Direction of travel - Copland, Bartok and Bernstein in ADDA, Alicante

It is rare for a concert program to hang together as a unit both musically and intellectually. But the latest program from the ADDA orchestra in Alicante under the direction of Josep Vicent achieved this dual goal, and a whole lot more as well. 

There were many themes, but the enduring intellectual idea was surely the experience of the immigrant in the United States of America. The composers represented, Copland, Bartok and Bernstein, all had immigrant experience in their private reality. Copland’s family originated in Russian Lithuania, Bernstein’s in Ukraine and Bartok, of course, was himself Hungarian, but resident in the United States when he wrote his last piano concerto. Eugene Goossens, who provided the theme for the Copland variation that opened the program, was British, but he spent many years in the United States, and also in Australia. And, of course, Bernstein’s masterpiece, West Side Story, was set amongst the Puerto Rican immigrant community living in New York.

Immigrants can often feel like outsiders, excluded from local culture and therefore in search of their own identity. And this feeling of detachment, perhaps not exactly estrangement, came across musically in the works chosen. I found the musical similarity, not in the notes, but in the overall concept, of the second movement of the Bartok, the Copland Quiet City and the Somewhere theme from West Side Story a tightening thread that bound these works together.

Gentle but slightly dissonant string tones characterize Bartok’s night music, which can be described as “eerie dissonances providing a backdrop to sounds of nature and lonely melodies”. The third piano concerto’s second movement is in this style and forms the emotional heart of the peace. Bartok was not only exiled when he wrote this music, but also ill and penniless. No wonder the harmonies suggest unsettled, insecure feelings.

In Quiet City, Aaron Copland tries to depict New York at night, when a clearly lonely young Jewish man blows a trumpet through the silence. The answering call of the cor anglais is like an echo, but it seems to recall a former life now lost, rather than a playback of current experience. And then to Bernstein and Somewhere which, in the orchestral suite, concludes the piece with an unsettling clash of harmonies, suggesting not only estrangement from community, but also death.

Now these musical and intellectual threads, so beautifully drawn together by this orchestra’s perfect playing, did not arise by chance. This wonderful musical experience was clearly thought through by the inspired artistic director at ADDA, Josep Vicent. And not only did it work, but he created one of the most memorable concerts I have ever had the privilege of attending.

We started with a short piece, the Copland contribution to the Jubilee Variations. Eugene Goossens provided the theme, and ten other composers wrote one variation each. We heard just the one by Aaron Copland, two minutes of the composer being his most American.

Then the Bartok piano Concerto No. 3 followed, featuring Jose de Solaun as soloist. To describe this performance as memorable would do it an injustice. The understanding and communication between director, soloist and orchestra was palpable in a work that can sometimes not knit together. In this performance it came across as a perfect unit, perfected by the playing. The slow movement was particularly memorable. The pianist then played two solo pieces by Debussy as encores for an adoring audience.

Quiet City by Aaron Copland opened the second half. Josep Vicent placed the solo trumpet high on the balcony at the side of the stage and its answering cor anglais on the opposite side of the auditorium. It was a theatrical masterstroke, serving to emphasize the separateness and the loneliness of being a member of a minority amidst a sprawling and perhaps oppressive city.

And then the rip-roaring suite from West Side Story by Leonard Bernstein allowed the orchestra to show off its virtuosity, an opportunity that the ADDA orchestra grasped with abandon. But this piece, despite its mambo, despite its big band jazz, despite its finger clicking, is eventually tragic. Star-crossed lovers die and the loss is deeply felt in the music, to such an extent that a piece that in theory arouses and excites, eventually deflates with its gut-wrenching sadness.

And then the direction really came into its own. Josep Vicent had chosen to include two encores and they provided yet another layer to the musical and intellectual threads. First, he chose to repeat the mambo with just a little audience participation. This was the lollipop that again got the audience rocking. But then, we had the funeral march from Beethoven’s seventh symphony, a reminder perhaps of the tragedy that we befell the immigrant community in West Side Story. It was a memorable evening, including pop music highs, loneliness and estrangement, loss, and death, but its real triumph was the artistic direction that created it. And under that direction, surely the ADDA orchestra, via its superb playing and its inspired programmes, can already claim to be at the pinnacle of achievement.

Óscar Esplá – music in context

Some artists seem to be inextricably linked to places. Henry Moore’s legacy is in Leeds, where he studied, but was not born. Barbara Hepworth’s is in Wakefield, where she was born but did not live. And what about Picasso? There is Malaga, when he was born, Barcelona where he lived, but what about Paris, where he did much of his memorable work? Nuremberg equals Durer, South Kensington is Lord Leighton, a Paris suburb is Gustave Moreau, Zaragoza is Goya, Figueres is Dali, Stockholm is Milles, perhaps. The list includes the better known juxtaposed with the less familiar, deliberately.

All the examples above are painters or sculptors. What about writers? There are many associations, but not so many museums dedicated to a life and its work. Spain, for example, has Blasco Ibañez in Valencia and Miguel Hernandez in Orihuela, sites chosen here for their geographical and contemporary relevance.

But what about composers and musicians? Again, there are associations, but only a few dedicated museums. There is Puccini in Lucca, Tartini in Piran, Beethoven in Vienna and Mozart in Salzburg, for instance. Bayreuth is more Wagner’s memorial rather than record. Perhaps the relative paucity of permanent exhibitions dedicated to non-visual artists reflects the fact that painting and sculpture occupy space, whereas writing and music occupy time. The dramatist Shakespeare is a crossover who occupies both space and time, and he has a museum of sorts, but Shakespeare is always a special case.

In Alicante, the main road linking the waterfront to the centre of town is called Avenida Óscar Esplá. I had walked the street many times before I realized it was named after a composer. He was born in Alicante and lived there as a youth, before heading off to Barcelona to study engineering. He then turned to philosophy and finally music. But as an adult in the nineteen thirties, like many other Spaniards, he fled Franco’s internationally tolerated brutality. He was a dedicated teacher and active composer, but, as the Zaragoza pianist, Pedro Carboné, pointed out in his discussion of the composer’s work at this week’s concert, even in his hometown one would be hard-pressed to identify recognition of his achievement, apart from the name of that street. After decades of neglect, a week of concerts in Alicante’s ADDA concert hall offered the chance to hear his music and perhaps to reassess the significance of this neglected composer. Pedro Carboné gave the first of these concerts, alongside an extensive discussion of the man and his work. Pedro Carboné is himself a noted exponent of Esplá’s music, having recorded volume one of Esplá’s complete piano works for Marco Polo in 1998.

The music must precede the life. The achievement must be the starting point of any discussion of the man. As Carboné explained, Óscar Esplá was a deceptively complex composer. A surface gloss of apparently conventional harmony, simple lines and miniature forms initially suggest populism. Anyone who listens, however, knows within seconds that this first impression is quite false. Óscar Esplá’s principal inspiration probably did come from folklore, the folk music of the region which is Alicante. It is known throughout Spain is the Levante region, the place where the sun rises, known for its brilliance, its light, its colour and, significantly, its contrasts, mountain to sea, near desert to tropical garden, remote campo to sophisticated cities. For those outside Spain, incidentally, Alicante is a long way from what is generally termed ‘flamenco’. That was the inspiration of Manuel de Falla in Andalusia. Now Esplá and de Falla are near contemporaries, with de Falla the senior by ten years. They both started composing in their teens, and even began their careers with similarly inspired impressionistic piano pieces.

