Odds and Ends

Friday, August 15, 1997

There are a few items that have occurred to me lately, that didn't fit into an entry. So this will be a pot-pourri of odds and ends.

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I bought the Savoy Opera version of Iolanthe the other day. I don't remember when I first got interested in Gilbert and Sullivan. It certainly wasn't when I was at music school! There was quite a bit of prejudice against singers there. Maybe it was when I developed a huge crush on Kevin Kline as the Pirate King in the early eighties. I know that G&S were one of my mini-obsessions after that. I have quite a colllection of books about them, and I have seen most of their works performed live. Even versions that aren't very good are usually still worth seeing.

Sullivan's music deserves more credit than he gets. He was not just a Victorian hack. There are all sorts of clever touches that have their effect, though you might not notice them. He was more celebrated than Gilbert during their lives. His non-Gilbertian music is worth listening to, but not listening to over and over.

Gilbert's writing survives the topicality that made it popular when first written. I never get tired of some of his jokes. The pirates capture the maidens, because they want to "wed" them. Their soft hearts mean they let the maidens go, because their elderly father, the Major General, pleads that he is "an orphan boy."

So I listened all day to Iolanthe. There is some real emotion here, and the Gilbertian paradoxes, and the Sullivan musical references to "A Midsummer Night's Dream" overture.

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I also bought Winterreise by Schubert, performed by Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau. This is a song cycle (the title means "the Winter's Journey") that has some of the saddest music and poetry you'll ever hear. I didn't follow along in the lyric translations for fear of bursting into tears sitting at my desk. The recording was one made in the sixties, now polished up for a cd re-release. Gorgeous sound! The funny part was that Deutsche-Grammaphon had printed the cd to look like an LP! A black border with fake "grooves" with the familiar DG label in the center. I laughed out loud when I saw it!

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The strangest thing that I have seen on my commute lately: As part of a highway construction project (which has been going on forever, of course) they are going to double the width of an overpass on 520. They finally got to the point where they were going to bridge that gap, after all the prep work was done. They brought in huge, precast concrete beams. The strange part was that these beams weren't on trailers, they were trailers. They attached wheels to both ends, and attached a truck cab to the front.