In memoriam: JCW (1 April 2001 - 13 May 2013)

Even the affection of his canine brother, Boulez could not prolong our cat Jeoffry's life,
for he died in his sleep sometime early this morning, a few hours after I took that picture
of our two black-and-white boys on the bed.

Here is the poem (most famously used by Benjamin Britten in his cantata, Rejoice in the Lamb)
from whence Jeoffry took his name, and quite a few of his traits. From the time he was a few weeks old when we first adopted each other in August 2001 to this very morning, he was my first feline best friend, and was beloved by virtually everyone who met him. And to everyone who ever looked in on him during my frequent travels these past years: thank you, thank you, thank you. I know you know how much he is already missed.


(Here he is during his last season in Norfolk, 2010)

from Jubilate Agno
Christopher Smart (1722-1771)

For I will consider my Cat Jeoffry.
For he is the servant of the Living God duly and daily serving him.
For at the first glance of the glory of God in the East he worships in his way.
For this is done by wreathing his body seven times round with elegant quickness.
For then he leaps up to catch the musk, which is the blessing of God upon his prayer.
For he rolls upon prank to work it in.
For having done duty and received blessing he begins to consider himself.
For this he performs in ten degrees.
For first he looks upon his forepaws to see if they are clean.
For secondly he kicks up behind to clear away there.
For thirdly he works it upon stretch with the forepaws extended.
For fourthly he sharpens his paws by wood.
For fifthly he washes himself.
For sixthly he rolls upon wash.
For seventhly he fleas himself, that he may not be interrupted upon the beat.
For eighthly he rubs himself against a post.
For ninthly he looks up for his instructions.
For tenthly he goes in quest of food.
For having consider'd God and himself he will consider his neighbour.
For if he meets another cat he will kiss her in kindness.
For when he takes his prey he plays with it to give it a chance.
For one mouse in seven escapes by his dallying.
For when his day's work is done his business more properly begins.
For he keeps the Lord's watch in the night against the adversary.
For he counteracts the powers of darkness by his electrical skin and glaring eyes.
For he counteracts the Devil, who is death, by brisking about the life.
For in his morning orisons he loves the sun and the sun loves him.
For he is of the tribe of Tiger.
For the Cherub Cat is a term of the Angel Tiger.
For he has the subtlety and hissing of a serpent, which in goodness he suppresses.
For he will not do destruction, if he is well-fed, neither will he spit without provocation.
For he purrs in thankfulness, when God tells him he's a good Cat.
For he is an instrument for the children to learn benevolence upon.
For every house is incomplete without him and a blessing is lacking in the spirit.
For the Lord commanded Moses concerning the cats at the departure of the Children of Israel from Egypt.
For every family had one cat at least in the bag.
For the English Cats are the best in Europe.
For he is the cleanest in the use of his forepaws of any quadruped.
For the dexterity of his defence is an instance of the love of God to him exceedingly.
For he is the quickest to his mark of any creature.
For he is tenacious of his point.
For he is a mixture of gravity and waggery.
For he knows that God is his Saviour.
For there is nothing sweeter than his peace when at rest.
For there is nothing brisker than his life when in motion.
For he is of the Lord's poor and so indeed is he called by benevolence perpetually--Poor Jeoffry! poor Jeoffry! the rat has bit thy throat.
For I bless the name of the Lord Jesus that Jeoffry is better.
For the divine spirit comes about his body to sustain it in complete cat.
For his tongue is exceeding pure so that it has in purity what it wants in music.
For he is docile and can learn certain things.
For he can set up with gravity which is patience upon approbation.
For he can fetch and carry, which is patience in employment.
For he can jump over a stick which is patience upon proof positive.
For he can spraggle upon waggle at the word of command.
For he can jump from an eminence into his master's bosom.
For he can catch the cork and toss it again.
For he is hated by the hypocrite and miser.
For the former is afraid of detection.
For the latter refuses the charge.
For he camels his back to bear the first notion of business.
For he is good to think on, if a man would express himself neatly.
For he made a great figure in Egypt for his signal services.
For he killed the Ichneumon-rat very pernicious by land.
For his ears are so acute that they sting again.
For from this proceeds the passing quickness of his attention.
For by stroking of him I have found out electricity.
For I perceived God's light about him both wax and fire.
For the Electrical fire is the spiritual substance, which God sends from heaven to sustain the bodies both of man and beast.
For God has blessed him in the variety of his movements.
For, tho he cannot fly, he is an excellent clamberer.
For his motions upon the face of the earth are more than any other quadruped.
For he can tread to all the measures upon the music.
For he can swim for life.
For he can creep.

