Italics are mine

The New Books: Audiobooks?

(Picture credit: audible.com) The New York Times ran an article in late June about the company Audible.com, an Amazon subsidiary, which provides steady work to many actors by hiring them to read books that will become audiobooks.

I liked the premise as someone who supports giving actors a living wage, and as a writer interested in new channels to disseminate her work. First, I'll point out that the actress featured in the article uses the money to continue to perform - certainly the best way to proceed. She hasn't given up on her art and she certainly has many more acting skills than simply reading with a clear voice, but that sort of gig will allow her to pay the bills and audition for the theater roles she loves, instead of requiring her to take a day job - like waiting tables - that makes no use of her talents.

From a consumer's perspective, I've enjoyed listening to Robert Caro's "The Passage of Power: The Years of Lyndon Johnson, Vol 4" during my many drives between Pennsylvania and Maryland. My only pet peeve with the system is that there should be samples for customers to listen to before they buy, since the reader's voice can turn any wonderful book into hours of cringe-inducing blabber. This thankfully did not happen for Caro's audiobook (Grover Gardner is a fabulous narrator), but a case in point is: The Odyssey read by Ian McKellen. It sounded like a great matching, and many people seem to enjoy the audiobook, but for me McKellen has an accent in that audiobook that makes listening to it simply unbearable.

I mainly listen to audiobooks when I drive and when I clean my home, so I'm probably not the ideal audience target for Audible, but as a writer, I see a lot of potential in that new medium. The traditional payment structure is flat-fee-per-finished-hour, and from what I've read, a 30,000 word-novella probably amounts to about 3 1/2 to 4 finished hours (using a 125-word-per-minute rule of thumb or a 9,400 words per hour rule of thumb). Many readers charge between $200 and $400 per finished hour, as a search of the ACX (Audiobook Creation Exchange) website will show, so it'd be about a $1,200 expense for a book like Isolde 1939. I haven't decided yet if I want to do it, but there is no doubt audiobooks are part of the future of the publishing and will within years become as common as paperbacks.

Wagner in Baltimore

(Picture credit: Didi Balle didiballe.com) This is another of those posts I meant to write before I left for Paris but wasn't able to, in the rush to finish the semester and get everything ready in time. As a matter of fact, I couldn't go - I had to be in New York that same evening - but I thought Marin Alsop, the music director of the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra, had yet again treaded new ground in explaining music to a wide audience when she commissionned "A Composer Fit for a King: Wagner and King Ludwig II" from Didi Balle, who had previously collaborated with Alsop three times on symphonic shows.

From the program: "The symphonic play is a seamless blend of music and theater dramatizing the backstage story behind the making of the Ring Cycle." It was performed mid-April at the Meyerhoff in Baltimore and at the Strathmore in Bethesda, one night each. I find the mix of multiple media (theater and opera, in this case) particularly useful in drawing in audiences which may be reluctant to sit through, say, four hours of Götterdämmerung as their first introduction to Wagner.

I was also pleased to also recognize, in the list of cast members, the name of Pomme Koch (playing King Ludwig II, no less), a young local - meaning DC area - actor I'd seen in February in Henry V at the Folger in a role he had understudied for and had been thrust into due to the sudden illness of another performer. He'd done remarkably well, not only under the circumstances, but as a matter of fact it was completely unnoticeable that he didn't usually play that role. I always enjoy watching young actors getting the success they deserve.

My big regret is not to have seen another of Dalle's symphonic plays, about my other big (musical!) love besides Richard Wagner: Dmitri Shostakovich. Shostakovich: Notes for Stalin premiered at Verizon Hall in Philadelphia with the Philadelphia Orchestra conducted by Yannick Nezet-Seguin, and for some reason I never heard about it. (I'm very good at not paying attention to anything besides work when it's the middle of the semester and I have tests and assignments to prepare.) Hopefully these shows will be recorded some day and I'll get to see them then.

"Lucrèce Borgia" next year

 The 2013-2014 season of the French national theater La Comédie-Française (CF) was announced a few weeks ago, and the big news is that one of the best French directors (and actors) of our time, Denis Podalydès, will direct the revival of a play that holds a lot of meaning for me - the first play I ever saw when I moved to Paris as a college student in the fall of 1994: Victor Hugo's Lucrèce Borgia, which I wrote about in an earlier post.

The big news for French audiences, though, is not that the play will be shown again Salle Richelieu after a 20-year absence, but that the main two roles will be played "in drag": Guillaume Gallienne will play the murderous queen Lucrèce Borgia, and Suliane Brahim will play the valorous soldier Gennaro. Needless to say, you don't see that sort of things every day at the CF, and it borders dangeroulsy close to being nothing more than a silly gimmick.

But perhaps if someone like Podalydès decides to have Lucrèce Borgia played by a man and Gennaro by a woman, there must be a way to justify it somehow. (I learned that from many afternoons spent staring at contemporary art on MoMA's third floor in New York City. There is too much money involved, at least at MoMA, for there not to be a reason hidden somehow.) 

So - back to Lucrèce Borgia - here are an explanation I came up with, for better or for worse. First of all, you can't switch the genders of the main characters without turning the play into a read about gender and power, not only in the nineteenth century but also today, through our reaction to Podalydès's casting.

