Yearly Archives: 2012

And Who Would Have Thought I’d Ever Have Anything in Common with the Metropolitan Opera

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It looks like me and the Met are now on the same blacklist, and how cool is that?

I used to figure it was just my bad luck that Opera News would publish reviews of a number of other Berkeley Opera (now West Edge Opera) productions but always seemed to skip over mine. Over the years, though, I’ve heard from a few people that Opera News actually made a decision that no review of my work could be published in the magazine. Apparently this was decided about a decade ago, and they’ve stuck to it. I have no idea why — they review lots of Bay Area productions, and they review lots of productions of operas performed in the vernacular or in unorthodox ways. I even know that reviewers have at times asked to be assigned to write a review of one of my productions, and they’ve been refused every time.

What gives? I have no idea why this is, or who decided it, but it seems petty and unprofessional, doesn’t it? Still, I’ve taken a perverse pleasure in knowing that, no matter how unsuccessful I am, no matter how completely unknown I am outside the Bay Area (and not all that well known within it, really), I have somehow managed to acquire one enemy in a high place.

Now Opera News has declared that they will no longer publish reviews of Metropolitan Opera productions. I can only assume that the Met is quivering in its boots.

The Dream Sweeper

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A few days ago, I noticed that there was less than a week left in the English National Opera’s “Mini Operas” competition, the first stage of which is a libretto writing competition.

When I first heard several months ago that the competition was coming, I thought it was a cool idea and I had wanted to write something for it. But then, when the rules were announced, I found them not only uninspiring but anti-inspiring, and I had drawn nothing but blanks.

First, the libretto had to be for an opera that was about five to seven minutes in length, which seems absurdly short to me. It seems unlikely to me that you can really accomplish the minimum that I think an opera should accomplish — tell anything resembling a real story, even a short one, and bring out through song the emotions that are stirred up by that story — in a mere seven minutes. If you manage to tell a very short story but don’t have time to use the music to enlarge on its emotional content, then why tell the story as an opera at all? It would be more effective as a short spoken play. Whereas, even if you use singing as the medium in which you show some kind of situation, if that situation is essentially static — if you’re not telling a story, however brief, in which somebody goes through some kind of experience and comes out the other end a different person in some way — then what you’ve got might be interesting and even good, but it’s a song, not an opera, and why not just call this a songwriting competition?

So I was having trouble imagining how I could create a libretto that I was at all satisfied with that could be adequately set to music and run no more than seven minutes. That was one thing. And the other is that the mini opera was supposed to be inspired by one of three short prose pieces, and none of them seemed to me to contain the seeds of an opera, either. Each of the three describes a static situation.

But last Wednesday evening, with just four days left in the competition, an idea came to me for a very short story that would involve a character from one of the prose pieces. Nothing else would be used from the piece but that character, and in fact the situation that I’d be placing that character in would be the very opposite of his situation in the prose piece. But the rules to the competition specifically say that you can be inspired by anything in the piece you choose and you can take it in any direction. So that should be cool.

And it was one of those rare moments when the Muse descends with full force: I started scribbling (in the back of my notebook for The Manga Flute, which still has a dozen or so blank pages left), and ten minutes later I had covered two pages with the outline for the whole thing, and I swear that thirty seconds before I started writing, I had no ideas at all. At least not consciously. Perhaps my unconscious had been thinking about it for weeks and chose that moment to spit the results up to me.

I looked over the outline. Four characters, which isn’t too many. Some opportunity for a composer to develop the emotional content. Not the same emotion running all the way through, either; there’s a variety of emotions along the way, which is good (though admittedly not as crucial for a seven-minute opera as it is for a full-length one). So all was looking promising.

The prose piece, which is by Neil Gaiman, describes the unfortunate consequences when its character (the Sweeper of Dreams) fails to appear, what happens when he refuses to do what is expected of him. This is intriguing but completely static, just a sketch or a vignette, really. My story, though, would be about his appearing and insisting on doing what he’s supposed to do over the objections of someone who doesn’t want him to do it. So, bingo, there’s my conflict, that’s where the force comes from to move the story forward and have the characters end up somewhere else from where they started.

And I was pleased to see that the story I’d outlined really did look like one that I could tell adequately in just ten minutes. It would be tight, but doable.

