Politically Incorrect Miscellaneous

When The Shoe is on the Other Foot

It is the one hundredth anniversary of the ethnic cleansing of Armenians that took place under the Ottoman Empire. While Pope Francis made headlines for offending the Turks by referring to these events as a genocide, Israel has made headlines for its refusal to recognize the genocide. The reasons for Israel’s stance are understandable – she does not want to offend what, until recently, was one of the few regional allies she had and which she hopes to have good relations with again. Nevertheless, it must surely strike those who possess a sense of irony as being truly ironic indeed that the government of a nation whose core ethnic group has lobbied to have the historical revision of their own genocide at the hands of the Germans seventy years ago criminalized as “Holocaust denial” across Europe and which has used several different laws, from an archaic law against spreading “false news” to the “hate speech” section of the Human Rights Act, to punish revisionists here in Canada, would turn around and deny someone else’s genocide.

An Awful Woman

Last evening I went to the final performance of the Manitoba Opera production of Puccini’s Turandot. It was an excellent production. Although I was already familiar with the opera for some reason it struck me for the first time last night what this opera was about – the conversion of a feminist. Well, a proto-feminist at least, as the story takes place centuries ago. Be warned that I am about to give the entire plot away. As the opera is almost a century old, based on an even older story, and sung in Italian, I doubt you will mind. The title character is a real ice princess. The daughter of the Emperor of China, whose hand is sought by suitors far and wide, puts them to a test. They must answer three riddles she sets before them and if they fail on any of the riddles, they will lose their lives. When the story’s hero, Calaf, the son of the deposed Tartur king Timur, takes the challenge she explains that she is indwelt by the spirit of one of her ancestors. This ancestor was a princess who had ruled in justice and peace, holding men in scorn, until an invading prince conquered and killed her. Now Turandot, has similarly rejected men and devised this scheme as a means of obtaining revenge on all men. Calaf answers all her riddles correctly but seeing her plead with the Emperor not to marry her off to him, he offers her a reprieve. If she can discover his name by dawn, he will forfeit his claim and his life. In the final act, the princess, desperately trying to find the stranger’s name, has an old man and slave girl that had been seen talking to him, captured and tortured. This is Timur, his father. Liu the slave girl announces that she knows his name, but will not give it up, even though she knows that by refusing to do so she gives him, whom she loves herself, to Turandot and then, grabbing a guard’s knife, stabs herself to death. Rebuking the princess for her cruelty, Calaf takes her in his arms and kisses her. Breaking down, Turandot begs him to leave and take his mystery with him, but he instead gives up the mystery, telling her that he is Calaf, son of Timur, in doing so handing his fate back to her. As dawn breaks, the conquered princess informs the Emperor and his assembled court that the stranger’s name is Love. Turandot has been criticized several times for its ending, as the title character’s change of heart is implausible even by operatic standards. The ending does not bother me, as seeing a feminist repent of the error of her ways is a rare pleasure, unlikely enough in itself as to make the incredibility of the circumstances of little comparable consequence. Where I would take issue with Puccini’s opera, as I would also with William Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew, is why Calaf (Petruchio in the case of Shakespeare) would want to go to so much trouble for the sake of so unpleasant a female, the exact type that as Stephen Leacock pointed out, used to be called an “Awful Woman”.

You Know What They Say About a Stopped Clock

After countless attempts to force stories into their prefabricated, “evil white cop kills sweet innocent black youth” mold, ruining people’s lives and stirring up mob violence in the process, in the case of the shooting of Walter Scott by Michael Slager in North Charleston, South Carolina, the factory of deceit, otherwise known as the media, may actually have found a bona fide case that matches the mold. Note that I said “may”. We’ll have to see what further evidence comes out as the case goes to trial. In the meantime, if the “black lives matter” crowd really believe their slogan, which has the distinction of having achieved banality the second it was coined if not before, instead of focusing on white law enforcement officers, would do better to complain about the real mass killers of blacks – abortion and black crime.

