Parker Ramsay

Interfaith coupledom has entered a new phase. Friday night, Richard and I headed up to B’nai Jeshurun on 88th Street a little after 6 o’clock. Having become accustomed to relatively poor church attendance rates in Manhattan, watching a room and balcony fill up with congregants was a jolt to the system. People talked enthusiastically before the service as the oud and clarinet tuned up in front of the bimah. Within ten minutes there was singing with dancing soon thereafter.

Unfamiliar with the proto-Mediterranean music, the order of service or the essence of what being there ought to be about, my only point of reference were correlating elements with the Anglican tradition. Preparation for Sabbath begins with the 95th Psalm, the same Psalm which constitutes the Venite, the first appointed canticle for the service of Matins. Much like Evensong, Psalms are essential to getting the service going. Far more was sung than said in the service. And even more was read privately than sung.

I admit I had never thought of reading as having a physical embodiment until Friday. Fellow congregants read psalms, prayers or other texts at their own pace, partaking in a middle ground of public performance and private devotion that doesn’t exist in the Anglican Eucharist. One might have near silence at points, or low level muttering and chanting of psalms, as well as occasions when the congregation is singing portions of the psalms in unison.

I realized that Anglicanism’s Catholic heritage has provided somewhat of a zero-sum game when it comes to participation in the service. Either you are watching, or you are sitting/standing/reading/singing exactly the same thing as your fellow congregants at the same time. Recited sections of text are often short, memorable, easily reproducible. The theatrical nature of Catholicism is beautiful, yes, but it’s built on the dark historical reality of illiteracy. Indeed the Eucharist has become beautiful over the centuries, but perhaps only due to necessity. After all, for hundreds of years, Christian children with intellectual promise were relegated to lives of celibacy in the church. Literacy did not pass from parent to child, but from cleric to novice.

I suppose I identified most with the very end of the Sabbath preparation and the singing of the L’cha dodi. It tells of anticipation for the arrival of God’s bride in the Sabbath, but also in awaiting Jesse’s son of Bethlehem, the foretold Messiah. In the final verse, the congregation turns to face the entrance to the synagogue, welcoming in the Sabbath as she enters as well as expecting the Messianic arrival.

Richard came to church this morning. It was a good morning for it, musically speaking. While I’d like to think every Sunday in front of the choir is a good musical occasion, Advent is special and weird. Think about it: it’s a season of waiting for something that we already know is coming. We get to be bleak, but it’s one that’s fairlt insincere. Christ isn’t not going to be born, and Episcopalians don’t really believe in hell or consequential divine intervention, anway. In this sense, there’s a dramatic element to the swathes of fire and brimstone, wailing and penitence, lying in the knowledge that there will be a release of the tension come December 24. We can’t un-remember that Christmas is coming – it’s kind of essential to the whole Christianity thing.

With little exception, I’m guilty of doing the same music every year for Advent. It’s simply not Advent without Byrd’s setting of words from the Lamentations of Jeremiah, utilized in the second section of the Advent Prose.

Civitas sancti tui facta est deserta. Sion deserta facta est, Jerusalem desolata est.

Living under the reign of Elizabeth I, William Byrd may have been more familiar with desolation and general bleakness than many composers throughout history. The English Reformation was still not over, and the fate of English Roman Catholics was unsure. Byrd’s Canciones Sacrae of 1589 were composed and compiled in a period of relatively violent period. There are at least eight martyrs officially recognized by the Catholic Church who died in 1589 for their faith. The relatively small scale of its contents point to the extent to which Roman Catholic liturgy had been diminished. Gone were extravagant and lengthy anthems for the English Marian liturgy, the likes of which were found in the Eton Choirbook. Byrd’s works instead hearken back to the smaller anthems compiled in the 1575 Cantiones quae ab argumento sacrae vocantur, such as Thomas Tallis’s In jejunio et fletu.

