Born in Cape Town in 1927, John Joubert’s compositional career stretches over 70 years. His catalogue includes over 180 opus numbers, ranging from operas, major orchestral works, concertos for oboe, bassoon, violin, cello and piano, chamber and instrumental music, through to short carols and anthems and a series of major choral-orchestral pieces that place him at the forefront of composers of the generation after Britten and Tippett.One of the highlights of his vast opus is the opera Jane Eyre (Op 134) (1987-1997), with libretto by Kenneth Birkin. The opera was finally premiered (in a two-act concert performance) by the English Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Kenneth Woods at The Ruddock Performing Arts Centre in Birmingham in 2016 with considerable success:
The tears in our eyes at the end of this professional premiere of John Joubert’s opera Jane Eyre were quickened not only by the ravishing music of Jane and Rochester’s reconciliation, but also by the sheer emotional importance of the occasion. (Christopher Morley in The Birmingham Post)
In the presence of the composer, there was added poignancy in the standing ovation, and a feeling that something of real value had taken place: an important contribution to the repertoire, deserving of a place on the world opera stage. (Pamela Nash in Bachtrack)The performance was published on CD by Somm Recordings in 2017. You can listen to an interview with the author here.
The production has been choreographed by Northern Ballet’s artistic director, David Nixon. The adaption of Wuthering Heights will be staged at the West Yorkshire Playhouse from September 6 to 10 launching the theatre’s Brontë season. It is set to an original score by celebrated composer, Claude-Michel Schönberg, who is known for his West End and Broadway hits, including Les Misérables and Miss Saigon. Mr Nixon said: “Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights is not a novel that you read and put back on the shelf. “It is a story that absorbs you, creating powerful imagery that stays with you long after you turn the last page. “In my adaptation of this timeless tale, I have brought to life the key elements of the narrative, focusing on the intensity and devastation of the relationship between Cathy and Heathcliff.”The last episode of the new season of Channel 4's Great Canal Journeys (August 31th, 20.00h) will feature Haworth. On WhatsonTV:
On their final trip of the series, Timothy West and Prunella Scales are transported into their own pasts as they revisit the Yorkshire of their origins (Tim was born in Bradford, where Pru’s mother also lived).Another alert. In Birmingham, this October the premiere of John Joubert's Jane Eyre opera. Kensington, Chelsea & Westminster Today says:
They’re travelling along the 200-year-old Leeds and Liverpool Canal, which takes them through the Pennines and Yorkshire Dales.
Along the way the couple make a diversion to see the Brontë sisters’ home in the village of Haworth, have to hold on tight over the steepest lock staircase in Britain, meet Huddersfield-born poet Simon Armitage and explore the model village of Saltaire.
From its first publication in 1847, Charlotte Brontë’s masterpiece Jane Eyre has inspired innumerable theatrical interpretations for both stage and screen. To mark the 200th anniversary of Brontë’s birth in 2016, and in anticipation of British composer John Joubert’s 90th birthday in 2017, Kenneth Woods and the English Symphony Orchestra will premiere Joubert’s opera based on Brontë’s first and most popular novel. Jane Eyre will receive its world premiere in a concert performance on 25 October 2016, at the Ruddock Performing Arts Centre in Birmingham. The SOMM label will be on hand to capture a live recording which is scheduled to be released in March 2017 to coincide with Joubert’s birthday.Bustle asks authors Carla Neggers and Brenda Novak about the dyanmics of suspense and romance:
Joubert’s Jane Eyre has been over two decades in the making, yet the seeds were sown as far back as 1969, when the composer penned his song-cycle Six Poems Of Emily Brontë. He became drawn into the world of the Brontë sisters and, perhaps inevitably, Jane Eyre. The result is a major operatic work with “a score of translucent beauty – Joubert’s undoubted magnum opus,” comments conductor Kenneth Woods. For the premiere, soprano Katherine Manley will portray the title character and baritone David Stout – who previously collaborated with Woods on a SOMM recording of Mahler’s Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen – will take on the role of Rochester. They will be joined by a full supporting cast. The librettist is Kenneth Birkin, a post-graduate student of Joubert’s at Birmingham University whose Ph.D. focused on the libretti of Strauss’s post-Hofmannsthal operas. (...)
Kenneth Woods remarks, “In Jane Eyre, John has created something very special – an opera based on a literary masterpiece in which the music is not only worthy of the original text but seems absolutely of and from it. Joubert emerges in this score as both a great literary and great musical mind. It’s astonishing that a work which is the crowning achievement of a composer as revered and important as John Joubert has had to wait almost two decades for a premiere performance and recording. The English Symphony Orchestra and I couldn’t be more thrilled to be part of this historic project in partnership with Siva Oke, SOMM’s owner and the Executive and Recording Producer of Jane Eyre,” says Woods. “It was due to Siva’s enthusiasm for Joubert’s music that the idea of recording Jane Eyre was born.” SOMM Recordings had previously recorded 80th and 85th birthday tributes to John Joubert, the second of which consisted of first recordings of his three String Quartets with the Brodsky Quartet.
Siva Oke says, “I first heard John Joubert’s music 10 years ago when pianist Mark Bebbington played his Lyric Fantasy based on themes from the love scene between Jane and Rochester in Act 2 of Jane Eyre. I was stunned by the beauty and lyricism of the music. When we recorded it, as part of John’s 80th birthday celebrations, Christopher Morley described it in his liner notes as luminous and radiant and I couldn’t agree more.”