Superficially, there is a similarity between the unexpected features of flamenco and the scale that Esplá developed to use as the basis of the folkloric Levante. What they share is the almost blues-like modification of a couple of notes in the diatonic scale, changes that confuse the ear between conventional major and minor keys, classifications that actually don’t apply unless your aural expectations are fixed in what you already know. Others at the time did similar things elsewhere. Bartok used a Bulgarian scale in his early work, Debussy his whole tones, Vaughn Williams his modes and Schoenberg his everything equally. The scale, for a composer, has a similar effect to a painter’s palette, and throughout history there have been individual painters and schools associated with particular groups of colours and their use. Music, though it is often overlooked, has the same colouristic characteristics and these, sometimes, are based on the scales used to express the musical language.

In Valencia, when we think of colour and painting, we automatically think of Sorolla. His principal museum might be in Madrid, and he may well be known outside Spain for the work he created for New York, but Sorolla’s oeuvre is of Valencia, of the same Levante coast that extends south to Alicante. At first sight, Sorolla and the style he founded may appear sweet, rather populist, trite, somewhat kitsch and sentimental. But that would be a misinterpretation.

Impressionism is always close by, but so is expressionism in a form where the dreams are pleasant, never frightening. But there is also the simultaneous realism and experiment of Singer Sargent. The subject matter, however, remains folkloric, domestic in its Spanish outdoor form, depicting a long-suffering but apparently docile peasant contentedly living alongside comfortable middle classes and usually less than ostentatious aristocracy. Anyone who knows Spanish history will understand both the ironic and illusory nature of this apparent harmony. This art has a surface gloss, and apparent ease, but the vivid contrast of colour reflects not only the quality of Levantine light, the montane and plane, the arid and the lush, but also a potential for spontaneous combustion in the social tinderbox, where the traditional equals poverty and insecurity and the modern implies capital, exploitation and wealth for the already well shod, though, it must be admitted, this political dimension is never explicit in Sorolla’s work.

In music, colour may be sensed via harmonic contrast as well as via the scale chosen to communicate. The latter, in Óscar Esplá’s case, continually confuses major and minor, constantly prompts the listener to review the perspective, to flip between emotional states, perhaps to see two sides of every argument. It is sound that conveys a natural cubism. Pedro Carboné was keen to point out how Esplá was always trying to insert colour through the use of chromatic harmony, shifts of rhythm, divergence in the material, inserted deliberately to push the listener onto another, only sometimes parallel path with its own unique view.

But there is another element at work. Pedro Carboné repeatedly offered examples of how Esplá’s writing for the piano was holistic in that its effect has to be experienced in its totality, but also how it relies on the juxtaposition and superimposition of often trite material, in itself less than memorable. He played several examples where the left-hand figure was heard in isolation and then the right, sequentially. Separately these two musical lines provided little that was memorable and less that was individual, but played together they intermingled to invoke colour, contrast, even counterpoint. But that counterpoint is never expressed in the linear form with which we are familiar in Bach and others. It is present more in the sense of it creating a flow of repeated ideas, like a sequence of photos from an album that seem at first sight to be random but are later recognized as chosen.

At this time, the early decades of the 20th century, other composers were also experimenting with similar processes of juxtaposition. In Mahler we abruptly move from one view to another, mix the mundane with the sophisticated, but in general we do it sequentially, again like a sequence of scenes in a film with eventually a linear plot. In Ives, however, we are often presented with these different experiences superimposed to reflect the confusion of everyday life, to mirror how easily human senses can resolve apparently conflicting experience, but it remains a resolution that requires active participation by the listener. In the music of Óscar Esplá, we have the mix of the mundane and sophisticated, but we also often have them superimposed rather than sequential.

Earlier, Alicante was cited as the land of not-flamenco, but Alicante definitely is the land of the town band. Every town has one. These are not the brass bands of northern England, though they are often similarly linked to particular types of economic activity. These are symphonic bands, with woodwind as well as brass and they often march through towns in the frequent festivals. It is common to have three or four bands playing simultaneously in a procession within the hearing of a spectator, the individual pieces perhaps nothing more than the duple rhythm of the Valencian pasodoble.

But two or three at the same time conjures up the kind of musical experience that Ives was imagining when he heard a brass band walk past the string section in a different key, playing different and completely unrelated music. Here also we have an illustration of what Pedro Carboné was demonstrating with Óscar Esplá’s simple but contrasting left- and right-hand parts in his piano music. The different bands are not playing different kinds of music. They are not playing complex harmonies. The idiom of each piece is popular, even populist. But heard at the same time, two or three bands produce the kind of oral confusion of stimuli that everyday life often creates, a melee the listener’s mind must actively interpret.

Here we have, at long last, the essence of Óscar Esplá’s music. Above all it features coloristic effects of harmony and rhythm, mirroring the contrasts of the Levante region and its brilliant light. We have the popular and folkloric, but not simply as ends in themselves, or even used as deferential gestures. In Esplá’s music, these elements merge like simultaneous marching bands to reflect the complexity of everyday oral experience. But, above all, as in Sorolla’s painting, there is a sense of beauty, of impressionistic engagement with the attractive surface of life, whilst also perhaps acknowledging the unspoken tensions that pervade everything.

Recalling Óscar Esplá’s contemporaries in Spain reveals the niche, for that is what we must accept on his behalf, into which his music fits. Manuel de Falla was steeped in Andalusia and nationalism. His music often resorts to big statements on broad canvases. He never left his folkloric inspiration behind, but he always put his audience’s ear into his work, always strove to address the popular. Frederick Mompou is more similar to Esplá in style, but perhaps not content. Like Chopin, Mompou was a grandiloquent miniaturist. His music is generally simpler than Esplá’s, deliberately and intentionally simple, it must be said, but essentially backward looking. Mompou’s world is Chopinesque, an individual romantic response to the world of experience. Its understatement is its strength, but understatement is not a characteristic of Óscar Esplá. Roberto Gerhard, like Esplá, had to leave Spain under the dictatorship. Always more interested in the atonal, even serial technique, Gerhard’s music often sounds deliberately modernistic, seeking to extend Schoenberg’s ideas and as a result becoming internalized in the individual creator’s mind rather than recalling the aural world we inhabit. Esplá’s music is often atonal, but it becomes so via techniques of juxtaposition and superimposition and therefore by musical accident, not by ideological design. Joaquin Turina is also a prime candidate for comparison. Turina’s main musical influence was found in France, but his roots were solidly in Spain’s earth. He differs from Óscar Esplá, however, in his more conventional harmonies and his use of familiar musical forms. Also, Turina rarely superimposes simultaneous material in an expressionistic or impressionistic way.

