Book/DVD/Record Review | Town Topics

July 17, 2013

Sleeping on Hallowed Ground: A Gettysburg Seance With Stephen Crane

By Stuart Mitchner

She was at last looking upon those curious beings who rode down from the North — those men of legend and colossal tale — they who were possessed of such marvellous hallucinations.

—Stephen Crane, from “Three Mysterious Soldiers”

During a July 4 NPR broadcast live from Gettysburg, Pa. on the occasion of the 150th anniversary of the battle that turned the tide of the Civil War, people were talking about how the historic site should be preserved and remembered. On the street that runs between the battle lines, there are restaurants, souvenir shops, and motels. One Gettysburg historian named Jerry Bennett said it was “a great place to put a motel, right in the middle of it, because you’re sleeping on hallowed ground that night, if you’re a tourist.”

Although there has been a great deal of storm and strife over the Institute for Advanced Study’s plan to build faculty housing on property proximate to our own Battlefield, at least Princeton has been spared the presence of a Travelodge on hallowed ground, not to mention the paranormal buzz that has made Gettysburg a “Mecca for ghost hunters.” A story in the York Daily Record begins, “In a town where even the land beneath McDonald’s is believed by more than one ghost tour guide to be tinged with spiritual energy, Gettysburg has managed to build a booming paranormal industry.” You have to wonder when some pulp novelist or Hollywood idea guru will figure out how to bring zombies to Gettysburg. Think of the feast for the living dead as all those thousands of soldiers congregate on the battlefield for a grisly reenactment before fanning out to dine on the locals, including the faculty and student body of Gettysburg College, not to mention the folks at the Lutheran Seminary. more

July 10, 2013

“Time Is a Very Considerable Place” — Beethoven Plays an Adagio for Proust’s Birthday

By Stuart Mitchner

I can be visited in bed by the brook and the birds of the Pastoral Symphony, which poor Beethoven enjoyed no more directly than I do since he was completely deaf. He consoled himself by trying to reproduce the song of the birds he no longer heard …. I, too, compose symphonies in my own way, when I portray what I can no longer see.

—Marcel Proust (1871-1922)

Proust was able to hear the Pastoral Symphony in bed with the help of a device called a theatrophone, the 1913 equivalent of streaming music. For 60 francs a month, a system using telephone wires connected the subscriber to live performances at eight Paris theaters and concert halls, including the Opéra. According to William C. Carter’s Marcel Proust: A Life (Yale 2000), “no matter how sick he was,” the novelist could place his ear “next to the black trumpet” and enjoy concerts, operas, and even plays.

One drawback to the theatrophone was the erratic quality of the transmission. Three years later Proust solved this problem by inviting a string quartet into his bedroom to play César Franck’s Quartet in D. During a performance “lighted solely by candles,” Proust lay on a divan covered in green velvet “with his eyes closed, without making the slightest movement,” and when the 45-minute-long piece had been played, he thanked the musicians and asked them to play it again. By then it was two in the morning. Proust sealed the deal by giving each man three 50 franc notes that were redeemable for gold. After they finished the second performance, Proust’s housekeeper Celeste Albaret served them champagne and fried potatoes and sent them home in four taxis shortly before dawn. A month later they returned to perform Beethoven’s 13th Quartet. more

July 3, 2013

On His 130th Birthday — A Little Touch of Kafka in the Night

By Stuart Mitchner

While today, July 3, is Franz Kafka’s 130th birthday, the shadow of his name continues to spread, stretching on either side of his birth and death dates, 1883 and 1924. As Frederick Karl, one of his numerous biographers, once observed, the word “Kafkaesque” has “entered the language in a way no other writer’s has.” Joycean, Proustian, Hitchcockian, even Chaplinesque — nothing else approaches the sheer adaptibility of the ominously nuanced dynamite packed into the K-word. The definitions are all over the place. Wiktionary suggests “marked by a senseless, disorienting, often menacing complexity,” or “marked by surreal distortion and often a sense of impending danger.” Wikipedia’s Kafka entry mentions “surreal situations like those in his writing.” Merriam-Webster comes at the word as “having a nightmarishly complex, bizarre, or illogical quality.” Ask someone on the street to free associate and you’ll find them running roughly the same changes, as in bizarre, weird, paranoid, existential, far out, sick, perverse, dreamlike, nightmarish, phantasmagoric, absurd, funny, grotesque, scary, dark, ad infinitum.

According to Jack Greenberg’s piece “From Kafka to Kafkaesque” in Franz Kafka: The Office Writings (Princeton University Press 2009), edited by Princeton professor emeritus Stanley Corngold, with Greenberg and Benno Wagner, a Lexis search of state and federal courts found 245 opinions in which “Kafkaesque” was used, five of them in the Supreme Court. Between 2002 and 2006, Westlaw’s All News reported between 455 and 669 uses of the word outside the courtroom in “encounters of everyday life with the law, and the bureaucracies of state and society.” more

June 26, 2013

Don’t Stop Believing — James Gandolfini’s Tony Soprano Lives On and On and On and On

By Stuart Mitchner

The magnitude of the response to James Gandolfini’s death in Rome last Wednesday is clearly also a tribute to a fictional character and a television series created by David Chase and his writers. If Chase had picked someone else to play Tony Soprano back in 1998 (as almost happened), Gandolfini (1961-2013) would be remembered as a good actor with a knack for playing heavies. But it works both ways and the part of a lifetime miraculously found perhaps the only actor in the world worthy of it, as Chase implied when he called Gandolfini “one of the greatest actors of this or any time.” Then Chase raised the stakes: “A great deal of that genius resided in those sad eyes. I remember telling him many times, ‘You don’t get it. You’re like Mozart.’ There would be silence at the other end of the phone.”

The outpouring of grief and adulation for this New Jersey native, a Rutgers graduate of the Class of 1983 for whom the state’s flags were flown at half-mast Monday, has been extraordinary. I can’t recall another instance where the actor and the role were so closely associated in the process of mourning. Friends and fellow actors knew him on another level, needless to say. Yet even they could not help but speak of Tony Soprano, a work of art in human form conceived by David Chase and embodied and brought to life by James Gandolfini. People clearly loved something beyond the racist, sexist brute who could and did kill with his bare hands. They loved his heart, his humanity, his anger, his misery, his wife, his children, the way he went out to the driveway in robe and slippers to get the Star Ledger like thousands of other New Jerseyans, his doomed efforts to deal with a nightmare mother, and a dangerous, highly profitable, but crushingly burdensome business. more

June 21, 2013

Sneaking Through Baltimore With Lincoln, Pinkerton, and America’s First Female Private Eye

By Stuart Mitchner

He reached the Capital as the poor, hunted fugitive slave reaches the North, in disguise, seeking concealment, evading pursuers … crawling and dodging under the sable wing of night. He changed his programme, took another route, started at another hour, travelled in other company, and arrived at another time in Washington. We have no censure for the President at this point. He only did what braver men have done.