In jejunio et fletu orabant sacerdotes: Parce, Domine, parce populo tuo, et ne des hereditatem tuam in perditionem. Inter vestibulum et altare plorabant sacerdotes, dicentes: Parce populo tuo.

(In fasting and weeping the priests prayed: Spare, O Lord, spare thy people, and give not thine inheritance to perdition. Between the porch and the altar the priests wept, saying: Spare thy people.)

If anything from this period could be seen in a Dickensian light, it would be the Byrd’s and Tallis’s Reformation era Latin works. Like Dickens’s prose, the counterpoint speaks fluently of depressing matters.

In the hardest working part of Coketown; in the innermost fortifications of that ugly citadel, where Nature was as strongly bricked out as killing airs and gases were bricked in; at the heart of the labyrinth of narrow courts upon courts, and close streets upon streets, which had come into existence piecemeal, every piece in a violent hurry for some one man’s purpose, and the whole an unnatural family, shouldering, and trampling, and pressing one another to death; in the last close nook of this great exhausted receiver, where the chimneys, for want of air to make a draught, were built in an immense variety of stunted and crooked shapes, as though every house put out a sign of the kind of people who might be expected to be born in it; among the multitude of Coketown, generically called ‘the Hands,’ — a race who would have found mere favour with some people, if Providence had seen fit to make them only hands, or, like the lower creatures of the seashore, only hands and stomachs.                                                                                  (Hard Times, Charles Dickens)

One gets enjoyment out of reading Dickens, as the landscape and environment are so equally detailed in their descriptions. The interaction between space and the lives of the characters in Hard Times keeps the reader wondering if there really is any way out of Coketown.

Like Dickens, Byrd has way of getting at a similar sort of dramatic claustrophobia. Byrd’s situation of Civitas Sancti in a major key is deceptive. If one listens to the harmonies alone, without text, one might hear tones of comfort or sentimentality. But the middle section, Sion deserta facta est, is in pure homophony, total stagnation.

And yet the counterpoint tells a different story. Throughout the course of the anthem, the thematic material takes a interesting journey.

Each of the themes contain elements of each other. “Jerusalem” and “Civitas Sancti” use the same melodic descending third. The first “desolata est” and “facta est deserta” share the same rhythm.

They both come together however, in the final thematic iteration of “desolata est,” containing the same melody of the opening theme with the rhythmic impetus of the second.

The piece has travelled and at the same time the music has not. Though time passes, the listener is in the same place as when the piece began. Desolation may entail some vague expectation of improvement, but it’s also a confrontation of that which is in front of you. Otherwise, it will just remain the same. There is no hope without the preceding hopelessness.

The Jerusalem declaration did not go unnoticed at either B’nai Jeshurun or Christ & Saint Stephen’s. How could it not? The historical importance of the city draws the eyes of the world week after week, year after year, though solutions seem far away. But both congregations were told that while Jerusalem is important, it’s but a preparation for that Jerusalem which is to come.

But that doesn’t negate certain realities. Whether you like it or not, the State of Israel has made Jerusalem its political capital, irrespective of Donald Trump’s symbolic act of recognition. The status quo remains the same. The silver lining of Trump’s actions is perhaps the fact that we are asking ourselves about what the alternatives really are to the last 50 years of American policy in the Middle East. What are we anticipating? Is Advent – or indeed, are our lives – spent in confrontation or expectation?

A slightly touchy interview with Jean Rondeau for VAN Magazine.

https://van-us.atavist.com/juste

Café Grumpy, sat in the middle of West 20th Street in Chelsea, is a bit of a scene on weekday mornings. Most coffee shops in the city have a distinctive clientele: Blue Bottle in Williamsburg is half tech industry robots and half hipsters pretending not to work in the tech industry; Joe on Columbus and 68th is primarily moms and musicians. La Colombe on Vandam is solid early-30s professional types on break from advertising and general social media whoring.