Yep, ten minutes. I hadn’t looked at the ENO website in over two months at this point, and I was misremembering the rules of the contest. I thought the maximum length was ten minutes, not seven.

The next morning, during my long commute by BART and Caltrain to work, I looked at the outline again. The words for a conversation in the middle of the story started coming to me, and I started writing. As I wrote, more ideas came up, and about an hour and 45 minutes later, I had a complete first draft.

I knew I needed to look at the website again and double-check that I was following all the requirements of the competition. But it was a busy day at work so I didn’t get around to it during the day. And then on the way home I decided what I really wanted to do first was type my handwritten draft into my laptop, where it would be easier to work on revisions. As I was doing that, I saw lots of places to make small improvements, so I got carried away and spent the whole commute on rewriting. Even after the revisions, though, the story still followed the original outline very closely, which is pretty cool. Outlines usually take all kinds of work to get right, but this one was still basically in the same form in which it first occurred to me.

So it wasn’t until after I’d gotten home Thursday evening, with my second draft completed, that I finally looked at the website and discovered that the damn thing had to come in at under seven minutes, not ten. Argh.

The rest of the process was to go through the libretto many times, singing it in my head to trite but passionate melodies of my own improvisation, seeing how long the various parts took to get through, and figuring out where I could cut things without losing anything really essential. Early Saturday evening, I submitted my entry.

The rules of the competition are that, instead of submitting your libretto directly, you post your entry to your blog and then submit the link to the webpage with your entry. So if you want to read it, it’s here. The piece by Mr. Gaiman that the libretto is inspired by (I don’t think I can really say “based on”) is titled “The Sweeper of Dreams”, and in a final burst of creative brilliance, I have titled my libretto The Dream Sweeper. It really ought to have its own distinct title, but under the gun I couldn’t think of anything more suitable than that.

Anatol Again

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Dave and I took advantage of a discount offer on tickets and went back to see Anatol at the Aurora again. We both liked the play even better the second time. The performances were even stronger, sharper, and funnier than before. Also, we got to see the play from the opposite side of the stage (the Aurora has a thrust stage, with the audience on three sides), so we could see everything from a different angle — great fun, so thank you, ye gods of seat assignment. The Aurora has been one of my favorite companies since their days playing in a large room at the Berkeley City Club, and this production was no exception.

I gather from the comments I’ve seen on Goldstar and elsewhere that this hasn’t been a popular production. I’ve seen comments and a couple of reviews that complain that the central character isn’t likable and that makes the play itself impossible to enjoy — an attitude I totally do not understand. It seems to me that liking a character and being interested in what happens to the character are two different and to some extent even independent things.

Some of what I’ve read also suggests that some people are assuming that Anatol is supposed to be sympathetic and was regarded as sympathetic by nineteenth-century audiences, which is just wrong. If you cringe frequently at what Anatol says and does, then you’re getting the play, and you’re getting it in more or less the same way that its contemporary audiences got it; you’re just not getting that you get it.

One reviewer seemed to think that Anatol was a success originally because of its frankness about sex, but that our changing attitudes toward woman have dated the play and made it impossible now to approve of Anatol’s womanizing. That’s not quite right; there were plenty of plays in the nineteenth century that were every bit as frank about sex — really, many that were far more so. So many, in fact, that the theater had a reputation as not being quite a nice place for really respectable people.

However, in a typical nineteenth-century play, after the audience had had its fill of racy fun, the last scene would show conventional virtue triumphing. What was shocking about Anatol wasn’t the frankness about sex but the lack of explicit moral judgment. Anatol is presented for our examination and amusement, not as a simple theatrical type, neither as a single-minded villain nor as a shallow buffoon, but as a complicated psychological portrait with a few good points along with all his many bad points. If the final scene were replaced by one in which Anatol either shoots himself in despair or is forever reformed by the true love of a good, pure woman, the play would have looked a lot like a hundred others. But Schnitzler neither reforms nor kills off Anatol at the end of the play, just leaves him to continue on his self-deluded way, and some in the audience in those days found the absence of a firm moral judgment to be unsettling. Looks like some still do.

