The New Testament canon

I think it is axiomatic that Christians accept the Bible as the word of God.  If you don't accept the Bible as the word of God but still claim to be a Christian, you are some sort of hyphenated Christian.  I would call Episcopalians and Anglicans generally, post-Christians. Their adoration of homosexuals flies in the face of explicit Bible teachings in both the Old and New Testaments so they clearly do not accept the Bible as the word of God.

But what is meant by "word of God"?  Did God use the Bible writers as some sort of stenographers -- dictating precisely every word they wrote?  People who believe that are said to be "verbal inspiration" believers.  The verbal inspiration doctrine has great difficulties, however.  Take the account of what happened at Christ's tomb when his followers found his body no longer there. The four gospels give rather different accounts of what happened.

In Matthew 28 for instance, we read that when the two Marys approached the tomb, a glorious  angel came down and rolled away the stone.

In Mark 16 however we find that the stone had already been rolled away before they got there.  So they went into the tomb and met a young man sitting in it who told them Christ was risen.

And in Luke 24 we find that the women went into the tomb and were puzzled to find it empty.  But then two men in shining garments suddenly appeared beside them. And it was only after they had bowed to the men did the men tell them that Christ is risen.

And John 20 is different again.  This time it was just Mary Magdalene who came to the tomb and found it empty. This time nobody appeared to her so she ran away to tell some of the disciples.  So the disciples came to the tomb and examined its contents.  Then the disciples just went home.  But Mary stayed on.  And then two angels in white appeared and told her that Christ was risen

So we have four different accounts.  Was there one angel or two, for instance?  The accounts are not necessarily wrong.  They are about as consistent as what you get in court when different eye-witnesses to a crime are being examined.  So is God as scatterbrained as four human witnesses?  Surely not.  If he had dictated every word he would just have given the actual events, not what looks like a set of wobbly recollections.

So few Christians now believe in verbal inspiration.  They believe that the Bible writers wrote their own thoughts in their own way  but God was behind those thoughts, gently guiding them in the right direction.

But then another problem arises.  How do we know who had God behind their thoughts?  There were many documents around in the early days which contained accounts of Christ's history and teachings.  Why did they all not make it into the New Testament?

The Roman Catholic church has an answer to that.  They say that the church made the pick.  They say that the church knew which document was divine and knocked back the others:  It was the church that assembled the NT.

That is not much of an answer however.  For a start, the church at that time was almost entirely located in the Greek-speaking cities of the Eastern Mediterranean lands.  Rome was a distant offshoot.  So the discussion about which documents were divine occurred in the Greek churches, not in Rome.  And the Greek Orthodox church does to this day with some justice regard itself as the lineal descendant of the original Christian church and say that authority about the canon belongs to them

Even if we accept the Roman claim, however, it just pushes the question back one step.  How did the church know which books were divine?  The only reasonable answer to that is that God influenced the minds of the men of the church to make the right decisions.

But if God was working through the minds of men, why did it have to be just one group of men?  Surely it could have been men anywhere in the Christian world and not merely a few big shots in Rome! So, broadly, the answer to the question of what formed the canon is a simple one from a Christian viewpoint:  If God inspired the writing of the various books, he could surely also see to it that the right ones were selected as holy!

So how do I think the books of the Bible were chosen?  I do actually lean to an explanation that would fit in with God's guidance.  The history of the matter is that there was a considerable debate in the early days about which books were new revelation -- and various collections were made which embodied particular people's view of what was divine.  But after a while a consensus did emerge.  And it was an inclusive consensus:  Enough books were included to keep most people happy.

So was God behind that consensus?  Since I am an atheist I think not but a Christian could reasonably think so.  What I think happened is that those books which made most sense and sounded good at the time gradually, amid debate, came to be generally accepted as holy.

With his background in Greek learning, Paul was quite a good theologian, he wrote very energetically, wrote very extensively and he explicitly claimed divine guidance -- so it would appear that the whole available corpus of his writing was included.

And in the nature of these things, a tradition developed which saw that early consensus as authoritative.

Did Bach set Psalm 23?

As I have mentioned previously, the most popular setting of Psalm 23 is Crimond, from Jessie Seymour Irvine, but many composers have set it.  So did the greatest religious composer of all time also set it?

He did but not in the way often asserted.  His aria "Sheep may  safely graze" is often said to be his version of Psalm 23 but its wording has next to nothing in common with the psalm.  See the words below:

Schafe koennen sicher weiden,
Sheep can safely graze
Wo ein guter Hirte wacht.
where a good shepherd watches over them.
Wo Regenten wohl regieren,
Where rulers are ruling well,
Kann man Ruh und Friede spueren
we may feel peace and rest
Und was Laender gluecklich macht.
and what makes countries happy.

The aria is sublime music but it in fact is part of a whole cantata devoted to currying favour with his aristocratic patron, Duke Christian.  It is not religious at all.  The aria is from Cantata 208: Was mir behagt, ist nur die muntre Jagd ("Hunting is the only thing that satisfies me").

Bach left few tempi notations in his MSS but most conductors do it as an adagio, though largo would also defensible and some conductors have adopted that.  I am with the majority there. Sir Neville Marriner's interpretation below.



The cantata (no. 112) that does contain a setting of the psalm is "Der Herr ist mein getreuer Hirt" -- to a German text by Wolfgang Meuslin.  It's on YouTube e.g. below:



The words:

1. Coro
Corno I/II, Oboe d'amore I/II, Violino I/II, Viola, Continuo

Der Herr ist mein getreuer Hirt,
Hält mich in seiner Hute,
Darin mir gar nichts mangeln wird
Irgend an einem Gute,
Er weidet mich ohn Unterlass,
Darauf wächst das wohlschmeckend Gras
Seines heilsamen Wortes.