Carla Neggers: Brenda, I’d love to get your take on the challenges and opportunities of the stand-alone romantic suspense novel versus a romantic suspense series? While Liar's Key the sixth book in my Sharpe and Donovan series, I’ve also written stand-alone romantic suspense novels. Do you have a preference?Slate has an article on Anthony Trollope's characters:
Brenda Novak: Somehow I missed Mary Stewart, but I read Jane Eyre when I was nine or 10 and absolutely loved it. Iconic for its dark, gothic tone, it’s a great example of how a little mystery and danger can enhance a good romance. I was biting my nails at the mysterious sounds in the night, the fire and the shocking discovery of the hidden woman, which then, of course, further complicated the romantic conflict. I see it as a textbook example of what I was saying before—that the romance and the suspense need to enhance each other. I've loved stories that mix these elements ever since. (Cristina Arreola)
I don’t know whether university English departments still fill up with earnest young women who hope that they’ll learn something about life and love from Victorian novels, but mine did. Make no mistake, we had inklings of how misguided we were. My friends and I engaged in long conversations about how our favorite 19th-century authors portrayed girls like us: So many of George Eliot’s heroines practice a form of ecstatic renunciation while the ordinarily shrewd Jane Eyre seems oblivious to what Mr. Rochester’s past behavior suggests about him as a future husband. Scrutinizing the way classic fiction depicts women has become one of the well-worn grooves of scholarship, but I often think, looking back, that we’d have been better served by a bit more critical attention to how those books portray men. (Laura Miller)411Mania lists the best songs of the 70s. Number one is:
The was no question which track was going to top my list. Kate Bush is royalty in my neck of the woods (South London, in the UK). Local chain restaurants have her lyrics and quotes adorning their walls (that’s not a joke) and there has always been a certain pride in the fact that these working class suburbs – famed for their lack of culture and distinct identity – could deliver the most uniquely demented and willfully intellectual art-pop sensation of the 70s. So influential is Bush, that comparing female pop and rock stars to her has become a cliché that journalists simply cannot avoid. She inspired and continues to inspire an endless array of artists and – quite remarkable – despite the repetition of her themes, the imitation hasn’t blunted Bush or “Wuthering Heights”. (David Hayter)Women's Agenda talks about the financial situation of women:
Austen is writing at a time in history when a man really was a financial plan. In fact, marrying well was virtually the only financial hope a woman had. Austen herself – who never married – lived with her widowed mother and unmarried sister on the charity of her wealthiest brother. Her books didn’t really earn her much money until after she died, but at least they were an attempt at supporting herself. The Brontës were forced to hire themselves out as miserable, resentful governesses, until the success of Jane Eyre gave them some independence. (Jane Caro)Los Angeles Review of Books talks about the recent Dickens Universe conference:
Robyn Warhol, a specialist of 19th-century seriality, gave the closing lecture on her project of collating sections of Victorian novels in the order they were originally published. Like a lot of Victorian novels, it’s online and it’s compelling on even just a glancing level. If you squint hard enough, it looks like Wuthering Heights is giving birth to The Communist Manifesto!!!El Universal (Venezuela) interviews the actress Michelle de Andrade, Catalina in the upcoming Venezuelan adaptation of Wuthering Heights:
-¿De qué manera piensa preparar este nuevo personaje? ¿Cree que necesita alguna educación adicional?Disappore (Italy) talks about the Fictious Feasts series by Charles Roux:
-En este momento estoy participando en una miniserie de cinco capítulos inspirada en la novela Cumbres borrascosas, pero mucho más actualizada. Allí interpreto el personaje de Catalina, una mujer bastante fuerte que día a día me consume en todos los sentidos. Termino agotada. Así que al terminar, necesito unos días de relajación y meditación que me ayuden a deslastrarme de la intensidad de Catalina. Quizá me vaya a la playa para volver a ser yo y retomar la inspiración que me llevará a este nuevo rol. También me gustaría hacer un curso de actuación, porque lo cierto es que me están tomando en cuenta para personajes más adultos y necesito profundizar mi educación en la materia.
-Catalina es un personaje sumamente dramático...
-Es la protagonista del clásico universal escrito por Emily Brontë, que está adaptando VIP producciones. Es una mujer enérgica, caprichosa y egoísta. Todavía no sabemos qué canal transmitirá el proyecto. (Gabriel Guzmán Lacruz) (Translation)
Il pessimo sapore del pasticcio di carne mangiato in collegio dalla piccola Jane Eyre nell’ omonimo romanzo di Charlotte Brontë è impresso indelebilmente nella memoria della protagonista, che lo ricorda con immutato disgusto. Roux edulcora questi ricordi con una immagine gradevole e rassicurante. (Nunzia Clemente) (Translation)Dolci & Parole (Italy) interviews the author Chiara Giacobelli:
Dicci il titolo di un libro e il perchè lo consiglieresti a tutti.
“Cime tempestose” di Emily Brontë, perché si parte sempre dai classici e per ricordarci che deve esistere un prolungamento di noi stessi all’esterno, altrimenti per quale ragione saremmo al mondo? (Translation)
Last Sunday, August 13, among the events in the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, we have noticed that a quite extraordinary concert was performed. Extraordinary because it's really difficult to hear John Joubert's Six Poems of Emily Brontë, Op. 63 (composed in 1968) nowadays.
Some time ago we posted about the works of the British composer John Joubert related with the Brontë sisters. An opera based on Jane Eyre (1997) (Opus 134), a song cycle based on six poems by Emily Brontë (1968, Opus 63) and a Lyric Fantasy based on themes of the opera Jane Eyre (2000, Op. 144).A great 80th birthday present for the neglected British composer John Joubert: seven works, six first recordings. The Brodsky Quartet’s second string quartet is the highlight: a passionate reading just slightly dented by Joubert’s tendency to overwork motifs. Look out, too, for the Piano Trio, and the pianist Mark Bebbington’s lovely way with the Lyric Fantasy from the opera Jane Eyre. A two-disc set to explore with delight. (Geoff Brown)Next month, Toccata Classics will release John Joubert: Song Cycles that includes Six Poems by Emily Brontë. With Lesley-Jane Rogers (soprano), John Turner (recorder), John McCabe (piano).
Jane Eyre. The OperaMore information at the ESO website and on Seen and Heard International.
by John Joubert
An Opera in Two Acts
Space Ruddock Hall
King Edward's School & King Edward VI High School
Edgbaston Park Road, Edgbaston, Birmingham, B15 2UA
7:30 PM Tuesday, 25 October 2016
A concert performance by English Symphony Orchestra
conducted by Kenneth Woods
recorded live by SOMM Recordings
Please join us for a pre concert talk at 6.30pm
April Fredrick as Jane Eyre, soprano
David Stout as Rochester, baritone
with full supporting cast
Since its first publication in 1847, Charlotte Brontë’s fatalistic masterpiece Jane Eyre has inspired countless re-readings and retellings. Now, marking Brontë’s 200th anniversary and his own 90 th birthday, the revered British composer John Joubert will finally see the world premiere concert and recording of Jane Eyre, his long-awaited third opera. The unforgettable tale of an obsessive love threatened by an unutterable secret, the opera has been more than 20 years in the gestation. It is, says conductor Kenneth Woods, “Joubert’s undoubted magnum opus”.
With a single public showing as an amateur production some years ago, Joubert has since substantially revised it for this official world premiere, but the idea had taken root as far back as 1969. That’s when, while writing his song-cycle, Six Poems Of Emily Brontë, he was drawn into the world of the Brontë sisters and, inexorably, Jane Eyre. The result is a major operatic work, with a score of translucent beauty, of foreboding; suffused with a sense of the destiny that may hold terrors, may hold love – but may not be withheld.
SlipedDisk reveals great news. John Joubert's 1997 opera Jane Eyre (with libretto by Kenneth Birkin) will be premiered in Birmingham in October, albeit in a concert version. Even more, the performance will be recorded and it will be released next year:A Charlotte Brontë opera that occupied twenty years of composer John Joubert’s life until its completion in 1997 is to receive its world premiere on 25 October 2016, at the Ruddock Performing Arts Centre in Birmingham.More on Edition Peters and on the ESO blog.
Joubert will turn 90 next year. (...)
To mark the 200th annive Jane Eyre will receive its world premiere in a concert performance on 25 October 2016, at the Ruddock Performing Arts Centre in Birmingham. The SOMM label will be on hand to capture a live recording which is scheduled to be released in March 2017 to coincide with Joubert’s birthday.
rsary of Brontë’s birth in 2016, and in anticipation of British composer John Joubert’s 90th birthday in 2017, Kenneth Woods and the English Symphony Orchestra will premiere Joubert’s opera based on Brontë’s first and most popular novel.
