Miscellaneous arts and artists not covered in other groups:
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FilmOtherAngela GheorghiuThe world's greatest living soprano. Well, her official website describes her like that, and I agree. She is everything a great singer should be: passionate, powerful, beautiful, a consummate actor. Probably no-one since Maria Callas has fit the great star roles of opera as well as the Romanian singer Angela Gheorghiu. She also has a very happy, romantic marriage to the star tenor Roberto Alagna, and to top it off there is the exciting story of her almost overnight leap to stardom.Born Angela Burlacu in the town of Adjud in the Moldavia region of Romania, she studied at the Bucharest Musical Academy, and got the best of both regimes: the excellence of training under communist rule, then the liberation of being able to travel overseas just when she was ready for it. In 1991, speaking hardly a word of English, she auditioned for Peter Katona, artistic administrator of the Royal Opera. He described this stunning experience of her voice as "like a violin, totally even and seamless throughout its range"; and "every note, nuance, accent and colour absolutely perfect". Her first significant role was Mimì in La Bohème, one especially associated with her ever since. She sang this at Covent Garden in 1992. Here she met Roberto Alagna, who was also appearing in it, in his London début. They became instant friends, but at this time both were married. In 1993 she premiered in Vienna and New York as Mimì. Other early roles she sang at Covent Garden were Zerlina, Liù, and Micaëla, but it was Violetta in La Traviata that made her reputation what it is now. The theatre director Richard Eyre flew out to Vienna to see her Mimì: it was to be his first time at directing Traviata, as it was for the conductor Sir Georg Solti, who was in tears watching her rehearse. In November 1994 she sang Violetta at Covent Garden. The controller of BBC2 television was in the audience; he was so stunned that he cleared the schedule for several nights later and ordered the opera should be broadcast live. I was watching, not inside the hall (an impossible wish), but crammed with thousands of others in the piazzas outside watching it on giant video screens. I have never, ever seen opera to compare with it. Her performance will stay in my memory forever, when every other opera I've seen fades away. She is the Violetta of her generation, unequalled. By 1996 she had divorced Mr Gheorghiu, and Mrs Alagna was dead of cancer, so she and Roberto were married. It took place backstage at the Met, where they were performing in Bohème. Predictions of acrimonious break-up have proved unfounded. In this tough world they very happily work together, and many of their best roles these days are collaborations.
Helena Matheopoulous, Diva: The New Generation, Little Brown and Co., 1998 Cold Comfort FarmFlora Poste is nineteen, orphaned, practical-minded, fond of restrained and elegant beauty such as Purcell and Jane Austen, and likes things neat and tidy and peaceful around her. Having no employable talents, she resolves to lives on her relatives, and to mould them to her own way of living, to make it more pleasant for her.Aunt Ada Doom married into the Starkadder family, and they live at Cold Comfort Farm, near the village of Howling. (The local pub, the Condemn'd Man, is run by a Mrs Murther.) These are the relatives who seem like her best bet, having rejected all the others as even less suitable for her projected way of life. So down to deepest, darkest Sussex Flora goes. Flora is all good sense, clean linen, and simple pleasures. The Starkadders - Seth and Reuben and Amos, Micah and Urk and Harkaway and all the rest - are all about creeping horrors, doomed farms, curses and torments and the brooding evil of the earth, and the inevitable sick sexuality that unfolds its ugly animal nature to mock the barren and dying... She is met at the station by Adam Lambsbreath, the old retainer who is at least ninety years old and could be somewhere over two hundred, whose two deranged loves are the farm's decrepit cows, Aimless, Feckless, Graceless, and Pointless, and the dizzying young flower-girl daughter of the family, Elfine. He always addresses Flora as 'Robert Poste's child', hinting at the dark horror that the Starkadder family did to her father. Flora meets her cousin Judith (you'd think with a name like that... oh never mind), deep in the throes of depression, despair, and a crazed pride in her handsome panther-like son Seth that borders on the incestuous. The head of the family, Aunt Ada Doom saw something nasty in the woodshed when she was a little girl, so spends her time in her room, mad, and threatening to go even more mad if any of her family disobey her or leave Cold Comfort Farm: a convenient form of madness. Cousin Judith should be managing the farm but she spends her time consumed with despair, and Amos is consumed with preaching hellfire to the Quivering Brethren of Howling, and Seth is consumed with mollocking in the sukebind (a mysterious process that annually results in the confinement of the serving girl) and the talkies, and Urk is consumed with catching water-voles and brooding over Elfine... Although she makes it her business to rescue, reform, or simply clean up numerous of her relatives, it is Elfine who interests Flora first. Elfine is wild, unschooled, fleet of foot, long of hair, and writes poetry and loves communing with nature. She is also tremulously attached to nice but dim Richard Hawk-Monitor, one of the county set, and Flora sees that she needs to be taken in hand, tidied up, and divested of poetry, before she can be acceptable to the Hawk-Monitors, and before she goes entirely to the bad and opens a little craft shop in Brighton. Cold Comfort Farm is hilarious, a comedy classic since its first publication in 1932. Stella Gibbons did write a number of other books, interesting and quirky and touching in various ways, but this one's the masterpiece. In many places it's a parody of the fashionable nature novelists of the time, people like D.H. Lawrence, one of whom appears in the novel as Mr Mybug. He sees sex everywhere: the buds are nipples, the hills are breasts, the earth is a womb; and this fashionable conversation is just boring to sensible Flora. Kenneth Williams did a classic radio recording of the book. He does the deep Sussex rural accent (all gone: Sussex is practically London now) with inimitable relish, Seth's purring, manly, animalistic tones, and Aunt Ada Doom's querulous, mad, horrorstruck 'I saw something nasty in the woodshed!', and old Adam's idiotic, fearstruck 'Nay, niver say that, Robert Poste's child!' all to perfection. For some odd reason Stella Gibbons set it in the near future - 1950, perhaps. So we get video telephones and personal aeroplanes playing a minor part in the plot, but nothing essential, just another distancing element. To make the reviewers' jobs easier she marked particularly literary bits of (parodic) description with one, two, or three stars according to the system of Mr Baedeker.