So, what is it that characterizes this music of Óscar Esplá? First and foremost, the place he knew best is depicted here, its contrasts of light, landscape, campo and city, popular and elite culture, clashing, sometimes confused aural experience that must be deciphered. There is musical impressionism in that the material is often deliberately evocative of experience, flitting from scene to scene with immediate jump cuts, often indeed superimposing images to accomplish, if nothing else, a reflection of the complexity and colour of experience. There is also conflict, but it is the implied conflict we encounter in Sorolla’s painting. It is the conflict of potential rather than current difference, where elements coexist, but at the touch of a flame could ignite. In the music of Óscar Esplá, the conflict is not ongoing, but its threat is always there. This is amplified by his musical scale’s confusion of major and minor. Through it, we are constantly reminded that things might be capable of change, that there exist different perspectives, all of which are valid.

If there is expressionism also in this music, then we might do well to carry some images of Chagall in our head. Nothing is threatening. Life in the village goes on. But the head might be green, or upside down. And the bride and groom may just be floating through the sky while the guests ignore them. It’s colourful, it’s dreamlike, but it is disorientating, sometimes disconcerting.

Above all, Óscar Esplá’s music, at least in the ears of this listener, is most reminiscent of Ravel. Now this is a name that is significant in many ways. Ravel has achieved deserved international and lasting recognition for his original music, but the corpus of his work is far from extensive. He dabbled with the sonata and string quartet, but his reputation is built on his piano and ballet music, often written in the forms that he invented to invoke particular experience or emotional states. For me, Óscar Esplá’s music, if it needs a context, is best approached via the inspiration it shares with Ravel. Esplá’s technique of juxtaposition, however, extends and amplifies these elements and perhaps renders them more vivid as a result.

So surely it is time for Óscar Esplá, the one-time engineer and philosopher who became a composer, to take his rightful place, at least alongside his contemporaries such as de Falla, Gerhard and Mompou in Spain’s musical tradition. He was an exile in Belgium. Manuel de Falla went to Argentina and Gerhard to Britain, so there is nothing unique about his exile. Just as Weinberg is appearing from the deep shadow of Shostakovich, it is surely time for Esplá to emerge from the umbra of de Falla and Turina. His music is unique and, in its own way, revolutionary.

On Tuesday 14 September 2021 in ADDA, Pedro Carboné played movements one and four from Suite Levante, Three Movements for Piano, the Sonata Española and the Berceuse from Cantos de Antaño. On Wednesday 15 September, Marisa Blanes played the first three movements from books four and five of Lírica Española, and La Tarana from Cantos de Antaño, alongside similarly evocative and contemporary works by de Falla, Ernesto Halffter and Julian Bautista.

The Life of Lord Byron by John Galt

John Galt published his Life of Lord Byron in 1830, just six years after the poet's death in Missolonghi, in what is now modern Greece and then was part of the Ottoman Empire. Byron had been legging it around the Mediterranean for a number of years, his entourage significantly greater than a backpack. Modern reads will need to readjust their ideas of travel when they read details of the veritable caravan that accompanied the Good Lord and will then immediately understand why it was that everywhere he went he was immediately able to access elite society. In modern day terms, this is like a dot-com-owning billionaire moving into the local estate that in feudal times used to own the locality. His presence, it seemed, demanded attention. Having said that, he was always short of money.

Apart from occasional vocabulary that we no longer recognise, John Galt's work reads easily, its tenor remarkably modern, except in matters of race and religion, where a modern interpretation might just confuse. It is important to understand the assumptions of these people in order to understand their work. Yes, Wagner was anti-Semitic, but wasn't everyone else at the time? Rejecting his work on that basis would lead to an equal rejection of other people and institutions that shared the same beliefs, which would automatically include anything to do with Christianity and most writers. Two centuries ago, people did not see the world in the same light and it is through their eyes, not ours, that their work must be seen.

Paradoxically, the Lord Byron was perceived as a Liberal which, at the time, must have placed him in sympathy with at least some of the aims of the French Revolution. This is interesting, given his title, but understandable given his relative penury. He supported the Luddites in Britain, but his domestic political life in the House of Lords was not easy and he was not chosen or perhaps suited for a life in public affairs. His identification with liberal politics is exemplified in this passage from Galt, though it must be noted that at the time liberalism did not extend far into the realm of gender relationships (a cicisbeo is a lover, by the way).

“but young Italian women are not satisfied with good old men, and the venerable Count did not object to her availing herself of the privileges of her country in selecting a cicisbeo; an Italian would have made it quite agreeable: indeed, for some time he winked at our intimacy, but at length made an exception against me, as a foreigner, a heretic, an Englishman, and, what was worse than all, a Liberal.”

His liberalism did extend to the support of liberation movements, however, particularly those in Greece, where still today he is seen by some as a national hero. That is not to say that he was particularly fond of the people.

 “Do you know,” said he to the doctor, “I am nearly reconciled to St Paul; for he says there is no difference between the Jews and the Greeks, and I am exactly of the same opinion, for the character of both is equally vile.”

The significance of the above reference to Wagner's anti-Semitism now becomes clear. Perhaps we ought to reject much of Romantic poetry from the canon if we deny Wagner a place. What would be left? Answer – very little...

So what was it that Byron saw worthy of struggle and sacrifice in liberating people for whom he had little respect? The key, which becomes clearer as Galt's biography progresses, is that Byron, like other Romantics, possessed an internal motivation, a personal interpretation whose vivid emotion perhaps raised a screen that was capable of obscuring, even contradicting experience. His response to reality, it seems, is not directly born of the real, but of an idealised knowledge, perhaps pre-formed via education, birth-right and culture, that was more important, at least for the poet, than hard evidence, which could be dismissed or ignored. Galt sums up the process thus.

“that is another and a strong proof too, of what I have been endeavouring to show, that the power of the poet consisted in giving vent to his own feelings, and not, like his great brethren, or even his less, in the invention of situations or of appropriate sentiments”

The author describes how Byron was ambivalent towards the reality of Classical sites, not really showing much interest in the archaeology or the history. Perhaps, via his English public school education, he was au fait with the detail all along and so did not need to absorb direct experience. Perhaps the assumptions of his social class and culture did not admit contradiction of an already internalised ideal that was simply more important than any concrete reality.

Galt's account of Byron's life, however, seems to lack evidence of the hours that the poet devoted to writing. Given that he died in his mid-thirties, spent eight years on the road and did fifteen years in the House of Lords and several years in education, one would expect to find him at work with pen and paper much of the rest of the time. But Galt offers little evidence of this, preferring to concentrate on the travels, themselves, the people he met and the consequences of the complete breakdown in his family and marital relations. But Galt does quote extensively from the poems which, once we absorb the author's analysis that the work is rarely descriptive of anything but the poet's own emotional state, become distinct statements of personality. One feels that Lord Byron was not prone to great self-analysis or soul-searching. He had his opinions, and those were made from granite.

He did campaign for Greece's independence and he did much to achieve what the Greek people wanted at the time. But one feels that for Byron he was working towards the re-establishment of a Classical ideal, a quintessence of democracy that existed longer in school textbooks than it did in ancient Greece. Perhaps "liberal" is too strong a word for Byron... Perhaps "libertarian" would be closer to the modern equivalent. He was for individual freedom, what he saw as the natural order and more democracy, though this probably did not include either women or the lower orders.

