Tale 8: Part 3 - Beginning Rewritten

  And it was Lisette's turn to say the Benedic Domine before the meal, which she said, as every good French girl can and does in Latin three times a day. Therese the housekeeper always thought Lisette's pronunciation particularly fine for a mere housemaid and always wondered if Lisette concealed some illegitimate nobility in her background and blood. 

Frederic, Rachel's tutor, always had an unkind word for this ritual, as he would, that mad socialist who never missed an opportunity to remind everyone he was part of the Commune in '71 who overthrew Napoleon III, but Therese could not help herself and as she sometimes did marveled out loud at how little trouble Frederic had responding 'Amen' as a communist who hates 'us.' 

Frederic simply shrugged; as a socialist it cost him nothing to worship idols. 

Frederic had an answer for everything, and Therese could, as usual, not help responding in a tone that was 1% shouting "how can you believe we're idolators?"

"Look at all those statues you bow down to in your Cathedrals." 

"They're not gods." 

"Certainly they're gods."

"Saints, gods, it's all the same!"

"How can you possibly believe that?"

"At least the Trinity is real gods, but the Saints are pagan statuary! You pray to Joseph to replace your ceiling like he's Vesta then you pray to Matthew to pay for it like he's Juno. And I'll tell you something else, back in '71..."

And Lisette as always came to the rescue: 

"We know, you were there when they shot the Archbishop, unless you pulled the trigger this time we don't want to hear about it." 

But ever since graduating Le Cordon Bleu, Louis never missed a chance to work his new political views into conversation. One would think as one of the most celebrated chefs in Paris, he'd be more concerned with his art than ever, but as usual with celebrity chefs, the standard was a shell of what it was when he had something to prove, and his diners would marvel at it all the same, knowing no difference. Rather than food, Louis inevitably concentrated on the outrage of the week from La Libre Parole. Sometimes he even got his views from l'Antijuif but he knew better than to tell anyone in Maison Bloch. 

"I can have at least have a little appreciation for socialism, you care about the poor, even if your poor is everyone but Frenchmen."

Frederic seemed almost eager to take the bait tonight: "It's Frenchmen too!"

"Frenchmen can't get what they need if they have to share it with the whole world!"

"Why shouldn't we care about the world?"

"Because you're a Frenchman!"

"I'm a Frenchman? How many times has our antisemtiic cook told us Jews can never be Frenchmen."

"How are you a Jew Frederic? You're a socialist!"

"I have Jewish blood!"

"I thought you told me that only your grandfather was a Jew."

"Doesn't that mean that my Frenchness is impure?"

"Relax Frederic, there's not an antisemite in the world who'd consider you a Jew because you have a Jewish grandparent."

"You shout all the time how Jewish blood pollutes the purity of France!"

"Frederic, nobody has pure French blood."

"They don't?"

"Frederic, you're an Alsatian, I'm an Alsatian. Even if you're part Jewish, you're part German too, and German blood is better than French." 

Louis must have been in a better humor than recently because he was usually not ready to concede nearly as much, and it was particularly on Friday nights that he was at his most belligerent. It was only last Sabbath dinner that Louis was going on about how since Frederic's family name - Waldteufel, means 'forest devil' in German, Frederic is descended on his Jewish side from devils. When Frederic agreeably pointed out that it was the Germans who forced Jews to take insulting surnames, Louis replied that surely the Germans forced Jews to take such names after Jews did something devilish. Louis was feeling more belligerent than ever, but he was grooming another target.  

Tale 8: Part 3 - Beginning

 And it was Lisette's turn to say the Benedic Domine before the meal, which she said, as every good French girl can, and does, in Latin, three times a day. Therese the housekeeper always thought Lisette's pronunciation of Latin particularly fine for a mere housemaid and always wondered if Lisette was concealing some illegitimate nobility in her background and blood. 

Frederic, Rachel's tutor, always had an unkind word for this ritual, as he would, the mad socialist who never missed an opportunity to remind everyone he was part of the Commune government in '71 who overthrew Napoleon III, but Therese could not help herself and said that she was amazed at how little trouble he had responding 'Amen' as a communist who hates 'us.' 

Frederic simply shrugged and responded that as a socialist it costs him nothing to worship idols. 

Frederic had an answer for everything, and Therese could, as usual, not help responding in a tone that was at least 1% shouting "how can you believe we're idolators?"

"Look at all those statues you bow down to in your Cathedrals." 

"They're not gods." 

"Certainly they're gods."

"Saints, gods, it's all the same!"

"How can you possibly say that?"

"At least the Trinity is real gods, but the Saints are like pagans! You pray to Joseph to replace your ceiling as though he's Vesta then you pray to Matthew to pay for it like he's Juno. And I'll tell you something else, back in '71..."

And Lisette as always came to the rescue: 

"We know, you were there when they shot the Archbishop, unless you pulled the trigger this time we don't want to hear about it." 

But ever since graduating Le Cordon Bleu, Louis never missed a chance to work  his new political views into conversation. One would think that as one of the most celebrated chefs in Paris, he'd be more concerned with his work than ever, but in fact, the standard of cooking had fallen off a bit with his new celebrity, and Louis was more concerned with his outrage from whatever he'd read this week in La Libre Parole. Sometimes he even got his points from l'Antijuif but he knew better than to tell anyone in Maison Bloch. 

"I can have at least have a little appreciation for socialism, at least you care about the poor, even if your poor is everyone but Frenchmen."

Frederic seemed almost eager to take the bait tonight: "It's Frenchmen too!"

"Frenchmen can't get what they need if they have to share it with the whole world!"

"Why shouldn't we care about everyone?"

"Because you're a Frenchman!"

"I'm a Frenchman? How many times have our antisemtiic cook told us that Jews can never be Frenchmen."

Louis still didn't seem to understand this point Frederic had made to him nearly every day for more than two years. "How are you a Jew Frederic? You're a socialist!"

"I have Jewish blood!"

"I thought you told me that only your grandfather was a Jew."

"Doesn't that mean that my Frenchness is impure?"

"I don't understand why you're so anxious about this Frederic. There's not a single antisemite in the world who would consider you a Jew just because you have a Jewish grandparent."

"You shout all the time about how Jewish blood pollutes the purity of France!"

"Frederic, nobody has pure French blood."

"They don't?"

"Frederic, you're an Alsatian, I'm an Alsatian. Even if you're part Jewish, you're part German too, and German blood only improves French blood." 

Tale 9: Will the Servants Not Think?

 And Abram took Sarai his wife, and Lot his brother's son, and all their substance that they had gathered, and all the souls they had gotten in Haran; and they went forth to go into the land of Canaan; and into the land of Canaan they came.

And in the land of Canaan did Abram go to the Habirus, and the Habirus did say to him "Behold, there is famine in the land, which is grievous with drought. Go unto Egypt where a river does make the land plentiful and bounteous. 

And Abram did call to his celestial King for edification, and the King did not respond.  And Abram took Sarai his wife, and Lot his brother's son, and all their substance that they had gathered, and all the souls they had gotten in Haran; and they went forth to go into the land of Canaan; and into the land of Egypt they came.