Five Children and ItFive Children and It is a children's story by E. Nesbit, published in 1902. Like her earlier story family, the Bastables from The Story of the Treasure Seekers, these children got into scrapes and tried to do the right thing and jumped to absurd conclusions, and performed hare-brained experiments, but unlike the mundane Bastables, these children (I can't find a surname for them) got involved with Magic in some form or another.Their first adventure was Five Children and It, and it was followed by The Phoenix and the Carpet and The Story of the Amulet. The five children are Robert, Anthea (or Panther), Jane, Cyril, and the Lamb, who is a baby (and whose real names are Hilary and St Maur and Devereux, but those are only used when he's a grown-up man, which he is for a short time, much to the chagrin of his elder siblings). It is a psammead, a sand-fairy, and a more than usually grumpy and tricksy one at that. Once sand-fairies were common, and children would go out and catch them and wish for sensible mundane things like a Pterodactyl for breakfast or Megatherium steaks for dinner. Now their numbers have declined precipitously, and one of the last psammeads was having a very nice long rest in the dry sand of a gravel-pit, where it had retreated from the danger of little children of olden times letting moats into the sandcastles they built for psammeads. For as you probably know, even a small amount of water can be fatal to a psammead. It's a curious creature, a kind of tubby spidery monkey with bat's ears and eyes on stalks, and it can grant them wishes. Since this involves great expenditure of energy in personal stress, it's rather vexed at the silly wishes the children inevitably make, and somehow none of them go quite right. The wishes only last the day. The first: to be as beautiful as the day. So no-one recognises them, and this isn't much use. Next, the quarry full of gold coins; and as these can't be carried away, and the very few they do take aren't accepted in shops, by quite ordinary, unmagical shopkeepers, this wish too produces nothing but frustration. They all love the Lamb, but he is a nuisance to be taking care of when no-one else wants him and they're stuck looking after him while they go on adventures. Wishing everyone wanted the Lamb, however, produces a few kidnappings and run-ins with childless great ladies and a band of gypsies. Now E. Nesbit was a very kind and liberal lady for 1902, and she makes quite sure there are good and bad gypsies, often in the same gypsy, just like everyone else in the world. Wings? Well they were fun while they were flying, until they got a very long way from home and realised that to eat they would need to steal food from orchards, or off windowsills, or some such device they couldn't square their well-brought-up consciences. And having a post-prandial nap on a church roof as the sun went down and their wings went away gets them into trouble with a rather confused vicar. Wishing that Robert was bigger than the baker's boy who was bullying him meant that, once more, they had to hide away until the effect wore off, or see how they could turn the calamity to their advantage: they hired him off to a circus. Wishing there were real live Indians (whoo-whoo-whoo) in England, or that they were in a besieged castle, would have produced startling effects on the servants who looked after their house, if they hadn't had the forethought to wish that the servants never noticed anything unusual. This also presented a problem when nurse carried away the grown-up Lamb. They end this charming and very readable story by solving most of the problems they've created: wishing people would forget about the stolen jewels, and that no-one would ever tell about the psammead, and so on. They do meet him again, in different and less dangerous circumstances, in another book. Originally published by T. Fisher Unwin, 1902, now reprinted in Puffin, with the original illustrations by H.R. Millar.
Ginette NeveuFrench violinist, 1919-1949, equalled only by Heifetz, but she was coruscating and piercingly passionate. She won the Wienawski Competition in 1935, defeating Oistrakh. Among her few recordings are the Brahms and Sibelius concertos. She lived solely for music, and rubbed herself raw when playing.Born in Paris on 11 August 1919, she could sing tunes accurately after a single hearing, while still in her pram. At the age of five she would practise passages over and over again, telling her teacher, "It must be beautiful". She played the Bruch Concerto in G Minor in public at the age of seven. Travelling Europe as a virtuoso, she took lessons with Georges Enesco, who said of the Bach Chaconne, "I play that passage rather differently": she, nine years old, said "and I play this music as I understand it". She won many prizes and competitions (she lost once in her career), she studied with Nadia Boulanger and Carl Flesch, and she was 16 she beat the already-famous 26-year-old David Oistrakh into second place in Warsaw. She was a sensation. She toured, she recorded, she was received with adulation. The War interrupted her career; after it she resumed touring the world, with her brother the pianist Jean Neveu as her accompanist. She wrote, "I am aware of a new evolution taking place within me. May it lift me higher in my art." On 28 October 1949 the plane carrying her hit a mountain in the Azores. She was cradling her Stradivarius protectively in her arms. The aeroplane carrying her also carried Jean, and her friend Edith Piaf's lover, the boxer Marcel Cerdan. Neveu is buried in Père Lachaise, near Chopin. Other recordings include a live performance of the Beethoven violin concerto; the Richard Strauss sonata in E flat major; Debussy's sonata in G minor; Ravel's Tzigane; and Chausson's Poème. Yes, coruscating is the word: her style was coruscating, driven, celestial, incandescent, angelic.
Nothing great is achieved without the solitude of vocation, and true greatness is, perhaps, a kind of radiant solitude... People are sometimes faint-hearted because they fear death. But death is something sublime, which one must deserve according to the life and ideals within one's self. Jessica MitfordOne of the six lively Mitford girls, daughters of Lord Redesdale, whose early lives were chronicled in Jessica Mitford's book Hons and Rebels. Two (Jessica and Nancy) became famous socialists, two (Diana and Unity) became famous fascists, and Debo married a duke.Born in 1917, Jessica was always known as Decca, but she kept the name Jessica on her books. The other best known of hers was The American Way of Death, a condemnation of the funeral trade. She and her first husband Esmond Romilly were both socialists from an early age, and she already knew his writings on the fight against fascism before meeting him. They ran off to Spain together to help the Loyalists in the Spanish Civil War. Lord Redesdale persuaded the government to send a destroyer to rescue her, but she declined, and made the rift with most of her family irreparable. They went to the United States, living poorly, and had a daughter Constancia. Romilly, a nephew of Winston Churchill, joined the Canadian Air Force and flew missions against Germany, but was lost over the North Sea. Decca asked Churchill to confirm his death. She got a job at the Office of Price Administration (OPA), where she became close friends with Bob Treuhaft, a lawyer who worked on civil rights cases. They were married in 1943 after moving to California, and then joined the Communist Party. Both were subpoenaed before the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1953, but refused to cooperate. They left the party in 1958. In 1955 they visited her homeland England then went to his, Hungary. They were by now prominent campaigners, working against exploitation and racism. In 1961 Decca found herself trapped along with Martin Luther King in a Baptist church while a racist mob rioted outside. But amid this she wrote her renowned (auto)biography Hons and Rebels, published in 1960. A "Hon" (an "Hon"?) was an "honourable", the courtesy title given to the girls as daughters of a lord. This was later adapted for TV. Bob Treuhaft did a lot of work with trade unions, especially longshoremen, and was appalled at how much of their hard-earned money they could spend on a funeral. This spurred Decca into her other great book, published in 1963, a sweeping condemnation of undertakers and the industry. Other books by Jessica Mitford include Kind and Usual Punishment on the prison system, a study of the 19th-century heroine Grace Darling, and A Fine Old Conflict. In their house Maya Angelou first began writing I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. Decca died in August 1996. Her last request was that SCI, the large funeral organisation she had so often battled, should pay for her funeral, because of all the publicity she had given them. The cremation container cost the grand total of $15.45. Her husband Bob has just (11th November 2001) died, at the age of 89. Joanne Rowling named her daughter Jessica after her.