Joubert’s Jane Eyre has been over two decades in the making, yet the seeds were sown as far back as 1969, when the composer penned his song-cycle Six Poems Of Emily Brontë. He became drawn into the world of the Brontë sisters and, perhaps inevitably, Jane Eyre. The result is a major operatic work with “a score of translucent beauty – Joubert’s undoubted magnum opus,” comments conductor Kenneth Woods. For the premiere, soprano Katherine Manley will portray the title character and baritone David Stout – who previously collaborated with Woods on a SOMM recording of Mahler’s Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen – will take on the role of Rochester. They will be joined by a full supporting cast. The librettist is Kenneth Birkin, a post-graduate student of Joubert’s at Birmingham University whose Ph.D. focused on the libretti of Strauss’s post-Hofmannsthal operas. (Norman Lebrecht)
CBBC's Horrible Histories Special Episode: Staggering Storytellers was aired yesterday, July 11. It included the Brontës (even Branwell) in a funny sketch.The episode wraps up with a few more trivia about Lord Alfred Tennyson, Charles Dickens, who apparently was the star of his era (semi-agoraphobic and fan-despising as it were), and the Brontë sisters, whose antagonist was Jane Austen in the publisher’s eyes. (Katerina Perdikaki on On the Box)Harrogate Informer tells us of yet another floral homage to Charlotte Brontë:
The fifty year anniversary of the Harrogate International Festivals and some significant literary landmarks are being celebrated in a special flower bed in the town’s Valley Gardens.Newsweek presents the Prime Minister-in-waiting and Leader of the Conservative Party, Theresa May with a Brontë reference:
Over eleven thousand plants have been used to create the flower bed, the centrepiece of which is a giant ‘50’ to mark the 50 years that Harrogate International Festivals have been bringing world class acts to the town.
The flower bed also depicts four open books, each featuring the initials of four literary giants who have special anniversaries this year: Charlotte Brontë (2016 is the 200th anniversary of her birth), Beatrix Potter (150 years), Roald Dahl (100 years) and William Shakespeare, who died 400 years ago.
May also presents as the serious-minded and dutiful daughter of a modest English clergyman. This is a strong myth in British society, with its Brontë undertones. And in terms of image it is worth pointing out that this is a much more powerful and intricate myth than being a clergyman’s son. (John Gaffney)The Guardian has an article about what we call solipsistic femininism and mentions Maggie Nelson's novel The Argonauts:
Her narrative is neither solipsistic nor a cold critique; yet it is both literary and feminist. “Reader, we married there,” she says a short way into the book, Jane Eyre’s words reconstituted to fit the comedy of rushing to marry in California before the midnight passing of Proposition 8. It is arrangements like these, frequent in Nelson’s work, that show the artistry in self-exposition, the role of curation in the task of mining one’s own life for feminist fodder. (Rafia Zakaria)Washington Post reviews the novel Miss Jane by Brad Watson:
Dr. Thompson gives her books to read — Brontë, Flaubert — and continues explaining Jane’s biology to her. These moments of pure honesty ground the book in the reality of medical conditions that, a hundred years ago, changed lives permanently. (Aditi Sriram)Washingtonian is concerned about how many sentences begin with an unnecessary 'and':
And reader, I married him.AND... blunder habemus (in an article correcting style, it's frankly a bit embarrassing).
*
You wouldn’t remember them in quite the same way if Abraham Lincoln, James Joyce, and Emily Brontë (!!) had actually put in the Ands at the start of those sentences (added by me). (Bill O'Sullivan)
"Shrunken Treasures: Literary Classics, Short, Sweet, and Silly," written and illustrated by Scott NashThe Tribune (India) quotes the author Vani saying:
Kiddos aren't quite ready for "The Odyssey," "Jane Eyre," or "Hamlet"? Enter "The Versizer," a new - and very scientific - invention that condenses those voluminous literary works into children's verse. Genius! Far from your typical CliffsNotes, these nine kid-friendly interpretations of the classics feature fun illustrations and lots of jokes.
Vani, whose debut novel The Recession Groom is a rom-com set in the period of global credit crisis, believes that age has no bearing on writing. She substantiates her point by throwing in some internationally well-known names, “Some of the greatest writers of all times such as, Emily Brontë, who wrote Wuthering Heights, penned their best works in their 20’s.”Her best and only work, we may add.
“Our honeymoon will shine our life long: its beams will only fade over your grave or mine.”Trendencias (in Spanish) explores things that can be learnt from the Brontës:
Although this quote from Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre is admittedly a bit morbid, we think she gets her point across quite well: Honeymoons are important. (Lucas Oakeley)
1.- Se puede comprender la intensidad de la naturaleza humana viviendo en un páramo solitario o en un pueblo perdido en el monte.Also on Trendencias, a recommendation of Jasper Fforde's The Eyre Affair.
Las tres, Anne, Charlotte y Emily fueron capaces de derribar las barreras del mundo en el que vivían y escribir historias extraordinarias, comprender una pasión que ellas mismas no habían experimentado y abrirse a un mundo totalmente diferente al suyo. No podemos menospreciar a las personas que llevan vidas mucho más sencillas porque eso no significa que su naturaleza no sea igual de curiosa, inquieta y compleja que la de las personas que tienen por costumbre viajar, relacionarse más, vivir en grandes urbes con acceso a muchos eventos culturales, etc.
2.- Para ser un gran escritor no hay que vivir una vida épica y llena de excéntricas experiencias.
Nada que ver con Ernest Hemingway o Jack London. Las tres hermanas Brontë llevaban una vida de lo más casera, encerradas en una pequeña casa repleta de trastos y en el campo. ¿Y cuál es el secreto para sin abandonar esa casa escribir Cumbres Borrascosas? Ser una gran observadora de la naturaleza humana, ser auténtica y fiel a sí misma. (Read more) (Rebeca Rus)
Essas mulheres abriram a porta para que grandes escritoras como Jane Austen, George Elliot e Emily Brontë pudessem escrever sob suas próprias assinaturas. (Kelly Cristine) (Translation)Filthy Casket Book Reviews and The Vince Review post about Jane Eyre; Eric Ruijssenaars continues exploring Villette and The Professor translations (now in Czechia and Slovakia) on the Brussels Brontë Blog.
'My soul is awakened, my spirit is soaring— Brontë Parsonage (@BronteParsonage) January 17, 2019
And carried aloft on the wings of the breeze;
For above and around me the wild wind is roaring,
Arousing to rapture the earth and the seas.'
Anne Brontë was born #OTD in 1820. pic.twitter.com/6gnZRPInGT
A few years ago, Siva Oke, founder of Somm Recordings, approached me with the idea of premiering and recording Joubert’s magnum opus, his opera Jane Eyre, a work begun in 1987 which had been languishing without a professional performance for years. Our goal was to make Jane Eyre the focal point of the celebrations of John’s ninetieth-birthday. Jane Eyre was to become the work through which I would get to know John and his music.And from The Guardian:
Whatever our expectations were for the scope of this project, nothing could really prepare us for the enormity of the task. In spite of the exceptional quality of the work, John’s advancing age and the obvious interdisciplinary appeal of a major new operatic setting of one of the most popular novels in the English language (during the Charlotte Brontë bicentennial, no less), raising the money needed to bring this huge work to life proved a truly Herculean task. In its original three-Act form, Jane Eyre is almost Wagnerian in scale. In order to make the premiere a more manageable task, John cheerfully and pragmatically adapted the work into a two-Act score, excising the wonderful entr’actes and cutting some scenes. If the original version has an epic quality, the two-Act revision has a directness and intensity not far from scores like Bartók’s Bluebeard’s Castle or Richard Strauss’s Salome. Throughout this whole process, John’s approach to his beloved score was always eminently practical. He managed a process of revision that many composers would resent in such a way that the result was a very different but equally magnificent opera, and he was able to re-work the cut orchestral music into a Third Symphony. [...]