How far we have progressed in the last two hundred years can be judged by the fact that Byron secured both personal fame and prestige of office in his own time with certain personal characteristics. He went to public school and Oxbridge, studied ancient Greek, achieved political status and public fame while being largely ignorant of the scientific advances of his day, was a libertarian and had distinct failures in both personal and familial relationships. Couldn't happen now, could it?

Costa Blanca Arts Update - Through the emotions – Soler, Valero and Gandía at ADDA in Alicante

Gala Lirica, Opera Gala or merely Song Medley often labels an admixture of showcase snippets, offered, it seems, primarily to advertise a voice or commemorate a venue. Too often these evenings degenerate into a succession of star turns, offering world-stopping climaxes every three minutes or so, with each old chestnut being greeted with the audience’s enthusiasm merely because it is recognized. One is reminded of the occasions where the star is applauded over the top of the music, making it inaudible, merely because the song has been included.

At its best, this format can offer a memorable evening of fine singing that, via its very brevity, reminds an audience of a multitude of bigger experiences. At its very best, a judgment that would apply to the evening offered by Lorena Valero and Antonia Gandía in Alicante, fine voices deliver superb music and just enough acting and characterization to offer meaning without excess sentimentality. It is often an excess of false emotion that often renders these occasions less than memorable, but the right amount, as here in Alicante, adds to the experience.

These two voices, the mezzo of Lorena Valero and the superb, dramatic tenor of Antonio Gandía gave a mixed program of well-known set pieces from grand opera and, perhaps for many in this audience, a set of pieces from the less well-known world of Spanish Zarzuela. It was a world that was well known, obviously, to the two singers and especially to the conductor, Cristobal Soler, who regularly presents this genre in Madrid’s Zarzuela Theatre.

The format was clear, orchestra, solo, solo, duo and repeat. Juxtaposed with Verdi, von Flotow and Gounod, one is reminded just how unique is the sound world of Puccini. Delilah’s aria from Saint-Saens’s Samson and Delilah and Lippen Schweigen from Lehar’s Merry Widow brought the opera half to close.

After the interval, the Zarzuela began with Chueca, Marqués and Sorozábal, whose sound world is itself very sophisticated. Moreno Torroba featured large, as did Jiménez’s famous Luis Alonso Intermezzo. Fernández Caballero’s El Dúo de la Africana brought the evening to a close, but there was always going to be an encore, which was Me Llamas Rafelillo from Penella’s El Gato Montés, sung in Valenciano to the audience’s delight.

Throughout, the ADDA Simfonica played their part to perfection, as ever, with the brass especially resplendent. Loreno Valero’s voice, always accurate and never forced, coped well with some testing moments. Antonia Gandía’s tenor is a great voice throughout its vocal and dynamic range. And both singers communicated superbly with their fellow musicians, one another, and with their audience. It was an evening that went through the emotions, from love to regret, from anger to sympathy, from playfulness to aggression and ultimately to joy. These occasions often go only through the motions, but this Soler, Valero, Gandía and ADDA combination made this a night to remember.

SPQR by Mary Beard

 

I have just finished Mary Beard’s SPQR. I have just started Susan Sontag’s Against Interpretation. The connection? Susan Sontag’s essay deals momentarily with the relation, if any, between form and content. She seems wary of the concept of form, seeing it often subservient to content. Perhaps the confusion is mine, since it may be the argument, rather than form, that stands out. More on this later.

SPQR is, put simply, an overview of the origins and the rise of Rome, from fabled Trojan settlement to Empire. It charts the growth of the state, from a probably mythical wattle and daub hut to an empire built of marble, from its assumed foundation in the middle of the eighth century BCE, as far as Caracalla’s offer of Roman citizenship in 212 CE. This is roughly, as the author labels it, Rome’s first millennium.

Remembering my first paragraph, it’s the form that Mary Beard imposes upon her work that makes the book’s argument. A less inventive mind would have started at the city’s foundation and progressed chronologically. Mary Beard profitably avoids this approach by beginning with the confrontation between Scipio and Catiline in the first century BCE, conveniently just over half-way through the author’s chosen era.

Catiline had led a revolt, not the first, or last, or most bloody, or most successful, against the established authority of the republic. The kings were already long gone, and the emperors has yet to assume their status. But the confrontation between the brilliant but rather condescending Scipio and the brash, brutal aristocratic chancer that was Catiline provides a starting point for an author who wants to stress what she defines as the essential cultural and political characteristics that can frame the reader’s understanding of this vast imperial achievement. For Mary Beard, this trial before the Senate symbolizes a couple of basic ideas that she uses as a cement to bind the various courses of the city’s history. These are the continual struggle for power alongside the surprising, for the uninitiated, but consistent, tendency for the Roman state to accommodate new ideas, new values, new religions and new citizens from those peoples it conquered.

The struggle for power was perpetual and ruthless. There were no rules apart from the winner took all, and then suffered the continual neurosis of how to hold on to it. Starting with the perhaps mythical fratricide that founded the city when Romulus killed Remus, ruling families or elites internally turned on themselves and one another to secure a hold on power. This is nothing special. Any visitor to Istanbul will vividly recall the rows of miniature coffins that were displayed when newly enthroned sultans disposed of their siblings to reduce potential competition. But Rome was, at least in extent, rather different, since it morphed from local warlords, perhaps, through kings, to republican presidents, in all but name, and then finally to emperors. Each manifestation of power brought its own kinds of struggle, but eventually struggles they all were, and usually involved eliminating the competition. The names and roles may have changed, but the methodology did not. You killed your way into power and killed to maintain it. There were, of course, exceptions.

The second characteristic that Mary Beard uses to create the form and thereby the content of this history is the Roman propensity for assimilation. This began with the rape of the Sabine women. Myth, perhaps, cites a shortage of breeding-age females amongst the early settlers, so what better way to obviate the problem than embark on the cattle raid? The logic, if that be the word, is quite simple. I do not have cows. My neighbour has cows, so I will steal them. It’s the same with women, it seems, and the booty seems to share the same status as the booty from a cattle raid.

But what ensues is change. There is inevitably a clash of culture that leads to accommodation and assimilation, resulting in complications of culture via marriage, albeit a marriage in chains. This process, argues the author, became a characteristic of Rome, in that kingdoms and peoples subjugated by force were culturally assimilated by Rome, and not necessarily destroyed by it. Indeed, some aspects of the defeated culture, such as their religions, were transported back to the centre, where they gained pragmatic adherents eager to try anything that might offer a competitive leg up. And it is this constant ability to change via assimilation that forms the second strand that gives form to this wonderful work.

But why finish with Caracalla, when the Roman empire endured for more than another century after his demise? Mary Beard is clear about this. It was Caracalla’s granting of Roman citizenship to all free men in the empire that change things. Until then the differences in status between men and women, between citizens and classes, between free men and slaves, between military and civilian that had set the boundaries on Roman life, boundaries that were admittedly fluid by virtue of people’s ability to be on either side and to change their relative status, gender apart. Mary Beard thus makes the case for the later years of the empire representing a different historical reality and thus warranting a different treatment. This change became even more apparent when the state adopted Christianity, which would brook no alternative and led to the conscious exclusion of further assimilation.

Mary Beard does offer the reader much detail. But her insistence on setting events in their wider political and cultural context really does clarify a bigger picture which then starts to reveal inter-related detail. By the end of SPQR, we fell we have been there.