Krzysztof KieślowskiSuperbly great Polish film director, allusive and poetic, famous principally for the two series Dekalog, of ten films based very loosely on the Ten Commandments, and Three Colours, three films based very loosely indeed on the tricolor of liberty, fraternity, and equality. He also made The Double Life of Véronique, and Bez Końca (Without End). Several of these feature Irène Jacob and Grażyna Szapołowska. He died comparatively young and is much lamented.7th Nov. 2001. That was my E1 node. Let me try to expand on it: E2 deserves a bit more. He was born on 27 June 1941, in Warsaw, and studied directing at the Łódź Film School from 1964 to 1968. His TV debut was The Photograph in 1969. Other early films include Camera Buff (1979) about a filmmaker who starts making more realistic, documentary films. In Blind Chance (1981, banned until 1987) three possible directions of a story are explored. I haven't seen any of those. In Bez Końca (No End), a husband is dead at the beginning of the film, and watches his wife live. She (Grażyna Szapołowska) offers herself to a young American, and during their lovemaking, because he does not understand Polish, she can spill out the whole story of her feelings. Dekalog came in 1988. I can't remember all the plots. The first (having no other god) tells of a man with faith in science who uses a computer to calculate the thickness of ice it is safe for his young son to go out on, with tragic results. The ones about murder and adultery were later expanded into longer films called A Short Film About Killing, a horrific exposé of capital punishment quite as brutal as the murder it punishes (I recall reading it made a considerable effect in Poland and may have resulted in a change in the law, but I'd better not assert that); and A Short Film About Love, in which a timid youth is obsessed with a glamorous lady (Szapołowska again) whom he spies on through a telescope, until she catches him and coldly initiates him into the unloving mechanics of love. At the time of his death (on 13 March 1996, two days after a heart bypass) he was supposedly planning another trilogy, of Hell, Purgatory, and Heaven. His late major films were co-written with Krzysztof Piesiewicz (b. 1945). Music for his films was often composed by Zbigniew Preisner (b. 1955), who is almost exclusively associated with him, as far as I know; I've only once heard his music played on the radio in its own right. He is a kind of busy, repetitive composer a little bit like Michael Nyman. His work has an especially central role in Blue (1993), where Juliette Binoche plays Julie de Courcy, widow of a great French composer, killed at the beginning of the film, who was working on a great triumphal cantata for the European Union. It is stirring music, but perhaps not entirely believable for what it's meant to be. He also provides the music for a fictional baroque composer called Van den Budenmayer who is mentioned in several films.
Complete filmography:
There's a list of all websites about him, and about his actresses such as Binoche, Jacob, and Julie Delpy, at Cine Kieslowski Web. Leaf by NiggleA tale by J.R.R. Tolkien, an allegory of sorts for death and creativity, but Tolkien didn't like allegory, so let's just say it's a kind of fairy-tale with a certain degree of abstraction, a certain vagueness that makes it easily applicable when we think of death and creativity.It says that we have in each of us something that is supremely ours and will last forever, if only we could see. Niggle is a painter. Not a very good painter, nor a very good anything, an ordinary man with a kindly heart sometimes and a bad temper sometimes, who puts up with a bad grace with the little and thoughtless impositions his neighbour Parish asks of him. So they're like you and me. He can't finish his paintings, he can't muster the discipline to do any one of them really well, but still he thinks he ought to try, that there's something he's got, in his own little way. Sound familiar? You and me again. Leaves. He can do a leaf quite well. He spends care on his leaves, catching the light and dew just so, and out of these things he can in some degree do, Niggle over his lifetime has been buildiing a larger vision, a Tree. A home for all these leaves: and for birds, strange birds, and for vistas of mountains beyond, and almost a whole country built around what he can do with leaves and would like to do with his life's vision. But with unhurrying chase, and unperturbèd pace, come the things that we all need to face: he had to make a Journey, and answer to the Inspectors, and give up whatever he had not yet finished. Agonised to be called away when he'd got closer than ever to getting right the leaves and the Tree and the country beyond, he goes with the Driver to a kind of sanatorium, where he is put to work, hard work, making himself useful, forgetting his old life, learning skills. Eventually he is judged by unseen Voices, and sent on to his next destination, a vale where he sees the Tree, his Tree, as he had made and envisaged it, but far more complete. Exploring, he finds his neighbour Parish, who in their old life was a gardener with no interest in painting. Together they cooperate to bring to fruition their joint vision of a new and beautiful place: later to be known as Niggle's Parish, a haven for travellers passing on to the great Mountains beyond. First published in the Dublin Review in 1947, inspired by the senseless felling of a great poplar in Tolkien's neighbour's garden, Leaf by Niggle was reprinted and made more accessible in the 1964 volume Tree and Leaf, as a companion to his essay On Fairy-Stories. Lee MillerLee Miller was a famous beauty, who became a famous model, which got her interested in photography. She became a famous photographer, and that led her to photojournalism. Of course she became a famous photojournalist during the War: she accompanied Allied troops into the liberation of Paris then of Buchenwald and Dachau, and her searing images of that helped render it visible.She was born in Poughkeepsie, NY, in 1907, and her modelling took her to Paris in 1929, where she worked with Man Ray. Together they accidentally discovered the process of solarisation, created by very quick exposures to light. Man Ray was also one or her famous lovers. In 1939 when war broke out she was in Britain, so she stayed there, joining Vogue. Her earlier photography was of fashion but she moved into documentary and finally became a war correspondent. In the liberation of Paris she greeted her old friend Picasso. From Dachau she sent images of the massed skeletal corpses