When at last the premiere of Jane Eyre arrived on 25 October 2016 (review below), it was a blessed occasion. John was rewarded at the end of the concert with a standing ovation from both the audience and the orchestra, and both the premiere and the recording which was released a few months later have been greeted with universal praise. I am certain that in time, Jane Eyre will take its place in the repertoire alongside works like Britten’s Peter Grimes and Stravinsky’s Rake’s Progress as one of the greatest and most-beloved English-language operas. It is a remarkable work of music theatre, a sublime vehicle for singing and a profound and moving response to a literary masterpiece.
How long it takes Jane Eyre, and John’s other major works, to earn its rightful place in the repertoire remains an infuriatingly open question. In his review of the premiere, Richard Bratby wrote in The Spectator: “At the end of the performance the audience rose and, applauding, turned to the 89-year old Joubert. I was left with the unhappy thought that this one-off outing in a suburban school hall was in all probability the only time that the composer will get to hear his vital, warm-blooded creation performed live. We tut disapprovingly at the way Victorian Britain forced its composers on to a treadmill of oratorios. But in Joubert we’ve taken a born musical dramatist and pigeonholed him as a composer of Christmas carols. Barring a David Pountney or a James Conway throwing the resources of a national opera company behind it, the odds of Jane Eyre receiving the full professional staging it begs for are vanishingly small. And there’d still be the problem of attracting an audience that’s long since learned to run a mile from an unfamiliar name. This, reader, is why we can’t have nice things.”
In the end, in spite of monumental efforts by all those involved in the premiere and others to organise a full production of Jane Eyre while John was still with us, Bratby’s grim prognostication proved all too true. John never heard the work live again. [...]
While John’s music is grounded in tonality and deeply connected to tradition, it is music that overflows not only with mastery of technique, but with originality, passion and personality. John is one of the most accomplished and individual orchestrators I know. Jane Eyre, which has not a single special effect or extended technique in it, is overflowing with textures, sounds and timbral combinations I’ve never seen anywhere else, always at the service of the drama and the musical ideas. Scored for remarkably small forces, John manages to generate everything from huge symphonic sweep to a spikier, more modernist soundscape to the most intimate pianissimos. By having each of the four woodwind players double, he’s able to create a huge range of sounds. I’ve never heard anything quite like the duet for contrabassoon and bass clarinet John wrote near the end of Act One of Jane Eyre.
John’s writing for the human voice is challenging and exposed, but he understood it, whether in opera or choir, to perfection, and his ability to set texts is second to none. John’s response to Kenneth Birkin’s excellent libretto in Jane Eyre is so natural that one forgets, for once, how difficult it is to set English clearly and naturally in music. Listening to almost any other English-language opera after Jane Eyre will make one appreciate John’s understanding of both the sound and the meaning of the words.
And while John’s music is tonal, his harmonic language is distinctive and original. Although critical responses to Jane Eyre have often rightly suggested the influence of operatic masters like Janáček and Richard Strauss, I challenge anyone to find a chord in Jane Eyre that anyone else would have organised and orchestrated as John has. Of course there are evocations of past masters in John’s music. As a composer who takes part in the ongoing struggle to re-invent, renew and revitalise our precious tradition, he invokes the work of his forbears just as Strauss did Wagner or Brahms did Beethoven.
There were also eight operas, or nine counting the two distinct versions of his last, Jane Eyre. Composed in 1987-97 in three acts, it was recast in 2014-15, with much of the discarded music reworked as his Symphony No 3, completed in 2017. (Guy Rickards)More music, if of a totally different sort. Forbes features The Bookshop Band:
The Bookshop Band has also done special commissions, working with The Pompidou Centre in Paris on songs related to Beat Generation poets and writers, with the The National Portrait Gallery in London on songs inspired by the Brontë sisters, with literary festivals such as the Wigtown Book Festival in Scotland and The V&A Museum for Shakespeare’s 450th birthday, penning tunes inspired by his plays.The Washington Post reviews The War Journals, 1941-1945 by Ernst Junger.
Many of his lunchtime walks take Jünger to the city’s print dealers and antiquarian booksellers — “oases in a world of carnage.” He reads widely: Pliny’s letters and a glossary of medieval Latin, a biography of the Brontë sisters, the essays of Léon Bloy and Joseph Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness.” At bedtime he gradually makes his way through the Bible twice. (Michael Dirda)The Eternal Couch Potato posts about the 1949 Studio One production of Jane Eyre.
Some weeks ago we reported the release of a new CD with John Joubert's music. We said:Some time ago we posted about the works of the British composer John Joubert related with the Brontë sisters. An opera based on Jane Eyre (1997) (Opus 134), a song cycle based on six poems by Emily Brontë (1968, Opus 63) and a Lyric Fantasy based on themes of the opera Jane Eyre (2000, Op. 144). (...)The album appears this month and is reviewed on MusicWeb International:
Next month, Toccata Classics will release John Joubert: Song Cycles that includes Six Poems by Emily Brontë. With Lesley-Jane Rogers (soprano), John Turner (recorder), John McCabe (piano).
With Toccata CDs you are guaranteed something unusual, new to disc or challenging. Adventure is the key. To this the company couple good documentation, in this case provided by the composer. (...)The Six Bronte Songs are from the 1960s and again return to Joubert's accustomed landscapes of the mind; nature poetry is not his prime concern. This cycle describes an arc via desolation, bereavement, death to consolation. The steady symphonic pulse in the centre of Oracle is impressively done and the operatic luminosity of the final three lines of the last verse is memorable. After the desolation in Caged Bird comes the defiance of Immortality. However that last song sounds rather like a hoped for desperate consummation rather than a grand blaze of confidence. I wondered whether the climax had actually been achieved in Oracle. There is however no doubting the power of this last song which certainly has an air of high finality about it.
As expected, this majestically confident collection is matched by a booklet that includes the complete texts. (Rob Barnett)
EDIT:
CD Spotlight publishes another review:
Six Poems by Emily Brontë is an earlier work by Joubert, for soprano and piano. Her poems are much as one might expect, not the equal of her prose, but certainly good enough to inspire Joubert, especially in his subtly searing Oracle (though I personally suspect that, were I to ask any 'smiling child' what 'the past is to thee?' one would be extremely unlikely to get the answer, 'An Autumn evening soft and mild/With a wind that sighs mournfully'). Still, such cavils aside, the song Immortality seems to me exactly to express the soul of Emily Brontë in music: her longing for freedom and wildness, her precocious maturity, her inexpressibly dramatic yearning. (Alice McVeigh)
Categories: Emily Brontë, Music, Poetry
A couple of months ago, ASC records released the complete piano music of John Joubert:The Complete Solo Piano Music of John JoubertIncludes:
Duncan Honeybourne, pianist
February 22, 2019
ASC Records - Prima Facie
Duncan Honeybourne performs the complete piano music of John Joubert, the eminent composer who sadly passed away in January 2019. Joubert had written to the pianist Duncan Honeybourne to congratulate him on this new, comprehensive recording only days before his passing. The album therefore serves as a fitting tribute to his musical life.