2. Aria A
Oboe d'amore solo, Continuo

Zum reinen Wasser er mich weist,
Das mich erquicken tue.
Das ist sein fronheiliger Geist,
Der macht mich wohlgemute.
Er führet mich auf rechter Straß
Seiner Geboten ohn Ablass
Von wegen seines Namens willen.

3. Recitativo B
Violino I/II, Viola, Continuo

Und ob ich wandelt im finstern Tal,
Fürcht ich kein Ungelücke
In Verfolgung, Leiden, Trübsal
Und dieser Welte Tücke,
Denn du bist bei mir stetiglich,
Dein Stab und Stecken trösten mich,
Auf dein Wort ich mich lasse.

4. Aria (Duetto) S T
Violino I/II, Viola, Continuo

Du bereitest für mir einen Tisch
Vor mein' Feinden allenthalben,
Machst mein Herze unverzagt und frisch,
Mein Haupt tust du mir salben
Mit deinem Geist, der Freuden Öl,
Und schenkest voll ein meiner Seel
Deiner geistlichen Freuden.

5. Coro
Corno I/II, Oboe d'amore I e Violino I col Soprano, Oboe d'amore II e Violino II coll' Alto, Viola col Tenore, Continuo

Gutes und die Barmherzigkeit
Folgen mir nach im Leben,
Und ich werd bleiben allezeit
Im Haus des Herren eben,
Auf Erd in christlicher Gemein
Und nach dem Tod da werd ich sein
Bei Christo meinem Herren.

Wiener Blut -- a splendid farce

And a celebration of a great city

To Americans, a wiener is either a sausage or a private part of similar shape.  But in German neither Hamburgers nor Wieners are food items.  Both refer to the inhabitants of famous cities.  So Wiener Blut means "Vienna blood".  But what exactly that is we shall see.

In my well-spent youth in Sydney in the '70s I went to a lot of plays.  Sydney had a variety of them on at any one time and I took advantage of that -- seeing perhaps one play a week.  They weren't all good -- I walked out of a few -- but I enjoyed most of them, as did the ladies I took along.  Ladies LOVE going to plays. And there were among the plays I saw quite a few farces, including plays by that master of farce, Feydeau. And Wiener Blut is an excellent farce, worthy of Feydeau.  The show was written in 1899 and set in 1814.

Also in the early 70s, a lot of cinematic versions of operetta were made for German TV.  And the best of those are  now being released on DVD -- perhaps something to do with copyright. And a lot of the DVDs I have acquired are from that source.  An amusing consequence of that is that I see from time to time the same singers in different shows.  For me the '70s German operetta scene is still live. 

So the version of Wiener Blut that I have -- a 1971 production conducted by Kurt Graunke and directed by Hermann Lanske -- actually had three singers in it whose work I knew.  One of the reasons I bought that DVD was that it had the Austrian soprano Dagmar Koller in it, who is a genuinely lovely lady.  She is of my vintage but still survives. 

The point of it all

So let's look at the theme song which tells us what Das Wiener Blut is about.  The song itself defines such Blut as "Voller Kraft, Voller Glut! ... Was die Stadt Schönes hat, In dir ruht! Wiener Blut, Heisse Flut. (Roughly: "unique, full of fire, full of power, hot and flowing").  The idea is that the great city is embodied in its people. It basically means "high-spirited" -- bright and lively -- perhaps "gay" in the old meaning of that term -- and infidelity is accepted as part of that. If a man is not smitten by every beautiful woman he meets, he lacks Wiener Blut.  But operetta always has happy endings so in this case the Graf ends up falling in love with his wife! (As well he might!)

A wonderful farce. I am laughing as I write this.  But he only falls in love with his wife because his wife suddenly falls in love with him.  She had herself been before her marriage a gay and lively  Wiener ("Ich war ein echte Wiener Blut") and had thought that her husband lacked Wiener Blut -- until she saw and heard of his infidelities.  That convinced her that in Vienna he had become a real man by Vienna standards ("Aus dem soliden und strengen Mann wurde der flotteste Don Juan!  ... Sie wurden Mann von Welt").  So, as the wife, Ingeborg Hallstein was given a sophisticate's role.  And she conveys it with complete conviction and elegance.  It makes some sense that she wanted her man to be one who was desirable to other women.  See below:

So was there more than that with Wiener Blut?  Was it just a similar culture that Hallstein's character wanted?  Partly so, I think.  But Wien was at the time a great imperial city and civilizational centre so there was also there a longing for the high and sophisticated culture that existed in Wien.   At one stage Wien was undoubtedly the greatest city in the world since Constantinople/Byzantium.  To be and feel part of that was a great privilege.  And we see from the scenes of the ordinary people of the city at Hietzing that a love of their city included all orders of Viennese society.  They compared Wien to Heaven!

But other people esteem their city highly too.  We even have a rather good song of praise for Galveston!  And who can forget Elvis's "happy home" in Memphis, Tennessee?  London is a bit disappointing though. Such an amazing city seems to have produced only the Cockney song, "Maybe it's because I'm a Londoner ..".  But nothing can compare with the frequent and brilliant songs of praise for Wien that occur throughout operetta.  And Wiener Blut is undoubtedly the leading example of that.

