Princess Turandot appears at a staging in Shanghai of the Puccini opera that bears her name. This version of the opera has a new ending penned by Chinese composer Hao Weiya. Puccini died without finishing the opera. This is the third ending written and the first by a Chinese composer.
Chinese composer Hao Weiya was asked to write a new ending for Turandot while studying opera in Italy. "It's my destiny, my fate," he says.
All Things Considered, April 29, 2008 - For 84 years, opera buffs have puzzled over how the Italian composer Giacomo Puccini meant to end one of his best-loved operas, Turandot, which is set in a mythical China.
Puccini died before he finished writing the music, leaving 23 sheets of manuscript sketches.
To date, the most-performed ending of Turandot was written by one of his contemporaries, Franco Alfano.
Now, a young Chinese composer has written a new ending.
Performing Turandot in China is rife with political difficulties. The opera tells the story of a tyrannical, blood-thirsty princess, Turandot, who has unsuccessful suitors beheaded. Partly because of this depiction of China, the opera wasn't performed in the country for nearly seven decades.
Inaugurating Arts Center
But when Beijing wanted to inaugurate its new, massive National Center for Performing Arts, officials decided to stage Turandot — the only Western opera set in China. And they wanted a new ending written by a Chinese composer. They chose 36-year-old Hao Weiya, who was then studying opera in Italy.
"When I think about it, I think it was my destiny, my fate," Hao says.
He wasn't scared, he says, because it was "only a job." But he did worry about doing it well, because he was writing for the "very important" performing arts center.
Hao studied Puccini's texts and the opera for about a month. Then, in just six weeks, he penned an 18-minute ending. It was then revised seven times, with help from experts from the Puccini Foundation in Italy.
One big difference is a new aria he wrote for Princess Turandot. It attempts to tackle the opera's main difficulty: how can the cold-hearted ice princess Turandot fall suddenly and deeply in love with her suitor, Calaf? The new aria aims to give psychological depth to Turandot's transformation while staying faithful to Puccini's original music.
"We wanted to respect Puccini's style and finish the work in the same way. We didn't want my contribution to be completely Chinese or completely modern or completely different from Puccini," Hao says.
Composer Built on Tradition
The music from Turandot is known — even among people who never go to the opera — for the aria "Nessun Dorma." In the traditional ending, it finishes the opera triumphantly.
But Hao went in a different direction. He decided to end with the traditional Chinese folk song, "Jasmine Flower," which Puccini uses throughout the opera to foreshadow appearances by Turandot.
Hao believes it is "correct" to end with "Jasmine Flower," likening it to putting the most important character, Princess Turandot, at the end.
"In my last use of it, I made the tune of 'Jasmine Flower' bright and glorious, like the last few words of the opera — 'love lights up the world,'" he says.
Revision Draws Mixed Reviews
Hao's new ending was greeted with almost unanimous approval in China. One reviewer, Xu Ziaozhong, called it "an extremely significant artistic feat."
But opera critic Andrew Moravcsik, who has seen the performance twice, calls parts of it "kitschy" and "Metro Goldwyn Mayer all the way."
"Puccini just didn't write that way. Guys in Hollywood wrote that way," he says.
Moravcsik describes the new ending as a noble effort that falls short — but is striking for what it represents.
"There's a little bit in it that's modern, a little bit that seems traditionally Chinese, a little bit that's glitzy, a little bit that's commercial, a little bit that's sincere," he says. "But in the end, it isn't coherent. That's very much like China is today. It's on its way to finding a coherent identity, but it hasn't found it yet."
As Moravcsik points out, this is a sophisticated and audacious production — especially for a country like China, with no tradition of Western opera. That it has come from almost nothing to a world-class production in just three short decades shows that China — in opera, like in much else — has world-class ambition.
The kinetic art works incorporate cogs, wheels, pulleys and motors into moving sculptures which evoke the viewer's imagination, tell humorous stories and display scientific principles - all at the same time.
In the exhibition called, "Fantastic Machines - Machines Tell Stories" there are huge sprawling, metal works which incorporate found objects like sewing machines and type-writers. There are also small, intricate carved wooden scenes telling funny stories; and then there are curious machines made out of wire and bone, or zinc and magnets.
Cinnamon Nippard went to Wolfsburg to find out more.