and prisoners, and of GIs aghast and uncomprehending. She cabled her editor: "I IMPLORE YOU TO BELIEVE THIS IS TRUE". Her first marriage was in 1932, to an Egyptian; in 1947 she married the surrealist painter Roland Penrose. She and Penrose lived at 21 Downshire Hill, Hampstead between 1936 and 1947, then later in another house in the same street; but it was No. 21 that was marked with a blue plaque in June 2003. She died in 1977. A film is now to be made, with Nicole Kidman as Lee. A string of tragedies fell across her life: raped at seven, and infected with syphilis. Her first lover drowned in a boating accident. Her modelling career began when Condé Nast rescued her from being almost run over in the streets of New York. The Egyptian lover she was later to marry summarily divorced his wife, who committed suicide; she and Lee were close friends too. Years, smoking, and drinking ravaged her. She came to enjoy cooking a great deal. Sometimes she made surreal dishes such as blue spaghetti. But she also anonymously entered a recipe contest in Norway under multiple pseudonyms, and won first, second, and third prizes. There's a website archive of her work. Mary ShelleyMary Shelley was the writer famous in her own right for the creation of Frankenstein, and was the wife of the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley and the daughter of the feminist Mary Wollstonecraft and the radical philosopher William Godwin.She was born in 1797; her mother died from it. Later Godwin married a Mrs Clairmont, who had a daughter Jane (1798-1879) by her first marriage. Jane was usually called Claire. Percy Shelley was poet, eccentric, atheist, vegetarian, democratic, and socialist; he had read works by the likes of Godwin, and been expelled from university for atheism. In 1811 he had eloped to Scotland with 16-year-old Harriet Westbrook. They had two children, a nomadic life, and free love, but the marriage collapsed in 1814. Despite the fact that Harriet was suicidal, Shelley eloped with both stepsisters, 16-year-old Mary Godwin and 15-year-old Claire Clairmont. They travelled over the Continent, then back to England, and to Europe again. Claire had a daughter Allegra by their friend Lord Byron. It was in a castle overlooking Lake Geneva in 1816 that the friends and lovers told each other ghost stories; the most lasting legacy of that was Mary's novel Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus, published in 1818. Harriet Shelley killed herself in 1816 and Mary and Percy were immediately married, though the trio with Claire remained until the end. Of their children only one, called Percy, survived long. The poet was drowned off Italy in 1822, and Mary returned to England the following year as his literary trustee, arranging and prefacing his poems, essays, and letters She wrote numerous other works of various kinds - novels including Valperga (1823), Lodore (1835), and Falkner (1837) - travels, biographies, stories - often of Gothic style, with a recurring element of what can be called science fiction. She died in 1851. Apart from Frankenstein, on which her literary fame rests, I've only read (and only seen) one other work: her futuristic novel The Last Man (1826). See that node.
Michala PetriMichala Petri is a Danish virtuoso on the recorder, that bane of small children and their parents. She showed it could be an instrument of surpassing beauty and virtuosity. Her recordings are mainly of the Baroque: the recorder (and transposed flute and oboe) concertos of Vivaldi, J.S. Bach, Telemann, Frederick the Great, Handel, and their fellows.She was born on 7 July 1958 in Copenhagen, was playing at the age of three, was broadcast over Danish radio at the age of five, and gave her first solo concert in 1969. Her good looks bring great lustre to her album covers, but in musicality she is a master comparable to James Galway and Evelyn Glennie. Although most of the repertoire for the various sizes of the recorder and related flutes is from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and accounts for most of her numerous records, she has also done modern works, and as the star exponent of the instrument, composers are now queuing to write for her. In recent years she has worked with the lutenist and guitarist Lars Hannibal. I am reminded by Wiccanpiper of something I had meant to say about her recordings: she never breathes. You can't hear her breathing, at all, ever, and most of the CDs I own have her playing almost continuously for minutes at a time.
Many of her CDs, over and over again Patricia RozemaCanadian film director and scriptwriter who came to prominence with her 1987 feature debut I've Heard the Mermaids Singing, a whimsical, refreshing, and beautiful thing notable for its use of the Flower Song from Lakmé. It is consistently rated one of Canada's best ever films.Rozema has been described as a lesbian magical realist. In 1999 she made a controversial adaptation of Mansfield Park in which Fanny Price was not the self-righteous milk-and-water prig of the book, but a sexy and powerful figure based on the letters and juvenilia of Jane Austen herself. Frances O'Connor plays the spirited Fanny, fending off amorous advances not only from Henry but also from his sister Mary. Rozema's web page for this film opens with the telling quote from Jane Austen's letters, "Pictures of perfection make me sick and wicked". Harold Pinter also stars. Other films include White Room (1990), When Night is Falling (1995), Six Gestures (1997, with Yo-Yo Ma playing), and Beckett's Happy Days (2000). Born to a Dutch family in Sarnia in Ontario, in 1958, she was an actor in school, gained a double degree in English and philosophy, and worked as a writer and director in theatre and television before becoming a producer on CBC. After doing night classes in film production she made her first short in 1985, called Passion: A Letter in 16 mm. Her website is a well-designed and informative site. Not to be confused with the British soprano Patricia Rozario. Pauline BaynesPauline Baynes is a much-admired illustrator primarily known for her work with children's books, above all the seven books of the Chronicles of Narnia by C.S. Lewis, but she also did several of J.R.R. Tolkien's smaller works, including Farmer Giles of Ham and Smith of Wootton Major.Her style is immediately recognisable: rather sharp, miniaturist pieces owing a fair bit to her heroes such as Arthur Rackham and Edward Dulac. In the overtly medieval Smith of Wootton Major her pictures are considerably stylised into the quaint angles of medieval drawing. She became friends with Tolkien but