Goran Bregović: a Polish View

Goran Bregović was in the area recently with a concert titled Three Letters from Sarajevo.   I could not make it, quelle dommage, but I alerted all my Slavic friends to go if they can.  I have been a Bregović fan since seeing the Queen Margo movie many years ago on VHS and being startled by the opening bars of the soundtrack: "Ju te san se zajubija....", a traditional   Dalmatian song.  Rushing through the credits, I learned that the movie music was arranged by one Goran Bregović. Later, I got a CD from a Polish friend featuring Bregović in concert with Polish musician Kayah and heard that he was immensely popular in Poland. Wow! It so happened that another Polish friend of mine actually made it to the concert and here is his account.

Three Letters from Sarajevo, review by Wojciech Zorniak

I had never seen Goran Bregovic live on stage before this Saturday. I overslept his biggest Polish hit "Sleep baby, sleep," recorded with Polish singer Kayah, I did not hear his duets with another Polish singer Krzysztof Krawczyk. I had heard a few of his pieces on YouTube. But, I knew that Brego, as he is known in Poland, was big because my friend was his Polish manager, wrote a book about him and as a result of this association he was able to buy himself a villa in the posh part of Warsaw.

Therefore, when I learned that Goran would appear in the Strathmore Music Center, which is within the distance of a Kalashnikov shot from my home, I would not miss the chance to see him. After all, man does not live by McCartney alone. Strathmore Hall, in suburban Maryland, juts outside Washington DC, was filled to the brim. From the conversations I overheard, I gathered that the audience was mainly the immigrant population from former Yugoslavia. Serbian and Croatian dominated. Not that I could capture the linguistic nuances, but I could tell that much.

I was hoping to eat čevapčići at the bar and wash them down with slivovitz, but no such luck. I paid ten bucks for a lousy plastic cup of mediocre wine from Chile. I sat next to my Balkan brothers who spoke the language so similar to mine, but still hard to understand. I felt at home, but a stranger all the same. An interesting feeling!

Finally, Goran walked on the stage in a white suit (as always), with a guitar and computer, immediately followed by three violinists, two bulky Bulgarian ladies in folk costumes, a brass band, a guy with a large drum and a male choir. And it started. Like a thunderbolt from the clear sky, like a volcano eruption, like an avalanche in the Alps, like the end of the world. I hit the back of my chair as if I were taking off in a space rocket. Ethnic music crucible dazed. The drummer hit the drum, the Bulgarian ladies climaxed in mezzo-soprano, the trumpets thundered straight from Jericho, and I, with horror, noticed that my legs began to shake dangerously, as if they wanted to dance. Strathmore is absolutely not fit for wild dancing. So I resorted to jumping up and down.

On the stage, it was getting more and more lively. "Three Letters from Sarajevo" is the title of the new Bregovic album and the program in Strathmore. The artist combined the music of three religious groups here, hence the three violinists. Three melancholic and romantic violin spacers gave us a chance to take a breath and recuperate. And then full throttle again. The walls were trembling, as did the candelabra, and the floors vibrated. The audience went crazy. People around me were on cloud nine, possibly ten. I had the feeling that in the heat of the sound battle some toothless Baba Yaga jumped into my bed. And Marshall Tito was looking down on us from above, smiling benevolently.

***

Another, non-Slavic, friend posted this on Facebook, also raving about the concert at the Strathmore.

https://www.facebook.com/betsysmithplatt/videos/10214760739946966/

Poster for the Bregovic Chicago concert

Back in Zagreb, I would have been hard pressed to identify Bregović as a member of the then popular Bosnian rock band Bijelo Dugme.  Even though many of us snubbed the band in favor of British and American groups, some of its hit songs, rooted firmly in the Balkan tradition, tugged at our heartstrings:  "It's like this, my dear, when a Bosnian loves you"  (Tako ti je mala moja kad ljubi Bosanac), "Speed on my horses"  (Požurite konji moji) .... They were too close to home for those of us striving to get away from the local culture. Sometimes one needs to see things from far away to understand their value. 

When the band fell apart, Bregović did not.  He left former Yugoslavia for the west and greater glory, based on his Sarajevo memories, poking fun at those of us who had rejected all things made at home.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2fJP1seQFtY

Good for you, Brego!

Washington National Opera: Silent Night

It took seven years for Kevin Puts' award-winning opera Silent Night to reach the nation's capital, but the timing could not be better. We just saw our president arrive in Paris to "celebrate the end of World War One"and subsequently heard he could not make it to the Aisne-Marne American cemetery outside Paris, to honor about 2,200 U.S. war dead who are laid to rest there. We saw world leaders and dignitaries attending various remembrance events and finally gathering in the French capital to commemorate the centenary of the armistice signed to end the four-year war. The big anniversary is likely to entice some people to review some of the basic historic facts of the world's deadliest war. Those planning to see Silent Night should be among them.

German, French and Scottish regiments  pray together on Christmas Eve.

