Die Große Stille [Into Great Silence]

Philip Groning (Director, Screenplay, Editor, Cinematographer)

Documentary, Germany 2005, 162 minutes; Philip Groning, Elda Guidinetti, Andres Pfaffli, Michael Weber, Michael Stricker (Producers)

Many years ago I met a charming man who had, for a time, dedicated himself to a silent, enclosed order of monks. His account of the experience made me want to know more about it and I even developed the conceited fantasy that I too should dedicate my life to silence.

Philip Gröning had the same fascination and in 1984 he wrote to the Carthusian Order high in the Chartreuse Mountains and asked them to give him permission to film them. The Order replied that it would let him know when a decision had been made, and sixteen years later (a mere moment in time), it was ready. This documentary is the result.

Gröning lived with the monks for six months during which he closely observed their daily activities - with a camera. Apart from the creaking sounds of the ancient building and the disciplined routine of the monks, the film is mostly silent and establishes a clear sense of the rigorous, ascetic discipline of the life of silent contemplation.

Anyone would think this observant film would be an adequate substitute for those like me, whose egos allow them merely to fantasize about taking eternal vows in a silent order.  But the film left me with such a sense of calm and serenity that I cannot understand why it did not spark a stampede of frustrated bourgeoise heading to the Grande Chartreuse in search of the contemplative life.

Watch the trailer:

 

Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers

By Mary Roach

W. W. Norton & Company, New York, 2003; Softcover; ISBN-13: 9780393324822 ISBN: 0393324826


This "larf 'n barf" account of the uses to which corpses are put attracted the attention of more than a few of my fellow passengers on the train from Pennsylvania Station last Friday, and rightly so. Occasionally I had to put it down, either because I was turning green or because I was convulsed with laughter.

The opening chapter reveals a room full of baking trays containing the freshly sawn-off heads which await a plastic surgeons' face lift class. Did you know that Botox is derived from cadavers donated to medical science? Want to know how to transplant a head, or learn more about "organ harvesting"?

If it all becomes too much, turn for a sweet note to the section concerning "mummy candy," a confection comprising dainty slices of the fermented bodies of old men who willingly spent the last ten years of their lives eating nothing but honey so as to be transformed into a yummy snack.

The book surprises and alarms and in my case it ensured a 12 hour train journey from New York to Maine passed in what seemed like a moment.

Visit Mary Roach 's website

Handling Edna, The Unauthorised Biography

By Barry Humphries

Hachette Australia, 2009, 412 pages, ISBN 0733624006, 9780733624001

Having seen every show, film, TV programme and book written by Barry Humphries I did not expect to be surprised by this, his 4th autobiography, and I was not disappointed.

The story is the same, more or less a melange of his two previous autobiographies and Edna’s "My Gorgeous Life," plus the new admission that, from time to time at least, Barry himself dresses as Edna and pretends to be she.

None of this matters, though. We all know Edna is a discrete personality. Barry is alone with the conundrum of her existence, and the jokes are almost as funny the fourth time around as they were when they wrecked me on the rocks of hysteria 40 years ago.

October 2009

Metropolitan Opera, Tosca

By Giacomo Pucini (music), Giuseppe Giacosa and Luigi Illica (libretti)

Luc Bondy (Director), James Levine (Conductor), Karita Mattila (Tosca), Marcelo Álvarez (Cavaradosi), George Gagnidze (Scarpia), Lincoln Center, New York, October 6 2009

I went to see the much maligned Metropolitan Opera production of Tosca in New York on October 6 2009. That was my birthday treat.  I took one of the last seats that was for sale and it was in the director's box, so I hung over the side of the auditorium (taking care not to fall, unlike Tosca) and had a wonderful time. It had its own little sitting room behind it, and a narrow corridor which was separated from the auditorium by a velvet curtain with PRIVATE inscribed on the pelmet.

What can be said about Tosca that has not been said before? It was brilliant. How could it be otherwise? Anyone who loves the "shabby little shocker" could enjoy it performed anywhere and anyhow. I’ve seen a few productions, firstly in Tasmania in 1967 with my cousin Mavis Brinckman as Tosca, then at the Sydney Opera House with Eva Marton in 1984, the Glimmerglass Opera Festival in upstate New York in 1998 and now at the Metropolitan Opera. But I have also enjoyed a version delivered by a solo street busker at the Cafe de la Paix in Kings Cross, Sydney, and nothing can compare with the performance of Act 2 by two octogenarians, residents of the Casa di Verdi home for retired opera singers, in Daniel Schmid's famous film Il Bacio di Tosca (1984).