The casting

I did not think that Rene Kollo was well cast in Csardas Fuerstin  -- though he is undoubtedly a good and powerful singer -- but he suited his fickle part in Wiener Blut very well. As the Casanova he did not do any stern parts but when he was rumbled with his Geliebte in her floral and very modern underwear he managed to say "Ich auch" in a somewhat stern manner. And his surprised expressions when he encountered his seamstress Geliebte standing in for a Princess of Poland in the grand dance were spot on. The more I have listened to him, the more I appreciate his powerful and faultless tenor voice. And his diction is good too.  Regardless of the language of the song, operatic singing is often hard to follow, but Kollo's German is very clear.

But the real surprise for me  was German soprano Ingeborg Hallstein, of whom it has been said:  "Ingeborg Hallstein burst onto the scene in 1959 with an uncommonly sweet voice and beautiful face and figure, which immediately moved her front and center in German musical life."

There is a lot of her work available on CD -- for good reason -- but almost nothing on DVD.  But what a lady! An elegantly beautiful woman.  She conveyed eloquently the air of sophistication that her role as Graefin called for.  She really has the sort of face that would launch a thousand ships -- a face of both character and beauty. And she has the long neck that one normally finds only in beautiful Northern European women.  Virginia Woolf was another example. So Hallstein was a most convincing Graefin!

But is her beauty in part a function of stage makeup?  I don't discount that. On the few occasions that I have appeared on TV, I have been amazed about how the makeup artists were able to banish my facial spots.  But we do  get a lot of closeups in this show that clearly show Hallstein's stage makeup.  And it clearly just emphasizes already beautiful features.  

There is one thing that I am not sure that I should mention. Hallstein has some sort of mole on her lower face.  So why did not the makeup artists blot that out?   There was apparently in times past such a thing as a "beauty spot" and that idea still lives to some extent.  Don't ask me for the logic of it (if any) but some sort of facial blemish on a beautiful lady was held to be an enhancement rather than a blemish.  So Hallstein has it all.

KS Hallstein is a remarkable singer too.  She is known for her range and she does show a bit of it on a couple of occasions in this show.  It is not a big voice but it is probably just right for the ultimate lady that she is. Needless to say, she has long been recognized as Kammersängerin (KS).

If you want to really hear what she can do as a high coloratura soprano there is a 1965 B&W film clip below:



where she sings the haunting nightingale song by Franz Grothe from the 1941 German film "Die Schwedische Nachtigall".  Hallstein has been described as having crystal bells in her throat and that clip will tell you why.  (Lyrics for the nightingale song here).  In a sound-only file here you also hear her in high coloratura mode -- singing the wonderful An der schoenen blauen Donau, Austria's unofficial national anthem.  

The Donau (Danube) is shown in appropriate blue in the map below -- though I gather that it is rarely blue these days:

 

Hallstein was said in the 60s and 70s to be "die weltweit beste Königin der Nacht" (the world's best "Queen of the Night") and I can believe it. She is still alive and active on judging panels in her late 70s.  

Note: There is also a "Spanish" nightingale operetta, "Die Spanische Nachtigall" by Leo Fall. And also a Nachtigall song in Zeller's Vogelhaendler. You have to keep your nightingales straight.

And Hallstein's facial expressions and body language were brilliant too. She is a superb actress as well as a remarkable singer.  It seems to come naturally.  It probably does. She is as good as any Hollywood actress at living her part and better than most of them at subtlety of expression.  

An example of that which I really enjoyed was her very small but rightly contemptuous gesture of dismissal -- mainly just a tiny and momentary inclination of her head combined with a small "Oh!" -- when she first saw one of her rivals, little Helga. Her vocalization there was not even an Ach!.  She knew that she was miles ahead of that "rival".  And the scene where she asks the clumsy Prince to take her to Hietzing was brilliantly done.  I laugh every time I think of it.  It was almost an enchiridion of feminine wiles there.  She knew her power and even found it amusing.

And her expressions as she spoke with her flirtatious husband were also well done. She showed subtly that she did not believe a word of his attempted deceptions but was amused by them instead -- indulgent and quietly confident expressions.  She was aware of her high standing in Wiener society so was not easily abashed.  She has irrefragable dignity.

I have seen and heard other versions of the Wiener Blut song but I think Hallstein here is better than them all (see the clip above).  What a stunning woman!  The other women in the show are girls compared to her.  That clip may in fact get my vote for the most beautiful scene in operetta.  There are other strong candidates  -- such as Die ganze welt is Himmelblau with A.K. Wigger at Moerbisch in 2008 or Martina Serafin's in Als geblueht der Kirschenbaum in the Moerbisch performance of Vogelhaendler but  the emotion is so intense in the above scene that it certainly gets to me.

Not that I would say a critical word about the other two ladies in the show. Dagmar Koller once again came across as a lovely and lovable lady. Let me say that again: Despite what could have been a bitchy role, Dagmar Koller once again came across as a lovely and lovable lady.  She is a honey.  I suspect she would not accept casting any other way.  

And little Helga Papouschek as the servant's girlfriend was well cast. She has a certain prettiness but is no beauty -- a point made in the show when the two beautiful ladies (the Graefin and "Cagliari") agreed that they  could forgive the Graf that one.  She was in their view no threat to them. Wiener Blut!  

