FEMININE BEAUTY, OR 70 GIRLS 70

Some things are absurd. I am frequently accused of misogyny; what nonsense! For me, there is nothing more beautiful in the world, and thus more sacred, than a beautiful woman. True, this excludes many women; it presupposes beauty of face and body, of limbs and extremities—ideally, the convergence of several beauties into one.

Of course, face and figure are the most important, and, after that, legs and behind. But one can be a beautiful woman without perfection in all parts; we think of Myrna Loy, Gene Tierney and Liz Taylor as beautiful, even if none of them had perfect legs. And unless we have seen them in bikinis, we cannot vouch for their derrieres. And sometimes not even then.

But even with some imperfections, there is nothing, I repeat, more beautiful than a beautiful woman. This is true even in art, hence the prevalence of female nudes. But art also reveals to us how the concept of beauty has changed over the years. What was beautiful for Rubens or Rembrandt is quite different from what was beautiful for Manet or Modigliani. 

Thus what I proclaim beautiful today may not be so for future generations. Even so, let me name a number of actresses from several countries whom, at one time or another, I have found beautiful. Even just writing down their names gives me a frisson of beatitude.

Isabelle Adjani, Anouk Aimée, Bibi Andersson, Ursula Andress, Laura Antonelli, Karin Baal, Barbara Bach, Brigitte Bardot, Halle Berry, Adriana Beneti, Laura Betti, Jacqueline Bisset, Florinda Bolkan, Francesca Braggiotti, Genevieve Bujold, Leslie Caron, Valentina Cortese, Dorothy Dandridge, Danielle Darrieux, Catherine Deneuve, Doris Dowling, Anita Ekberg, Lena Endre, Jane Fonda, Megan Fox, Jane Greer, Virginia Grey, Camilla Horn, Brigitte Horney, Marsha Hunt, Jennifers Garner and Lopez, Jessicas Alba and Beil, Angelina Jolie, Katalin Karádi, Nicole Kidman, Keira Knightley, Johanna von Koczian, Hilde Krahl, La Jana, Hedy Lamarr, Diane Lane, Virginie Ledoyen, Vivien Leigh, Sofia Loren, Anita Louise, Antonella Lualdi, Silvana Mangano, Lea Massari, Irene von Meyendorff, Giovanna Mezzogiorno, Sarah Miles, Marilyn Monroe,  Rossana Podesta, Micheline Presle, Liselotte Pulver, Lee Remick, Julia Roberts, Laila Robins, Keri Russell, Romy Schneider, Simone Signoret, Alexis Smith, Kristina Söderbaum, Audrey Tautou, Elizabeth Taylor, Charlize Theron, Ingrid Thulin, Gene Tierney, Nadja Tiller, Mari Törőcsik and Alida Valli.

Given my lifelong distaste for lists, I have herewith contradicted myself, but, like others who have lapsed into self-contradiction, I invoke Walt Whitman in my defense. Some seeming contradictions may even be mere changes of opinion, which are perfectly permissible.

Now, what of looks acquired through or enhanced by cosmetic surgery? Some people regard that as cheating, indeed invalid. Not so I; I say beauty is beauty, however achieved.

More problematic are women whose sexiness, though not exactly beauty, proves a compelling substitute. Think Nastassja Kinski or Gloria Grahame.

Sometimes the boundaries are blurry and it is hard to decide whether a woman is beautiful or just sexy: think Marion Cotillard, Susan Sarandon or Sigourney Weaver. What is certain is that no straight man would kick any of them out of bed. 

Someone might wonder why my list is as long as it is. Usually lists are of the ten-best or twenty-best variety. This one could easily have been much longer and I am sure to be soon kicking myself for some obvious omissions. The intention was to include those women who, at my various stages, have been most attractive, most exciting to me.

Definitely omitted are women who were merely lovable. That is more of an inner beauty, not visible, and therefore not to be counted. It is more goodness than beauty, though the two sometimes get confused. Not to be omitted were some actresses not known to many of my readers. Not any of them ended up in my arms, but once a woman becomes a memory, there is scant difference between what you had and what you only yearned for.

