Tuesday, August 09, 2016
Benjamin Britten Salvages Guy de Maupassant from Jingoism
ALBERT (RED) HERRING
Jacques COULARDEAU
BENJAMIN BRITTEN – ERIC CROZIER – ALBERT
HERRING – COMIC OPERA or OPERA BUFFA– 1947
This opera is inspired – adapted they say –
from a short story by Guy de Maupassant, “Madame Husson’s Rosier,” and do not
make the simple mistake to believe this Madame Husson is a Madame. She is an
old spinster or maybe old widow, rich enough to believe she can change the
world by buying the soul of a young virginal man to make him her virtuous
mascot for the whole village or city. She is enslaved to the local Catholic priest,
not physically of course not, not emotionally of course not, not sensually
either of course not. But she is kneeling in front of Jesus and God, she is in
full mesmerism when the priest speaks, and yet Maupassant cannot escape his
anti-catholic blockage and he turns that virtue, that cultish adoration of
virtue for all into ridicule and the satire, the caustic debunking of this fundamentalist Catholic
hatred of life and pleasure is as hot as hell and burning bright in what he
considers the night of religious faith if not dependence, the opium of the
people, as you know. We are in 1887, the famous Third Republic, the Republic of
the Jules (and there are many of them: Jules Favre, Jules Grévy, Jules Simon and
Jules Ferry, the Three Musketeers who were four of course), a republic that was
anti-religious first of all, and becoming more and more urban minded if not
Paris-centered, considering the provinces as some underdeveloped Purgatory if
not Hell, because these anti-religious politicians kept the concepts of Heaven,
Purgatory and Hell, just as if they were natural continents on the planet Earth.
Luckily Benjamin Britten and Eric Crozier got rid of this
impossible extreme war against anything divine just as well as Maupassant’s
hatred of anything English seen as the main enemy, the only enemy, the empire
of Satan and all his devils and witches along with Lucifer, Mephistopheles and
many others. Listen to that jingoist brave and warmongering anti-British absurdity
of a character for sure but reflecting the atmosphere of Maupassant’s time and
the phenomenal fight between the British and the French colonial empires.
Maupassant was a real jingo indeed (http://wordhistories.com/2013/06/15/jingoism-chauvinism/).
"The spirit of provincialism, my friend, is
nothing but natural patriotism," he said. "I love my house, my town
and my province because I discover in them the customs of my own village; but
if I love my country, if I become angry when a neighbor sets foot in it, it is
because I feel that my home is in danger, because the frontier that I do not
know is the high road to my province. For instance, I am a Norman, a true
Norman; well, in spite of my hatred of the German and my desire for revenge, I
do not detest them, I do not hate them by instinct as I hate the English, the
real, hereditary natural enemy of the Normans; for the English traversed this
soil inhabited by my ancestors, plundered and ravaged it twenty times, and my
aversion to this perfidious people was transmitted to me at birth by my father.
See, here is the statue of the general." . . .
“I also learned that Clothaire II had given the patrimony of
Gisors to his cousin, Saint Romain, bishop of Rouen; that Gisors ceased to be
the capital of the whole of Vexin after the treaty of Saint-Clair-sur-Epte;
that the town is the chief strategic centre of all that portion of France, and
that in consequence of this advantage she was taken and retaken over and over
again. At the command of William the Red, the eminent engineer, Robert de
Bellesme, constructed there a powerful fortress that was attacked later by
Louis le Gros, then by the Norman barons, was defended by Robert de Candos, was
finally ceded to Louis le Gros by Geoffry Plantagenet, was retaken by the
English in consequence of the treachery of the Knights-Templars, was contested
by Philippe-Augustus and Richard the Lionhearted, was set on fire by Edward III
of England, who could not take the castle, was again taken by the English in
1419, restored later to Charles VIII by Richard de Marbury, was taken by the
Duke of Calabria occupied by the League, inhabited by Henry IV, etc., etc.