10 Lyric Fantasy on themes from the opera Jane Eyre, Op. 144
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Arcola Theatre & Green Opera presentComposed by John JoubertLibretto by Kenneth BirkinGrimeborn Festival24 Ashwin St, London E8 3DLWednesday 6th August 2025, 7.30pmThursday 7th August 2025, 7.30pmFriday 8th August 2025, 7.30pmSaturday 9th August 2025, 7.30pmEleanor Burke – DirectorKenneth Woods – ConductorLaura Mekhail – Jane EyreHector Bloggs – Edward RochesterEmily Hodkinson – Mrs Fairfax/Mary RiversChris Murphy – Rev. Wood/JohnAnna Sideris – Sarah/Blanche Ingram/Diana RiversLawrence Thackeray – Richard Mason/Sir John RiversAlexander Semple – Mr Brocklehurst/Briggs“I am no bird; and no net ensnares me.”Arcola Theatre and Green Opera proudly present John Joubert’s Jane Eyre — his final opera, now fully staged for the first time.First heard in concert with the English Symphony Orchestra under Kenneth Woods, this bold adaptation of Charlotte Brontë’s novel follows one woman’s fight for freedom and fulfilment on her own terms. Facing adversity, injustice, and a shattering betrayal, Jane’s journey unfolds through a dynamic cast of young performers, directed by Eleanor Burke.As Green Opera’s second production of the season and fifth for the Grimeborn Opera Festival, Jane Eyre continues the company’s mission to combine dramatic vision with environmentally conscious practices.
This summer, John Joubert’s final opera is fully staged for the first time. Director Eleanor Burke tells us how memory, music, and sustainability converge in a radical reimagining of Brontë’s classic – and how a labour of love finally reaches the stage.For decades, John Joubert’s opera Jane Eyre sat in relative obscurity – completed over ten years in the 1980s and premiered in concert in 2016, it was a labour of love born not from commission but from deep personal passion. A South African-born British composer, Joubert was best known for his choral music, though his operatic output – of which Jane Eyre was the eighth – remains substantial for a post-war British composer. He died in 2019 at the age of 91 Now, for the first time, the opera comes to the stage in a fully realised production at the Arcola Theatre as part of this year’s Grimeborn Festival. Directed by Eleanor Burke for Green Opera, this long-awaited staging is as much about creative resurrection as it is about radical reinterpretation.‘The opera wasn’t written for a commission,’ says director Eleanor Burke. ‘It was just something John and Ken worked on over more than a decade, purely out of love for the book.’ Joubert and librettist Kenneth Birkin began developing Jane Eyre from 1987 to '97, corresponding by letter – over 700 of them are archived at the British Library – as they shaped the libretto and score. ‘It feels like a real labour of love,’ Burke adds. ‘That slow, careful process gives it a kind of sincerity you can really feel.’But this Jane Eyre is not your textbook period drama. Burke and her team have embraced the opera’s fragmentary structure – beginning as Jane leaves Lowood rather than charting her full life – and reimagined it as a memory play, where episodes resurface like flashes of a vivid, turbulent inner world. ‘It’s emotionally urgent,’ Burke explains. ‘We’re not trying to be comprehensive. We’re following Jane through the memories that made her.’ (...)The opera has been reorchestrated for a chamber ensemble (string quartet, harp, horn, bassoon, piano, and more) by Thomas Ang (who previously reorchestrated Bartok’s Bluebeard’s Castle for Green Opera’s 5-star 2022 production), making it both agile and immersive – ideal for Arcola’s Studio 1. Kenneth Woods, who conducted the opera’s concert premiere, returns to lead the performances, sharing the podium with current Royal Opera Jette Parker Artist Peggy Wu. (Jonathan Whiting)
“On opening the little door,” recounts Wuthering Heights’ Mr Lockwood, “two hairy monsters flew at my throat, bearing me down, and extinguishing the light; while a mingled guffaw from Heathcliff and Hareton put the copestone on my rage and humiliation.” Mockery abounds in Emily Brontë’s 1847 Gothic novel, with comparatively little wholesome laughter. Indeed, Brontë invites the reader to deride the hapless Lockwood; his farcical entry throws into relief the bleak atmosphere of the Heights. It’s a darkly humorous opening that accentuates the wickedness to come.Aspects of the upcoming film adaptation have been met with some derision, which, unlike Brontë, the director probably didn’t intend for. Whether the movie will be unintentionally comical remains to be seen. (Andrew Whitfield)
The event, on July 27, also invokes music legend Kate Bush, coinciding with the annual The Most Wuthering Heights Day Ever in celebration of the artist’s number one hit Wuthering Heights.Last year, Calder Wind Farm Ltd submitted a scoping document to Calderdale Council outlining proposals which, in the company’s revised form, would see 41 giant turbines sited at Walshaw Moor.Campaigners opposing the proposals are concerned about the impact the wind farm might have on peatland and the moorland habitat, including nesting birds, and its impact visually.The dancers – in flowing red dresses – will evoke the spirit of both Emily Brontë and Kate Bush, whose Wuthering Heights song topped the UK charts in 1978.They will be dancing on the moorland surrounding Top Withens, reputedly the inspiration for the setting of the classic novel. (John Greenwood)
In a fragmented age increasingly seduced by the cult of the self, "Wuthering Heights" challenges us to reclaim the difficult virtues that make real community possible.Literary anti-heroes can seem romantic: Holden Caulfield, Hamlet, Meursault, and, chief amongst these brooding men, Wuthering Heights’s Heathcliff. Heathcliff emerges from the pages like a dark elemental force—a creature as wild and ungovernable as the Yorkshire moors that shape and shelter him. Found as a nameless orphan and absorbed reluctantly into a fragile household, he grows into a figure of feral passion and relentless vengeance, unmoored from any communal obligation or moral restraint.Neither fully villain nor tragic hero, Heathcliff embodies a radical individualism so absolute that it corrodes every relationship and every patch of land he touches. His love, fierce and possessive, curdles into hatred; his longing for belonging twists into a campaign of generational revenge. In Heathcliff, we confront the terrifying specter of a soul severed from the common good—a man who forsakes reconciliation and stewardship for the consuming fire of his own wounded will. Through Heathcliff’s alienation, Wuthering Heights serves as a dark meditation on what happens when personal grievance overtakes the common good, echoing contemporary concerns about atomization and social fragmentation. (Read more) (Raleigh Adams)
You might think that a book club hosted by a bar wouldn’t talk much about the book, but you would be wrong.On a recent Wednesday, more than a dozen people settled in at Benny Thunders, 605 Columbia St., in the Heights to delve into the club’s summer classic read - and toxic love study - Wuthering Heights. Over beer and wine from the self-pour taproom, the group hashed out the same questions you might have had if you were ever assigned it in high school English.Was Catherine truly in love with Heathcliff, or was she a psychopath? Was Heathcliff a hero, or the devil? Why is every character in this novel so messed up? (Betsy Denson)
J’ai prévu de lire Les Hauts de Hurlevent, qui s’empoussière chez moi depuis des décennies, dans une édition de poche à la couverture très Dark Romance. C’est peut-être cette illustration orageuse qui m’a tenue éloignée du roman d’Emily Brontë. À moins que je n’aie eu le sentiment de l’avoir lu sans l’avoir lu. Les Hauts de Hurlevent, tout le monde sait à peu près de quoi il retourne. Catherine, Heathcliff, la lande, la passion, la vengeance… Et puis je suis tombée sur ce passage, illustre semble-t-il, mais qui avait échappé à mes radars jusqu’ici : ‘Nelly, je suis Heathcliff ! Il est toujours, toujours dans mon esprit ; non comme un plaisir, pas plus que je ne suis toujours un plaisir pour moi-même, mais comme mon propre être. Ainsi, ne parlez plus de notre séparation ; elle est impossible…’ Ma décision est prise : je vais enfin lire Les Hauts de Hurlevent. (Translation) (Sylvie Tanette)
Which area of England, known for its moors, was the family home of Charlotte, Emily, Anne and Branwell Brontë? (J. D. Biersdorfer)
The lyrics in Violet have attracted much scrutiny and controversy over the years.Love stated that the song had been partially influenced by poems by Alexander Pope, specifically The Dunciad, and Emily Brontë. (Amit Sharma)
Pen names have a long history. Now Liadan Ní Chuinn is shunning publicity in an industry that demands ever more exposure. (...)Writing anonymously or under a pseudonym is a long-established custom in publishing. Jane Austen’s novels were attributed to “a Lady”, Mary Ann Evans went by George Eliot, and the Brontë sisters were Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell. (Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett)
Other, less protest-oriented, MWHDE events; The Hunts Post, KentLive, The Isle of Thanet News...