翻譯較難的是文化背景（2）：The Decorative Art of Today by Le Corbusier 之Eugène Samuel Grasset
"Grasset was the geometrician and algebraist of flowers. With him we had to extend our admiration for all flowers as far as the secret of their structure, to love them so much that there was no alternative but to scatter them over all the works that we would like to have undertaken. Our childhood was illuminated by the miracles of nature. Our hours of study were spent hunched over a thousand flowers and insects. Trees, clouds and birds were the field of our research; we tried to understand their life-cure, and concluded that only nature was beautiful and that we could be no more than humble imitator of here forms and here wonderful materials."---
Le Corbusier , The Decorative Art of Today
這本1925的法文書很早就有日本翻譯本； 1965年修正版。如果MIT出版社說的沒錯，英文翻譯是1986/7年的事。 初淺的Eugène Samuel Grasset 介紹，還是對他們之間的關係了解有限。我是透過Le Corbusier's formative years by Brooks, H. Allen...的索引來了解他們的奇遇（Le Corbusier在電話步上看到他在學校讀書看過的Grasset的電話號碼，後者給他2小時之「先知般的教誨」：巴黎建築為”頹壞之流無法落實19世紀新材料之承諾、頁364有裝飾圖案之分解的習作學習...）
Le Corbusier , The Decorative Art of Today by Le Corbusier
Eugène Grasset (
Born Eugène Samuel Grasset in
In 1877 Eugène Grasset turned to graphic design, producing income-generating products such as postcards and eventually postage stamps for both France and Switzerland. However, it was
With the growing popularity of French posters in the United States, Grasset was soon contacted by several American companies. In the 1880s, he did his first American commission and more success led to his cover design for the 1892 Christmas issue of Harper's Magazine. In 1894 Grasset created "The Wooly Horse" and "The Sun of Austerlitz" for
At the end of the 19th century, Grasset was hired to teach design at École Guérin and École Estienne in Paris. Among his students were Maurice Pillard Verneuil, Augusto Giacometti, Paul Berthon and Otto Ernst Schmidt. At the
Eugène Grasset died in 1917 in
ウジェーヌ・グラッセ（Eugène Grasset, 1845年5月25日 - 1917年10月23日）は、スイスの装飾芸術家。ベル・エポックの期間、フランスのパリで、さまざまなデザイン分野で活躍した。彼はアール・ヌーヴォーの先駆者と考えられている。
ウジェーヌ・サムエル・グラッセ（Eugène Samuel Grasset）はスイスのローザンヌで生まれた。生まれた年は一説には1841年とも言われている。父親が飾り棚のデザイナー・制作者、彫刻家だったので、美術的な環境で育った。フランソワーズ・ボシオン（1828年 - 1890年）の下で絵を学び、1861年には建築の勉強をするためにチューリッヒに行った。卒業後、エジプトを訪問。この時の経験が、後に彼が描くことになるポスター・デザインに反映されることになる。さらに彼は日本美術のファンで、これもまた彼のデザインに影響を与えた。1869年から1871年にかけて、グラッセはローザンヌで絵と彫刻の仕事をしていたが、1871年にパリに移った。そこで家具、タペストリー、陶器、宝石のデザインをした。彼の美しい芸術装飾品は、象牙や金といった高価な素材を絶妙に組み合わせて作ったものだった。彼の作品がアール・ヌーヴォーの様式とパターンの基礎を築いたと考えられている。
1877年、グラッセはグラフィック・デザイナーに転身し、金になる作品、たとえば絵葉書や、さらにはフランス、スイス両国の切手などを作るようになった。しかし、速やかに彼の牙城になったのはポスター・アートだった。彼の作品のいくつかは装飾芸術美術館の一部を占め、その中に彼のリトグラフ『Jeanne d'Arc Sarah Bernhardt（サラ・ベルナール主演ジャンヌ・ダルク）』がある。1890年、彼は辞書出版社ラルース版が使う『Semeuse（スムーズ）』のロゴをデザインした。
フランスのポスターがアメリカで評判になり、アメリカの何社かがグラッセに連絡をしてきた。1880年代、彼はアメリカからの最初の仕事を受けた。グラッセが表紙を描いたハーパーズ・マガジン社の1892年のクリスマス号は大成功となった。1894年には、センチュリー・マガジン社が自社で出版していたナポレオン・ボナパルトの連作伝記の宣伝のために、『Wooly Horse（羊毛の馬）』と『The Sun of Austerlitz（アウステルリッツの太陽）』を描いた。『Wooly Horse』の絵は有名になり、ルイス・カムフォート・ティファニーがステンドグラスに再創造したほどだった。アメリカでのグラッセの仕事は、アール・ヌーヴォーがアメリカ美術に普及する道を開いた。
19世紀の終わりに、グラッセはパリの「エコール・ゲラン」と「エコール・エスティエンヌ」でデザインを教えるために雇われた。教え子の中には、モーリ ス・ピラール・ヴェルヌイユ、アウグスト・ジャコメッティ、ポール・ベルトン、オットー・エルンスト・シュミットらがいた。1900年のパリ万国博覧会では、「G・ペイニョ・エ・フィル」（フランスのタイポグラフィ工房）が、グラッセが1898年にいくつかのポスターに使うためデザインしたイタリック書体を紹介した。
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「天目の龍山」と称され、色絵（いろえ）の伝統産地・佐賀県有田町で異色の黒い釉薬（うわぐすり）を追求し続けた、文化勲章受章者で日本芸術院会 員の青木龍山（あおき・りゅうざん、本名・久重＝ひさしげ）さんが２３日午後１１時１０分、肝不全のため亡くなった。８１歳だった。
告別式は２６日正午、同町南原甲１１１３の１１の有田セレモニーホールで。自宅は同町外尾山丙１５９５。喪主は長男、清高（きよたか）氏。
有田の窯元に生まれ、多摩美大日本画科を卒業後、高校の美術教諭をしているうちに呼び戻されて陶芸の道へ。１９５４年の日展に「花紋染付大皿」を 初出品して入選した。天目作品「豊」が７１年の日展特選を受賞。造形美の「豊」シリーズから、黒い磁肌に銀色などの線を生かした「渚」、リズムを表現した 「韻」と、名品を生んだ中国・宋時代の天目に現代感覚を取り入れ、作品を展開した。
９１年の日展に出品した「胡沙の舞」で日本芸術院賞を受賞し、翌９２年に日本芸術院会員。日展常務理事に就任、工芸部門の審査主任を務め、現代工芸のレベル向上に力を尽くした。