You most likely know how pleasurable it is to live with a lovely view outside your windows. Well, how about having it inside your walls in the forms of a beautiful face and figure? 

                                                           
You go to bed content and wake up content, and in between there is something even better. You are not plagued by envy of other men, and feel affluent without a dollar in the bank. Life itself has become beautiful.

To be sure, you may resent knowing, or just knowing of, a woman beautiful without deserving it in the slightest. Why such injustice? You must then be either very young or blind not to be resigned to there being no justice in the world.

And then, again, how relative everything is! I see on my computer a full-length picture of Jane Greer in a bikini and leaning on an outdoor chair. She is stunning from top to toe, yet out of eleven respondents, one, so Google tells me, finds her feet ugly. This strikes me as totally incomprehensible. Tastes may differ, but white cannot be anyone’s black, square anyone’s round. Jane Greer’s feet are just fine; is that respondent an idiot?

The only problem with female beauty is that, like any other, lesser one, it ages. Some women age better than others, but none, alas, stays forever young. Some women are beautiful even in old age, but merely with the austere, cold beauty of the monument they have become. It is not even the just one remove from the flesh and blood kind of a photograph. It inspires merely a remote nostalgia for what the woman must have been or, if she is a friend or spouse, was. She is even a symbol of mortality, inducing a kind of melancholy respect. Is that a good feeling? I truly don’t know.

SONG EVENINGS

Theater is not only plays and musicals; it is also opera and ballet, and perhaps even sports events. Also canny storytelling and, if they still exist, poetry readings. And certainly masterly song recitals.

By this I mean the English art song, the German lied, and the French melodie, all of which, expertly performed, yield their kind of drama. Let the song be about a relationship of love or hate, a person’s elated response to natural phenomena like flowers and birdsong, or elegiac contemplation of a parting or death, and drama is born, presupposing of course the capturing and holding of a theatrical audience.

I am thinking here of a recent Alice Tully Hall Liederabend, a concert evening of songs by Hugo Wolf in recital by the English tenor Ian Bostridge and the Austrian soprano Angelika Kirchschlager, a major artistic occasion. The songs were culled from the Spanisches Liederbuch (Spanish Songbook), Wolf’s setting of Spanish folk songs and lyrics by lesser known rhymesters—although also one each by Lope de Vega, Cervantes, and the Portuguese master Luis de Camoes—as translated into German verse by two decent minor poets, Emanuel Geibel and Paul Heyse.

There was first a group of spiritual songs concerning God and Christ, then a secular group, mostly love songs of one kind or another, and rather more satisfying. Bostridge and Kirchschlager are both consummate artists, but there was a difference. He was affected and posturing—which, in the past, he wasn’t, or just barely—whereas she was perfect and adorable.

The white-bread, gangly, Oxford undergradish (he is indeed an ex-Oxonian) Bostridge has the requisite voice and technique, but his physical mannerisms now cry out for the discretion of the CD, sparing us the distracting carryings-on. The tenor swayed to the right and left, sometimes threatening to fall on the piano—at which Julius Drake superbly supported the singers, albeit as an accompanist, not as a crutch. Worse yet, Bostridge kept taking little—or not so little—listing walks toward the footlights and back again, rather like an as yet novice sleepwalker.

One might also have quarreled with his dynamics, which seemed excessive at times, as were his exaggerated facial expressions. It made me nostalgic for the recitals of the greatest singer among my coevals, Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau. He remained upright, close to the piano, without making faces like the hapless little girl in the Hilaire Belloc poem. The voice acted out the meanings of what it sang, a dignified kind of theater, without unleashed histrionics.

But Kirchschlager made up for everything—and then some. The singers alternated after every one or two songs. When not singing, each sat on a chair well to the right of the piano. As one finished and headed for the chair, the other was crossing him or her on the way toward the piano. The tenor did this deadpan, whereas the soprano with a slightly sly, almost mischievous smile.