Six Brandenburgs at the San Francisco Symphony

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Dave and I saw both halves of the San Francisco Symphony’s two-part “Baroque Delights” concerts (what an awful name that is), each concert including three of the six Brandenburg concertos and one or two popular Handel suites. The tickets were discounted on Goldstar, and the Brandenburgs are always terrific and, well, I’m sure Handel won’t care if my mind wanders while listening to his Royal Fireworks and Water Music once again. (After all, he wrote them in the first place as background music, as music intended to accompany but not distract you from whatever else you might be paying attention to at the same time. It seems to me that he was altogether successful in this, and the suites are perfectly pleasant pieces to listen to while reading or working; but why they keep turning up in concerts baffles me.)

The first of the two concerts, which was conducted by Jane Glover, was lovely. The sound balance was poor during the Water Music suite that opened the concert, and the lower strings were just about inaudible (couldn’t they have borrowed a shell from Berkeley Symphony or somewhere?). This boded ill for the rest of the concert, but as it worked out, different subsets of the orchestra were needed for each work, so the players rearranged themselves in between works, and the balance problems were mostly fixed for the rest of the concert. Whew.

I’ve heard more exciting performances of these three Brandenburgs (I love the sharper tang of period instrument performances, myself), but this was certainly one of the suavest — clear and polished and full of crisp colors. The first of them to be played was No. 3, which was enjoyable but a little on the polite side for my taste — in the last movement especially, I like a faster pace and for the occasional cross rhythms to have more of a kick to them.

No. 2, which was next on the program, was a particular joy — all four soloists (Nadya Tichman on violin, Robin McKee on flute, Jonathan Fischer on oboe, and John Thiessen on trumpet) were terrific, both individually and as an ensemble. In No. 6, the four solo violas were led by Jonathan Vinocour, who can produce an amazingly beautiful, rich sound out of his instrument. (He is also looking very woofy lately with his scruffy red beard.) The ensemble playing, the back-and-forth conversations where a theme is tossed around from instrument to instrument, all of it was clear and intricate and a lot of fun to hear.

The concert ended with Handel’s Music for the Royal Fireworks and I’m afraid my mind started wandering again.

The second concert, a few days later, was conducted by Alexander Barantschik, who also played all the violin solos — halfway through the program it finally dawned on me that Brandenburgs Nos. 1, 4, and 5 have in common a violin among the soloists, and that’s why the six were divvied up that way.

This concert is now a strong candidate for the least enjoyable concert I’ve ever attended performed by an orchestra that wasn’t actually playing wrong notes. The Brandenburgs aren’t concertos in the modern sense; they’re not showpieces for a virtuoso soloist with the rest of the orchestra reduced to a supporting role. Each of the Brandenburgs has at least three soloists, and they spend more time playing as a small ensemble than they do playing individually. The point is in the musical conversation back and forth between the large group and the small group. So — with the exception of one portion of one movement, which I’ll get to in a moment — the orchestra is every bit as important as the group of soloists.

Mr. Barantschik and his players, though, seemed to think that these were bravura violin concertos in the Romantic style, or at least that they could be turned into something resembling that with enough determination. The result wasn’t happy.

No. 1 (my personal favorite of the six) was the most successful of the three, mostly because the violin is only one of six soloists. Three of the others are horns, in fact, and the parts Bach wrote for them are scene stealers.

But now and then Mr. Barantschik did have a violin solo, and when he played, it suddenly seemed like he’d stepped in from the wrong century. His playing was yearning, passionate, rhythmically free, with more than a touch of Gypsy in it, and it floated above all the other instruments instead of blending with them. His violin was even tuned slightly sharper than the rest of the orchestra, the way a soloist in a nineteenth-century violin concerto will sometimes do to make him stand out against the orchestra rather than blend in. There was no back-and-forth between the solo violin and the other instruments, just the violin soaring rhapsodically above the background music provided by the rest of the orchestra. Which is perfectly fine for a bravura showpiece for a star violinist, but not so good for intricate baroque counterpoint. Considered apart from its context, it was beautiful, even sumptuous playing, but oh did it ever not belong in this music.

This was only an intermittant annoyance in No. 1, but it got sillier and more irritating in No. 4. With fewer soloists, and none of them horns, there were more frequent opportunities for the violin to seize attention at the expense of the music as a whole.

But then No. 5 actually made me angry. I had already said to Dave at intermission that I didn’t see why they didn’t just use a modern grand piano instead of a harpsichord if they were going to play the concertos in this way. With the louder modern instruments playing in the louder modern style, the harpsichord was very difficult to hear in the first two concertos, just an indistinct tinkling in the background.

