Italics are mine

A Lesson on Dialogue

One of the most-repeated lessons of writing workshops is that your characters should have different voices. I have been struggling with that (euphemism), but I was impressed by the unwitting demonstration Tad Friend made of the power of dialogue in his recent New Yorker article about Pixar's first live-action movie.

The movie in question, called "John Carter", features Friday Night Lights heartthrob Taylor Kitsch in the leading role, and if Friend's quotes are representative of Kitsch's usual way of expressing himself, the actor uses the f-word a lot. He uses it in just about every single one of his sentences, as a matter of fact, while none of the other interviewees - Andrew Stanton, the main focus of the profile, and Kitsch's partner in the movie, Lynn Collins - even got close to pronouncing that sort of profanity in front of the journalist. (Stanton uses a b-word, about Disney, in the sentence "Disney... won't, history tells us, have the b---- to commit", but no f-word. Gotta have values in life.) 

So it was a testimony to Friend's good writing, which highlighted the protagonists' different voices, that when I reached the last column of the article and read " 'It still makes no f------ sense to me, but this is how we do it,' Stanton said" (except that The New Yorker did not censure the f-word), I knew for sure someone at the magazine had let a mistake slip by. This is not Stanton's voice, but Kitsch's. 

Some fiction-writing instructors like to mention 3 Vs in creating distinctive voices: vocabulary (pet words), verbosity (erudition, length and construction of sentences) and velocity (pace, speed of elocution). The Gotham Writers' Workshop occasionally runs free writing classes at my favorite bookstore - McNally-Jackson in SoHo - including a dialogue writing one. I've never attended the class, but anything that happens at McN-J has to be good.

I think one of the reasons I've had a hard time writing distinctive voices is that I only write dialogue I feel I could speak. (I often read my dialogue aloud. And my non-dialogue. Although Gustave Flaubert has been advocating this method since the nineteenth century, I owe it to Garrison Keillor's Good Poems to have finally prompted me to take action; once I got started with [reading aloud] poetry it was easy to transition to fiction.) I use breath a lot to figure out when a sentence is getting too long for a character to say, but for my next book I should also make more of an effort to vary words and pace instead of simply making the conversation believable to the reader.

I do wonder if Kitsch will ever stop peppering his sentences with the f-word. That would certainly show an evolution (growing maturity? different self-perception?) in him. An outer change in dialogue reflecting an inner change in the character: that would be the best dialogue lesson of all.

Beethoven Sonatas Marathon

On Sunday I was in New York for the Beethoven Sonatas Marathon organized by WQXR, the best classical music station of all. (This doesn't have much to do with my novel except that there are two pianists in the book, Louis and Paul - Paul is much more often mentioned than seen, though - and people who are interested in classical music might well be interested in my book, about opera and World War II.)

The event, where rising stars and more established stars took turns in playing Beethoven's 32 piano sonatas, was quite simply fantastic. It was divided in 6 parts of 2 hours, and my only complaint was that there was no time to grab lunch between 11am and 11pm, so I gave up my excellent seat at 3pm to head to Jane's on West Houston St and grab a bite before returning to the Jerome Greene Performance Space. (The wait for a table was 45min. Good thing I found a seat at the bar. The food is good, but nothing really warrants a 45min wait.)

I most loved the young prodigies who amazed the audience at the ripe age of 17 to 24 years old. It felt like a true blessing to see them in concert right now, when they have already won piano competitions but have not yet become household names such as Leif Ove Andsnes or Maurizio Pollini. Even the slightly older rising stars were clearly delighted to have been asked to participate, taking advantage of this exposure to a crowd of music-lovers and piano connoisseurs. The best known name was Jeremy Denk, whom I saw in his Carnegie Hall debut when he replaced an ill Pollini on short notice last year and also in Santa Fe at the Chamber Music Festival. He played two sonatas, including the No 32 that closed the program (an apt choice, both regarding the sonata and the musician.) But again, as much as I enjoyed his clearly proficient technique, I connected most to the sheer joy of the younger pianists.