Once Angelika sang, she was truly angelic, with understated but charmingly varied facial expressions, whatever subtly enhanced the text. Drama was exuded by the eyes, and surged from the versatility of the voice. That she is a lovely woman added to the expressiveness of the performance. (Personally, I would not allow a pachyderm like Stephanie Blythe on a concert stage no matter how good her voice.)

The last song she delivered in her crystalline yet also warm soprano, “Geh, Geliebter, geh jetzt!” (Go, Beloved, Go Now), was one of my supreme concertgoing experiences. In the text, a girl after a night of lovemaking urges her lover to be off with the dawn, lest prying neighbors’ eyes and malicious tongues put paid to the lovers’ nocturnal trysts.

There was more true, deep feeling in the soprano’s rendition of that one lied than in an entire recital by so many other singers. Then, delightfully introduced by Drake—as apt with his words as with his fingers—we got for an encore a duet by Schumann, which recalled for me an evening at Carnegie Hall: a joint recital by Kirchschlager and the marvelous British baritone Simon Keenlyside, featuring several such duets.

But what about the songs themselves? I prefer Wolf’s similar Italienisches Liederbuch, a setting of songs from the Italian, and even more so the lieder from neither of the songbooks, but superb settings of great poems by the likes of Goethe and Mörike, exalted or shattering as very little in the two song cycles is.

But Hugo Wolf is always interesting. I have a little brochure entitled Das Lied, and subtitled (I translate) “A German Contribution to World Culture,” a collection of essays by various hands (including a lovely prose poem by the distinguished Ingeborg Bachmann), published as an elaborate program booklet in conjunction with a series of concerts and master classes in the fall of 1990, presided over by Fischer-Dieskau, Elisabeth Schwarzkopf, Mitsouko Sirai and Hartmut Höll, and sponsored by the International Hugo Wolf Society of Stuttgart.

I definitely wasn’t there, alas, and have no idea how the brochure came into my possession. In any case, it contains the text of a talk by the eminent French philosophy professor and music scholar Andre Tubeuf, in which he aptly characterizes Wolf’s work as “l’apogée désespérée d’un genre,” the desperate high point of an art form, which Wolf’s lieder assuredly are.

This brings to mind an incident from the distant past, when Fischer-Dieskau gave a series of lieder recitals in Carnegie Hall. The last of them was to have been all Hugo Wolf, but the crass impresario Sol Hurok persuaded the baritone to switch to all Schubert, which, he claimed, sells better. Emerging disappointed from the concert, I ran into the legendary music critic B. H. Haggin, who beamed at me and exclaimed, “Wasn’t it wonderful?” It would have been more so, I replied, had it remained Wolf. Haggin stared at me in disbelief: How could anyone prefer Wolf to Schubert? Well, by and large, I did. And still do.

THE -ESS WORDS

There used to be an anecdote around the American Cambridge that, whether apocryphal or not, had wide currency. One of the Radcliffe College dorms being Bertram Hall, story has it that when a lady was introduced to a visiting French academician as the mistress of Bertram Hall, he apologized for not knowing who Bertram Hall was.

The man had to be a Frenchman, for in France a mistress, especially the maîtresse en titre to royalty, could be proud of and respected for being a mistress. Thus a Frenchman could feel apologetic for not knowing who Bertram Hall was. However, for other reasons, other designations for women ending in –ess are rejected in modern society. In America, being mistress to the equivalent of royalty, a movie star, even if widely known, is not to be uttered; but the same holds true even for far less controversial –esses. Yet when you think of it, a few centuries ago Mistress was the proper title preceding the family name for respectable women.

Today, however, such terms as actress, poetess, airplane stewardess, among others, have become objectionable and discarded thanks to political correctness (let alone such things as Negress and Jewess). And yet, isn’t it a respectful recognition of femininity to call someone an actress or poetess?