And Abram did suffer from a kind of impotence, possessing loin of slender compaction, and for fifty years in Haran did Abram only know his wife Sarai by mouth, for her opening beneath was naturally great. 

And Sarai was very beautiful, and did long to be known loin to loin, and did suffer while Abram did know his concubines by all manner of opening. 

And it came to pass, when he was come near to enter into Egypt, that he said unto Sarai his wife, Behold now, I know thou art a fair woman to look upon:

Therefore it shall come to pass, when the Egyptians shall see thee, that they shall say, This is his wife, and they will kill me, but they will save thee alive. 

Say, I pray thee, thou art my sister: that it may be well with me for thy sake; and my soul shall live because of thee. 

And Sarai did reply, Will the rulers not take me for concubine?

And Abram did respond, It is my envisage that they do. You shall become great with child from a Pharaoh of Egypt, and behold, Pharaoh shall bless us with his favor by raising his child. 

And Sarai did answer, Will the servants not think I am a ho?

And he did reply, It is only such time as we must remain in Egypt, for the Lord did promise me the land through which we passed. 

And she did answer, Thou shalt make me a ho. And Abram did reply, So it is as our Lord wills.  

And Sarai did riposte, The Lord willed naught, we came unto Egypt because the land promised you was fallow. Behold, you are a false prophet and naught but my pimp. 

And he did answer, If the Lord wanted me to not make you an ho, He would have told me. You shall know raiment well beyond yours in Haran. 

And did Sarai retort, You shall know gold well beyond yours in Ur. 

And Abram told her, Silence woman, thou art mine helpmeet, and if I command thee to ho thou shalt ho. 

And it came to pass, that, when Abram was come into Egypt, the Egyptians beheld the woman that she was very fair.

The princes also of Pharaoh saw her, and commended her before Pharaoh: and the woman was taken into Pharaoh's house. 

And he entreated Abram well for her sake: and he had sheep, and oxen, and he asses, and menservants, and maidservants, and she asses, and camels. 

And it came to pass that Sarai was fulfilled, and Sarah did visit Pharaoh an hundred-and-ninety-nine nights, and yet Sarai was not great with child. 

And she did send word to Abram, Pharaoh is of plenteous loin, but my belly is nonetheless of barren valley. Hasten my departure for Pharaoh shall weary of me, and he shall not bequeath you greater favor. 

And Abram was wroth with vexation, and cried unto his celestial king, Behold a Lord who hath lain me promises with land and blessing and righteousness, and He hath made me a pimp. Woe to Abram whose house shall end in with him in the land of Pharaohs. 

And in desolation Abram did walk the length and breath of the Nile, and he did return with a plague of fleas, and the fleas did transmit Abram's plague to the city of the Pharaohs. 

And Pharaoh did essay to lie with Sarai, but was too afflicted to conjugate, and did lament the grievous malady of Egypt. 

And Sarai did think to say to Pharaoh: the Lord plagued Pharaoh and his house with great plagues because of Sarai, Abram's wife. 

And Pharaoh called Abram and said, What is this that thou hast done unto me? why didst thou not tell me that she was thy wife?

Why saidst thou, She is my sister? so I might have taken her to me to wife: now therefore behold thy wife, take her, and go thy way. 

And Pharaoh commanded his men concerning him: and they sent him away, and his wife, and all that he had. 

Tale 9: First Half

 And Abram took Sarai his wife, and Lot his brother's son, and all their substance that they had gathered, and all the souls they had gotten in Haran; and they went forth to go into the land of Canaan; and into the land of Canaan they came.

And in the land of Canaan did Abram go to the Habirus, and the Habirus did say to him "Behold, there is famine in the land, which is grievous with drought. Go unto Egypt where a river does make the land plentiful and bounteous. 

And Abram did call to his celestial King for edification, and the King did not respond.  And Abram took Sarai his wife, and Lot his brother's son, and all their substance that they had gathered, and all the souls they had gotten in Haran; and they went forth to go into the land of Canaan; and into the land of Egypt they came.

And Abram did suffer from a kind of impotence, possessing loins far thinner than average, and for fifty years in Haran did Abram only know his wife Sarai by mouth, for her opening beneath was naturally great. 

And Sarai was very beautiful, and did long to be known by loin, and did suffer many a year while Abraham did know his concubines by all manner of opening. 

And it came to pass, when he was come near to enter into Egypt, that he said unto Sarai his wife, Behold now, I know thou art a fair woman to look upon:

Therefore it shall come to pass, when the Egyptians shall see thee, that they shall say, This is his wife, and they will kill me, but they will save thee alive. 

Say, I pray thee, thou art my sister: that it may be well with me for thy sake; and my soul shall live because of thee. 

And Sarai did reply, Will the rulers not take me for concubine?

And Abram did respond, It is according to my plan that they do. You shall become great with child from a Pharaoh of Egypt, and behold, we shall abscond by nightcover and we shall be blessed with child. 

And Sarai did answer, Will the servants not think I am a ho?

And Abram did reply, It is only such time as we must remain in Egypt, for the Lord did promise me the land through which we passed. 

And Sarai did answer, Thou shalt make me a ho. 

And Abram did retort, So it is as our Lord wills.  

And Sarai did reply, The Lord willed naught, we came unto Egypt because the land promised you was fallow. Behold, you are a false prophet and naught but my pimp. 

And Abram did answer, If the Lord wanted me to not make you an ho, He would have told me. You shall know raiment well beyond yours in Haran. 

And you shall know gold well beyond yours in Ur, did Sarai retort. 

And Abram told Sarai, Silence woman, thou art mine helpmeet, and if I command thee to ho thou shalt ho. 

And it came to pass, that, when Abram was come into Egypt, the Egyptians beheld the woman that she was very fair.

The princes also of Pharaoh saw her, and commended her before Pharaoh: and the woman was taken into Pharaoh's house. 

And he entreated Abram well for her sake: and he had sheep, and oxen, and he asses, and menservants, and maidservants, and she asses, and camels. 

A Cautionary Tale

 Occasionally you encounter someone who is everything you hate, who is everything you don't want to be and worry you are, and is just so loathsome that you almost admire them. You'd stop hating exes long before you stop hating this person, and your every interaction with them seems designed by the other person to be fingernails on a chalkboard for you, no interaction with you goes by without them doing something to raise your pulse, no interaction with other people goes by without them doing something to raise your pulse, and every interaction becomes worse just by the thought that they might become part of it. The world is a worse place because they are there, there is not a thing they touch that they don't slime, and not a thing they do that does not seem designed to make themselves feel better at everyone else's expense.

And then you find out they're dead. And you don't celebrate, you just feel bad. And then you find out the circumstances in which they lived, and you feel even worse. You wish that there could have been some circumstances in which you could have seen the good in the person and they did not seem so gleefully filled with hatred. You can only imagine the life experiences which made them that way, and it fills you with a kind of horror. What terrible things about the world must they know to become the person they became?

And of course, you only know this person from the internet.

And then you take stock of yourself. You begin to wonder, did this person react to me the way they did because you are in fact closer to that way of being than you can possibly realize? And then you begin to question every interaction of your own; interactions in which your choices made perfect sense in the moment but when viewed with the distance of days, months, years, even hours, you wonder: am I that guy? And if I am that guy, what has made me that way? And even if certain things made me that way, what does that matter if I have contributed to making other people the same way; a state of being I do not wish on my worst enemy, even that guy who is now dead?