For my book (I had to mention my book, didn't I? or you can pledge to buy it right away and I'll try to leave you alone) my father suggested I put together a CD of arias mentioned in the novel that have fallen in the public domain, to market alongside the book. I think it is a wonderful idea, but frankly if I could I would make a CD with the students of the Curtis Institute of Music or the Academy of Vocal Arts in Philadelphia, leveraging my Pennsylvania ties and hopefully giving some of tomorrow's stars the opportunity to shine. One thing I have learned in this line of work is that you've got to be generous and try to help others succeed when you can, because it is so hard to catch a break. 

But anyway, returning to the sonata marathon, here is some information about the artists. I enjoyed all of them and all are truly exceptional musicians deserving of acclaim, but I've put in bold those I liked the most on Sunday, along with a few comments.

• Marina Radiushina – Sonata No. 1 in F Minor, Op. 2, No. 1. In her early 30s, Ukraine-born Radiushina has many awards under her belt and is currently in the middle of a two-year residency at Carnegie Hall in the Academy program. More info here and here.
• Hyung Min Suh – Sonata No. 4 in E-flat Major, Op. 7, “Grand Sonata” A 21-year old student majoring in history at Columbia University, he is also an exchange student at Juilliard where he is taught by Emanuel Ax. More info here (p.4)
• Philip Edward Fisher – Sonata No. 10 in G Major, Op. 14, No. 2 Fisher is a 32-year-old Juilliard alumnus born and raised in England. His website is here. He also has a Wikipedia page.
• Evan Shinners – Sonata No. 11 in B-flat Major, Op. 22. Shinners is an actor as much as a pianist, cultivating an offbeat persona with black-and-white pants and black-and-white shoes as well as facial expressions that make his piano playing come across as performance art. Probably the Nigel Kennedy of piano, he is hard to forget. Check out his webpage here.
• Alessio Bax– Sonata No. 8 in C Minor, Op. 13, “Pathétique” and Sonata No. 31 in A-flat Major, Op. 110. Bax's playing was magnificent but he made audible use of the foot pedals (audible referring to the noise he made with his right foot) and also marked the beat with his left foot, which was distracting. This, however, probably would not be an issue in a larger performance space such as Carnegie Hall or the 92nd St Y. More info here.
• Daria Rabotkina – Sonata No. 2 in A Major, Op. 2, No. 2. I don't remember her, but click here for her website.
• Michael Brown – Sonata No. 15 in D Major, Op. 28, “Pastoral” and Sonata No. 22 in F Major, Op. 54. A 24-year-old native of Long Island, he won the 2010 Concert Artists Guild Victor Elmaleh competition and his rendition of the Pastoral was phenomenal. Check out his website, which also contains a list of his very impressive awards and accomplishments.
• Inon Barnatan – Sonata No. 27 in E Minor, Op. 90 and Sonata No. 6 in F Major, Op. 10, No.2. Outstanding playing by a 32-year-old Israeli-born musician clearly promised to a great career, whose bio you can read here.
• Qi Xu – Sonata No. 25 in G Major, Op. 79 I can't figure out from the web if he's 16 or 17, but in any case, he's a prodigy from China and his playing is magnificent.
• Ching-Yun Hu – Sonata No. 3 in C Major, Op. 2, No.3 and Sonata No. 28 in A Major, Op. 101. This young lady from Taiwan won the 2009 Concert Artists Guild International Competition. Her website is here.
• Yuchong Wu – Sonata No. 19 in G Minor, Op. 49, No. 1 and Sonata No. 20 in G Major, Op. 49, No. 2. Another prodigy from China, he's 15 or 16 years old but plays with the mastery of someone twice his age.
• Benjamin Hochman – Sonata No. 23 in F Minor, Op. 57, “Appassionata” and Sonata No. 7 in D Major, Op. 10, No.3. Born in Jerusalem, he is a graduate of the Curtis Institute of Music and recently won the 2011 Avery Fisher Career Grant. His career path is clearly in an ascendant phase. More info here.
• Valentina Lisitsa – Sonata No. 14 in C-sharp Minor, Op. 27, No. 2, “Moonlight”. I don't remember her (she might have performed while I was out for a late lunch), but you can find more info about her on her Wikipedia page and on her official webpage.