In conclusion, Mary Beard warns against importing perceived values or solutions across the centuries in the belief that they might have relevance to contemporary society. Not only do we not really understand the values of this ancient age, nor do we really have sufficient material to be certain about anything. Rome did exist and is therefore worthy of study, but its example is relevant only to the furtherance of that specific study.

Form and content thus come together to create, in Mary Beard’s hands, a stunning, brilliant book that provides context, observation and profound insight into Roman history. It’s a book that only could have been written by someone who has both brilliant communication skills and perhaps unsurpassed in knowledge of her subject. This book is not recommended reading: it is nothing less than essential.

SPQR by Mary Beard

I have just finished Mary Beard’s SPQR. I have just started Susan Sontag’s Against Interpretation. The connection? Susan Sontag’s essay deals momentarily with the relation, if any, between form and content. She seems wary of the concept of form, seeing it often subservient to content. Perhaps the confusion is mine, since it may be the argument, rather than form, that stands out. More on this later.

SPQR is, put simply, an overview of the origins and the rise of Rome, from fabled Trojan settlement to Empire. It charts the growth of the state, from a probably mythical wattle and daub hut to an empire built of marble, from its assumed foundation in the middle of the eighth century BCE, as far as Caracalla’s offer of Roman citizenship in 212 CE. This is roughly, as the author labels it, Rome’s first millennium.

Remembering my first paragraph, it’s the form that Mary Beard imposes upon her work that makes the book’s argument. A less inventive mind would have started at the city’s foundation and progressed chronologically. Mary Beard profitably avoids this approach by beginning with the confrontation between Scipio and Catiline in the first century BCE, conveniently just over half-way through the author’s chosen era.

Catiline had led a revolt, not the first, or last, or most bloody, or most successful, against the established authority of the republic. The kings were already long gone, and the emperors has yet to assume their status. But the confrontation between the brilliant but rather condescending Scipio and the brash, brutal aristocratic chancer that was Catiline provides a starting point for an author who wants to stress what she defines as the essential cultural and political characteristics that can frame the reader’s understanding of this vast imperial achievement. For Mary Beard, this trial before the Senate symbolizes a couple of basic ideas that she uses as a cement to bind the various courses of the city’s history. These are the continual struggle for power alongside the surprising, for the uninitiated, but consistent, tendency for the Roman state to accommodate new ideas, new values, new religions and new citizens from those peoples it conquered.

The struggle for power was perpetual and ruthless. There were no rules apart from the winner took all, and then suffered the continual neurosis of how to hold on to it. Starting with the perhaps mythical fratricide that founded the city when Romulus killed Remus, ruling families or elites internally turned on themselves and one another to secure a hold on power. This is nothing special. Any visitor to Istanbul will vividly recall the rows of miniature coffins that were displayed when newly enthroned sultans disposed of their siblings to reduce potential competition. But Rome was, at least in extent, rather different, since it morphed from local warlords, perhaps, through kings, to republican presidents, in all but name, and then finally to emperors. Each manifestation of power brought its own kinds of struggle, but eventually struggles they all were, and usually involved eliminating the competition. The names and roles may have changed, but the methodology did not. You killed your way into power and killed to maintain it. There were, of course, exceptions.

The second characteristic that Mary Beard uses to create the form and thereby the content of this history is the Roman propensity for assimilation. This began with the rape of the Sabine women. Myth, perhaps, cites a shortage of breeding-age females amongst the early settlers, so what better way to obviate the problem than embark on the cattle raid? The logic, if that be the word, is quite simple. I do not have cows. My neighbour has cows, so I will steal them. It’s the same with women, it seems, and the booty seems to share the same status as the booty from a cattle raid.

But what ensues is change. There is inevitably a clash of culture that leads to accommodation and assimilation, resulting in complications of culture via marriage, albeit a marriage in chains. This process, argues the author, became a characteristic of Rome, in that kingdoms and peoples subjugated by force were culturally assimilated by Rome, and not necessarily destroyed by it. Indeed, some aspects of the defeated culture, such as their religions, were transported back to the centre, where they gained pragmatic adherents eager to try anything that might offer a competitive leg up. And it is this constant ability to change via assimilation that forms the second strand that gives form to this wonderful work.

But why finish with Caracalla, when the Roman empire endured for more than another century after his demise? Mary Beard is clear about this. It was Caracalla’s granting of Roman citizenship to all free men in the empire that change things. Until then the differences in status between men and women, between citizens and classes, between free men and slaves, between military and civilian that had set the boundaries on Roman life, boundaries that were admittedly fluid by virtue of people’s ability to be on either side and to change their relative status, gender apart. Mary Beard thus makes the case for the later years of the empire representing a different historical reality and thus warranting a different treatment. This change became even more apparent when the state adopted Christianity, which would brook no alternative and led to the conscious exclusion of further assimilation.

Mary Beard does offer the reader much detail. But her insistence on setting events in their wider political and cultural context really does clarify a bigger picture which then starts to reveal inter-related detail. By the end of SPQR, we fell we have been there.

In conclusion, Mary Beard warns against importing perceived values or solutions across the centuries in the belief that they might have relevance to contemporary society. Not only do we not really understand the values of this ancient age, nor do we really have sufficient material to be certain about anything. Rome did exist and is therefore worthy of study, but its example is relevant only to the furtherance of that specific study.

Form and content thus come together to create, in Mary Beard’s hands, a stunning, brilliant book that provides context, observation and profound insight into Roman history. It’s a book that only could have been written by someone who has both brilliant communication skills and perhaps unsurpassed in knowledge of her subject. This book is not recommended reading: it is nothing less than essential.

Childe Harold by Lord Byron

I finished a novel recently. In Eileen McHugh, a life remade, I created a character called Alice, an art teacher close to retirement, as the principal character’s sculpture teacher during her first year as an art student. The structure of the book demanded that the story, set in the 1970s, should be told by contemporary survivors from today’s perspective. Alice would not have lived until now, so I passed the responsibility of her character to her son, a physics professor in a university in the north of England. I had already decided on the surname of the artistic household in which the son grew up. It was, by chance, Childe. These two artist parents, one three-dimensional, the other two, would certainly have chosen a one-dimensional name for their son, so I called him Harold, Harold Childe. It was a joke.

Then, a few days later, I heard a performance of Harold in Italy, the viola concerto in all but name by Berlioz. Somewhere in this drug-fuelled Romanticism there was an account, or perhaps the mere reflection, on Byron‘s Childe Harold’s travels through Italy. It occurred to me that I should re-read the poem. I read it first when I was the age that my character, Eileen McHugh, was in her art college. I could now remember next to nothing about it.

It’s an heroic poem by the equally drug-fuelled Lord Byron, written in nine lines stanzas, eight pentameters followed by the terminating Alexandrine. It rhymes ABABBCBCB, meaning that five lines in every stanza rhyme in a traditional manner. In it, our eponymous hero traverses the Mediterranean by sea, if that’s linguistically possible, and visits many places where an artistic education might recall classical allusion. Throughout the journey, he calls in to places with millennia of evident history and proceeds to show off much of what he knowns, all learned within the confines of an English private education. Childe Harold remains self-obsessed, always eager to place his own responses at the forefront of his thoughts, often in spite of external stimulation. But that’s Romanticism, isn’t it? And I had not just written about Eileen McHugh, a 1970s concept artist who imagined meaning into everything she might choose to juxtapose?