Yet the New York audience, led by the increasingly conservative city newspaper critics, hated this new production and booed the director. The New York Times called it "a kinky take on a classic" because the staging of Act 2 introduced ogling prostitutes to Scarpia's den and, furthermore, deprived the audience of the spooky moment when Tosca arranges the candles and crucifix on and around Scarpia's remains (she lolls in shock on a sofa instead).  In a discussion at the New York Public Library two days after this performance (see the video below) Luc Bondy, having been forced by hostile critics to defend himself, said "I did not realise that Tosca is like the Bible in New York."

The audience booed because they love the old Franco Zefirelli production, in the same way as they love The Nutcracker at Christmas. Luc Bondy’s sets and staging are as new and crisp as Zefirelli's were old and fussy, yet the Te Deum was as spine chilling as ever as were all the famous, anticipated hair-raising moments. Floria’s demise was actually more dramatic than usual; instead of skipping off a three foot high battlement onto the old stuffed mattress hidden in the wings, she plunged face-first from a vertiginous bell tower, in full view of the audience.

It doesn’t really matter. All performances of Tosca are good. It's the kind of opera that just makes people want to scream, or cry, or die, or boo.

Watch Luc Bondy defend his new production of Tosca:

Snowdon, The Biography

By Anne De Courcy

Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2008, 404 pages, ISBN 0297844873, 9780297844877

Apart from his photographs, there's not much about the Earl of Snowdon that is intrinsically interesting except for his sex life or, more specifically, the microscopic portion of it which he shared with his wives.

After decades of discretion on the subject of Princess Margaret's sexual promiscuity and alcohol abuse, Anne de Courcy has blown the lid and the greatest burst of steam comes from none other than Lord Snowdon himself. He details not only his late wife's infidelities and addictions but also his own.

He is probably much less kind to himself than he is to his former wife, but the point remains that in co-operating with this book he displays his egocentricity more than his compassion.  As a result, reading the biography is an intense experience, involving hour after hour of voyeurism as the dirty linen of London's high society and the Royal Family is washed, scoured, scrubbed and dried in plain sight (of all who wish to watch, that is).

It’s impossible to imagine that H.M. The Queen, hitherto Lord Snowdon’s good friend, will have been greatly pleased by this book, but she has forgiven the Earl’s rakishness before and so she might again.

Somewhere along the line Anne de Courcy fell in love with Lord Snowdon.  This works well for the book as her feelings intensify rather than compromise her desire to tell all.  In fact, her fascination with the Earl seems to cause her to draw more attention to his less appealing actions and qualities than to any others.

This does not reflect favourably on her subject, and it is disgusting for the reader who is nevertheless well - entertained.

The Other Elizabeth Taylor

By Nicola Beauman

Persephone Classics, Persephone Books, London, 2009, 444 pages, ISBN 1906462100, 9781906462109

Elizabeth Taylor was despised by the literary establishment in Britain, and she still is. This biography helps to draw attention to her genious not only by accounting for her life but by describing it in the context of a literary analysis of Taylor's work.

It's a fascinating account of a sharp eyed observer who turned all she saw into some of the most brilliant fiction of the twentieth century. Despite recent re-publication of her novels and short stories, she remains unpopular and disregarded.

Even her own family opposed the publication of this book, which is brilliantly informed and studious and places Elizabeh Taylor in the firmament of literary stars where she belongs.

August 2009

Frances Partridge, The Biography

By Anne Chisholm

Publisher Weidenfeld & Nicolson, London, 2009, 36 pages, ISBN 0297646737, 9780297646730

Everyone who loved reading Frances Partridge's diaries waited for this book with the sort of greed which could only be rewarded with a stomach ache. 

It was widely expected that many of the tantalising gaps Partridge had deliberately left in her published diaries would be filled by the author's access to previously unreleased papers and letters, as well as Frances Partridge's friends and acquaintances and to Frances herself, who co-operated with the writing of the book for several years, until she died in 2004.

Some of the gaps are filled, such as the deaths of her husband and her son (painful events which Frances Partridge edited out of her published diaries), but most are not.  It's impossible not to wonder why or to conclude that the author decided not to include material which would dismay Frances Partridge or her many friends and aquaintances still living.

Ultimately, the biography adds little to the diaries; in fact, it relies heavily on them for content and this defeats its purpose.  Considering Frances Partridge's almost uniquely privileged position as an accute observer of British art, literature, music and society throughout the entire twentieth century, and Anne Chisholm's access to her during the last ears of her life, this biography is cause for significant disappointment.

