It's Anne Brontë's 199th birthday today. We are only a year away from her bicentenary and our wish for the coming year is that she gets mentioned too whenever Charlotte and Emily are referred to as the Brontë sisters. Anne wrote two magnificent novels, one of them so modern that it's still sadly relevant today. Apart from a great writer and poet, she was hardworking, kind and generous, and her breakthrough is definitely due. Happy birthday, dear Anne!
The Brontë Parsonage Museum, although closed this month, hasn't forgotten the occasion on Twitter:
AnneBrontë.org celebrates it too.
The Sisters' Room recommends several 'must-read books to know her better' and
SoloLibri (Italy) shares some of her most memorable quotes.
We have a couple of obituaries of
composer John Joubert today. Conductor
Kenneth Woods writes about him and his
Jane Eyre opera.
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.
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.
And from
The Guardian:
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.
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