She has been described elsewhere as a "vielseitige Schauspielerin und Sängerin" (a many-sided actress and singer) and I can see that. She has a squeaky little voice but she gets her notes well enough.  She portrayed various moods very  well and looked right for her part.  She certainly showed various sides in this show.  And her role as a seamstress in a Polish hat standing in for a princess of Poland in the grand dance was one of the good jokes of the show.  And her  comment earlier on in the show that the overweight Polish princess might have been overdoing the cakes was as irreverent as it was apposite.

And we must not for a moment forget the character actors. Benno Kusche did his part as the confused Prince superbly well and Ferry Gruber as Josef the servant was very convincing.  He was very clever in fact.  He was as good a character actor as you could get and he certainly got the laughs, probably about half of them in fact.  There was brilliant acting throughout the show.

The costumes

A small note about riding habits:  I was much impressed with the riding habit worn by "Lisa" in Das Land des Laechelns but the outfit worn by Hallstein in this show was pretty good too.  I think that up until now I had only seen Englishwomen in riding gear.  Austrians do it infinitely better.  There is a low rez clip below that gives you an idea of Hallstein's outfit -- and also follows her into her visit to her old home at Döbling.  The beginning of the clip shows her actually riding a horse so the outfit was apparently practical.  She looks good most of the time but in her riding habit and riding hat she was really something  -- both while riding and after riding. 

Part of the attractiveness of the riding scene was the beautiful grounds through which she trots her horse. I gather that that scene was recorded in the grounds of the Palais Strattmann in Vienna.

I think the point of such an elaborate habit is that you could get off a horse and immediately be dressed for the best society.  I note that the lovely Dagmar Koller was also presented in a flowing riding habit in the vignettes of her pre-marital times in Csardasfuerstin

The golden garment with lots of ermine trim on the hood and sleeves that Hallstein wore to Hietzing also impressed me.  Not everyone could have worn such a garment effectively but on Hallstein it created a great image of privilege and luxury.  It complemented and framed her beauty.  A face framed in ermine certainly has a good start.  Dagmar Koller also wore a similar rather gorgeous flowing garment at Hietzing.

The garments both ladies wore were dominos, all-covering garments often worn to masked balls and the like. They are a way of hiding in plain sight and both ladies in this story were indeed trying to hide at Hietzing. There are some modern ladies' garments called that but they are totally out of touch with the late-19th-century original, with its hoods, big sleeves, fancy trims and the like.  Below is a picture of a lady wearing a pink domino at a performance of Heuberger's Opernball

And Hallstein looked so happy in that scene.  Good to see.  I suspect that she is basically a happy lady who suppressed her good humour only slightly in the scenes where she is dealing with the attempted deceptions of the Graf.

Perhaps the elaborate Fächer (hand-held fan) much used by Hallstein in the show deserves a mention.  It is very feathery and is obviously meant to be part of a lady's ensemble rather than merely utilitarian.  She certainly uses it expressively.

Hair!

Interesting that Hallstein wore small stars in her hair for much of the time.  In operetta it is very common for the ladies to wear laurel wreaths  -- but not in this show:  Diamond stars as a hair adornment were invented by the rather tragic Empress Elizabeth of Austria around about 1860 so seeing them in this  show (set in 1814) is a bit anachronistic but certainly glamorous.  They do convey elegance.  Anne tells me that you can still buy in Vienna hair stars such as Hallstein wore.  So perhaps that is the practical reason why they were used.

It was Anne who told me about hair stars. I know nothing about the mysteries of ladies' hair, other than having a general view that more is better.  I have even bullied Anne into wearing her hair long, even though she is a lady of advanced years. I have of course scriptural support for my view of the matter (1 Corinthians 11:15) but even in the human race's oldest literary work, "The epic of Gilgamesh", we find a view that long hair is proper for women.

And I still have not figured out how Schellenberger in the one year (2004) had both very short hair (in Graefin Maritza) and very long and gorgeous hair (in Lustige Witwe).  Lustige Witwe  could have come first, of course, but as a "Daily Mail" reader I am aware that there are such things as hair extensions -- but I have no idea how that works at all.  But when Gilfry was fiddling with Schellenberger's hair in the Lippen  Schweigen scene I was mentally warning him to be careful of those extensions.  Fortunately, he was.

A few other details

Some of the jokes come very quickly and you have to be alert to get them.  One such was when Hallstein was offered a jumping jack but she declined to buy, saying as the seller walked away:  Ich hab' schon eine (I have already got one) -- meaning probably her husband. Another joke was the stern and prowling geheime Staatspolizist (secret policeman) at Hietzing in his brown hat. (OK.  He was just a Geheime Polizist.  We know who in history the Geheime Staatspolizei were, don't we?)

I was amused when the sausage king described Hallstein as "a dazzling piece of construction" and her rival as an "architectural masterpiece".  We see architectural allusions to the looks of a lady in other operettas too, notably Kalman's Graefin Maritza and Lehar's Die lustige Witwe.

And I also wonder a little what the sausage king's sausages were like.  As a sausage devotee I entirely agree with the prominence they were given in the show.  My devotion to sausages could make me a good German.  A good sausage is a work of art!

When the Graf is trying to seduce the wily seamstress with invocations of Stoss an (drink up), he orders Wiener Wein to help the proceedings.  I wonder what the wine was?  The most popular Austrian wine these days seems to be Grüner Veltliner, which is a rather undistinguished wine IMHO -- reminiscent of an Australian Hunter Valley  Semillion. Maybe he had in mind Gemischter Satz, which would have been around in the early 19th century.  

