Berlioz and Being the Ball

“I’m going to give you a little advice. There's a force in the universe that makes things happen. And all you have to do is get in touch with it, stop thinking, let things happen, and be the ball.”

What does Caddyshack have to do with a night at the symphony? Everything, apparently, when the conductor is Charles Dutoit. Although one might think I was at Davies Symphony Hall to watch the sexy French man (see below) on cello, it was Dutoit who held my attention as he conducted the Symphonie fantastique without a score, literally becoming the music in front of our eyes. Since Dutoit is known for his recordings of Berlioz and Ravel, this was not surprising, but it was an amazing experience to watch him throughout the piece, with every note written in his powerful but fluid movements as if on a score.

La Liberté guidant le peuple, 1830, Musée du Louvre

The Symphonie fantastique is such an important work in the canon that it was delightful to see it in such good hands. Groundbreaking in and of itself, it premiered during a seminal moment in the arts and literature of France: 1830 witnessed not only the political July Revolution, but also its artistic depiction in Delacroix’s La Liberté guidant le peuple, as well as the publication of Stendhal’s Le Rouge et le noir and the première of Victor Hugo’s Hernani amidst public riots heralding the downfall of classicism. Yet this symphony is also one of the easiest to understand and follow, as it is essentially one long tone poem about the artist’s obsessive and unrequited love. It will always be one of my favorites, despite its use in Sleeping with the Enemy.

Gautier Capuçon

Unfortunately, the cello concerto at the beginning of the bill (Dutilleux’s Tout un monde lointain) was less interesting, despite the presence of Gautier Capuçon. While the piece requires extreme and impressive ranges of sound from the instrument, and Capuçon achieved them, the work as a whole just never captured and held my interest. To me, it sounded like the soundtrack of some sort of creepy neo-noir from the 1980s or 90s trying to be avant-garde.

Maybe that’s what they should have used in Sleeping with the Enemy?

The Great Unread—March

Due to my recent travels, this March book challenge post was a bit delayed—much like the reading of my own challenge book, Suite Française, by Irène Némirovsky. Suite Française caught my eye in the window of BookShop West Portal when I first moved to San Francisco. At the time, I didn’t know the story of its publication (had I realized, it might have made it off my shelf a bit quicker).

Némirovsky, a Russian-Jewish immigrant, was a successful author in interwar France. When World War II broke out, she began a planned five-part epic depicting the stages of the war. Unfortunately, she had only completed two sections of the draft manuscript when she was arrested, deported, and sent to Auschwitz in 1942, where she died one month later. Thankfully, even though her husband soon suffered the same terrible fate, their two children were able to go into hiding and survived, carrying the manuscript with them. Only years later would they realize that the notebook scribblings, which they thought were a private journal, were complete enough to be published.

The work is an incredible fictional depiction of the June exodus and later German occupation of France. I can’t imagine how good this epic might have been had the author lived to finish the novel. It was one of the works that served as inspiration for Chris Bohjalian’s Skeletons at the Feast, which I read for my “War, What Is It Good For?” book salon last month, and makes a great companion piece to that novel. You can read my reviews of both at Goodreads.

I hope everyone is making good progress on this challenge. I’d love to hear about what you’ve been reading. As for April, I am still considering my selection. Either way, it is likely to be one of two books related to last year’s challenge: Shakespeare: The Tragedies (since, now that I’ve read Macbeth, I can finally appreciate this study analyzing his four major tragedies) or Le Comte de Monte-Cristo, which I began too late last year to finish before the challenge ended.

Ballet 101—Giselle

This weekend, I took a break from the endless process of setting up my new computer and watching Oscar hopefuls to attend the opening night of Giselle at the San Francisco Ballet. Although I have long appreciated the music, I had never seen the actual ballet live.

After being relatively disappointed with my last outing to the Nutcracker, I was glad to see the San Francisco Ballet kick it up a notch and deliver a stellar performance all around, particularly Yuan Yuan Tan in the title role. Apparently, the company is using multiple pairings throughout the run, so I’m glad we went to opening night and were able to see her. Giselle is such a demanding role, both technically (requiring exquisite balance and difficult footwork) and expressively (with the lead moving from naïve peasant girl, to someone driven mad by love, to a mature adult in the netherworld of the Wilis) that it is essential to have an experienced dancer.

One of the reasons I first sought out the ballet is that it was co-written by one of my favorite nineteenth-century authors, Théophile Gautier. Virtually unknown here in the States, Gautier is a jack-of-all-cultural-trades: painter, critic, poet, novelist, and dramatist. His most famous legacy is probably his espousal of the phrase “l’art pour l’art,” that is, art for art’s sake, or, as adapted for MGM’s Leo the Lion logo, Ars gratia artis. I love him for his supernatural short stories involving vampires, mummies, and all manner of ghostly appearances, which is probably why he was so attracted to the legend of the vengeful ghost-like Wilis.

The music helps enormously in telling the story, with a heavy use of leitmotif to heighten the drama. While not as overtly dramatic as something like Swan Lake, for me, Giselle is one of the strongest ballets in conveying the story through music. This may be because its composer, Adolphe Adam, was primarily a composer of operas. However, he did compose another ballet in the repertoire, Le Corsaire (ballet with pirates!), which I was lucky enough to see at Lincoln Center some years ago. Perhaps more familiar to readers, he was also the composer of the ultimate French Christmas carol, “Minuit, chrétiens” (“O Holy Night”). Léo Delibes, who composed Coppélia, the next story ballet in the San Francisco Ballet’s 2011 season, was his pupil. And, after this amazing performance, I’m very sad I won’t be able to see it.

Technological Gains vs. Tactile Loss

Weeks ago, I dug out my mother’s old copy of Théâtre de Beaumarchais in order to finally read Le Barbier de Séville and Le Mariage de Figaro in preparation for seeing Le Nozze di Figaro at the San Francisco Opera. It’s one of the few books of hers that I have, and the only work of fiction. I finally opened it this past weekend. This is what I found:

Once I got over the shock that my mother wrote in books (!), I was thrilled to turn the pages and discover what she had written almost 60 years ago: thoughts and connections from years before I was born. Reading them now, more than 20 years after she died, was both fascinating and comforting. Just seeing her handwriting (so very French, so very her), brought back a flood of memories—like I could feel her fingerprints.

I’m lucky to have plenty of fond memories of both my parents, but it made me realize how lucky I am to have these tangible memories as well: letters, photos, postcards. With digital cameras, emails, and texts, are kids today even familiar with their parents’ handwriting? Are these technological gains worth the tactile loss? Are they gathering different physical memories?

As much as I personally loathe the Kindle, I never thought that one of my arguments against it would be that you couldn’t write in it. But I guess I’m particularly glad that it didn’t exist in the 50s, or I might never have known that, apparently, Mom wasn’t a fan of trilogies either—there’s not one mark in La Mère coupable.