A tribute today to some of those whose birthday this is.

For William Shakespeare—two favorite of innumerable favorite quotes.

Love is not love

Which alters when it alteration finds,

Or bends with the remover to remove.

O no! it is an ever-fixed mark

That looks on tempests and is never shaken;

It is the star to every wand'ring bark,

Whose worth's unknown, although his height be taken.

—Sonnet 116

I see a voice.

—A Midsummer Night's Dream

For JMW Turner, painter of landscapes and seascapes and skyscapes and light—this Norham Castle Sunrise, with its radiant cow.

For that prose stylist supreme, Vladimir Nabokov, who I discovered at an early age and loved first for his writings about chess (not yet having learned about his butterflies or way of hearing colors)—a few typical quotes.

. . . and as for history it will limit his life story to the dash between two dates.

“I am sentimental,’ she said. ‘I could dissect a koala but not its baby. I like the words damozel, eglantine, elegant. I love when you kiss my elongated white hand.”

(from Ada, or Ardor:  A Family Chronicle)

The pages are still blank, but there is a miraculous feeling of the words being there, written in invisible ink and clamoring to become visible.

For Ruggero Leoncavallo, Italian opera composer—this performance of his "Mattinata" by Beniamino Gigli.

For Ngaio Marsh, my favorite mystery writer from New Zealand, creator of detective Roderick Alleyn and his famous artist wife Agatha Troy—this account of her cottage outside Christchurch and her fascinating life.

For John Hannah, who so movingly read it in Four Weddings and a Funeral—this poem of W.H. Auden's.

Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone,

Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone,

Silence the pianos and with muffled drum

Bring out the coffin, let the mourners come.

Let aeroplanes circle moaning overhead

Scribbling on the sky the message He Is Dead,

Put crepe bows round the white necks of the public doves,

Let the traffic policemen wear black cotton gloves.

He was my North, my South, my East and West,

My working week and my Sunday rest,

My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song;

I thought that love would last for ever: I was wrong.

The stars are not wanted now: put out every one;

Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun;


Pour away the ocean and sweep up the wood.

For nothing now can ever come to any good.

And for Roy Orbison, the singer-songwriter, this performance by The Traveling Wilburys of "Handle Me With Care."

Happy birthday, all!

image:  JMW Turner, Norham Castle Sunrise

So Beautiful and Lost

In a small moment of huge significance this week, whether intended as such or not, the 45-year conductor of the Metropolitan Opera, James Levine, humane and full of love for music and for life, gave a signal to the orchestra and chorus to begin an unprecedented encore of "Va Pensiero," the Chorus of Hebrew Slaves in Verdi's opera Nabucco, during the broadcast to listeners in some two thousand theatres in seventy countries.  "Oh my country, so beautiful and lost . . ."  The song of the exiles on the banks of the Euphrates in conquering Babylon, lamenting the loss of their homeland.

Verdi wrote the supremely moving piece when Italy was struggling for its own freedom in the late 1800s, and it quickly became a popular anthem for the Italian people, expressing their longing for political freedom from Austria, for unification of their country.  It was surely not by accident that we were given this shared gift of solidarity and spiritual comfort just when we in America are heading into the dark night of exile. 

So many echoing cries of the heart, for loss both personal and national—and far beyond.  Verdi composed Nabucco at a difficult moment in his life, when his wife and small children had all just died.  When Verdi's coffin was carried to its final resting place a month after his death in 1901, the crowd of a quarter of a million people along the route spontaneously began singing the stirring chorus.  A month later, when he was reinterred alongside his wife at the "Casa di Riposo," a young Arturo Toscanini conducted a choir of eight hundred in the famous hymn (once proposed as the Italian national anthem).

"But the reason the Italians took to the streets that wintry day at the dawn of the last century was about much more than just music. Verdi’s operas had provided the soundtrack to the politically tempestuous half-century that preceded his death, and his most famous arias had become quasi-anthems for a nation recently unified. When Nabucco had its premiere at La Scala in 1842, ‘Italy’ was  simply a cluster of geographically contiguous kingdoms and principalities with little more to unite them than a common language.

     So when Italians sang the Chorus of the Hebrew Slaves at Verdi’s funeral procession, it wasn’t just because it was a catchy tune they knew the words to. Its subject—the Israelites giving poignant voice to their longing for the promised land—had become a powerful analogue for the long-frustrated desires of the Italian people.  When they cried  'Viva Verdi!' during the funeral procession, they were still acutely conscious of the slogan’s double meaning and its clandestine resonance for the agitators of ‘the Risorgimento,’ as the cause of Italian nationalism was known. The letters VERDI also spelled out the name of the King of Sardinia who, in 1861, finally took the throne of a unified nation for the first time since the 6th Century—Victor Emmanuele Re D’Italia."