had an uneasy relationship with Lewis, whom she only met twice. The first occasion was in December 1949 when she was working on his first Narnia book, The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe (published 1950). She remembers he picked out and ate all the walnuts, and his brother Warnie Lewis tried to make her feel comfortable. She was not. Lewis later recalled she was far too pretty, and that probably rattled him to distraction. The second meeting was lunch at Waterloo Station, equally unremarkable. He was pleasant about her illustrations to her face, regarding them as a necessary evil in a children's book, but carped at some of them elsewhere and said she couldn't draw lions. She recalls that she had not realised the Christian allegory in Lewis's stories. Born in India in 1922, her father being a commissioner at Agra, the family returned to England when she was five, leaving her father behind. Her father and mother were not on close terms, and he had a mistress. Pauline stayed unmarried and looked after him, living in a cottage nearby, in Farnham in Surrey. In 1961 she met and married a German, Fritz Gasch, and they were together until his death in 1988. Later, when Eastern Europe opened up, she was contacted by his daughter from a first marriage, before he had become a prisoner of war, and they are now close, Pauline effectively becoming a grandmother to the other's children. But she suffered terribly on his death, including a lot of memory loss. Pauline Baynes won the 1968 Kate Greenaway Award for The Dictionary of Chivalry, and has altogether illustrated over 100 books, her first being in 1940. She had studied at the Slade School of Art but this was curtailed by the need to do technical draughting in the War. She continues to work, and for the fiftieth anniversary of the beginning of the Narnia series she produced a lot of subtly coloured versions of her original work. I have read somewhere that she keeps rottweilers. Much of the detail of this is from an interview with her at The Woman Who Drew Narnia, and there's a bit more at BookPage. Picture of her with Lewis's stepson Douglas Gresham are no longer found. Sir John TennielThe illustrator of the Alice books, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass. He never met the real Alice Liddell, so his Alice is not based directly on her looks. I don't know whether he ever saw Lewis Carroll's photographs of her.He was born in London on 28 February 1820, and died in London on 25 February 1914, not a bad print run. He was a very well known illustrator and satirist in his own day, and a leading contributor to Punch magazine, but it's his Alice pictures that will live forever. I find it hard to accept how anyone else can bring themselves to do new illustrations. His are simply perfect for it, and for most of us, embossed ineradicably into our memories from early childhood. The respectable White Rabbit in his waistcoat, long-necked Alice startled after drinking her latest buttery potion, the Dodo solemnly presenting the thimble, Bill the lizard shooting out of the chimney, the caterpillar with his hookah, Father William balancing an eel on his nose, the Frog footman and the Fish footman rigged up in their finery, the monstrous Duchess... He got the Duchess from a stained glass window somewhere in England, I wish I could remember where. I've seen it. Was it Fairford? Up on one side of the church, there she is, the grotesque figure we know and... well, know. A comic picture from hundreds of years ago, and now pointed out as the original for the Duchess. The fading Cheshire Cat, the Hatter with his huge hat marked "10/6", the noble and pathetic White Knight, Alice rowing the sheep out of her shop, the Walrus and the Carpenter weeping, the Jabberwocky garden... on and on the familiar images go, brilliantly realised by Sir John Tenniel, and I'm doing him injustice with every one I fail to mention. In his long life and career he contributed over 2000 cartoons to Punch, which he joined in 1850 (or 1851?), became chief cartoonist for in 1864, and served until 1901. He was knighted in 1893. One 1890 cartoon featured Bismarck as the pilot of a ship, being dropped ashore by the Kaiser. The caption "Dropping the pilot" became well-known as a memorable phrase. Tenniel was the son of a famous dancing master, and was self-taught in art. In 1845 he was chosen as one of the artists to decorate the new Houses of Parliament; his contribution was a fresco of Dryden's "St Cecilia". Before Alice came out in 1865, books he had illustrated included Lalla Rookh by Thomas Moore, and Aesop's Fables.
Smith of Wootton MajorHere is a difference between Tolkien and Lewis. I weep and marvel at both, at times, yet at Lewis only at certain high points, which he has captured dramatically, such as the death of King Caspian in The Silver Chair. But with Tolkien I gasp and weep not at the heights of imagery, but in the depths of belief.Lewis wrote children's stories. Tolkien walked in Faërie, and the folk he brought back to us were graver, older, wiser, merrier, more shining and more numinous than any we have ever met. It is the rarest of gifts, to make you believe, to convey you into the eternal evening and bright day of a Fairyland more terrible and more desirable than it is possible to imagine. In stories we do not go there; we catch a glimpse, a tug, a wash, of what it is like to go there. Smith of Wootton Major was published in 1967, with beautiful line illustrations by Pauline Baynes peopled with the gentle, stylised folk of medieval tapestry. It is set a little while ago, some little distance away, but reachable. And from the village of Wootton Major, famed locally for its cake, we can reach not only Wootton Minor and the outskirts of a forest, but the bournes of Elfland. Smith is the village smith, but while he was still a boy he attended the festival of good children and shared the cake, the special cake that the village cook makes once every twenty-four years. They were trinkets in it, but in his slice he found a fay-star, a little silver star that came from Faery. With this inside him he grew up with a fair voice, a shining eye, and the urge to wander in the realms beyond those we know. The elf-star upon his brow admitted him far and deep in Faery, and he saw marvels, and met and danced with the laughing Queen of Elfland. Years passed. The village went through twenty-four more years, with changes, with marriages and growing up, and the yearless Cook gives him the choice of who the elven star should pass to. And those who have the star, what do they see, where do they go? Why do I weep?