Some years ago, I wrote a novel that attempted a loose parody of Don Quixote. It was called A Search for Donald Cottee. I am the person who wrote it, so you will be unsurprised by my estimation of success. I was particularly proud of my updating of the episode in the Caves of Montesinos. I began to wonder how one might parody Byron’s Harold some 200 years on from its conception.

So rather than review Childe Harold, which has probably been done, what I offer here is a plan of parody that may never be written. The first two stanzas, for me, if experienced today, would be a Mediterranean cruise. Let’s not experience much at first hand but take pleasure in being dropped off for a passing couple of hours in the protected zone of somewhere famous, visited, historical, as specified in the brochure. A diary, kept by our cruiser, written in verse, is Childe Harold 2020, with sections copied from the handouts given on the onshore day trips. It’s not Childe Harold’s nor any other passenger’s reflections on experience that forms the gist but grab quotes from the tourist notes supplied to anyone who was paid for the excursion.

The later stanzas do travel inland. How we get from A to B is largely ignored, but Byron rarely strays anywhere off the Grand Tour. In contemporary terms. it’s surely a bus trip, a 50-strong group of the kind that marches, chattering, past the wonders of Neapolitan art in Capodimonte, to be loudly lectured in front of the Caravaggio, in Milan ignores the Brera to marvel at the Last Supper’s peeling plaster and congregates surround the copy of David in front of Florence’s Palazzo Vecchio. I think I jest. But Naples is rather too dirty to walk around, isn’t it?

What interest me in 2020, is the fact that the coronavirus pandemic would make both cruise and bus trips rather difficult to pursue. The barriers are obvious and I will not even try to list them. So how would Childe Harold 2020 manage to suffer his cascaded paroxysms of emotion?

Online, that’s how. WebCams, Wikipedia, TripAdvisor, Airb’n’b reviews, restaurant evaluations complete with owner’s apologetic comments about the service, that’s how our lockdown 2020 Childe Harold might play his viola. Imagine the locked-down pensioners at home. Where did you go today dear? I had a walk around the Uffizi. Ignored the crap. Just looked at the Canalettos. Read about them as well. Views of Venice, apparently. The poem will be epic.

Verdi: Man and musician by Frederick J Crowest

I began reading this on the bus coming back from Valencia, having consumed Byron’s Corsair on the way up, before a performance of Il Corsaro. Amazing to see what had happened to the English language in a few decades! OK, the Byron was supposed to be poetic…

Crowest’s short critical biography was written at the end of the nineteenth century. Verdi is still alive, but has completed all of his operas, including Falstaff. What is truly amazing about the book is the inclusion of quotes from reviewers throughout the century. It should be compulsory reading for anyone who might be put off expressing themselves because of a fear of what criticism might bring. In an apparent stream, critics of the nineteenth century queued up to lambast Verdi’s work as crass, unintellectual, in bad taste, loud, shallow… By the end of his life, most of the critics are kowtowing to greatness.

I have to find myself agreeing with quite a lot of the detailed points, however, as the above illustrates. Otello and Falstaff are different, however, in that they have stopped using the set pieces that he seemed to love in the earlier years.

An interesting if now irrelevant fact relates to the composer’s name. VERDI, Crowest assures us, came to stand for Victor Emmanuel Re d’Ilalia. Though Verdi, we are told here, shunned all aspects of politics, his identification with Italian nationalism cannot be denied.

Overall this seems to confirm what I am coming to believe more strongly by the day – that people don’t know what they like, they like what they know. Given enough airings, even Verdi became acceptable!

Adam Smith: An Inquiry Into The Nature And Causes Of The Wealth Of Nations

Proverbially, the horse’s mouth is always the best source. Academically, primary material is usually the most reliable. So now what is to be found by revisiting a major work of the past, a work whose current iconic status has provided a multiplicity of quotes and endless justification of current positions? In the case of Adam Smith’s An Inquiry Into The Nature And Causes Of The Wealth Of Nations, what can be gained now from revisiting the text is enlightenment, a great deal of surprise and yet another realisation that when sophistication is reduced to mere icon, it is often not only the detail that is lost.

Written in 1776, less than 70 years after the Act of Union that created Great Britain out of England and Scotland, and during the American Revolution, Smith’s book analysed the history of economic and commercial relations at the very start of Britain’s industrial transformation. Britain’s colonial expansion was under way, while the empires of Portugal and Spain were already long established. Wars with the Dutch had been fought and won to establish trading supremacy, the East India Company had monopolised the Asia trade and had as a result become the de facto ruler of India. The British had already become a nation of tea drinkers.

In the economics and politics of the twenty-first century, Adam Smith’s Wealth Of Nations is more usually associated with the politics of the right, associated with calls for free trade and demands that governments withdraw as far as possible from commercial interchange, an activity that is regarded as capable of regulating itself. And this position is asserted despite the fact that much of today’s trade is in the hands of corporations that are often larger than some of the governments that are criticised by corporate apologists for their meddling. So dominant is this thumbnail sketch of The Wealth Of Nations that a general reader may assume there is no profit in revisiting the text to seek new experience. Such a general reader would be wholly wrong, since this much quoted work is full of surprises.

The oft-quoted and more often assumed summary of Smith’s analysis – for that is precisely what this book represents – arises from the author’s repeated insistence on the albeit presumed existence of a “natural” order of things. Smith assumed that if left alone to find its own level, free of interference from interests capable of influencing the supply or price, then a traded good or service would inevitably gravitate towards natural levels of both consumption and price, the one obviously influencing the other via the familiar concept of demand. This natural level, however, could become distorted. For Smith, government influence via regulation, quota, taxation or, more commonly, monopoly, usually results in disrupted, artificial trade, its dysfunction as often a consequence of incompetence as it is because of inappropriate control. But what is not usually quoted from Smith’s work is that he often blames producer or merchant cartels for this counter-productive meddling as much as he does governments. Indeed, some of the most vehement and serious criticism in the Wealth Of Nations is reserved for commercial corporations, especially  The East India Company, a giant of contemporary international trade. Their corporate interest receives Smith’s blame for a whole host of ills, such as profiteering, distorting trade, creating surpluses and shortages and even causing famine. In addition, Smith was clearly no friend of those who populated chambers of trade or monopoly holdings of any kind, since all such interests could distort his “natural” markets.

Adam Smith was clearly in favour of both education and training. He saw education as being capable of developing skill, knowledge and sometimes wisdom. He recognised that different kinds of human labour would necessarily attract different rates of reward, since different skills and capabilities required different amounts of commitment to secure them. Effectively, he was recognising in his own language the existence of what we now call human capital.

The acquisition of such talents (the acquired and useful abilities of all the inhabitants and members of the society), by the maintenance of the acquirer during his education, study, or apprenticeship, always costs a real expense, which is a capital fixed and realized, as it were, in his person. … The improved dexterity of a workman may be considered in the same light as a machine or instrument of trade which facilitates and abridges labour, and which, though it costs a certain expense, repays that expense with a profit.