If someone had told me I would get a lump in my throat and tear up during a performance of a contemporary opera, I probably would have nodded to avoid offending the interlocutor and privately dismiss the idea. But that's exactly how I felt in Silent Night's crucial moment, when one soldier steps out of his shelter into a minefield, waving a Christmas tree and calling for one night of peace. The first reactions from the enemy lines - fear, bewilderment and suspicion - soon give way to acceptance, resulting more from general exhaustion than any religious feeling or revolutionary anti-war stance.

Based on the 2005 movie Joyeux Noël, which in turn is inspired by a true event, the opera centers on one day in the lives of a French, Scottish and German contingent, entrenched at a WWI battlefield in Belgium. In reality, German Crown Prince Wilhelm sent tenor Walter Kirchhoff to sing for German soldiers during the first Christmas season of the war, in December of 1914. His singing could be heard by French soldiers in nearby trenches who stood up and applauded his performance. And the rest is history.

In the fictionalized version, the visiting singer is a soprano who joins her tenor on the battlefield.

In the opera, the tenor is soldier Nikolaus Sprink (Alexander McKissick) and he is summoned from the front to sing at the crown prince's Christmas party.  This was arranged at the request of Sprink's fiancée, Swedish soprano Anna Sørensen (Raquel González).  She also finagles an official permission to return to the frontline with her soldier for one night. 

In the first act, we get a glimpse into the lives of main characters as they get news of the war. French Lieutenant Audebert (Michael Adams) is saying good-bye to his pregnant wife Madeleine (Hannah Hagerty), Scottish brothers Jonathan and William Dale and their local priest, Father Palmer, enlist as volunteers for what they believe will be a quickly won war. The music is a lively combination of waltz and variations on traditional tunes. The transition from peace to war is marked by powerful music score in which you can recognize sounds of cannon blasts, explosions, gun shots and screams.

The trenches in this production are lined up one above the other with Germans at the bottom, the French in the middle and Scots on top.  After a powerful and very cinematic battle scene, the soldiers in the trenches account for their dead and wounded, and reminisce about peaceful time at home. Jonathan is brokenhearted because his brother is killed and he was forced to leave him on the battlefield. He writes a letter to their mother pretending that both are still alive and swears he will revenge William. Audebert is longing for his wife, his aide-de-camp Ponchel silences his mother's alarm clock which goes off every morning to remind him of their morning coffee together. 

German Lieutenant Horstmayer is disdainful of Christmas gifts sent to his soldiers ("What next? Santa Clause?") and angers the singer who walks out into the mine field and shouts for a night of peace.  The soldiers from other trenches cautiously join him. At their urging, the German, French and Scottish commanders agree to permit a temporary truce. Father Palmer leads the soldiers into prayer and then they bury their dead, share their whiskey, wine, beer and chocolate and even play a game of soccer. 

French, German and Scottish lieutenants shake hands on the truce

This kind of story is always in danger of falling into the pitfall of sentimentality and cliché, and Silent Night is not completely devoid of them. What made me go maudlin was the opera's powerful reminder of what a wonderful world this would be if we all made just a little more effort to get out of our trenches and meet the other side. Silent Night carries a powerful anti-war message with barely a touch of blood or gore on the stage. Moments of humor are frequent, but they serve to make the underlying reality even more bleak. "This will be our most memorable Christmas," soldiers say. "It will be my only one," says Lt. Horstmayer, "I am Jewish." His pun suggests an expectation of an early end to the war. 

The angry generals back home won't reach the wisdom of their foot soldiers before they've sent millions of people to early graves and left millions of others maimed, orphaned and destitute.

As a punishment for the unsanctioned truce, one contingent receives the order to withdraw from the Belgian battlefield to the then quieter Verdun in northern France. In less than two years after the brief Christmas truce in Belgium, Verdun became the site of the longest and bloodiest battle of World War I. Mentioning it in the opera was a message that the worst is yet to come after a small reprieve.

This past week we have heard world leaders deliver touching eulogies and saw dignitaries lay wreathes at military cemeteries across the western world.  Silent Night offers an intimate encounter with the kind of people they are honoring.

Much of the cast portraying characters in their respective languages are talented young graduates of the Domingo-Cafritz program. Michael Adams as Lt. Audebert, Raquel González as Anna Sorensen, Norman Garrett as Lt. Gordon, and Aleksey Bogdanov as Lt. Horstmayer stood out for me.

Silent Night may not be modern enough or original enough for some tastes, but it is simply beautiful: the music, the story, the singing, and the production. At times wild, at times gentle and elegiac, or pensive, Puts's score is always hinting at the brevity of peace and goodwill on earth and at something sinister to follow. Librettist Mark Campbell uses generally light touches to expose the absurdity of war, with few exceptions, such as Johnathan's killing of an allied soldier by mistake.  Anna Sorensen's peace activism was another heavy-handed touch but, hey, this is opera.

WNO's Silent Night is an ideal opportunity for skeptics to step out from the safety of Verdi and Rossini trenches and venture into the minefield of modern opera, one careful step at a time. This one is safe.

