Wuthering Heights Park and a protest

The Beaumont Enterprise publishes an article about the plans for the improvement of the Wuthering Heights Park in Beaumont, Texas. The existence of a Wuthering Heights Park in Texas it was already discussed in a recent article by Paul Daniggelis in the Brontë Society Gazette (No. 39 January 2006). This is an extract of that article:

Ben and Julie Rogers were born in Chicago and met as teenagers. Ben knew that marriage was inevitable with this dark-haired beauty especially when he discovered that they both loved the same book, Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights. The irony is that Ben and Julie were lifelong romantic lovers while Heathcliff was obsessively determined to avenge the selfish deceits perpetrated by Cathy, even after her death. (...)

Ben had earned his first fortune in the optical business, and earned a second fortune in real estate. But Ben was not about money; he was in the business of philanthropy. (...)

Actually, the list of their philanthropic enterprises is too numerous to enumerate and that would still not define who these people were. In 1986, Ben presented an interesting illustration of his devotion to Julie. He had a billboard sign posted along Interstate 10 which read, “Cathy, my life, my love,” and it was signed, “Heathcliff”. Julie knew it was for her. It caused a minor sensation in the community but Ben was just testing the waters. He had bigger fish to fry!

In 1990, Ben donated land to be used as a park for the citizens of Beaumont. At Ben’s request, it was named “Wuthering Heights Park”, in honor of the book he and Julie loved most. The 20 acre wooded tract, located at 3650 Delaware, has one and a half miles of walking trails, benches, trash containers and, remarkably, heather to enhance its association with the purple Yorkshire moors. But officials had to make allowances for the difference in climate between Beaumont, Texas and the Yorkshire moors. The heather is a species grown in Mexico.

The park is decorated with two stone monuments and has perpetual landscaping maintenance. One of the monuments, in addition to the Wuthering Heights Park name, carries the inscription, “Dedicated with Love to Cathy from Heathcliff – Julie and Ben Rogers”. (...) (Paul Daniggelis)

A nice story indeed.

And now a protest. This half of BrontëBlog expresses his deep disagreement with this comment by Peter G. Davis in his article about the recent performances of Elliot Goldenthal's new opera, Grendel, in the Lincoln Center:

What a pity that the music gets in the way and finally defeats the project. Goldenthal may be a wonderful composer of atmospheric film scores (Frida, Batman Forever, and many more), but that hardly guarantees success at opera—Bernard Herrmann, after all, was a legendary master of movie music whose only opera, Wuthering Heights, is unmemorable.

We don't know about Goldenthal's Grendel (but remembering Juan Darien: A Carnival Mass these comments are hard to believe), but we do think that Herrmann's Wuthering Heights is quite memorable.

Categories: In_the_News, Wuthering_Heights, Weirdo, Opera, Music