９９年秋、文化功労者の顕彰を受け、２００５年に文化勲章を受章した。
青木さんはここ３年ほど中国・明代の染め付けに興味を持ち、天目と並行して作品づくりに励んでいた。昨年６月、妻の綾子さんを亡くしてから肝臓の 持病が悪化。半月ほど前から車いす生活になったが、創作意欲は衰えず、入院する前日の今月１９日には庭のボタンの花を皿に描いていたという。
悲報に接した有田焼の人間国宝の十四代酒井田柿右衛門さん（７３）（佐賀県有田町）は「有田の歴史と技術を体得した上で新しい世界を見せてくれた。やればできると若い作家に教えてくれた」と話した。
有田焼の白磁で知られ、「白の井上、黒の青木」と並び称される人間国宝の井上萬二さん（７９）（同）は、５０年来のつき合い。１月に青木さんが福岡市で開いた個展で会ったのが最後に。「先輩なのにいばるところがない、おおらかな人だった」と悼んだ。
有田焼の十四代今泉今右衛門さん（４５）（同）は「印象に残るのは笑顔。でも、陶芸の話になると真剣な表情に変わった。有田の文化を引き上げてもらった感謝の気持ちでいっぱい」と語った。
昨年１２月に日本芸術院会員となった唐津焼の中里逢庵（十三代中里太郎右衛門）さん（８４）（佐賀県唐津市）は「同じ芸術院会員として二人で日展系の陶芸家を育てていこうとしていた。惜しい人を亡くした」と肩を落とした。
Ollie Johnston Jr, the creator of Bambi and the last living member of Disney’s celebrated “Nine Old Men,” who set the standards for the art of animation, has died at 95.
Johnston died Monday afternoon of natural causes at a long-term care facility in Sequim, Washington, according to a press release from Walt Disney Studios. John Lasseter, chief creative officer for Walt Disney and Pixar Animation Studios called him “one of the greatest animators of all time.”
Johnston helped create Disney’s legendary status, beginning with his animation of the Seven Dwarfs and Pinocchio. He helped to create such celebrated characters as Bambi and Thumper in Bambi, the Three Good Fairies in Sleeping Beauty, Pongo and Perdita in 101 Dalmatians, and Mowgli and Baloo in The Jungle Book.
Among the most famous scenes he created were Pinocchio’s nose growing when he lied to the Blue Fairy in the 1940 movie; Thumper reciting his lesson about eating clover greens under his mother’s watchful eye in Bambi and Baloo performing The Bare Necessities in The Jungle Book.
Johnston was born on Oct. 31, 1912, in Palo Alto, California, and studied art at Stanford University, where his father was the head of the romance languages department. He joined Disney in 1935 and quickly worked his way through its ranks.Oliver Martin Johnston, Jr. (born
He was a directing animator at
Johnston co-authored, with Frank Thomas, the classic reference book
Born in Palo Alto, California, Johnston attended Stanford University- where he worked on campus humor magazine the Stanford Chaparral with fellow future animator Frank Thomas - then went on to the
Ollie married a fellow Disney employee, Ink and Paint artist Marie Worthey, in 1943. Marie Johnston died May 20, 2005.
Ollie's lifelong hobby was
In the 1960s Ollie acquired and restored a full-size
On November 10,
Apr 24th 2008
From The Economist print edition
IF YOU interviewed Ollie Johnston in the last years of his life, sooner or later he would start to change. The trim body, lean as a whippet's, would begin to prowl and strut, then round on you with an accusing, pointing arm, just like the evil prosecutor in “Toad of Toad Hall”. Or he would cock his head, gyrate it, fidget and twitch, for all the world like the rabbit Thumper as he explains to Bambi why he doesn't like clover greens. He would skip and stumble to play little Penny carrying a slithering cat in “The Rescuers”, or tilt stiffly from side to side like a waiter-penguin from “Mary Poppins”.
All these vignettes, performed in his 80s with a young man's grace, had come from decades of observation. For the plump, elderly Good Fairies in “Sleeping Beauty” (1959) Mr Johnston and Frank Thomas, his lifelong friend and fellow animator, would lurk behind little old ladies in the supermarket, noting how they bounced as they walked and how they pinned up their hair. For “101 Dalmatians” (1961), in which he drew the parent-dogs Pongo and Perdita, he studied every nuance of ears, noses, flanks and tails. Dog-nous had helped him too in his first job as an assistant animator, “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs” (1937), in which Dopey's paw-flapping stupidity was based on hound behaviour.