Just Fabulous

There has been a lot of nonsense spoken, in the weeks both leading up to and following the state of Indiana’s decision, a month ago, to pass the “Religious Freedom Restoration Act”. The basic gist of the bill is that allows people and companies to plead the freedom to exercise their religion as a defence when sued in court. The question that this ought to raise is why on earth it was deemed necessary to pass such a law in a country in which freedom of religion is already guaranteed in the first amendment to their Constitution, the first entry in their Bill of Rights? The immediate situation to which this bill was a response was created by the recent cultural revolution in which governments have redefined marriage to include same-sex couples. In the wake of this revolution, Jacobins have been suing Christian photographers, florists, and bakers who do not wish to participate in these phony weddings. The purpose of the bill was to protect these Christians who cannot, after all, accept this change in the meaning of marriage if they truly believe Him to be the Son of God Who said “Have ye not read, that he which made them at the beginning made them male and female, And said, For this cause shall a man leave father and mother, and shall cleave to his wife: and they twain shall be one flesh? Wherefore they are no more twain, but one flesh. What therefore God hath joined together, let not man put asunder.” (Matt. 19:4-6). Knowing full well that this is what the law was about, a host of celebrities, civil rights activists, businessmen, politicians from other states, journalists, and other assorted scum and riff-raff, began to ham it up, and put on this big act of moaning and crying and carrying on about how the wicked, backwoods, bigots of Indiana had passed this terrible law so that now hamburger shops, instead of asking if you want fries with your meal will be asking if you are gay and lesbian and if you answer yes will be booting you out on the turf. These concerns are mostly fictional – the lawsuits against Christians are very real. (1) The root of the problem is the idea that discrimination should be against the law and governments should be actively trying to extirpate their peoples’ prejudices. What utter rot! Any good such laws and government practices might possibly accomplish is far outweighed by the evils done, including the severe abridgement of long established and recognized liberties. The road to the present day, where judges place the gun of the law to Christians heads and force them to participate in gay weddings, while the progressive propaganda that passes for journalism today claims to see no threat to religious liberty, began with the road to Selma. It is time the idol of Martin Luther King Jr. were tore down before more destruction is wrought in his name.

(1) Here is a list compiled by WorldNetDaily: http://www.wnd.com/2015/04/courts-conclude-faith-loses-to-gay-demands/ A new one was added just today: http://www.wnd.com/2015/04/fines-levied-against-oregon-bakery-owners/?cat_orig=faith Note the huge, punitive amount of the fine, and the chilling recommendation of “re-education”. h/t Laura Wood http://www.thinkinghousewife.com/wp/2015/04/bakers-fined-135000/

Here in Winnipeg the Fat Lady Sings Well

It was sixteen years ago that I first attended a production of the Manitoba Opera at the Centennial Concert Hall here in Winnipeg. The Manitoba Opera puts on two operas per season, one in the fall and one in the spring, with three shows per opera. The spring production in the 1997/1998 season was of Giocomo Puccini’s La Bohème. I purchased a ticket to the first of the three performances and was so captivated that I went back for the other two performances as well. I have since become a subscriber to the Manitoba Opera and last night once again saw a magnificent production of the opera that had first drawn me in almost two decades ago.

La Bohème has lost none of its power to charm, although exactly where the appeal in this opera lies is something that I cannot quite put my finger on. Could it be the characters?

I don’t think so. The poet Rodolfo and the painter Marcello are both quite realistic portrayals of modern artistic types, i.e., people far too full of themselves to be of any interest to anyone else. The philosopher and musician whose names elude me at the moment are for the most part forgettable. Marcello’s on-again, off-again, girlfriend Musetta, a brazenly selfish and worldly, social climbing, prima donna is more amusing than appealing, at least until her character shows an unexpected depth in the fourth and final act. The only consistently appealing character is Mimi, the Juliet to Rodolfo’s Romeo.

If it is not the characters, what about the plot?