Borgia is a woman of contrasts: a murderous queen with a deep love for her son Gennaro (who doesn't know he is her son). What makes her so notable is obviously not her maternal desire to protect her son, but the long list of people she has killed to achieve or remain in power. In particular, in the play she is determined at obtaining the death of whoever defaced her family name on the palace's coat of arms, removing the B to read "orgia" (orgy) - until she finds out that Gennaro himself did it.

If she's played by a man, then the trail of murders and the rage at the "orgia" prank don't draw attention as much as Borgia's deep love for her son - and perhaps Podalydès will help us notice those unsaid expectations we have toward both genders. (I'm far more interested, theater-wise, in a murderous queen than in a loving mother, though. There is also a can of worms waiting to be opened about female vs male leadership.) 

The same holds for Gennaro: "of course" we take it for granted that the young male soldier will be valorous and loyal to his best friend (the whole bromance stereotype, to use a very modern term), but we don't quite assume that same loyalty of women among themselves. Perhaps Gennaro's best friend Maffio will also be played by a woman, to make the gender reversal complete.

There is a risk that the play will lose its edge and melt into utter nonsense - also, there are already not enough strong roles for middle-aged female comedians as is - but for now I'll give Podalydès the benefit of the doubt (although I'm disinclined to believe the gimmick will pan out.) The play will be performed from late May of next year until July. That will give the cast a bit of time to figure out how to pull this off.

August Sander's "Middle-Class Children"

Of the disappointing exhibition “De l’Allemagne (1871-1939)” at the Louvre, seen when I was in Paris, with its glaring and unforgivable omission of the “Blue Rider” movement – the one group of painters that could have aroused the admiration of the younger-than-70 set, and instead we got boredom (paintings with antiquity themes), pretty boredom (Caspar David Friedrich) and ugliness (post-World War I expressionism of Ernst Ludwig Kirchner), with pathetic attempts by the French press to pretend it is only a misunderstanding – I only remember the set of photographs by August Sander, especially “Middle-class children”.

A little boy and a little girl stand on a Persian rug in an apartment, French doors and hardwood floors visible in their back. They wear the same boots and socks, hold hands. The girl, with bows in her hair, makes a faint smile for the photographer. The little boy sulks, as if his favorite toy had just been taken from him, and he’s dug the hand that doesn’t hold his sister’s into his pocket, his bow tie slightly askew. The children wear their best Sunday clothes and the title of the photograph, “Middle-class children”, when their parents clearly tried to appear much more sophisticated than simply “middle class”, speaks volumes of the family’s aspirations, in a very touching way. The photograph was taken in Cologne 1925 and one cannot help to do the math: by World War II, if not earlier, life as this family had known it would be destroyed forever. The young boy would go to war. Perhaps the young girl would still live in the house during the 1942 bombing of Cologne by the Allies. One looks at those two innocent faces and sees the devastation both they and their parents ignore and wonders what happened of them – but neither the exhibition plate nor the websites that mention the picture on the Internet provides any name for this middle-class family about to face the greatest tragedy of their time. And the little girl smiles and the little boy sulks, in their best Sunday clothes.

Brigitte Hamann on Winifried Wagner

 The Bayreuth Festival plays an important role in my novella "Isolde 1939", and because Wagnerian fans can be passionately opiniated about any matter regarding their beloved festival (I've attended a performance at Bayreuth where the director was vociferously booed by half the audience, for instance, and another where the first boos were covered by thunderous applause that silenced the naysayers), it was particularly important for me to know the basic facts surrounding Germaine Lubin's participation to the festival in 1938 and 1939, as well as her relationship to Winifried Wagner.

For that I was fortunate to draw upon Brigitte Hamann's exceptional scholarship, summarized in her book Winifried Wagner oder Hitler's Bayreuth. I read the book in German, so I can't judge the translation in English (which seems to be out-of-print anyway), but at least as far as the original version is concerned, Hamann's thorough research was complemented by an engaging writing style that made this thick book truly spellbinding.

This is where I learned about Lubin's meeting with German officer Hans Joachim Lange, her relationship with Winifried (including Winifried's role in asking Hitler's help when Lubin's son was made prisoner of war) as well as her singing Kundry in 1938 while Frida Leider sang Isolde, and her singing Isolde in 1939 after Leider - who was married to a Jewish man - had to flee the country.

Of course because my book is a work of fiction, I was able to create scenes to make those moments come alive without having to worry about being absolutely faithful to everything that happened seventy-five years ago - a technique that is most definitely not recommended in nonfiction but helped me convey some key elements of my leading character's personality, whether she was similar to Germaine Lubin in those aspects or not.

In particular, I made up the scene with Frida Leider. I wanted to show Yvonne's cluelessness and also her lack of insight regarding Europe's situation in the summer of 1938 (Yvonne being the fictional character inspired by Germaine Lubin, if I need to make that clear). I believe this is how many people began their involvement with the Third Reich: by not paying attention, by focusing only on their own life, by not realizing that what was happening around them required them to take a stand - so that when power finally changed hands, it was so much easier for them to continue with their oblivious behavior. So much more convenient too, for someone with Yvonne's ambition and her burning desire to sing. She compromised herself one step at a time, and thus no one step seemed particularly wrong, but her path taken altogether clearly left her on the wrong side of the moral fight.