Well, in No. 5, the soloists are the violin, flute, and harpsichord, and the first movement — the exception I mentioned earlier — ends with a very lengthy, difficult, and flashy cadenza for the harpsichord. This is far and away the most prominent solo turn in all the Brandenburgs, the one time any instrument is actually called on to show off for a couple of minutes while the rest of the orchestra keeps quiet. Music historians point to this movement as a percursor, in fact, to what the concerto later became.

Furthermore, playing the harpsichord was Robin Sutherland, the Symphony’s phenomenally wonderful keyboard player. So we figured at least the harpsichord cadenza would be stunning, as it’s the one place in the Brandenburgs where this kind of all-focus-on-the-virtuoso approach is not completely misguided.

Well, the way the orchestra was arranged for No. 5, the harpsichord was behind the other two soloists, the violin and the flute, when it desperately needed to be up front and center — no, it really needed to be positioned smack in the middle of the audience, if only that were possible. In any case, something, anything that would have helped correct the imbalance ought to have been done. Even just seeing Mr. Sutherland more clearly might have helped things, if only psychologically. But as it was, even during the passages where no one was playing but the three soloists, the harpsichord was faint against the other two instruments, and the effect was of a duet for flute and violin with some unimportant harpsichord doodling in the background to fill in the harmonies.

What’s happening in the music during this passage, as we move toward the cadenza, is that the harpsichord is gradually taking on more and more importance and the flute and violin are being reduced to melodic fragments. But with the harpsichord weak in the background, none of that came off — it just sounded like Bach was running out of music for the two real soloists, the violin and the flute, to play.

During the big cadenza itself, the rest of the orchestra was silent, so at least we could finally hear the harpsichord distinctly. But the volume was still so low compared with everything else we’d been hearing the whole evening that it came off as anticlimactic.

This was frustrating, but hey, even great artists now and then make really dumb miscalculations, and I was ready to give everybody the benefit of a doubt and write it all off as a bizarre but ultimately well-meaning attempt to try something different that just didn’t come off. However, Mr. Barantschik’s manner during the cadenza pushed me over from merely frustrated to actually angry.

As I said, the way the soloists were arranged for this concerto, Mr. Barantschik and the flautist were standing in front of the harpsichord. As the cadenza started, Mr. Barantschik stepped several feet to one side, which sounds innocuous enough in writing but which in the moment seemed like an ostentatious, attention-drawing movement — the star of the show gracious stepping aside to let someone else have his brief moment. Even sillier, Mr. Barantschik actually picked up his music stand and carried it with him, which had no purpose that I could see other than to make the gesture that much more theatrical — it wasn’t like moving the music stand was going to help us hear the harpsichord any better. The flautist, I have to say, did the same thing, but a moment later, and it looked like he had not been expecting this and was uneasily following Mr. Barantschik’s lead.

Then, instead of paying attention to (or at least feigning attention to) Mr. Sutherland’s cadenza, Mr. Barantschik stared intensely at his music, nodding his head with the beat all the while — an attention-drawing movement that I and my fellow amateur musicians have been sternly warned against by the conductor in every musical group I’ve been part of since grade school, so how is it that Mr. Barantschik doesn’t realize how distracting it is? Anyway, I know the cadenza well enough to know roughly where we are in it without having to stare at the music — just by, you know, listening — and surely Mr. Barantschik knows the music far better than me. So this seemed like gratuitously ungracious behavior.

As Mr. Sutherland approached the climax of his showpiece, Mr. Barantschik lifted up his violin with an air of getting himself ready to come in on time — except that it was much earlier than he actually needed to get ready, and I cannot see what point there was to this other than to make a large physical movement that would pull the audience’s attention back to him (or at least the attention of that portion of the audience that wasn’t already focused on the bobbing of his head) a moment before the high point of another soloist’s turn.

The Handel piece that night — yet another Water Music suite — turned out to be the most satisfying thing the whole evening, in spite of its relative triviality as music. The orchestra was clearly enjoying itself as it played, everybody was listening to one another and responding to one another, and nobody was trying to twist the music into something it wasn’t. This is a fine orchestra, and if they’d played the three Brandenburgs in that spirit, it would have been a fine concert.