—Frederick Douglass,

Life and Times (1881)

There are many reasons to think well of Baltimore, in spite of its being the place where the plot to assassinate President-elect Abraham Lincoln was hatched and might have been carried out but for the counter machinations described in Daniel Stashower’s The Hour of Peril: The Secret Plot to Murder Lincoln Before the Civil War (Minotaur Books $26.99).

Let’s start with the fact that the Baltimore Ravens are the only professional sports team in the world named for a poem. When the owner of the Cleveland Browns decided to move his NFL franchise to Baltimore, a telephone survey and a fan contest came up with a list of 17 names that was trimmed to three by focus groups of 200 Baltimore area residents and a phone survey of 1000 people. A fan contest drawing 33, 288 voters picked Edgar Allan Poe’s immortal bird over the Marauders and the Americans. more

June 12, 2013

Reading Brooklyn Without a Map, or Henry Miller Saves the Day

By Stuart Mitchner

The largest and most unknown continent of all is Brooklyn. You can say that I’ve gone out into the wilderness five hundred times armed with a trusty map, now worn to tatters, and have prowled about, exploring the place in the dark hours of the night as not even Stanley explored Africa in his search for Dr Livingstone.

—Thomas Wolfe (1900-1938)

It can also be said that the man with the map — a writer of immense, notoriously verbose novels — summed up the story of his writing life in a six-page monologue about someone attempting to do the impossible. The situation described in Thomas Wolfe’s letter of December 11, 1933, from 5 Montague Terrace in Brooklyn Heights, is the subject of “Only the Dead Know Brooklyn” (1935), a story told in a Brooklynese dialect in which the 6’6 Wolfe is the “big guy” with the map asking a Brooklynite how to get to Eighteenth Avenue and Sixty-second Street. In the letter, the prosaic statement, “The Brooklyn people boast that you can live here a lifetime and never get to know their town,” becomes the story’s punchline, “It’d take a guy a lifetime to know Brooklyn t’roo an’ t’roo. An’ even den, yuh wouldn’t know it all.” more

June 5, 2013

Light and Dark: Themes and Anthems for a European Tour

By Stuart Mitchner

The first real summer vacation I ever had was two and a half months in Europe with a student tour called the Golden Bear. I picked that particular tour because it was the only one that went to Vienna and Berlin, two cities that had aroused my interest because of the rich post-war atmosphere of Carol Reed and Graham Greene’s classic European thriller The Third Man starring Orson Welles in the title role.

When the Golden Bear powers-that-be cancelled the Berlin visit and feebly attempted to make up for it with a few extra days in Switzerland, I thought of the moment in The Third Man when after cynically justifying his immoral doings on the black market, Welles’s Harry Lime says: “In Italy for 30 years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder, and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love, 500 years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.” more

May 29, 2013

Spenser in Life: Students and Teachers From Keats to Alpers

By Stuart Mitchner

Minor miracles are literature’s stock in trade. Thus an English poet who died at 47 in 1599 can change the lives of a stableman’s son in London in 1813, a graduate student at Indiana University in 1944, and a sophomore at the University of California-Berkeley in 1963. The poet whose work enforced the change is Edmund Spenser. The intermediaries include John Keats’s friend and tutor Charles Cowden Clarke, followed some 130 years later by Rudolph Gottfried, editor of the Prose Works for the Variorium Edition of Spenser overseen by A.H. Judson, who wrote the Variorium biography (1945). The last and personally most significant intermediary, and the inspiration for this column, is Renaissance scholar Paul J. Alpers, who died at 80 on Sunday, May 19.

If there were a Mount Rushmore of pre-1700 English literature, Edmund Spenser would have a place up there along with Chaucer, Shakespeare, and Milton. The sculptor would be working in the dark, however, since the elegant Elizabethan face on the cover of Andrew Hadfield’s Edmund Spenser: A Life (2012) is a portrait of “A gentleman said to be Edmund Spenser.” As the biographer himself admits, there is “no reliable image” of the poet, although he clearly has a soft spot in his heart for the “charming print” from English Literature for Boys and Girls that shows Spenser reading something of his to a suavely attentive Sir Walter Raleigh. more

May 22, 2013

Whistling in the Dark on Wagner’s 200th Birthday

By Stuart Mitchner

I’m looking at a photograph of my father when he was a graduate student at Indiana University. He’s wearing a sleeveless sweater and in his lap is a princely male Siamese cat named Kiloo. He had purchased Kiloo for a nominal sum from an opera singer everyone called Madame Manski, who, I have just discovered, sang at the Met, as Brünnhilde in Wagner’s Die Walküre, Elsa in Lohengrin, Venus in Tannhäuser, and Gutrune in Twilight of the Gods before moving on to sing Isolde in Tristan und Isolde under the direction of Bruno Walter at the Vienna State Opera. Being only six at the time, I would not have been as impressed by this information as I am now, faced with the daunting prospect of delivering a column on Wagner’s 200th birthday (1813-1883). I own no LPs or CDs of Wagner’s music and have never been to a concert, unless you count the production of Parsifal I was coerced into attending at a time when my interest in “serious music” had peaked with the Gerry Mulligan Quartet.

One of the handful of Wagnerians I know is a London research consultant who recently told me of the time he somewhat nervously introduced his 15-year-old daughter to “her first real experience of Wagner,” a performance of Siegfried at Covent Garden. Booking the tickets, he’d been worried she might not “take to it.” At the end of the first act he turned to her to see how she liked it, and she said, “Daddy, you’ve changed my life!” They’ve been sharing Wagner ever since, including memorable productions of the Ring at the Royal Albert Hall in 1998 and Covent Garden in 2007. more

May 15, 2013

Doing “Gatsby”: F. Scott Fitzgerald and the Man With the Beautiful Shirts

By Stuart Mitchner

The Garden Theatre was filled to overflowing for the Friday evening showing of Baz Luhrman’s big, jazzy, flamboyantly picturesque improvisation on The Great Gatsby (see review in this issue). People were seated on the steps of the aisle between the stadium seats. You got the feeling half the Princeton student body was there, along with a goodly number of teenagers from the area schools. Most nights at the Garden or Montgomery, particularly when the film is a literary classic as was recently the case with Anna Karenina, you see very few people under 30 or even 40. Or 50. Or, well, you get the idea.

