Richard II

Today our play-reading group moved on from Shakespeare's King John and Goldman's The Lion in Winter to Shakespeare's next English history play, Richard II. And here's the historic background notes I wrote for my fellow participants:

It's 1398, six generations and almost 200 years after King John. This is the first of a sequence of eight plays that will take us through the next 85 years of English royal history.

The backstory comes from Edward III, who (like Henry II) was a masterful king who had too many sons. The struggles for power among his five adult sons, and their sons, are the root of all the royal troubles of the 15th century, and the fat hits the fire right here.

By this time, primogeniture had been firmly established. Edward's eldest son, a mighty warrior later known (from the supposed color of his armor) as the Black Prince, died before his father. So Edward was succeeded, not by one of his other adult sons, but by his grandson: the Black Prince's ten-year-old son, Richard. He became Richard II (Richard I had been Henry's son from The Lion in Winter).

There was no formal regency, but Richard's uncles were powers in the realm, and the struggle to establish himself was not good for Richard's personality. Now he is 31 years old, firmly in command, artistic and courtly rather than military, but indecisive, willful, and arrogant.

Up until recently, Richard had three remaining uncles:
1. John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster, an uncle whom Shakespeare treats kindly. He has a son of Richard's age, Henry of Bolingbroke, Duke of Hereford, usually in this play called just Bolingbroke.
2. Edmund of Langley, Duke of York, a conciliatory but weak uncle. His son is the Duke of Aumerle.
3. Thomas of Woodstock, Duke of Gloucester, a hostile and overbearing uncle.

Thomas Duke of Gloucester had recently died under mysterious circumstances. As this play begins, Bolingbroke accuses another nobleman, Thomas Mowbray, of murdering him, which he probably did, but Bolingbroke and the king may also be complicit, so Richard has a motive for hushing this up. At the last moment he arbitrarily cancels a duel between Bolingbroke and Mowbray and sends them both into exile. This pisses off Bolingbroke in particular, and the play's main conflict is underway.

Note 1: What's with all this "of", and why "Gaunt"? It was customary at the time for princes to be known as "of (their place of birth)." These princes' mother was from Flanders, and John was born there, in Ghent, which the English called Gaunt. Richard was Richard of Bordeaux because his father the Black Prince was ruling Aquitaine at the time.
Note 2: You may remember that the Wars of the Roses, a couple generations later on, were between the House of Lancaster and the House of York. The titles here are where that comes from.

two loads of freight

Poking my (mask-covered) face out in to the world a bit, I got to the Freight & Salvage for two folk or folk-like concerts this week, I think my first musical visit there in three and a half years.

First was Richard Thompson, with just his guitar and his songs and (for part of the time) a backing vocalist and a mouth organist. This was good, but less fun than his all-request program of a few years back. Most of the songs were new ones that I didn't know and found a bit hard to assimilate, as shown by even the ones I did know ("Gethsemane," "She Moves Through the Fair," and of course "1952 Vincent Black Lightning") being given heavy-handed. RT's guitar style has developed a lot of heavy bass thumps that I could do without.

The other was a Scottish folk band called Talisk. The description on the Freight's calendar was intriguing, so I listened to some of their videos and was dazzled: Celtic fast folk dances delivered by a trio of concertina, fiddle, and guitar with blistering high energy and a charming infectiousness. They've just recently changed fiddlers, and this has had some good effects: more solos, and some interesting harmonic and rhythmic passages, for fiddle, instead of just doubling the concertina, and more variety of tempo in the songs. But though the energy remained high in concert, the infectiousness had leaked out of the new material. The volume level was a wee bit too loud for me, and I could really have done without the electronic bass thumps controlled by the guitarist's foot.

What is it with all these thumps? Has our music been infected by the malign spirit of Donald Thump?

concert review: Peninsula Symphony

Oh, really? What with all that's been going on in the world over the last week, now you program an all-Russian concert?

Well, to be fair, it was chosen a long time ago. And before the last piece, conductor Mitchell Sardou Klein spoke to the audience. He said that Shostakovich had spent his entire adult life under the heel of an authoritarian regime, and he poured all his resentment, anger, fear, and more into this work, his Fifth Symphony. Thus it's more, rather than less, appropriate to play it now, as a symbol of defiance.

A little oversimplified, but the right thing to say. And it was mostly a slow, sober performance without emotional overload at the clinaxes. Except for the celebratory, or mock-celebratory, finale, which was taken at a hasty clip, as if the conductor didn't quite believe the music. Many don't, but they're rarely this explicit about it.