Of the elite animators Walt Disney gathered round him in the 1930s, the “Nine Old Men” as he called them, it was generally agreed that there was none like Mr Johnston. His background was suitable enough for the work: middle-class Californian, Stanford University art department, Chouinard art school in Los Angeles, until in 1935 he was hired, at $17 a week, by the studios in Burbank. But his approach was different. Where his colleagues focused on the “extremes”, the beginning or end of an action, he worked like an “in-betweener”, filling in with his quick, clear lines the smallest progressions of movement in a cheek, a hand or a leg, finding and sustaining the inner rhythm of the character.
What mattered for him was not movement, but the emotions behind it. “What is the character thinking, and why does he feel that way?” was the question he asked himself as he sat down to draw. As a student he had dreamed of being a magazine illustrator, producing portraits so alluring that buyers would feel they had to read the stories. Here his portraits could actually move and breathe. They could touch hands. He wanted to know the whole track of their lives to that moment, so that the way Sneezy blew his nose, or the delight of first-mate Smee as he sucked the liquor from his thumb in “Peter Pan” (1953), or the shambling dance of the bear Baloo in “The Jungle Book” (1967) would be informed by a universe of experience.
Some characters were harder than others. Mr Johnston could never find the spark in Lewis Carroll's Alice, with her prim hairband and her white apron, and thought the film a failure. In “Bambi”, where he excelled himself with the pathos of the fawn discovering his mother dead in the snow, or acknowledging with a slight, shy droop of the head the magnificence of his father, or stumbling through the forest on legs as thin as the grass, he found the face too bland, and the nose too short, to register as much as he wanted. He had more nose to work with in “Pinocchio” in 1940; but there, typically, he drew just the beginning of the transformation, as the puppet-boy, “who doesn't know a darn thing”, was suddenly, astonishingly confronted by the Blue Fairy and his own lies. The six-foot-long nose, with a bird's nest swaying at the end of it, was somebody else's thought.
The work of a Disney animator, as the studios roared from strength to strength, could be as numbing as the daily grind on any other production line. The constant perusal of the storyboards pinned along the wall; the mute challenge of the pile of medium-grade bond paper and the pencil-sharpener full of shavings; the exposure-sheet tacked to the drawing-board, giving the exact times allotted to the scene and the dialogue; the knowledge that 30 feet of drawings, at 16 drawings a foot, would have a running time of merely 20 seconds. But Mr Johnston made light of it, adoring the work and passing on his expertise enthusiastically to others. The only thing he possibly loved more was the inch-scale hand-built railway that ran round his garden, which with huffing and panting and articulated pistons moved much like an ideal cartoon character: everything functional, everything with a purpose.
Those who came to see him in the studios might find him acting, rather than drawing. Disney routinely brought in actors to help the animators, but their bodies and faces seldom matched up to the ones Mr Johnston had in his mind, with their flowing capacity to squash, stretch and rebound. He could sometimes give the idea better himself, by getting up and doing. When his characters had to speak he would draw with a mirror beside him, giving them the lines of his own mouth making letters and his own eyebrows rising and falling. “You get an idea, your eyes begin to widen,” he noted. “Your cheeks start to come up; your whole face moves...The entire pose should express the thought.” Small wonder that so much of his own life got into his drawings, and so much of their life into him.
04/12/2008
At the Opening Ceremony of the 2006 Turin Winter Olympics on Feb. 10 that year, Luciano Pavarotti delivered the aria, "Nessun Dorma" (None Shall Sleep), from Giacomo Puccini's opera "Turandot."
"I shall win! I shall win!" sang Pavarotti, and this column marveled that his voice, reverberating under the cold night sky, was still as incredibly powerful as at the height of his career, or, as the writer said at the time, "at least from how it sounded on television."
Thirteen days later, Japanese figure skater Shizuka Arakawa skated to the same aria to win her gold medal.
But it has come to light that Pavarotti's performance that night was lip-synced. This revelation must have deprived some fans of sleep for a while.
Leone Magiera, Pavarotti's longtime colleague and conductor, revealed in his recently released book that both the singing and the orchestra had been pre-recorded for the opening ceremony.
I checked the performance's video tape. Pavarotti is gripping a white handkerchief in his left hand, and his signature eyebrows are working expressively, as his mouth forms a large "O."
"The King of the High C's" was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer four months later, and died in September 2007 at the age of 71. Apparently, he was already in pain by the time of the Turin Olympics.
Because of his condition on the opening night, according to Magiera, it was decided that the taped versions of the singing and the orchestra--recorded separately a few days before--would be used.
This became Pavarotti's final big performance. When it ended amid thunderous applause and cheering, he blew kisses with his right hand.
I wonder if this was a gesture of relief at completing this important mission in his native country "without incident," or gratitude, apology and farewell to Muse.
For this opera superstar who could mesmerize hundreds of thousands of people in a single outdoor concert, perhaps lip-syncing was a shameful thing to do.
However, I don't think this changes the fact that he "won" all the same.
I wouldn't defend his action openly, but he did mesmerize hundreds of millions of people around the world that night. "And that," I mouth the words to myself, "takes superlative artistic talent."