According to the “Arts, Briefly” column in Monday’s New York Times, Gatsby took in $51.1 million over the weekend, second to Iron Man’s $72.5 — “an astounding result for a period drama” that received, at best, mixed reviews. Only 33 percent of ticket sales were for the 3-D version. Apparently the word of mouth about Gatsby’s flying shirts was less than enthusiastic. If you’re interested, those “beautiful shirts” can all be had at Brooks Brothers, along with the regatta blazers and boater hats, bow-ties, and shawl-collar sweaters. According to Adweek, the film’s 500-piece wardrobe was modeled on Brooks’ early 1920s catalogue. It’s also reminiscent of the faux sixties marketing boom created when Mad Men was the rage, with cool, elegant Don Draper at the center, a self-created mystery man who has more than a little in common with Fitzgerald’s “elegant roughneck,” Jay Gatsby. more

May 8, 2013

Deanna Durbin’s Star Shone Brightest in the World’s Darkest Hour

By Stuart Mitchner

It’s already old news now, as dated as its subject — the obituary notices announcing the death at 91 of Deanna Durbin, the “plucky child movie star” who saved Universal Studios from financial ruin; “the best-loved and most fondly remembered singing star of Hollywood’s golden age” who cut short her career at 28; “the perfect girl next door” who left the fans-next-door to live the rest of her long life in a suburb of Paris.

Was the Canadian-born Durbin truly the “superstar” claimed by the headline of the Associated Press obituary? Indeed she was, and then some. If anything, the Hollywood hype falls short because her impact on a world at war transcended stardom. Stay with the metaphor and you could say she outshone all the stars in Hollywood, whether her light was shining on the battlefield or the homefront, soldiers or civilians, regardless of nationality. The April 30 New York Times obit’s “wholesome, radiant, can-do girl who in a series of wildly popular films was always fixing the problems of unhappy adults” became the “can-do” embodiment of beauty and music and youth symbolically opposed to the problems of a disastrously unhappy world. more

May 1, 2013

Hello Goodbye Alexandria: A Five-Day Whirlwind Tour of Cavafy’s City

By Stuart Mitchner

In the loose living of my early years

the impulses of my poetry were shaped,

the boundaries of my art were plotted.

—C.F. Cavafy, from “Understanding” (1915)

Monday was a two-sided anniversary for the Greek poet C.F. Cavafy, born 150 years ago on April 29, 1863, to Greek parents in Alexandria, where he died 70 years later on April 29, 1933. UNESCO is commemorating his 150th birthday with Cavafy festivals around the world this summer, and one of his foremost translators, Princeton Professor Emeritus Edmund Keeley, will be reading from his renderings of Cavafy and other Greek poets at the PEN World Voices Festival May 5 in New York and on May 7 at a dinner for the Princeton University Society of Fellows at Palmer House. more

April 24, 2013

Up the Hill and Over the Top With Berlioz, Jack Nicholson, and Sir Colin Davis (1927-2013)

By Stuart Mitchner

I had just never heard music like that. I never heard melodies that wafted away and came back to earth a long way off.

—Colin Davis on first hearing Berlioz

I move around a lot because things tend to get bad when I stay.

—Jack Nicholson in Five Easy Pieces –

It’s just not done. You don’t drive to New Hope with the Berlioz Requiem. It’s too much to ask of Moby, my sturdy 12-year-old Honda CRV, who has just been treated to a new timing belt. But this is a special occasion. Colin Davis, the conductor in charge of the sonic juggernaut rocking the car, died last week, April 14, at 85.

As we speed down down down one hill, gathering momentum for the steeper hill looming dead ahead ten minutes this side of Lambertville, I’m holding on for dear life with my left hand, conducting with my right. We’re into the last of the massive orchestral movements surging toward the Day of Wrath as we hit the upgrade, and here comes grief and glory from the four corners of the earth, four brass choirs playing the fatal fanfare, the Tuba Mirum that, as Davis liked to say, “blows your brains out.” Now Moby’s pushing past horsepower to whalepower like his great white namesake and we’re over the top as the chorus lays a wave of pure sound on the hilltop horizon, 400 voices above a score of thundering drums, it’s as if everyone who ever lived is singing “as all creation rises again.” Then we’re over the top into the sun and wind and the hushed, humbled calm of the Quid sum miser. On to New Hope! more

April 17, 2013

In the Month of His Birth, A Little Touch of Shakespeare in the Night

By Stuart Mitchner

Shakespeare, he’s in the alley with his pointed shoes and his bells ….

—Bob Dylan

You read me Shakespeare on the rolling Thames, that old river poet who never, ever ends …. —Kate Bush

Whatever, whoever he may be, Shakespeare is everywhere. Locally, he was just the subject of an early birthday celebration at the library. Universally, besides being caricatured in Shakespeare in Love (1998) and deified in Berlioz’s Memoirs (1865), he’s in Dylan’s alley “stuck Inside of Mobile with the Memphis blues again,” whispering poetry in Kate Bush’s elegant ear in “Oh England My Lionheart,” and now and forever, or so I like to think, he’s moving “with sweet majesty” among us like King Henry among his troops the night before the battle of Agincourt in Laurence Olivier’s film, Henry V.

If I were asked this week’s Town Talk question about a favorite work by Shakespeare, I’d give the lazy, easy, obvious answer. But Hamlet was more than a favorite, it was the great insurmountable mist-shrouded summit of graduate school, and by the time I bowed out of the program, I felt like the pilgrim in the old joke about the quest for the meaning of life who finally finds the master’s cave and throws himself at the enlightened one’s feet only to be told “Life is just a bowl of cherries, my son,” except instead of cherries the answer is Shakespeare. Just Shakespeare. more

April 10, 2013

Waiting for the Glass Family: A J.D. Salinger Experience on His Double Anniversary Year

