Terry Teachout's Blog, page 107

TT: Francis Poulenc, maître

In today's Wall Street Journal "Sightings" column I commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the death of Francis Poulenc. Here's an excerpt.

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When Francis Poulenc died fifty years ago this month, the world of classical music sorrowfully noted the passing of a delightful artist of the second rank. Even his friends seem to have thought him a bit of a lightweight. The British composer Lennox Berkeley, who knew and loved Poulenc, wrote an obituary that praised the "touching tenderness and simplicity of heart" of his ever-so-French music--but went on to say in the very next breath that he "lacked the power of large-scale construction." Talk about faint damns!

That was in 1963, at a time when the classical-music establishment was still in thrall to the postwar professoriat of Austro-German composers and their foreign epigones who believed that the future of music lay not with traditional harmony but with Schoenberg-style serialism. They thought it to be historically inevitable, and had no use for those who disagreed. Least of all did they care for composers who, like Poulenc, happily embraced tunefulness and wit and sought to give pleasure to their audiences. Such dour folk took it for granted that pleasure was bad for you.

Today the avant-garde monopoly is a thing of the blessedly distant past, but Poulenc, though his music continues to be played around the world, is still widely seen as a lightweight. Not that there'd be anything wrong with that--lightness of touch has always been undervalued in the world of art--but to write him off as a mere charmer is perversely wrongheaded....

What is it about Poulenc's music that makes it hard for some listeners to understand exactly how good it is? Part of the problem, I suspect, is that he really did start out as a lightweight, an impish comedian with a dilettantish streak. His first great success, "Le Bestiaire" (1919, words by Guillaume Apollinaire), was a song cycle about animal life that is scarcely four minutes long. Even after his music grew more ambitious, he was still inclined to slip his audiences the occasional wink....

For all his humor, though, Poulenc was at bottom a deeply serious artist who never quite managed to reconcile the two sides of his no less deeply divided personality....

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Read the whole thing here .

Jean-Pierre Rampal plays the slow movement of Francis Poulenc's Flute Sonata, accompanied by the composer:

TT: Almanac

"It is a good morning exercise for a research scientist to discard a pet hypothesis every day before breakfast."

Konrad Lorenz, On Aggression

TT: So you want to see a show?

Here's my list of recommended Broadway, off-Broadway, and out-of-town shows, updated weekly. In all cases, I gave these shows favorable reviews (if sometimes qualifiedly so) in The Wall Street Journal when they opened. For more information, click on the title.

BROADWAY:

• Annie (musical, G, reviewed here)

• The Mystery of Edwin Drood (musical, PG-13, closes Mar. 10, reviewed here)

• Once (musical, G/PG-13, nearly all performances sold out last week, reviewed here)

• Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (drama, PG-13/R, reviewed here)

OFF BROADWAY:

• Avenue Q (musical, R, adult subject matter and one show-stopping scene of puppet-on-puppet sex, reviewed here)

• The Fantasticks (musical, G, suitable for children capable of enjoying a love story, reviewed here)

CLOSING SOON ON BROADWAY:

• Evita (musical, PG-13, closes Jan. 26, many performances sold out last week, reviewed here)

CLOSING SOON IN SARASOTA, FLA.:

• The Best of Enemies (drama, PG-13, closes Feb. 2, reviewed here)

CLOSING NEXT WEEK IN BOSTON:

• Our Town (drama, G, remounting of off-Broadway production, closes Jan. 25, original production reviewed here)

CLOSING NEXT WEEK IN FORT MYERS, FLA.:

• The Little Foxes (drama, PG-13, closes Jan. 26, reviewed here)

CLOSING SUNDAY ON BROADWAY:

• Glengarry Glen Ross (drama, R, nearly all performances sold out last week, reviewed here)

• Golden Boy (drama, PG-13, reviewed here)

CLOSING SUNDAY OFF BROADWAY:

• The Freedom of the City (drama, PG-13, reviewed here)

• Tribes (drama, PG-13, reviewed here)

TT: Almanac

"A suicide kills two people, Maggie, that's what it's for!"

Arthur Miller, After the Fall

TT: Almanac

"Only people who die very young learn all they really need to know in kindergarten."

Wendy Kaminer, I'm Dysfunctional, You're Dysfunctional

TT: Snapshot

Mike Wallace interviews Salvador Dali in 1958:



(This is the latest in a series of arts-related videos that appear in this space each Monday and Wednesday.)

TT: Lookback

From 2004:

I was channel-surfing the other day and stumbled across Woody Allen's Play It Again, Sam, which opens with the last scene from Casablanca. The camera pulls back to reveal Allen watching the film in a small art house--the kind of theater of which Manhattan once had many, but now has only a few.

As I watched, I thought, I wonder how many people under the age of 45 saw Casablanca for the first time in a theater? I'm 47, and I first saw it in a Kansas City revival house a quarter-century ago, just prior to the introduction of home video recorders. Back then, seeing Casablanca anywhere was still a big deal: it didn't get shown all that often on local TV stations, and there weren't yet any cable networks devoted exclusively to old movies. Come to think of it, there weren't any cable networks, period....

Read the whole thing here .

TT: Almanac

"Speeches measured by the hour, die with the hour."

Thomas Jefferson, letter to David Harding, Apr. 20, 1824

TT: Before you knew it

On Friday I pried myself away from Mrs. T and Duke Ellington, flew up to New York, and went directly to Broadway, where I saw The Other Place. The next day I caught back-to-back performances of Picnic and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, which is a lot of thwarted sexuality for one day. On Sunday I saw an off-Broadway matinee, Water by the Spoonful, then headed for LaGuardia and flew from there to Sanibel Island by way of Charlotte, North Carolina.

It was a wildly hectic weekend, though I did manage to get some reading done on the plane. I've been making my way through new biographies of two notable men of the theater, Marc Blitzstein and Thornton Wilder, and in the course of reading Howard Pollack's Marc Blitzstein: His Life, His Work, His World , I ran across a paragraph that I very much wish I'd had at my fingertips while writing Pops . It's about the version of "Mack the Knife" that Blitzstein wrote for his English-language adaptation of The Threepenny Opera:

Blitzstein found the song's many renditions "more or less acceptable," although he thought performers "often weighed down by a self-consciousness amounting to awe." In 1958, he singled out [Louis] Armstrong's relese and Turk Murphy's less successful instrumental version as "having caught, in American terms of course, the sardonic insouciance asked for." Even earlier, in late 1955, he recommended that Sam Wanamaker, in casting the Street Singer for the London production, listen to Armstrong's "fabulous" recording: "It brings us absolutely into the world of the work--American in style, of couse, so that an English equivalent should be found."

Who knew?

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In an excerpt from Satchmo the Great, Edward R. Murrow's film documentary, Louis Armstrong and the All Stars perform "Mack the Knife" on stage in London in 1956:

TT: Just because

Bing Crosby and Louis Armstrong sing "Dardanella" on The Hollywood Palace in 1965:



(This is the latest in a series of arts-related videos that appear in this space each Monday and Wednesday.)