Quiggin

I love Tchaikovsky too, especially in Mravinsky's accounts, which gives Tchaikovsky more complexity. But he reprises phrases too often, repeats them in twos and twos, without varying or redeveloping them enough. My list would include (not in any order): 1) J S Bach - because he develops everything as he goes on and, as Rosen or Adorno point out, never has to recapitulate at the end. 2) Beethoven - for the sonatas, the bagatelles, and all the odd variation sets (Olli Mustonen has a wonderful disc of them) and the late string quartets. 3) Mozart - for the concertos and the piano variations, which include the real "Mozartiana," and the quartets dedicated to Haydn. 4) Haydn - the piano sonatas and Variations in F 5) Debussy - especially in the robust architecture and playfulness of Richter's 1967 live Spoleto recordings of Book I & II Preludes - complete with the thud of a chair crashing to the floor 6) Satie - an important influence on Stravinsky and Debussy - for his work for Diaghilev; for his music for sea cucumbers 7) Buxtehude 8) Chopin 9) Mahler - for the most wonderful live music performance experiences there can ever be 10) One of the contemporary Italians - Donatoni or Castiglioni Stravinsky I like a lot for his wonderful patchwork colors and the brilliance of the early work. But it seems he's often getting by on a pass - is it because he really doesn't develop any ideas?

I think the word "colored" has the special impact of its making its appearance - as documented in so many WPA photographs like those of Walker Evans - again and again over theater entrances and water fountains. I'm afraid I was the poster who brought up the question of Lifar and the fact that Lifar had been fired from the Paris Opera Ballet for his dubious activities during WWII. He's an interesting character to me - a brilliant dancer at times - and not so interesting at others, at least according to Richard Buckle. He's sort of like Plato's Alcibiades, a charming lion cub but not so charming as he grows up. But I don't think it's politics that keeps Lifar's choreographies from being revived. Aside from "Suite en Blanc" there might not be much worth redoing, especially without Yvette Chauvire' to dance them (and think of all the Ballets Russes stuff that doesn't get revived). In uncharacteristically strong language, Edwin Denby says Pavane, L'Inconnue, and Entre Deux Rondes were particularly bad and that none of the others held a much of a lasting interest for him.

According to the "Issyvoo" diaries, he and Don Bachardy didn't like the stage version of "Cabaret" at all - but the royalties were a very helpful source of income. With Auden and Kallman he at some point had tried to write a Berlin musical, and eventually Isherwood and Barchardy wrote a screen treatment of "Cabaret" - again for the income, but Tony Harvey, who was supposed to direct, didn't care for their approach, saying it had been done dozens of times before. In the latest set of diaries, what's astonishing about Isherwood are his anti-semitic rants - it's like a home base or key for him, the only thing he really believes in; it's also one of the reasons he doen't like "Cabaret." This is especially weird in that moral force of the subsequent versions of the original (and nicely small-scaled) "Mr Norris Changes Trains" & "Goodbye to Berlin" is based on being on the right side of history. Isherwood comes off as a fairly shabby and untrustworthy diaryist - and by extension novelist I now think.

The City Ballet production I saw with Nicolaj Hubbe a few years ago looked a little cleaner and overall better balanced than the Baryshnikov - Ferri version on tape. "Night Shadow" / "Sonnambula" seems very much of Balanchine's 1940's Ballet Russes period, and there's a bit of something of the "Cotillon" - "Le Valse" line to it, as Edwin Denby suggests with his "the vapid walzes" and Edgar Allen Poe references. "Sonnambula" opens almost like an Anthony Tudor ballet, or a slight parody of one. The Suzanne Farrell Ballet version I saw in Berkeley fairly recently was very stripped down and showed off the structures of the ballet very effectively - especially when the poet passes, backwards, his rounded empty arms over the length of the sleepwalker's body. The part seemed to have an affinity to the blind poet in "Serenade." The Harlequins that Degas painted at the old Paris Opera were also played by women - so there might be a tradition of that. In the new book "Picasso Harlequin" there is a discussion of the trickster quality of the Harlequin and its origins in Mercury or Hermes, "constantly changing, constantly on the move: Harlequin is diversity personified". Picasso was always changing (as was Balanchine - and Stravinsky) and Harlequin appears in Picasso's paintings, according to Yve-Alain Bois, "whenever Picasso felt inclined to play with several distinct styles at once." [corrected]