Glenstone, America's Sustainable Museum

The Washington area's new museum, or more precisely extension of an existing museum, has attracted enough attention to have all its reservations filled till the end of the year, within days of making them available. This is no small feat for a lesser known art institution, located far form the city and public transportation, even if the entrance is free. But Glenstone, a private museum in Potomac, Maryland, has achieved it.  How?

By creating a buzz and keeping away the crowds. A key word is essential in attracting interest. Museums are not what they used to be - large halls filled with artifacts encased in glass cabinets or paintings hung on the walls. These days art institutions have to be interactive, educational, organic, good for body and soul, meaningful and anything else that will make them stand out. Glenstone's buzz word is "sustainable", which is more frequently associated with farming or fishing. So what does it mean in the context of an art institution?

The museum is part of a large family estate whose uneven landscape contains wild grass meadows, woodlands, hidden glens, winding creeks, meandering paths, meadows and ponds. Scattered among these are several austere grey museum buildings, monumental outdoor sculptures and the owners' home, whose privacy is guaranteed by an elongated artificial pond, serving as a moat. The estate includes cisterns that can collect and reuse nearly 1 million gallons of water, a composting and a material recycling facility, and an environmental center to show visitors how they can adopt sustainability practices in their own homes.

Glenstone accepts a relatively small number of visitors a day and does not admit children under 12, which excludes many families. But it is hard to get even a single pass when so few are offered in the first place. I tried to get reservations for 1:00 PM and was told only 12:30 PM slots were available. Instructions also said to come no more than 15 minutes prior to our allotted time.

Glenstone Museum, Arrival Hall

Judging by the difficulty of gaining admission (I had press passes), we expected long lines and huge crowds outside the museum. But on that sunny Friday, the road to Glenstone was not jammed, nor was the museum's parking lot filled. Afraid of missing our slot, we arrived earlier than the permitted 15 minutes and then fretted that we'd be thrown out to wait with nowhere to sit on. But the ushers at the Arrival Hall, which has its own building, were very kind, assuring us there was no pressure that day and sending us forthwith without delay.

It takes about five minutes on foot to get from the Arrival Hall to the Pavilions, the latest addition to the Glenstone Museum, which has created the most recent stir in the art world. The choreographed walk starts along the path lined with wild grass and cosmos. On a glorious sunny day, the white, pink and magenta flowers wave the visitor on with a promise of wonderful things to come.

From the meadow, the path winds into the woods and then, around another bend you catch your first glimpse of the Pavillions, 13 somber cubic and rectangular structures arranged around a water court.

Designed by Thomas Phifer, the Pavilions are made of huge grey cement-and-sand blocks whose exterior and interior austerity is mitigated by an occasional wooden surface and large glass windows overlooking the former hunting ground.

Pavilions at Glenstone

The emphasis on flat, even, uncluttered, and geometrical is so strict that if you look for a restroom, you may find it hard to tell a toilet door from the surrounding walls.

Ushers, all dressed in grey like the Mao-era Chinese, made us pack our possessions into lockers "to protect the art" and bid us to enjoy the views free of digital gadgetry. The collection, owned by Emily and Mitchell Rales, is said to comprise the best and most works of post-World War Two art. Some names are immediately recognizable such as Giacometti, Duchamp, Rothko, Pollock and Warhal, others are known only to connoisseurs - Michael Heizer, Charles Ray, Lygia Pape, On Kawara, Roni Horn, and Cy Twombly, to name a few.

Can you find the toilet door?

Another five-minute walk takes you to the Gallery, the older part of the museum complex, currently exhibiting works by Louise Bourgeois.

Richard Serra

To reach the monumental outdoor sculptures by Richard Serra, Tony Smith and Jeff Koons, you need to take a longer walk, rather a hike, up and down the undulating terrain, along the restored stream beds and natural meadowlands, over a boardwalk and by a lily pond. Visitors are advised not to wander off the path.

Tony Smith, Smug, 1973

Apart from a group of students (or tourists ?) there were few visitors in the spacious new halls of the Pavilions and even fewer on the hike through the woodlands. The cafeteria was small by American standards and not overcrowded either. Even before learning about its policies, it was clear that Glenstone does not offer art for the masses. Is it elitist?

The collection was first opened to the public in 2006, but few people have heard about it until recently. Potomac is a Maryland suburb, known for its large private estates with their enormous and rather gaudy mansions, intended to impress rather than attract. By contrast, Glenstone buildings are maximally minimalist, but they are tucked away from the road and hidden behind trees so they don't stick out. Potomac is a community where the rich visit the rich and ordinary people do not come for a Sunday drive. The owners may not want to rock their neighborhood's boat, or perhaps do not want large groups wondering right outside their home. A few visitors scattered here and there add life to the landscape, a large crowd disturbs tranquility.

