Quotation of the day

[elettaria]

"It must have been a work of vast ability in the somniferous school of literature."
- Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter, p.158.

Yes yes, I know, I should be reading Barthes. I just came online to check the library opening hours, I'm going to borrow the video of Billy Budd and watch it at G's this evening, do a bit more pondering on Britten opera. Really it should be The Turn of the Screw, that's the one I'm working on, but I can't face watching it only two days after the first time, especially since I watched The Innocents the same evening (and really must make notes on both). I need a break from watching possessed children and peculiar ghosts who come with their own personal dry ice machine and irritating housekeepers and ludicrously phallic towers.

Hopefully the homoeroticism in BB will be subtle enough not to alarm his parents if they wander in. The other week I wanted to watch Maurice for my Forster essay, but as that presumably contains scenes with James Wilby in bed with Rupert Graves, and the television with the video is in the kitchen, G said he didn't want to risk it, his parents would have a canary fit. So then I ring up asking if I can bring round an opera about paedophilia...BB is probably (marginally) safer. It's ragingly gay but the whole point is that it's repressed, if Claggart was shagging Billy then he wouldn't be wandering around singing about the strange attraction/repulsion he feels, he'd be, well, shagging Billy; probably having a pretty twisted relationship to boot, and no doubt they'd still end up killing each other. The singer playing Billy doesn't look at cute as the one in my recording, but at least it has Philip Langridge as Captain Vere. Whom I value for his voice, I hasten to add, he's truly ideal for Britten. Two bars of his Quint could get me into bed any time; he looks like a Grimes in the pictures I've seen, which ain't a compliment.

Comments

[elfbystarlight.livejournal.com]

Yay Barthes! ::wanders by, waving 'Mythologies'::

[elettaria.livejournal.com]

Is the icon meant to mean anything in particular, or is it just pleasingly bizarre?

I'm meant to be reading "The Grain of the Voice", which I vaguely remember involves a rather bitchy discussion of Fischer-Dieskau.

[elfbystarlight.livejournal.com]

A Discworld reference. The first Discworld computer, Hex, upon discovering that either its processing is in error or the universe is, gave the above error message.

Although pleasingly bizarre is also a theme for today.

I am not familiar with 'Grain'. I will look for it when I've finished wrapping my head around structuralism :D

[elettaria.livejournal.com]

I should have known.

[elfbystarlight.livejournal.com]

I'm afraid that Discworld is so ingrained now that I don't even realise when I use it that it's not as widely understood as I assume it to be ::shame::

[ladyvivien.livejournal.com]

It's a Pratchett reference ;) Did you call this morning? I think I was asleep and told Laura to bugger off.

[elettaria.livejournal.com]

I did. The version she reported to me was more polite, though.

[lalumena.livejournal.com]

"I need a break from watching possessed children and peculiar ghosts who come with their own personal dry ice machine and irritating housekeepers and ludicrously phallic towers."
Well, yes, I can understand that.

[lethargic-man.livejournal.com]

Not in the slightest a propos of your posting, did I ever tell you you have immaculate taste in user icons?

[elettaria.livejournal.com]

Why, thank you. I nab them off gardening sites and the like.

[lethargic-man.livejournal.com]

It's a shame the old one had to go to make room for the new one. Could I interest you in making a gallery of them and putting it on your userinfo page? There's free photo hosting, I gather, at www.photobucket.com (http://www.photobucket.com).

[elettaria.livejournal.com]

Just go to my sources if you like them (and don't tell them I'm stealing their pictures). http://www.crocus.co.uk, recently supplanted by http://www.plantphotography.com.

[sphinxvictorian.livejournal.com]

If you can find it, the film of Billy Budd with a very young Terence Stamp and Peter Ustinov and Robert Ryan is worth getting your hands on. Does your laptop play DVDs? It might be a better alternative than shocking G's parents ;). Or can you only get the opera on videotape?

[elettaria.livejournal.com]

