoritative versions! Engrave it, and it’s fixed in stone. It never works, of course, trying to fix an “authorized version.” Publication, as musicologist Tim Carter points out, led to dozens of new arrangements of the popular Amarilli song, even further from the original — for six voices, for keyboard, maybe even for town band (just kidding, but who knows?).

Here’s a variant version, from a manuscript in the British Museum:

A take-away, for the moment:

Music exists not to be engraved in the book (or on the heart, like the poet’s “I love Amaryllis”) but to be used, changed, ornamented, performed–and learned from! 

If you want to know more about Italian madrigals and their texts, take a look at my book, A Poetry Precise and Free (Univ of Michigan Press, 2018).

Cruda Amarilli, a madrigal

Note: this post begins a series about Italian madrigal poems and their translations, a preview of an upcoming reading/recital at the Berkeley Early Music Festival, Wednesday June 10, 2 pm, at the University Lutheran Chapel.

If you enjoy this post, please sign up to get email notices of further posts on poetry and music. 

One of the most popular madrigal poems of the 16th century was “Cruda Amarilli” (cruel Amaryllis), by the Ferrarese diplomat and poet Giovanni Battista Guarini. The poem circulated widely across Europe: at least 22 musical settings of it were published between 1590 and 1626, including one in Dresden.

Broadly speaking, the poem is a Petrarchan complaint: that is, an offshoot of the centuries-old convention derived from the Canzoniere of Petrarch, in which a lover complains of the indifference, or “cruelty,” of the beloved one. Here’s the poem in Italian (I’ll get to a translation soon):

Cruda Amarilli, che col nome ancora
d’amar; ahi lasso, amaramente insegni
Amarilli del candido ligustro
   più candida, e più bella,
   ma de l’Aspido sordo
e più sorda, e più fera, e più fugace;
   poi che col dir t’offendo
   i’ mi morrò tacendo.

Hear the poem read aloud.

In the madrigal genre, poetic lines alternated between long (11 syllables) and short (7 syllables); here, the long lines are left-justified and the short ones are indented. By the way, if you’re counting syllables in Italian, you have to know that when a vowel ends a word and the next word begins with a vowel, the two are elided—they count as one syllable (as in the very first phrase, “Cruda Amarilli,” pronounced “crud’amarilli”).

“Amarilli” here is a conventional name for a beloved, derived from the related convention that love flourished best in a pastoral setting: even though the poets were courtiers, they imagined themselves as shepherds in an idyllic landscape, wooing lovely young nymphs whose names derived from Greek poetry. It’s not the flower we know by that name, though the flower name is related to the pastoral myths.

So the pun: the poet begins by saying that his beloved, “cruel Amaryllis,” has a bitter name. What does he mean? The word “amaryllis” derives from the Greek for “sparkling” — a far cry from “bitter.” But notice how often the syllable “amar” occurs in the first lines of the poem:

Amarilli . . . amar . . . amaramente . . . (and again) . . . Amarilli: Amarillis is amar, bitter.

I have been translating madrigals like these for a number of years (this and 149 others by Guarini are translated and discussed in my book, A Poetry Precise and Free). How to convey this Italian pun in English? One could change the name of the beloved, but that would take the poem too far from its history and legacy in the musical compositions based on it.

My solution was to keep the syllable “mar” but to use its English sense of damaging, hurting. Here’s my translation:

Harsh Amaryllis, aptly named,
alas, you “mar” me cruelly.
You’re far more beautiful
   than daffodils,
   but you’re as wild
and heartless as a rattlesnake.
   I’ll not mess with you:
   I’ll hold my peace and die.

Hear the translation read aloud.

I put “mar” in quotes to draw attention to the pun: it’s not subtle, but if one doesn’t recognize that “marring,” the opening doesn’t make much sense. Like all translations, there are compromises. In the Italian, she is as lovely as the “candida ligustro,” the white (or pure, innocent) privet (Ligustrum lucidum); but I thought daffodils might be seem more graceful and familiar to us (remember Wordsworth’s “host of golden daffodils”?). And Guarini’s Amaryllis is not compared to a rattlesnake, as I do, but to an asp (“sordo” — deaf); too complicated, and then there are those associations with Cleopatra. . . .

So, as I said at the outset, composers loved this poem—for its abrupt opening, its contrasts between Amaryllis’s beauty and her wildness, and its swift retreat from complaint at the end into silence and death. The most famous composer to set it was Claudio Monteverdi, who gave it a position of importance as the first song in his innovative Fifth Book of Madrigals (1605). Other composers you might recognize are Luca Marenzio (1595), Jacob de Wert (1595), and the wonderfully-named Sigismondo d’India (1606 and again in 1609).

Monteverdi’s setting, like the majority of Italian madrigals of the period, is for five voices (two sopranos, alto, tenor, and bass). Listen for the dissonances underlining and stretching out the bitterness of “amaramente” — the sudden harmonic change to mark the beauty of “ligustro,” — the snaky vocal line on “aspido” (asp) — the lively motion of the asp at “fugace” — and the dramatic pulling-back on “poi che col dir t’offendo” (lest I offend you by speaking).

Four years later, Sigismondo d’India published his setting of “Cruda Amarilli” for one voice. Using only a solo soprano means the text is clearer, though necessarily less richly set. I particularly enjoy the runs on “fugace” (“fast-moving”) and the beautiful tapering off of “tacendo” (“going silent”). Here’s a performance by soprano Valentina Salinas:

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Barrett Browning and the viol

Doing some work on the great 19th-century poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning, I came across this image of a viol in her sonnet #32 in “Sonnets from the Portuguese.”

The first time that the sun rose on thine oath
To love me, I looked forward to the moon
To slacken all those bonds which seemed too soon
And quickly tied to make a lasting troth.
Quick-loving hearts, I thought, may quickly loathe;
And, looking on myself, I seemed not one
For such man’s love!—more like an out-of-tune
Worn viol, a good singer would be wroth
To spoil his song with, and which, snatched in haste,
Is laid down at the first ill-sounding note.
I did not wrong myself so, but I placed
A wrong on thee.  For perfect strains may float
’Neath master-hands, from instruments defaced,—
And great souls, at one stroke, may do and doat.

She wrote this sonnet in 1850, shortly after falling in love with Robert Browning, and eloping with him to live in Florence, Italy. I don’t know why Barrett Browning chose the viol as the image in the poem—it wasn’t being played in the mid 19th-century much. Perhaps because she and Robert were avid fans of Renaissance culture in all its forms.

It begins with her doubts about the hastiness of Robert’s declaration of love, imagining that her lover could so swiftly turn to loathing her, as a great musician could loathe a beat-up gamba – “out-of-tune,” “worn”, “ill-sounding”—picked up too quickly. The poem turns her harsh self-criticism into an elegant complement to Robert: he is such an artist , a “master-hand,” that he can pick up a clunker of an instrument and make beautiful music with it. 

Despite her disclaimer (“I did not wrong myself so”), I find it painful to hear her (at that point, perhaps the most widely-read poet in the English language) disparaging herself with this comparison to the old gamba. But what I find most moving—and central to the poem—is the degree of self-examination that the poem packs in, her unflinching “looking at myself.”

In the strange last line, she wryly ends the poem with a little joke at Robert’s expense: yes, he’s a “great soul” who can “do”—create “perfect strains” even on a crummy instrument; but he’s also capable of “doting”—that is, of acting foolishly in love, of over-valuing the one he’s fallen in love with.