--The Asahi Shimbun, April 11(IHT/Asahi: April 12,2008)
This is a fitting time to revisit Philip Glass’s opera “Satyagraha,” a landmark work of Minimalism. I take Mr. Glass at his word that when “Satyagraha” was introduced, in Rotterdam in 1980, he was following his own voice and vision, not firing a broadside against the complex, cerebral modernist composers who claimed the intellectual high ground while alienating mainstream classical music audiences. Happily, that divisive period is finally past.
Richard Croft, in white, at the Met as Mohandas K. Gandhi in the Philip Glass opera "Satyagraha," which depicts Gandhi’s path to spirituality and political activism in South Africa.
In a swirl of newsprint: Richard Croft as Gandhi, who relied on the news media in his agitation for civil rights, in the Philip Glass opera “Satyagraha,” at the Met.
A scene from the Philip Glass opera "Satyagraha."
Metropolitan Opera patrons, mostly bound by tradition, might not seem a likely source of Glass fans. But when Mr. Glass appeared onstage after the Met’s first performance of “Satyagraha,” on Friday night, the audience erupted in a deafening ovation.
“Satyagraha” (a Sanskrit term that means truth force) is more a musical ritual than a traditional opera. Impressionistic and out of sequence, it relates the story of Mohandas K. Gandhi’s fight for the civil rights of the Indian minority in South Africa from 1893 to 1914. The staging — created by Phelim McDermott, director, and Julian Crouch, associate director and set designer, for the Met and the English National Opera, where it was seen last year — makes inventive use of fanciful imagery, aerialists, gargantuan puppets and theatrical spectacle to convey the essence of a self-consciously spiritual work.
Without knowing the events of Gandhi’s struggles in South Africa you would have little idea what is going on, starting from the opening scene. Gandhi, portrayed by the sweet-voiced tenor Richard Croft in a heroic performance, lies on the ground in a rumpled suit, his suitcase nearby. The moment depicts an incident when Gandhi, as a young lawyer en route to Pretoria and holding a proper first-class ticket, was ordered to take his place with the Indians on board and, when he resisted, was pushed from the train onto the platform.
But this abstract production takes its cues from Mr. Glass, who was not interested in fashioning a cogent narrative. What continues to make the opera seem radical comes less from the music, with its lulling repetitions of defiantly simple riffs, motifs and scale patterns, than from the complete separation of sung text from dramatic action, such as it is.
The libretto, assembled by the novelist Constance DeJong, consists of philosophical sayings from the Bhagavad-Gita, the sacred Hindu epic poem. Mr. Glass honors the text by keeping it in the original Sanskrit and setting every syllable clearly. This production dispenses with Met Titles on the theory that the audience would actually be distracted by paying attention to the words, which at best serve as commentary. Instead key phrases in English are projected on a semicircular corrugated wall that forms the backdrop of the production’s gritty and elemental set.
“Satyagraha” invites you to turn off the part of your brain that looks for linear narrative and literal meaning in a musical drama and enter a contemplative state — not hard to do during the most mesmerizing parts of the opera, especially in this sensitive performance. For example, in the hauntingly mystical opening scene when Gandhi reflects on a battle between two royal families depicted in the Bhagavad-Gita, Mr. Croft, in his plaintive voice, sang the closest the score comes to a wistful folk song while undulant riffs wound through the lower strings.
That the impressive young conductor Dante Anzolini, in his Met debut, kept the tempos on the slow side lent weight and power to the repetitive patterns. At times, though, during stretches in the opera when Mr. Glass pushes the repetitions to extremes, as in the wild conclusion to the final choral scene in Act I, the music became a gloriously frenzied din of spiraling woodwind and organ riffs.
Even in this breakthrough work Mr. Glass does not come across as a composer who sweats over details. He tends to rely on default repetitions of formulaic patterns, the only question being how often to repeat a phrase. Sometimes the daring simplicity just sounds simplistic. When he does work harder, fracturing the rhythmic flow or injecting some pungent dissonance into his harmonies, I am more drawn in.
In this regard Mr. Glass is different from another founding father of Minimalism, Steve Reich, whose music is just as repetitious as Mr. Glass’s. But Mr. Reich has always had an ear for ingenious, striking and intricate detail.
Sometimes, with its aerial feats and puppetry, the Met production relies too much on stage activity. Still, it’s quite a show. Mr. McDermott and Mr. Crouch have assembled a group of acrobats and aerialists called the Skills Ensemble, who produce magical effects. In once scene they form a huge puppet queen clothed in newspaper who goes to battle against a hulking puppet warrior assembled from wicker baskets. The use of simple materials is meant as homage to the poor, oppressed minorities for whom Gandhi gave his life.
Because Gandhi relied on the news media of his day to support his agitation for human rights and published his own journal, Indian Opinion, newspapers are a running image in the production. Actors fashion pages into symbolic barriers for protests. At one point, in despair, Gandhi disappears into a slithering mass of people and paper.