The internet attracts malcontents. There are two types of people who post on it regularly, the people who post the darkest parts of themselves - outrage, dehumanization, even antisocial behaviors... and then there is a second kind of exhibitionist who posts on it: the people in denial of their dark side, who simply want to convince others of their wonderfulness, and believe that perhaps in convincing others, they can convince themselves.

Either behavior only makes people feel worse, and makes people feel need to spew more rage and seek more approval. People gravitate to internet addictions because they have exhausted the possibilities of social interaction in their personal lives, and whatever affinity and togetherness they don't get from the people around them, they have to seek elsewhere.

The internet was created to bring the world together, and in a way it has, but everyone with whom we have not been brought closer together we feel farther away from than ever - and perhaps feel more rage toward people with whom we have animus than we ever did in the years before a troll could shitpost. And it's made all the worse by the fact that we don't actually know these people, because that means that our frustrations online may ultimately be emptied on our real life interactions.

There are so many miserable people out there, far more miserable than anyone reading or writing this post. Mentally ill people who can't leave their homes, physically ill people who can't leave their beds, and both for decades. But even for those who are not miserable in that particular way, what are we doing here? So many of us are on the internet because we find ourselves without enough purpose or meaning in real life, and here comes this place we didn't even know existed thirty years ago, a place to scrawl around all the various bits of wisdom and judgement we think we've accumulated, only to find that all too many others on the internet don't appreciate our wisdom or judgement any more than they appreciate us in the physical world.

It's probable that nobody has ever known why we were deposited on this planet. Every one of us has some responsibility for our misfortunes, but none of us asked to be in troubling situations, we all did the best we could with the hands we were dealt, many of us were dealt bad hands, and while we hope that future generations will be dealt better ones, we have no way of being certain they will.

But I do believe there is a way of learning from it. The pandemic has made the internet responsible for our lives to an extent it never could before, even in the heyday of Trump's government by tweet. The internet was practically the only way we all kept in touch, and whoever we were two years ago, we have all changed in the meantime more than at any point in the last 30 years, and that's even after the years of Trump, when the liberals among us have never experienced fear to such an extent, or 9/11, when the same happened to conservatives. The pandemic, whatever your opinion on it, was a universal experience shared by everyone in the world, and whatever your perception of it, it forced everyone on Earth to rethink their priorities.

For the first time in years, my social anxiety went waaay down. Hardly anybody would believe me if they found out I think myself an introvert, but it's true. Motormouthing was just the way a desperate kid with torrentially consequential learning disabilities found to cope with his many anxieties, which never went away, and resulted in him finding ways over the years to repay the bullying deposited upon him on many other people. It's not bragging to say that I've been very good at humiliating other people for decades, I have much experience in how to do it,... but the satisfaction in being the court jester who knows how to make a party of drunks laugh is extremely fleeting.

Some of us learn all too late that we have to be very selective in our interactions. Some of us learned to crave acceptance from people that we would never get when much of the real acceptance comes simply from doing the activities we love - be it sports, reading, music, hiking, whatever else. Being among people is a whirlwind, the potential for 'drama' and misunderstanding is astronomic, and inevitably none of us say what we mean or mean what we say. You often don't know which friendships will stay time's test until it's much too late, and all you have left of them is regretful memories.

'Things' are not forever, but 'peace' can be forever, and peace is as often as not procured through the inner life - whatever it is in the inner life that gives you satisfaction, be it music and books, or baseball and football.

One day, hopefully sooner rather than later, those of us who take to the internet will find the companionship we seek in real life, be it through love or friends, but in the meantime, activity is the key to getting us through the other side, where life is peaceful enough that others want to spend significant parts of it with us. A book is not a substitute for a friend, but it is a much better substitute than the internet. Books, music, sports, movies, walking and running, these are activities that, unless you do them competitively, can't judge you or tell you how inadequate you are. They're routine, they're regulation, they're prayer, they're a way to keep up the spirit and hold you together through the next anxiety fueled interaction.

As nice as it is to find out that there are other people who share our passions and broadcast our findings to them, nothing is a substitute for the thing in itself. The inner experience is the ultimate reward, and nobody, not even people who hate you, can take that away.

Another (slightly longer) Comment on Norrington

 

I seem to have created an enormous bruhaha in the 'conductors' facebook group by posting about Norrington's pseudoscholarship. I don't know what I expected, but my point was to point out to other extreme Norrington skeptics that even Norrington had his strengths. Of course, that resulted in people taking the gravest possible exception to what I posted, which is, of course, one of the the ultimate signs of a cult....

I can tell you right now, for those of us who harbor resentments toward the Historically Informed Performance movement, an enormous part of our resentment is class-based. The sheer number of eminent musicians in HIP who come from the most extreme possible privilege is mindboggling. At least Harnoncourt, an Austrian Count, had to suffer through the privations and losses of the Hitler years, and at least Bruggen involved himself with the Dutch avant-garde figures like Andriessen and de Lieuw, but the British HIPsters, what have they ever experienced to justify the perception of them as having accumulated such enormous wisdom? Norrington was the son of an Oxford Chancellor, Gardiner the good friend of Prince Charles and the son of a DH Lawrence disciple who was barely less influential a Hitler supporter to England than Oswald Mosley. Christopher Hogwood and Raymond Leppard were both in the social circles influential English right-wingers. Leppard is well-documented, but one young and well-connected Young Republican I used to know who went to Peabody got a personal invitation by Hogwood to tour Scotland with him... Only David Munrow came from origins that were in any way humble. It was a movement soaked in political reactionaryism, and its founders held such august social connections that they could simply saunter into music, and newspaper editors who knew their parents would pointedly tell critics to pay attention to them.

I don't doubt they all worked hard, but most musicians work just as hard if not harder, and it's only luck that gets them noticed. Guys like Norrington never learned to properly conduct, and were put in front of the world's greatest orchestras because they gave a couple of provocative presentations.

The Historical Performance movement happened because the music world needed a movement like that which made us pay attention to the vast reservoir of great pre-Bach music, and got us away from the soporific pseudo-profundity of instrumental performance, which in the era of Karajan and Celibidache had grown increasingly humorless and bombastic, but large parts of it have become the sickness of which it was supposed to be the cure.

The HIP movement has a number of really wonderful achievements and I wouldn't dream of writing it off as a net loss, but it was a movement like any other in music history that has terrible weakensses alongside its great strengths. If the HIP world cannot come to terms with its worst features, its dogmas will be largely overthrown in exactly the same way as it overthrew the dogmas of the era preceding it.

A Brief Comment on Roger Norrington

 So Roger Norrington's retiring.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5T9MctxZKCA

Don't worry, I will never make a claim Norrington is underrated, but it still makes me sad to hear. Norrington was a pseudo-scholar whose lies should have effectively disbarred him from the profession, but he wasn't a bully, he generally seemed like a pleasant and entertaining chap who evangelized well on behalf of music to the public. And against his own instincts, he could occasionally give very good performances. There are a couple among the piles of crap I really do value: Beethoven 2 and 8, the Berlioz SF, Mendelssohn Scottish, even Bruckner 6. And in English repertoire, he was nearly like any other decent British conductor and clearly knew how the music should go.

