“Ocyrrhoe transform’d into a Mare” (II) – Ovid
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Month: September, 2020
September 22, 2020
Serenade after Plato’s “Symposium” – Leonard Bernstein
“Plato’s Symposium“
Anselm Feuerbach
__________
imagine my surprise when having put
on a concert I’d recently taped from
television and, not having checked
out the program, apart from having
noted the featured violinist, someone
I, however peripherally, knew, then
heading out to the kitchen to do
some kitchen things, chop vegetables,
stir a pot, watch water, maybe, come
to a boil, a piece came up with which
I wasn’t familiar, thought maybe it
might be Shostakovich for its atonality,
though with, here again, his signature
decipherable melodies, ever, and
characteristically, maimed, twisted,
contorted, for, too, its Eastern
European rhythms, its apparent
Jewish folklore, touches of Fiddler
on the Roof, I thought, hints of
Schindler’s List, maybe, when the
work turned out to be, however
improbably, by Leonard Bernstein,
most famous, rather, for his Broadway
shows, West Side Story, for instance,
but especially as a conductor
his Serenade for violin, string orchestra,
harp and percussion, known also as
Serenade after Plato’s “Symposium”,
was written, in 1954, in commemoration
of a couple of personal friends, husband
and wife, after their demises
Plato‘s Symposium is one of his several
dialogues, a clutch of noteworthy
Athenians meet socially after an earlier,
more crowded, revel, a kind of debriefing,
and decide to each give his definition of
love, the work remains one of the great
disquisitions on the subject, not tackled
much since, surprisingly, in the history
of philosophy
there are seven people in attendance,
though Alcibiades, yes, the Alcibiades,
orator and statesman, stumbles into
the gathering, late and last
Bernstein has a voice for each
participant, though in five rather than
seven movements, two couples, the
first and the last, have no break
between their conjoined movements
I. Phaedrus: Pausanias – lento and allegro
II. Aristophanes – allegretto
III. Eryximachus, the doctor – presto
IV. Agathon – adagio
V. Socrates: Alcibiades – molto tenuto and allegro molto vivace
in the Symposium, Eryximachus speaks
before Aristophanes, yes, the Aristophanes,
the playwright, cause the bard has the
hiccoughs, and the doctor, Eryximachus,
agrees to go first, if out of the agreed upon
order, an order that Bernstein chooses not
to follow, for reasons to do with tempo, I
suspect, otherwise the progression is as
in Plato
Eryximachus, interestingly, advises
Aristophanes to make himself sneeze,
a cure apparently for hiccoughs, in
order to be ready for his turn, which
he does, and indeed manages
Agathon was a poet, his adagio here
is accordingly gorgeous, melting,
completely appropriate for a writer
of verse, and entirely, incidentally,
worth the price of admission
Socrates‘ molto tenuto, even and
tempered, measured, is, likewise,
totally apt for a philosopher
enjoy
R ! chard
September 21, 2020
“Ocyrrhoe transform’d into a Mare” – Ovid
“Centaur and Nymph“
Arnold Böcklin
________
Old Chiron took the babe with secret joy,
Proud of the charge of the celestial boy.
His daughter too, whom on the sandy shore
The nymph Charicle to the centaur bore,
With hair dishevel’d on her shoulders, came
To see the child, Ocyrrhoe was her name;
Ocyrrhoe, daughter of Chiron and [t]he
nymph Charicle, c[o]me …[t]o see
the child
With hair dishevel’d on her shoulders,
there’s a suggestion here, regarding
Charicle, of madness, or possession
the child, the babe, the celestial boy,
the infant, ript, by its very father,
Apollo, from his unfaithful lover,
Coronis’, womb, and [given] … to
the centaur Chiron”s charge, into
its, or his, care
She knew her father’s arts, and could rehearse
The depths of prophecy in sounding verse.