I just encountered a fabulous poem by the contemporary New York poet, Edward Hirsch. It's called "Wild Gratitude" and it's a meditation on Smart's poem, the poet's cat, and more. You can read it online and hear the poet read it on the Poets page.

Joeffry's first sister, Lucina, also shared her name with a beloved poetical cat. Auden's poem
to his beloved kitten was set by another favorite composer of ours, Hans Werner Henze
(1926-2012).

Here's that poem, following a picture of Jeoffry and Luci in Norfolk, 2008.



In Memoriam, L.K.A; 1950-1952

At peace under this mandarin, sleep, Lucina
Blue-eyed queen of white cats
For you the Ischian wave
Shall weep
When we who now miss you
Are American dust
And steep Epomeo in peace and war
Augustly a grave-watch keep.

(W.H. Auden)

In one of life's many unpredictable twists, Luci died just after I left for the airport and another gig. Amy has been away much of this Spring, and J died just one week before her return. We'll read Christopher Smart together while we scatter Jeoffry's ashes across our new garden, outside a house which has never felt emptier.

For further reading on poems about cats, pets, grief (and every other occasion) see the Poets page for Thomas Gray's "Ode on the death of a favorite cat" and links to similar poems.

Pirate Dreams: Original Poetry after The Pirates of Penzance

Pirate Dreams

I.
Dreams of dancing police
in a game of
chance or music for
changes – what was it?
Nevermind the weather let’s
talk about the daisies
or binomial theorem if
you’re teeming with a
lot of news practice
squaring the hypotenuse General
as the sorties scour
the commissariat and the
Pirate King loots the
shore with a centre-
bit another orphan boy
empty-handed hail poetry
___

II.
Thirteen-four-thirteen
Pirates and police – oh my!
Please no more encores

Caravanserai
Disyllabification
Commissariat

Dotted with daisies
talking about the weather
matrimonified

Heliogabalus
binomial theorem
deliberateness

___


III. A portrait of Isabel’s mermaids

… a carved stone-portal entrance / to a forbidden sea-temple;
they called the creature… / …a Siren, / a maid-of-the-sea, a mermaid,
Some said, this mermaid sang / and that a Siren-song was fatal (H.D.)

Isabel, aka Tall Stanley, likes
“mermaids and eating” or so
the local newspaper reported.
She thinks of them as
fellow humans, we aver
from her dialogue with
Kate and Edith (Spunky
and Short Stanley, respectfully).
“It’s the very place for mermaids!”
she gleefully exclaims
through a mouth full of cake.

What does Isabel – o la
belle! Mademoiselle! Veuve
la belle – La Belle Dame…
What do you dream
you’ll find five fathoms deep?
Do you fancy some
Pre-Raphaelite vision
like Cowper’s portrait
of Keats’ La Belle
Dame Sans Merci ?
The dangerous nymph,
the “lady in the meads,
full beautiful – a faery’s child
Her hair was long, her foot was light
And her eyes were wild.”

Oh! What a lady
she must have been,
right, Isabel? What
mermaids wait at
the bottom of your dark
wishing-well? You’re
as mysterious as they are.
Dare I write another

___

[Here the poem breaks off]


Cowper: La Belle Dame Sans Merci (The Beautiful Woman Without Mercy)

Henze, in his own words

Hans Werner Henze (1926-2012 - see below for a personal tribute), in his own words...
(from Music and Politics, Collected Writings 1953-1981)

My certainty lies in my wavering. My wavering is ambivalence about a world that has populated itself with people whose papers are all in order. is one meant to congratulate, to applaud them? (1957)

Art is constantly in danger and must incessantly be re-invented, to ward off the encroachment of mechanical processes. (1959)

Old forms, like classical ideals of beauty, seem to me no longer attainable, but they still may be seen in the distance; they stimulate memory, like dreams, but the path to them is filled with the great darkness of our age; this path to them is the most difficult and impossible. It seems to me the only folly worth living for. (1963)

I needed to be entirely alone, like a hermit, in order to find out what music represented for me, how it is tied to our existence, what its meaning might be, and what the cultural tasks might be for the composer in human society.

Music as speech: a discourse, a syntax, a means of communication and instruction.

Music is not musicology, and the logic of a work resets on a unique constellation of incident, encounter, experience, agreement; it transcends inherited rules, construction, calculation… illuminations and discoveries take place in dreams, not in the laboratory. Not, however, in a state of haziness, but in the wakefulness of sleepwalkers, where facts are perceived with abnormal clarity. (1964)

On Auden & Kallman’s libretto for The Bassarids, quoting Aurora Ciliberti:
Culture is for Auden not scholasticism, but a real knowledge of the facts; its core is faith; it is not something one wears like a piece of jewelry, but what makes a human being.