Anatol at the Aurora

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Anatol at the Aurora was terrific. Mike Ryan is both adorable and exasperating as Anatol — he made me believe that women would keep falling in love with Anatol and also made me believe that women would keep breaking up with him. Tim Kniffin as Max is funny and quite a bit more acid than I’ve imagined Max to be when I’ve read the play.

Delia MacDougall is really brilliant and often hilarious as six of Anatol’s lovers — a different one in each scene. Her performance is partly a tour de force and partly a quick-change stunt, and I’m not sure that in my ideal production I wouldn’t rather see two or three women splitting the roles, but she pulls off the six roles with great style and assurance.

She’s especially touching as an former lover of Anatol’s in a chance encounter on Christmas Eve, and especially hilarious as a ballerina eagerly wolfing down the expensive after-performance supper of oysters and champagne and Sacher torte that Anatol is buying her, determined to enjoy it even though the two of them are quarreling all through the meal, for she knows that the relationship is ending and that it will probably be her last fancy supper for a long time, and she can’t bear not to savor it.

Barbara Oliver’s staging is lovely, inventive and lively, but at the same time simple and direct. (I was misremembering before, though, when I said she directed that wonderful Vanya — welcome to late middle age, Scott. She was in it but did not direct it.)

Seeing the play in performance for my first time, I found that some parts of it seemed fairly facile to me again, just as the whole play had when I first read it in college. While I like the play much better now than I did in college, I can see why I felt the way I did. Some of it is predictable stuff. The first scene in particular seems that way to me, taking a fair amount of time to reach a conclusion that is telegraphed early on, and I think it gets the play off to a weak start.

But along with the sometimes-too-pat plotting is a lot of wonderful insight into a character who is maddingly, hilariously oblivious to his own nature and how he sabotages himself in his relationships with women.

The play is in seven unconnected vignettes; in this production one is dropped and the order of the others is slightly changed — probably in large part to make Ms. MacDougall’s changes of costume and character more manageable. Nothing wrong with any of that, but as long as they were switching things around, I do kind of wish that they’d dropped the first vignette instead. The vignette they don’t use involves Anatol’s affair with a married woman, and to me it has a bracing bleakness to it — on the page, anyway — that the other scenes don’t have, even the bittersweet Christmas Eve scene, and it makes an affecting contrast with the comedy of most of the scenes.

Mustard and Ketchup

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Neat article in the food section of today’s Contra Costa Times about homemade condiments — flavored mustards, mayonnaises, and ketchups. Mmm.

I don’t care much for mayonnaise, but I’ve been making homemade mustard every now and then for a long time now. It’s very easy, and you can even whip up a batch in about 90 seconds and use it on sandwiches at once; while it won’t be as yummy as if you let it sit for a while, it’ll still have a great, fresh, bright flavor. (Just grind some mustard seeds to a powder and add a few drops of liquid to make a paste. That’s it. Use yellow seeds or brown seeds — which are hotter — or a mix of the two, use whatever kind of vinegar or wine or sake sounds good at the moment, maybe add a pinch of salt and/or any other spice that sounds good with the sandwich you’re making. Improvise! Yum!)

I don’t like ketchup, at least not the commercial kind — it’s too sweet for my taste and if you look at the label you’ll find out why — but I’ve never tried making my own, and I suspect I might like ketchup a lot more if it were savory rather than sweet. Doesn’t sound that hard, though if you make it from fresh tomatoes instead of sauce it takes a long, long simmer. Maybe that’ll be a project for a weekend sometime soon.

Listener Statistics

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One of the things most amazing to me about the Listener puzzle is that, even though prizes go only to the first three entries drawn at random each week, every entry is checked, and a full record is kept of how each individual solver does through the year. Given that there must be a thousand or so people who submit at least one entry during the year, this seems both wonderful and awfully obsessive-compulsive to me. And a tribute to the cult-like following that the Listener crossword has acquired over the decades.