"What beggars, those English! And what sots, my
boy; they are all 'Rosiers,' those hypocrites!" (http://www.online-literature.com/maupassant/242/)
So, as you can see the French, and Guy de Maupassant first of all,
voted for Brexit a long time before the English did. Britten and Crozier
expurgated that mud out of the story and transplanted the plot to England in a city named Loxford, some pseudo-mythical
irban neighborhood of the vast London area that
could be London per se and Oxford ,
London the real capital and Oxford
the intellectual capital, both of England
It is interesting to also quote some background on ”jingoism,” the
reference Britten and Crozier rejects in their verson of this chauvinistic
story by Maupassant. I borrow this information from word histories facts,
opinions & creation (http://wordhistories.com/2013/06/15/jingoism-chauvinism/):
“The
English word jingo and
the French word chauvin both apply to that
ultra-patriotic section of the population which, in war-time, attends to the
shouting.
Jingo first appeared in
conjurors’ jargon of the 17th century.
It
was used in the oath by Jingo, sometimes by
the living Jingo.
Peter
Motteux (1663-1718), who translated François
Rabelais, used by jingo for par Dieu and sacré Dieu in Pantagruel:
By
jingo! quoth Panurge, the man talks somewhat like.
Par Dieu, dist Panurge, je l’en croy. (chapter
56)
And
if they were painted in other parts of your house, by jingo, you would
presently conskite yourself wherever you saw them.
Si painctes estoient en aultre lieu de vostre
maison, en vostre chambre, en vostre salle, en vostre chapelle, en vos
gualleries ou ailleurs, sacre Dieu ! vous chiriez par tout sus l’instant que
les auriez veues. (chapter 67)
Jingo is perhaps a form, introduced by gypsies or soldiers, of the Basque Jinkoa, Jainkoa, Jeinkoa,
contracted forms of Jaungoicoa, Jangoikoa,
meaning God, literally the Lord of the high.
It
is also said that the word Jingo was picked up from Basque
sailors, who were employed as harpooners on the early
English and Dutch whaling voyages to the Arctic .
(The
present specialized sense of the word harpoon itself might have been given by those
Basques.)
In
this case, jingo might be the only Basque word in the
English lexicon.
The
name Jingo then
came to designate a member of a section of the Tory
party in Great Britain
It
was especially used during the Beaconsfield 80, in reference to the Russo-Turkish
war:
When
Lord Beaconsfield courted the cheers of the City by threatening the Emperor of Russia
The
name alluded to an 1878 music-hall song, written by G.
W. Hunt, popular with Russophobes. When war with Russia
We
don’t want to fight, but by Jingo! if we do,
We’ve
got the ships, we’ve got the men, we’ve got the money too.
The
political sense of Jingo first appeared in the Daily
News, on 11 March 1878, and was fixed two days
later in a letter signed by George Jacob Holyoake:
I
am, if you like, a Jingo, a word which, by the way, I was the first person ever
to write – at the dictation of my late uncle, George Jacob Holyoake. (H. Bottomley, in John
Bull, 10 November 1917)
Then they moved the campaign from the hands of some old virginal
spinster to a local Lady, hence a representative of the local aristocracy that
is helped in her newborn campaign against pleasure and enjoyment, particularly
physical and hormonal, by the local Vicar Mr. Gedge, but also by the local
Superintendent Mr. Budd, the local Mayor Mr. Upford and the local Head Mistress
from the school Miss Wordsworth. Then
the satire is against the five basic institutions of England
Then our composer and author invent all kinds of names that are
funny in many ways but they make the story both believable and in many ways
plausible. Of course Albert Herring is nothing but a red herring (A “red herring” is
something that misleads or distracts from a relevant or important issue. It may
be either a logical fallacy or a literary device that leads readers or
audiences towards a false conclusion) but the story does not lead that poor young man to perdition in
alcoholism and death in delirium tremens like in Maupassant’s short story, but
just to only one night of escape and come back in the morning. In other words
it is a very simple prodigal son though he leaves with 30 pounds and comes back
with 27, which is very reasonable for a prodigal son. Maupassant’s Isidore lost
all his money and even his heirloom silver watch after a week or so of complete
drunkenness he will never manage to override and leave behind.
