Antique roadshow

Okay, time travelers – sit back and relax while we watch the Airplane (Smothers Brothers thrown in for good measure) and celebrate Gracie Slick, who is 72 today. It is totally psychedlic.

The art of the possible

New Yorkers woke up on this date in 1787 to find the first installment of an exciting new series in the twice-weekly Independent Journal, an essay that came to be called Federalist Paper No. 1.

Seriously, was everyone reading the Federalist papers as they appeared?  I doubt it – you’d have to care a lot to tackle that text.  Maybe a few political wonks did, and shared their opinions in the taverns in the Battery or maybe – as is the case now – people already knew how they felt about having a constitution and very few minds were changed before New Yorkers met to ratify the document.

The real fun of the Federalist essays was trying to figure out who wrote them – they had the pen name ‘Publius’ attached – and what kind of reaction the anti-Federalists might manifest.

Then as now, politicians were addicted to arguing with each other in public.  We like to think of the Founding Fathers as a bunch of wise men sitting around the campfire mulling the best way to provide for the public good, but they were just politicians really, and every bit as snide, back-stabbing and double-talking as now.

Fifteen years after the Federalist papers began appearing, it was revealed that James Madison, Alexander Hamilton and John Jay were the authors of the papers, although Madison had been a sworn enemy of the other two on various issues in the past and would be again in the future.  Hamilton and Jay, for instance, strongly urged the formation of a national bank, an idea that Madison just as strongly opposed – until he was president, then he was for it.

James Madison by John Vanderlyn

Madison, in fact, was a major flip-flopper.  He was strongly opposed to a Bill of Rights, until he yielded to anti-Federalist pressure to include a specific list of rights and speed the ratification process. (I’ll confess here that I always thought Thomas Jefferson wrote the Bill, but then I always figure he wrote everything important.)

In short, our smallest, slightest president (five-four and a hundred pounds) was a political heavyweight precisely because he had no fear of compromise, deal-making or just plain changing his mind.

The real power of the Federalist Papers, of course, has been to historians and to interpreters of the Constitution down through history.  They are the go-to source for Supreme Court Justices as well as legislators from time to time – the irony is, the last person who would have let himself be chained to a predecessor’s opinion would have been James Madison.

A big hand for the little lady

Hillary Diane Rodham Clinton, Wellesley ’69, celebrates her 64th today – many happy returns to our Secretary of State.

Secretary Clinton with Chancellor Merkel last year.

Really, it is very nice to have this particular secretarial job filled by a woman.  It was classy of the two big-time politicos concerned to make it happen – i.e., for Obama to offer and  Clinton to accept.

HRC is pretty much the definition of all modern things; she’s an overachiever, a Type-A personality, a multi-tasker, etc., etc.  She’s the most traveled SoS in history, I think, and she did a lot of her traveling last summer while also planning Chelsea’s wedding.

She went from being a Nixon fan in college to supporting Eugene McCarthy, from being president of the Young Republicans to writing her senior thesis on Saul Alinsky.  The summer after Wellesley and before Yale Law, she got a job at a fish plant in Valdez AK, but got fired after complaining about the unsafe working conditions.  Cool.

The first day of the rest of everything

Sorry, missed the anniversary of the birth of creation yesterday and laugh if you will, but until relatively recently, many people took Bishop James Ussher’s word for it: the world was created on the eve of October 23 in 4004 BC.

Bishop James Ussher by Peter Lely.

Ussher published his chronology of creation in 1654, basing his calculations on the genealogy from Adam on down and the reigns of kings, although he differed with other scholars who were sure it started in the spring.  Ussher decided the fall start of the Jewish calendar was an important clue and that the Sunday nearest the autumnal equinox was the likeliest date.

His calculations weren’t far off those of people like Kepler and Newton, btw, and Stephen Jay Gould has said, “I shall be defending Ussher’s chronology as an honourable effort for its time and arguing that our usual ridicule only records a lamentable small-mindedness based on mistaken use of present criteria to judge a distant and different past…”

Excellent point, that, about the “mistaken use of present criteria to judge a distant and different past…”

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There’s no controversy about the New York City subway – everyone knows it started with the opening of the first IRT line this week in 1904  All the details are at the Wik and don’t miss the explanation of token sucking.  From the library of Congress come two great photos – the first shows the city hall stop in 1904 and the second is how things looked sometime between 1908 and 1920, when the line was expanded.