This doesn’t seem to be the answer either. The plot is not particularly outstanding. I would say it is nothing to write home about but as I intend to write about it for the rest of this paragraph perhaps a different phrasing is called for. Just a head’s up, if you don’t care to have the ending of an opera that was first performed in 1896 revealed, you had better skip ahead. In the first act, Mimi comes by to borrow a light for her candle from Rodolfo who has lagged behind while the others have gone off to spend an unexpected windfall at an expensive café rather than use it to pay their rent. They fall in love at first sight and, in the second act, join the others at the café. There Musetta comes in, on the arm of a rich, old man that she dumped Marcello over, makes a big scene in which she reunited with Marcello, and they all take off leaving the poor old sucker to pay the bill. In the third act Mimi comes to Marcello to complain that Rodolfo has been acting jealous and accusing her of flirting with every man who comes along. It turns out that Rodolfo has recognized that Mimi is dying of galloping consumption and, in a display of true artistic temperament has managed to make it all about himself by covering up his fears with his inappropriate, boorish, behaviour. In the final act, Musetta finds Mimi and brings her back to Rodolfo, just before she succumbs to the tuberculosis and closes the opera with her death.

In the words of that most distinguished of music and theatre critics, Bugs Bunny, what did you expect, a happy ending?

If the characters and plot are weak, the same cannot be said of Puccini’s musical score. The music is both beautiful and enchanting. For those who are only familiar with opera music through the recordings of singers like Pavarotti, some of it will be easily recognizable. Rodolfo was Pavarotti’s first major role and while later in his career, his signature aria was “Nessun Dorma” from Turnandot (also by Puccini and the Manitoba Opera’s spring selection for next season), “Che gelida manina”, the aria in which Rodolfo introduces himself to Mimi, was also an indispensable part of his repertoire.

Excellent as Puccini’s musical score is, however, is it sufficient in itself to explain the appeal of the opera despite the weakness of story and characters? If it were Mozart’s Die Zauberflöte we were discussing, in which a breathtakingly beautiful score is able to transform one of the most vapid stories that ever wasted ink into a great work of art there would be no question, but then Mozart’s music was on a level few other composers could ever dream of approaching.

Perhaps the only explanation is to say that it is the magic of opera. The Greeks, Nietzsche told us in his first and best book, by imposing the Apollonian order of dialogue and plot upon the chthonic, Dionysian, music of the Greek chorus had created a new art form, tragedy, which was able to speak order into chaos and lift men out the meaninglessness of their lives. Tragedy had been lost, Nietzsche claimed, due to the New Tragedy of Euripides, the Comedy of Aeschylus, and the philosophy of Socrates, but had been reborn in his own day in the operas of Richard Wagner. Granted, Wagnerian opera is radically different from those of Puccini or, for that matter, of virtually any other composer, and Nietzsche repudiated his own thesis when Wagner composed Parsifal based upon Christian legend rather than Nordic myth, but I think there is something to be said for the idea that in opera the combination of drama and music produces something that is greater than its components. There are other genres in which the two are combined but none of these has ever been able to do what opera does. In words from a very popular work in one of those other genres, words that were clearly intended to satirize opera but which nevertheless manage to convey a sense of the true uniqueness of opera, “you’d never get away with all this in a play, but if its loudly sung and in a foreign tongue it’s just the sort of score the audiences adore, in fact the perfect opera.” (1)

Whatever the case, I have renewed my subscription for next season. I strongly considered not bothering with it when I saw, to my disgust, that the fall production of Beethoven’s Fidelio was being deliberately timed to coincide with the opening of the Canadian Museum of Human Rights. I decided however that it would be silly to punish myself for the local opera company’s decision to make some banal, left-wing, political statement, especially when the composer’s politics were no better.

People fortunate enough to live in a community that has a local opera company, after all, ought to support it. A small company like Manitoba Opera may not be able to put on productions on the same scale as a large company like the Met in New York City but it is unfair to expect them to be able to do so. An opera is different when experienced in live production than when listened to on the radio or in recording. Operas are written to be performed live and there is something to be said for that experience, even when conducted on a smaller scale. To understand and appreciate this distinction is part of the cultivated taste which the fine arts are supposed to instil in people and so in a sense to lack this understanding and appreciation is to miss the whole point altogether.

In the case of Manitoba Opera, our local company puts on excellent productions and last night’s was no exception. I look forward to seeing what they will do with Beethoven’s only opera in the fall, even if I have to hold my nose against the stench of association with the CMHR the whole time.

(1) “Prima Donna” from The Phantom of the Opera, (1986), music by Andrew Lloyd Webber, lyrics by Charles Hart and Richard Stilgoe.