The next change, and that is a deep change in the line of
Britten’s themes, is the relation between the young man Albert and his mother.
His mother is actually present in the opera and she is an obvious control
freak, and that is a theme Britten will work on regularly and maybe all his
life? Mothers are most of the time absent or power freaks with the exception of
Curfew River
in which the son was abducted by a male stranger or foreigner and the mother is
running after them to finally cross the Curfew River
So we do not have the tale of perdition that Maupassant imagined.
We have a tale of salvation from imposed innocence, imposed blindness, imposed
dullness and the discovery that plain simple pleasures are something you have
to experience once in your life and then bring them under control and know that
you can drink a little bit, you van have and make love from time to time and
you can have other simple pleasures like a peach and the best way to appreciate
the taste of a peach is to pass the basket around and give a peach to all the
kids just to share the pleasure, though our Albert seems promised to have some
competition with Sid concerning Nancy who seems to be wavering between Sid and
the redeemed Albert who is maybe after all not a red herring at all but might
be promised to a brighter future. Let’s hope he will not turn into a
carnivorous if not cannibalistic pike.
Of course then we have to wonder what makes this Opera Buffa a
real masterwork. And that’s the music of course.
The music never stop and intermissionS are in fact musical
interludes. The music is extremely dynamic with singers mixing their voices and
their lines into choruses at times, duets and other small groups of coordinated
singing, but also and quite often a group of characters, all of them most of
the time sing together one on top of the others, or one line between the lines
of someone else, etc. We have a real sensation of having a crowd in front of
us, a rowdy and excited crowd. Many of the songs and tunes are simple and
rather joyous, dynamic and even popular in many ways. We could easily get up to
them and sing along. This is typical of Comic Opera or Opera Buffa, just as
much as of pantomimes and I must say quite in the long tradition of the English
stage, since Shakespeare and even before with medieval mysteries for example,
or Elizabethan masques. This mixture of simple music and dancing in between the
scenes of a play will still be alive and strong under Henry Purcell, thus
surviving the Commonwealth, and even under George F. Handel. That gives to this
opera a joyful and extremely pleasant sound and look.
In the third act Britten manages to create a real funeral wake for
the supposedly dead and lost Albert and this wake becomes little by little more
and more sinister with songs that are more dirges, a threnody, even a requiem
to poor Albert that suddenly pops up hardly soiled and hurt by his night of
evil adventure, though apart from the drink and the fights we do not get much detail.
The prodigal son is after all discreet, modest, bashful, still shy and we could
even say demure if Albert were a woman. Dies Irae Dies Illa, indeed.
What’s more any stage production is easy with such an opera buffa
that does not require any hard and complex interpretation and the creation of a
stage universe to make the meaning explicit.
BENJAMIN BRITTEN –
ERIC CROZIER – ALBERT HERRING – LIBRETTO – 1947
Just
out of World War Two, let us sing the greatness of Great Britain
This
Albert Herring, with no father any more and only a possessive control freak
mother is the next greengrocer of the village when his mother decides to
retire. More than a simpleton, since he knows how to count and he’d better do
so since everyone is trying to cheat him out of what they owe him, he is nicely
autistic more than anything else: he has difficulties establishing a relation
with any third person apart from himself and his mother. He is shy they say. He
is hard working and one-pointed but he does not have any vision of the future:
He lacks ambition – maybe – they say. And he does not know at all what is
beyond the narrow pale of his mother: he has never had any alcohol since his
mother is a teetotaler. He has never gone out to a pub or anywhere else since
he works for his mother from sunrise to beyond sunset. He has never approached
or been approached by a girl or woman since he is the untouchable of his
mother.