Gemischter Satz is in fact grown and produced in Vienna itself. So it really is a Wiener Wein. Vienna actually has its own vineyards on the outskirts of the city. Austria as a whole is a significant wine-producing region.  It exports to Germany. I noticed at the big party in Hietzing that everyone seemed to be drinking wine, not beer.  Not a North/South difference this time, I think.  Maybe just a Wiener difference?  

We saw a North/South difference when the (presumably) Northern Prince told the (Southern) sausage king to speak German, remarking that the sausage king's German sounded like Tibetan.  In good Southern style, the sausage king was not at all abashed and just carried on. There was rather a lot of commentary about Wiener speech being "different" and I gather that there are still such differences.

I am no authority on anything German and I know only the basics about North/South differences but I noted that the sausage king pronounced junge Leute as junge Leiter and there is no doubt that could cause amazement or amusement.

Another detail of the show that interested me was the novels the Graefin took out of her bookcase.  Because I had never heard of him I looked up Christoph Martin Wieland.  He was apparently a rather light novelist, best known for translating Shakespeare into German.

Realism and operetta have a limited relationship -- though I don't like deliberate anachronism.  So I cannot be censorious about a very curious thing about the streets of Vienna that we see in this  show: The streets were sparkling clean.  But the streets of of a great city in the 19th century would have been much used by horses and various horse-drawn conveyances.  And what does that produce?  Huge amounts of horse-manure and horse-pee in the streets.  The real-life streets of Vienna at that time would have stunk to high heaven and soiled anybody who walked them. Sorry for that totally inappropriate burst of realism.

The wrap-up

As endings go, this has to be the supreme operetta -- with FOUR happy couples at the end of it: All waltzing and singing Das Wiener Blut of course. Superb, superb! (As the  French Vicomte said in  Lustige Witwe when he heard that the widow was worth 500 million francs). Even the sausage king finds his match. 

It's hard to believe that the show was initially a flop.  Bizet died thinking "Carmen" was a failure too. The first producer of Wiener Blut was bankrupted by its failure and shot himself!  A terrible contrast between reality and fantasy. 

And the praise of Vienna as being unique and happy is of course common in operetta. One thinks of the joy in the two second-string stars of Zirkusprinzessin when they discover in cold St. Petersburg that they are both from warm Wien.  And the Princess in Vogelhaendler at her first appearance in that play is also proud to proclaim that she is a gay Wiener.  But a heterosexual one, of course.

And, as usual in operetta, the waltz (Der Walzer in German) is both much practiced and warmly praised.  And something I noticed at the end of one of the waltzes was that the ladies did a low curtsey to their men at the end of the dance.  I am aware that there can still at formal balls be a certain amount of bowing and curtseying at the beginning of a dance but I had not seen it as the conclusion of a dance.  Is that still widely practiced?  I have no idea.  But someone should bring it back routinely.  It would make the feminists burst into flames!

Some reflections

And an inevitable reflection that Wiener Blut inspires is how we mere mortals live up to the splendid life in Wien that it portrays.  I am sure I score a zero on glamour but, although I am no Wiener, the fact that I have been married four times to four fine women must testify to some sort of "Blut"!

But have I had in my life an ultimate lady such as Hallstein?  A lady who is beautiful, smart, confident, socially acclaimed, very musical and kind?  And have I walked through a crowded room with the lady to see her greeted with pleasure by many? (As Hallstein did with Kollo in the grand ball)?  I have done that. And I treasure the experience.  She may even read this.  Unlike Hallstein, she does not have crystal bells in her throat but I think we can both overlook that.  A real lady is a great pleasure to us mere men.

And what is the role of culture in male/female relationships?  With the lady I mentioned above  it was  very important.  She once said to me:  "I could forgive you anything because of the way you feel about music".  But there is more to it than that.  

The lady in my life these days is in fact a good soprano but that is rather incidental -- though we do sing some of the great old Protestant hymns together at times!  What she and I have in common is small-town Protestant Queensland culture.  We come from very similar environments. When I speak broad Australian she understands. We sound right to one-another.  It really pleases me to use traditional Australian expressions.

The great aria

Here it is in full:

Das Wiener Blut! 

Wiener Blut!

Wiener Blut! 

Eig'ner Saft 

Voller Kraft, 

Voller Glut! 

Du erhebst, 

Du belebst 

Unsern Mut! 

Wiener Blut! 

Wiener Blut! 

Was die Stadt 

Schönes hat, 

In dir ruht! 

Wiener Blut, 

Heisse Flut 

Allerort 

Gilt das Wort: 

Wiener Blut! 

I know the literal meaning of all the words but it would be maddening to try to translate it adequately so I am not going to try.  Someone bolder than I am has however subtitled it in an old performance by Elizabeth Schwarzkopf.

Rather sad that the undoubtedly distinguished Schwarzkopf grew to be roughly twice as wide as Hallstein.

Libretti are online here and here but performances of course differ so neither  corresponds exactly to the DVD performance

Perhaps I should in closing pay tribute the librettists, Victor Léon and Leo Stein. The fun was entirely their work.  A later libretto for which Léon and Stein were responsible was that of Lehár's highly successful "The Merry Widow". Strauss was in his last days when this show was created and, although he approved of the project, he did not specifically compose any music for it, although many of his earlier compositions were incorporated, as we can hear. He was mostly content to delegate the musical arrangements to Adolf Müller. You have to get your Adolfs right!  -- JR

Das Land des Laechelns

I have the 2001 Moerbisch performance of the show. Das Land des Laechelns means "The land of smiles" -- i.e. China.  I was very curious to see how a Viennese composer and his librettists would write about China!    My skepticism that Austrians could write reasonably about China in 1923 was actually rather unfair.  Chinoiserie had been very popular even in the late Belle epoque (before WWI) so China was hardly a mystery by then. And interest in the Far East generally had been greatly aroused in 1905 when Japan's admiral Togo sank most of the Russian navy!