Here then is human capital, but also recognition of education as an investment, both personal and societal. He also thus stated the labour theory of value.

The real value of all the different component parts of price … is measured by the quantity of labour which they can … purchase or command . Labour measures the value, not only of that part of price which resolves itself into labour, but of that which resolves itself into rent, and of that which resolves itself into profit. … In the price of corn, for example, one part pays the rent of the landlord, another pays the wages or maintenance of the labourers and labouring cattle employed in producing it, and the third pays the profit of the farmer.

Smith also differentiated clearly between the use value and the exchange value of a good . A hundred years later, Marx would begin Das Kapital with a similar analysis. Smith’s assertion that the tradable price of a good covered three areas of cost – labour, rent and profit – also opened up two important issues. A century later Marx would cite greed as a reason why those who controlled capital – the life-blood of trade – could seek to maximise the profit element of the cost of a good, a practice that would inevitably lead to the increased exploitation of the labour involved, since their contribution to the cost could be controlled, even depressed. And in Smith’s own analysis the likely effects of price rises in a good would be to put up rents, thus eventually benefiting landlords and landowners. Thus even in Smith’s work, those who represented the more powerful interests would be the ones to reap the lion’s share of the benefits of trade, even the lion’s share of growth in the economy or expansion of trade.

Smith saw business owners as a group as nothing less than likely conspirators in raising prices. He stated this quite explicitly.

People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices.

He also warns against charitable intentions, especially ones where those with commercial interest participate or organise, since these often offer justification for the gatherings where interested parties could meet and conspire.

A regulation which enables those of the same trade to tax themselves, in order to provide for their poor, their sick, their widows and orphans, by giving them a common interest to manage, renders such assemblies necessary

So that is why, despite their laudable aims and significant achievements, we eventually do not trust movements such as freemasons, lions, rotaries or charitable endeavours funded by corporate riches.

Smith does recognise that workers might organise to drive up the cost of labour, just as owners certainly do conspire to raise profits.  He repeatedly, however, cites the existence of an imbalance of power in this apparently competitive relationship between owners and workers. Governments often legislate against trade unions, but rarely act to curb profiteering. We hear, he says, of every attempt to organise labour, but usually nothing of corporate conspiracy.

We have no acts of parliament against combining to lower the price of work, but many against combining to raise it.

Masters, too, sometimes enter into particular combinations to sink the wages of labour even below this (natural) rate. These are always conducted with the utmost silence and secrecy till the moment of execution; and when the workmen yield, as they sometimes do without resistance, though severely felt by them, they are never heard of by other people. Such combinations , however, are frequently resisted by a contrary defensive combination of the workmen, who sometimes , too, without any provocation of this kind, combine, of their own accord, to raise the price of their labour. Their usual pretences are, sometimes the high price of provisions, sometimes the great profit which their masters make by their work. But whether their combinations be offensive or defensive, they are always abundantly heard of.

Smith seems to link the concept of “natural” to transactions between individuals and organisations of only moderate size, ones that are capable of influencing only a minuscule fraction of the overall trade in a good. Perhaps the largest trading group of his time was the East India Company, but this organisation he usually associates with incompetence or conspiracy or both. The problem with this contemporary corporate giant was twofold: its monopolistic advantage and its proximity to political power. The company, indeed, was the de facto ruler of India and, over two hundred years before Amartya Sen suggested via the concept of entitlement, that famines can operate selectively and often in times of plenty, Smith suggested that famines in India were largely a result of maladministration driven primarily by greed.

The drought in Bengal, a few years ago, might probably have occasioned a very great dearth. Some improper regulations, some injudicious restraints, imposed by the servants of the East India Company upon the rice trade, contributed, perhaps, to turn that dearth into a famine. …

….famine has never arisen from any other cause but the violence of government attempting, by improper means, to remedy the inconveniencies of a dearth. …

In an extensive corn country, between all the different parts of which there is a free commerce and communication, the scarcity occasioned by the most unfavourable seasons can never be so great as to produce a famine; and the scantiest crop, if managed with frugality and economy, will maintain, through the year, the same number of people that are commonly fed in a more affluent manner by one of moderate plenty. …

Such exclusive companies, therefore, are nuisances in every respect; always more or less inconvenient to the countries in which they are established, and destructive to those which have the misfortune to fall under their government.

Smith’s analysis of empire, or the colonies, as contemporary language would have labelled it, suggested that the home country, at the centre of the empire, should offer administration for and representation of all of its constituent parts. He suggests this not to assert power, but to ensure even treatment of subjects.

Under the present system of management, therefore, Great Britain derives nothing but loss from the dominion which she assumes over her colonies. …

But there was no doubt that those involved in the colonies should be represented in the political system at home. …

The assembly which deliberates and decides concerning the affairs of every part of the empire, in order to be properly informed, ought certainly to have representatives from every part of it. …

It must be remembered that the American colonies were already in revolt, so this was a politically difficult stance to take at the time, especially since one of the fundamental differences between the home country and the colonies concerned representation. Smith did, however, distinguish between the civilised and the savage inhabitants of the empire, so let us not be too carried away with the apparent modernity of much of the ideas. One must assume that his franchise would only have extended to the settlers.

He was in no doubt that technology could innovate.

There is scarce a common trade, which does not afford some opportunities of applying to it the principles of geometry and mechanics, and which would not, therefore, gradually exercise and improve the common people in those principles, the necessary introduction to the most sublime, as well as to the most useful sciences.

And the concept of modernisation, at least as applied to the reduction of the power of existing structures, notably regent and church, was something he supported.

In the state in which things were, (previously), the constitution of the church of Rome may be considered as the most formidable combination that ever was formed against the authority and security of civil government, as well as against the liberty, reason, and happiness of mankind, which can flourish only where civil government is able to protect them. In that constitution, the grossest delusions of superstition were supported in such a manner by the private interests of so great a number of people, as put them out of all danger from any assault of human reason; because, though human reason might, perhaps, have been able to unveil, even to the eyes of the common people, some of the delusions of superstition, it could never have dissolved the ties of private interest. Had this constitution been attacked by no other enemies but the feeble efforts of human reason, it must have endured for ever. But that immense and well-built fabric, which all the wisdom and virtue of man could never have shaken, much less have overturned, was, by the natural course of things, first weakened, and afterwards in part destroyed; and is now likely, in the course of a few centuries more, perhaps, to crumble into ruins altogether.

Read with care, this passage is found to suggest that dominant economic and political interest may only be challenged by some form of insurrection, though Smith clearly does not use the word “revolution”.

But overall, what will strike the twenty-first century reader of Smith’s Wealth Of Nations is its complete lack of polemic. This is not a political tract, and neither does it ever descend into propaganda. What will impress throughout is the author’s stated desire to research and present the facts, as they were able to be researched by him at the time. Yes, Smith makes assumptions about what is civilised and what is savage. He also assumes some state he calls “natural”, without ever really addressing a definition. Effectively he leaves us to conclude that this state is achieved by letting things happen without deliberate meddling. How there might be a trade in anything without human beings meddling in something is one of the great weaknesses in his analysis. Like Marx a century later, he seems unable to conceive of any sectional interest larger than the state. But he also believed that, when organisations achieve a size capable of challenging the state’s assumed supremacy, then they would use that power to serve their own sectional interests to the detriment of all others. We seem to have arrived at Marx again.