The Raleses and their architects and designers say they wanted to create a space that seamlessly integrates art, architecture and landscape into a "serene and contemplative environment." They have a point. Nothing serene about elbowing your way through the Louvre to see Mona Lisa. And who can remember hundreds of masterpieces seen in a rushed tour through a world-class gallery. The Glenstone concept is neither new nor original. Denmark's renowned Louisiana Museum of Modern Art has promoted it for decades. But instead of making it exclusive and hard to get in, the Danish venue welcomes large groups as well as families with small children, with no restrictions. In fact, the Louisiana offers a variety of programs for children to attract more of them. 

Regardless of the Glenstone owners' intention, it was great to get out of the exhibition halls and digest the art, or forget it for a while, during a walk through the woodlands, painstakingly re-populated by indigenous trees and plants. I wouldn't mind doing it again, but not if I have to reserve a time to visit three or four months ahead of the time.

Indigenous trees and restored streambed at Glenstone

Still, one must give the wealthy couple credit for the willingness to allow a glimpse into their world of art, beauty and ideas, albeit in small portions. One guide told us Glenstone exhibits only one-twelfth of the Raleses' entire art collection. Is it worth a trip to Potomac? Yes. Is it phenomenal? No. In fact, it's a good reminder to all of us to appreciate the treasure we have in our good old National Gallery of Art, accessible to everyone, including children, free of charge, no reservation, and open throughout the year, except for a few holidays.  The NGA's south side also looks onto a spacious grassy land, known as the National Mall, with no restrictions for walkers, except an occasional reminder not to trash the lawn.

The 2018 Summer of Discontent

Manafort's trial is in full swing and those in the know say you can read his indictment as you would a spy novel. If it isn't thrilling enough by itself, then Gates's testimony definitely adds spark to it. Just as you begin to get bored with that story, you learn about Wilbur Ross and that reminds you of Pruitt..... If you live overseas and these names mean nothing to you, all you need to know is that people behind them have been accused of amassing large amounts of money, in one case $120 million, in illegal ways. More importantly, they are all linked to the current U.S. administration.

Commentator Steve Chapman recently wrote: "Since Jan. 20, 2017, Americans have seen an endless torrent of corruption beyond anything previously imagined. No president has ever had a surer instinct than Donald Trump for finding and empowering scam artists, spongers and thugs."

Others have said worse things about our president and his administration. But Trump's support base is unwavering. T-shirts with the logo "I'd rather be a Russian than a Democrat" are for sale online, and photos of people wearing them are posted on social media.

Prints of the painting below, priced at $30 to $750 depending on the size, are almost sold out.

Crossing the Swamp by John McNaughton, 2018

And just to clarify the significance, here is the original the above painting is based on.

George Washington's crossing of the Delaware River by Emmanuel Leutze, 1851 

Some "insiders" claim that Trump is nervous, concerned, agitated...but in this case I would agree with the president that this is fake news. He has nothing to worry about and he knows it. Didn't he famously say: "I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn't lose any voters".

While we are entertained by real life stories inspired by spy novels, other news fall through the cracks.  Another forest fire in California? The biggest one ever? The deadliest fire in Greece? The hottest summer in Japan, Britain, Germany? The Swiss Army having to air drop water for cattle in some farming areas? Oh, yeah? Ho-hum.

A joint study by Australian, Danish and other institutions, published last week, has found that even if signatories of the Paris 2015 Climate Agreement adhere to the decision to limit the rise in temperatures to 2 degrees Celsius, global warming will continue because of processes already in motion, such as ice melting in the polar regions. Scientists are talking about 4 to 5 degrees rise, which will make some parts of the world uninhabitable.

Meanwhile, plans are underway for an attempt to clean up the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, an island of plastic and debris the size of Texas, floating half-way between California and Hawaii.  (The U-shaped tube is designed by 23-year-old Dutch college dropout Boyan Slat, which is most interesting for the United States where colleges are unaffordable and possibly useless.) There are concerns that the first-of-the-kind cleaning device could cause further environmental damage without serving its purpose.

New contraption to be launched September 8 to scoop garbage from the Pacific Ocean

But environment is such a boring topic. To get away from depressing news, I choose to read (long overdue) Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughter House-Five, about World War Two devastation of Dresden. I've been meaning to read it for a long time, ever since I interviewed Vonnegut on the occasion of a Dresden bombing anniversary, a few years before his death. It was a phone interview but a memorable one. He seemed such a nice guy. In the book, he called himself "an old fart." We need more of such humility today.  But perhaps it's not possible without getting as close to death as Vonnegut did.

"The old fart" must have whispered in my ear from the other world because what do I find in one of the first few pages in the book but his memory of an American soldier who had been arrested and executed for taking a teapot from the ruins of the incinerated city. "Poor old Edgar Derby", wrote Vonnegut, "a whole city gets burned down, and thousands and thousands of people are killed. And then this one American foot soldier is arrested in the ruins for taking a teapot." It turned out that many other soldiers had picked up "souvenirs" in Dresden, but had gotten away with them, including someone absconding with a bunch of rubies, emeralds and diamonds taken from dead people in the cellars of Dresden.