This coffee haunt is not so dissimilar in that all the customers are in desperate need of coffee, but there’s a gentler vibe. One door down is Harmony House, a publicly subsidized building for low income and homeless people living with HIV and AIDS. Two doors down is the local police precinct. Gay bars and chic restaurants line 8th Avenue just once you get to the end of the block. You get the idea – West 20th Street between 7th and 8th Avenues is a strange intersection in the heart of Chelsea. As with most Thursday mornings, there are a number of bleary eyed queens recovering from Wednesday nights at Gym or the Eagle. But you also have cops, citizens waiting on friends to get out of the precinct, families and friends of Harmony House residents, as well as the slew of standard professionals who live in newer luxury buildings on 7th Avenue.

Another variety of customer is the pet owner, grabbing a cup of coffee prior to heading to the vet’s office on 18th Street. There’s always a dog owner there with a small breed dog, purchased at CitiPups and spayed or neutered at Heart of Chelsea across the street. Owners like me, often too overwhelmed by the prospect of finding a new vet, stick with the vet that first knew the dog, though the office may be 25 minutes away by train and extremely overpriced. But if the long and expensive trip to the vet were not enough, other matters have caused relations with my pooch to be a bit frayed in the last few days. On Tuesday, I had to head to the Juilliard Store to buy a new copy of Handel’s Harp Concerto, as my own copy had turned up someplace I had not expected: my dog’s anus.

I’ll be the first to admit that videos and photos of dogs surrounded by destroyed pieces of paper taken by good-natured owners are hilarious. But what they don’t tell you is that dogs don’t necessarily digest the pieces of paper they swallow. Indeed, one can certainly fathom my surprise when I went to pick up Lunchmeat (my dog) after a walk last week, only to find a dingle of feces trailing from her rear end, attached to her sphinctre by a thin piece of paper. Though disgusted, I spared my Corgi any further embarrassment and dutifully removed the turd and accompanying bit of paper. Indeed, it was only a sliver of paper, but its provenance was unmistakeable. I looked down and saw F-G-A-B-flat, the famous first four notes of the piece. Upon returning home, I looked under the kitchen table to find the remnants of my Andrew Lawrence King edition, missing the cover, preface and first page.

This is not the first time this has happened with Lunchmeat. It’s of course natural that her literary interests would range beyond music, and into current affairs. Her normal paper diet consists of Richard’s law papers emitting from his bag left unzipped in the kitchen, copies of Foreign Affairs from the living room, back issues of the New York Review, and even last month’s issue of Harper’s (which I never got to read). Indeed her tastes have advanced from her initial forays into paper consumption just 4 weeks ago, when she would eat her soiled pee pads when she got bored (I should like to add that these are even less digestible than Breitkopf editions of Handel concerti).

Ironically, the vet’s visit this morning had nothing to do with her bowels (or my sheet music) but with a certain build up of green gunk in her eyes due to rolling around in each and every dirt hole she can find on the west side of Central Park. As usual, Dr. Nguyen was fantastic with Lunchmeat. He’s an animal whisperer of sorts, able to get animals to stave off wiggling long enough to check their ears, look at their teeth and shove a thermometer up where the rest of my Handel resides (yes, I’m still annoyed).

Scores are replaceable, but markings aren’t. Fingerings are one thing, but some instructions about where to ornament, change octaves and how to dress up the piece were embedded even on the first page. But for this score there was some sentimental value too, as different teachers from New York, Paris and London had written comments over the course of my education. Fortunately the rest of the score was salvageable and I could transfer some markings, but the thought of losing this score entirely – as with many scores – is heartbreaking. After all, it’s the first “concerto” that we harpists learn. It’s a rite of passage, a milestone and something that we in return make our own as there’s significant room in the score to embellish.