It makes sense that he'll bid farewell with Haydn. Most every classical performer has one or two 'home composers' through whose rubric they see music. Norrington generally did Haydn extremely well, and just happened to turn everything into Haydn. Hearing Mahler 9 or the Deutsches Requiem as with the perkiness of Haydn is an insult to the vulnerability of such desperately sincere music. Audiences would have been within their rights to riot and beat him up on the stage, but if you give an artist enough chances, especially chances they don't deserve, they will surprise you with occasions that they rise to. Such was the case with Norrington, and now that he's about to go, it does make me at least a little nostalgic.

Tale 8: Part 2 - Rough Draft

Everything had to go right for entertaining la Marquess de Boildier. Louis had to make his baekoffe perfectly and if he was even slightly off form the baekoffe had to be sent back and made again from scratch while the Marquess waited for as long as she was willing to wait. She was known for abrading everyone from the masters to their servants to marching straight into the kitchen. 

On the one hand, the Marquess was la grade dame among Paris grande dames, known for her social authority, generosity and politesse. To be graced by the Marquess de Boildier was to have every door of Parisian society open forever, to be out of her graces was to have to return to the provinces, where her reach was such where families she hated may not even be received in their towns of origin by lifelong friends. Families in her favor sat at the table of Kings and generals, and servants she noted for exemplary conduct were remunerated for years thereafter with monthly gratuities in the mail. But legends had grown round Madame la Marquess that if she thought one ingredient off in her meal she would march down to the kitchen and expunge her dish upon the executive chef's head. 

We needn't have worried. La Marquess was so taken with the meal she repeated dipping her finger in the plates to savor the sauces of Louis's Baekoffe and the Tarte flambee. Louis will be overjoyed to learn he'd surmounted one of his greatest triumphs. She correctly guessed that the chef had been in Madame Bloch's service since her childhood in Strasbourg, and noted with an impressed gasp of Madame Bloch's lineage, which she'd traced back to the sixteenth century peaks of the Holy Roman Empire when her ancestor, Rabbi Yosel of Rosheim, was a chief advisor and financier to Emperors no less august than Maximilian I and Charles V. But if Madame Bloch could trace her lineage back to the high financiers of Charles V, the Marquess de Boildier, nee Capet, could trace her lineage all the way back to Hugh the Great, and legend had it that her mother's brother, Charles Carolingus, was the patrilineal heir of Charlemagne. To French society, the Blochs would always be Jews, but la Marquess de Boildier would always be France herself. 

But even the Marquess de Boildier had bad investments, and even Madame la Marquess had a son... and though Guillaume had bedded his way through Paris, not even Madame la France herself had the bank account to support his gambling largesse, nor was there a suitable match to calm him, a lady beautiful and forgiving and intelligent and rich enough to love this boy who would always remain a boy. The only girl in Paris for Guillaume de Boildier was Rachel Bloch, and it took six years for Guillaume to come to his senses and propose to this unspoiled girl sage enough to forgive him everything and smart enough to keep track his every dalliance, pay his every debt, and manage his every estate. And if Rachel herself proved not smart enough, surely her eldest brother, the honourable Robert, was as cunning and patient as their estimable father. 

All the more urgent was this matter because La Marquess felt personally responsible for the Bloch's societal humiliation. Madame la Marquess came within days of sealing the betrothal between There were twenty-million women in France with whom Guillaume's affairs would cause no scandal, but Guillaume had to run off with the Duchesse d'Orleans, which of course necessitated a duel, which of course ended with Guillaume killing the Duke d'Orleans, which of course resulted in the Duchesse's suicide. Any other woman in France would never be able to show her face again in polite society, but polite society was la Marquess, and no French noble would deign her unvenerable enough to withhold reservation of her rightful place. 

But Madame la Marquess had not the heart to visit a son like this upon any family, even a Jewish one. The Bloch's gave no indication of wilting zeal to press the betrothal forward, but so soon after scandal, Guillaume could have no public wedding befitting a de Boildier. The Marquess considered a public ceremony empty theater, except it would keep society's eyes affixed upon Guillaume, who might then be prevailed upon somewhat to reform. 

Certainly Guillaume was unready for any commitment resembling marriage, and therefore Rachel must be free to bless a more deserving family with her manifold charms. It was not long before la Marquess heard that she would marry into the Dreyfuses - another sensible family of Alsatian Jews. Those Hebrews could do much for France if only they were not so prudent in keeping to themselves. France would not be France without risk, and these Israelites seem to believe that the society of France will believe any family well intentioned that makes no display of itself. 

Yet again poor Rachel avoided a scandalous marriage by a centime when her fiance's uncle was arraigned on charges of treason and espionage, and was mercifully permitted escape of betrothal. At twenty-five, she may not now seem as marriageable as once she was, but she still seemed beautiful, witty, modest, pure, and most importantly, relatively fascinating to Guillaume, who was still looking at her across the dinner table as though she were Helen of Troy. 

The Marquess had absolutely been to soirees at Maison Bloch, and even dined as a guest of honor at their formidable table, but in all this time, never had she dined intimately with the family. What she saw was both charming and perhaps a little troubling. It turns out that this family, seeming so perfectly reserved to outward appearance, was a family like any other family; but the lack of control in front of a guest to whom they should have the good taste to show deference was disquieting. Bernard, the younger son, accounted by many of her friends a brilliant young doctor, did not keep his more radical opinions to himself, launching into his thoughts on Napoleon, 1848, the Rights of Man, and justifying it all with vociferous praise of her great-grandfather, the Comte Mirabeau, for whose actions the Marquess blamed for the entire French Revolution. 

But what was equally troubling was that Robert, the Baron's elder son, did not have the sense to ignore Bernard's lack of discretion. With every new mention of Bonapartism, Robert's entreaties upon Bernard to change the subject grew more agitated, which prompted the Baroness in turn to angrily upbraid both her sons for discord in front of their guests. 

Rachel, however, had the good taste to say nothing except for a few demure answers in response to questions from Guillaume. And the Baron had the sense to work Bernard's agitations into an extraordinary toast about the possibilities of progress, in which he recounted all the recent generations of his family - the great-great-grandfather who left the Jewish schools in Rouen to fight in the Revolution and lost his head in The Great Terror, then a great-grandfather who fought in the Italian campaign and established a factory during Napoleon's consulship that built Bonaparte's most crucial armaments, and his grandfather who created a firm out of the factory that established one of France's largest banks and diversified into railroads and textiles, and his father who financed Emperor Napoleon III, and he who established the deed to so many mines in West Africa and Indochina. And the Baron tied it all together by demonstrating the ultimate sign that progress is real: a de Boildier can love a Bloch, and a Bloch can marry a de Boildier.  

Such an admirable man and inspirational optimist this Baron Bloch. Were he truly one of us he could stand for Prime Minister. Never had the Marquess heard anyone use their own family history to demonstrate as Baron Bloch did how much France has progressed. When Baron Bloch declared that 'The Age of Revolution is over,' for a moment, the Marquess really believed him. 