Around the end of each March, you can send in a self-addressed stamped envelope and receive a ten-page report about the previous year’s puzzles. This report lists:

  • all the year’s puzzles, identified by number, name, and constructor, along with statistics about how many correct and incorrect entries were received for each and how many of those entries were from new solvers
  • a list of the most common errors made in each puzzle
  • the top 200 or so solvers, along with the numbers of the puzzles (if any) they got wrong
  • a table summarizing how many of the people who sent in x errors during the year got y correct (for example, of the seven people who sent in exactly 27 entries during the year, one got 26 correct and two each got 25, 21, and 20 correct, and what possible interest there is in these data I cannot fathom)
  • a report of the annual dinner that is held for the constructors (in British terminology, setters) of that year’s Listener puzzles, which many solvers also attend

I made the list of top solvers this year (yay!), getting only three puzzles wrong out of the year’s 53. The first page of the list is taken up by those who made none, one, or two errors, so my three are enough that I only make it to the second page. And not even near the top of the second page! Those who miss the same number of puzzles are further ranked by when they made their errors (the longer your string of correct solutions from the beginning of the year, the better), and as I made my first error on the second puzzle of the year, I am near the bottom of those who made three errors. I haven’t yet counted exactly where I am in the rankings, but it looks like somewhere around 70th or 75th. Not a dazzling performance, but not too bad.

I knew about one of the errors already — while looking at the published solution to one of the puzzles, I spotted that I’d put in the wrong spelling of an archaic word that has several spellings given in Chambers Dictionary, apparently having never taken the time to go back and double-check that my chosen spelling fit the wordplay in the clue (it didn’t quite). As this puzzle was late in the year, my excuse is that I was preoccupied with finishing The Manga Flute. But the other two errors were a surprise, both of them looking like silly copying errors I must have made when preparing my entry.

Into the stapled packet of photocopied pages is folded a single, additional, loose piece of paper. It is a list of the exact errors that you personally made during the year — yes, it really tells you that you got 18 Across wrong on this puzzle and 25 Down wrong on that puzzle and so on. Do you not find it both wonderful and freaky that, in this day and age, there is somebody in England, who cannot possibly be getting more than a modest stipend at best for all this, who week in and week out is actually keeping track of these things for a thousand or so solvers, and will send you your individual stats for the year just for a self-addressed stamped envelope? Overseas solvers like me don’t even have to send stamps, just the self-addressed envelope.

But even this is not the part I find most wonderful and freakiest of all. It is that this list of your own personal errors is neatly written out — yes, I mean by hand — on a sheet of lined paper, the three-hole looseleaf notebook kind. Amazing. Just amazing.

“Ballad”

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I finished this Friday’s Listener crossword, “Ballad” by Elgin, late Saturday morning after a longer struggle than usual.

It’s a tough puzzle. The across clues aren’t given entry numbers for the grid, and they are listed not in order of their appearance but in the alphabetical order of their answers. Now, this actually helps a lot in solving them: You can figure that a clue, say, about a third of the way down in the list probably starts with a letter around F or G or H. Then as you find some of the answers, that helps narrow down the possibilities for the rest; if one answer is GENERAL and the answer two clues down is GOLDFISH, then you know that the answer to the clue between them starts with a G and the second letter is somewhere between E and O, which probably means GE, GH, GI, GL, GN, or GO. So even without any help from crossing letters, the possibilities for the across clues narrow pretty rapidly, and it wasn’t all that long before I had close to half of them solved.

However, you could solve all the across answers and still not know where to put any of them in the grid. For that, you need help from some down clues. Down clues are ordered normally, so once you solve one you know exactly where in the grid to place it. But you don’t get any help from crossing letters till you’ve placed a few of the across answers, and you can’t place any of the across answers till you’ve solved some of the down answers, so you have to solve at least a handful of the down clues without any help from crossing letters before you can start filling in any of the grid.

But on top of that, the across answers may be entered either left to right or right to left, and there are no vertical bars to show where across entries begin and end, so that has to be deduced as you go along, and there are additional strange things in the instructions about a missing column in the grid and two across answers that have to be entered overlapping and some unknown number of across answers that aren’t entered in the grid at all, and these things also have to be figured out as you go along.

And on top of that, the clues are a lot harder than usual, though inventive and fair, I’d say. So all in all I found filling the grid to be a slo-o-o-o-ow, gradual process.

I didn’t figure out what the theme of the puzzle was until I’d just about finished filling the grid. But it’s a delightful surprise to discover the theme and see how it is worked into the puzzle in several amusing ways, justifying all the odd things about the puzzle. Everything comes together very satisfyingly. All in all, a tough puzzle, but worth the struggle.