Jack Reed: I was trying to pack too many things together too tightly - and I had just seen a couple of fine Degas works from the Museum d’Orsay that are being shown in San Francisco I sensed in "Apollo’s Angel’s" there was a lack of interface with the world outside the idealized one of ballet and with history outside ballet - like battles going on outside Versailles in Holland, or riots in Paris - and a shying away from the immediacy of primary materials and in favor of secondary materials. In a way what Homans complains is happening to the performance of ballet is happening to the telling of its history - the same smoothing and blending together the same sources, so that the narrative no longer has any bite - like the fading of color from the original fabric that Herodotus complains about. This is especially apparent in light of the exciting art history writings of the past thirty years which re-present Impressionist art as a harsh documentary record of the powerful social changes in Paris. Degas really shows this harsh, grittier reality by turning his eye away from orthodox romantic view of ballet - and into its component pieces backstage and at the barre and focuses on the economies of patronage and exchange between mothers and daughters and silhouetted men in black opera hats. That male dancers are never shown serves to heighten the contrasts. I couldn’t tell if this was the world Homans was saying Degas was reflecting or the conventional idealized one. I do appreciate your pessimistic views about the current state of ballet and society.

Jack Reed: My sense, as I'm reading "Apollo's Angels," is that there is no society-at-large or history to it. Jennifer Homans' thesis seems to be that ballet is a sublime mechanism existing outside everything else. Her book, while a smooth summary of other researchers' work, doesn't itself dig into the girt of history or argue with and evaluate its sources - as Lynn Garafola often does. In Homans' telling, ballet history moves on a single homogenous trajectory (like the adagio movement of Symphony in C, or Diamonds?) - in which everything keeps getting better, albeit with some reversals, until the death of Balanchine, and then everything falls apart. There are also very strange ways of reading things - for instance Homans cites a "prominent writer" of the era of Louis XIII - XIV, a period when there was probably no such concept, and goes on to characterize the brilliant memoir writer Duc de Saint-Simon, as "himself a virtual patron saint of ambition and spleen" and then hardly uses him - or Madame de Sevigne' - as eyewitnesses. And while not mentioning the development of Cuban ballet at all - as Natalia has previously noted, Homans curiously remarks that “Dancers from Russia and the former Soviet bloc, as well as Cuba and South America, are flocking the the West.” Regarding Diaghilev, "Apollo" - the ballet of the title - rates only two pages of analysis and "Prodigal Son" is not mentioned at all. Both are significant end points for the Ballets Russes ("Apollo" can be looked at as a remake of "Afternoon of the Faun," all its excesses corrected, and "Prodigal Son" burlesquing and then purifying early Ballets Russes Orientalism). "Parade," a significant mid-point ballet, subject to much scrutiny these days by art historians such as Yve-Alain Bois and Elizabeth Cowling, is not taken seriously. Another odd comment: "Degas' intense preoccupation with ballet - almost half his work focused on ballet - was evidence of the art form's lasting ability to mirror its times." The other half or so of the famously grumbling misanthropist Degas' work is, unfortunately for this comparison, that of the brothels, which according to the art historian Theodore Reff, was "a subject imbued with that melancholy spirit of isolation and disillusionment which Degas and Huysmans identified with a modern sensibility. [They were] drawn by nature to the closed, nocturnal world of urban entertainment and distraction, rather than the sunlit one chosen by their Impressionist colleagues." The balletic world that is reflected in Degas is of odd and cool alliances between patrons, mothers and dancers. His paintings are made up of small isolated drawings, as repetitious as barre work, that finally are tacked together, like a series of fruit on an espaliered tree - borrowing Degas' own metaphor. Jules Perrot - whom Degas genuinely admired - is moved about like a chess piece among the girls and mothers and stray cats and stray men in high hats (there are no male dancers at all in Degas' world).

Some people even object to the word "slave" - which by its elimination, neuters history. Tanner discusses some other interesting topics of the period, including William Dean Howells's ambivalent attitude in his novels, though not in his acts: * papeetepatrick: Your friend should definitely not read the new Keith Richards memoir, in which chick is the mildest term Richards uses. Jenny Diski has written a very funny account in the new London Review on her experience reading it, titled "Never Mainline."