In 2011, after playing 'Va, pensiero' at a performance of Nabucco at the Teatro dell'Opera in Rome, conductor Riccardo Muti made a short speech protesting cuts in Italy's arts budget, then asked the audience to sing along in support of culture and patriotism.  In the same spirit, I think, conductor James Levine was through the repetition of the famous music asking our support of both.

Music will perhaps save us, when nothing else can.  Or at least memorialize our dear lost land.

Va, pensiero, sull'ali dorate;


va, ti posa sui clivi, sui colli,


ove olezzano tepide e molli


l'aure dolci del suolo natal!



Del Giordano le rive saluta,


di Sionne le torri atterrate...


O, mia patria, sì bella e perduta!


O, membranza, sì cara e fatal!



Arpa d'or dei fatidici vati,


perché muta dal salice pendi?


Le memorie nel petto raccendi,


ci favella del tempo che fu!



O simile di Sòlima ai fati


traggi un suono di crudo lamento,


o t'ispiri il Signore un concento


che ne infonda al patire virtù.

Go, thought, on wings of gold;

go settle upon the slopes and the hills,

where, soft and mild, the sweet airs

of our native land smell fragrant!

Greet the banks of the Jordan

and Zion's toppled towers...

Oh, my country, so beautiful and lost!

Oh, remembrance, so dear and so fatal!

Golden harp of the prophetic seers,

why dost thou hang mute upon the willow?

Rekindle our bosom's memories,

and speak to us of times gone by!

Oh you akin to the fate of Jerusalem,

give forth a sound of crude lamentation,

oh may the Lord inspire you a harmony of voices

which may instill virtue to suffering.

(libretto, Temistocle Solera, inspired by Psalm 137)

image:  Nabucco, Assembly Hall Theatre

The Best of July

The baby quails nesting in the lopsided bush beside our porch—(though a tragedy with a swift and silent hawk the same day as the death of the priest in Rouen has left me fearing for them more than I can delight in their baby bounce now.  My innocent enjoyment is gone, or severely rattled, my love much cordoned-about with cautions against losing more of me.)

Good music—

. Beethoven's 9th, his life-affirming symphony with choir, horns, and trumpets.  "Every creature drinks in joy"—music to take to heart.

. Mozart's Cosi fan Tutte, joyful in quite a different key, and equally restorative.

. Somebody singing in the back garden, this last day of the month.  An off-key hymn maybe, the Baba Yetu we heard one workday on campus, the Lord’s prayer sung in Swahili, or ad lib plainchant, or some kind of spiritual or  working song, from a culture I'm not even aware of, giving thanks another way.  A second voice picking up from the first.  A man and wife, celebrating Sunday.  (Saturday is usually tennis lessons with the children on the red clay court.  Or actually a green court which I have transformed into red clay, because I liked the one in Aosta so much, and the one I used to play on with my friend Rachel back home in Santa Fe, at the convent across the road from school, the net torn and swayed, no one ever around.)

Good books, even without a striped hammock or Nantucket porch swing to read them in—

. The High Mountains of Portugal, by Yann Martel.  Quite fascinating.  (And never mind that Portugal has no high mountains:  that's one of the fascinating things.)

. A Small Death in the Great Glen, by A.D. Scott.  Compelling, a good summer read.  The first book in a series of mysteries set in the Highlands, which sat on my shelf for years untouched and I was pleased to find.

. After the Fall, by Victoria Roberts.  Funny.  Very New York, like Eloise, beginning with a most precocious Olmec head.

Flowers—

. tea with blue cornflowers (the Darjeeling with strawberries as well)

. another tea, a gift from Mendocino, with flowers too, hibiscus, and the spice of cinnamon, the leisurely presence of elderberry

. the edible flowers I found to decorate a double-chocolate clementine cake for last night's dinner with friends around an outdoor table

This blessing, for the coming month, from John O'Donohue—

May you awaken to the mystery of being here

And enter the quiet immensity of your own presence.

May you have joy and peace in the temple of your senses.

May you receive great encouragement when new frontiers beckon. 


May you respond to the call of your gift and find the courage to follow its path.

May the flame of anger free you from falsity.

May warmth of heart keep your presence aflame and


Anxiety never linger about you.

May your outer dignity mirror an inner dignity of soul.

May you take time to celebrate the quiet miracles that seek no attention. 


May you be consoled in the secret symmetry of your soul.

May you experience each day as a sacred gift 


Woven around the heart of wonder.

images:  Christie B. Cochrell, Bowl with Tea

Cake with Edible Flowers, MyLife Living Assistance