There are a few clues where I know from the completed grid that I must have the right answer but I still don’t understand the wordplay. For another clue, I think I understand the wordplay but the clue seems to involve an alternative spelling that, while perfectly familiar to me, is nevertheless not given in Chambers Dictionary, or at least in the iPhone version (the only version that I have the latest edition in). That seems like it shouldn’t be kosher according to the rules of the Listener puzzle, but I’m not really sure.

Showing My Age

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I just caught myself saying “Looks like we’re on the same wavelength” to a man who is easily young enough to be my son. My god, am I establishing myself as an old fart or what? Hey Grampa, that’s a ham radio metaphor! That is ancient technology!

Obviously I should have said “Looks like we’re on the same page”.

Anatol

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Over the last few days I’ve reread Schnitzler’s play Anatol, to get ready for the Aurora Theater production which we’re planning to see.

I don’t think I’ve looked at the play since my twenties. If I remember correctly, I was actually looking for a copy of Reigen (meaning Round Dance, but best known in English as La Ronde after the movie version), which I’d seen a production of, and while I was browsing through some used-book store or other, I came across the Modern Library edition of some of Schnitzler’s plays, including Anatol. Some time later I came across a wonderful little book of the published letters between an experienced actress and a young man just starting out, in which she writes about the art of acting in comedy, and she uses the last scene of Anatol as the basis for many of her examples, so I was glad to have a copy of the play handy.

Still, I don’t remember thinking much of the play when I was younger. My recollection is that I thought it was arch and facile, going after paradoxes and contradictions for easy laughs at the expense of believable characterization.

Oh my. Well, what can I say, I was in my twenties and didn’t understand much about human nature yet. On rereading it, I find that the paradoxes and contradictions in the play seem very true to me of how people actually are. Just not true of the way we think we are when we’re in our twenties. The way Schnitzler pokes fun at Anatol’s self-imposed delusions — with affection and understanding, perhaps, but unsparingly all the same — reminds me a lot now of Chekhov and Ibsen. (I know, I know, Ibsen??? But in my middle age I have come to think of both of them as two of the greatest comic playwrights ever.) The director of Anatol, Barbara Oliver, directed the sharpest and at the same time the funniest Uncle Vanya I think I’ve ever seen a few years ago, so I’m expecting that she’ll do right by Schnitzler, too, and I’m greatly looking forward to the play. (Later: Whoops. Ms. Oliver was in that production but did not direct it. I’m getting forgetful in my advancing age, I fear. That doesn’t change the fact that Barbara Oliver is a longtime favorite director of mine and Dave’s.)

I was struck by how similar Anatol is in structure and theme to the musical Company. Anatol has no story; it’s just a series of seven vignettes, each showing Anatol’s relationship with a different woman. Taken all together, they’re a shrewd and funny and rather sad portrait of a man who is completely deluded about love, who wallows in his illusions about it and refuses to give them up even when it should be obvious that they are not serving him well. As a result, even though he thinks of himself as an expert on love and the human heart, he’s completely barricaded himself off from any genuine love in his life.

One considerable difference is that in Company Bobby eventually comes to see through the lies he tells himself and makes a psychological breakthrough — and it’s by far the least convincing part of the story. Anatol gets to the end of his play having not learned a thing; the only real difference between the first scene of the play and the last is that at the end Anatol has gotten himself into a much bigger mess than he ever has before. Yet I find the ending of Anatol very satisfying, at least in the reading of it, and after seeing the show several times I still find the ending of Company a real letdown.

But I’ve never seen Anatol staged before, so I’ll have to see how I think it works once I’ve seen it in performance.

Curiously, Anatol has much more in common with Company than it does with The Gay Life, AKA The High Life, the 1950s musical that was ostensibly based on it. I’ve never seen the show and I don’t have a copy of its book, so everything I know about the story is from a couple of synopses I’ve read. But it looks like they basically threw out the play, threw out most of the characters, threw out everything the play is about, and replaced it all with a rather trite, sentimental story about a playboy who is in the end reformed by an innocent young woman who loves him. Blech. Why bother with the pretense of adapting a play if you’re going to throw out everything but your central character? And not even really keeping him, just keeping his name and changing the essence of his personality. I’ve got the original cast album, too, but I haven’t listened to it much. There’s one song I like a lot, “Something You Never Had Before,” but the rest of the score has always seemed rather lame and false to me.