"And so it goes," says Vonnegut. Indeed it does. Some people get away with embezzling $120 million, I pay hundreds of dollars in fines for parking tickets and for every time a red-light camera captures the tail end of my car.

Another catchy detail from Slaughter House-Five: someone asks Vonnegut to write an anti-glacier book instead of an anti-war book, meaning that there will always be wars and there will always be glaciers. Well, I am thinking, since glaciers are now shrinking, can we hope that perhaps ...? Maybe it will be too hot to fight. Except verbally, on social media. I have already done that with friends who suggest that their right to own a gun is more important than other people's right to live and those who claim that poor people are poor because they don't work hard enough.

I think back on all the books I have read and liked by Erich Fromm, whose ideas are obsolete today, but who has made an important observation - normal, healthy and well meaning people often choose to live in an insane society.

CANDIDE, ou l'Optimisme à l'Américain

The Washington National Opera on Saturday presented the last piece of its 2017-2018 season: Leonard Bernstein's Candide, an unmistakably American music work based on a French satirical novella. This year marks Leonard Bernstein's centennial and all major U.S. theaters are performing his works. Not only that - a major filmmaker has announced plans to make a biopic about the composer's life, aptly titled The American.

Pangloss teaches Candide, Maximilian, Cunigonde and Paquette that the world is perfect

So why would this 20th-century American composer choose an 18th-century picaresque novella, with no less than 30 chapters, each set in a different part of the world, and a plot often described as erratic, as the basis for his operetta? Voltaire's satire is ridiculing von Leibniz's philosophy of optimism in the face of major world disasters: wars, earthquakes, social injustices, exploitation, poverty and others. In the 1950s, Bernstein could have found plenty of justification to ridicule the glories of American optimism. It was the era of nuclear arms race, Cold War, McCarthyism, organized crime and rampant racism. But it is not clear that he referred to any of that.

After testing several versions, Bernstein settled for a libretto firmly grounded on Voltaire's work, which he set to his own distinctly American brand of music. His Candide too is neither French nor German, but the epitome of a young optimistic American, who believes that the world is his to conquer and that, as his teachers say, "the sky is the limit." Cunegonde is equally naive in her expectation to land a husband who can provide a life of bliss and luxury. Like Voltaire's, Bernstein's Candide is kicked out of his master's house in Vestphalia for daring to aspire to his noble daughter Cunegonde.  Thus begins Candide's roaming around the world, a voyage beset with misfortunes, betrayal and disappointments. His optimism, as taught by his tutor Pangloss, persists as he receives or delivers blows one after another. Cunegonde is a survivor too. After losing her home in a war and surviving serial rape by the conquering soldiers, she uses her youth and good looks to secure a comfortable lifestyle.

Emily Pogorelc and Alek Shrader as WNO's Cunegonde and Candide

The action moves briskly through a series of musical episodes connected by short narratives. Major characters die and come back to life, including Pangloss, Cunegonde and her brother Maximilian. New people appear and disappear every step of the way. So much so that some performers can easily take on two roles. Actor Wynn Harmon doubles as Pangloss and Voltaire, the narrator, not impressive as either. Bass-baritone Matthew Scollin excells as both James the Anabaptist and Martin the pessimist.

For those who have not read Voltaire or heard the musical before, Bernstein's Candide is not always easy to follow. The WNO provides surtitles for the song lyrics, but not for the narrative where they could be more useful to help orient the clueless. Somewhere halfway through the performance, you are only vaguely aware of what's going on, or are completely lost. It is the power of the score, starting from the energetic overture, which made Bernstein bounce every time he conducted it, through the catchy tunes of songs such as "The Best of All Possible Worlds", that holds a spectator's attention through to the concluding chorus of "Make Our Garden Grow." 

Conductor Nicole Paiement, dressed surprisingly in a biker jacket, skinny jeans and ankle boots, led the WNO orchestra with sustained energy. Alek Shrader's Candide was gentle, benevolent, convincingly naive and beautifully sung. Emily Pogorelc sparkled as Cunegonde. Their marriage duet "O, Happy We" stands out as a conspicuous departure from Voltaire and a perfect example of American optimism: Candide wants to live on a farm and raise kids, Cunegonde wants lavish and jet-settish lifestyle, but both still expect to have a perfectly happy marriage. Washington's darling Denyce Graves was a good choice for the role of the long-suffering but feisty Old Lady, Cunegonde's protector.  She has lost one buttock to cannibals so sitting and riding is painful, but she does not let a minor obstacle like that stand in the way when the time comes to escape.

Sometimes directors opt to set Candide in modern times or in some imaginary fantastical world. A long-ago production at Washington's Arena Stage used puppets and doll houses, model ships and other playthings popping out onto the the stage like jack-in-the-box. Artistic director Francesca Zambello chose a stylized period setting with costumes that sometimes amounted to nothing but underwear, or dresses missing large chunks of fabric in strategic places. But the El Dorado scene was unmistakably Broadway-ish with its glitter and plumes. The performance was fast moving and effervescent as one would expect from a good American musical. 