But even directly after such a wonderful peroration Bernard could not let his extremism go, and had the social lunacy to not only bring up 1871 but also the Dreyfus Affair. And yet this zenith of the occasion's contentiousness was precisely the opening the Marquess had been hoping for all evening. The Marquess turned Bernard's irresponsibility to everyone's advantage. 

All of Paris knew that Rachel was betrothed to a Dreyfus, but all of Paris had to pretend that they did not know, and that the Blochs had not been spoken of in the most withering terms along with the Dreyfuses and excluded from many soirees, and the Blochs too had to pretend they had no idea of their exclusion or their defamation. This was the moment the Marquess had rehearsed in her mind for five years. She knew exactly what to say, what Guillaume would say, and what Rachel would say. 

Marquess: Well, what about Rachel, wasn't she briefly engaged to Monsieur Dreyfus's nephew. 

Guillaume: MAMAN!

Marquess: It does no good to pretend your fiancee doesn't know very well the most famous celebrity in France. 

Guillaume: She doesn't want to speak of it!

Marquess: Have you even asked her?

Guillaume: Why would I?

Marquess: Well I wouldn't have to ask had you treated her well seven years ago!

Guillaume: Rachel you don't have to answer anything Maman demands.

Rachel: I don't mind.

Marquess: What is the Dreyfus family like?

Rachel: They're like us. They love France, they wish France loved them. 

Marquess: They do my dear. Everyone who matters loves you. 

To Madame's delight, the exchange went exactly as she had conceived for all these years.  Rachel was blessed, the engagement was blessed, the Blochs were blessed, Guillaume was blessed, and France was blessed to welcome new families this brilliant and unpolished into her highest echelon. 

Tale 8: Paris 1899 - Part 2 Beginning

Everything had to go right for entertaining la Marquess de Boildier. Louis had to make his baekoffe perfectly and if he was even slightly off form the baekoffe had to be sent back and made again from scratch while the Marquess waited for as long as she was willing to wait. She was known for abrading everyone from the masters to their servants to marching straight into the kitchen. 

On the one hand, the Marquess was la grade dame among Paris grande dames, known for her social authority, generosity and politesse. To be graced by the Marquess de Boildier was to have every door of Parisian society open forever, to be out of her graces was to have to return to the provinces, where her reach was such where families she hated may not even be received in their towns of origin by lifelong friends. Families in her favor sat at the table of Kings and generals, and servants she noted for exemplary conduct were remunerated for years thereafter with monthly gratuities in the mail. But legends had grown round Madame la Marquess that if she thought one ingredient off in her meal she would march down to the kitchen and expunge her dish upon the executive chef's head. 

We needn't have worried. La Marquess was so taken with the meal she repeated dipping her finger in the plates to savor the sauces of Louis's Baekoffe and the Tarte flambee. Louis will be overjoyed to learn he'd surmounted one of his greatest triumphs. She correctly guessed that the chef had been in Madame Bloch's service since her childhood in Strasbourg, and noted with an impressed gasp of Madame Bloch's lineage, which she'd traced back to the sixteenth century peaks of the Holy Roman Empire when her ancestor, Rabbi Yosel of Rosheim, was a chief advisor and financier to Emperors no less august than Maximilian I and Charles V. 

How Good Was Clara Schumann?

 So how good was Clara Schumann?

Obviously she was one of the greatest pianists of her day, and in many ways had a much more satisfying, meaningful piano career than Franz Liszt. Liszt only played a full-time recital schedule for 11 years, from which we derive his entire reputation as a pianist. When the complete piano works of Liszt were recorded, they fit on 101 CDs, there is no way Liszt could have written anything like that much piano music and kept up a full time concert schedule. Perhaps considering the music's variable quality, the world might have been better served if he gave a few more concerts... but even listeners like me who are Liszt skeptics have derived hours and hours of joy from his music.

Clara Schumann on the other hand, had a 61 year solo career, most of it full-time. There are still programs from 1300 concerts she gave. For her time, Liszt was like Horowitz, Argerich, Richter, who only emerged ever so seldom and whose every appearance was an event. But Clara was the true workhorse: of her era, she was the Arrau, Rubinstein, Barenboim, who year in and year out, appeared before a public of whole family trees who were born and died part of a public grateful for her every concert. Only artist of iron will and deepest seriousness could manage a concert schedule and perform with consistent excellence.

Was she as great a composer as some people suddenly allege? Well, yes... and no... and yes... and...

• Tonight we in Baltimore heard the Clara Schumann Piano Concerto. It is by no means a masterpiece. Most of it is quite a bit less than that. But then again, neither frankly are the piano concertos of either Chopin or Liszt. Clara Schumann's Piano Concerto does, however, have a middle slow section as stunning as any music written by any composer in the generation of the Schumanns.
• On the other hand, Clara Schumann wrote it when she was sixteen. SIXTEEN! When she was on the verge of an unlimited future in music and seemed as though her talent could go in a hundred different directions.
• On the other hand, at sixteen, Mendelssohn had written his Midsummer Night's Dream Overture and a number of String Symphonies more interesting than this. Schubert had written his Household Quartet and first symphony, both of which are very nearly masterpieces. And Mozart?... well he'd already completed Lucio Silla and Ascanio in Alba, which for most composers would be of a quality to consider the crowning achievement of their careers. Since most of C. Schumann's output comes from the beginning of her career, that's what we have to judge her by. Was she a Schubert or Mendelssohn? Well, certainly not...
• On the other hand, most great composers do not show the extent of their capability until adulthood, and sometimes, well into middle age. If Clara Schumann wrote music every day of her life the way her husband or Brahms did, I suppose it's entirely possible she'd have been as great a composer as they. No one can possibly say that she did not have some sort of divine musical gift.
• On the other hand, there is another category of composer. The child prodigy composer who then became legendary performers: Jascha Heifetz, Vladimir Horowitz, Fritz Kreisler, Igor Markevitch, George Szell, Andre Previn, these were all legendary performers who showed extreme early promise as composers, but found their vocation on the concert stage.

So therefore, I would argue that Clara Schumann was one of the very few women throughout music history who got all the opportunities to reach her full potential she could possibly wish for. She was one of the very greatest performers in the history of the piano and was, in addition, a very fine composer. That's enough, and compared not only to most women but to 99.99% of her peers, that is a life full of the most spectacular achievement.

The confluence of factors which created Clara Schumann is both fascinating and easy to draw specious conclusions. On the one hand, she clearly lost creative opportunities by choosing motherhood, by choosing to support her husband's career and champion his music rather than create her own, and let's not forget, garden variety sexism would have made acceptance of her music colossally harder than it had to be - regardless of how great.

...On the other hand, Clara Schumann only got to develop her talent to the extent of her abilities because her father Friedrich Wieck worked her just as hard as Leopold Mozart worked Wolfgang and Nannerl. The demands of a male created Clara Schumann, and many fathers more sympathetic to women did not make that level of demands on their daughters, and as a result, we have no idea of their talents. When Wieck tried to stop the Schumann marriage in court and spread all kinds of rumors about Robert, it was partially because he felt his daughter was throwing it all away on a mentally unstable man whose talent was inferior to his daughter's, but it was also because Friedrich Wieck saw that his daughter was throwing her independence away - and he worried that she would become little more than a footstool to another musician rather than an immortally great musician in her own right.