I'm interested in Britten opera rather than Melville, but thanks anyway. What's it like? The only thing I've seen Stamp in is Priscilla, Queen of the Desert, so my mind is boggling slightly. Well, at least it's suitably gay. I still can't believe how many people write about BB and try to ignore the colossal homoeroticism. Which was done very nicely in the production I've just watched, incidentally. Billy wasn't terribly good, he's meant to be young, gorgeous, very charismatic, and this one was about 40, bit plump, smiled with his eyes but that was about it, really not attractive. But Vere and Claggart were superb, both vocally (hmm, Claggart's low notes were a bit iffy, as were the other basses'; G has perfect pitch so I could check) and in terms of acting skills. Langridge (playing Vere) actually looked moderately attractive for once. He's got a strange face but it's very expressive, and as long as you don't see too much of his dreadful teeth and he doesn't have that creepy expression he does in the photos accompanying my BB recording, not to mention nice navy uniforms, he's quite convincing. And he was totally convincing as the character, you could see why all the men adored him and his agony over failing to save Billy was really well done. Claggart was terrifying (though they overdid the white face paint!), incredibly powerful, absolutely electrifying. Obviously a highly repressed man, but still exuded an extraordinary sexuality, even if the other singers weren't always responding. The scene where he tempts the Novice, who has absolutely no idea what's hit him, was brilliant. There was a nice bit of chemistry between him and Vere, as well, and the scene where he denounced Billy to him was like III.3 in Othello (that man just is Iago); really, this opera is about the Vere/Claggart/Billy triangle. Everyone loves Billy. Everyone loves Vere. Everyone hates Claggart. I'm surprised they manage to keep the ship sailing, with all these intense emotions around. None of it's so obvious that a parent passing through the kitchen would notice - OK, maybe the scene where Claggart stands over the Novice and hits him, and the blubbering Novice is clinging to Claggart's black-leather-(or oilskin?)-clad thigh. This opera really does bring up uncomfortable stuff about sexual sadism.

I have a computer which plays DVDs; no television, no intention of acquiring one. Basically, the situation is that the uni have two sets of recordings. The languages and humanities centre has a large film collection on videotape, and as they're not commercial recordings, they will copy them onto DVD for you to borrow. I've already done this with Howard's End, which I wrote an essay on last week, and The Innocents, which is a non-opera version of TotS. The latter must have been put onto a faulty DVD, it kept freezing every five minutes from about half-way through. I tried for Dracula a while back but the machine was wonky, he tried twice and ended up recording Channel 5 horse racing both times. I gave up and hired it from Vogue Video, but I'll borrow the uni version and watch it again some time, Drac and TotS are my two dissertation texts, both in novel and staged forms.

Anyway, that's one facility. The other is the set of video recordings kept in the main library, which contains a wide variety of operas. These are commercial recordings, so they can't be copied onto DVD, which means either going to a friend's or watching them in the lang & humanities centre. I need comfy seating (ME and bad back) and I can only take notes on a computer (muscular probs, can't hold a pen), so nothing's perfect so far. G's kitchen table wasn't really any more comfortable than the uni place, so I think I'll watch the next Britten opera (got my eye on Lucretia, the guy who sang Claggart will be singing Collatinus) there. Though I'm glad I watched BB at G's, it's a film of a staged version and it's like various dire productions of Macbeth, they decided that since it's a Dark Opera they're going to stage it in various shades of grey and black, and then light it badly just for extra fun. G has a decent sized TV screen at least, I wouldn't have been able to see a thing on those tiny ones at uni.

[sphinxvictorian.livejournal.com]

Terence Stamp as a young man was incredibly attractive, and his Billy is blond-haired and sweeter than pie. Ryan's Claggart is suitably nasty, reads like everyone's nightmare homophobe/homosexual. Peter Ustinov plays the Captain (is that Vere? It's been a while since I saw the movie) and is absolutely convincing in his obvious attraction to Billy and his uncomfortableness at Billy's predicament. Claggart bullies him rather a lot, and Ustinov, instead of just kowtowing, does try to stand up for Billy, but in the end...

How can anyone ignore the homoerotic tones of most of Melville's work!! The man had an obsessive crush on Nathaniel Hawthorne, for heaven's sake! The willful blindness of some scholars about things that they don't want to know astonishes me sometimes.

Ah, I understand the video watching conundrum. Back when I was in college the first time, I used to haunt our language/video lab, because my family didn't have a video player and I got to watch a lot of the BBC Shakespeare programs and the video of the RSC's Nicholas Nickleby, which I watched over and over, until I thought the video librarian was going to stop letting me watch it! :)

Speaking of bad productions of Macbeth, have you ever seen the BBC's production? The acting was so-so, but the costumes and set direction were atrocious, it was all greys and browns and muddy yellows, and the clothes looked like they'd been made out of decayed burlap bags. On the other hand, there's the Ian McKellen Macbeth, which is out on DVD now. If you haven't seen it, I recommend it, as I did in my journal post. It was greys and browns as well, but the acting was so good, I just didn't care.

[elettaria.livejournal.com]

Yes, and Hawthorne seems rather iffy. I've just reread The Scarlet Letter because a kid in gothic_lit was talking about it, and bloody hell, it is seething with homoeroticism. Look at this bit at the end, after one man has hounded his wife's lover to death, and then died himself:

"It is a curious subject of observation and inquiry, whether hatred and love be not the same thing at bottom. Each, in its utmost development, supposes a high degree of intimacy and heart-knowledge; each renders one individual dependent for the food of his affections and spiritual life upon another; each leaves the passionate lover, or the no less passionate hater, forlorn and desolate by the withdrawal of his object [bad, bad phrasing, Hawthorne]. Philosophically considered, therefore, the two passions seem essentially the same, except that one happens to be seen in a celestial radiance, and the other in a dusky and lurid glow [because homosexuality wasn't socially acceptable at this point and was demonised]. In the spiritual world [*cough*], the old physician and the minister - mutual victims as they have been - may, unawares, have found their earthly stock of hatred and antipathy transformed into golden love."