it appears that Ocyrrhoe, daughter of
Chiron and the nymph Charicle, was
a poetess, was possessed, on her
father’s side, of poetry, could reveal,
decipher, or rehearse / The depths
of prophecy, in sounding verse, was
able, as wordmongers sometimes do,
to tell truth, deliver, in rhyme, incisive
evaluations
Once, as the sacred infant she survey’d,
the sacred infant, the child born of
Apollo and Coronis
The God was kindled in the raving maid,
The God, the child, the sacred infant,
by virtue of being half, if only half,
divine, having been fathered by the
god, Apollo
kindled, inspired
the raving maid, Ocyrrhoe, beset by
neurotic, irrational, though prophetic,
it is proposed, powers
And thus she utter’d her prophetick tale:
“Hail, great physician of the world, all-hail;
great physician of the world, the fated
child of Apollo and Coronis would
become a healer of legend
Hail, mighty infant, who in years to come
Shalt heal the nations, and defraud the tomb;
defraud the tomb, recall from the
hereafter, resuscitate, revive,
return to life
Swift be thy growth! thy triumphs unconfin’d!
Make kingdoms thicker, and increase mankind.
thicker, more populated
Thy daring art shall animate the dead,
Thy daring art, medicine, the mighty
infant will eventually be recognized
as a celebrated man of healing
And draw the thunder on thy guilty head:
guilty head, when Hades, king of the
Underworld, complained to Zeus, his
brother, that the mighty infant was
stealing his subjects, the departed,
Zeus shot the great physician down,
acknowledging the healer’s guilt, of
his defraud[ing] the tomb, condemning
the culprit with a punishing, an
annihilating, thunderbolt
Then shalt thou dye, but from the dark abode
Rise up victorious, and be twice a God.
Apollo, aggrieved, had had his son,
the child, the sacred infant, reinstated,
after tortuous ministrations, as an
immortal god, an entirely, however,
other story
And thou, my sire, not destin’d by thy birth
To turn to dust, and mix with common earth,
How wilt thou toss, and rave, and long to dye,
And quit thy claim to immortality;
When thou shalt feel, enrag’d with inward pains,
The Hydra’s venom rankling in thy veins?
the child, the sire, not destin’d by [its] birth
/ To turn to dust, which is to say, to be no
longer mortal but immortal, how will it, not
wanting particularly to survive, quit [its]
claim to immortality, deal with the
impossibility of dying, [w]hen [it] shal[l]
feel, enrag’d with inward pains, agonies,
that compel it to seek personal annihilation
Hydra, a snakelike monster with many
heads, whose venom and very breath
were poisonous, stationed at one of
the entrances to the Underworld
The Gods, in pity, shall contract thy date,
And give thee over to the pow’r of Fate.”
contract thy date, make mortal,
subject once again to Fate
R ! chard
September 17, 2020
Preludes and Fugues, Op.87 – Shostakovich
Tatiana Nikolayeva
___________
during this period of self-isolation, it
is nearly an unavoidable consequence
of such imposed solitude that one
would become contemplative, though,
I must admit, this is not for me an
especially unusual state
lately, I’ve returned to the Preludes and
Fugues of Shostakovich, a reinterpretation
of the form that Johann Sebastian Bach
had initiated in 1722, and indeed
reinterpreted himself between 1739 and
1742, each set known separately as
Books 1 and 2
a prelude is, as the name itself suggests,
an introductory piece, and I won’t get into
any further explanations of it, which would
be technical, and not especially relevant
here
a fugue is a line of music, however, that
is repeated a few bars in so that the tune
ends up essentially analyzing itself, for
voice we know this as singing in canon,
you’ve probably done this yourself, in a
group, singing, for instance, Row, Row,
Row Your Boat, or, even in French,
Frère Jacques
but the strictly instrumental form becomes,
by virtue of re-examining itself over and
over again, nearly, by definition,
introspective
there are neither highs nor lows, which
is to say, alterations in volume, in a fugue,
so that the couple of hours it takes to get
through any set including them would be
restful, though never not intellectually
intriguing, much as mental meandering,
or daydreaming, speculation, is
Shostakovich, much as Bach did,
composed his in every key, major
and minor, for a total of 24
here are his first 12
here are the remaining dozen
they were written by Shostakovich for
Tatiana Nikolayeva, who plays them
herself in both of these iterations
sit back, relax, enjoy
R ! chard
September 7, 2020
“The Story of Coronis, and Birth of Aesculapius” (IV) – Ovid
“Apollo and Coronis“ (1606 – 1608)
Adam Elsheimer
__________
On her incestuous life I need not dwell
(In Lesbos still the horrid tale they tell),
And of her dire amours you must have heard,
For which she now does penance in a bird,
That conscious of her shame, avoids the light,
And loves the gloomy cov’ring of the night;
The birds, where-e’er she flutters, scare away
The hooting wretch, and drive her from the day.”
