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Robert Gibson

I first came to Hobart just over three years ago, to take up a job. Unencumbered and ready for an adventure, I thought nothing of agreeing to the post without ever having visited the Tasmanian capital (or Tasmania, for that matter). The job advertisement included the promise of an ‘idyllic lifestyle’, which sounded pretty good to me.

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Richard Wagner: A Life in Music by Martin Geck (translated by Stewart Spencer)

by
February 2014, no. 358

After four days in the theatre, and just as many resting up between instalments, Richard Wagner’s Der Ring des Nibelungen ends with a big tune. Like most of Wagner’s themes, this one has been given a name: the ‘Redemption through Love’ motif. The name was not the work of the composer but of one of his acolytes, Hans von Wolzogen, and in its original German it is ‘Liebeserlösung’ which, strictly speaking, is ‘Redemption of Love’ or ‘Love’s Redemption’. But ever since guides to Wagner’s music began appearing in English – which is to say, a long time ago – the motif has been incorrectly labelled ‘Redemption through Love’, and so it has stuck.

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Claudia Gorbman, in her ground-breaking and much-admired book Unheard Melodies: Narrative Film Music (1987), invites us to imagine an alternative cinematic universe, one in which music has never played a part. Imagine if this were the norm, and imagine, after years of being accustomed to films in which music was absent altogether, attending a film such as the 1940s weepie Mildred Pierce and hearing the ebb and flow of Max Steiner’s luscious orchestral score. ‘What sheer artifice this would appear to the viewer! What a pseudo-operatic fantasy world! What excess: every mood and action rendered hyperexplicit by a Wagnerian rush of tonality and rhythm! What curious music, as well – robbed of its properly musical structure, it modulates and changes color, chameleonlike, in moment-to-moment deference to the narrative’s images.’ Of course, film music does not always defer to the narrative’s images, but Gorbman makes a good point: our willingness to admit music – music which emanates from a source external to the action on screen – as a perfectly normal constituent of film. It is surprising that we don’t find music in film surprising.

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David Malouf, one of the subjects interviewed by Margaret Throsby in Talking with Margaret Throsby, recounts his childhood experiences as an eavesdropper. He reveals that by listening in on conversations between his mother and her women friends he learnt about a world that was otherwise off-limits to him. For devotees of Mornings with Margaret Throsby on ABC Classic FM, the experience might sound familiar as they tune in to live conversations between the host and her distinguished guests; conversations which, although obviously public in that they are broadcast on national radio, frequently open a window onto the private world of the subject. Paul Keating, in Talking with Margaret Throsby, reveals that he would often prepare for cabinet sessions by listening to music (‘Start off slow, you know, and finish on something big’), conductor Jeffrey Tate discusses the ways in which he has coped with spina bifida, and writer and restaurateur Pauline Nguyen, who arrived in Australia as a ‘boat person’, talks about the difficulties of growing up in a household marked by fear and violence.

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In the course of its seventy-five years, the ABC has maintained a variety of in-house live music ensembles, including symphony orchestras, radio choruses, dance bands, a show band, military band and string quartet. In its capacity as a concert agency, the national broadcaster has been responsible for touring an astonishing array of artists. Claudio Arrau, John Barbirolli, Thomas Beecham, Otto Klemperer, Rafael Kubelík, Yehudi Menuhin, Birgit Nilsson, Eugene Ormandy, Artur Schnabel, Elisabeth Schwarzkopf, Isaac Stern, and Igor Stravinsky all made at least one visit to our shores, thanks to the concert-giving activities of the ABC. High-end classical music traffic in and out of the country has been so intense over the years that, at one point, piano legend Arthur Rubinstein crossed paths with violin virtuoso Bronislaw Huberman in remote Daly Waters in the Northern Territory (their inbound and outbound planes were refuelling at the time). To the Polish-born classical music celebrities, outback Australia in 1937 must have seemed as strange and unlikely a meeting place as deepest, darkest Congo. Rubinstein couldn’t resist exclaiming to his startled friend, ‘Dr Huberman, I presume!

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Dear Editor,

Brian Matthews makes an eloquent defence of Manning Clark’s Kristallnacht fantasy, but I was surprised to find myself being drafted as a witness simply because I once said that autobiography is ‘a lying art’ (May 2007). Actually, I can’t remember ever having used quite those words, but, as Brian Matthews well argues, memory plays tricks.

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Divas and scholars is the work of a scholar who is no stranger to the world of divas. Philip Gossett is a music professor at the University of Chicago and is principally in the business of preparing scholarly editions of nineteenth-century operas by Italian composers. We might think of the academic institution and the opera house as antithetical spaces, but Gossett is frequently called upon to advise and assist with the staging of works that belong to his area of expertise. In other words, not only does he know the operas of Rossini, Bellini, Donizetti and Verdi as historical artefacts and texts that take all manner of forms –fragments, drafts, complete manuscripts, variant manuscripts – but as phenomena that take shape on stage and in the orchestra pit in contemporary realisations that, as he argues, owe a responsibility to the fruits of scholarship. Divas and Scholars, then, is part personal and professional history, part history of nineteenth-century Italian opera (and operas in French by Italian composers), part manifesto, treatise on the transmission of opera and handbook for present-day singers, conductors and opera producers. In a happy coincidence, the author’s surname is a near-homonym for gossip, and this excellent book is leavened with timely and beautifully judged accounts of vanity, ignorance and arrogance: three vices which, while not indigenous to the opera house, are often depressingly at home within its gilded ambience.

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