But even in the best of productions, and Zambello's comes close enough to it, Candide sooner or later becomes tiresome. Awards and glowing reviews notwithstanding, the frenetic exchange of scenes is hard to absorb and the work lacks the passion to hold the audience in thrall as Bernstein's West Side Story does. 

Whether it is opera, operetta, musical or zarzuela, a music theater piece requires a clear and concise storyline, with characters affecting or completely changing one another's lives. Candide and Cunegonde are affected by life's misfortunes, but not by each other. They retire to a little farm after being disillusioned by life's vagaries. The conclusion comes too abruptly to give them time to transition from silly to wise. Is this how Bernstein saw average Americans? Or was the restless and overactive genius offering practical advice to ordinary people with overly rosy expectations for their future? Voltaire's satire may have been the wrong medium to convey this message to a broad-spectrum audience.

Candide and his companion Cacambo in El Dorado, which looks like a Broadway musical

Works such as Stravinsky's Rake's Progress, Glass's Appomatox and, yes, Bernstein's Candide, that lack passionate characters, will never have the lasting popular appeal of tragic Romeo-and-Juliette-type stories, or music comedies such as Oklahoma and My Fair Lady, or dramatic works like Porgy and Bess - despite the quality of music they offer.  

It is surprising, therefore, that the WNO would offer just a few performances of West Side Story in Concert, which were sold out despite poor publicity  (I learned quite by chance and after the fact that they had been given) as opposed to a lavish staging of Candide, which had difficulty filling the opera house on its first night Saturday, despite the availability of heavily discounted seats. 

"Any questions?"  Yes, many.

The Emperor's New Clothes

American kids are less familiar with Andersen's classic The Emperor's New Clothes than their European counterparts. They spend more time watching educational video cartoons that teach colors, numbers, letters and other things deemed useful, such as the ultimate potty humor  (The Unflushables, available in ebook, hardcover and audio). But kids are kids everywhere and American kids are no different than the kids in Anderson's story - they can be brutally frank.

Today, I got an assignment of the kind I hate the most: to cover the latest U.S. shooting of interest, and I say "of interest" because there are too many to cover all, so we choose only those that attract attention with their weirdness or degree of awfulness. 

In this case, the shooter was mentally ill (aren't they all?) and he ran out of his vehicle naked from waist down to fire at presumably sane people. A background search shows that he has claimed to have been stalked by celebrity Taylor Swift and that last year he tried to approach the White House with four firearms on him. 

The only redeeming aspect of the story, the one that was worth writing about, was the bravery of a young man who in a crucial moment decided that if he was going to die, he would die fighting. The man was hailed as a hero because he had disarmed the killer and prevented more bloodshed. He declined the accolades, saying he had reacted instinctively to save his own life and not the lives of others. The honesty of the young black man, named James Shaw jr., is refreshing to say the least.

I have not checked the statistics lately, but in my estimate, based on the news reports that I was not allowed to miss, most of the mass shooters in this country are young white men. The Las Vegas shooter was not young, but he made up for it by killing a bigger number of people than his younger counterparts.

Reactions to the shootings have been entirely predictable (pro-gun vs. anti-gun, the sanctity of the 2nd amendment, etc.) until the Valentine Day shooting at Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida. For the first time we have heard Americans, mostly young Americans, question if the right to own a firearm is more important than the right to live. That question was always stifled in the past.

In Anderson's fairy tale, the courtiers fawn over a foolish king, "admiring" his invisible clothes, because to admit they can't see them would make them appear uninformed and unworthy of the king's company. Our courtiers fawn over the 2nd amendment even when privately they question its effects on today's society. 

Kids in Anderson's tale ridicule the naked king, making the adults finally acknowledge the obvious. Our kids today are shouting out what is clear for all to see: we are being massacred so that people who like powerful gadgets can obtain them, be they too young or insane. American students may have to shout a lot louder before the most powerful of our courtiers acknowledge the truth.

Meanwhile, Friday's report from Florida: One student was wounded at Forest High School in Ocala, Florida, the Marion County Sheriff’s Office said. The incident occurred shortly before students were to walk out as part of a national protest against gun violence. A resource officer, Deputy Jimmy Long, heard a loud bang at 8:39 a.m. and rushed to the scene........ One student was wounded ..... 19-year-old suspect was apprehended.

The news is neither weird nor horrible enough to earn anything more than local media attention.

*******

P.S. Worth noting: 

The National Rifle Association has announced that weapons will not be allowed when Vice President Mike Pence delivers keynote address at the NRA-Institute for Legislative Action's leadership forum in Dallas on Friday. The NRA says the ban was ordered by the U.S. Secret Service.

Matt Deitsch, a student at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School who helped organize the "March for Our Lives" protest, wrote on Twitter.

"Wait wait wait wait wait wait you're telling me to make the VP safe there aren't any weapons around but when it comes to children they want guns everywhere? Can someone explain this to me? Because it sounds like the NRA wants to protect people who help them sell guns, not kids."