Subway construction, photo by Henry Steffen.

Lisztomania

Something happened when Franz Liszt played – variously described as mass hysteria, the effects of magnetism or a form of collective epilepsy, it was considered a serious medical condition for which the only cure was the avoidance of crowded concert halls filled with other victims – all there to hear the young virtuoso from Hungary.

During the 1840s and early 50s – for about eight years – Liszt toured the capitals of Europe, performing at best guess more than a thousand times.  By the end of the decade, he’d made so much money that he began to donate most of his fees to charity – which naturally made him an even greater object of adoration.

Most of what you’d like to know about Liszt is here - but if you want the whole story, you must read Alan Walker’s three-volume biography.  Walker is a teacher and musicologist who found, while assembling some notes on Liszt, that there was no decent biography available, so he set out to write one.

One of Liszt's pianos. Photo by Tamcgath.

It took Walker 25 years, but the result was three volumes that are described as landmark.  The New York Times review observed that,  ”Mr. Walker seems to know everything about Liszt, and anything connected with Liszt, during every single day of the long life of that genius.”

Liszt, born this date in 1811, was taught piano by a student of Beethoven’s, studied composition with Salieri, was inspired to perform at the same level after seeing Paganini, was life-long friends with Chopin and did what he could to help the desperately poor Berlioz.

It must mean something when you can describe all the key figures in someone’s life using only last names…

He lived with the Vicomtesse de Flavigny for about five years and fathered three children, including Cosima Liszt, who grew up to become Cosima Wagner.

In 1863, he joined a Franciscan order outside of Rome, although he continued to teach and perform.  He traveled constantly between Rome, Budapest and Weimar for the rest of his life.

Liszt has been portrayed in a couple of not very notable movies, but this Liszt-as-a-rock star – with Roger Daltrey as Franz – gets the originality award:

Rehearsal

It’s Franz Liszt’s birthday tomorrow, so by way of warm-up for the occasion, here’s Lang Lang with the Rhapsody No. 2.  Details about the Rudolph Valentino of the piano will wait for the day, but if you’d like to see the floor piano version of this piece – and you know you do –  it’s here.

From the ground up

Sir Christopher Wren, born this date in 1632, studied Latin and physics at Oxford and became famous in his own time for his accomplishments as an astronomer, mathematician and geometer. No one ever asked where he’d studied architecture, because there was no such field at the time – an architect was someone who practiced a particular kind of applied mathematics.

Christopher Wren by Godfrey Kneller

In fact, he was a professor of astronomy at Oxford when, in 1661, he gave a lecture that prompted his friends and colleagues to join him in starting what became the Royal Society. At the same time he undertook the first renovations of St. Paul’s Cathedral.

Besides his understanding of math, physics and by extension, engineering, however, he spent a year in Paris in 1665, soaking up the lessons of the French and Italian baroque styles.

And it was just in the nick of time – the Great Fire of 1666, which began in a bakery and burned for four days, destroyed about two-thirds of London  and it was Wren who was put in charge of rebuilding it. Not personally, of course – he had numerous other architects and engineers to call on.  After all, he had quite a to-do list, including the rebuilding of 51 churches.  It is now thought that Wren personally designed very few of them, but he rebuilt St. Paul’s and it remains his monument.

Most of his life he served his sovereign as Surveyor of Works (first Charles II and then James I) and he lived to the ripe old age of 90.  All of the details are here and so are lots of great pictures.

Wren Library at Trinity College, Cambridge, carving by Grinling Gibbons. Photo by Andrew Dunn.

Kensington Palace. Photo by Colin Smith.

Interior, St. Paul's Cathedral. Photo by Josep Renalias.

A haaaaandbagggg?

On October 16 in 1864, Sir William Wilde and his wife Jane became the parents of Oscar Fingal O’Flahertie Wills Wilde, their second son.  He would be a middle child.

The house in Chelsea where the Wilde family lived until his arrest and exile. Amazingly, it's for rent, or was in 2002. Photo by Adam Carr.