The kids on my bus - the 49 Van Ness in San Francisco - use all sorts of shocking racial names addressing each other, back and forth, like a sort of hard table tennis - as if they're somehow trying to wear them out and desensitize them. So such words may currently embarrass the teachers and people of an older generation more than the students. Anyway, regarding how racially mixed things are regarding Mark Twain and Huck Finn, I recently came across an old, slightly cranky Tony Tanner review in the London Review concerning a book by Shelley Fishkin called "Was Huck Black?" Its premise is that Huck Finn was based to some degree (Tanner says only partially) on a talkative African American young man whom Twain met and wrote about as "Sociable Jimmy" - sort of a Rameau's Nephew to Twain. Tanner begins by quoting Ralph Ellison: Tanner goes on to say: Voice of America [may be subscriber only link] * Almost as nutty as that was this week's set of "Why Criticism Matters" New York Book Review essays which - with the exception perhaps of Elif Batuman's - seemed, contrary their mission, to trivialize criticism, to be impatient with genuine tools of analysis and render it toothless and meaningless - and to say things like "the secret function of the critic is to write beautifully and in doing so protect beautiful writing" and "what matters most is not exercising influence and force but writing well." It was as if the great critics like Auerbach or Lukacs (at least of Theory of the Novel) or Bahktin had never exisited.

Croce I agree with this - the Scheijen book seems a calm, homogeneous executive summary - though with some new materials - compared to the book Buckle wrote. Buckle follows Diaghilev like a documentary cameraman. Most importantly he has talked with many of the originals and knows just the right tone to take with the materials. From Buckle's book - which seems to be out of print: Buckle includes Diaghilev's last telegram to Lifar - during D's last days which Buckle develops over many pages.

I agree with Bart - the first thing I thought of was "I was such an idiot [to do such and such]" - you sometimes overhear people saying that on the street or in cafes and it has a certain charm to it. It was something Johnson just as well could have said about himself. But the second part of the sentence about turning the part into bathos and comedy is more important than the first - and perhaps should be the subject of controversy. We sometimes get so sensitized to the little transgressions that the real things get a pass.

As a someone who has worked as a librarian, I've noticed that periodical name changes cause continuity problems for researchers as well as for occasional readers. The San Francisco Performing Arts Library & Museum, or PALM which was easy to remember, changed its name to The Museum of Performance & Design and now it's difficult to find the old name linked to the new one - and from other library pages you often get broken links. For research and citation purposes, for treating your archive as a serious resource, perhaps you should keep the old name somewhere on the title page with the spans of name changes. And design it in someway that Google and Yahoo and the rest will see a natural relation between all the iterations (the old and new Ballet Alert and not-for-dancers Ballet Talk) - and treat them as the same resource and bring up search results on the same page.

I didn't quite know which Nutcracker thread to post this clip in, but it would seem appropriate to mention Yevgeni Mravinsky's connection with the "Nutcracker" score - also with other Tchaikovsky works, and with Stravinsky and Balanchine. Mravinsky would have heard the music as it was being conducted in and before 1920, but the tempos he took might have been different and uniquely his. The great virtue of his intrepretations is that he brings out all of the voices and all of the colors, at the expensive perhaps of the dynamics and obvious stresses. I especially like his "Petrouska." There is also a 1946 recording of the Nutrcracker divertissements - difficult to find except for dubious mp3 downloads. Some background from "St Petersburg: A Cultural History" by Solomon Volkov and Antonina W. Bouis: Balanchine in Taper: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9K0N16w0yjA .

He was phoning her late at night or something like that and it was creeping her out - I don't remember the details and only wanted to suggest the contours of the situation. Yes I remember all of those fun lines. We originally had only Rodgers & Hammerstein musicals in our house - how I wished my parents had checked the classical music box on the Record of the Month Club membership card. Only the Bruno Walter Brahms symphonies (but no Mahler) had slipped through, which my father would play in the mornings to wake us up and to which we dutifully brushed our teeth. But discovering Lorenz Hart - Richard Rodgers secret-til-then earlier partner - so irreverent and with occasionally brilliant interior rhyme schemes, felt so liberating after years of the well-constructed Sound of Music and South Pacific and Mr Roberts (not a musical but in the same vein and done at every little theater). "Guys and Dolls" on scratchy Decca vinyl was a welcome later addition to our very short play list. John Kobal did a nice interview in "People with Talk" with Vivienne Segal when she was living in Los Angeles - also with Arletty I think - but I can't find a table of contents online to be sure.

The movie "Pal Joey" really doesn't have much to do with the play or with the Pal Joey to Pal Ted - or Dear Friend Ted from ex-pal Joey - letters of John O'Hara that were the play's original basis. San Francisco was a weak substitute for Chicago, and Sinatra was not really about to play the part of a heel - even Broadway audiences in the early forties were uncomfortable with the characters. "Some Came Running" was a harder, better movie for him and closer to being an original thing. The Goddard Lieberson Lp of "Pal Joey" did contain lines such as "horizontally speaking, he's at his very best" and "I was reading Schoepenhauer last night - zip - and I think Schoepenhauer was right." - perhaps racier ones weren't. For "Connecticut Yankee" Lorenz Hart supposedly was writing and passing new verses up to Vivien Segal as she was singing them, so there may be more material for "Take Him" and "Terrific Rainbow". "Gilda" and "Lady from Shanghai" are in some way companion movies - done at roughly the same time, Shaghai much harder. As pure cinema though, "Lady from Shanghai" is far superior, full of stunning "iconic" images. There's the brilliant scene in the house of mirrors with everyone followed by a train of reflections - in a way a static critique/paraody of standard montage cutting. At the same time corny but effective radio dialogue is running counterpoint underneath. "Killing you is like killing myself ... but I'm pretty tired of the both of us," says Everett Sloane whose fresh image emerges out of the maze of reflections. "Lady from Shaghai" has some of the bitterness of betrayal of the late Sternberg films - and of Maltese Falcon. It far outdoes "Vertigo" in its depiction of the real San Francisco of the period - in comparison "Vertigo" seems to limit itself to red velvet hotel lobbies and tourist spots (though there is a wonderful glimpse of the original Podesta Baldocchi florist shop from the alleyway behind). I remember my aunt, who worked at a charity where Rita Hayworth would do occasional fund raising, saying that sometime in the seventies Hayworth discovered that she and Glenn Ford were living in the same canyon district, Benedict Canyon perhaps, and Ford had become fascinated with her in a way that made her feel a little uncomfortable.

I saw a couple of the “Nutcrackers,” this week and wish that Ingmar Bergman could be whisked down from heaven to reset the first act and ruffle up its oppressive good cheer with a some of the stagecraft of “Fanny & Alexander” or his “A Winter’s Tale.” I sometimes try to slip in a little late. And the production as a whole seems to have been trimmed in places or to have lost some interest in itself - I agree with PeggyR about Daniel Deivison standing out with such great dash and personality in Russian, and about Isaac Hernandez being wonderful in Spanish, his arm movements particularly crisp and articulate. On Sunday he seemed to be miscast in Chinese which depends on pure speed and doesn’t need his beautiful legato phrasing - but he was very fine in his debut as the Nutcracker Prince. He puts amazing little pauses in his turns in air at junctures no one else does. Vitor Luiz’s transformation from Nutcracker to Prince was less incisive and exuberant than last year - but everything was another level when he and Lorena Feijoo did the grand pas de deux, and Lorena was a wonderful Sugar Plum Fairy a few nights before, all her choices fascinating to watch. Thursday’s Nutcracker Prince, Taras Domitro, was “the best.” Everything he does seems completely original as if he’s making things up as he goes along; you don’t want to miss anything - his concentration, his landings, his beautiful turns, his seeming to be floating on updrafts of air - like Kafka’s sad trapeze artist to whom food and water are brought up by ladder and who sleeps on luggage racks when he travels. Taras has been wonderful to watch since his first appearance at San Francisco in “Melancholic” - as intense and definitive as any I saw during at City Ballet - and he’s also been great in “Rubies,” “Emeralds,” and Helgi’s Tomasson’s very dark “Quattro Stagioni.” Hopefully we'll see him in “Symphony in C” this season. And Maria Kochetkova was delightful in her short Queen of the Snow appearance, full of good humor, grace and ease. Last season she and Vitor Luiz were so generous with their balletic gifts and so light and Mozartian in Helgi Tomasson’s “Haffner Symphony” - which seems to poke fun at Balanchine “Divertimento #15” - that it rose to the level of the original influence.

It may also come through Alexandra Danilova who saw the originals and transmitted a significant amount of 19c classical Russian choreography to France and the US - "Coppelia" most notably. The video clip of Danilova's Sugar Plum Fairy variation looks uncannily like Lorena Feijoo's, especially the quick recto/verso transitions.

In the early days I think you went to see Carolyn Brown and Viola Farber as much as the cooler Cunningham, all were great dancers to watch. I once saw Merce in the seventies dance with his company like a strange Pinter street person and you couldn't take your eyes off him - but then it seemed to become less interesting without him. The Septet clip has a some relation to "Apollo" with the soft banality of Satie rather than astingent neoclassicism of Stravinsky underwriting the movements. Ultimately with Cage - I agree with papeetepatrick - it isn't very interesting music - and was sometimes played horribly loud. It's is a taunt, a poke in the face at middle class values, and which ends up as Adorno has said "an exaggerated version of the very postivism it sets to out to denounce." Sometimes the new music (though I like Donatoni) seems so elaborately stingy - I heard Sylvano Busotti at the San Francisco Museum last Thursday in the open atrium sing and very nicely play the piano with an opera singer adding voice patterns and there was some string playing - and I kept thinking but why don't they just go on and play "PIerrot Lunnaire" - they're so close and it would bring in so much range and pleasure. Or sometimes I think why don't they just say it and play one of the Beethoven late quartets and break through these arbitrary conceptual walls they all set up, Cage and Duchamp and the rest. As Rauchenberg's collages derive from Kurt Schwitter's, Cunningham's on-site proceniumless works come from the experiments in Gemany and Russia in the twenties when they had real brute force and context - Eisenstein's last stage production, before he went to film, took place in a factory and the audience moved from place to place. Some of this mad experimentation Balanchine brought over with him (along with the earlier avante garde of Petipa) - there is more of this to him than Diaghilev or "jazz' or american venacular - and that's why I think Balanchine's work is more radical than Cunningham's - some of it like the Beethoven late quartets in its ranging over scary and lyrical uncharted territories.

It's a good question - but Hollywood may be off by a cycle. This seems to be the year of Coppelia - at San Francisco and in Seattle, or Midsummer Night's Dream. Maybe Neumeier's Little Mermaid would appeal to Black Swan fans.

Actually I thought the clip of “The Coast [Zone]” Cristian has posted was lovely - and I’ve had difficulties with the length and sometimes atomized structures of Merce’s pieces. I think Elizabeth Bishop says if only her students would leave out the last stanza they’d be much stronger, and I’ve remembered thinking with this or that Cunningham’s piece, if it ended right now, it would be perfect, it would be a thing complete in itself. But “The Coast Zone” had some nice matching of shapes with shapes and a nice caesura or two to anchor those. I do have a problem with “Les Sylphides/Chopiniana" as an advance in ballet, being a little sickly sweet, though the figures and the development of the corp-al lines are beautiful. It may be that the Glazunov orchestration denatures Chopin’s pieces, their architectures and faceting more at home on the hard keys of the piano. Alexandra Danilova says that already by the twenties Fokine was out of date, that for her and Balanchine and the people of the Young Ballet, Fokine was the past, the clean lines of Apollo and rhythms were the kinds of things they were looking forward to. Would Diaghilev have brought Cunningham to the Ballets Russes along with Rauchenberg and Johns? - He probably would have, just as he had with "Pas d’Icier"/"Steel Step" and its hard and incessant Prokofiev score, in order to catch up with the latest thing the Soviets were doing. As he had with Balanchine who was bringing with him the latest from Meyerhold and Goleizovsky. And as Diaghilev almost did with Alejo Carpentier who was bringing modernist Cuban ballet pieces to Paris - but too late - and who would in turn take “La Consagracion de la Primavera” back to Havana with him. Regarding "Don Quixote" (rechoreographed and lightened I believe in 1910 or so) - it's a sidebar to the real thing and Don Quixote himself has been downgraded to a minor character - and so it's not a bad thing to excerpt, just as you would an opera aria here and there, as Schwarzkopf or Lucia Popp would do.