July 2009

The Letters of Noel Coward

Barry Day (ed.)

Random House Inc., New York, 2007, Hardcover, 800 pages, $37.50, ISBN: 978-0-375-42303-1 (0-375-42303-6)

It's no surprise to that Noel Coward not only wrote notes and letters compulsively, but that he meticulously kept copies of them in a well organized archive so that he could be sure we would have the benefit of reading them decades later.

The trouble is, many of them (in fact most of them) are not worth reading.  Until she died in the 1950s his mother was the main object of his letters and his affections and it is impossible to read the letters to her without feeling slightly nauseated. It's a relief when now and again she attacks him for being pompous or patronising, because in the main he is, not only to her but to, well, almost everyone.

The editor's decision to 'stream' some of the letters into subject matter channels makes the book complicated because this interrupts the chronology, but sometimes this also saves one flipping back and forth to the index to find the next letter dealing with a particular subject. The tale of Coward's friendship with Marlene Dietrich is a good example. We are able to read of her unhappy affair with Yule Brynner without pausing to pant and fumble through the index to find the next lurid instalment (and it is lurid). But this approach destabilises the book's essential continuity.

The non-chronological approach frustrated me less than the inconsistent standard of the letters themselves.  Most are neither intrinsically interesting nor of a publishable standard. To the die hard fans such as the editor is (he has written or edited all of the authoritative works on Noel Coward) this would be no deterrent to enjoyment, but to those of us who love good letters more than we love Noel Coward it is a bore to have to wade through so much of so little consequence.

In Tasmania: Adventures at the End of the World

By Nicholas Shakespeare

I read this book while I was in Tasmania in March, 2009, staying at my late grandparents’ shack at Marion Bay, so found myself in the places Shakespeare was writing about, up the East Coast and around Swansea.

I enjoyed its casual narratives in the way that it is fascinating to read about a place you know well but I remained distant from the narrator.

Shakespeare accumulates no end of contradictions, paradoxes, and missing pieces as he drives about the island exploring its history and gossip. Although he engages plenty of weathered, shrewd and atavistic locals in discussions, he doesn’t pursue to conclusion any of the hints they make about the facts behind their histories, but leaves the stories as they are, enigmatically colourful.

Ultimately the book is a vast collection of pithy observations and leading questions, which remain unresolved. After writing it, Shakespeare decided to move permanently from London to Tasmania, to a house in a remote location beyond Swansea on the south east coast. I wasn't really surprised to find that he remained a visitor and has since moved back to the UK

Anyone who grew up in Tasmania knows there actually are solutions to the riddles for which Shakespeare finds no answers and I certainly doubted that he would want to stay in Tasmania once he’d worked them out for himself.

March 2009

Life With My Sister Madonna

By Christopher Ciccone

Simon & Schuster, New York, 2008, hardcover, 352 pages, ISBN-10: 1416587624, ISBN-13: 9781416587620

Reading this book is like watching an obese man complaining about his weight while stuffing himself at an "all you can eat" buffet.

Evidently Christopher Ciccone did not know that, in the wild, siblings slaughter each other.  When he was fourteen and his big sister Madonna started telling him what to do, he assumed she knew what she was talking about, and he obeyed her.  He's been doing this ever since and now he wonders why he is in trouble with his career, finances and identity.  Naturally, when he followed Madonna’s every instruction and made himself available whenever she wanted him, he became a bore and Madonna fired him.

Poor Christopher is still trying to work it out. He won’t of course, until like the man at the buffet he steps away from the table.  But in the meantime he hangs in the purgatory he shares with all of Madonna's ex family and friends, waiting for the call to return to duty.

Diaries: 1939-1972, Frances Partridge

Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2000, ISBN 0297646664, 9780297646662, 715 pages

Frances Partridge, who died a few weeks short of her 104th birthday in 2004, kept diaries throughout her whole life, and reading them propels you into a parallel universe from which there is no escape until they have all been devoured.

She was acquainted with the entire Bloomsbury Group, but she knew almost everyone else who played a leading role in British writing, music, theatre, dance, cinema and painting throughout the 20th century, and her diaries lead the reader into what feels like an intimate acquaintance with them all.

The diaries continued for thirty years after the last published volume so we addicts are waiting for more (quite soon, please).

