Author Archive: Peter Jakobsen
Don Quixote
"I shall be the more highly esteemed..." (poster by Georges Rochegrosse, 1910, for the opera by Massenet)
(Miguel De Cervantes) (1605 -15) The man of La Mancha is somewhat akin to Walter Mitty, braver and with dementia. A proud and hapless dreamer, he is perhaps rather the inverse of Mitty (a modest man who dreamed of himself as doing great feats) in doing silly things and imagining them as great. Not just silly, mind – proud and uncanny – some of his acts verge on the psychotic. Idealised as the first ‘modern’ novel, arguably post-modern, reading it today, you start to feel as mad as the faux knight after working through the artless courtly romances of his time. A minor noble…
Continue Reading →The Marriage of Figaro
(State Opera SA, 2008) Mozart takes an imperial opera buffa and outdoes Rossini, no mean feat. As directed by Neil Armfield, the sense of the composer’s wickedness is retained, with slight sets that actually add rather than detract. As the triumphant underlings, Figaro and Susanna, David Thelander and Teresa La Rocca make a lovely couple and were in fine form. Based on the subversive book by Beaumarchais, Mozart manages (apparently without effort) to give his frantic entrances and exits a hard edge. A great piece, worth seeing anytime – here done very well indeed.
Continue Reading →Incitement
Caesar stabbed in the forum & elsewhere, painted by Vincenzo Camuccini (@ Moderna)
Julius Caesar (1601) (Dir. Joseph L. Mankiewicz, 1953) A good film of a great play, scribbled when Shakespeare was limbering up and entering his white hot phase. The story is mainly of Brutus, nicely and very glumly played by James Mason as the ‘reluctant’ conspirator. All of the key players are good, although one might say Louis Calhern plays Caesar much like he was as the big spy boss in Notorious (that playing strangely fits the minor but key part in the play but is much too vigorous for a 66 year old prone to fainting spells). Suetonius called Caesar “deified” and suggested that…
Continue Reading →Mad King Ludwig
The Moon King
June 13, 1886: what happened? Ludwig II King of Bavaria, son of Crown Prince Maximilian and grandson of Ludwig I, died mysteriously that summer day in Lake Starnberg, Bavaria. If he was mad, he was our kind of mad. But he was also a threat, and this is why his ‘death by drowning’ has serious questions hanging over it – he was found floating, with his asylum doctor (also dead) near the shore, in shallow water, no water in the lungs, and he was a strong swimmer. As accidental drownings go, it has as much cogency as the water commissioner’s in…
Continue Reading →Half-priced sex
Up for it...Laura de Sade by Stefano Bolognini
Music being the food of love, where to get it cheaply? Some suggestions for starving pagans on this Eastertide: Bluesfest, just north of Byron Bay, can be done inexpensively, but TVC does not recommend it! Classic FM – yet another argument for the national broadcaster. Seriously though – how expensive is it, such that the ‘savage cuts’ by government threatens its existence? With all due respect to the superb pre and post prandial duo of Lawrence and Lester, they’re not paid as much as Leonardo Di Caprio! With a staffer to select the material and a taxpayer funded studio, plus the strongest transmitters…
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