In my recording of BB, the photos of the singers are all the gayest photos you'll see (apart from Langridge who looks like he's about to leap at your throat), but the intro says loftily that it's not going to discuss the homoeroticism because that's already been done to death (implication: it's not actually there, please stop being so distasteful). You may as well say that you're not going to discuss the hetererotics of Romeo and Juliet because that's been done already.

Personally I think there's more to Billy than being sweeter than pie, at least in Britten's version, though I'd be glad just to see one who was attractive. Let's face it, the boy has quite a temper. I reckon they all turn into each other and destroy each other. Billy's latent violence is developed by his link with Claggart, whom he has to be repeatedly warned away from, he keeps saying, "But he seems all right, and he really likes me..." Captain Vere ends up echoing what Claggart had said, with "O beauty, handsomeness, goodness, I have destroyed you." At the start it's suspiciously basic: everyone hates Claggart, everyone loves Vere, everyone loves Billy. Then it gets rather more complicated.

I've just finished my Britten binge, I can't face watching any more for a while. Lucretia this morning was the limit, I am now sitting around muttering, "Why am I working on such a disturbing composer?" The rape scene is nearly 20 minutes long and it was terrifying, the male singers in the drama (we won't discuss the Male Chorus, he looked like a constipated banker) were all superb actors. Incidentally, how have I spent all these years listening to Lucretia and managed to miss the homoeroticism? Britten's really got an Iago thing, hasn't he. The scene where Claggart tells Vere that Billy is causing trouble is just like III.3 in Othello (the temptation scene), and the same goes for Lucretia, when Junius is basically talking Tarquinius into raping Lucretia (yeah, nice one Junius, your wife is unfaithful and so you get another man to go to the home of the man who was being smug about his wife's fidelity, and rape her). Talk about Sedgwick's theory of erotic triangles. I don't know why Britten didn't just write an Othello and have done with it. I'm always trying to compare his Lucretia to Shakespeare's, though unfortunately there's a mostly unobtainable French play in the middle. One of these days I am going to force S (director of studies, former Shakespeare tutor) to watch or listen to Lucretia, and then we can have a nice discussion about commodification of women, the politicisation of rape, the ideology of shame, erotic triangles and why so few singers can act and opera is often so appallingly shot, lighted and choreographed, especially any fight scenes.

I saw a bit of that Macbeth at school, McKellan and Dench, right? I think I had the same reaction: not wowed by the production, but you can't beat those two for acting.

[sphinxvictorian.livejournal.com]

Better you should see that Lucretia than me! I simply cannot watch rape scenes.

I have to confess I've only ever seen one Britten opera, and that was Gloriana, many many years ago, at the English National Opera. Our seats were in the "gods" but the music was glorious. I'm more of a Vaughan Williams fan, I have to admit. Not just his pastoral tone poems, but The Call and Antiphon from the Mystical Songs, and some of his other symphonic and choral work moves me intensely. I like a lot of the early 20th century English composers like Finzi and Warlock and Holst. I also like Satie and Ravel and Richard Strauss. Philip Glass and Henryk Gorecki are the only contemporary composers that I like.

I'm an early music nut, mostly, with some baroque thrown in for good measure. And I'm passionately fond of Scottish folk music, both the straight up traditional and the fusion stuff, like Salsa Celtica and Shooglenifty.

I'm nothing if not eclectic in my musical tastes! I worked in music retail for many years, so I have listened to lots of different things and I like quite a lot of bizarre stuff. There's a really great recording from the early 80's of Ancient Greek Music which I love to listen to, but then I also like a good bazouki tune!

Anyway, sorry if I got off the academic stuff there for a moment. Have you read a book called Strangers by Graham Robb? It's all about homosexuality in the 19th century. His premise is that while it was demonized in some countries, most particularly Britain, the atmosphere in other places was really quite tolerant. Also, have you read Louis Crompton's Homosexuality and Civilization? Lija (my wife) and I read it together (me reading aloud, one of our favorite relaxing pastimes). It is one of the best overviews of gay history either of us has ever read. It's not completely comprehensive, but he does the best he can. And his writing style is incredibly readable.

Now that I think back, I think that there was some latent violence in Billy in the movie, but it stemmed I think from his treatment on board, didn't it? I really must try reading it sometime.

Well, good luck with your Britten stuff. Sorry for another incoherent 5am ramble!