Obviously, C. Schumann's career as a composer was set back by choosing to have a family life for which she bore eight children. On the other hand, child-rearing among the 19th century bourgeois was a rather different thing: much of which was done, post-pregnancy anyway, by wet-nurses, governesses, and maidservants. Clara Schumann could not have resumed a spectacular solo career after her children grew up and Robert died unless she put in hours of daily practice to maintain her abilities during her years of motherhood. Even in the 19th century, you didn't return to professional pianism after maintaining a casual relationship to the piano for twenty years. Clara decided to be the keeper of Robert's legacy through many performances of his work, but if she really and truly had evidence of compositional talent that exceeded her extraordinary pianism, she literally had forty years after Robert's death to pursue it. And if her music ran into trouble with critics, such critics could not possibly have given her more trouble than her own musical cliques gave to Bruckner, occasionally at her own encouragement.

Considering how little I have to lose, I'll just say flat out that the effort to promote women composers from history, to me, seems like a deeply misguided effort - effort that could be spent in pursuit of promoting great women composers today, or sifting through 800 years of unheard masterpieces which have to collect dust for yet another generation because the only concert real estate permitted for anything but the newest music is music from underrepresented demographics whose music was, by definition, not properly developed. Lilli Boulanger is a grand exception - a properly trained talent by her father whom, had she survived even as long as Mozart would be, I believe, considered the greatest composer France has produced in literally hundreds of years. But to promote musicians like Clara Schumann and Fanny Mendelssohn to fully canonical status, let alone mediocrities like Amy Beach and Ethyl Smyth, is to erase the existence of the problem - if we were to pretend that there were more than half a dozen female composers in the era of common practice tonality making music the equal of the greatest of the great (and, for the record, there weren't), how would that not be erasing the extent of classical music's gender problem?

'Art music' was a career barely available throughout history to any but the haute bourgeois, gentry, and aristocracy, and at least we hear Clara Schumann's explosive talent speak through a few dozen works that don't necessarily put her talent to the best use, but truly lower class musicians of all genders and races were utterly confined to ephemeral bands of folk musicians whose talent can never be transmitted to posterity in the slightest, and those are only the musically talented people permitted to pursue music as a career, 99% of whom were men. So who then is really and truly erased? Clara Schumann, who was the Arthur Rubinstein of her era, or the millions of artistically gifted women in every generation who had to spend their lives away from everything which could have enlivened both them and us? Which of them deserves to have their narrative of frustrated creativity less than Clara Schumann does?

The past is the past, and we can't do anything about how male-or-race-or-class-centric it was. Talent is not achievement, it needs the space to be properly developed, and tragically, woman composers were not allowed to develop their abilities to the best of their extent - just as 99% of lower-class men were. What we can do is chip away every day for the future at making that lack of opportunity a thing of the past, and give the great talents we see today every opportunity to express their full potential.

...will I be writing my obituary if I post a link to this to twitter?

The Three Weeks

Halloween always marks the beginning of my least personal least favorite holiday, 'The Three Weeks.' The three weeks between Halloween and Thanksgiving are, for me, the worst time of every year. The lack of sunlight and eternal gray, the dying of the trees and absence of birds, the wet rain colder than any snow... I find November so much more difficult than winter, when we've all adjusted to this new world and have occasional outbursts of snow, color, good cheer, and light.

Bad things just seem to happen to me during The Three Weeks in manners that seem almost occult. I won't give many examples... but last year's Three Weeks were made still much worse by an unexpected and very messy breakup, devastating enough to make me move into my childhood home for nine months because the general loneliness of a small apartment was just too much to bear. I'm now back home for three months, and the mess I left last 'three weeks' is still not picked up - dishes, trashbags, bedsheets... it's just a wonderful life to come back to... and very difficult to resume in any way that invests faith that things can improve.

Judaism has its own 'Three Weeks of Mourning' in the three weeks before the Ninth of Av, the summer holiday that commemorates the destruction of the two Israelite Temples in Jerusalem. On the one hand, it's very difficult in a modern context to mourn what our more skeptical era would perceive to be a malodorous slaughterhouse. On the other hand, it is a commemoration of all the time immemorial destruction of imperial occupiers, who slaughter for glory rather than sacrifice.

Can the world exist without this kind of senseless domination and subjugation, or is there just a wheel of humiliation, where some people are inevitably up at the expense of people who are down? History so far would seem to show the world can't, and yet no decent person could get out of bed in the morning without believing that it can. It's a very cruel paradox, and one with no real resolution.

Tomorrow I will be kicking off the festivities with a visit to the cardiologist to investigate my omnipresently accelerated heartbeat and shortness of breath, even after losing roughly twenty pounds in twenty weeks. This is roughly par for the course. I suspect the news will not be all great. We're all not supposed to believe in hexes but sometimes it's difficult...

Due to a mixture of health, disenchantment, and anxiety, I barely socialize anymore, my once extremely social self finding that all but the closest friends and family are extremely anxiety inducing unless indulging in substances that are clearly deleterious to my body.

There aren't that many consolations left to me, and the paradox is that the more you isolate yourself, the more you ask yourself 'where did it go so wrong?' and 'was there ever a way to right this ship?'

And so I grit my teeth, put my head down, bare whatever bad news comes - as it does every single year..., and await the end of The Three Weeks and the coming of Thanksgiving and Holidays, hoping that my resolve to not indulge in food and drink will hold, and at the same time any celebrations coming my way will give any satisfaction without the haze of food and drink to abet it.

What shitshow is in store for me this year?

Tale 8: Paris 1899 - First eighth or so

 The chef was not quite French and not quite German. He'd been in her employ since childhood when she was just Mademoiselle Bloom. His father Ludwig was chef to Monsieur Bloom, his grandfather Ludovic cuisinier to Herr Bloom. The Blooms were in Alsace since the 12th century, and as far as the Wolfshunds knew, a Wolfshund cooked for a Bloom when the Blooms entertained Emperor Barbarossa. Every Wolfshund knew how to make that egg-noodle monstrosity they called 'kugel' and that wretched apples nuts and wine dip they forced themselves to eat every Passover. 

But now that Madame Bloom was Baroness Bloch, Louis Wolfshund was in Paris, ordered to move with with new Baroness so her children would know how a decent Baekoffe and Shiffala taste. Once in Paris, Louis cured meat at the feet of the Bloch's formidable executive chefs, two brothers and Italian kitchen tyrants named Ebreo, and whom together taught Louis by the spoon how to make Paris's best Beouf Bourguignion, Coq au vin and Cassoulet, along with some worthlessly fried ball of bicot merde called 'falafel.' And yet upon retirement the Ebreos recommended a different executive chef with Louis as the mere chef de cuisine. Fortunately, the young and facile Chef Rosenthal had a better offer: the kitchen of Baron de Rothschild, and therefore Louis was made executive chef to what he knew he'd soon raise to Paris's best kitchen in any house or restaurant. 