After checking Lunchmeat’s weight and only gently fat-shaming her (she’d grown 25% in three weeks), he took out an orange paper strip and touched both of her eyes with it. Immediately, they were filled with bright orange dye. But before looking into her eyes, he took a bottle of saline solution and washed it all out of her eyes. I admit I was slightly puzzled. The vet saw the look on my face and smiled. “It’s counterintuitive, I know. Put the dye in, only to wash it out, right?” I laughed, and asked why. “You have to wash it out to see where an injury might be. If there’s a slice in the eye, the dye will seep in. But you can’t see it unless you clear out the rest of the eye first.” He proceeded to turn the light out and take a UV lamp to Lunchmeat’s eyes. Again, she remained totally still as he held her and looked into her corneas, somehow put at utter ease by either his voice or his touch.

In trying to practice the Handel over the weekend without the score and my markings, I felt a level of exposure I hadn’t felt before. There’s a clarity that comes when you rely on only one or two of your senses – in absence of seeing my score, I had only my ears and my fingers. Whether or not certain embellishments were necessary or constructive occupied the majority of my practicing on Monday, as I came to terms with what every musician fears the most: that one might actually be doing injury to the music one has spent so much time interpreting. After a while, I decided that getting a replacement score had been put off long enough, and so I grabbed one from the Juilliard Store, just down the street from my office. I was fortunate that they had the right publisher, editor etc. But in looking at a blank score, there was a sensation that I was looking at a new piece of music entirely. Devoid of my scrawls and my teachers’ markings, this pristine, sterile urtext edition challenged me on some gratuitous liberties I had become accustomed to taking since I learned the piece some 10 or 11 years ago.

Starting from scratch is often synonymous with inefficiency, right? When we musicians have a problem, we’re supposed to isolate it immediately in order to save precious time and energy. But one problem may be symptomatic of a larger issue. There are times when taking the extra step back to clean everything out takes care of the problem more quickly than we might think. There are times when the train to Chelsea is worth every minute.

I’m back in Oberlin. After a few hours’ organ practice, I headed up to the third floor of Mudd Library to sit in a “womb chair” and read. I try and get here as often as I can, as the depth of these rotating sofa pods work in conjunction library’s designated quiet zone to lend the same sense of isolation I can normally only get in a practice room. They feel protective.

Since interviewing Alice Goodman by phone a few weeks ago, I’ve been working my way though Paradise Lost. It’s the 350th anniversary year of the poem’s publication, so I suppose it’s as good a time as any to have grabbed a fresh copy. For certain, it makes more pleasurable reading than the countless mind-numbing books on the political revolutions wrought either by Donald Trump in 2017 or Martin Luther in 1517 (men equal in their social charms, from what I gather).

The last time I read Milton was as an undergrad, so I’d since forgotten the little chuckle that one has upon reading the introduction to Paradise Lost. Milton makes it clear that you’re about to embark on a mega-poem adventure with no rhyming. None. Zip. Zilch. Zero. It is, apparently, “barbarous,” “troublesome,” “unnecessary,” “restrictive,” and apparently no longer used in Spain or Italy. But with Milton, you don’t need syllabic symmetry. That which is poetic lies in Milton’s gratuitous conjuring up of images to evoke aural sensations. It’s not surprising – he was blind, after all. And yet the sheer number of constant references to the Bible, Dante, Virgil, Ovid, and anything Greek and mythological feels astounding. One can almost imagine Milton working through a checklist of myths and legends about heaven and hell, one by one, variation by variation. While each idea feels familiar, every presentation feels fresh or spoken anew. One starts to hear voices of characters that seem close, real, tangible. Indeed, in encountering the band of fallen angels gearing up for war in Book I, one can’t help but be but drawn in.Whence the chaos, torture, brimstone, lava, colorings of red and black? It’s clear that these aren’t demons or fork-tailed devils that we think of when we think of hell? They still seem angelic.

But why flutes? While Paradise Lost is an epic poem, Milton doesn’t look back to Homer, but to the historian Thucydides’ account of the Battle of Mantinea (418 BC).
Milton’s reference is pointed: Of the many battles of the Peloponnesian Wars, Mantinea was Sparta’s battle of pride after being barred from the Olympic Games by the Athenians in 420 BC. It might seem trivial at first, but Sparta’s isolation was not merely symbolic, as the Olympics constituted a religious ceremony on Mount Olympus, the dwelling place of the god Zeus. To be barred from the Olympics was to be cut off from Zeus entirely. Both Thucydides’ Spartans and Milton’s angels thus march to sounds of flutes so that they might regain an audience with God, and not simply to return to the place from which they were expelled. The flutes inspire order and stoicism, as the Spartans and fallen angels fight not for revenge, but for dignity.