By Stuart Mitchner

It’s the first day of March and I’m at the new hospital lying on a gurney, unsedated and edgy, nothing to do, no TV I can watch old movies on, as was possible at Robert Wood Johnson. Since I’m waiting to be wheeled in for minor surgery (a “procedure,” they call it), I think about the longest wait I’ve ever endured. Before I know it, I’ve disappeared into a prayer disguised as a daydream that begins with the sense of intense, even delirious anticipation I would feel if J.D. Salinger’s heirs finally announced the release of some of the Glass family stories so many of us know, believe, feel in our bones he was working on for four decades up in his Cornish N.H. bunker. My daydream prayer takes the form of a miles-long caravan of school busses heading toward the Salinger enclave. The drivers are all versions of the Chief of the Comanche Club, John Geduski, who drives the bus in “The Laughing Man,” one of my two favorite stories, along with “For Esmé — With Love and Squalor,” from his 1953 collection, Nine Stories. The kids on board are singing old show tunes; we’re all kids in this Salinger fantasy; it’s like the greatest school trip that never happened. Everyone’s punchy because the feeling is that this demonstration may finally do the trick. We’re 20,000 versions of the amateur reader to whom Salinger dedicated the last work he allowed to appear between covers. That was 50 years ago. more

April 3, 2013

Reflections on the Crown Jewel of Manhattan’s Literary Hotels

By Stuart Mitchner

We went to the Algonquin for lunch …. We sat in a big round booth built into the wall that felt cozy like a clubhouse.

—Margaret Salinger

I can’t prove it, but I’m pretty sure I was the only person on the packed-to-the-gills Manhattan-bound Jersey Transit train who was reading a 57-year-old paperback edition of J.D. Salinger’s Nine Stories. Aside from the fact that I still spend time rereading Salinger’s fiction while still foolishly looking forward to that legendary trove of unpublished work (hey, it’s only been, what, 47 years?), my choice made perfect sense. We were on our way to a night at the Algonquin, the crown jewel of New York’s literary hotels, where Salinger and his then-editor at the New Yorker, Gus Lobrano, often met to talk about these selfsame stories, all but one of which first appeared in the pages of that magazine. And when the reclusive author made forays into the city from his New Hampshire sanctuary, he would revisit the hotel for lunch with his New Yorker pals William Shawn and Lillian Ross. If you have any doubt about the symbiotic relationship between the magazine and the hotel, take a look at the decor on the hall outside your room and you’ll see framed New Yorker covers from the golden years and framed vintage New Yorker cartoons. more

March 27, 2013

Bargain Days at Bryn Mawr, An Interrupted Conversation, and A Sunset in Trieste

By Stuart Mitchner

With apologies to Robert Browning’s “Rabbi Ben Ezra,” but at the Bryn Mawr–Wellesley book event, “The best is yet to be, the last of the sale, for which the first was made.”

It’s true. The bargain glories of half-price Thursday and box day Friday are yet to be this week at Princeton Day School on the Great Road.

Okay, the first was not made for the last. In fact, the vast stock is routinely ransacked during Monday’s paid preview, but the beauty of Bryn Mawr now, as always, is that the table-sweeping dealers of day one always leave gems in their wake. Almost without exception, some of the sweetest surprises surface on the last day. more

March 20, 2013

Remembering My First Bryn Mawr Book Sale and a Man Who Was Interested in Everything

By Stuart Mitchner

My early and invincible love of reading I would not exchange for all the riches of India.

—Edward Gibbon

I bought no books at my first Bryn Mawr Book Sale, April 28, 1976. I was incapable of serious browsing, having witnessed earlier that same morning the birth of my first, and only, child. I was floating. I floated in and I floated out. I don’t mean to slight the community’s single largest book event, but much as the arrival of a life in the context of Bryn Mawr 1976 puts the occasion in philosophical perspective, so does the loss of a life in the context of Bryn Mawr-Wellesley 2013. The life lost — that of Princeton bibliophile/philosopher/scholar/enlightened enthusiast Peter Oppenheimer — has given the sale one of the most sizeable and categorically rich and diverse donations in its history. Fifteen thousand volumes of philosophy, mathematics, history, art, music, literary criticism, literature, and biography, among other subject areas from Oppenheimer’s library, will be divided between the 2013 and 2014 events. Next week’s five-day sale begins with a $20 preview at 10 a.m., Monday, March 25, at Princeton Day School on the Great Road.

I didn’t leave my first Bryn Mawr sale empty handed, by the way. I had the piece of sheet music shown above in my hand. The cover silhouette of “Hindustan” signified another blessed event, my newborn book, Indian Action: An American Journey to the East. The lyrics were pure Tin Pan Alley circa 1918, “Shades of night are falling, nightingales are calling, every heart enthralling,” but the cover image was all it took to seal a special day and it’s been on display near my desk ever since. more

March 13, 2013

Living in Dostoevsky: Joseph Frank’s Acclaimed Biography Was Born in Princeton

By Stuart Mitchner

In Beat Generation scripture Carl Solomon asks Allen Ginsberg, “Who are you?” to which Ginsberg instantly replies, “I’m Prince Myshkin,” asking the same of Solomon, who says, unhesitatingly, “I’m Kirilov.” The two poets identifying themselves as the holy fool and the nihilist from The Idiot aren’t delusional, they’re just living in Dostoevsky. So was Jack Kerouac, who called him Dusty, and so are generations of readers, who, like actor/writer Stephen Fry, put him foremost among those great writers who were “not to be bowed down before and worshipped, but embraced and befriended,” and who “put their arms around you and showed you things you always knew but never dared to believe.”

It Began in Princeton

Award-winning Dostoevsky biographer Joseph Frank (1918-2013), who died in Palo Alto on March 3, wrote the first volumes of his magnum opus in Princeton, where he lived at various times during the 1950s and from 1966 to 1985. Early in his preface to Dostoevsky: A Writer in His Time (2010), the one-volume edition of the five-part work published by Princeton University Press, Frank pays his respects to “the much lamented and gifted novelist” David Foster Wallace, “the most perceptive reader of my first four volumes.” The only sentence quoted from Wallace’s essay, however, is the one in which he contrasts Frank’s approach to that of James Joyce biographer Richard Ellman, who “doesn’t go into anything like Frank’s detail on ideology or politics or social theory.” more

March 6, 2013

“Darconville’s Cat”: The Power and Glory of Vengeance Writ Fantastically Large

By Stuart Mitchner

If this column were a film, I’d begin with a close-up of Robert Mitchum’s hands in Night of the Hunter (1955), where he plays a psychopathic preacher who has LOVE tattooed on the knuckles of one hand and HATE on the knuckles of the other. Then I’d cut to the bizarre scene in Gilda (1946) between estranged lovers, Glenn Ford’s Johnny and Rita Hayworth’s Gilda, where they express their deep mutual detestation, Gilda saying, “I hate you, too, Johnny,” as they move closer to one another. “I hate you so much,” closer, closer, “I think I’m going to die from it.” As they kiss, passionately, she repeats in a voice that makes you feel that she means every word, “I think I’m going to die from it.”