And still, when Le Cordon Bleu opened in 1895, the Bloch ordered him to enroll immediately, Louis, an executive chef of Paris for nineteen years whose food was served to Zola, Rodin, Clemenceau and Rothschild a dozen times each was taking instruction on how to crack eggs. The Rothschilds never made Chef Rosenthal enroll... The other servants explained to him that this was meant as a great honor. Imagine being the first scientist to graduate from l'Ecole Polytechnique! 

The truth of the matter was the Blochs were concerned that all their friends had younger chefs who'd be trained at Le Cordon Bleu, and they didn't want anyone to comment that the Blochs employ a chef with credentials any less than immaculate. Jewish or gentile, the Blochs knew they would find no better chef out of Le Cordon Bleu's graduates than Louis already was, so Baroness Bloch hit upon the magnificent idea to send Louis to Le Cordon Bleu, where he could stun the students and faculty with his quality and become known to a wide gastronomic public as one of the finest chefs of the Third Republic. 

Louis always suspected the idea was not the Baroness's but rather the lady's maid, Lisette. Louis had always flirted in ways designed to make Lisette mal at ease; he thought the way she looked embarrassed deeply charming, and of course, thought Lisette's protestations of disinterest the lies of a teasing flirter who took pleasure in drawing out Louis's seduction, only to be told one day in 1895 that he would spend six hours every day learning to cook like a first-year dishwasher when he knew everything better than his maitres, and have no free moment for Lisette to play with force for the next two years.  

For the first year, the young students at Le Cordon Bleu laughed at Louis like serpents in a vegetable garden, as he knew they would - a Baron's executive chef forced to take lessons in remedial cooking, and from teachers who had not half his experience or skill. Just his mere presence in a place like this ensured no professor would appreciate his professionalism or gift. And while the students snickered at his presence, the maitres critiqued his kitchen technique as though he were a first year sous chef when he hadn't burned a Sauce Bearnaise in thirty years and could make the clearest Consomme to be found outside the kitchen of Auguste Escoffier at the Savoy in London. Surely, were these amateur gourmands true chefs themselves, they would be employed in a grand house like the Maison Bloch, to which he had to return every evening and prepare the night's meal he'd assembled that morning before class.

But in Louis's second year at Cordon Bleu arose a student group inflamed on the eclat of French glory and incensed there would be any French chefs who polluted their cuisine with international influence: discussing with outrage that any French chef would serve a Ratatouille on pasta or drench a Coq au vin in Riesling, and repeat with outrage the oft-repeated claims that omlettes and pates were Tuscan in origin rather than French. Their consciousness of the foreign encroachment sharpened by the subversive threat on display in the trial of Lt. Colonel Dreyfus.  

Obviously these students were passionate about food, and Louis finally made time in his assiduously occupied schedule to attend a group meeting of "Cuisine Francaise pour la France," where he quickly discovered these students to be so incompetent they could barely hold together a Croque Madame. Louis immediately began banging the pots and shouting at these culinary infants like a proper chef and shoved them out of the classroom stoves' way to demonstrate their every error. For this fanatical histrionic he received not jeers but a hail of applause. Over the next six hours, Louis neglected the Bloch's dinner and showed them all the mistakes with which their maitres were instructing them. A student finally asked him in which kitchen he learned, and when he said that for twenty years he's been executive chef in the kitchen of Baron Bloch, the room went completely silent, until someone called out: "Only a Jew would force a servant as loyal as me back to training." the students followed by approving nods of 'd'accord.' A year's worth of rage came venting forth about all the luminaries whose compliments he received, all the absurd dietary demands by Bloch relatives (and all the times he secretly disobeyed them), and how two years of remedial culinary training was his reward. 

It seemed quite sudden that Louis was hailed as the glory of Le Cordon Bleu's first graduating class, but there he was, the head of faculty suddenly taking his instruction on how much raspberry sauce Escofier put on top his peche Melba and how La Varenne's bisque and Bechamel was more butter and fat than the official recipe ever called. 

When a representative of the military was called in to talk about the Dreyfus case and the importance of maintaining the honor and purity of France in all her endeavors, Louis needed no convincing. When he returned to Maison Bloch, Louis Wolfshund was hailed as France's finest executive chef short of Escoffier and Rosenthal, and he'd made up his mind that never again would he serve falafel, charoset. No more brassado bagels, no more Provencal breast of veal served in chicken soup, no more water challah with potatoes, no more carp a la juive in a parsley sauce, no more smoked beef tongue, and no more apple pudding made with matzoh. 

When Louis returned, the Blochs tripled his salary along with septuple overtime for holidays, and he went right on making that revolting food a la juif. 

------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Tale 8: Paris 1899 - Rewritten Beginning

  The chef was not quite French and not quite German. He'd been in her employ since childhood when she was just Mademoiselle Rosheim. His father Ludwig was chef to Monsieur Rosheim, his grandfather Ludovic cuisinier to Herr Rosheim. The Rosheims were in Alsace since the 12th century, and as far as the Wolfshunds knew, a Wolfshund cooked for a Rosheim when the Rosheims entertained Emperor Barbarossa. Every Wolfshund knew how to make that egg-noodle monstrosity they called 'kugel' and that wretched apples nuts and wine dip they forced themselves to eat every Passover. 

But now that Madame Rosheim was Baroness Hachmei, Louis Wolfshund was in Paris, ordered to move with with new Baroness so her children would know how a decent Baekoffe and Shiffala taste. Once in Paris, Louis cured meat at the feet of the Hachmei's formidable executive chefs, two brothers and Italian kitchen tyrants named Ebreo, and whom together taught Louis by the spoon how to make Paris's best Beouf Bourguignion, Coq au vin and Cassoulet, along with some worthlessly fried ball of bicot merde called 'falafel.' And yet upon retirement the Ebreos recommended a different executive chef with Louis as the mere chef de cuisine. Fortunately, the young and facile Chef Rosenthal had a better offer: the kitchen of Baron de Rothschild, and therefore Louis was made executive chef to what he knew he'd soon raise to Paris's best kitchen in any house or restaurant. 

And still, when Le Cordon Bleu opened in 1895, the Hachmeis ordered him to enroll immediately, Louis, an executive chef of Paris for nineteen years whose food was served to Zola, Rodin, Clemenceau and Rothschild a dozen times each was taking instruction on how to crack eggs. The Rothschilds never made Chef Rosenthal enroll... The other servants explained to him that this was meant as a great honor. Imagine being the first scientist to graduate from l'Ecole Polytechnique! 

The truth of the matter was the Hachmeis were concerned that all their friends had younger chefs who'd be trained at Le Cordon Bleu, and they didn't want anyone to comment that the Hachmeis employ a chef with credentials any less than immaculate. Jewish or gentile, the Hachmeis knew they would find no better chef out of Le Cordon Bleu's graduates than Louis already was, so Baroness Hachmei hit upon the magnificent idea to send Louis to Le Cordon Bleu, where he could stun the students and faculty with his quality and become known to a wide gastronomic public as one of the finest chefs of the Third Republic. 