Well, political correctness has pronounced it condescending to stress the female sex of a person. The argument usually runs that the –ess ending brackets you with animals, such as lioness and tigress. But isn’t that royalty of a kind? After all, there is no such thing as rabbitess or mousess.

There may be no glory in being a waitress, laundress or seamstress, but neither is there anything shameful about it. Granted that even “waiter” has become undesirable, so that we get server (as if it were tennis) or waitperson, which is ludicrous. Can you imagine a diner in a restaurant calling for the waitperson?

I would say that it is downright helpful that some words have feminine forms, as when a Frenchman or a German speaks of his amie or Freundin, thereby indicating that the relationship is heterosexual—not that that makes it better, merely different. It is actually confusing to use a circumlocution such as “female friend,” which can as easily mean friend girl as girlfriend.

I cannot help feeling uneasy when a beautiful actress refers to herself as an actor. Doesn’t it somehow imply that the feminine ending is less dignified, patronizing, or even ghettoizing? Not so for the divas of the past: in nobody’s parlance were Sarah Bernhardt or Eleonora Duse actors. Even much more recently, Helen Hayes and Ruth Gordon, Katharine Hepburn and Ingrid Bergman were styled actresses.

The distinction is even more intense in poetry. “Poetess,” nowadays, implies one of those three-named women who publish verse at the bottom of newspaper columns and revel in such dated things as meter and rhyme. No one today would dare to refer to Sylvia Plath or someone even more recent as a poetess. And if the person in question were a tough lesbian like Adrienne Rich, calling her a poetess might have got you a punch in the kisser.

But again, go back into the past and it is perfectly respectable to be a poetess. Sappho was a Greek poetess and Louise Labé a French one. It is not until, I would guess, Emily Dickinson that “poet” becomes desiderated. And yet how confusing for today’s nonspecialist to read about H. D. without knowing that it was a woman, Hilda Doolittle. And who can tell about foreign names such as Turkish ones whether they are male or female? Or even about such Anglo ones as Leslie, Evelyn and sundry others.

There were female prose writers who deliberately wanted to be thought male, such as those Georges, Eliot and Sand. Admittedly “authoress,” before it became obsolete, might already have sounded funny. As a matter of euphony? Not when “prioress” was in good order. Then perhaps because of its rarity, and especially so today, when even Episcopal “priests” can be women.

How then about such most vehemently repudiated terms as Jewess or Negress? Quite some years ago, the critic Robert Brustein got criticized for referring to a female thespian as a “powerful negress.” It wasn’t just the lower-case “n,” but, even more, that –ess. You might suppose that the epithet “powerful” could have created a positive aura. All the more so as “black” or “black woman” would definitely not have passed muster, though today the opposite is true. Well might you ask where the logic is in such matters.

But “Jewess,” even with the capital letter, is unacceptable, as T. S. Eliot has been rightly reprimanded for a lower-case “jew” in a poem, which, however, he never changed. The feminine form, though, was unexceptionable to Sir Walter Scott, whose Rebecca in Ivanhoe is a valiant Jewess. Here I am reminded of Jonathan Miller, speaking about himself in the hit show Beyond the Fringe, as being not a Jew, merely Jewish. This by way of analogy with, say, “bluish” as being less blue than “blue.”

Also, more important, on the anti-Semitic notion that the less Jewish, the better.

The argument against “Jewess” is also that there is no such thing as Christianess and Protestantess. Therefore –ess must be derogatory. And if, for whatever reason, “Jewess” is scarce  and generally avoided, it turns excessive and deliberate, and thus in bad odor, even as such a recherché synonym as “Israelite” becomes an elucubrated edulcoration, and thus distasteful.

Certainly there are no longer stewardesses on airplanes, not even hostesses, as they were briefly known, inconsistently with their services. But the settled-on flight attendants has it downside too, sounding prissily excogitated and perhaps even servile. Isn’t a female servicing a public toilet called an attendant? Words matter, even where they shouldn’t.