The charm and the fascination of the theatre lies precisely in the multitude of possibilities with which it can reflect life in ever new shapes and forms.

Fundamental human and existential problems give rise to music.

I have on occasion said that music drama interest me because for me music is a language that people have not yet mastered, and about which they do not yet know enough. Today [1975] there is a terrible danger, as people are bombarded with music everywhere they go, that this situation will harden into a kind of paralysis of the ear and the organs of sound perception. So instead of the human psyche and intellect being developed to understand music as a language – as a part of the sign-system of our civilization – there is a total idiotization, an impoverishment of the possibilities of perceiving the true meaning of musical signs. A major part of my efforts is concerned with communicating the language of music as such, and as a language that comes from the history of our civilization, that has an origin, a present and a past, and will have a future for which we, the composers, are responsible.

Forms in art are in fact also forms of behavior as between people – modes of communication… Art is living and essential only where it is involved with people’s needs and problems. (1975)

The "rich & strange" music of Thomas Adès...

On the occasion of the Met "Live in HD" broadcast of The Tempest
by Thomas Adès, here's a poem inspired by one of his orchestral works.

Simon Rattle paired Mahler's 5th Symphony with Adès' 4-movement symphonic tone poem
Asyla (the plural of Asylum) for his first program as the new director of the Berlin Philharmonic a decade ago. It's 3rd movement is a symphonic evocation of club music, and its title, Ecstasio is as rich a play on word as is Asyla.

Asyla

III. what is this
sound coming

out of even
the stems

of these
flowers?

and is
this ecstasio
imagined
or
palpably real

as Hamlet’s wound
or doubt
or disgust…

IV. so much

depends upon
a piano

tuned to another
key like

the crossed
purposes of
lovers or

parents

or gods.

The
thing is

simply

to find it.
(after Adès)

In Memoriam: HWH: 1926-2012

In Memoriam: Hans Werner Henze, 1.VII.1926-27.X.2012

We just learned yesterday that one of our favorite composers - and one of the most vital, original and prolific composers of the last 60 years - Hans Werner Henze, died October 27 at age 86.

I met Maestro Henze at the US premiere by the New York Phil of his anti-fascist 9th Symphony, based on Anna Seghers searing novel, The Seventh Cross. He signed my study score of his 5th Symphony (written for Bernstein and the NYPO in the early '60's). We talked briefly about the importance of music like his - music that is full of humanity and consciousness; art that performs, enacts or enables the act of memory.

Excellent obituaries can be found online at the Guardian, Musical America and the NY Times. YouTube has an extensive Hans Werner Henze playlist, featuring excerpts from some of his 2-dozen operas, 10 symphonies, dozen ballets, and many of his hundreds of other vocal, chamber, choral and orchestral works. He was a visionary, an iconoclast and an eccentric, and his music reflects his character. He is at once a late romantic, an expressionist and impressionist, a member of the avant-garde and one of its scourges. Like his beloved Whitman, Henze contains multitudes. Below are some quotes from a book of his essays, followed by poetic tributes I penned in his honor.

The charm and the fascination of the theatre lies precisely in the multitude of possibilities with which it can reflect life in ever new shapes and forms.

Fundamental human and existential problems give rise to music.

I have on occasion said that music drama interest me because for me music is a language that people have not yet mastered, and about which they do not yet know enough. Today [1975] there is a terrible danger, as people are bombarded with music everywhere they go, that this situation will harden into a kind of paralysis of the ear and the organs of sound perception. So instead of the human psyche and intellect being developed to understand music as a language – as a part of the sign-system of our civilization – there is a total idiotization, an impoverishment of the possibilities of perceiving the true meaning of musical signs. A major part of my efforts is concerned with communicating the language of music as such, and as a language that comes from the history of our civilization, that has an origin, a present and a past, and will have a future for which we, the composers, are responsible.

Forms in art are in fact also forms of behavior as between people – modes of communication… Art is living and essential only where it is involved with people’s needs and problems.

(from Hans Werner Henze, Music and Politics, Collected Writings, 1953-1981, Faber)

Ø∑∏ÆΩ∫ß◊†
a HWH

I. You must be laughing with Selim and Suleika in the Spirit world,
As your disciples, devotees and lovers left behind mourn
Your passing and celebrate your prodigal gifts to music, art
And humanity. Thank you, Hans for singing such rich and strange
Songs across the tempestuous decades after the War. Your
Voice may echo only faintly in hardened quarters; it quavers
In between the heartstrings in the enchanted forest you
Composed to life, and it sings an ecstatic descant above the
Ravaged world over which you ranged, explored and excavated.