Oscar’s mother was a published poet and an Irish nationalist.  Sir William was Dublin’s premier ear and eye surgeon, knighted for his work, who published works on Irish archeology.  Sir William also had three illegitimate children born before his marriage, whose paternity he acknowledged, but who were raised by relatives.

Clearly, Wilde’s family was intellectual, unorthodox and the perfect environment for a genius who would impress, delight and shock the wider world.

That wider world would also treat him very badly – he would die at 46 in poverty and despair. It is some small comfort to know that he has flourished in memory, that his work is more popular and appreciated with each passing day and that his enemies are forgotten, except insofar as they touched his life.

You can find the facts at the Wik, read and download most of his works at readprint.com, find a recently discovered Wilde work here and an amazing collection of photographs here, You can also find a detailed history of his trials here.

The photographs, btw, are at one of Los Angeles’s little-known treasures, the Clark Library of Rare Books and Manuscripts. It was built by William Clark Jr., son of billionaire  Senator William Clark, one of the giants of the Gilded Age. William Jr., instrumental in the creation of the LA Phil and the Hollywood Bowl, had a particularly fine collection of Wildeiana, which he left to UCLA.

[A bit off-topic, but terrifically interesting - the senior Clark started out as a miner in Montana, but soon found there was more money to be made hauling in eggs for miners than panning for gold.  He went from trade to banking, railroads and so on until he was ready to buy himself a seat in the Senate. He was so famously corrupt that Mark Twain called him "the most disgusting creature that the republic has produced since Tweed's time." One of Clark's children was Huguette, half-sister to William Jr. Huguette Clark, not seen in public since 1930, just died last May at the age of 104.  Quite a scandal about her later years and where the Stradivarius went.]

But I digress.  For a great depiction of Wilde’s life see the movie with Stephen Fry – Netflix has it.

In the meantime, we’ll always have this – eight minutes of some of the most brilliant dialogue ever written in English:

Transplants

Many happy returns to Emeril Lagasse, a true son of New England  (Fall River, Mass.), who flourished like the kudzu when transplanted to Louisiana forty years ago.

We also celebrate P.G. Wodehouse, creator of Jeeves, author of 96 books and a lyricist of accomplishment.  He wrote the original book for Anything Goes and wrote the lyrics for ‘Bill’ in Jerome Kern’s Show Boat. He created the quintessential English twit in Bertie Wooster, but did much of his work on this side of the Atlantic.

Wodehouse, living in France when the Germans arrived, was interned for much of the war. He did some radio broadcasts  based on his internment – under the aegis of the Germans – which led to a great deal of ill-will toward him back in England, so after the war,  he and his wife moved to the US and he became a citizen in 1955. The Wodehouses spent the rest of their lives in Remsenburg on Long Island.

Here’s a Jeeves and Bertie Wooster that would have pleased Wodehouse:

Prost!

Oktoberfesters.

Traditionally, royalty generally allow the peasants to celebrate weddings and coronations, sometimes even providing food or drink or amnesty or whatever they deem appropriate.

So when Crown Prince Ludwig of Bavaria (the First, not Mad Ludwig II) married his second wife – Princess Theresa of Saxony-something – in 1810, he authorized a party, a parade and a horse race.  The event was called an Oktoberfest.

Too bad the Bavarian royals didn’t copyright the name – the marks would be pouring in. But it’s unlikely they’d have imagined people would still be celebrating Ludwig’s marriage 200 years later with an 18-day bender that begins in September and ends before the weather gets bad.

It’s a collective drunk that requires the presence of nearly a hundred doctors and nurses because drinkers forget Oktoberfest beer is stronger than usual and so drinkers pass out more often  - and it requires, for the same reason, a substantial Munich police presence for those who stay on their feet.

Until the beginning of the 20th century, Oktoberfest involved a lot of dancing, skittles-playing and tree-climbing contests, but organizers decided they needed more room for drinking, so the space was turned over to giant beer tents.  The horse races lasted until 196o, however.

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Luciano Pavarotti was born on this date in 1935 and what a gift for our time. Comparisons are indeed odious, but to understand the genius of Pavarotti, it helps to hear the wonderful Juan Diego Flores do an excellent job with the nine – nine! – high Cs in Donizetti’s ‘Daughter of the Regiment,’ followed by Pavarotti singing the same: