Paris Note: Stripped-down Messiah

I mentioned that concert at  l’église Saint-Eustache although I didn't mention, like, you know, the concert.  But it's worth a word: the performance was Handel's Messiah. The hook was that it was a stripped-down version,with an orchestra of perhaps 20 and a chorus of about the same size.   Suppose to replicate, or at least resemble, what it might have been like in Handel's own day, perhaps even at its first performance in Dublin, where the musical resources would have been more 

The actual performance here was, shall we say, somewhat lacking in polish, but no big deal.  It's (almost) always fun to hear one of the war horses in an antique venue, and I think they got their point across about the virtues of the stripped down model. Having heard my first Messiahs back in the area when the musicians arrived by battalions, I can relate.

For comparison, and for the sheer fun of it, here's a rather different Messiah --this from Vienna, where the Germans so often feel they have to lard up the music with some sort of wacky modernism.  I don't get it but mostly because I didn't watch--just left the sound on and reduced the screen.  I thought the music lovely, even if not of the stripped-down 1740s variety:

France Note: Cathedrals

Paris again, or rather France, or rather Northern France, the potion between Paris and the great battlefields of World War I. The subject of the late outing was cathedrals--more precisely, the cathedrals most easily reached by SCNF. That would include, for one,  Rouen, locus of the pivotal scenes in Madam Bovary; also the great facade which you'd remember from countless Monets, even if you've never seen countless Monets.   Also Reims, where they used to crown the kings.  And Amiens.  My heavens, Amiens.  I probably haven't seen enough to say with confidence, but I can believe those who say that Amiens is the most remarkable of all: massive and yet delicate, as if just this once, the builder(s) kept everything in balance.  And the whole only enhanced by the irony that the city itself is surely as grim and charmless as any you would want to imagine.

The obvious virtue of a trip like this is that you get a chance to assimilate some stuff, to begin to see particulars out of the blur. And perhaps in particular, to begin to see the evolution of techniques, as the builders learned from their mistakes.  It becomes easy to see, for example, how Reims grows out of Chartres and Amiens out of both.  It becomes also possible to understand how Henry Adams might have favored the earlier, more primitive, Chartres over the other two: precisely because the builders of Chartres still needed to learn a thing or two, the building carries a kind of weird otherness that its progeny cannot match.

Aside from ourselves,we traveled in the company of a rewarding guidebook by one Stan Perry, otherwise unknown to us.  It's an amateur's book with the passions and enthusiasm of one's personal taste but hardly less worthwhile therefore.   And another: I tucked in a copy of a little book on the finance of cathedral construction,  by an American, but which I found in a French translation last year in Belgium.  It was useful enough on its own terms but it provided an unexpected extra: in discussing the sources of funds, the author does an admirable job of making vivid the unstable confrontation of social strata--churchmen, townsmen and chivalric rural strongmen--whose contention defined the age.  

I said that Amiens is, or must be, the greatest.  I'll stick to that until I learn better.  But I do have to admit that my personal favorite remains the much less grand little cozy corner at Wells in England, so obviously the local of so many Trollope novels.

Afterthought:  Oh, and I neglected to mention the great cathedral of Paris--i.e., the Gare Saint Lazare, the train station from which Monet himself and tourists today begin their journey out to the gardens at Giverny.

Paris Note: Piketty, and A Second Choice

At Les Cahiers de Colette Bookshop in the Rue Rambuteau in Paris a few days back I came upon a copy of the French edition of the Piketty world shaker, aka Le capital au XXIe siècle.  Best  I can tell, it is even longer than the English language version, and with footnotes.  At 25 Euros, the per-pound price doesn't seem out of line.  I did give it a heft but the--nah, I went for a new Livre de Poche one-volume edition of the memoirs of Casanova. aka Histoire de ma vie, with a rewarding intro by Jean M. Goulemont.    Apparently there was a "new" edition published just last year by Robert Laffont, supposedly from an "original" manuscript but this isn't it.  The edition bears a 2014 copyright but it appears to drive from an earlier publication dated 1993--also, somewhat confusingly, from Laffont.

No matter.  It's a good, clear, readable text which helps one (assisted by Goulemont) to see Casanova as a complex and challenging.  Yes, there is rutting enough to scandalize a Jesuit but as the editor urges, there's a lot more.   Casanova indeed comes across as a man of the 18th Century--alert, inquisitive, energetic with a high sense of self worth.   The comparison that comes to mind is he memoir of Lorenzo da Ponte,  Da Ponte comes across as a lesser figure--odd, when one reflect that he wrote three of the best opera libretti ever.  But they both offer the same posture of restless, worldy self-sufficiency--and both were Venetians who spent a good deal of their life on the run.  One also thinks of the Tiepolos (Tiepoli?) father and son--particularly the son with his dark, ambiguous comic visions of an Enlightenment in decline.

Fun fact: I see there is already an Executive Summary of Piketty, available, so far as I can tell, in France and England, not (yet?) in the US.  So far as I can tell, no executive summary of Casanova. 