The protagonist of Alexander Theroux’s vast, rich, diabolically labyrinthine enterprise, Darconville’s Cat (Doubleday 1981, 704 pages) dies from an overdose of both emotions. This Divine Comedy plumbing the circles of love and hate was included by Anthony Burgess in Ninety-Nine Novels: The Best in English Since 1939. Besides being nominated for a National Book Award, it also made the Good Reads list of the 100 Top Literary Novels of All Time.

For almost five years I scoured secondhand bookstores and book sales looking for Darconville’s Cat, my interest aroused by Theroux’s massive tour de force Laura Warholic: or the Sexual Intellectual (2007), which I wrote about here in February 2008. In spite of Darconville’s stature, not a single bookseller I asked in the U.S., Canada, or England had heard of it; the only Theroux they knew was Alexander’s brother Paul. Last October I gave up the quest, ordered the novel online, and began reading. more

February 27, 2013

“Double Indemnity’s” Seven Oscar Nominations Helped Ignite the Film Noir Boom

By Stuart Mitchner

While channel-surfing the other night, I found myself watching the beginning of a film I’d already seen and had no intention of seeing again. That’s Fred MacMurray slumped at a desk in the film noir shadows of the headquarters of the Pacific All Risk Insurance Company. He’s talking into a dictaphone, about to confess to his boss his part in a sordid tale of claim-rigging, murder, and betrayal. The room onscreen is so deep in the murk of its mood it seems to be glowering at me from the third dimension. Never mind that the man slowly bleeding to death is being played by one of my least favorite actors, he’s sinking his teeth into the role of a lifetime, a mortally wounded insurance salesman named Walter Neff mouthing the hardboiled poetry of Raymond Chandler, with contributions by director Billy Wilder, from a novella by James M. Cain. That’s all she wrote, I’m stuck, can’t turn it off, can’t stop watching, can’t change the channel, Turner Classic Movies scores again.

As the scene shifts to a daylight flashback that shows Neff driving up to a nifty little Spanish colonial hillside chateau, I shout out, “It’s Double Indemnity, Barbara Stanwyck’s house in Los Felix!” and my wife, who grew up in L.A. and loves this movie, comes running. more

February 20, 2013

As Grand Central Marks 100 Years, New York Deserves a Lifetime Achievement Oscar

By Stuart Mitchner

People on their busy way across Grand Central’s main concourse the evening of February 1 stopped and looked up, struck by the sudden appearance of rows of lights dancing in the great arched windows on the west wall. Though the lights seemed to be appearing sequentially, changing color as they moved up and down and back and forth, there was nothing remote-controlled or digital or otherworldly about the behavior of these white, red, and green flarings and flashings. This was no manufactured Times-Square-type display. These dancing lights were dancing people.

The show created by over a hundred members of the Improv Everywhere troupe using a combination of LED flashlights, camera flashes, and body English began at 7:13 p.m., according to the legendary golden clock atop Grand Central’s information booth, one of Manhattan’s favorite meeting places. It was the first evening of the terminal’s year-long centennial celebration. In railroad time, 7:13 is 19:13, which with a simple subtraction becomes the birth year, 1913. more

February 13, 2013

Struggling Couples, Silly Love Songs, and a Valentine’s Day Conception

By Stuart Mitchner

Some people wanna fill the world with silly love songs ….

—Paul McCartney from “Silly Love Songs”

By all rights, George Stevens’s 1941 film Penny Serenade should be to Valentine’s Day what Frank Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life is to Christmas. The season of silly love songs, candy, flowers, and date movies could do with a film about a couple struggling to honor the marriage vow, “for better, for worse, in sickness and in health, to love and to cherish, till death us do part.”

Not that I’ve got anything against Valentine’s Day. If it didn’t exist, neither would I.

My mother was stone cold sober when she mentioned the occasion of my conception, a date later confirmed by my father. The revelation came when she was telling me the facts of life and my stunned response (“You and Dad did that?”) had less to do with pre-adolescent naivete than with my acute awareness of the lack of physical affection between my parents. Possibly the only reason I’m here in Princeton at this moment is because my father was living up to his part of a nationally accredited romantic situation. Otherwise, the most productive phase of the relationship took place when they were writing plays together the year before they got married. Two of their one-act farces, And Silently Steal Away and Mr. and Mrs. Uh-h, were published by Samuel French, and at the time of their divorce 37 years later they were still receiving small royalty checks. The plan was to move from Hutchinson, Kansas to New York City and write Broadway plays. To make ends meet, she would be a stenographer and he would play piano in a night club. On the way to the Bright Lights they ended up in Bloomington, Indiana, where my father became a Medieval scholar and my mother a legal secretary working for a Court of Appeals judge who put the make on her and later became the subject of a story in the Kenyon Review.

“It’s Love, It’s Love”

In the 1950s my father, of all people, filled the world with some pretty silly love songs of his own that I inherited in manuscript. Several of these ditties are so tuneful that I sometimes find myself whistling or humming the melodies. It’s hard to keep from smiling when I think of my reserved, undemonstrative father writing Tin Pan Alley lyrics like “It’s love, it’s love, it’s love, it’s love, it’s love, it’s love, I’m zoomin’/She caught my eye, I’m not so shy, we’ll multiply, we’re human!”

The period when my father was composing “It’s Love,” “The Magic of Love,” “It Can Happen,” and the others must have been like a reprise of the courtship year when they were collaborating on plays. My mother was actually sitting next to him at the piano singing along one night when some friends were over, an event I witnessed, amazed, from the top of the stairs. The most musically sophisticated and lyrically overwrought of my father’s compositions, “The Magic of Love,” begins, “If I wish, I could swim like a silvery fish,” and ends with four lines that my needy mother almost surely contributed: “Hold me tight! Keep me earthbound and still tonight./Lift your spell — let me breathe the air of the ordinary room we share./The enchantment is with you there/That’s the magic of love!”

Tucked in with the song manuscripts is a royalty statement for $229 showing that And Silently Steal Away was performed in 22 different towns in Minnesota between January and May of 1950 (with multiple performances in Olivia, Windom, and Thief River Falls).

Though this story doesn’t have a happy ending (what real-life story does?), my parents remained close after the divorce and were always there for each other, “till death did them part” fifteen years later.