Nyctimene, daughter of Epopeus,
king of Lesbos, a Greek Island in
the Aegean Sea, had been defiled
by her father, Minerva, out of pity,
transformed her into an owl, the
above verses tell the story of
that owl, Nyctimene
The raven, urg’d by such impertinence,
Grew passionate, it seems, and took offence,
And curst the harmless daw; the daw withdrew:
The raven to her injur’d patron flew,
And found him out, and told the fatal truth
Of false Coronis and the favour’d youth.
the raven, Apollo’s own bird, having
discovered Coronis to be unfaithful
to their master, its and hers, remained
intent, despite the daw’s warnings,
earlier here reported, on informing
the god of the Sun
The God was wroth, the colour left his look,
wroth, angry
The wreath his head, the harp his hand forsook:
[t]he wreath, … the harp, Apollo’s
usual attributes, symbols of his
harmony, concord
His silver bow and feather’d shafts he took,
And lodg’d an arrow in the tender breast,
That had so often to his own been prest.
though Apollo is not usually
associated with bows and arrows,
his twin sister Diana, goddess of
the Hunt, always is, it would not
be unusual to conflate the two
deities for poetic, or indeed
mythological, purposes
Down fell the wounded nymph, and sadly groan’d,
And pull’d his arrow reeking from the wound;
And weltring in her blood, thus faintly cry’d,
“Ah cruel God! tho’ I have justly dy’d,
What has, alas! my unborn infant done,
That he should fall, and two expire in one?”
This said, in agonies she fetch’d her breath.
it is supposed here that the unborn
infant is indeed Apollo’s
The God dissolves in pity at her death;
He hates the bird that made her falshood known,
And hates himself for what himself had done;
The feather’d shaft, that sent her to the Fates,
And his own hand, that sent the shaft, he hates.
Apollo is suffused with regret, anger,
self-recrimination
Fain would he heal the wound, and ease her pain,
Fain, with pleasure, gladly
And tries the compass of his art in vain.
the compass of his art, the range
of his ability, in this case vain,
faulty, ineffective
Soon as he saw the lovely nymph expire,
The pile made ready, and the kindling fire.
pile, pyre
the sentence lacks a verb here, it
should read The pile was made
ready, just saying
With sighs and groans her obsequies he kept,
obsequies, funeral rites
And, if a God could weep, the God had wept.
I’ll have to watch out for gods
weeping, I suspect some have,
some can
Her corps he kiss’d, and heav’nly incense brought,
And solemniz’d the death himself had wrought.
corps, body, corpse
wrought, brought about, made
happen
But lest his offspring should her fate partake,
Spight of th’ immortal mixture in his make,
Spight, in spite
He ript her womb, and set the child at large,
And gave him to the centaur Chiron’s charge:
Chiron, first among the centaurs,
half man, half horse, was highly
revered as a teacher, having
been raised by the twins, Apollo
and Diana / Artemis, supremely
accomplished deities
Then in his fury black’d the raven o’er,
And bid him prate in his white plumes no more.
black’d, Apollo turned the snowy
plume[d], [w]hite as the whitest
dove’s unsully’d breast raven
black
prate, babble, talk incoherently
R ! chard
September 1, 2020
“The Story of Coronis, and Birth of Aesculapius” (III) – Ovid
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