The opening scenes of operetta are often pretty forgettable and I tend to skip them on re-watching a show but the opening brackets of this  show were all devoted to showing the supreme grace and elegance of the great city so were very pleasing to watch.

The story

The show was basically in two parts: First in Vienna then in China. The first part was where most of the jokes were -- though the eunuch scene in the second half of the play had some very good lighter moments too.

The story is that a Viennese lady and a Chinese prince fall in love in Vienna and both then go to China -- with unhappy results.

The idea that a smallish East Asian man might fancy a big blue eyed blonde from Northern Europe was very plausible. For better or worse, the Nordic ideal of beauty is the default ideal worldwide.  Something like 95% of the world's blonde ladies were not born that way.  Even in Japan, ladies blond their hair.

Blue eyes are also much admired but, unlike hair, eyes are not so changeable. I checked my blue-eyed privilege and married four blue eyed ladies -- so I have a blue-eyed son.  And his blue-eyed GF augurs well for the next generation. Leftists these days often tell us to "check your privilege" but I don't think they would approve of my version of that.  Their version is just Marxist claptrap anyway.

In part 1 of the Singspiel we first heard the famous "Dein ist mein ganzes Herz" ("You are my heart's delight"). It is a great and famous aria and was originally written by Lehar for Richard Tauber so it seemed a bit strange to hear it sung by an Asian  tenor. Sangho Choi gave an impassioned performance, however, so did it justice. Tauber sings it here -- in English! I am inclined to think that the Korean (Sangho Choi as the Chinese Prince)  sang it better, actually. The audience at Moerbisch certainly applauded it heartily.

And the second half of the show was surprisingly dark and tragic for an operetta.  The lady goes to China but can't fit in there so has to make her escape.  Her lover reverts to Chinese form and she ends up tragically by declaring to him:  "Ich hasse dich" ("I hate you").

So the ending is low-key by operetta standards. The lady and her Viennese admirer are happily reunited and escape back to their beloved Wien but the Chinese players are left desolate. Not good. Had it been grand opera, everyone would have died, so we have to be thankful for small mercies, I suppose.

It's interesting how times have changed.  Wien was once THE city and China was a backwater.  These days it is just about opposite to that.

Costumes

I was MOST impressed by the magnificent riding habit "Lisa" (Ingrid Habermann) wore for her entry to the show.  I have not seen anything before remotely as good.  It must be Austrian elegance.

And the military hats on the men in the early scenes initially rather confounded me. They were such an unostentatious type of shako that I thought at first that they were French pillbox caps. But in fact we see below the unfortunate Archduke Ferdinand in a similar shako. The costume department did their homework.



Speaking of hats, was this the first time Serafin trotted out absurd green plumes on his hat?  He did it in Weissen Roessl too.  A good comic touch.

Towards the end of the first part, I loved the old car that took "Lisa" away.  A bit like a very well-appointed A-model Ford.

The cast

And we got in part 1 a good introduction to Ingrid Habermann as the lady the Chinese Prince fancied -- a regal and classically good looking Vienna lady with blue eyes and a great mop of blonde hair.  I would have fancied her too. I did, after all, once marry a lady with a great mop of blonde hair.  Habermann was presented as the aspirational Austrian lady, even wearing a substantial tiara at one stage -- showing her as a princess of Viennese society.

The contrast in appearance between Habermann and her Chinese admirer was of course deliberate.



Habermann is actually Austrian -- from Linz -- so the part would have been very congenial and easy for her. She really is an aspirational Austrian lady.  Even the blonde hair may well have been real.  The age of most operatic ladies seems to be a State Secret so I was not able to ascertain her DoB but I suspect that she was in her 30s for this show.  She was a touch "broad in the beam" for youth, if I may add a nautical simile to the architectural similes that one sometimes finds in operatta.

Austria is in fact rather Southerly in Europe but the Nordics from both the North and South coasts of the Baltic have been marauding South for well over 2,000 years so seem to have left rather a lot of their genetics in Austria. So much so that we hear that Die ganze Welt ist himmelblau there.  There are some brilliant blue eyes in Austria to this day.  Austria looks like a rather nice bit of territory so maybe a lot of Nordics never went home from there.

But the show was a magnificent part for Habermann and she went from strength to strength thereafter.  Moerbisch has been a place of takeoff for many singers and I am hoping that will work for Cornelia Zink (seen in Bettelstudent) as well.

Intendant Harald Serafin gave most of the jokes in the show  to himself.  He is very good at comic parts so that was fair enough.  He always took a part in Moerbisch performances as well as directing them.

He got his post at Moerbisch because he was already a great actor and singer and I have always liked him in his various roles.  Even in 2011 when he rather lost the plot at Moerbisch he did his own part very well.

Apparently I was not the only one who thought he lost the plot in 2011. The year after 2011 his audience at Moerbisch declined -- resulting in him being retired against his wishes.  So Schellenberger got his job.  And she did it well, with audiences numbers recovering in 2013 (with Bettelstudent).

After watching the show  again, I still laughed at all the jokes again.  Serafin delivers them expertly.  His dry comment on a Chinese "dirndl" was exquisite, as was his non-recognition of Confucius.