Milton also says that they’re playing in a “Dorian mood.” It’s a clever play on words, referring at once to the modal system in music, as well as the moods that beset the soul upon hearing certain musical keys or tonalities. In The Republic, Plato declares some modes as useful and not useful: the Lydian mode was too relaxed and melancholy, supposedly “not even fit for women” (yikes); and the Phrygian mode is energetic and lively. But when he gets round to the Dorian mode, Plato is often quoted as talking about militaristic affect. But the longer quote actually reads:
The Dorian mode is that of assertiveness, sure, but also that of last resort even. It’s not aggressive. It’s as if the fallen angels are somehow trying to shake off their sense resignation.

The references back to Thucydides and Plato in just ten lines of poetry feel dense and profound. But I see a glaring problem: the flute generally signified something very different in Milton’s day. It doesn’t quite line up with, say, Shakespeare’s famous lines about the recorder in Act III of Hamlet:

Hamlet’s paranoia is in full swing by this point in the play: he’s putting on a play to tap the conscience of his uncle Claudius, depicting a fictitious king being poisoned in the ear. Recorders here are no instruments of war, organization, or resolve, or of anything really; they are but reflections of those who breathe life into them and maneuver them – instruments to move the souls of others. Such a notion was set forth beautifully by St. Augustine:But Augustine’s erudition is Hamlet’s pain. Hamlet feels himself a pipe, and his father’s ghost the piper. Here flutes have no perfection, no phalanxes. They don’t serve to organize. They sing to move, to discombobulate.

And what of modes? What of the moods they inspire? Especially if the ancient Greek Dorian and Phyrigian modes known to Plato were not known to Milton. The modes of Milton’s day were Church modes, which over the course of centuries inverted the Phyrigian and the Dorian.Milton’s Dorian was the same as our own today. If you sit at a piano, it’s just a scale which starts on D and works its way up the white notes. It’s wistful, but also somewhat duplicitous. When you get to to the sixth note, B, it’s always higher than you’d expect. It feels like you’ve started a minor scale all over again on A, as the last four notes mirror the first four notes of the scale. One gets the sense that two sad keys sitting side by side in the same scale. It’s what gives Simon and Garfunkel’s Scarborough Fair that peculiar  edge of melancholy when they sing “parsley, sage, rosemary and thyme” the first time round.

Conversely, Plato’s Dorian mode is the same as our Phryigian mode. It’s the one that’s a bit of a drag. If you head over to your piano, start a scale on E, and work your way up, it’s the second note that sounds too low. When you head back to home base or your home key, there’s no avoiding a certain depressive quality to that single too-low note.

I’ve kept returning to that passage over the last few week, wondering exactly how it is the fallen angels are moved in that passage. As I write, I ponder if the distinctions are arbitrary – it’s such a small difference. But as I read and reread, I have trouble hearing Thucydides and Plato. Shakespeare and Purcell are somehow engrained in my musical sensibilities. I can’t “unhear” them.

                                                                                                                               

Alice Goodman got me back into reading Milton while talking to me about The Death of Klinghoffer in an interview for VAN Magazine. She’s republished her libretto in its entirety without any cuts.  In some ways she’s a real hero of mine, as the libretto of Nixon in China puts me on edge every time I hear or read it. But the questions I have after talking to her are ones that only time will answer. I wonder whether people will be able to “unhear” John Adams’ opera. After all the fuss, the protests, the sheer noise, I wonder if people will be able to hear Alice’s when they read it. It’s as if we now have two operas: we have “Klinghoffer” as it’s referred to colloquially, and we have The Death of Klinghoffer, a work of poetry embedded in Alice’s new book, History Is Our Mother. 

https://van-us.atavist.com/silent-valley

This week, an interview with Kristian Bezuidenhout!

https://van-us.atavist.com/cross-pollination

Last week, I had the great pleasure of interviewing Richard Egarr for VAN Magazine.

https://van-us.atavist.com/walking-on-wire

Enjoy!

