Invited Web Content
“Verdi’s Macbeth: ‘The Opera without a Love Affair!’”
Web blog post for “Shakespeare & Beyond,” Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington, DC, October 2019
“‘L’opera senza amore!’ That was the Italians’ reaction to Verdi’s Macbeth when it premiered in Florence in 1847. Despite its immediate success and subsequent popularity, an opera that involved no great love affair struck audiences as an oddity. It was not as if Verdi was known for any blatantly amorous scenes in his operas—quite the contrary. But, without lovers who must go through hurdles to consummate their love, what would opera be like? There is a reason Charles Gounod in 1867 chose to concentrate on the two lovers in Roméo et Juliette and downplayed any aspect of politics from the original. After all, he gave us one of the best adapted endings when Juliet awakes for a few precious minutes in order to sing a sumptuous duet with Romeo before their inevitable death. And a year later, in 1868, French sensibility dictated that Ambroise Thomas needed to valorize Hamlet—few saw anything wrong with the character’s crowning as king at the end of the eponymous opera. As these examples show, bringing Shakespeare to the operatic stage often involved substantial adaptation. […]”
https://www.folger.edu/blogs/shakespeare-and-beyond/verdi-macbeth-shakespeare-opera/
“On Cavafy, Then and Now”
Essay invited by the C.P. Cavafy Chair at the University of Michigan to celebrate the 150 years of Cavafy’s birth. In C. P. Cavafy Forum, “Greek Diaspora Intellectuals on ‘the meaning of Cavafy today’”; curated by Vassilis Lambropoulos, Department of Modern Greek at the University of Michigan, April 2013
“[In college we] discovered the sensuous Cavafy, the clandestine poetry that our teachers had kept unseen. The entryway to what I like to call “the muted” Cavafy, might have been Manos Hadjidakis’s setting of “Days of 1903.” What robust musical language! We ended up memorizing not only the poetry but all the songs of his Magnus Eroticus record. Cavafy wrote about diaphanous erotic landscapes with an extraordinary linguistic boldness. His descriptions of sensual hedone transferred as synesthetic aromas onto our young souls; and his innate musicality fed our voracious minds with sensory and spiritual delight: “. . . those lips—I never found them again. […]
Today, more than ever, we yearn for Cavafy’s poetry. It teaches us the pleasure of solitude, in a world that screams for exposure; it promotes the fragility of pleasure in a world full of fake cacophony; and it elucidates a mythical world of grandeur and fall, at the same time robust and weak, familiar and alien, attractive and grotesque, much like our own. In our ever-changing world, Cavafy’s poetry embodies the melancholy of ruin as well as the promise of desire. Maybe we can exorcize some of today’s evil if we start to recite his poetry out loud again. ‘Δώδεκα και μισή. Πώς πέρασεν η ώρα. / Δώδεκα και μισή. Πώς πέρασαν τα χρόνια.’”
https://lsa.umich.edu/modgreek/window-to-greek-culture/c-p--cavafy-forum.html