I owe you a large portion of my conscience, a hearty store of
Imagination and an ever-renewing source of inspiration from
Your polyphonic symphonies, your visionary operas, your sui generis
Concertos and evergreen ballets, the beautiful palette of your tone poems;
Songs, chorales and chamber works of floral intimacy and fluorescent
Luminosity. Your voice is missed already, but it will resound as long as
The bards hymn, the dancers fly and the singers soar ethereal…


II. With whom shall we commune in the dreamworld today, Hans?
Sebastian or Percy? Lady M or Jean G? Where is Rudi? Natasha?
The Cimarrón and the Pigs who should have drowned with the Medusa?
(Mustn’t hold the bitterness in the mouth; it sours the wine…)
Where are Peter and Ben? Chester and Wystan, Willie, Ingeborg, Christopher?
I haven’t heard your love letter to Fausto and I miss the Greyhounds almost as much
As you do. Persephone, Antigone, Orpheus! Selim, Suleika, Rimbaud and Walt!
Pentheus & Dionysus, Apollo & Hyacinth, Phaedra, Daphne, Manon!
The Prince and King Stag, the Young Lovers and the Hoopoe! The English Cat,
Undine and Fonteyn! Have they cut down the 7th Cross and censored your
Requiem? Fear not, we will dance like the Maenads and Dithyramb a storm for those
Whispers of the Heavenly Death. The West Wind will carry the intoxicating scent of
The Miracle of the Rose and only the fascists will be thrown in the Labyrinth.
We give Thanks you were not burned at the stake like Bruno for your
Praise to the Infinities. The Sicilian Muses and Neapolitan Songs and the ethereal
Cantata of the Ultimate Fable – Your beautiful eccentric life’s work, é vero?
We’re joining Aristaeus for the Barcarola with the Ferryman, singing
Nocturnes and Arias with abandon, Being Beauteous, Behind the Wire, like
Swann in Love with Tristan. Ciao, Caro. Bis bald.

To E.A.P on the anniversary of his death

In honor of Columbus day and the anniversary of the death of America's most original and visionary romantic, Edgar Allan Poe (d. Oct 7, 1849) here is a little ditty incorporating all of the titles of Poe's mature poems. It is dedicated to the young apprentice artists of Opera Roanoke. We began rehearsals yesterday for our upcoming Masques of Orpheus scenes program entitled "Tempests, Ghosts & Mad Queens." Edgar Allan himself will be the host of this ghoulish entertainment Nov 2 & 4 in Floyd and Roanoke, respectively.

To E.A.P on the anniversary of his death
(7.X.12 | Roanoke, VA)

What fantastic images of yore –
What haunted images of yours,
Edgar Allan shall we today conjure?

Shall we visit The Haunted Palace –
“Ah, nevermore!” Serenade Ulalume, sing
To Helen or meet Annabel Lee in
Dream-Land by The City in the Sea that is
An Enigma tolling like “the tintinnabulation
that so musically wells” from The Bells
or the “double life” of Silence in The Valley of Unrest?

“I saw thee once” in A Dream Within a Dream –
To One in Paradise - The Sleeper reads a twisted
Valentine of The Conqueror Worm –
One of numberless unfinished Scenes from Politian –
In The Coliseum, a Hymn from Israfel – To My Mother –
(in Eldorado) – ah, Lenore – or
To Helen, Eulalie, “blushing bride”
on the “Isola d’oro” when we fled
To Zante and sang our Bridal Ballad
For Annie, To F – S S. O – D, To F - -, To - -

Quoth The Raven: “Nevermore…”

N.B. The Italicized words are the titles of Poe’s poems;
the words in parentheses are quotations from them.
Very little in this so-called poem is therefore original. – H.L.M.

(Manet's illustration for Mallarme's French edition of "The Raven")

Interpretation, or reading the lines & what is or is not between them…

16.IX.12/Roanoke (for James, on his birthday)

We call a hole a grave if we value what goes into it, a mine if we value what comes out.

The instrument at hand. (The instrument. The hand.)

No snide experiment. A broken filament like a pearl must be drawn from the lip of a bruised music.

from “What Is a Threnody” in Archicembalo by G. C. Waldrep (Tupelo, 2009)

Poetry and opera may be the two most “specialized” forms of “classical” art in human culture. Each inspires a cult-like devotion and a seemingly exclusive obsession among its practitioners, amateurs and patrons alike. To those ignorant or suspicious of poetry or opera, such ritual stylization may be an obstacle to the exploration of these rarified genres.