But Serafin does his tragic scene well too. His tragic final call to his departing daughter not to forget Vienna is very significant.  As I have argued previously, Vienna at that time was what New Yorkers think NYC is -- the center of the civilized world.  And she later did admit with passion how much she missed Wien.  Only in her hometown could she be "free".  New Yorkers would understand.

Speaking of jokes, another was when "Gustl" (Gustav) in the second half excused himself from being a fickle Viennese by saying that he was from "Burgenland", I thought that was quite good.  The audience did too.  That got a laugh, though not a big one. Burgenland is of course where Moerbish is located.  But Mitani's reply was good too: "Isn't that the same?"  Moerbisch and Vienna are only about 60 kilometers apart, from memory.  Most of the shows from Moerbisch do incorporate some reference to it -- most often in a complaint about the mosquitoes there.

And I must pay some tribute to Yuko Mitani, the Japanese soprano playing the Prince's sister.  Having a Japanese playing a Chinese was no problem, of course.  They all look the same, you know.  Jokes aside, however, by her manner she could have been a Viennese lady.  I guess it shows how much of Western culture Japan has absorbed.  She was certainly as expressive as one could wish, quite un-Japanese, it seems to me. The show was part-sponsored by NHK in Tokyo so perhaps it all fits somehow. Most of Mitani's singing history has been in the German lands.

A final point of amusement: There were no actual Chinese in the show. The Chinese parts were mainly played by Japanese plus one Korean (Sangho Choi). Serafin would have got into trouble if he had done that in politically correct America.  And even I am a bit stunned to find that Sangho Choi is an acclaimed interpreter of German Lieder.  What is the world coming to? Sangho Choi deserves his success, however.

The show is also reviewed here, with a more comprehensive account of the plot.

Altemeyer: Gross hypocrisy and Leftist bias in Wikipedia:

Revised and updated

I put up some information on the Wikipedia page for Bob Altemeyer.  Altemeyer is a particularly witless Leftist psychologist who made large and derogatory claims  about conservatives that he later had to retract.  But there was nothing on his Wikipedia page about that retraction.  So I put up a brief account of that.  What I put up was wholly scholarly and fully referenced -- just what Wikipedia says it wants.  But criticism of Leftists is not allowed of course, so my contribution was deleted after only a few days.

I imagine that they will find some quibble to justify their deletion of my entry but I am pretty sure that the outcome would have been different had I praised brainless Bob. Anyway, after a couple of run-ins with them, I have no confidence in being able to navigate my way onto Wikipedia again -- so I am putting up below what I originally submitted to Wikipedia. Altemeyer is an unusual name so a Google search on that name should still find my comments, whether the Wikipedians like it or not:

The centerpiece of Altemeyer's research is a questionnaire he designed called the Right-Wing Authoritarianism (RWA) scale. If you get a high score on it you are allegedly revealed as a Right-Wing Authoritarian. A major problem with the RWA scale is revealed, however, when we find that it identifies the Communists of the old Soviet Union as right-wing.  But if they are right-wing who is left wing?

His confusion arises from his apparent  definition of conservatism as "opposed to change".  That definition is however politically naive.  Conservatives from Burke onward have never been opposed to change as such but rather opposed to changes desired and enacted by Leftists.  Is Donald Trump opposed to change? The current Left/Right polarity is between conservatives who want less government control and Leftists who want more of that.  Altemeyer seems to be unaware of that so his work has no current political relevance.

In detail: The decline and fall of Communist regimes in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe enabled use of his RWA ("Right Wing Authoritarianism") scale there. Studies in the East such as those by Altemeyer & Kamenshikov (1991), McFarland, Ageyev and Abalakina-Paap (1992) and Hamilton, Sanders & McKearney (1995) showed that high RWA scores were associated with support for Communism!! So an alleged "Rightist" scale went from being Rightist to being a predictor of Leftism! If you took it at face-value, it showed Communists were Rightists!

After that, Altemeyer more or less gave up his original claim and engaged in a bit of historical revisionism. He said (Altemeyer, 1996, p. 218) that when he "began talking about right-wing authoritarianism, I was (brazenly) inventing a new sense, a social psychological sense that denotes submission to the perceived established authorities in one's life". It is true that he did originally define what he was measuring in something like that way (in detail, he defined it as a combination of three elements: submissiveness to established authority, adherence to social conventions and general aggressiveness) but what was new, unusual or "brazen" about such a conceptualization defies imagination. The concept of submission to established authority was, for instance, part of the old Adorno et al (1950) work. What WAS brazen was Altemeyer's claim that what he was measuring was characteristic of the political Right. But it is precisely the "Right-wing" claim that he now seems to have dropped and the RWA scale is now said to measure simply submission to authority. See:

    Adorno,T.W., Frenkel-Brunswik, E., Levinson, D.J. & Sanford, R.N. (1950). The authoritarian personality. New York: Harper.

    Altemeyer, R. (1996). The Authoritarian Specter. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

    Altemeyer, R. & Kamenshikov, A. (1991) Impressions of American and Soviet behaviour: RWA changes in a mirror. South African J. Psychology 21, 255-260.