Another Couple

In Penny Serenade, Roger and Julie, newlyweds played by Cary Grant and Irene Dunne, struggle financially in a desperate attempt to adopt a child when the bureaucratic odds are stacked against them.

The flashbacks that tell the story of Penny Serenade are structured around songs associated with the relationship, each in the form of a record that Julie is playing on the victrola, beginning with “You Were Meant for Me.” The theme is set from the first meeting in a record store where she’s a sales clerk and he buys a big stack of records (78s in those days), which gives him an excuse to spend time in her company. He walks her home, and after admitting he owns no phonograph, invites himself into her apartment to listen to some silly love songs. The next scene, which begins with the playing of another record, shows them shyly talking around embarrassingly relevant fortune cookies (marriage, a baby); then comes a big, rollicking, brilliantly directed New Year’s Eve party where Roger proposes to Julie just before midnight. A newspaperman on his way to a two-year assignment in Japan, he wants her to join him three months after he gets settled. They have only hours before he has to catch a 3 a.m. train. With Hollywood serendipity on their side, they manage to get married that same snowy night and make the train in time. As they’re sharing a passionate goodbye embrace in his compartment (in the picture shown below), the train’s about to leave, she has to get off — but she doesn’t. Next shot shows the train pulling into a station, the camera lingering suggestively on the compartment’s frosted-up, snow-edged window. In case we don’t get the point, a sign says “To New York 115 Miles.” The nudge isn’t necessary; their goodbye kiss makes clear what’s taken place, and the next time Roger sees her, in Japan, she has big news to tell him.

Although Penny Serenade shifts abruptly from romantic comedy to the dramatic mode typed as a “tear jerker” when it gets to the struggle at the heart of the story, it’s one of George Stevens’s finest films, with memorable supporting performances by Beulah Bondi as a sympathetic worker in an adoption agency and Edgar Buchanan as a tried and true friend. Grant and Dunne are even better together than they were in The Awful Truth (1937) and My Favorite Wife (1940). In both those comedies, one of Dunne’s many charms is her knowing laugh, but the half-laugh, half sigh that emerges when she perceives what Grant is up to that first day with the records is so right that it makes you laugh, too. Grant is no less subtle, speaking soft and low when he proposes and then kissing her with words of love we can barely hear.

Roger is the confident carefree Cary Grant that film fans know and love until an earthquake brings the couple’s world down on top of them, destroying the unborn child and Julie’s ability to ever carry a baby to term. After she recovers, they move back to the States and a small town north of San Francisco where Roger uses all of a small inheritance to buy a weekly newspaper that doesn’t make enough money to satisfy the adoption agency’s regulations. Eventually, thanks to the caring employee sensitively played by Bondi, they are allowed a one-year trial adoption of a baby, a little girl “like no other child.” Anyone who’s ever gone through the first days and nights home from the hospital with a baby will be touched and amused by the scenes depicting the panic-stricken inepitude of the new parents. The crisis comes a year later when Roger, still struggling to keep the paper going, appears before an unsympathetic judge and is told that because they’re financially incapable of supporting the child they will have to return her to the orphanage. Grant’s passionate, choked-up, ultimately successful plea is painful to behold. As the New Republic’s Otis Ferguson observes in his wise, eloquent review, the scene is “one of the rightly moving things in the picture.”

Falling Star

The most beautiful moment in Penny Serenade, however, occurs when Roger and Julie’s little girl, Trina, now 6, plays the “Silent Night” echo in her school’s Christmas play. As Hollywood children go, Eva Lee Kuney is about as good as you could hope for in her brief, touching, ill-fated part. Her role in the pageant becomes a piece of cinematic poetry involving a cloud on a string and a falling star. As Julie sadly puts the last record on the phonograph, a letter to the woman at the adoption agency reveals that the child has died after a sudden illness. Rather than inflict a death scene on us, Stevens and screenwriter Morris Ryskind simply show the impact on the parents. There’s no fight left in this couple; the marriage is over. Or so it seems until their guardian angel at the adoption agency gives them a call.

As far as I know, the framing device of a character playing records to accompany the flashbacks composing the picture is unique to Penny Serenade. It’s also one of the most conspicuous examples of product placement I’ve ever seen. All the records have the RCA label and are played on an RCA victrola.

Though it’s in the public domain, Penny Serenade is not easy to find on DVD. You can see it in its entirety on YouTube.

Now if only there were a film of my father playing his silly love songs with my mother sitting beside him singing along.

February 6, 2013

It’s for Real — Observations on Love, “Homeland,” and “Downton Abbey”

DVD rev By Stuart Mitchner

Last week people all over the country were in mourning for Downton Abbey’s Lady Sybil (Jessica Brown Findlay). The brutal, shocking demise from postpartum eclampsia of the youngest and most lovable of the Crawley sisters was a scene worthy of a great or at least very good novel. Looking down from death-scene heaven, Charles Dickens might tip his hat, for not since Little Nell bit the Dickensian dust has a fictional demise had such an impact stateside. All the more impressive is the fact that the blow was so deeply felt in spite of many viewers knowing it was coming, thanks to leaks from the U.K. where Season 3 had already been aired. You have to hand it to Julian Fellowes and the cast for a truly bravura piece of theatre (the great strength of Downton Abbey is in the ensemble playing), as the titled doctor, oozing class, forces through his feel-good prognosis and everything seemingly bears him out, the baby safely delivered, joy reigns supreme, then wham!

Meanwhile there are reports of binge viewers planning weekend marathons of The Wire and The West Wing or viewing a whole 12-episode season of Homeland in one sitting. Denizens of PBS’s Masterpiece Theatre at least have the decency to wait a week for the next episode of Downton Abbey, allowing the plot to steep, as it were, while they quote their favorite lines from Maggie Smith’s undaunted Dowager Countess of Grantham and ponder the future for Upstairs’ Mary and Matthew and Downstairs’ Bates and Anna. No doubt when Downton fans get together, their dinner parties or high teas are more civilized than the Soprano-themed evenings we shared with our neighbors where we ate gabagool and ziti a la Carmela and speculated on great issues like who would get whacked next week. But what a great foil all that Downton decorum is for subtle, nasty little twists like the bar of soap put where a pregnant Lady Grantham will step, or the not so subtle outrages like the dead Turkish diplomat dragged out of Lady Mary’s bed.

Raising the Stakes

Along with as many as 7.9 million other viewers, my wife and I have been enjoying Season 3 of Downton Abbey on PBS and have just finished all of Season 2 of Showtime’s Homeland On Demand, firmly limiting ourselves to two episodes a night until indulging in a minor binge watching the last three straight through. We became curious about Homeland when we were in the midst of the Breaking Bad addiction described here late last year (“Investing in Breaking Bad: A Matter of Life and Death,” Nov. 21, 2012) and learned that a 24-style CIA series (same producers, Howard Gordon and Alex Gansa) had swept the top three Emmys, Best Series, Best Actor and Best Actress. After being mesmerized by 24 for 5 seasons, we fell off the back of that runaway train from sheer exhaustion.

As soon as we were able to get to the top of the library’s DVD wait list, we found that Homeland indeed offered more of the same with its crazily convoluted, high-stakes, terrorism-driven plot, but there were several stunning differences that lifted it to a level above both 24 and Downton Abbey. Kiefer Sutherland’s Jack was a very human superhero but his feats demanded a formidable suspension of disbelief and his love life was a mess. Homeland’s version of Jack, Claire Danes’s CIA agent/analyst Carrie Mathison, performs wonders on a slightly more believable level and her love life is what people have come away talking about. Carrie’s obsessive affair with ex-Marine Nicholas Brody (Damien Lewis), the terrorist disguised as war hero that she’s stalking, creates a fascinating emotional dimension all its own. There’s been nothing like this unique romance in any of cable television’s landmarks from The Sopranos on. It’s in their scenes together that Danes and Lewis earn their Emmys and put the series over the top.

Carrie

Carrie is played to the hilt, taken to the limit, name your superlative, by Claire Danes. Brody is a human conundrum who, as good as Damien Lewis is, could have been played by any number of actors, probably even including Kiefer Sutherland. Lewis’s greatest moments are drawn, coaxed, caressed from him by Carrie, notably in their cozy idyll in a lakeside cabin where she spent childhood summers (“The Weekend,” episode 7 from Season 1) and ultimately and most movingly in episode 5 of Season 2 (“Q and A”), where she, in a manner of speaking, saves his soul, takes the terrorist apart, and puts the real Brody back together again. That’s the calm caring conflicted but ever resourceful Carrie, on task even when she’s turning the love of her life into a double agent.

Saul

What makes Homeland remarkable is not just the improbable Carrie-Brody romance, it’s also the bond between Carrie and her professorial mentor at the CIA, Saul Berenson, played with just the right balance of heart and mind by Mandy Patinkin. Here’s this wild woman passionately devoted to her task as a spy who also manages to be deliriously engaging, silly, slaphappy, hard as nails, funny, fascinating, frantic, disaster-prone, and infuriating. Saul is the falconeer to Carrie’s falcon, the eye of her hurricane, and in the devious world of Homeland, he’s also the emotional and intellectual mean. When everything else is descending into chaos, especially bipolar Carrie minus her meds, only Saul has the patience to sort it out. One of the reasons “The Weekend” is, along with “Q and A,” among the best episodes ever on cable television is the way the cabin scenes with Carrie and Brody are interwoven with the scenes between Saul and Aileen, a member of the terrorist cell plotting the attack that the CIA is scrambling to circumvent. Nicely played by Marin Ireland, Aileen was captured at the Mexican border but deep down she’s a Princeton girl (really) who fell in love with a young terrorist, and while it’s true that Saul is masterfully endearing himself to Aileen in order to secure information, he also is clearly becoming paternally attached to the girl and will weep for her in Season 2.

Mainly, Saul has his hands full with Carrie, who breaks all the rules. When a national catastrophe is prevented only thanks to her last-ditch, frantically determined efforts, she’s scorned, despised, and treated as a nut case. By all rights she should be hailed as a hero (at least within the CIA); instead she’s ousted from the agency, and at the end of Season 1 voluntarily receives shock therapy.

Chemistry

One thing that drew people to Downton Abbey and kept them watching was the teasingly thwarted, drawn-out romance of Matthew (Dan Stevens) and Lady Mary (Michelle Dockery). The positive negative chemistry of attraction was there from the beginning and carefully processed and developed until it produced the wedding that opened Season 3. By comparison, the force of attraction binding Carrie and her quarry, Brody, is complex and explosive, with two wounded people bonding in endgame situations. As Carrie’s professional obsession with Brody becomes personal, you have the feeling that if he hadn’t existed, she’d have invented him.

Real Love

For a bizarre take on Homeland, see Lorrie Moore’s piece in the February 21 New York Review of Books (“Double Agents In Love”), where, besides contradicting her own title, she claims that the “main problem with the show is that the love between Carrie and Brody” (pictured here) is “unconvincing for many reasons having to do with common sense,” that “viewers will sense a lack of chemistry between Lewis and Danes,” that the actors “project only a cold canned heat,” that “this is too tense-making for what purports to be a love story,” that they “lack mutual trust or any palpable erotic vibe,” and that “they are not bonded and they part without any persuasive anguish.” If you turn each of these observations upside down, you will understand why Danes and Lewis and Homeland swept the Emmys. This love story is, as Carrie might say, for real.

January 30, 2013

A Birthday Schubertiad Featuring Janowitz and Gage, Goethe’s Mignon, and Nora the Cat

By Stuart Mitchner

Wilhelm followed every movement of the dear little creature, and felt surprised to see how finely her character unfolded itself as she proceeded in the dance …. At this moment he experienced at once all the emotions he had ever felt for Mignon.

—from Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship

Franz Schubert (1791-1828), whose birthday is this Thursday, January 31, found musical ideas in some unlikely places, including the old coffeemill he called his “most precious possession,” grinding away while telling a friend, “Melodies and themes just come flying in …. One sometimes searches for days for an idea which the little machine finds in a second.”

Though the anecdote comes from “a not absolutely reliable source,” according to Joseph Wechsberg’s Schubert, it sounds too good, too Schubertian, not to be true, and if he could find music in a coffee grinder, what’s to keep him from finding it in a cat? I’d like to think that at some point in his life Schubert had a feline at his feet as he was composing and that whenever he felt in need of some company he could reach down and stroke it while the creature gazed up at him the way cats do, as if he and the world were one. While I’m at it, let’s make the cat the 19th-century Viennese equivalent of our Nora, a ten-year-old tuxedo female with a white patch on her brow and white paws.