But, again like Marx in Das Kapital, Smith analyses the data available to him, conducts research, constructs argument and supplies copious illustrative detail. Much of his theory is based on historical records on the price of corn. This he sees as the singular subsistence that everyone must obtain and which, therefore, must contains within its price movements reflections of contemporary prosperity. Thus the pricing of a single commodity over the ages mirrors the fortunes of entire nations and economies. He even extends this to introduce a concept of inflation generated via increased money supply. When precious metals are repatriated from the colonies, especially to Spain and Portugal, he argues, then the availability of capital increases, and so the price of corn inflates. On even more up-to-date scenarios, Smith even analyses the operation of a traded secondary debt market. In the eighteenth century, this was manifest in the trading of credit notes from one bank to another, obtaining new short-term loans to pay off existing debts, when their due dates approached. 

Overall Adam Smith’s Wealth Of Nations, when taken in the original, surprises more often than it confirms. It is certainly not the polemic that it becomes when quoted in iconic form to justify contemporary neo-liberal or neo-conservative politics that it, itself, neither describes nor advocates. It does champion non-intervention, but it lists large corporate interests, those often championed by today’s political promoters of the work, as part of the problem, not the solution. As ever, the horse’s mouth is the best place to look and the nature of what we find there gives the lie to what issues from many professedly interested parties, who mouth the title as apparent justification for their own ideas, ideas that the book itself does not express.

Joaquin Palomares and Bruno Canino playing Brahms, Grieg and Franck

The joy of music is that it is new every time it is played. There is no such thing as a definitive version of anything. A composer indicates intention, but, whatever the piece, the music only comes to life when it is interpreted. A programme of Romantic violin sonatas by Brahms, Grieg and Franck might, to the uninitiated, appear to be potentially run-of-the-mill. But such an assumption would ignore the potential interpretive contribution of two superb musicians, Joaquín Palomares and Bruno Canino.

The duo performed on 11 February 2012 in the first concert of La Nucia’s Spring Festival in the town’s beautiful Auditori de la Mediterrània. They have played together many times and their perfect understanding was in evidence from the very first notes of the Brahms second sonata. Joaquín Palomares’s violin playing was, as usual for him, supremely lyrical and was able to communicate the long melodic lines of Brahms’s style. And Bruno Canino’s piano playing throughout went way beyond the role mere accompanist. The almost tangible communication between the two players gave both shape and meaning to the music’s narrative.

Less familiar to most in the audience was Grieg’s third sonata, considered the best of the composer’s three works in the form. Palomares and Canino blended the elements of folk song, dance rhythms and northern toughness into a truly impassioned performance of a beautiful work. The contrasts were strong whilst at the same time the performers retained a wonderful balance that made perfect musical sense. Palomares and Canino together led their audience through the tableaux of the work’s scenes, endowing the whole with shape and thus accessibility.

Their final piece, the Franck sonata, is nothing less than a masterpiece. In the hands of Palomares and Canino, the piece played out almost like a novel, sounding like a mixture of confession and personal experience related with some pain but delivered with resolve. The catharsis of the final movement was striking, the virtuosity of the duo’s playing quite breathtaking.

The audience demanded and received no less than three encores and were treated to performances of the Brahms Scherzo, Tchaikovsky’s tender Melody and the haunting favourite, the Meditation of Thais by Massenet.

Joaquín Palomares and Bruno Canino offered their combined virtuosity to create a superb concert of mainly well-known music. But the quality of their playing was such that the experience became special, even for a listener who came to the concert familiar with the music. It was great music faultlessly played and beautifully interpreted.

Marriage under scrutiny - A review of Jude The Obscure by Thomas Hardy

In the postscript to the preface of Jude The Obscure, Thomas Hardy quotes a German reviewer of the novel. Sue Bridehead, the heroine, was described there as “the first delineation in fiction of the woman … of the feminist movement – the slight pale ‘bachelor’ girl – the intellectualised, emancipated bundle of nerves” that modern conditions were producing. The book’s reception ‘cured’ Hardy of the desire to write another novel, and all of the above happened before the dawn of the twentieth century.

Jude The Obscure is a novel about relationships within marriage. Hardy’s opinion was that legal ties between men and women ought to be breakable once the union had achieved dysfunction. It was an opinion that differed from that expected by the age. It prompted a bishop to burn the book, rather than the writer, who was unavailable at the time. Thomas Hardy’s Jude Fawley was adopted into a baker’s family, and harboured an ambition to self-teach himself into a classical education in Christminster’s learned colleges.

His schoolmaster, Mr Phillotson helped a little. Jude’s ambition was always somewhat far fetched, though he applied himself diligently to his studies and achieved a great deal. In his formative years, he also learned the stonemason’s trade to allow the earning of a living. On a country walk he then took up with Arabella, the daughter of a pig farmer. Having found himself stuck, he tried to learn how to stick real pigs but somehow the penetration never came easy. The couple parted, apparently childless. Sue, Jude’s cousin and thus a co-member of a family reputed for its marital failures, was always a soul mate for the young man. But she never quite seemed up to the task of giving herself, giving of her self. Thus, when she married Phillotson, the much older, staid and perhaps already failed schoolmaster, his lack of demands on her fit exactly with her assumptions about how married life would progress. Sue certainly knew what she wanted from life and did everything in her power to secure it. Safety, security, respectability, perhaps property were top of her list.

Arabella, the pig farming barmaid who lured the naïve Jude, was similarly single-minded in pursuing her own, rather different interests. After leaving Jude, she takes up with a new man and hops it to Australia, apparently for good. Sue and Phillotson finally dissolve their marriage by mutual consent to allow Sue to pursue her desires. She and Jude, who love one another dearly, then make their lives together. They do not marry. They live as brother and sister, with lust on one side of the bed and revulsion on the other. A child arrives by train. The wizened-looking boy is Jude’s, Arabella claiming she was pregnant before the couple separated. Sue and Jude offer a home for the waif, and then two more whose family fortunes have fallen on bad times.

And then tragedy appears. Their world falls apart. Sue craves the responsibility of marriage, perhaps merely for the respectability she has lost, so she returns to a new marriage with Phillotson. As before, it’s just for the show of it. Jude develops consumption. What happens in Jude The Obscure is the meat of the book. How it happens is less important than how the characters justify their actions, effectively their reactions to what life offers in response to their imagined aspirations. How these people seek to justify themselves tells much of what they think is expected of them by others, by the society at large. Thus the novel appears to be a study – even a treatise - in selfishness melded with self-obsession, but this is always shrouded in a coded justification that cites the need for social, societal, even sanctified heavenly approval.

In many ways, Jude The Obscure’s men are its victims, its women coldly triumphant, its tone vaguely misogynist. It has little time for the establishment, which is often portrayed as a conspiracy to promote misery. Christminster, Oxford in other words, is thought of as a great centre of high and fearless thought. But in reality it is “a nest of commonplace schoolmasters whose characteristic is timid obsequiousness to tradition.” The alternative, self-congratulatory selfishness did not appear to be much better. Thus Jude The Obscure has much to say about our own time, about public virtue and the need to live according to the socially expected.