Reading Matters, Even If It's Only One Book

A lovely photo of a boy reading a hefty tome in a bookstore in Afghanistan grabbed my attention recently on social media, and without thinking I typed my comment: "He is reading the Koran." Someone promptly responded saying that my remark was hateful, and that it did not matter what the book was as long as the boy was reading. I can see why someone could consider the comment mean, but it was not meant to be. The picture of the Aghan boy reminded me of a visit to the Darul Quran Madrasa Azmatia in Kolkata, India, more than 15 years ago.

About 150 boys were attending classes at the madrasa attached to Kolkata's largest mosque. When I saw the students during the break they seemed reticent and looked at me as I imagine they would look at a Martian. But within minutes their natural curiosity and friendliness won over, and some of them were even ready to make silly poses for the camera.  

The imam told me through an interpreter that poor families from all over India sent their boys to the madrasa. Their tuition, board and lodging was paid by the charity. The school was more than 100 years old and the number of students was growing.

"Two reasons," Imam Qari Fazlur said, "one is the population growth and the other: people are bending toward religion. People like to see that their children learn the Koran and the Koranic teachings and the practices followed by the Prophet Mohammed."

But there were other reasons, I learned. India's constitution guarantees children's education in their mother tongue, but speakers of minority languages, such as Urdu and Bengali, often complain that the official language Hindi, spoken by the Hindu majority, is enforced in schools throughout the country. So when possible, speakers of other languages send their children to private schools.  But the vast majority of Muslims in India are poor and instead of sending their children to any school, they are sending them to work. Some families who cannot feed their offspring feel lucky if at least one child is accepted at a madrasa where it will get a clean bed, food, clothes and education free of charge. 

The education at a madrasa consists largely of learning to read and recite the Koran.  By the time they finish school, most boys know the holy book by heart.  There is nothing wrong with that.  The problem is that they learn little else and once out of the madrasa, these young men are not prepared for gainful employment, and the cycle of poverty continues.  

More than 120 million people aged 15 to 24 in the world cannot read or write. Close to a half of them live in only nine countries: India, Pakistan, Nigeria, Ethiopia, Bangladesh, Democratic Republic of Congo, Tanzania, Egypt and Burkina Faso. Poor education is linked to poverty in these countries, regardless of religion.

So, as my angry commenter remarked, it is important to read, or to be precise: to be able to read. With a literacy rate of 28 percent, Afghanistan is the second most illiterate country in the world after South Sudan. Therefore, the picture of the barefoot Afghan boy in a library, engrossed in a book, is heartening. What is disheartening is learning - as I have at a Library of Congress event - that bookstores are disappearing from the neighboring Pakistan. The only "reading" available to ordinary citizens are tape-recorded sermons by local imams, sold outside the mosques. One can only hope that Afghanistan has many bookstores like the one in the charming photo with a young reader.

Waiting for Godot...Pardon Me: Spring

Watching the incoming fashion trends is one of my favorite winter pastimes. Whether they are pretty, elegant or just ridiculous, new creations are fun and inspiring. They tantalize, they inspire, they hint at promises of spring just around the corner.... even if the apparel is designed for the next fall.

But what a confusing message this year! Moving forward or turning back? Just look at the sample below - I distinctly remember seeing that same outfit in the 60s, or thereabout.

What's new here?

 Downright depressing:

And when the design doesn't attract, depending on a celebrity (or their offspring) to draw attention:

I reach out to my all-time favorite Dries van Noten for something really magnificent, and I can't believe my eyes.  His latest reminds me of the merchandise at Trieste's Ponte Rosso we used to flock to from the communist Yugoslavia.  Dries, how could you?

 

I think I've seen more original creations in H & M last time I shopped there.  So now I turn to reliable catalogues, such as Boden, and I find a pair of scalloped shorts, such as I wore at least 30 years ago in South Africa, and a maxi dress I got in the 70s in Rome:

Last resort - Swedish designers:    Meh!

The spring does not look promising this year.  One remaining hope: the groundhog.  

Carmen for the #MeToo Era

Sunday's Golden Globes awards ceremony was all about fighting against men's abuse of women. And it's not only America endeavoring to raise awareness about the widespread social problem. The Opera of Florence, Italy, on Sunday premiered a new production of Carmen in which the eponymous heroine does not get killed. Instead, she kills Don Don José with a gun that she wrests from him. Producers say they wanted to draw attention to modern-day mistreatment of women.

Some of my European friends were put off by the Golden Globes speeches and said they were all about hating men. One said when Oprah delivered her much celebrated oration, she looked like she wanted to grab a man from the audience and devour him. Privately, many people had a problem with the Hollywood event, but now we hear publicly from Catherine Deneuve  and a hundred other women that preventing men from going after women is an attack on men's freedom of expression.

Deneuve and others, mostly women in the entertainment business, said in a letter published by Le Monde Tuesday that “Rape is a crime, but persistent or clumsy flirting is not a crime, nor is gallantry a chauvinist aggression." They described #MeToo feminism as “a hatred of men and of sexuality,” and said that some men have already suffered professionally "while the only thing they did wrong was touching a knee, trying to steal a kiss, or speaking about ‘intimate’ things at a work dinner, or sending messages with sexual connotations to a woman whose feelings were not mutual." Of course, there was an immediate backlash. 