Listen to Frances Partridge on the BBC Women's Hour

December, 2009

Wodehouse, A Life

By Robert McCrum

W. W. Norton & Company, New York, 2004 530 pages, $27.95, ISBN: 0393051595

Reviewed in Good Reading, the Magazine for Book Lovers, ABN 38003 750 150, October 2005

Good Reading Magazine

Like millions of others I had an early attachment to P.G. Wodehouse’s books having read them in omnibus version through four years of Scripture at Prospect High School in Launceston. Although I have returned to them over and over I’ve always had the impression that Wodehouse was born old and boring.

This biography indicates that I might have been right about that. Half way through the book there is an entire chapter on tax returns and during the first half of the book Mr. McCrum cranks the reader's flagging interest with frequent promises of more excitement during the chapters covering World War Two.

It appears, despite McCrum’s apologia, that Wodehouse was an outright collaborator except that unlike some others he was directly commissioned and sponsored by the Nazis. Previously I had always thought he was an innocent victim of circumstance who richly deserved the knighthood so remarkably bestowed in his last year (the Queen Mother was a fan).

The book is well written and easy to read though it hasn't much to say as, when not writing, Wodehouse seems to have spent all his time watching cricket, having a martini before dinner and going to bed. If he did anything else (apart from collaborate with Nazis that is) there is little evidence of it in this book.

There is much to enjoy in McCrum’s valuable and informed enthusiasm about Wodehouse’s writing, but he tends to dismiss the rest of Wodehouse’s life by saying what an odd person he was - oh and a Nazi collaborator, but lets draw a veil over that.

After reading Allan Jefferson’s 1996 biography of Elisabeth Schwarzkopf in which it was proved that she was a willing member of the Nazi Party, I was never able to listen to her music again and having failed to give away her CDs I threw them out. After reading "Wodehouse, A Life" I honestly doubt that I will ever read another Wodehouse book again (don’t hold me to that) or have one in the house (ditto).

The Blue Piano and Other Stories

By Carol Montparker

Amadeus Press, New York, 2004, hardvover, 30 pages, $24.95, ISBN 1-57467-087-5

Review published in Good Reading, the Magazine for Book Lovers, ABN 38 003 750 150, March 2005

Good Reading Magazine

The Blue Piano describes the experiences and people Carol Montparker encountered as she made her way to the top as a concert pianist and teacher of renown. As she did this on her own terms there is nothing Cinderella-like about this story, and the author’s ability to balance the consequences of human frailty with an erudite if obstinate optimism make this book untiringly readable.

The real horrors of her first marriage are off-set by her second husbband's kindness and generosity; the pomposity of parochial concert organizers is syncopated with the delicious bitchiness with which the author refuses to let them have their own way; the poignant description of the decline and death of a great mentor is enhanced by its treatment as a comedy of manners, and the meretriciousness of the author’s erstwhile country neighbors runs counterpoint to the spontaneous kindness of strangers (a recurring theme).

More about this book

The angst involved in the story about an impossible search for a lifetime’s journal and sketch book (accidentally left in a taxi by her well meaning husband) has one breathless for a happy ending, the elusiveness of which also defines the brutal yet moving story of a prodigiously talented student for whom success remains just beyond reach.

The Blue Piano And Other Stories powerfully conveys the endogenous talent and self discipline required to succeed as a professional artist. Yet the author communicates the positive value of all of her experiences so entertainingly that it’s not so much her success as a concert pianist that the reader admires as her understanding, her talent for witty observation and her enviable peace of mind.

The Extraordinary Operatic Adventures of Blanche Arral

By Blanche Arral, Translated by Ira Glackens, William R. Moran, Editor.

Amadeus Press, Portland, Oregon, 2002, hardcover, 14 illustrations, $24.95, 352 pages,
ISBN 1-57467-077-8

Reviewed in Good Reading, the Magazine for Book Lovers, ABN 38 003 750 150, May, 2005


Good Reading Magazine

Any opera lover or anyone who has enshrined their copies of Beaton’s "My Royal Life" and Dennis’ "Little Me" simply has to have this book. But, unlike the stories of Beaton’s faux family and Belle Poitrine's misadventures for love, this story is real. Blanche Arral really did grow up in a well to do Belgian home, become a famous opera star in the Paris of the Gay Nineties, sustain an international career for many decades, and die the wife of a New Jersey dentist in the 1940s.

"Extraordinary” hardly begins to describe her adventures. After becoming an opera star despite her family’s better intentions, she married a Russian Prince, held court in St. Petersburg, and lost her husband in a mysterious manner in the early stages of the Russian Revolution. While searching for him in Constantinople she was imprisoned by the Sultan and literally had to escape from the seraglio (does this sound familiar? Keep reading).