The piano music of John Joubert
23rd April, 2017, 3.00pm
Lion Ballroom, 17 Broad Street, Leominster, HR6 8DB
John Joubert is 90 this year, and best known for his carol, Torches.
Duncan Honeybourne will play the Dance Suite, the 3rd Sonata, dedicated to Duncan, and the Lyric Fantasy, based on his opera, Jane Eyre.
John Joubert’s compositional career now stretches over 70 years. His catalogue includes over 180 opus numbers, ranging from operas, major orchestral works, concertos for oboe, bassoon, violin, cello and piano, chamber and instrumental music, through to short carols and anthems and a series of major choral-orchestral pieces that place him at the forefront of composers of the generation after Britten and Tippett.
Duncan Honeybourne enjoys a colourful and unique career as solo pianist, chamber musician, educator and artistic director.
He has appeared at many major concert halls and at leading festivals, and has been a frequent broadcaster at home and abroad.
One of his generation's leading exponents of 20th century English piano music, several celebrated contemporary composers have also dedicated major new works to him.
An extraordinary concert will take place next September 17 at Elizabeth Gaskell's House in Manchester:Saturday, September 17, 2016 - 19:00Concert: Love, Loss and Longing
As part of our Brontë200 season, join us for a programme exploring love, loss and longing in the life and work of Charlotte and Emily Brontë, through music and the spoken word.
The centrepiece of the concert will be the world premiere of Robin Walker’s Letter to Brussels, a setting of Charlotte Brontë’s passionate letters to Constantin Heger, her tutor in Brussels, performed by soprano Lesley-Jane Rogers.
Emily Brontë's poetry will complement Charlotte's texts, in anticipation of her own bicentenary in 2018, and we will hear work by contemporary poet Edwin Stockdale. This is also a rare opportunity to hear the song cycle of six Emily Brontë poems by John Joubert, and the premiere of Robin Walker’s song setting of her poem Self-Interrogation.
The performance will take place in Elizabeth Gaskell’s Drawing Room, where Charlotte visited her dear friend (and biographer) on several occasions.
Featuring Lesley-Jane Rogers, Soprano
Janet Simpson, Piano
Suzanne Casey, violin
Philip Watts and Edwin Stockdale, Readings
Letter to Brussels for soprano and piano by Robin WalkerSix Poems of Emily Brontë for soprano and piano by John JoubertSelf-Interrogation for soprano, violin and piano by Robin WalkerPoems by Edwin StockdaleReadings of Charlotte and Emily Brontë's poetry
Charlotte Brontë: contemporary visions of her love and troubled genius expressed through the power of music and the spoken wordManchester's exciting Bicentenary contribution will centre on Elizabeth Gaskell's House. This unique concert experience is of both national and regional significance: commemorating the genius of the author's work through contemporary re-interpretation in music and poetry and featuring two world premieres, it brings to light not only the power of her genius but also the condition of suppression in the lives of Victorian women, including that of Emily Brontë, whose work is also celebrated in the theme of unattainable love.Robin Walker has written a commemorative song setting entitled “Letter to Brussels” based on the letters of Charlotte's unrequited love for Constantin Heger, and this will be the centrepiece, to be featured alongside settings of Emily Brontë by living composer John Joubert and by a further premiere by Robin Walker – also of Emily's poetry – and complemented by the Brontë-inspired poetry of young North West poet Edwin Stockdale and by the poet Philip Watts. The musicians, all highly experienced proponents of contemporary music, are the soprano Lesley-Jane Rogers, pianist Janet Simpson and violinist Suzanne Casey.The composer Robin Walker is recognised as a giant of British contemporary music, and along with John Joubert (the other living composer on the programme), has a particular affinity with the work of both Brontë sisters. Like them, Walker's own compositional processes are founded in an instinctual response to both discipline and passion, and it is the meeting of these elements which forms the equilibrium in his new song ”Letter to Brussels” for soprano and piano. Whereas Elizabeth Gaskell, as a Victorian biographer, was constrained to avoid the more compromising circumstances in the life of her subject (she omitted reference to the tyranny of religious and social prejudice which dogged the Brontë women, as well as the perceived 'shame' of Charlotte's rejected attempts to win romantic affection), Walker, in his contemporary role, has sought to reveal that which Charlotte was so desperate to expostulate. By exposing the conflict within her inner life - her rage at unrequited love for an unattainable man and also her desperate need to escape the stifling Protestantism and patriarchy of her father - the composition will bring a new resonance to the 'missing' elements from the biography, yet in the very place in which it was written. The poignancy of this association will be certain to heighten audience awareness of a part of her creative genius and life experience which can most powerfully be expressed through the re-interpretation of her words through music of the highest calibre.Walker's second premiere, “Self-Interrogation”, for soprano, violin and piano, similarly explores the common themes of despair and lost love and is the one remaining unperformed song in a series of Emily Brontë settings which lead you from hope-of-love to despair-and-death: the condition of Emily's life in a nutshell, also the ideal companion piece to illustrate the absolute contemporary relevance of the Brontë sisters' work to us today through a modern voice, and in anticipation of the upcoming Brontë 200 commemorations of Emily's birth.