Take a very tall woman. Would it be insulting to refer to her as a giantess? Or would it be preferable, as in the case of the actor-actress dichotomy, to call her a giant? Surely less desirable. I think the problem is that in English there aren’t enough examples of –ess endings, as, say, in German, where any noun can also have a female form ending in –in. In English, several of those that do exist are unpleasant, such as traitress, adulteress, procuress.

Of course, there are also respectable ones: sculptress, patroness, proprietress, millionairess, prophetess, baroness, countess, marchioness and duchess. But especially now, with the glass ceiling almost abolished, there ought to be many more. Why not, for instance, painteress and lawyeress? Then even my wife might call herself an ex-actress rather than an ex-actor.

MURDER OF INNOCENTS

What about the horrific tragedy at Sandy Hook Elementary School?  Of course there should be stricter gun laws and there should be no NRA. Of course there should be greater attention paid to troubled youngsters (and even oldsters) with a seriously antisocial attitude. But what there shouldn’t be—if only one could control it—is a mother like Nancy Lanza.

Da liegt der Hund begraben, as the German adage has it: there lies the buried dog, or, in the English equivalent, there’s the rub. In all this understandable uproar, there hasn’t been enough barking up the right tree (the dog image again!) at mother Nancy Lanza.

What exactly shooter Adam Lanza’s motive may have been we’ll never know for sure, but we could look more closely at Adam’s mother, without whom there would have been no Adam. She is the Eve who, however inadvertently, fed this Adam the apple, which in this case was the assault weapon AR-15.

Let us look at her more closely. What kind of woman keeps a deadly arsenal at home, a semiautomatic rifle and four handguns? Is this for the self-defense of a woman living alone, or with one unbalanced son, which proves more precarious? Either way, one handgun should be sufficient, unless perhaps the locale is Syria, Mexico or the Sudan, although even there more might be less useful. What good is even an armed innocent against a heavily armed killer with murder in his soul? But in peaceable, small-town Connecticut, a Texas congressman’s idea to turn high-school principals into gun-toting cowboys would seem—and be—absurd.

Yet not only did Nancy have such an arsenal, she was also proudly boasting about it in the bar where she was—suspiciously—a regular.  A barfly in the ointment, indeed. And she used her weaponry at the shooting galleries she frequented, taking her troubled son along. Such establishments should provide clients with one relatively harmless gun, and legally ban all others.

In any case, why bring Adam with her? Did she think that that’s the way to make a nerd macho? As far as I can gather, Adam did little or no shooting there. But watching his mother at it must have given him some notions. He must have learned all too well how to use guns.

That Adam was weird was apparent to any number of youngsters and probably not-so-youngsters at school and elsewhere. It may have been made clear by his older brother’s not visiting for the last two years. Also by the father’s having divorced Nancy and subsequently staying away from any contact. What does it mean that the 28 killings elicited only such scant, routine condolences from him?

Significantly, the first person Adam killed with several shots in the face was his mother. Was it only because she happened to be there, blocking his path? He could easily have sneaked out of the house when she was not watching him. Adam, after all, was twenty, and not some kid under close parental surveillance. And that, too, is peculiar. Why, given his acknowledged smartness, was he not in college?

He did, to be sure, speak of moving to the West Coast for some higher education. But why so far away, making it an idea as inchoate, as unreal, as our death is to most of us? More interesting yet is the fact that Nancy declared her willingness, if Adam chose California, to pick up stakes and make a home for him there. Could he have felt smothered by excessive coddling?

But those grade-schoolers—surely they were not suffocating him with some unwelcome and draining dependency. Rather, I think, they represented to Adam the larger enemy, humanity. Moreover, he himself had gone to that school years ago, and maybe harbored unhappy memories. Ultimately, though, it was a place where he knew his way around, and where a sizable chunk of humanity was conveniently gathered nearby into an exposed target. A vulnerable kind of infant humanity, unlikely to fight back. The same for some women teachers, no obviously formidable adversaries. Still, if, say, a factory, or some other adult assemblage, had existed a few miles away, there is no telling that he wouldn’t have hatched the same plan.  