    Hamilton, V. L., Sanders, J., & McKearney, S. J. (1995). Orientations toward authority in an authoritarian state: Moscow in 1990. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 21, 356-365

    McFarland, S. G., Ageyev, V. S., & Abalakina-Paap, M. A. (1992). Authoritarianism in the former Soviet Union. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 63, 1004-1010

MORE

What I said above was designed to be acceptable encyclopedic writing but I can go further than that.  I can offer a more extended critique of Altemeyer's work.  And continued critique would seem to be needed.  The RWA scale is still widely used in psychological research and generally seems to be used without any awareness of the invalidity of the instrument.  It is still commonly paraded as a measure of something right-wing, which it clearly is not.  So I think a more extended consideration of what it measures is called-for.

In the beginning

In one sense, what it measures is perfectly clear;  It measures the old 1950 Adorno  conception of authoritarianism -- in which Marxist theoretician Theodor  Adorno and his friends claimed to have discovered a "new anthropological type": The authoritarian.  Authoritarians were conservative, racist, both dominant and submissive, rigid in their thinking, "intolerant of ambiguity",  and a product of bad relationships with their father. The authoritarian was just a maladjusted psychological mess generally. Adorno did not claim that all conservatives were authoritarian but it became generally assumed that they were. Leftists just loved the idea.

It was clear early on -- even to Altemeyer -- that the F scale which the Adorno team devised to measure their conception of authoritarianism was fatally flawed.  But that did not dent the great appeal that the Adorno theory had for Leftists.  And Altemeyer was one who drank the Kool-Aid.  He swallowed the Adorno theory hook, line and sinker.  His project was to devise a better measure of the concept rather than to question the concept.  The RWA scale was his replacement for the old F scale

But it was very much like the F scale.  Its items consisted of aggressively worded versions of popular sayings from the past.  Pflaum (1964) had shown that you could create a parallel form of the F scale by gathering together sayings that had been popular during the pre-war "Progressive" era.  Progressive ideas dominated American life throughout the first half of the 20th century so ideas that were popular at that time were also progressive or at least compatible with progressivism.

The Progressive era

But what were progressive ideas?  The ideas do not sound progressive now.  The great hero of the progressive era was Teddy Roosevelt.  He even founded his own "progressive" party (often referred to as the "Bull Moose" party).

So what did TR believe in? He believed in battleships (he built lots of them) and that war is a purifying force for a nation.  He had many ideas that sound "Right wing" these days, largely because modern-day progressives tend to reject them. See here and here for a fuller account of the American "Progressive" era.

And Adorno, Pflaum and Altemeyer all created collections of the old Progressive ideas and proudly presented them as being both authoritarian and "Right-wing".  That conservatives had been in opposition throughout almost the whole of the Progressive era was ignored.  The wars of conquest (Cuba, the Philippines etc) waged under the aegis of TR were met with conservative isolationism.  And the big government ideas of FDR were solidly opposed by conservatives of the day.

After WWII

So in the immediate post-war era we had the strange spectacle of pre-war Leftist ideas being presented as conservative. And most Leftists bit the bullet.  Pre-war Progressive ideas had been shared by another prominent socialist of the pre-war period, Adolf Hitler, so it was urgent to distance post-war Leftists from his ideas.  And what better way to do that than to try to pin such ideas onto conservatives?  In 1950 all Leftists would have been be aware that Hitlers ideas had also largely been their own until recently  but Leftists can pivot on a dime when it suits them so Leftist psychologists did just that.

So it is true that the RWA scale statements do reflect authoritarianism -- but it is the authoritarianism of the pre-war Left.  Leftism is intrinsically authoritarian.  In Mr Obama's famous words, Leftists aim to "fundamentally transform" their society.  And it was not the geography or topography of America that  Obama was talking about.  It was the American people.  He wanted to make them do things that they would not normally do (like pay more in taxes) and to stop them from doing things that they would normally do (like mock homosexuals).  Whether or not you agree with the desirability of his program, the point is that it was inescapably authoritarian.  It aimed to dictate behavior.  Conservatives do have some authoritarian impulses at times (restricting abortion etc) but Leftism is authoritarian root and branch.  Telling other people what to do and making them do it is the whole of their program.

Looking inside the black box

So what do conservatives do when confronted with RWA statements?  Because of the old fashioned content of the items they may agree with some of them.  Conservatives tend to have some respect for things of the past.  But that agreement will not be politically relevant. That they can see something in the old ideas will not tell you anything about their likely choices on the current political scene. The old ideas are not at issue so will not influence current choices.

Leftists, on the other hand, will tend to reject most of the statements as something they now disagree with -- but  will rightly see them as not of current political relevance now so will not relate them to current political choices. Their attitude to the old items will not influence their currtent choices.  So neither their agreement nor disagreement with the statements will predict their current political choices. And it doesn't.  The scale is an exercise in political irrelevance.

So from both sides of politics you will have agreement with the statements that is not of current relevance -- and that shows in the fact that conservatives and Leftists are not demarcated by agreement with the scale items.  It  explains why big scorers on the RWA scale are just as likely to be on the Left as on the Right.  It is just not a scale of current political relevance.   Some of the items may touch on what are still current issues but the aggressive way they are expressed will not be supported by either conservatives or Leftists -- e.g. items supporting oppression of homosexuals would be generally rejected by both sides.

So the RWA scale measures an old-fashioned form of LEFTISM but not anything of current political relevance. Which is why the scale does not correlate with current political preferences in (for example) American Presidential elections.  A lot of high scorers would have voted for Mr. Obama.

And it also explains why high RWA scorers in Russia today tend to be members or former members of the Communist party.  In Russia today, Communism IS old-fashioned Leftism

Reference:

Pflaum, J. (1964) Development and evaluation of equivalent forms of the F scale. "Psychol. Reports" 15, 663-669.