John Joubert’s opera Jane Eyre has had an altogether unhappier time of it — so far, anyway. Completed in 1997, it has only now been heard in full, in a concert performance by the English Symphony Orchestra under Kenneth Woods that doubled as a recording session. Joubert and his librettist Kenneth Birkin have taken the Eugene Onegin approach, extracting six key scenes from a well-loved novel and going straight for their emotional heart. Some critics have grumbled about a lack of narrative continuity; I couldn’t feel it myself, and Joubert’s luminous, ardently lyrical score (think Britten without his splinter of ice) is disarmingly direct. David Stout made a suitably brusque and Byronic Rochester, but it was April Fredrick as Jane who really carried the whole thing. Whether flashing with defiance or soaring rapturously and with radiant tone over a surging orchestra, she looked — and sounded — as if she needed to be on stage. Jane Eyre itself certainly does.Daily Mail reports that film editor Anne V. Coates will be receiving an honorary Oscar. Apparently,
At the end of the performance the audience rose and, applauding, turned to the 89-year old Joubert. I was left with the unhappy thought that this one-off outing in a suburban school hall was in all probability the only time that the composer will get to hear his vital, warm-blooded creation performed live. We tut disapprovingly at the way Victorian Britain forced its composers on to a treadmill of oratorios. But in Joubert we’ve taken a born musical dramatist and pigeonholed him as a composer of Christmas carols. Barring a David Pountney or a James Conway throwing the resources of a national opera company behind it, the odds of Jane Eyre receiving the full professional staging it begs for are vanishingly small. And there’d still be the problem of attracting an audience that’s long since learned to run a mile from an unfamiliar name. This, reader, is why we can’t have nice things. (Richard Bratby)
Coates first became dazzled by the world of film while a student at boarding school. Her class was reading "Wuthering Heights" (which she found "extremely boring") when they went on a field trip to see the movie version.Fact Magazine is rather confused about the new release by Dean Blunt and Yung Lean.
"Well, apart for falling madly for Laurence Olivier, it just so excited me to see what you could do with pictures, with telling a story in pictures," she said.
Dean Blunt and Yung Lean have released a video for a new project titled ‘Fronto Kings’. The eight-and-a-half minute clip features both artists walking through late night Stockholm, entering apartment buildings and an arcade filled with pinball machines.
In typically oblique Blunt fashion, it’s unclear whether ‘Fronto Kings’ is the name of a project, an album or a song. The video itself actually appears to contain multiple tracks and the description alludes to something called ‘Wuthering Heights’ a possible reference to the Kate Bush track Blunt has sampled in the past along with many others.
In 1978 Kate Bush famously took Wuthering Heights to the top of the charts. Now, the Brontës themselves have become the subject of a musical.And more Brontë-related things on stage as Planet Hugill features John Joubert's Jane Eyre opera and its Jane Eyre soprano April Fredrick.
Wasted is a tale of sex, drugs and early death, told in the musical style of rock icons such as Queen and Rage Against the Machine.
The BBC's entertainment correspondent Colin Paterson went along to final rehearsals at the West Yorkshire Playhouse.
The South-African born composer John Joubert (based in the UK since the late 1940s) will celebrate his 90th birthday in 2017, and in celebration his opera Jane Eyre is being recorded on the SOMM label. The opera is being given in concert on 25 October 2017 (the work's world premiere) with Kenneth Woods conducting the English Symphony Orchestra at the Ruddock Performing Arts Centre, King Edward's Schools, Birmingham B15 2UA, and the performance is being recorded by SOMM. The performers include April Fredrick as Jane, David Stout as Rochester, Clare McCaldin as Mrs Fairfax and Mark Milhofer as Rev. St John Rivers. I caught up with soprano April Fredrick to find out more about the opera. [...]Birmingham Post has an article on it as well.
April had never sung any of Joubert's music before and as well as appreciating getting to know his music, she finds he writes well for the voice, and he aptly captures Jane's combination of a passionate nature with strong self control.
She has warm words too for Birkin's libretto, with its combination of carefulness and lushness. The compression necessary to turn the novel into an opera has been done with imagination. The first scene is an imagined confrontation between Jane and Mr Brocklehurst, as she is about to leave Lowood, which telescopes the first ten chapters of the book. This technique is used in other scenes, to put some of the back story into monologues. The libretto uses a lot of text verbatim, and the passages that are not feel a close version of the original.
Jane herself is a very big role, on stage for a lot of the time, and singing a great deal. In style, April feels that the dramatically well realised opera recalls Britten in the psychologically acute way Joubert writes, and for April you forget that singing is not the normal way of communications. Even in the most lyrical moments, Joubert adds something to the harmonic mix which keeps the music from being perfectly consonant all the time.
Joubert's opera is in three acts, but the performance on October 25 will be cut, re-shaping the work into two acts so that it fits onto two CDs. April does not feel that the essentials of the opera are lost,
It is very much a stage work, not a concert piece, and though the performance on 25 October is being given in concert April feels that it really deserves to be on the stage. The performance and subsequent recording will thus not only celebrate Joubert's 90th birthday, but hopefully will stimulate interest in the opera. April feels that it deserves to be seen and having got to know the work, she is amazed that it has never been done before. (Robert Hugill)
What was it that attracted John to Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre?The Christian Century recalls an 'experiment' in which Jane Eyre was read as a sacred text.
“I thought it was a great romantic novel, and had operatic potential. It’s a great love story, and I thought one should be able still to write about love - after all, it’s the basic emotion for most people, everybody!”
The ending of the opera is magical, but isn’t there a question-mark at the end, in the layout of the concluding chord?
“Oddly enough, I was thinking about that the other day, and yes, I think there is. The remarkable thing is that at the beginning of the novel Rochester isn’t a very nice person, a bit of a cad, really. He treats Jane very badly, but at the same time is very attracted by her.
“She, on the other hand, she is a very early feminist, she wants to find work and be accepted. Though there are big differences between each other, they nevertheless fall in love. And the question mark at the end is, I think, it’s not very much emphasised, but that it’s just suggested that this is not the end of the story, that she’s taking on something really big.
“Rochester is now a crippled man, and a blind man, and she still is determined, and they do get together, despite his moral objections to her taking him on as a semi-invalid. There’s a little bit of tension, there.”
The idea for Jane Eyre began in the early 1980s, when John took early retirement from the University of Birmingham. “But I did have commissions to get on with, so I had to squeeze time in between, working on Jane Eyre, so I wrote it over a very long period, alternating between commissions as they came in.”
When this forthcoming concert-performance was mooted, John went back to his score of Jane Eyre, and realised that some of the material in the scenes, as well as orchestral interludes between the scenes, was superfluous to the action. He decided to make one event central to each scene, and actually cut 45 minutes’ worth of music.
“You can take your time writing a novel, but you can’t take your time writing an opera!”
He modestly adds that the discarded orchestral interludes have now formed the basis of a new work, his Third Symphony. “I call it Third Symphony on themes from the opera Jane Eyre.
“There was a time that I thought I’d never live to see the opera performed, and so I composed a piano Fantasy upon Themes from Jane Eyre, and I think material from the opera has appeared subconsciously in other works.