In Faery at first he walked for the most part quietly among the lesser folk and the gentler creatures in the woods and meads of fair valleys, and by the bright waters in which at night strange stars shone and at dawn the gleaming peaks of far mountains were mirrored. Some of his briefer visits he spent looking only at one tree or one flower; but later in longer journeys he had seen things of both beauty and terror that he could not clearly remember nor report to his friends, though he knew that they dwelt deep in his heart. But some things he did not forget, and they remained in his mind as wonders and mysteries that he often recalled. stained glassColoured glass is an ancient technique; the practice of making it into windows however is a product of the early Middle Ages. In fact the earliest stained glass is from Jarrow in the north of England, from before the year 850.* Others are found at Lorsch Abbey in Germany, about the same time. The oldest surviving complete window is from Augsburg, about 1080.Early windows were small and based on the roundel, which was a round space large enough to contain a single scene, with a small amount of decoration around it. These developed into medallions, a large round scene with a lot of smaller scenes radially around it. The apex of the development of this style was the rose window, dominating an entire side of a cathedral. The invention of the flying buttress in the early 1100s allowed cathedral walls to be supported externally, so they did not need to be so thick. This allowed them to be pierced with windows. Round windows gave way to huge space-filling lancet windows, running up and down a side, and allowing for huge figures to be portrayed. One of the earliest major stained glass works was in the west face of Chartres cathedral, from around 1140, which has a Jesse tree in which blue predominates. From the early thirteenth century large standing figures in the upper gallery or clerestory replace medallions. The cathedral is now very open and full of light. Windows served the triple function of lighting, of being an inspiring and beautiful blaze of colour, and of teaching the illiterate by their illustration of Bible stories. Early stained glass was composed of pieces of coloured glass in simple colours, caused by fusion of metals when the glass was made (iron caused green, gold caused pink, etc.). These were cut or broken up and fitted together on a template, with space left for the lead between them. The assemblage was fired to fuse it together. Later, colours became more complicated, and in the high Renaissance they took to painting designs on glass instead of piecing single-coloured chunks together. This meant that by the mid 1400s the art was dead, or at least not as vibrant and interesting as before. Colours in glass stay pure because they're metal fused into its nature. So painting over it is missing the plot completely. In England, stained glass between 1500 and 1900 is of negligible interest. It was eventually reduced to the painting of coats of arms on plain glass, and in the Victorian period it was hideously fussy scenes full of saints, darker colours, and complicated sentimental arrangements. Between 1900 and 1920 a new revival in design came about, and most stained glass since then is worth looking at. The lead traditionally used was stable and uncorroded because it had impurities (antimony, copper, silver). It lasted forever. Modern refining methods removed these, with the result that the lead framework fell apart within a few decades, until it was realised the impurities had been refined out of it and needed to be put back. Most cathedrals in Europe have stained glass, with Chartres and Sainte-Chapelle being notable examples. In England a lot of was destroyed in Cromwell's iconoclasm, but Canterbury and the small town (once a very prosperous wool town) of Fairford are among the best. nevermind_me tells me those at Jarrow date from about 680. My own brief researches confused me just enough that I don't want to assert anything too definite about these dates and priorities. Sur une morteOne of the cruellest, and most misguided, poems ever written. The poet Alfred de Musset was one of many who attended the Paris salons of, and inevitably fell in love with, the extraordinary Princess Cristina di Belgiojoso (1808-1871). She was a striking, dark-eyed and dark-haired, pale-skinned beauty, whose suites were always in sombre hues to set off her own pale and dark. There gathered the luminaries of mid-nineteenth-century Paris, such as Balzac, Liszt, and Heinrich Heine. Many tried to win her favours; few or none succeeded. She was as intelligent as any of them; and she was a hero of the 1848 revolutions in Italy, running a nursing corps in the thick of battle in Rome before Florence Nightingale began. She deserves a large node of her own, but for now it suffices to say that Musset cast his heart at her feet, was received as a friend and refused as a lover, and in his agonies wrote this poem.Everyone knew who the poem meant. Musset quickly repented, and (as I recall, which might be incorrectly) tried in vain to recall it from the press. It was published in the Revue des deux mondes on 1 October 1842. It agonised him; and she forgave him. Here is my unpolished translation.
Sur une morte Qui dort dans la sombre chapelle Où Michel-Ange a fait son lit, Immobile peut être belle.
She was beautiful, if the NightElle était bonne, s'il suffit Qu'en passant la main s'ouvre et donne, Sans que Dieu n'ait rien vu, rien dit, Si l'or sans pitié fait l'aumône.
She was good, if it's enoughElle pensait, si le vain bruit D'une voix douce et cadencée, Comme le ruisseau qui gémit Peut faire croire à la pensée.
She thought, if the idle noiseElle priait, si deux beaux yeux, Tantôt s'attachant à la terre, Tantôt se levant vers les cieux, Peuvent s'appeler la Prière.
She prayed, if two beautiful eyes,Elle aurait souri, si la fleur Qui ne s'est point épanoui Pouvait s'ouvrir à la fraicheur Du vent qui passe et qui l'oublie.
She would have smiled, if the flowerElle aurait pleuré si sa main, Sur son cœur froidement posée, Eût jamais, dans l'argile humain, Senti la céleste rosée.
She would have wept if her hand,Elle aurait aimé, si l'orgueil Pareil à la lampe inutile Qu'on allume près d'un cercueil, N'eût veillé sur son cœur stérile.
She would have loved, if prideElle est morte, et n'a point vécu. Elle faisait semblant de vivre. De ses mains est tombé le livre Dans lequel elle n'a rien lu.
She is dead, and hasn't lived at all. The Bone PeopleKeri Hulme's extraordinary first novel The Bone People deservedly won the Booker Prize in 1985; since then she has not written a lot (some poetry and short stories), and as far as I know has not followed up with a second novel. This might be because the novel concerns her herself so closely. The very unusual heroine Kerewin Holmes fits Keri Hulme down to such details as her part Scottish and part Maori ancestry, and the fact that she built her own home, and I'd be willing to guess more of the stranger propensities of Kerewin.In the novel, Kerewin (also known as Kere) has built a tower, with her own hands, for her own pleasure, on her own land on the South Island or New Zealand, and fitted it with a voluminous library, and with whatever luxurious fittings she needs to hold her collection of jade, her staggering quantities of all kinds of alcohol, among other fine things she enjoys. She is a loner, very much a loner, having divorced herself from her whole family and renounced the company of the world. She gathers shellfish, she goes out in her boat to catch the finny kind, and she takes them back to consult cookbooks on how to do them best; as she does this she plays her guitar and drinks. Having won a lottery and invested well, this is all she ever needs to do. She drinks a lot. She used to paint and draw, and now has lost whatever it was that gave her that power. In this solitary world, interested only in her aesthetic pursuits, but pained by the absence of her own creation, and free of human contact, she remains; until one day a small urchin child enters her tower. She would throw it out: she has no kindness to the brat, but it's raining, and the brat has hurt its foot, so she lets it stay a little while. From a tag around its neck she learns its name (Simon), who to contact (one Joseph Gillayley), and that the boy Simon is a mute. From this the central relationship of these three begins. Simon's history is never resolved, though Kerewin researches it and gets a little further than Joe had done when he had first found the boy. At an early age, three perhaps, the blond Simon had been washed up after a shipwreck that killed two adults. In the book we hear or sense his tormented recollections, without becoming certain what happened; and we learn a little of what made him autistic, wayward, independent, and with this strangely trusting. Joe Gillayley is Maori, and he and his wife took in this Pakeha child and brought him up as their own. Joe's wife is gone now, dead, and Simon is all Joe has, and Joe is all Simon has. Until they meet the mysterious lady who lives in the tower. Kere doesn't want ties, but they both want someone like her. It's sort of a love story. What I've written so far is the plot and background as they unfold early on. The long story after that is expanding on their relationships, as they go on holiday together, then go their separate ways. The secrets behind the love between Joe and Simon, the way each of the trio in their own way passes close to death, and the way the Maori powers living within the land have an ancient purpose. The Maori myth of the colonisation of Aotearoa by great canoes only impinges a little on the story (and the Bone People of the title only obliquely explained): she could have written a similar book without it, on isolation and child abuse and trust, but the style of writing is full of myth and song and magic and dream, a compellingly literary style of great originality and exhilarating power. I was quite bowled over when I first read The Bone People many years ago and it immediately became one of my favourite books. Revisiting it, my impression is the same: a masterwork quite unlike any other.