What I meant about Macaulay's lively style is that when there were more columnists practicing it, such as Kael and Manny Farber (who wrote "Nearer My Agee to Thee*") and many classical music opera critics, it was less likely to be an object of general anxiety. Here's Denby on the "Toumanova Problem" - a whole column, not just one line. John Martin wrote more stongly and dismissingly, once saying Eglevsky was less an Apollo than an Hephaestus in his landings, weight and style. And again Macaulay's comment was one line in an article that was valuable in describing in fair detail the plan of Balanchine Nutcracker - before that one line got sent to Huffington Post readers for thumbs up or thumbs down. *Farber: "Even when he modified and showboated until the reader got the Jim-jams, Agee's style was exciting in its pea-soup density.

The greater part of Alaistair Macaulay's column was about Balanchine's choreography for the Nutcracker, its basic plan, what its great pleasures were, how it was stronger and more daring or weaker than other versions. Macaulay is doing this as a part of a marathon viewing of Nutcrakers productions in the US, something not usually done by Times or New Yorker critics. In one line in the last paragraphy of the City Ballet review Macaulay made a sharp comment about two dancers' bodies and their appropriateness to the particular roles they were dancing that night - in the way an opera critic might talk about how well matched an older singer to the part she or he were singing. He also wrote., "they’re among the few City Ballet principals who dance like adults, but without adult depth or complexity," which is the sort of thing Edwin Denby, or B H Haggin too, used to say. Of the whole article, this one line is what the commentors and sub-commentators discussed at Huggington Post and elsewhere - in a frightening lynch mob tone (making Fritz Lang's Fury now seem to me not the stiff and schematic movie I used to think it was). This is a serious situation. Criticism is dying from tea party-like bullying from one side or having to comform to the bland tastes of the "Like" or "Digg" button on the other. (The only place you see "passionate" used are in Craigslist personnel ads for jobs in the tech industry: "You will join a fun, talented, and passionate team building the next generation of eGain Open CIH platform and products with infinite possibilities for innovation.") Even having to defend Macaulay's right to compose smart and snappy columns (there used to be dozens of writers like him, Kael, Manny Farber, Kermode, etc) means the battle is mostly lost.

Interesting about Delphine Seyrig. I'm trying to imagine Garbo in "Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles" - three days in the routines of a homemaker which go slightly and slightlier out of kilter - which Seyrig did so brilliantly. Below is a photograph of Seyrig at Coenties Slip. She was married to Jack Youngerman and then lived with group of artists which included Agnes Martin, Ellsworth Kelly and Robert Indiana. The group was living in cold-water abandoned sail lofts and ships chandleries and were trying to distance themselves from the influences of the Eighth Street abstract expressonist scene [i'm paraphrasing from the lovely 1993 Pace Gallery catalog]. Youngerman compared them to Godard's "Band of Outsiders." Kelley said Seyrig was a civilizing influence. Antonioni and Monica Vitti paid a visit about the time "L'Avventura" was being released, interested in meeting a group of artists. A variant of the famous photograph by Hans Namuth of them all on a rooftop - if you scroll up: Nos 3-5 Coenties Slip Regarding ""Ninotchka," I think I prefer its successor, "Silk Stockings," which has been discussed here before - with Fred Astaire and Cyd Charisse and scene stealing Peter Lorre.

The Motion Picture Herald rankings seem to be an odd mix to judge an actor's box office effectiveness by, what with Wallace Beery, Will Rodgers, Shirley Temple and Rin Tin Tin also in the running. (Like the Judy Holiday song in "Bells are Ringing.") Regarding the chemistry of Marlene Dietrich and Gary Cooper - and many other screen pairings - it should be noted that in "Morocco" they were often not on the soundstage at the same time. In his memoir Josef von Sternberg says:

This readers comment was just posted at the Times in a discussion about the book's premise: Arts Beat: When the critic says

Elif Batuman has written a review on "The Programme Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writin" by Mark McGurl in the "London Review of Books" and has taken a different point of view on the subject - coming down on the side of the "cliches and tropes", as George Saunders characterizes the criticism of the programs. Down With Creative Writing