• Drew Petersen – Sonata No. 16 in G Major, Op. 31, No. 1. A New Jersey resident, he is only 17 but has clearly a phenomenal career ahead of him. Watch an old video of him playing the piano at age 12 here. He has won, among others, the Manhattan School of Music Concerto Competition, the Yonkers Philharmonic Concerto Competition, the Friday Woodmere Young Artists Competition and the Lincoln Center Chamber Music Society’s competition, this last one as a member of a piano trio. I'm looking forward to hearing him again.
• Timothy Andres – Sonata No. 21 in C Major, Op. 53, “Waldstein” and Sonata No. 24 in F-sharp Major, Op. 78, “A Thérèse”. A 26-year-old native from California, he graduated from Yale and is also a composer. He has received awards from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, BMI, and ASCAP, as well as grants from Meet the Composer and the American Music Center. His website is here.
• Steven Beck – Sonata No. 30 in E Major, Op. 109. A 33-year-old Juilliard graduate, he has been deemed "exemplary" by the New York Times.
• Louis Schwizgebel – Sonata No. 9 in E Major, Op. 14, No. 1 and Sonata No. 26 in E-flat Major, Op. 81a, “Les adieux” A native of Switzerland who won 2nd prize at the Geneva International Music Competition and 1st prize at the Young Concert Artists International Auditions, and is now studying at Juilliard with Emanuel Ax, Schwizgebel turned 24 the day before the concert. Apparently he only learned Op 81a last week, but he certainly managed to master it in the short time allotted - his playing was flawless with great expressivity. A name to watch. Check out his website here.
• Jonathan Biss – Sonata No. 12 in A-flat Major, Op. 26, “Funeral March” and Sonata No. 5 in C Minor, Op. 10, No. 1. A 31-year-old pianist among the better known names on the program, he has studied at the Curtis Institute of Music under Leon Fleisher and has many recordings under his name, from Schubert Piano Sonatas to Mozart Piano Concertos and Beethoven Piano Sonatas. Here is his website.
• Joyce Yang – Sonata No. 18 in E-flat Major, Op. 31, No. 3, “The Hunt” A 25-year-old from Seoul, Yang gave a great performance, both musically and theatrically. While many pianists overdo their facial expression in an attempt to tell a story at the same time as they play, Yang struck a perfect balance of top musicianship and theatricality without coming across as too mannered. Learn more about her here.
• David Kaplan – Sonata No. 13 in E-flat Major, Op. 27, No. 1, “Quasi una Fantasia”. Outstanding playing. Here is his website.
• Natasha Paremski – Sonata No. 17 in D Minor, Op. 31, No. 2, “Tempest” The playing of 24-year-old Moscow-born Paremski was simply spectacular. No other word for it. Do yourself a favor and go and see her play live. In the meantime, you can browse through her website.
• Jeremy Denk – Sonata No. 29 in B-flat Major, Op. 106, “Hammerklavier” and Sonata No. 32 in C Minor, Op. 111. Do I even need to discuss Denk? The most famous pianist of the lot, he also writes a popular blog. More info at his Wikipedia page.

I was pleased to see many young adults in attendance, especially in the last two sets. The tickets certainly were a bargain: $11 for each 2-hour set, $50 for a day pass. I feel WXQR may have stumbled on a new modus operandi for classical music concerts: instead of the traditional format in three pieces (1. a newer, more obscure piece followed by 2. a concerto showcasing a soloist along with the orchestra, and then 3. a large symphonic piece after the intermission), there seems to be a real interest in groups of works by the same composer but played by several artists, especially up-and-coming musicians in intimate spaces - the Greene Space sits only 120.  

I hope we will see more of such concerts, allowing the audience to listen to many soloists in the same program. It was certainly a fantastic experience for me and I will follow the career trajectory of these musicians with much interest in the next few years.