After having her little operation on Monday, our new Corgi puppy has been recovering at the puppy shop in Chelsea (yes, you are welcome to judge me for getting a dog at a puppy shop). In the mean time, R and I have been visiting her every afternoon and indulging her passions for fashion and anatomy as she chews on his arm, my hands, his pants, my bag, his shoes, my socks, his nose, my ears, an Australian exchange student’s brunette ponytail. (She really is very well-rounded.)

Smitten as I am with my own puppy, I admit I find it hard to focus on one dog at a time in the shop. On the one hand, the barking, the crowded cages and the constant smell of cleaning products makes me uneasy, but also after a few days, I’ve started to recognize some of the other dogs’ odder traits and habits. There’s the escape artist Husky who jumps out of the playpen at every opportunity in order to greet the entire store; the indignant Pug and her dozy French Bulldog companion who both gaze upon you expectantly from the display window; a Pomeranian that literally pees everywhere, without fail, whenever it sees a human (while the shopkeeper isn’t supposed to assign names, he nicknamed this one Geyser); a stalkery Shiba Inu who tends to stand up and stare at the nearest human from within his cage, while he prarie-dogs a turd in and out of his anal sphincter. My dog may be gnawing on my big toe, but I can’t help but continually lock eyes with this hypnotic Shiba with poor bowel control, who somehow looks into my soul, sensing my discomfort, doing his very best to make it worse with every clench and release of his anus. I’m transfixed.

Of course, my own dog doesn’t notice. She’s attending to important matters (at this point, I think it’s my left shoe). I can’t help but see irony in the fact that that despite being two months old, she has the ability to focus on chewing intently without being watched or judged by the other dogs, while I, a 25-year-old human, really just want to get away from the Shiba-shitter at all costs. The initial idea is that we’d name her Brünnhilde, only natural for a strong, persistent female Corgi (R rejected the idea of naming her after Elizabeth Warren). However, we realized over the course of a few days what it took most people about 5 seconds to figure out: a Corgi named after a Wagnerian opera heroine is a tad pretentious. Coupled with the fact that she is in fact two months old, has two dads and lives near Lincoln Center, it would just be downright precious. (Also, to my slight disappointment, when she barks, it in fact does sound like “bark, bark” and less like “ho-yo-toh-hoe.”)

So, what to name her? Let’s talk aesthetics. Corgis are adorable, right? Their feet are too short, their bodies are too long, they can’t really run all that fast, they can’t really climb up on to the couch before pre-adulthood or post-arthritis, etc. Their utility is rather, um, stunted. Usefulness aside though, they are really only recognized as being cute because Corgis are some of the stupidest looking dogs on earth. Some think they look like loaves of bread (thanks to the square, tailless, wiggle-butt), but ours is a bit more tubular in appearance. Some say they look like bats, but they’re a tad too long for that. Really, ours just looks like a bat-eared salami.

*Ta-da!*

Readers, allow me to introduce the latest addition to our household. Her name is Lunchmeat.

I’m happy to have gotten to spend an hour with Paul Jacobs over lunch! It’s really such a joy to get to be on the team at VAN Magazine as a staff writer!

https://van-us.atavist.com/sacred-spaces

R and I took a couple of days to go and hear a rarely performed opera in L.A. Having never visited previously, the hour spent in traffic to get the Dixie Motel in West Hollywood (complete with an enormous painting of Lucille Ball on my door) made it feel like a “real” trip to Los Angeles. But the trip was a really lovely occasion, as director Yuval Sharon directed a performance of Lou Harrison’s Young Caesar which sold well over 2000 seats in Walt Disney Hall.