And
the opera turns to his disadvantage and to our merry pleasure since he is a
fool in the first act, a fair idiot in the second act and then he disappears to
come back a transformed person who has discovered there are many other things
in life beyond his mother and her narrow-minded vision of her living death and
her cane if not cudgel imposed authority. Good riddance and welcome home,
finally home, your home, the way you make it and not the way your widowed
mother wants to impose it.
The
text is light and light-hearted, and yet it makes fun of British fundamentalism
based on “no alcohol, we are teetotalers” and “no **fleshy contact**,
we are British” and “no free thinking or atheistic illusions, we are
Anglicans.” How could that fundamentalism survive in Great Britain
What
is amazing is that two of the basic themes of Benjamin Britten’s operas are
already all contained in this early one. Albert Herring is a stranger in his
own village, kept apart, on the side and the target of jokes, tricks, and other
pranks, like making him drink rum laced in his lemonade, or stealing his
apples, or getting herbs for free by just forgetting to pay before leaving. He
is also a stranger to his mother because she does not know he is a man and she
treats him as if he were a pet, a working pet mind you, hence a domestic animal
like an ox, and he is as strong as one if not two.
The
second theme is of course the denunciation of ethical, religious, moral
fundamentalism and particularly the way some women who think they are the
mothers of society like Lady Billows, not one billow but several large undulating mass of something,
typically cloud, smoke, or steam, or maybe a vast inflated balloon billowing in
the hot air of her moralistic discourse, fanned like a moralistic fire by the
local Mayor, the local Vicar and the local Superintendent, or is it only a
simple Constable? Three men aided by a fourth female character, the local
teacher, Miss Wordsworth who is worth what words are worth, not much indeed
since they only exist in dictionaries. And of course a real mother, the
possessive control freak that she is, is seen as stifling, choking and smothering
her own son into asocial suffocation with only one intention: to make him a
money-earner for the family, that is to say for herself.
These two themes are extremely present in many
operas with one absent here: the killing or abducting father figure, the third
side of the trinity Benjamin Britten used so much all the time along with
pentacles and pentads like the five selectors of the new May King: Lady
Billows, Mr. Gedge the Vicar, Superintendent Budd, Mr. Upfold the Mayor and
Miss Wordsworth the Head Teacher, clearly opposed to the three people around
Albert, Sid, Nancy and Mrs. Herring, and the three kids from the village,
Emmie, Cis and Harry. And if you add Florence Pike, the Housekeeper of the
Lady, you reach thirteen fateful blind deaf and not dumb at all, meaning mute,
though quite dumb meaning besotted characters. And their names are just a bunch
of funny puns.
GUY DE MAUPASSANT –
LE ROSIER DE MADAME HUSSON – 1887
Une historiette que l’on peu appeler nouvelle de
Guy de Maupassant dans son plus pur style si grotesquement caustique et
satirique qu’il en devient hilarant et ce qui devait être une critique acide de
la bourgeoisie parvenue de Normandie – comme Madame Bovary de Gustave Flaubert
– ainsi que de la pruderie vierge et totalement stérile et impuissante d’une
vieille rombière tout aussi vieille fille mais riche qui vit cul et chemise
avec Jésus Christ et le Bon Dieu, et l’âme entièrement conquise par le célibataire
curé du village, pardon de la paroisse. Celui-ci n’est pas près de tomber dans
les rets de Madame Husson car Madame Husson n’a pas de rets. Elle n’a tout au
plus que des rots, des hauts-le-cœur, des nausées devant les cochonneries, pour
ne pas dire cochonnailleries ou autres activités porcines ou dignes d’un goret,
que les jeunes font aux quatre coins de la rue Dauphine comme il se doit, car
c’est rue Dauphine que tout arrive dans ce monde.