Having resumed her career on the international opera circuit she was rescued from opera - loving rebels in Latin America, stole Melba’s concert audiences in Melbourne by virtue of superior marketing and escaped a tsunami in Thailand by clinging to a Louis Quinze chimney piece. She eventually found haven in the USA where, while singing Carmen, she was literally stabbed by her leading man who used a real knife instead of the one with the collapsible blade.

After her hair was burned off in a freak accident she made some of Edison’s first voice recordings and took to wearing the loaf-like wig in which she concluded her "extraordinary" life in New Jersey.

More about this book

These are just some of her adventures. Only their impossible circumstances and the history of the manuscript (there are several prefaces, the result of an amanuensis’ draft being passed from one intergenerational protégé to another) lead to the delicious yet unfounded suspicions about this biography. 

If it were not for the existence of historically proven photograhs and recordings which support many of the extraordinary facts set out in this book it would be far too tempting to supect that Blanche is yet another fabulous creation of a clever and very funny mind.

The Unknown Callas: The Greek Years

by Nicholas Petsalis-Diomidis, with a foreword by the Earl of Harewood

Amadeus: Timber. (Opera Biography, No. 14). Portland, Oregon, 2001. c.600p. illus. bibliog. index., $40, LC 00-040155. ISBN 1-57467-059-X


Like the fans of James Dean, Jean Harlowe, Jim Morrison, Diana Princess of Wales, and others, Maria Callas’s fans remain grief-stricken 29 years after her death, her annual record sales amount to almost one million dollars and her underwear is publicly offered to souvenir hunters at auction.

This book takes the prolonged post mortem one step further by focusing on Maria Callas’ early years before she acquired the fame, which gave her immortality, about which almost nothing has been previously written. As an investigative work it is staggering, involving minute detail of the years she spent in occupied Athens during World War 2. It’s a major task to read, and it’s with a sense of enhanced, sad understanding rather than factual enlightenment that one finishes the book and gazes once more on the Callas recordings and authorized iconography which the singer would probably have preferred as her memorial.

Still, the legitimate research behind the book counts for much, and it may be for this reason that the distinguished Earl of Harewood, regarded as a trusted friend of Maria Callas, wrote the preface. The strength of the book is the work the author did to find and interview witnesses, many now dead, whose observations are presented with apparent caution and respect for their reluctance to talk on the record at all.

This strength is also the book’s weakness, as few are willing or able to make authoritative remarks. It’s touching to see how many of her unknown former acquaintances and colleagues were unwilling to make adverse comments about Maria Callas or to recall events, which were painful to her and to them. In the absence of their precise confirmation of the facts on which they are asked to comment, the author presents the information anyway, subject to sufficient caveats to protect the integrity of the text and, in some cases, enhanced by his own opinions.

His attention to detail leads Mr. Petsalis-Diomedes to reinforce some of the well-known stories that usually appear in discussions of the singer’s life before she became successful and beautiful. Those that predominate in this book concern her youthful ugliness, greed, nastiness to others, and susceptibility to enemy aliens during the occupation of Greece, the approximate date of the loss of her virginity, and her relationship with the “wobble” in her upper register. These are part of the Callas legend and do no particular damage, but as Mr. Petsalis-Diomedes announces at the beginning of the book that he is going to avoid them it is bemusing to find oneself reading so much about them.

The book ends with the young Maria’s departure from Greece for her career abroad, but the author adds as one of several appendices a discussion of Maria’s famous break with her mother. No other book, except perhaps Litsa’s own silly book published in 1967, makes such a case of perfidy against Litsa Kaloyeropoulou. The author with relish presents previously unpublished letters between the husband, mother and father and Maria’s mother emerges as a giant amongst those self obsessed child/mothers who never allow their children to ignore them while simultaneously failing to give of themselves. For this reason alone the book is fun to read, but the discussion hardly amounts to the most perfect case of objective historicity.

In setting out to be the witness of truth to Maria Callas’ early years the author has succeeded in exposing many authentic (and minute) details of the child who metamorphosed into what the author calls “the miracle that was Maria Callas.” However Maria’s ability to be eponymous was too great to allow him to succeed completely. Like her underwear, which was bought and burned by the Athenian municipal council, this book shows, by a serious and mostly scholarly effort to find them, that Maria’s secrets are no longer available. Too much was not said and too many have kept their silence. For those who try to speak for her, this means everything.