The Double Life of VéroniqueA film by Krzysztof Kieślowski, starring Irène Jacob as two people whose lives touch tangentially: a Polish singer Weronika and a French Véronique. One dies on stage during a performance; her existence is revealed to the other accidentally in a photograph, taken from the window of a tourist bus. They never met or spoke but came that close.Like several Kieślowski films, it has a haunting score by Zbigniew Preisner. Ouroboros has summed it up well below, so I don't know quite how to expand to my E1 writeup. I love Kieślowski's light and shade, the relaxed way he moves around people, and I have nothing but pleasant memories of La Double Vie de Véronique. Watching Irène Jacob having sex is rather delicious, and the puppetmaster lover of the second Véronique is a very taking young man. Lots of dimly lit naked flesh as he takes her from behind. *sigh* I'm sure there were other good scenes in it too. The Last ManA futuristic novel by Mary Shelley, published in 1826, a forerunner of science fiction. She is best known as the creator of Frankenstein, and The Last Man is not as good in literary quality, but is still fascinating.This is set in England in the distant future: I forget the year, but I think it's about 1972. The last King of England abdicates, and his friend is installed as Protector of the new republic. The king adopts the (prophetic) title of Earl of Windsor. (The Shelleys had a house on the edge of Windsor Great Park in the time they were living in England.) The gentle, saintly king, originally a foundling until his true identity was discovered, was based on Mary's late husband, the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley; while the vigorous, dynamic Protector was based on Byron. Mary cast herself as the Earl's (male) friend. A great plague descends on the world, and all the world's population gradually die off. The three friends go on a quest into Europe: the Turks are still occupying Constantinople, and the Byron figure is still trying to help the Greeks free it. Eventually, everyone dies of the plague. The tale is recorded on a few leaves in a Sibyl's cave. (This annoyed the hell out of me when I kept asking myself how many leaves were there altogether, and only at the end realized she just meant pages!) One amusing thing is the striking "science fiction" device of high-speed balloons. They can travel from Windsor to Edinburgh in the astonishing time of (if I recall right) thirty-six hours. The balloons are propelled by giant wings, with feathers, flapping up and down.
The Silver Chair'You would not have called to me unless I had been calling to you,' said the Lion.The Silver Chair is I think the darkest of C.S. Lewis's Narnia series, with an accumulation of disturbing things in it, images which do not go away with any resolution at the end. We came to know Prince Caspian as the eager, brave, occasionally haughty lad in the book bearing his name, then as the strapping new king leading an expedition in The Voyage of the 'Dawn Treader'. So it is almost heartbreaking to see him in extreme old age, on the point of death. He does not speak in the book, he appears briefly at the beginning and the end, and while he is away Narnia is a land without a king, or under the Arthurian gloom of a wounded king. This gloom is doubly, triply, and quadruply enforced, as Jill Pole and Eustace Scrubb find that their adventure takes them away from bright Narnia to the giant-lands in the far north, then to endless caverns deep under the giant-lands, then into dealing with the accursed enchantment of the Prince. What are your fears? Darkness? Burial? Drowning? Heights? Starvation? Serpents, beasts, giants, the deep, storms, cannibalism, dreams, bullying, annihilation, lies, deception, slavery, failure? All are here. Jill and Eustace, bullied at an unlovely school called Experiment House, are transported to Aslan's world, and Aslan gives them four infallible signs by which to seek Prince Rilian, son of King Caspian X. They must travel northward out of Narnia into the rugged giant-lands, first the Ettinsmoor where the dumb and hulking giants live, then the Castle of Harfang where ugly but courteous giants live, built near the ruins of an ancient Giantish city. With them is the pessimistic, mournful, but ultimately brave and no-nonsense creature Puddleglum the Marsh-wiggle, their guide from the marshes that form northernmost Narnia. Jill is new to Narnia but Eustace had been in that world before, on board the Dawn Treader, in company with the young King Caspian. Near the world's uttermost end, Caspian had met the daughter of Ramandu, a star, and she was to become his queen. Years later this queen was slain by a great green serpent, and the young knight Rilian in seeking to avenge her had fallen under the spell of a green-clad witch. And so he had disappeared. Escaping from the giant house when they find what's in store for them, they fall deep underground, into a world of gloomy subterranean creatures. These gnomes or Earthmen take them past enchanted caves of sleeping creatures, through the cathedral-like cavern where Father Time himself sleeps until the end of the world, and on to a sunless sea.