Our brother and sister tuxedos were named for that effervescent couple from the Thin Man movies, Nick and Nora Charles (William Powell and Myrna Loy). Although the Dickensian puddle of lovable catness we call Nick has never been remotely effervescent, his sister Nora has been a screwball comedy, a Disney cartoon, a creature feature, and a silent musical all in one. Most kittens meet the challenge of climbing and descending the stairs in their own sweet way, some more playfully and lovably than others. Nora slid down the bannister. Nor did she simply trip kittenishly up the stairs: she took them in three effortless bounds. She did not romp: she flew. And she danced. The gavottes we witnessed had to be seen to be believed. When confronted by a suspect obstacle or a toy mouse she would jump straight up, halfway to the ceiling.

Nora and Mignon

Lately I’ve been listening with special attention to the Mignon songs in Schubert Lieder (Deutsche Grammophone), with soprano Gundula Janowitz and pianist Irwin Gage, while reading selectively (the emphasis on Mignon) in Thomas Carlyle’s translation of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship (1795-96). The more I read, the more I recognize qualities in the gentle, loving, otherworldly Mignon that remind me of our antic Nora.

“In her whole system of proceedings,” Goethe says of Mignon, “there was something very singular. She never walked up or down the stairs, but jumped. She would spring along by the railing, and before you were aware would be sitting quietly above upon the landing.” When Wilhelm asks her how old she is, she says, “No one has counted.” When asked who was her father, she says “The Great Devil is dead.” Later on, when Wilhelm is feeling low, “she laid her head upon his knees, and remained quite still. He played with her hair, patted her, and spoke kindly to her” (he also pats her after she performs her flawless blindfolded dance among the eggs). Mignon, like our small but mighty Nora, “was frolicsome beyond all wont.” Responding to a Punch and Judy show, she “grew frantic with gayety: the company, much as they had laughed at her at first, were in fine obliged to curb her. But persuasion was of small avail; for she now sprang up, and … capered round the table. With her hair flying out behind her, with her head thrown back, and her limbs, as it were, cast into the air, she seemed like one of those antique Mænads, whose wild and all but impossible positions … often strike us with amazement.”

Like I said, two of a kind — though, to be honest, our Mignon has mellowed into middle age and is now sweet, sensible (most of the time), and companionable.

Mignon Lives On

When it comes to singing, however, the resemblance between early Nora and Goethe’s Mignon becomes decidedly less credible. A review of a lieder recital at Manhattan’s Carnegie Hall in New York in last Friday’s New York Times (“Of Goethe’s Land, Romantic and Full-Throated”) shows that Mignon is alive and well through German soprano Dorothea Röschmann’s performance of Schubert’s setting of “Heiss Mich Nicht Reden/Bid Me Not Speak.” In Wilhelm Meister, Goethe indicates what that song means for Mignon: “Often for the whole day she was mute. At times she answered various questions more freely, yet always strangely: so that you could not determine whether it was caused by shrewd sense, or ignorance of the language; for she spoke in broken German interlaced with French and Italian.”

A Potent Silence

A thoroughly mute and radiantly feline Mignon is 13-year-old Nastassja Kinski in Wrong Move/Falsche Bewegung (1974), the inventively free adaptation of Wilhelm Meister directed by Wim Wenders and written by Peter Handke. Having embarked on his adventures, Wilhelm (Rudiger Volger) is seated on a train bound for Bonn when he becomes aware of a presence, the full force of which is so magnificently impending you can feel him being literally turned in his seat by the penetrating gaze of the creature across the aisle. It’s an appearance in the most enigmatic sense of the word, revealed in a sequence of gradually more intimate camera movements until her face fills the screen, magnified to a mysterious glory by cinematic chemistry and the natural beauty of Kinski in her screen debut. Ten years later she’s the missing mother in Wenders’s Paris, Texas, one of the great films of the 1980s. Given the animal intensity with which she compel’s Wilhelm’s attention on the train, it’s no surprise that the same actress ends up starring in Paul Schrader’s Cat People (1982).

A Notorious Tour

The notes to Schubert Lieder, which was recorded in Berlin in 1976 and 1977, refer to how Gage encouraged Janowitz to “sing as her own nature dictated.” I chose this recording not only because it includes performances of the Mignon songs but because Irwin Gage introduced me to great music when he and I were on the same student tour of Europe long long ago. The tour earned a certain notoriety when the bipolar leader had a nervous breakdown ten days into the itinerary. Among the numerous delusions consuming the man was one right out of Wilhelm Meister; he wanted us to become a traveling company of performers called the Golden Bear (after the Berkeley-based tour company). He even wrote nonsensical songs for us to sing (“Vi are di Europins uf di Golden Bear/Ve have stars und straw dust in are hair”). By the time we got to Oslo, our guide was totally out of control and had to be taken away by the police.

As the tour was shepherded through Europe for the next two months by a relay team of leaders, Irwin accompanied me to a stirring outdoor concert of Respighi’s Pines of Rome in Venice, a performance of Turandot at the Baths of Caracalla, and a Mozart program in Salzburg, presumably part of the same festival where 18 years later he and Janowitz would present a program (“The Fortunes of Women in Schubert’s Lieder”) around the time they made this record.

Mignon’s Songs

The extraordinary rapport between singer and accompanist (they had been playing together since 1970) is worth a column in itself, but in deference to my theme I’ll stick to Mignon’s songs, “Kennst du das land/Know thou the land,” in particular. It always struck me as odd that pieces meant to be sung by a haunted 13-year-old waif should be performed by ample, well-endowed middle aged women. As if anticipating the potential incongruity, Goethe describes Mignon’s singing in Wilhelm Meister in terms suited for adult performers looking for direction: “She began every verse in a stately and solemn manner, as if she wished to draw attention towards something wonderful, as if she had something weighty to communicate. In the third line, her tones became deeper and gloomier; the words, ‘Dost know?’ were uttered with a show of mystery and eager circumspectness; in ‘’Tis there! ’tis there!’ lay an irresistible longing; and her ‘Let us go!’ she modified at each repetition, so that now it appeared to entreat and implore, now to impel and persuade.”

Composed when Schubert was 18, and performed by Janowitz and Gage in just under five brilliant minutes, the song has everything: grandeur, passion, longing, and mystery: it’s wanderlust set to music. No doubt that’s why Thomas Wolfe used the poem as an epigraph for Of Time and the River, and why Wim Wenders, whose production company is called Road Movies, gave us the train scenes and Kinski’s Mignon in his version of Wilhelm Meister. And it’s why I see a tuxedo cat named Nora sliding down the bannister every time the piano breaks free and flies at the “Let us go!” moment of maximum longing.