Hope to see some of you again soon; best of luck in your travels, those who are continuing on; and a safe journey home to everyone.

Don’t forget to post those photos!

Wanted to address one question that some of you may have had about last night’s (wonderful) performance: why were all but one of the male roles performed by women? Simple: castrati, who performed those roles in the first production of the opera, are now in short supply. So while the number of women onstage was unusually, and to my mind, refreshingly, high, it was a practical necessity.

Some links:

• Farinelli, a lush film of 1994 about a famous castrato (clip on YouTube; for more, follow links. Image, above, is of Stefano Dionisi in the title role. But don’t worry: no actors were harmed in the making of the film. Handel is a central character.)
• “Singing in the pain: Castrati were the singing superstars of the 18th Century. But, as a new exhibition illustrates, theirs is a tale with some modern parallels,” Sean Couglan, BBC News Magazine (29 Mar/06). Includes link to a recording of the “last castrato”, Alessandro Moreschi (1902).
• Website of Elsa Scammell, musical scholar
• Selected literature on the male high voice: a bibliography by Dorothe Kugler
• YouTube: Alessandro Moreschi – Crucifixus (Rossini), 1902 (follow links for more)
• Arias for Farinelli and Castrato
• Portrait of Farinelli and friends by Jacopo Amigoni

Portrait of Farinelli

What did you find most interesting, or affecting, in the exhibition?

What “story” does the exhibit tell about English literature?

She said, “I suppose a museum is a celebration of death. Dead people’s lives, the objects they made, the things they thought important, their clothes, their houses, their daily comforts, their art.”

“No. A museum is about life. It’s about the individual life, how it was lived. It’s about the corporate life of the times, men and women organizing their societies. It’s about the continuing life of the species Homo sapiens. No one with any human curiosity can dislike a museum.”

She said softly, “I love it, but then I think I live in the past. Not my own past, that’s verty unexciting and ordinary — but the past of all the people who have been Londoners before me. I never walk there alone, no one can.” (85)

On the other hand, here are two different characters talking:

She went on, “Neville thought we were too obsessed with the past — history, tradition, the things we collect. He said we clutter ourselves with dead lives, dead ideas, instead of coping with the problems of the present.” (257)

You have been to lots of museums lately; what do you think?

• Has learning about British naval history — the scope and the realities of British imperialism, the lived experience of those many Britons involved with the sea in one way or another — had any impact on the way in which you might now interpret literary or cultural texts?
• Readers of Jane Austen: several of her characters (notably Captain Wentworth in Persuasion) are naval officers; has learning more about British naval history had any impact on how you view these characters?

Things theatrical:

• You have seen two plays, Joanna Baillie’s De Monfort, and Shakespeare’s King Lear. Baillie, as I mentioned, was highly regarded in her lifetime and some compared her with Shakespeare. What might have prompted such comparisons, at the end of the 18thc? Why is it, do you think, that one of these playwrights still famous while the other has languished in obscurity? How would you compare the two plays?

So get at those journals, you modern-day Pepyses.

Gardens figure prominently in literature of the period, plays, novels, and poems. They were places where Londoners could take fresh air, but more importantly, they were places where they could meet, sometimes across social boundaries. In this sense they were sometimes places of risk and adventure, somewhere outside the more circumscribed world of the drawing room. Novels like Frances Burney’s Evelina use the public gardens to good effect, as when the naive heroine is accosted by a man and so takes refuge with two women, not realizing that they are women of dubious reputation (i.e. sex trade workers). She is seen by the hero, who is both worried and flabbergasted, and complications ensue.

We have visited a couple of gardens, at Chiswick House and Kenwood House. There are no longer the great public pleasure gardens in London, notably Vauxhall Gardens and Ranelagh Gardens, which is a great shame, but one can still feel an echo of what they must have been like in the (formerly) private gardens we have visited. Read a little bit about Vauxhall, Ranelagh and others from these and other links (Google is your friend) and compare them with what you have seen.

Here is a brief video about Vauxhall Gardens from the Victoria and Albert Museum.

EPILOGUE [spoken by Mrs. Siddons]

Ere yet affection’s Tears have ceas’d to flow
I come to cherish, not forget my woe.
No kindred heart will bid me check the tear;
A Sister’s love may claim protection here.
Dire is the passion that our Scenes unfold
And foreign to each heart of British Mould
For Britons sons their generous code maintain
Prompt to defend and slow in giving pain.
Warm in the Battle, yet the contest o’er
They deem the vanquish’d to be foes no more.
Sure with compassion then this night they’ll view
De Monfort’s fate, its ruthless court pursue;
And mourn a nature once by honour grac’d
By one foul deed’s atrocious guilt defac’d.

To court your smiles and win your hop’d applause
Ah! let me proudly boast my Sex’s cause.
A Female Muse triumphant has design’d
A paragon indeed of woman kind!
Has in this fair majestic portrait wove
Commanding Wisdom, and devoted Love
And bade e’en strength and tenderness agree
In maiden meditation–fancy free.

Yet, tho’ she fail’d a Brother to controul
And soothe the frantic troubles of his Soul,
Still be the Lesson of to-night imprest
To wake the judgement and to calm the breast,
To check by strong example’s potent spell
And each advance of subtle passion quell.

E’en in those happier times where restless rage
Nor dark revenge, no fatal conflicts wage,
Where mild reflection heals the transient strife
And smoothly flows the tranquil stream of life:–
Yet may our Muse with timely voice impart
Some wholesome lesson to the erring heart,
May check full vengeance for a past offence
And from the suff’ring mind remove suspence.

Thus turn not heedless from the Scene tho’ pass’d
Nor view in vain destructive passion’s blast,
But cherish ties, for which ’tis life to live;
Enjoy the good your love and kindness give;
banish from Friendship each offending fear,
And from confiding Love the doubtful tear.

Such the bright picture which the contrast shews,
Such the reverse of hatred’s deadly woes.
Thus let us bid the scene’s dread horror cease
And hail the blessing of domestic peace.

[source]

Here is the Wikipedia entry on Baillie. I know professors don’t normally refer their students to Wikipedia, but a graduate student of mine worked on this entry as part of a course requirement (the course was on women playwrights in the period and one of the assignments was to write or edit a Wikipedia article on one of our authors).

Here is the Orange Tree Theatre page on the play.

Here is a negative review, another negative review, yet another, and a really nasty one. Here is a (tempered) positive one (scroll down).

What do you think?

(Though you are of course free to go yourselves during our down time.)