If you don’t know Lou Harrison or his music, a good starting place to trust your initial observation that it’s bananas and you should just roll with it. A west coast composer who was self-immersed in non-Western music, Harrison has come to occupy an uncomfortable territory of integrative genius on one hand and cultural appropriation on the other. Harrison is perhaps known for his works for Javanese Gamelan and South-Asian instruments, including a Suite for Violin and American Gamelan.

Young Caesar is no different in this respect. In Disney Hall, the orchestra pit was crammed with Japanese traditional instruments, a Gamelan, percussion, strings, a harp, a harmonium and a prepared piano. But while Harrison remained true to form in musical content, the dramatic content is what really sets the opera apart: the presentation of Julius Caesar as “gay.” Recently, sites like Opera Wire and others have heralded the dawn of gay operas in the last ten years, celebrating a performance of Peter Eotvos’ Angels in America at Lincoln Center and applauding the announcement that New York City Opera will be staging Charles Wuorinen’s Brokeback Mountain next season. And yet prior to the performance of Young Caesar in L.A., there seems to have been little direct recognition of an opera about two men in love that wasn’t composed anytime recently, but in 1971.

In Harrison’s opera, Caesar is in late adolescence/early adulthood, starting his initial ascent into the imperial Roman hierarchy. Being sent to the kingdom of Bythinia to fetch ships and military supplies for the Roman Army, he starts an affair with the King, tragically cut off by Caesar’s sense of duty to the Empire and to greatness (and his mother?). The story is not totally ahistorical – sexual fluidity was more common among Roman men than it is among American politicians (unless, of course, it’s in airport bathrooms), but the story doesn’t conform to the norms of what we think of in history. In a way, what makes Young Caesar interesting is the fact that an opera about same-sex relationship is still marketed as a “gay” opera. Harrison himself was openly gay and a pretty vocal proponent of gay rights for sure, but the opera doesn’t really differ too greatly in dramatic content from many other historical dramas discussing love and duty.

In essence, there’s no “gay cause,” no instance of gay-bashing, a struggle with homophobia, etc. Similarly, there’s no real conjecture about the sexuality of Caesar and the King or an insertion of sexuality into an event that might not have such an element to it at all (the historian Suetonius makes the nature of the relationship very clear). It differs, say, from Max Klinger’s interpretation of Caesar’s assassination, which I saw in Leipzig just a few weeks back. On one level the painting is historical and academic (“realist” some might argue), showing the toga-clad politicians with Roman noses posing over Caesar’s cadaver. But the presentation in someways is phenomenally symbolist and even homoerotic, equating presentations of beauty with those of rightful vengeance. The assassins aren’t young in their faces, but the muscularity and definition of their bodies tell otherwise. On the other hand, Caesar, though freshly murdered, appears to be months into his decomposition. It’s not just just a triumph justice or will, but the supremacy of youth and beauty over age, a familiar theme in gay art.

The opera is beautiful, and Sharon’s production was truly exquisite. What I ponder is whether the appeal of such on opera would stick. As many gay films and books focus on very real issues of disease, social alienation and violence, it was strange to see an opera where none of those elements were directly related to the presentation of sexuality on stage – I wasn’t sure I was consciously witnessing a “gay” opera, despite the manner in which was advertised and billed.

Does the opera occupy one edge of the spectrum for “gay” opera? Is it tame? Is it realstic? Was it even sanitized? Was the age discrepancy between Caesar (supposedly 16 or so) and the King (presumably middle-aged) down-played? Were it more explicit, would it engender negative attitudes towards the frequency of inter-generational gay relationships? Whence the time honored pathology of the worship of youth in gay life and homoerotic art for thousands of years? Is it more similar to Klinger than I thought? Or was this just a stab at one a more normative representation of gay life (be it with not-so-normal characters) on an opera stage?  I think only time will tell, but I hope to see another production of Young Caesar very soon.