On Cardboard Characters

Today's post is not about books: it's about movies. Specifically, it is about two movies I saw not too long ago, and found below average (euphemism), in spite of the very positive reviews they received in the media. The main reason why I disliked these movies was because a main or key supporting figure was nothing more than a cardboard character. I decided to make this the topic of my post because my interest in multi-dimensional, often complex and flawed, characters not only underlies my novel but also explains why I didn't pick the easier route of all-good or all-bad protagonists (remember, my novel is set during and after World War II in Paris and deals with Nazism and the Occupation).

The first one is "Midnight in Paris", one of Woody Allen's most successful movies to date. The theme - an American screenwriter in Paris feels nostalgic for the city in the 1920s while his fiancee understands him less and less - was interesting enough, but the character played by Rachel McAdams was so obnoxious and caricatural I had to wonder why the screenwriter had ever decided to marry her. That completely ruined the movie for me.

The second one is "I've loved you so long", a French drama where a woman struggles to reconnect with her family after spending 15 years in prison for killing her son. (Spoiler alert! Stop reading now if you want to watch the movie some day without knowing the ending.) People do horrible, atrocious things in society and there are, sadly, many real-life cases of children killed by their parents, either due to severe mental illness or enormous narcissism (the child needs to be taken care of, which the "parent" doesn't want to do) or pure evil.

But to make the heroine likable, the filmmaker decided to take the easy way out and reveal she killed her son because he had a terminal disease and she didn't want him to suffer. Sorry, that doesn't fly for me. I can deal with stories of people wrongly convicted and again I find stories with deeply flawed characters of value when they teach us something about our world and even our own possible reactions (I believe that a not insignificant number of people who had been fine citizens before World War II became monsters denouncing their neighbors once the Nazis ruled over them during the Occupation), but having the mother turn out to be "good" is nothing more than the filmmaker chickening out. For that movie, since the relationship between the two sisters takes center stage, I could have imagined the mother being falsely accused or falsely accusing herself to protect someone else, but the ending in the script rang false. Since we don't even see the woman struggle with her decision (her behavior throughout the movie is hard to understand because she is not talkative and her actions don't betray a lot about her emotional state, which is probably to show us how numb she still is after the death of her son), I found her to be a two-dimensional character.

Of course, because of the strained relationship between the two sisters - the younger one taking the elder one under her roof after the elder woman's release from jail - the movie makes me think of my novel too, although I didn't yet know I would ever write a book about two siblings trying to reconnect with each other when I watched it.

Music Links

For this post I thought I'd provide some links to musical excerpts that are mentioned in my novel.

• Isolde's Liebestod. The aria serves as the flagship song of the Tristan und Isolde opera for whoever happens to be singing Isolde. In 1938 at Bayreuth, this happened to be Germaine Lubin. In my book, Yvonne Chevallier. In the YouTube musical excerpt, Isolde is sung by Kirsten Flagstad (1895-1962), who happens to have had an eventful and remarkable career in her own right. More information about her here.
• Tannhauser's Overture, in the Liszt arrangement for piano of the Wagner score, played by Jorge Bolet. Make sure you read the blurb on YouTube - it is worth it! This is the piece Louis played during the party at Madeleine's house, when the Nazi officer shows up.
• Tosca's "Ah quegli occhi". This is the duet Madeleine Moreau sings with the bass-baritone during the party at the Paris Opera at the Liberation. In the YouTube excerpt, superstar Maria Callas sings opposite Carlo Bergonzi.
• Lohengrin's "Ortrud! Wo bist du?": the scene between Elsa and Ortrud, which engineers Yvonne (singing Elsa) and Madeleine (singing Ortrud) first meeting, at the workshop at the Conservatoire de Paris. In the musical excerpt, legend Birgit Nillson sings opposite Astrid Varnay.
• Gilda's air (as part of the group aria) in Act 3 of Rigoletto: this is what Yvonne sings in her subway scene toward the end of the novel and is also the last musical air mentioned in the novel. In the YouTube video, Gilda's part is sung by opera star Diana Damrau.

Enjoy!