The cast entered into the ritualistic wonder of the work and the production despite solo and choral parts that are often formidably hard. It’s almost cruel to ask male choristers to sing foursquare, monotone repetitions of “ha, ha, ha, ha” for nearly 10 minutes, as Mr. Glass does. Yet the chorus sang with stamina and conviction.
Besides Mr. Croft, other standouts in the excellent cast included the soprano Rachelle Durkin as Gandhi’s secretary, Miss Schlesen; the mezzo-soprano Maria Zifchak as his wife; the bass-baritone Alfred Walker as Parsi Rustomji, a co-worker; and the baritone Earle Patriarco as Mr. Kallenbach, a European co-worker and ally. You are not likely to hear the long, ethereal sextet in the last act sung with more calm intensity and vocal grace than it was here.
Ultimately, despite its formulaic elements, “Satyagraha” emerges here as a work of nobility, seriousness, even purity. In the final soliloquy, timeless and blithely simple, Gandhi hauntingly sings an ascending scale pattern in the Phrygian mode 30 times. To some degree the ovation at the end, after a 3-hour-45-minute evening, was necessary. The audience had to let loose after all that contemplation.
The
Volume 13, Number 9 · November 20, 1969
Review
Gandhi: Non-Violence as Therapy
By Clifford Geertz
Gandhi's Truth, or the Origins of Militant Nonviolence
by Erik H. Erikson
Norton, 474 pp., $10.00
"Whence, however," the Mahabharata asks, "does Hope arise?" For twenty years, since his Childhood and Society announced the Freudian vocation to be the empowerment of the ego, Erik Erikson has been asking the same question. His whole career has proceeded from a settled determination to turn psychoanalysis away from fascination with weakness toward detection of strength, to dissolve its hospital odor and connect it up with the public aspirations of men. In modern
A man who claims to be a saint, as Gandhi did, if not in so many words, certainly in almost every action he took after his return from South Africa in 1915 (he arrived at the banquet, with which Bombay high society greeted him, in peasant dress and announced that he would rather have been received by indentured servants), demands, above all, a moral response. Rather like the little girl who did not know whether she wished to see the dinosaur in the museum until she found out whether it was good or bad, we have to decide how to feel about him before we really understand him, and coming to understand him does not actually help very much in deciding how to feel about him.
Indeed, when it is a dinosaur like Gandhi one is going to see, coming to understand him only makes the problem worse. The deeper the labyrinth of his personality is penetrated the higher rises the tension between admiration and outrage, awe and disgust, trust and suspicion, until the encounter with him becomes as painful and disaccommodating as he wished to make it. It is the triumph of Erikson's book that in uncovering the inner sources of Gandhi's power it does not dissolve but deepens his inherent moral ambiguity, and in so doing extends the intent of his career: to make of himself an exemplary prophet, a man who recommends his character to the world as a saving revelation.
The more prominent features of Gandhi's character are only too well known. His sexual and dietary asceticism, his hatred of filth, his shyness, his restlessness, his penchant for self-inflicted suffering, his moralism, his romanticism, his vanity, have all been described over and over again in what is by now a fairly sizable hagiographic and anti-hagiographic literature both inside
Erikson's Gandhi is an obsessive tease, a man with an extraordinary capacity to make others feel furious and foolish at the same time. At Benares, the arch symbol of Hindu humility, he dresses up as a pauper and offers a penny to the Well of Knowledge and is duly rewarded by having a custodian of orthodoxy (and, apparently, of the Well) inform him that he will land in hell for his stinginess. In
He is always taunting, testing limits, playing, up to some finely calculated point, with others' emotions. The essence of his spiritual gift is an edged gaiety, an Indic variety of kidding on the level, which keeps everyone—intimates, followers, rivals, officials, wisdom seekers from the West—psychologically off balance, unable to find their moral feet with him. Forged into a political instrument this becomes the famous Satyagraha, which literally means "truth force" or "perseverance in truth," is usually translated as "passive resistance" or (somewhat better) "militant non-violence," but which could perhaps be most informatively rendered as "mass taunting" or "collective needling." What in the end Gandhi did to colonial
Erikson centers his investigation of this intricate art around an incident—he calls it "The Event"—which, occurring at the very beginning of Gandhi's Indian career (though, as he was nearly fifty, well along in his life), demonstrates its workings in a parochial, highly personal, micro-context—a small, intense circle of intimates. Working into this "Event," the Ahmedabad textile strike of 1918, from Gandhi's youth and young manhood (Gujerat, London, South Africa), on the far side, and outward from it to the days of his Mahatmaship, when "all India would hold its breath while [he] fasted," on the near, he uses it, like a true clinician, to uncover the psychological materials out of which Satyagraha was made.
What made the Ahmedabad strike such a natural for Gandhi was the ingrown character of it all. The workers, many of whom were women, were led by the feminist sister of the main mill owner, one of the earliest of Gandhi's long string of devoted female disciples. Management was led by her less visionary brother, whose wife was also a Gandhi partisan, and who, for all his defensive bluffness, had himself been Gandhi's first important financial backer in
After such promising beginnings, however, the affair turned out, on the surface at least, to be a bit of a fizzle. Seated beneath a bulbul tree Gandhi lectured to thousands of people each afternoon on the principles of Satyagraha. He extracted, almost without quite realizing it, a sacred pledge from the workers neither to resume work nor to cause any disturbance until their demands had been met. And, when their resolution began to fail, he launched the first of his seventeen famous "fasts to the death." In the end, despairing of the moral fiber of the workers ("After twenty years' experience I have come to the conclusion that I am qualified to take a pledge," he told them with headmaster rudeness. "I see you are not yet so qualified.") he negotiated a settlement between the sibling antagonists which saved the workers' pride, the owners' pocketbook, and his own reputation.