Paris Footnote: First Responders

Another Paris footnote: we were at l’église Saint-Eustache the  other night, settling in for a Handel Messiah when a brace of four chairs just next to us began to lean back as if it intended to tumble over.  On closer scrutiny, it appears that the man at the end of the row had fallen victim to some sort of affliction and had collapsed into his chair, as if to take all the furniture down with him.  Several people moved in to prop the chairs up; a couple of others lifted him out of the seat and laid him on the floor (stone cathedral: must have been cold).  One woman knelt beside him and seemed to do some nurse-like things; checked his breathing, loosened his shirt. Another--I gather his companion--seemed to talk with him, but quietly so no strangers could hear.  After three or four minutes someone took out a cell phone and called for emergency aid--he seemed to be describing symptoms.    Another ten minutes and some first responders appeared on the scene, dressed in black polo shirts and slacks.  I think they must also have worn rubber soled shoes; they were so quiet you didn't know they were there until they were there.   I think there were four; one or two had small shoulder bags.  After  exchanging words with the two women an (I think) the victim, one of the men in black emerged from the shadows with a kind of wheely-chair. Two of them lifted him into it, and they disappeared again into the  shadows. The companion made as if to follow after although she set off in the wrong direction; somebody steered her straight, and with word of thanks, she followed after.

And after  few more minutes, the concert began.

The thing is--it was all so quiet, both the crisis moment itself and the response. Well, you say, this was, after all. a church.  Yes, maybe.  And I admit, I can't remember being that close to any such event in America.   But my instincts tell me that we'd do it with a lot more racket.  Particularly the first responders.  I have the vision of them arriving in America with the clatter of footsteps, with an array of hardware, perhaps even the occasional Kevlar vest.   Do I have this wrong?

Afterthought:  Oddly enough, no doctor volunteered from the audience.   I just now remember what my friend Linda used to say about St. Johns Smith Square in London. She said if you shouted "is here a doctor in the hour?"  you might not get a response.  But if you said "is there a licensed professional social worker?"  you'd get a stampede.

Could This Be the Ugliest Public Building in Europe?

Hint, it is only blocks away from what mighty be the most beautiful.

Oh, if you really want to know, go here.

Monumental Paris

And here's a Piketty-inspired inquiry about the nation that figures so high in the historical inequality tables--being, of course, his own France.

We took advantage of an unplanned free day today to ride the Metro out to the Arc de Triomph and walk back to the 

Hôtel  de Ville via the Champs-Elysee.  It's a part of Paris that neither of us has ever spent much time in, but on a sunny afternoon (after a few sprinkles in the morning), it's a splendid and invigorating promenade.  Past the site of the guillotine, past the place where Gilbert told Marcel that he could tickle her again, the whole schmear.  And it gives rise to two questions.

One: is there any city in he world that tops Paris in monumental architecture?   Actually, yes,* but compared with other Western metro centers, almost any other entrant is a piker.  Some this stuff goes back to the glory days of the Sun King; some you can blame on the Little Corporal himself, but from the look of things, the stone cutters and cement mixers kept cutting and mixing almost to the eve of the First World War.

Which brings me to question two: particularly in the 19C, where did they get the money for all this spectacular waste?  They had an empire of sorts, of course, but empires are often a drag on progress, not a spur.   Prosperous, perhaps, but how prosperous enough to throw the great stones about with such profligate abandon?

*Ashgabad in Turkemenstan, for sure, the great hulking ghost town.  Probably Pyongyang, although I've never been there.  Thank God.   Are there others?

The Bastille

Here's a first for the Buces: after all these years, we finally made it last night to the Bastille Opera House in Paris.   Takeaway, it's wonderful.  We'd heard the stories about its scandalous growing pains and also had a vague sense that theg'd turned things around.  The vague sense was right.  Just about everything here is first rate: great acoustics, comfortable seating, big stage.  Although that last could be a problem: the stage actually feels better than the Met, though perhaps only because in a somewhat smaller auditorium.  And the secondary stuff:  helpful staff, convenient signage.  And you walk right in from the Metro, with no risk of winding up in the wrong place.

Apparently some folks still complain that it doesn't look enough like the grand old confectionary of the Palais Garnier downtown.  And they have a point: the Bastille biuilding has all the charm of a Holiday Inn express.  But at least a wel-designed Holiday Inn Express, with findable rest rooms 

The performance--well, pretty good, actually.  Bellini's I Capuletti d I Montecchi, with a capable cast, albeit not the same as the show-stopper with Natalie Dessay and Nicole Cabell at San Francisco a couple of years back.  The staging here at the Bastille was something else again: evidently it's a much-repeated and much-admired rendition. But it struck us as pretty flat.  Maybe our tastes have ben jaded by HD.

I Don't Think They'll Carry This Precinct

It's the LePen party.  Paris, just behind the Pompidou Center.

Let's See, What Am I Missing?

Oh.  They don't use the f-word any more.

You Can Lead a Horde to Culture but you Can't Make'em Think

They say we are a herd animal. Trudging through Monet's garden at Giverny this morning, I came to understand that this is wrong.  We are a horde animal, at least when it comes to thundering across the central European landmass or descending from tour busses. An ordos in the hortos, with hortatory overtones.

Off Again

We're off with the morning plane/across the raging main--hey, somebody has to do it.  And this time I'm not taking much computer firepower with me, which might mean that this will be my most extended blog holiday since I set up shop way back in--what was it, aught six?  I see by the stats that my numbers are way down lately.   That doesn't really mean that I've lost interest in blogging per se.  It probably does mean that I no longer feel the need to be one of those chatterbox wannabees who act as if the world awaits their every word.  I'm more inclined to let it pass for a few hour, maybe even a few days.

No time for that at the moment,  in any event.  I did want to offer some sort of lament/salute to Joyce DiDonato--no, dears, nothing bad has happened to her. But I think I heard her say that last Saturday's performance in La  Cenerentola will be her last in this signature role.  Too bad for us, but I see her point.  I do hope she will continue with other stuff, including that magnificent three-in-a-bed that ends Le Comte Ory.  Never too old for a three-in-a-bed, dear.  Meanwhile, I have a plane to catch...