Also on the program, Tchaikovsky's Piano Concerto No. 1. Local hero Jon Nakamatsu played the solo part with skill and panache, seeming less like a flashy virtuoso than a guy who was just up there playing the piano. That could have been because he and the instrument were crammed into a narrow space at the front of a small stage in an undistinguished auditorium (Heritage Theatre in Campbell), but it was further emphasized by a thoroughly unpretentious encore, Joplin's The Entertainer. But my word, what a garrulous concerto.

Rimsky-Korsakov's Russian Easter Overture is a difficult piece to get running in gear, but assistant conductor Hoh Chen did pretty well with it. Playing was pretty good, though some exposed long lyric lines for viola in the Shostakovich could have used a little work.

concert review: San Francisco Symphony

What if I told you that there's a work for full orchestra, by Beethoven - the most renowned of all classical composers - that was 70 minutes long - as long as his Ninth Symphony; twice as long as most of the others - that hardly anybody has ever heard, and only real Beethoven fans are likely to know even that it exists?

Well, it does, and last night I heard it played live in its entirety for the first time - both them playing it and me hearing it - from the SFS, with EPS conducting.

It's a ballet score, The Creatures of Prometheus. It dates from around the time of the First Symphony, so it's fairly early Beethoven. One reason it's rarely played is because nothing of the dance content has survived beyond a few notes towards a scenario, so we don't even know what's happening on stage most of the time.

Never mind, we now have Gerard McBurney, who - having performed reconstruction acts on a lot of Shostakovich - is ready to undertake this also. He's taken the existing hints and put together a coherent scenario that fits the music. This was read aloud as between-pieces narration by Keith David, in much the same tone of voice that James Earl Jones used to describe the flamingos in Fantasia 2000.

This was accompanied by cartoons by Hillary Leben, projected on screens - animated during the narration, still while the music was playing, so it wasn't distracting. These were charmingly goofy and often quite silly.

The title The Creatures of Prometheus suggests a retelling of the story by Ovid - a very popular author in Vienna at the time - about the demigod Prometheus fashioning the first human beings out of clay, and asking the gods to help show them how to live and be human.

The net result is that most of the scenario consists of various dances in which the gods show off their dancing on top of Mount Parnassus. Beethoven's music has a stable dancing base, a lot like his sets of contradances, except there's less pure repetition, more variety and development. It was interesting to hear, especially the finale, which featured a contradance tune that Beethoven made more use of, as the theme to variation sets for solo piano and for orchestra, the latter as the finale of his Eroica Symphony, which is where you may have heard it.

If you want the whole thing, when the Philharmonia of London played the work - also with EPS conducting and Leben's cartoons, some of Leben's cartoons anyway - McBurney's narration was read by Stephen Fry, and you can watch and listen here.

coupon follies

I had a coupon for KFC. (Yeah, I know, but I pick up an order there occasionally when I'm in a hurry.) It was for "Kentucky Fried Wings," which are winglet pieces with their own breading style different from the regular chicken varieties. Underneath the header it read "Increments of 6 pieces" and then, in big type, "50¢."

I took it to the drive-through window and read the coupon. I said, "Does that mean I could get 30 wings for $2.50?" No, they said, it's 50¢ a winglet. If the word "wing" or "winglet" had appeared in small type below the "50¢" that would have been justified, but the only thing it said was 50¢ was "increments of 6 pieces." The coupon is really misleading.

However, I accepted this correction because the price by increment was ridiculously low, while the price by individual piece was about half what they normally charge, which is more reasonable. However, they weren't quite prepared to sell it by increments of 6 pieces. When I ordered 18, they were at first stumped because they don't have an 18-piece. Then they figured they could sell me a 12-piece and a 6-piece (see, elementary arithmetic is your friend). Ironically, it all came in one container.

seen online

One pleasant side effect of pandemic rules is the frequent ability to stay home and watch a theatrical live on the computer, instead of having to venture to a distant venue plus all of the time and expense of getting there. The problem is, though, that they don't have the same visceral impact on the viewer this way, and I find I have little to say about them.

The SF Conservatory of Music put on Bock & Harnick's 1966 musical The Apple Tree. It's three one-act shows based on stories by different authors. In the Broadway versions the cast appears in all 3; in this one they were different. Act 2, which is "The Lady or the Tiger?", is the best-written; Act 3, which is by Feiffer at his most Feifferesque, was the best-performed.

The Lamplighters did a celebratory program of numbers from all 14 Gilbert & Sullivan operas, not always the selections I'd have chosen but all well-performed in Victorian costuming.

Great Performances had a documentary on the reopening of Broadway (this was before omicron, though it does record how Aladdin opened for one night and then had to shut down again). Interviews and live footage convey how devastating the shutdown was for theater people whose life this is, how hard it was to get back into gear after a long shutdown, and how joyous the reopenings were. This was all musicals, by the way: no spoken drama. What struck me, having seen only 2 or 3 new musicals in the last 2 or 3 decades, is how many of them are built on pre-existing songs, and how many of those songs are really upbeat and energetic musically but have really depressed lyrics.

Movies are a better choice online because they're made for the recorded medium. I saw The Mauritanian, a legal drama with Jodie Foster and Benedict Cumberbatch tussling over the body (literally: habeas corpus) of a Gitmo detainee. If you've ever wanted to hear Benedict Cumberbatch essay a Southern American accent, this is your movie.

One other live event I participated online was the "laying-in ceremony" for my friend Jane who died last month. What her body is being laid into is a compost container, which is a thing you can do in Washington State but apparently not much of elsewhere, and highly appropriate for one who was both an engineer and a gardener. There's now a web page with Jane's wise sayings online, and it includes this essay on people's varying ideas of what doing someone a favor means - and this is exactly the sort of thing I mean when I say that people are different.

a crusty new book

Treacle Walker by Alan Garner (4th Estate, 2021)

A few connoisseurs of esoterica gathered online to discuss Alan Garner's latest novel - if it is long enough to be a novel; it's 152 small pages of big type.

Garner has long been noted for writing stories so deeply embedded in cryptic references to English and Welsh folklore - especially that of his native Cheshire - that they're difficult for any but the well-versed to understand, and which have been getting more challenging over the course of his over 60-year career.

We predicted that we'd be among the very few Americans to read this book. I refrained from pointing out that it'd be even fewer for a book that needs to be ordered from England and takes over a month to arrive. We'd already put off this discussion for a month because nobody'd gotten their copies yet who hadn't already read it.

One of our number argued forcefully that this time Garner has crossed the line. This book is so difficult to understand that it's not worth putting the effort into it. (I thought of my friend DGK, who maintains that nothing is so difficult to understand that it's not worth putting the effort into it.) I said that I was hardly in a position to judge, as Garner hit that threshold for me with Red Shift, which was his fifth book half a century ago. (I loved the first four.)

On one level, Treacle Walker is pretty simple. It's about a boy named Joseph Coppock who lives alone in a small house by a railway track, spending his time reading comic books. (It was suggested at the discussion that he might be dead, which would certainly explain a lot.) He meets a rag-and-bone dealer named Treacle Walker, trades with and sort of befriends him, and learns about magic from him. Joe can evidently see magical glamour with one eye but not the other. Treacle teaches Joe to whitewash his front steps with donkey stone, which keeps magical beings out of the house - or in, if they're already there. These supernatural practices, I am told, are all from Cheshire folk tradition.

You may wonder what donkey stone is. I wondered that myself, from the first words of the book which are Treacle's street-seller's cry: "Ragbone! Ragbone! Any rags! Pots for rags! Donkey stone!" So I looked it up, not knowing it'd become important later. Donkey stone isn't around much any more, but it was common in northern England for much of the 20C. It's an extremely rough soap made of hardened cement slurry, cut into blocks and used for cleaning grimy exteriors. An early manufacturer used a donkey as a trademark, thus the name.

But what this all adds up to, and whether there's an actual plot to this book, remained cryptic to us readers. Treacle Walker is written in an extremely deep countryside English dialect, full of nobbled telegraphic sentences, in which utterances like summat and nowt are words.

Yet on the surface level it's easy enough to read. The relationship between Joe and Treacle is querulous and difficult and even leads to humor:

'You're set on flummoxing me!'
'And if I am not?'
'You are! You! You! You big soft Nelly!'
'That is an appellation new to me,' said Treacle Walker. 'How may it be construed?'
'Sod off!'
Treacle Walker stood and ducked under the mantel beam.
'Where are you going?' said Joe.
'To observe the imperative,' said Treacle Walker. 'If I may.'

concert review: San Francisco Symphony

I did it; I went up to the City for a concert. My first since December 2, including the 3 I had tickets for in the last month but skipped due to omicron. Restrictions have been relaxed, but not inside Davies Hall: they're still requiring booster verification and a 95-level mask. I ate takeout in my car rather than going to a restaurant for dinner (there's some great independent takeout places in the City), and though I was strongly attracted by the night's program, few others were. The hall was fairly empty, with not another person in my box. So I felt rather safe.

This was the Michael Morgan memorial concert, which is why I was so eager to attend. The Oakland Symphony music director had programmed and was scheduled to conduct this concert, but he died unexpectedly last August. The varied and eclectic selection of works was put on as Morgan originally programmed it - a rather rare thing when a planned conductor becomes unavailable - but it took three conductors to do it: one African-American like Morgan himself, and two of Asian birth and North American residence.

Daniel Bartholomew-Poyser led the vocal part of the program, which included arrangements of some spirituals associated with Black churches, plus Brahms's Alto Rhapsody, an aria associated with the great Marian Anderson. Mezzo Melody Wilson has a voice of dark precision, but unfortunately not powerful enough, at least in the vast precincts of Davies, to carry above Jack Perla's overenthusiastic orchestration for the spirituals. The Brahms worked better.

Earl Lee led a pair of dramatic tone poems. Amen! by Carlos Simon attempts to convey the spirit of a Pentecostal church service in only 13 minutes of orchestral music, with a lot of wailing for trombones in the fast sections and many blues-like passages for solo winds in the slow ones. Le Chasseur maudit (The Accursed Huntsman) by Cesar Franck is one of those grittingly specific French tone poems on alarming supernatural topics of which Dukas' The Sorcerer's Apprentice and Saint-Saëns' Danse macabre are better-known examples. Truth to tell, they're deservedly better-known. This interpretation of a gory 18C ballad of a nobleman who goes hunting on a Sunday until the flames of Hell get him for his impiety fluffs irregularly around and does not sound in the least like anything else by Franck I've ever heard.

Akiko Fujimoto led the big piece on the program, Florence Price's Third Symphony, a marvelous work which I've heard Morgan conduct in Oakland, and from others on a couple of other occasions. This was a slow and darkly blended interpretation which kept Price's distinct sound-world intact and did well by the formal beauties of the slow movement, but which slightly dampened the energy and jauntiness of the rest of the work. Except insofar as the percussion really stood out in the scherzo and finale, it carried the slightly stuffy air of the Second New England School, i.e. as if Amy Beach had written it. An odd way to go, but that slow movement was a beauty.

one thing about Tybalt

One thing about Tybalt having had his teeth cleaned (for the first time in his life): he's even more desperate for affection, especially in the wee hours, than ever before. I've spent most of the last 3 hours cradling him in my arm while he purrs and makes happy grunting sounds, with my other hand cupping the top of his head. (Try that with your cat who likes to be scritched there, and see if it works.)

This despite the fact that we're still prying his mouth open and spritzing strange fluids into it twice a day. Which, together with his liking to butt his head in my face, another feline sign of affection, leads to the other thing about Tybalt: the teeth-cleaning has made a heck of an improvement on his breath.

King John

Our play-reading group has decided to work its way through Shakespeare's history plays, alternating with plays by others, mostly comedies. It's my job to assign the parts, which since there are only 4 of us consists mostly of ensuring there aren't too many places where we have to exchange lines with ourselves, while insuring continuity of parts and balance as much as possible.

Since the history plays require backgrounds, I attached to the e-mail assigning parts for King John, the first one, a short preface of my own. My colleagues appreciated this, so I intend to continue this. Here's the one I wrote for King John:

---

This play is largely about royal inheritance. A large part of Act 1 concerns an illegitimate son and how he therefore cannot inherit, even though his father turns out to be someone different than he was expecting.

John is King of England, but he also has inherited title to various territories in France. He is Duke of Normandy through his ancestor William the Conqueror, Duke of Anjou through his grandfather Geoffrey Plantagenet, and Duke of Aquitaine through his mother Eleanor. On these accounts he is subordinate to the King of France as overlord, but king of France was a weak title at the time, and as also an independent monarch John is under less control. None of which the King of France, Philip II, can be expected to like, so John (and his father Henry II before him) spend a lot of time in France on military campaigns to defend their holdings, at which John doesn't do very well.

But there's a further wrinkle. John was his father's youngest son, and by strict primogeniture succession the crown should have gone to the line of the next oldest brother, Geoffrey, who's dead but who left behind him a young son, Arthur, who was 12 when John became king. (Arthur's mother, Constance, is still around: like her mother-in-law Queen Eleanor, she had inherited lordship of part of France, in her case Brittany.) In those days strict primogeniture was only beginning to arise, and the king was usually elected by the nobles among the most promising relatives of the late king. John was an adult and Arthur only a boy, so he took over from his even elder brother Richard the Lionheart without controversy. But it suits King Philip to weaken John by arguing on Arthur's behalf, and that's how the play begins.