It seemed to Gandhi a rather sordid end to what was to have been a moral revolution. ("My co-workers and I," he wrote later in his Autobiography, "had built many castles in the air, but they all vanished for the time being.") But for Erikson it is the point at which Gandhi set definitively off down the road to sainthood, the point at which the philosophy of militant non-violence freed itself from his personal biography to become part of the collective consciousness of modern
…Casting Ahmedabadis against one another [The Event] was largely a local show, like a rehearsal before a provincial audience. This [becomes] especially clear when we look back on Ahmedabad from the first nation-wide Satyagraha exactly one year later…. Then hundreds of thousands of Indians of all regions and religions would be on the move; the
At Ahmedabad, teasing was finally raised to a philosophical plane, taunting exalted into a religious act. To an extent this had already occurred in the agitations in
The violence that non-violence contains, has, of course, often been noted; since Nietzsche, it has been a commonplace. But what Gandhi came, after Ahmedabad, to believe—and in so doing plunged himself into a forest of puzzles—was that this contained violence was precisely what gave nonviolence its moral grandeur. As a weapon of the weak, Satyagraha is reduced to cowardice, it is what the defenseless must do to survive; as a weapon of the strong, it is the highest form of courage, the willingness to suffer evil rather than commit it. From someone powerless to strike back, turning the other cheek is a token of submission, a victim mollifying his tormentor by dissembling his rage. From someone competent to strike back, and even to kill, it is a provocation, an assertion of moral superiority which an aggressor, whether with renewed brutality or crushed repentance, must necessarily acknowledge. The road to true non-violence passes then through the attainment of power, that is of the means of violence, a doctrine which, when stated in the context of India fifty years ago, breathes the same chill of desperate logic as it does in that of the contemporary United States:
What am I to advise a man to do who wants to kill but is unable owing to his being maimed? Before I can make him feel the virtue of not killing, I must restore to him the arm he has lost…. A nation that is unfit to fight cannot from experience prove the virtue of not fighting. I do not infer from this that
I have come to see, what I did not so clearly before, that there is non-violence in violence. This is the big change which has come about. I had not fully realized the duty of restraining a drunkard from doing evil, of killing a dog in agony or one infected with rabies. In all these instances violence is in fact non-violence.
Today I find that everybody is desirous of killing, but most are afraid of doing so or powerless to do so. Whatever is to be the result I feel certain that the power must be restored to
Whether one hears Malcolm X or Dean Rusk in these quotations—and it is part of the now-you-see-it-now-you-don't quality of Gandhi's Truth that one can hear something of both—this is clearly dangerous doctrine; the carnage after all did come, martyring Gandhi with it, and, as I write, Ahmedabad, of all places, is the scene of the bloodiest communal riots since Partition. The moral doubletalk to which it can lead is apparent, not only in Gandhi ("…Our offspring must be strong in physique," he said, urging Indians into the British Army. "If they cannot completely renounce the urge to violence, we may permit them to commit violence, to use their strength to fight and thus make them non-violent"), but, on occasion, in Erikson as well:
In view of the values which the Jews of the diaspora have come to stand for, the belated proof that Jews could fight a national war, may impress many as an historical anachronism. And, indeed, the triumph of Israeli soldiery is markedly subdued, balanced by a certain sadness over the necessity to reenter historical actuality by way of military methods not invented by Jews, and yet superbly used by them. I would go further: is it not possible that such historical proof of a military potential will make peace-loving Jews better potential Satyagrahis?
Yet, however one may prefer the bleak candor of Realpolitik to images of a saddened soldiery fighting to advance the cause of pacifism (as Burkhardt said, there is enough hypocrisy in the world already), the argument that a sacred pledge to abstain from the use of force can have moral reality only with respect to people who have a genuine possibility of effectively using force is surely correct. And, as Gandhi himself recognized ("…This new aspect of non-violence which has revealed itself to me has enmeshed me in no end of problems…. I have not found one master-key for all the riddles…. My powers of thinking fail me…") the acceptance of this hard truth introduces a paradox into the very heart of Gandhian doctrine. As ideological slogans, "Peace Through Strength" and "Strength Through Peace" do not sit altogether comfortably together.