Oprah Winfrey At the Golden Globe Award Ceremony

As someone who grew up in Europe but has lived long in the United States, I can understand both sides. Used to the ubiquitous, but harmless flirting with men in Europe, I found the social atmosphere in the United States to be so sterile at first that I often wondered how Americans married and produced children. In Europe and even in Africa I would receive compliments, flowers, chocolates and admiring looks from men. But in Washington, any compliments for my hair, clothing or figure come from women. I have never been sexually harassed at work. I even found myself envious once at dinner when two women, unattractive in my opinion, discussed unwanted attention from their male colleagues in the past. Not being able to contain myself, I finally exclaimed: "Wow, this has never happened to me - I must be very undesirable!"

After a while, I learned to appreciate the independence coming from not having to thank for gifts that did nothing but boost my false sense of "femininity." But over time, little things have built up into a bigger picture that could not be ignored: men would not offer me a seat on the train when I was pregnant, but women would. At work, it was men who kept me down and women who gave me a boost up. I have been insulted, attacked and belittled by men in the United States more than I ever have been in any other country. In the street, a driver once shouted after me "you f...ing c..." because I crossed a road when my light was green, but he moved forward and almost hit me.

Back in Europe when a woman approached a group of men, their eyes sparked and some sort of bantering ensued. They seemed to genuinely enjoy female company. In the States, I find the male conversation is more likely to come to a dead stop when a woman comes along, with men raising their eyes as if asking: "OK, how can we help you?" (so you can go away and we can continue). I often used to think American men really hate women. They certainly seem uncomfortable around them unless they smile very broadly, which I never do. Then I thought, OK they are just confused, and shy people often seem unfriendly.  

But reading the accounts of women who dealt with Weinstein and other men in power, I cannot but wonder what if not hatred could make a man treat a woman in such offensive manner as has been described.  It is one thing to try to seduce a woman with nice words, flowers and champaign, it's another to show her your ugly body and ask for services you would normally ask from a paid prostitute. The ugliness is not only in the sexual context. Just look at all the things Trump has said about Hillary.  I cannot imagine a politician anywhere in the world using such vulgar language about a woman. When a Polish representative in the EU said that women were inferior to men, he was quickly removed. 

People respond to hateful acts with hatred.  By her own account, Oprah was sexually abused as a child by a series of relatives.  If during her Golden Globe speech she looked like she wanted to devour a man, she had an excellent reason. Though I don't think she hates men in general.

Women worldwide have been treated hatefully by men. Deneuve and many others may not have experienced the worst of it. They have learned how to deal with unwanted attention from men and even use it to their advantage.  They have learned how to avoid getting into a situation where they could be raped (no one-to-one meetings in a hotel room).  They have got used to flirting, and many enjoy being pursued by men regardless of whether they find them attractive or not. In this push-and-pull game, both men and women have to be skilled in reading the signals telling them when to stop and when to go on. For those who despise such games, the alternative is a series of awkward or businesslike questions like: "May I kiss you? Are you ready to have sex?"  To which my answer (and I suspect Deneuve's too) would always be "not if you have to ask."

Unfortunately, Weinstein and the likes do not engage in harmless flirting games nor do they ask awkward questions. Neither do men who rape children in their family, or bosses who harass their female employees. They treat women like disposable objects, existing to serve, and with a big smile.  If they resist, they get beaten or maligned, or get their heads chopped off.  So movements like #MeToo and themed events like this year's Golden Globe ceremony, exaggerated as they may be, are useful and necessary tools in drawing attention to a social ill and the need to fight it.

New production of Carmen at the Teatro del Maggio Musicale Fiorentino  

Turning Carmen into a killer and Don José into an abusive man distracts from that purpose. Carmen is a troubled and complex person, who uses men for her purposes such as they may be at a given time.  Maybe she was an orphan, maybe she was raped as a child, maybe she was too much on the move to form a lasting attachment - whatever the reason, Carmen is not capable of genuine affection. She is a femme fatal, but also fatalistic.  In the "Card Trio" in Act 3, she foretells her death.  In the final act she embraces it.  When warned, she does not try to avoid a confrontation with Don José. She dares him to kill her or let her go. And when he refuses both, she riles him further by pulling his ring off her finger and throwing it at him.  Carmen is far from being an abused woman as portrayed at the Teatro del Maggio Musicale Fiorentino and is much closer to what a hateful man on Facebook called a "bitch."  

An abusive man getting killed by the victim of his violence is an excellent topic for a new opera. So were Nixon in China and Dead Man Walking in their time.  The Opera of Florence would have done better to commission an entirely new work from a contemporary composer than intervene in a time-honored classic.
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And in case you missed it, here is a NYT article with another European view:
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/12/opinion/catherine-deneuve-french-feminists.html