Je ne raconterai pas l’histoire, connue comme le
loup rouge, le loup qui boit du gros rouge qui tâche bien sûr, mais je dois
dire que Maupassant fait un peu fort en son temps contre les Allemands qu’ils
ne haït point et les Anglais qu’il honnit fort et bien Ecoutez un peu ces deux morceaux de bravoure
jingoïste ou pourrions-nous dire chauviniste : plus Affront Nationaliste
que moi tu meurs, mon pauvre Guy.
« Ainsi moi, je suis Normand, un
vrai Normand ; eh bien, malgré ma rancune contre l’Allemand et mon désir de
vengeance, je ne le déteste pas, je ne le hais pas d’instinct comme je hais
l’Anglais, l’ennemi véritable, l’ennemi héréditaire, l’ennemi naturel du
Normand, parce que l’Anglais a passé sur ce sol habité par mes aïeux, l’a pillé
et ravagé vingt fois, et que l’aversion de ce peuple perfide m’a été transmise
avec la vie, par mon père... […]
« Puis j’appris que Clotaire II
avait donné le patrimoine de Gisors à son cousin saint Romain, évêque de Rouen,
que Gisors cessa d’être la capitale de tout le Vexin après le traité de
Saint-Clair-sur-Epte, que la ville est le premier point stratégique de toute
cette partie de la France et qu’elle fut, par suite de cet avantage, prise et
reprise un nombre infini de fois. Sur l’ordre de Guillaume le Roux, le célèbre
ingénieur Robert de Bellesme y construisit une puissante forteresse attaquée
plus tard par Louis le Gros, puis par les barons normands, défendue par Robert
de Candos, cédée enfin à Louis le Gros par Geoffroy Plantagenet, reprise par
les Anglais à la suite d’une trahison des Templiers, disputée entre
Philippe-Auguste et Richard Coeur de Lion, brûlée par Edouard III d’Angleterre
qui ne put prendre le château, enlevée de nouveau par les Anglais en 1419,
rendue plus tard à Charles VII par Richard de Marbury, prise par le duc de
Calabre, occupée par la Ligue, habitée par Henri IV, etc., etc.. etc.
“Et Marambot,
convaincu, presque éloquent, répétait :
« Quels gueux, ces Anglais ! ! ! Et
quels pochards, mon cher ; tous Rosiers, ces hypocrites-là. »
Le Brexit est une invention française et bien plus
ancienne que l’on pourrait croire. C’est d’autant plus amusant que c’est un duc
de Normandie qui conquit l’Angleterre en 1066 à Hastings faisant ainsi des rois
anglais rien de moins que des ducs de Normandie légitimes.
De cette histoire il ne reste que l’immense mépris
de Maupassant pour les villes de province qui n’a d’égal que Jules Romains et Les Copains avec Issoire-Passoire et
Ambert-Camembert. Ici on fait dans Gisors-Isidore, ne réveillez pas l’ivrogne
qui dort en Isidore. Et ces copains-là, ceux de Gisors, eau bénite, curé et
vieille fille stérile n’ont rien à voir avec ceux du radeau de la méduse de
Brassens, pas plus que cette ville de province n’a rien de bien loin d’avec
celle de Jacques Brel de passage a Vesoul par le caprice d’une femme comme une
autre.
Je vous souhaite donc le plaisir de lire ce Guy de
Maupassant et de ne pas vous étrangler ni vous étouffer sur l’horreur qui est
la sienne contre tout ce qui est la France profonde, l’humanité première et naturellement
primitive dans nos sociétés pas encore complètement mais déjà un peu de
consommation. Guy de Maupassant a vieilli, comme Zola d’ailleurs. Mais George
Sand devrait vous charmez car elle a gardé une dimension féérique, voire
enfantine, tout comme Colette et ses Dialogues de Bêtes.
Dr Jacques COULARDEAU
# posted by Dr. Jacques COULARDEAU @ 5:01 AM 