Louis always suspected the idea was not the Baroness's but rather the lady's maid, Lisette. Louis had always flirted in ways designed to make Lisette mal at ease; he thought the way she looked embarrassed deeply charming, and of course, thought Lisette's protestations of disinterest the lies of a teasing flirter who took pleasure in drawing out Louis's seduction, only to be told one day in 1895 that he would spend six hours every day learning to cook like a first-year dishwasher when he knew everything better than his maitres, and have no free moment for Lisette to play with force for the next two years.  

For the first year, the young students at Le Cordon Bleu laughed at Louis like serpents in a vegetable garden, as he knew they would - a Baron's executive chef forced to take lessons in remedial cooking, and from teachers who had not half his experience or skill. Just his mere presence in a place like this ensured that no professor would appreciate his professionalism or gift. And as the students snickered at his presence, the maitres critiqued his dishes as though he were a first-year waiter when he hadn't burned a Sauce Bearnaise in thirty years and could make Consomme a thousand million times clearer than any of these amateur gourmands ever could. Surely, were they true chefs themselves, they would be employed in a grand house like the Maison Hachmei, to which he had to return every evening and prepare the night's meal he'd assembled that morning before class.

But in the second year, a student assembly arose: Cuisine Francaise pour la France, which  

(Louis becomes their star by sharing dirt on the Hachmei's)

When he returned, he did everything he could to show Lisette withering scorn, and Lisette Charlappe matched his contempt, ridicule for derision. 

no longer an Alsatian but a Frenchman who had even more reasons to hate Jews than every other decent Frenchman. 

The Thing About Yuja Wang

So now that yet another row has developed about Yuja Wang's clothes, here's the thing: on the one hand, you don't have to listen with your eyes open. Just close your eyes or put on a CD, open a video in a window you don't look at, and listen to what she's offering. The problem is that what she's offering is incredibly shallow and robotic.

Without looking at her, listen to this performance of the Chopin preludes. The Chopin preludes contain some of the sexiest, most romantic music ever written. It is literally the music of love in both its joys and heartbreak, but nearly every note sounds brittle and cast in steel. She still plays like she's in conservatory and every note is being played to impress a faculty jury. I can't find a single wrong note, there are deeply impressive soft dynamics, but every single bend of the phrase sounds coached and forced. No inner voices are brought out and there is no sense of the piano's infinite variety of color. But except for #8 in F-Sharp Major, which is genuinely impressive, it's all just monochrome and dull, loud or soft. She's playing as though she's just reading symbols on a page. The phrases have no rise and fall, the rhythms have barely any ebb or flow, and her sound in the loud passages is so brittle and percussive that it's ugly.

Technically, Yuja Wang may be the single most formidable pianist in the world, but in the head, heart, and soul, where is she? Occasionally she gives glimpses of the human being within, and what's inside is not that attractive either. There are the shows with Igutesman and Joo where she does comedy that plays to yellowface stereotypes. Perhaps she just doesn't know better, but to not know better than that at 35 is indicative of an immaturity that will stay permanent.

As far as I'm concerned, Yuja Wang can wear whatever she wants. She can come onstage wearing a swan like Bjork, and she'd still deserve to be judged by the ear alone rather than the eye, but to anybody who's really listening, what comes to the ear is so lacking that her approach to clothes seems indicative of her artistic approach, which is so on the surface that the clothes almost seem like a deliberate distraction from her lack of substance. She may be the most technically formidable pianist in the world, she's also a pianist who'd have no reason to get an international career if she looked like Yefim Bronfman.

I admit, unless they're gay, I have a lot of distrust and contempt for attractive artists. I know it's a prejudice, but like everyone with prejudices, I think I'm right. Perhaps the problem is me, but I don't really think so. My experience has always been that attractive people are completely unaware of how charmed they have it, and attractiveness can stunt compassion as much as whiteness or maleness. People just give them things and attractive people rely on their aesthetic appeal as much as white people rely on their whiteness. It is so easy for people who have never known daily rejection to simply perform heartbreak without having really experienced it. Ugly people are subject to all the same sexual pressures and terrors, perhaps not as consistently, but because ugly people have known so much rejection, the relationships, when they happen, tend toward a kind of dysfunctionality attractive people really, really don't understand. I could try to explain it but I'd be here all week.

So since we're now in an era when so many people believe that identity matters in every interaction, I do believe that an objectively measurable aesthetic identity influences the way people live their lives as much as any other form of identity. When I hear Myra Hess, Guiomar Novaes, Gina Bachauer, the Marias Yudina and Grinburg, I hear that inner depth that comes from an artist communicating substance rather than effect. One is a naked communicating from the heart, the other clothes a lack of heart.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pSpf9bKK_Zk&fbclid=IwAR348-Mw6eHW6gb5cRNZmR_F9zp95rmgB9KeOiOUV9FXy_jSDVcV7KXDLL4

Tale 8: Paris, 1899 - Beginning

 The chef was not quite French and not quite German. He'd been in her employ since childhood when she was just Mademoiselle Marceau. His father Ludwig was chef to Monsieur Marceau, his grandfather Ludovic chef to Herr Marceau. The Marceaus had been in Alsace since the 12th century, and as far as the Gerhardts knew, they'd cooked for Marceaus the whole time. Every Gerhardt knew how to make that egg-noodle monstrosity they called 'kugel' and that wretched apples nuts and wine dip they forced themselves to eat every Passover. 

But now Madame Marceau was Baroness Bloch, she was in Paris, and Louis Gerhardt was basically ordered to move with her so her children would know what decent Baekoffe and Shiffala taste like. And once in Paris, Louis went to work with the Bloch's chef de cuisine, a kitchen tyrant named Halevi who taught him by the spoon how to make Paris's best Beouf Bourguignion, Coq au vin and Cassoulet, along with some egg noodle monstrosity called 'kugel' and still he recommended a different chef to take his place when he retired. Fortunately Monsieur Rosenthal was offered the top spatula in the kitchen of Baron de Rothschild, and therefore Louis went about about running what he knew was Paris's best kitchen in house or restaurant. 

And still, when Le Cordon Bleu opened in 1895, the Blochs made him enroll, a chef with forty years experience, taking classes on how to use eggs. Nobody made Chef Rosenthal enroll... The other servants explained to him that it was a great honor. Imagine being the first scientist to graduate from l'Ecole Polytechnique! The truth of the matter was the Blochs were concerned that all their friends had younger chefs who would be trained at Le Cordon Bleu, and they didn't want anyone to feel their chef was in any way inferior. Jewish or gentile, the Blochs knew they would find no better chef out of Le Cordon Bleu's graduates than Louis already was, so Baroness Bloch hit upon the idea to send Louis to Le Cordon Bleu. 

Louis had always suspected that the idea was not the Baroness's but rather the lady's maid, Lisette. Louis had always flirted in ways designed to make Lisette mal at ease, he thought the way she looked embarrassed deeply charming, and of course, thought her protestations of disinterest in Louis the lies of a teasing flirter who took pleasure in drawing out the seduction, only to be told one day in 1895 that he would spend six hours in school every day and have no free moment to play with force for the next two years.  

When he returned, he did everything he could to show Lisette withering scorn, and Lisette matched his contempt ridicule for derision.  

no longer an Alsatian but a Frenchman who had even more reasons to hate Jews than every other decent Frenchman.