“The subconscious is very important in the creative process, and I don’t really know how I do it, or why I do it. All I know is, I can only write what I do write, what I can write.” (Christopher Morley)
A few years ago I wrote here about my student Vanessa Zoltan and her experiment with reading Jane Eyre as if it were a sacred text. She read and reread each chapter, prayed its prayers, wrestled with its difficulties. She often felt transformed by her reading, for once she began to treat Jane Eyre as sacred, she found herself approaching other parts of her life—relationships, conversations, encounters with strangers—as if they were also sacred.Erm... Jane Eyre is actually widely read.
There were times when she felt betrayed by the novel, as when the full horror of the imprisonment and death of the West Indian “madwoman in the attic,” Bertha Rochester, impressed itself on her through repeated reading. Loving Jane as she did, Vanessa was surprised to find the sacred heart of the novel in Bertha, a character who upended Vanessa’s expectations about her project, a character who made her feel not only challenged, but also read and interpreted. A sacred text, Vanessa learned, is not a perfect text, free from contradictions and outrages. A sacred text is a generative text, one that keeps reading and changing us.
Sacred texts also become sacred in community, and so Vanessa gathered a small group of Jane Eyre lovers and invited them into her practice, teaching them what she had learned. Fellow M.Div. student Casper ter Kuile joined in. Wouldn’t it be fun, he teased, to try this with a book that people actually read? (Stephanie Paulsell)
“She seemed such a poor ghost, I thought I'd like to write her a life”, Rhys explained of her feelings for the first Mrs Rochester. It sounds modest enough but half a century on, the book is enshrined in campuses around the world and beloved by readers of all stripes. Something else has become clear, too: the novel has forever changed the way we read Jane Eyre. As author Danielle McLaughlin recently put it, writing for The Paris Review: “The novel didn’t just take inspiration from Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, it illuminated and confronted it, challenged the narrative”. Or, to quote novelist Michele Roberts, “Rhys took one of the works of genius of the 19th Century and turned it inside-out to create one of the works of genius of the 20th Century”. (Hephzibah Anderson) (Read more)KPCC has a an original cast member and an original fan talk Dark Shadows which is 50 this year, just like Wide Sargasso Sea.
Both women agree: It wasn't a traditional soap opera about who is sleeping with who; nor was it a scary vampire story. It was an old fashioned Gothic romance, often based on classics of literature, like Jane Eyre. "Of all of the incarnations of these vampire stories, what so many people miss, and what (creator) Dan Curtis totally got, is that so much of this hinges on romance. It's not the gore and the horror. That's not the story. The central theme of Dark Shadows is that love triangle and unrequited love." (John Rabe)The Daily Dot reviews DC Comic's Deadman:
The dark, painted interiors of the mansion—and, strangely enough, the lettering style—are reminiscent of the late '80s heyday of Vertigo's horror like Sandman and Hellblazer, while the heroine's internal monologue is clearly inspired by vintage romance comics. And it all comes together in a setting that originated with books like Jane Eyre and Rebecca, now familiar thanks to decades of haunted house movies. (Gavia Baker-Whitelaw)Evening Standard reviews Alan Bennett's Keep on Keeping On, which includes some of his diaries.
Then again, among his many affectionate and grateful remarks about his partner Rupert, especially those recording their many visits to churches and country houses, provisioned with their own sandwiches, there’s this corker: “31 August. R. having spent most of the evening (and yesterday’s) watching Wuthering Heights turns to me at the finish and says: ‘You’re rather like Heathcliff.’ Me (gratified): ‘Really?’ R: ‘Yeah. Difficult, Northern and a c**t.’” (David Sexton)Manila Bulletin interviews writer Anna Todd:
Growing up, what kinds of books did you read? Who is your favorite author? My favorite author is Cassandra Clare, by a million times! But I didn’t read her until I was about 21, maybe. Before that, I read The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien, it’s a war story. I didn’t know why I loved it so much. I love classics like Pride and Prejudice, Wuthering Heights, and I read things like The Babysitter’s Club, I loved all those books but it was mostly like tame things until I found Fifty Shades of Grey, and then I was like, “Oh okay, there’s a whole other world of books I didn’t know existed.” (Angelo G. Garcia)The Telegraph has picked up on the Twitter hashtag #TrumpBookReport. This tweet telling Wuthering Heights as Mr Trump would is hilarious:
The Guardian features the sculptures made by David Medalla:Those poor heights. They were wuthering. Wuthering so bad. Bigly wuthering. I'll make them great again. #TrumpBookReport @AntonioFrench— Callie (@calliembush) October 20, 2016
In the middle of a further gallery, a tangle of golden wire – suspended on precarious lengths of bamboo and powered by a motor atop the trunk of a silver birch – slowly rotates on a bed of sand, leaving combed furrows that are perpetually drawn and erased. Surrounding this folly, first made in 1963, hang stretched hammocks of thin, coloured fabric, appended with reels of cotton. The audience can use these to stitch drawings and designs on to the lengths of material.Kate Bush's Wuthering Heights is one of Electric Literature's '13 Literary Songs for the Halloween Season'.
More lengths of fabric – with stories printed, sewn and painted on to them – line the walls. Here is Emily Brontë, there is an invented myth of a virgin-eating crocodile. Delicate, touching and wan, Medalla’s art is as hard to grasp as the soapsuds climbing and falling next door, where a long poem called The Bubble Machine is also pinned to the wall. The poem itself is a delightful, painful spume of reminiscence. (Adrian Searle)
Awesome creepy weirdo Kate Bush supposedly wrote “Wuthering Heights” in one night under a full moon when she was just 18, having devised the idea for it years previous when she caught the last 10 minutes of a BBC adaptation of Emily Bronte’s gothic novel of class warfare, mental decay and psychosexual obsession. (Bush shares a birthday with Emily.) Little could Bush have guessed at the time, her song would go on to become the first chart-topper by a female recording artist in the UK, and would inspire other awesome creepy weirdos such as David Bowie as Ziggy Stardust and St. Vincent, who frequently cites “Wuthering Heights” as her go-to karaoke jam, to get on with their bad selves in the years to come. Needless to say, there’s more than a little of Bronte’s novel in the song itself, which focuses its allusive energies on Catherine Earnshaw’s ghost and its recapitulant efforts to get at Heathcliff, her erstwhile lover, through his window casement. In fact, Bush’s song unfurls from Catherine’s spectral POV: “Ooh, it gets dark! It gets lonely,/ On the other side from you./ I pine a lot. I find the lot/ Falls through without you./ I’m coming back, love./ Cruel Heathcliff, my one dream,/ My only master.” Bush’s eerie vocal stylings, like some falsetto ghost priestess luring you to your doom, are a fitting conductor for Catherine’s tale. Ditto the cascading piano, Tangerine Dreamy guitar solo and intermittent strings that sherpa her voice as it climbs towards new heights, all the while invoking Catherine, the love that can never be Heathcliff’s and hers: “Heathcliff, it’s me — Cathy./ Come home. I’m so cold!/ Let me in-a-your window.” (Adrian Van Young)It's been a while since our last Brontë analogy in a football article. This one is courtesy of The Guardian.
And then, just as Rafa Benítez seemed to have broken the spell, just as he had ended the dependence on the old guard, Mourinho returned. It was like Heathcliff taking control of Wuthering Heights once again. There was one glorious high and then a second, crushing end to the affair. (Jonathan Wilson)Reading with Jade wonders whether to read Wuthering Heights.
Unless explicitly said