Yet how come that Nancy was blind to the threat Adam represented? Well, is there anything blinder than blind mother love? Only stupidity, of which, too, Nancy may have had a healthy—or, rather, unhealthy—share. Little children, moreover, so dear to their parents, might have been a double target for Adam, a smart, and therefore unsuspected, lunatic, surely the most dangerous kind. His act was clearly excogitated rather than spontaneous. And doesn’t the Bible warn us about the danger to little children ever since Herod’s time?

I repeat, arming teachers won’t do. Perhaps better arm all politicians who support guns for everyone, and have a go at them. Is the danger that the pols are underarmed, hence the murder of our consul in Benghazi, a highly well-meaning diplomat? No, the danger is both inadequate mental health and gun laws (if those aren’t just one and the same problem). And don’t think for a moment that either Bloomberg or Obama or 28 dead can seriously change the situation.

No doubt our Constitution must bear some inadvertent blame. What is that business about the right to bear arms? Protection against whom? Indians? Brits? Hardly threats any more. But certainly not against the Adam Lanzas, who always shoot first, unexpectedly and lethally.

MY MUSIC

The greatness of the Swiss cultural and art historian Jacob Burckhardt (1918-97) is unquestionable. Splendid are even his lesser works, like the Weltgeschichtlische Betrachtungen, whose English translation, Reflections on History, I don’t possess. From time to time I dip into the original, as I did the other day, when his thoughts on music caught my eye. Some of this I translate herewith.

“Its [music’s] effect is (i.e., in the right instances) so great and direct that the feeling of gratitude immediately seeks out the creator and coincidentally proclaims his greatness. The great composers belong among the undisputed geniuses. More questionable is their perpetuity. It depends in the first place on the ever renewed efforts of posterity, to wit performances, which must compete with performance of all subsequent and (each time) contemporary works, while other arts can display their products once and forever; and depends in the second place on the survival of our tone system and rhythm, which is not everlasting. Mozart and Beethoven may become for a future mankind as incomprehensible as might now be to us the Greek music so highly praised by its contemporaries. They will remain great on credit, on the enthusiastic say-so of our times, like, say, the painters of antiquity, whose works have been lost.”

Which makes me wonder: am I that postulated man of the future who has no use for Mozart and Beethoven—and throw in for good measure Bach and all others before the coming of the Romantics, Schubert, Schumann, Berlioz and the rest. I have a huge collection of CDs, but nothing before circa 1827. Bach, Mozart, Beethoven (yes, even the vaunted late sonatas and quartets) are anathema to me.

Now all you music lovers may ask, as did once a minor conductor of my acquaintance, “Do you then not love music?” But, of course, I do, only I start closer to home. And I proceed to many a composer, even little-known ones (see my book John Simon on Music), up to some of the more recent abominations, e.g., Pärt, Penderecki, Gorecki, Cage, Stockhausen, Glass, Reich and their likes, but not including the Messiaen of Quartet for the End of Time, a good deal of Henze, and some of Thomas Adès. And I love such slightly earlier composers as Frank Martin, Barber, Britten, Lutosławski and Dutilleux.

Who, though, are my desert island composers, my necessaries? Fauré, Debussy, Ravel and a bunch of other Frenchmen, but not Saint-Saëns and Lalo, and only some of Milhaud. Certainly Satie and Poulenc, and Bartók and Kodály, Berg and Stravinsky and early Schoenberg, the wonderful Janáček and Prokofiev and Shostakovich, and some other Slavs and Central Europeans, Benjamin Britten, William Walton, and a couple of other Brits (but Elgar only for the Cello Concerto), and yes, the delightful Nino Rota. Also Latinos like Falla, Villa Lobos, Guarnieri and the superb Montsalvatge. And still others—check out, I say again, John Simon on Music. 

The late Alan Rich, who loved to disagree with me, wondered how I could publish a whole book on music and mention Mozart only once, and even that in a quotation from someone else. My answer: Easily. Here again is Burckhardt on music: “Now it is fantastic mathematics—and now again all soul [lauter Seele], infinitely distant and yet intimately close.” Well yes: I don’t like it when it is merely fantastic mathematics, or, rather, geometry, governed by the kind of rules that make a square: four equal sides. Such, for me, is Mozart: one bar pretty much replicates the next three or more. (You are free to call me anything uncomplimentary you choose.) Repetition or near-repetition is to me one of the curses of pre-1927 music. A Bard College female student of mine once admonished, “Be charitable, John, toward mathematicians. They are failed poets.”

Failed poets—that covers for me (I keep stressing, for me) those earlier composers. Whereas something like the Janáček Sinfonietta or the Third Piano Concerto of Bartók or Prokofiev—that is poetry set free. It can be achieved even by somewhat lesser composers, say, Tcherepnin, Franz Schmidt (his Fourth Symphony), or much of Dohnanyi. And certainly by Hindemith, Honegger and Hahn, to name only a few H’s. (But not, of course, Handel, Haydn—though preferable to Mozart—or that ghastly Vivaldi.)

But what about failed poetry? Are the poets of earlier eras uninteresting? Certainly not. To say nothing of Shakespeare, a genius for all ages, but also Wyatt, Skelton, Donne, Marvell, Rochester, Prior, Pope, and a lot of others, to mention only early Brits. Still, my great passions are for later poets: MacNeice, Ransom, Cummings, and especially Robert Graves; also the Jameses, Dickey and Wright. Non-Anglos? Apollinaire, Mallarmé, Valéry, Prévert, Queneau, Celan, Rilke, George, Hofmannsthal, Kastner, Lenau, Morike, Storm, Morgenstern, Cavafy, Ritsos, Montale, and those amazing Hungarians: Ady, József, Babits, Kosztolányi, Illyés, Pilinszky and Radnóti, and one Serb, Vasko Popa. See my Dreamers of Dreams: Essays on Poets and Poetry.

                                                                                                                                                                

But back to music, and Burckhardt’s “all soul.”  What exactly is soul in music? I can readily point to it in, say, the piano music and melodies of Fauré, Debussy, Ravel, Poulenc, to name only Frenchmen; in operas like, among others, Otello, Falstaff, Wozzeck, Lulu, Bluebeard’s Castle, The Fiery Angel, Jenufa, Vanessa, Ariadne auf Naxos, Salome, Pelléas et Mélisande; in symphonic music by Prokofiev, Shostakovich, Myaskovsky, Stravinsky, to name only Russians.

But define it? I defy anyone to do so. I can only say that it is what moves me, stirs up my insides, would make me sing or hum it if I knew how. What, in a Hungarian phrase, crawls (caressingly) into the ear. What makes me forget my worries, my inadequacies, my mortality. What makes me want to hear it again and again. And what reinforces my love for my wife, even though her music is very different from mine.

Finally, what are certain works at least part of which elicit a swoon of ecstasy, that could sustain me in the dire case of all other music being lost? And let us assume that I’m allowed no more than a baker’s dozen.

So here, in no particular order, are fourteen sublime works by thirteen composers: Samuel Barber’s Piano Concerto and Souvenirs ballet, Ibert’s Trio for Violin, Cello and Harp, Mompou’s song cycle Combat del somne, Montsalvatge’s Lullaby for a Small Negro Boy, Martin’s Concerto for 7 Winds and Strings, Mahler’s Adagietto from his Fifth Symphony, Debussy’s La plus que lente, Ravel’s ballet L’Enfant et les sortileges, Kodály’s Approaching Spring (Közelítő Tél) for baritone and orchestra, Bartók’s Second Suite for Orchestra, Sallinen’s opera The Red Line, Britten’s Peter Grimes, and Strauss’s Der Rosenkavalier (I cite the works that include the beloved passages). However, I do hope it will never come down to no more than that.