One of the signifiers and qualifiers of greatness is its ability to reward repeated readings, hearings or viewings. Shakespeare’s plays continue to enrich and enthrall – and even entertain – us as we spend more time with the Bard and his work. Cervantes rightly observed that Don Quixote should be read across the span of a lifetime. A young man might marvel at the adventures while one in mid-life will laugh at human folly and an old man will cry with recognition, regret and the compassion borne of wisdom.

At the risk of over-generalization we would submit the majority of great art – poetry, literature, music, theatre and the so-called “visual” or “plastic” arts of painting and sculpture – is “accessible,” approachable and immediate in its appeal.

Let’s examine this essay’s epigram above. G. C. Waldrep’s musical gamut of cryptic poetry is not as “hermetically sealed” as an initial reading might imply. Titles – like names – are important clues. That Wagner’s rootless sea-faring wanderer Der Fliegende Holländer (the Flying Dutchman) is known by a legendary title rather than a name is hugely significant to who he is. Likewise, Waldrep drops clues across the lily pads of his "leapfrogging" poems. A threnody is literally a song of lament (from the Greek threnoidia – threnos = lament; odia = ode). This is clue number one.

The first line from which we’ve drawn our epigram is an example of one of poetry’s sharpest blades: the proverb, aphorism or dictum. We call a hole a grave if we value what goes into it… One of the paradoxical parallels and contrasts between Wagner’s Dutchman and the romantic archetype of the “undead” (familiar in the trope of the Vampire) is found in their distinctive “crypts.” The vampire sleeps in a coffin, representing her earthly origins and the grave out of which she arises. The ghost pirate descends into the bosom of the sea itself. We are also intrigued by the frequency with which vampires in their coffins are transported by ship across the sea. This reinforces the parallels between the varying types of “undead” in romantic and gothic art…

Waldrep’s line, A broken filament like a pearl must be drawn from the lip of a bruised music is lyric poetry first – musical, melodic and possessed of a sensuous beauty that is best appreciated by being recited aloud. Like opera, its physical sound alone is central to whatever its “meaning” or “interpretation” is. The poetic sentence is bookended by adjectives of vulnerability – broken, bruised – which evoke a wound that may be both real and symbolic. Both readings reinforce the lamenting song of the poem's title.

We believe many potential lovers of poetry and music – the oldest forms of art we know, predating the drawings which among other activities depict music making – get stuck in a quicksand of the imagination. The false myth that these forms require advanced degrees and a specialized knowledge to be enjoyed persists. One may prefer “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day” to Waldrep’s verbal and musical experiments, but to dismiss poetry as an opaque or difficult or nonsensical genre says far more about the ignorance of a would-be amateur afraid of an unfamiliar genre than it does about the qualitative differences between traditional sonnets and modern verse. Likewise, the number of potential opera patrons who have never experienced a great opera live yet maintain they “don’t like opera” will always confound us even if it has ceased to surprise.

The Flying Dutchman is an example of a great opera around which much false myth stubbornly clings like kudzu preventing many an eye from appreciating the beautiful details that have always been present. One 19th century conductor said the wind from Wagner’s romantic seafaring adventure story whips one in the face every time one opens the score. Indeed, its defining motive – the mirror inversion of the arresting leap with which Beethoven launches his great 9th Symphony (the “Ode to Joy”) – will be familiar to not only opera lovers but to anyone who’s listened to Bugs Bunny’s and Elmer Fudd’s hilarious operatic send up, “What’s Opera Doc.” (Yes, it’s on YouTube. The 4’ minute “music video” features a pastiche of Wagner from The Flying Dutchman to Die Walküre, Siegfried, Tannhaüser and back again…)

Let us conclude with another demystifying clarification we may later explore in more depth. The plots of operas are frequently fantastic and require the same willing suspension of disbelief necessary to appreciate many works of fiction in media as varied as film, theatre, television and all kinds of literature. As the scholar Robert Donington puts it, “it is the opera we are enjoying and not just the music.” Wagner was among the first composers of music drama to refer to his written scenario as a poem (an operatic libretto is like a script or a screenplay). The Flying Dutchman was his first masterpiece and major success. It was the operatic ship that launched an extraordinary and endlessly fascinating body of work. This singular marriage of poetry and music in the theatrical medium of opera is among the most immediate and most powerful of artistic media human creativity has imagined.