Not, at least. In thought. In action, Erikson argues, this contradiction was transcended by the sheer force of Gandhi's commitment, his readiness when faced with the immediate possibility, a possibility he had had usually himself specifically created, to get hurt rather than to hurt. Like Luther and like St. Francis, two other men with a subversive sense of humor, Gandhi was "a religious actualist," a man for whom truth resides neither in tradition nor in doctrine, but in "that which feels effectively true in action." In the carefully staged politico-moral dramas which he called his "experiments with truth"—Ahmedabad, the salt campaign, Hydari Mansion—Gandhi made his argument that the active decision not to do harm was the basic law of life come alive both to himself and to large masses of Indians. Stymied by the paradox that non-violence is the reciprocal of strength, power the prerequisite of self-command, his "philosophy" dissolved into a collection of colliding homilies and Indic eccentricities. Fired by the same paradox, his "method" focussed into a rising series of studied provocations designed to expose at once the pretensions of colonial society and the impotence of political brutality.
In attempting to clarify the anatomy of this exercise in collective truthfinding, Erikson follows a famous remark of Nehru's to the effect that what Gandhi accomplished for India was "a psychological change, almost as if some expert in psychoanalytic methods had probed deep into the patient's past, found out the origins of his complexes, exposed them to view, and thus rid him of that burden." Erikson constructs an extended parallel between the technique developed by Freud for renewing growth in neurotic individuals and that developed by Gandhi to restore hope to a crippled people. Both relied on engagement at close range between the agent and the subject of change; both attempted to give the subject courage to change by confronting him as a full and equal human being with a latent capacity to trust and love, rather than as a lunatic, an inferior and enemy, or a savage; both eschewed any form of coercion, even moral coercion; both regarded as critical the agent's openness to change as well as the subject's, and saw the process of "cure" as involving a deepening of insight and consequent selftransformation, on both sides. And so on. Satyagraha is Analysis writ large; Analysis Satyagraha writ small. Politics and therapy coincide.
Perhaps one should not expect an analyst, even an heterodox one, to come to any other conclusions. ("When I began this book, I did not expect to rediscover psychoanalysis in terms of truth, self-suffering and non-violence," he concludes somewhat ingenuously. "But now that I have done so I see better what I hope the reader has come to see with me, namely, that I felt attracted to the Ahmedabad Event…because I sensed an affinity between Gandhi's truth and the insights of modern psychology.") But there is in this analogy a rather serious defect: in a clinical encounter ultimate interests merge, in the political one they do not. It is the deliberate exclusion of extrinsic concerns from the therapeutic situation, the stripping away of everything but a common concentration on emotional exploration that gives it, when this in fact occurs, its enormous force. With politics it is just the reverse: the wider the range of divergent concerns with which it can manage to cope the deeper it cuts. As models for each other, the consulting room and the textile strike seem peculiarly likely to mislead.
Yet, even if the therapeutic image of political process, like the therapeutic images of art, law, or education, fails at a general level to do justice to its object, and even distorts it, with respect to Gandhi that image was, as Erikson clearly demonstrates, centrally relevant. And this in turn reveals why, even when brought down to the solid outlines of a polished method, Gandhi's teachings remain, like the man himself, ambiguous and only half-convincing.
Gandhi was, as Erikson is, powerfully attracted by a therapeutic view of politics—one which abstracts from the realities of group solidarity, divergent interest, social hierarchy, and cultural difference (and this in India!) in order to concentrate on exploiting the emotional involvements of individuals in one another's lives. At Ahmedabad, he had a situation in which such exploitation was possible, and though, characteristically, the strike failed, the therapy worked. "I have never come across the like of it," he said in his final speech to the workers. "I had had experience of many such conflicts or heard of them but have not known any in which there was so little ill will or bitterness as in this." And a few days later he wrote to the Bombay Chronicle to justify his own role which the paper had questioned as wasting large talents on parochial issues, "I have not known a struggle fought with so little bitterness and such courtesy on either side. This happy result is principally due to the connections with it of Mr. Ambalal Sarabhai [the millowner brother] and Anasuyaben [the labor-leader sister]."
Removed from this intimate context, he would never know it again. And in attempting again and again to re-enact this family drama on the national stage his career revealed both the intrinsic power of attraction that a view of politics as a process of inward change possesses—its ability to move men—and its radical inability, having moved them, to deal with the issues—whether workers' wages or the threat of Partition—thereby raised.
The contrast which appeared already at Ahmedabad between Gandhi's extraordinary ability to shape the personal lives of those immediately around him and his inability to control the direction of the strike as a collective act grew greater and greater as he extended himself across India and into larger and larger mass settings, and became, as violence followed violence to the climax of Partition and his own assassination, the distinguishing feature of his career. Nehru was wrong. Gandhi did not psychoanalyze India, he (though of course not alone) politicized it; and having politicized it, could not—a fact our own "religious actualists," taunting power, toying with social passions, and finding truth "in that which feels effectively true in action" might well ponder—in the end control it.
"Who listens to me today," he wrote just six months before his death,
…I am being told to retire to the Himalayas. Everybody is eager to garland my photos and statues. Nobody really wants to follow my advice…. Neither the people nor those in power have any use for me.
Today, when his centenary is being celebrated by men for whom he is neither a personal presence nor a moral force but a marketable national treasure, like the Taj Mahal, this is even more true. Erikson's penetrating book, more convincing in describing the dinosaur than in judging him, deepens our understanding not only of the inward sources of personal greatness but those, as well, of its self-defeat.
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