And the worst thing about is was that you began to feel as if you had always lived on that ship, in that darkness, and to wonder whether sun and blue skies and wind and birds had not been only a dream.Over and over the transience of our grip on reality is brought out. In the giants' land came the first of the scenes that haunts me, a giantish stone bridge so high that eagles pass under it, and by it they had met a Lady of the Green Kirtle and a Black Knight. Now in the city of the Underworld they meet the Knight openly, foolish and shallow. But in the night they discover his terrible secret, and confront the green Lady. Aslan the Lion gave them four signs. They muffed three of them, and in the worst part of the confrontation with the enchanted Knight they are given the fourth, and realise they have to act upon it, even if it means their deaths. Now the Lady tries to enchant them, telling them their ideas of sun and lion are foolish dreams, pale fabrications spun out from the only true reality, the yellow lamp and domestic cat of this bleak, drear, pitiless prison of an underworld. But behind the transience of our grip, is reality, deny it or forget it how we will. The silver chair is the witch's instrument of imprisonment for the young prince. With the overthrow of the witch her kingdom falls, the floodwaters rise up to consume it and drown them all, but her slaves are free, and the lugubrious Gnomes now gleefully let off fireworks and jump into their own far deeper home, a brilliantly blazing abyss of fire, called Bism, radiant like stained glass and where gold and jewels are living, drinkable things. Rilian returns to Narnia in the moonlight and snow, the gnomes rejoice in Bism, the children return to clean up their school with the courage they have gained, and King Caspian returns to his eternal home with Aslan. First published 1953 by Geoffrey Bles. Illustrated by Pauline Baynes. Three ColoursA trilogy of films (Trois couleurs) by Krzysztof Kieślowski, loosely inspired by the French tricolor and the ideas of liberty, fraternity, and equality. Very loosely, actually: after seeing them all you have to stare very hard at your memories to see how the word fits in. They are tangentially connected to each other, except at the end of Red, where their separate stories come together. These are Kieślowski's most popular and accessible works, and very beautiful to watch (well, I could skip White, but the other two are both among my favourite films).Remember this is the French tricolor, so it goes Blue-White-Red. It starts with Blue. They are in French and Polish. In Blue, Juliette Binoche plays the wife of a great composer Patrice de Courcy suddenly killed in a car accident. At first she tries to commit suicide in the hospital where she is recovering, but gradually she decides to seek her liberty, a new life away from their old home. She doesn't want anyone from the past following her, and she doesn't want to get involved with the people around her in her new block of flats; but she does find herself befriending a sad exotic dancer. Also, there is the matter of what to do with the sketches of her husband's powerful but incomplete grand oratorio for European union (music actually by Zbigniew Preisner). White is a comedy set mainly in Poland, with Julie Delpy as the disenchanted lover of a hairdresser with ideas of advancement. He fakes his own death to try to win her back, and this is also useful in the dodgy business dealings he makes with the help of a fellow Pole met back in Paris, where it starts. They try to work their way through the country's emerging capitalism. In Red, Irène Jacob confronts a cynical judge (Jean-Louis Trintignant) amusing himself by monitoring his neighbours' phone calls. Originally calling only to return his poor dog, which she had knocked down and taken to a vet, she challenges him over his cruel hobby. They discuss the world over wine. Her own love life is made unhappy by a chance discovery.
Tristram ShandyA quite extraordinary book, published in nine volumes between 1759 and 1767, virtually impossible to describe in any sensible way. The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, to give it its full title, is a comic novel by Laurence Sterne, or rather, a parody of a novel, which then was a new art form.Most novels are connected sequences of events in regular narrative order, with a beginning, a middle, and so on. Tristram Shandy constantly overturns every expectation and convention. Yet, remarkably, amid Sterne's fun and games, it contains some of the most vivid and best liked characters in literature. Tristram, son of Walter Shandy of Shandy Hall, sets out to write his life story. He tries to start at the beginning, with his birth, but finds himself so overcome with interruptions and diversions in the tale that whole volumes go by before he gets round to it, and he is writing events slower than they occurred, so he can never finish. The other characters include his Uncle Toby, a very kindly, gentle, and lovable old soldier, who has a bee in his bonnet about fortification, and Toby's manservant Corporal Trim, who is his faithful companion in all his fantasies. There is Yorick the parson, Obadiah the servant, Doctor Slop who is eventually to deliver Tristram, and the Widow Wadman, who sets her cap at Uncle Toby. There are, it is true, snatches of narrative that can be glimpsed briefly through the book, like the courtship of Uncle Toby and the widow, and his curious groin wound, but most of it is Tristram's exclamations, stories cut short, and re-started over and over again, and thoughts close to stream of consciousness form. Typographically, it is bizarre, and is constantly undermining the normal invisibility of the book. He uses CAPITALS, ************, asterisks, dashes and ---- --- Lots of dashes! -- Hey there! What? You want more dashes --- why -- Chapters can be a few lines long. Two consecutive chapters of Volume IX are blank. When Yorick dies there's a black page. Another page is hand marbled, yes that's right --- marbled, coloured, by hand. ******************* ************** ********** *************** *********** ******************* ********** ********* ******** ******* *************** !!!! There's a blank page for you to draw a picture of Widow Wadham. There are odd squiggles for diagrams. Page numbers get rearranged. One chapter is missing with the consequence that recto/verso numbering goes wrong. As he's fleeing from Death, somewhere in France he tells the story of an abbess and a novice who are in a mule cart when ther muleteer goes off to sample the delights of a local inn, and they are stuck by themselves with night drawing in, and the mules absolutely refusing to move. The novice reveals that she knows two words that are guaranteed to get mules moving, but it is grievously sinful to say them. The abbess, on learning of this, advises that there is no sin in saying the syllable fou and no sin in saying ter, so if one keeps saying fou and the other keeps saying ter, and they alternate, they can do it without harm to their souls. Likewise one can say bou and the other ger. So they puff alternately: fu, / cker, / fu, / cker, / fu, / cker and bu, / gger, / bu, / gger... The book ends abruptly by declaring something the story of a COCK and a BULL.
Yehudi MenuhinOne of the greatest of violinists, at least when he was younger. In later years his playing quality fell off a little, but he became a great humanitarian and worked for music as an instrument of peace and understanding. George Steiner said he was "Probably the best-loved personality in the history of the performing arts." He was widely known simply as Yehudi.He was born in New York in 1916, Menuhin's parents being Russian Jews. He accepted either the English pronunciation MEN-yu-in or the Hebrew me-NOO-khin. He became a child prodigy in America, with his first public performance being in San Francisco in 1924; then went to Paris to study under the composer Georges Enesco. His Berlin and London debuts were both in 1929: in Berlin, under the conductor Bruno Walter, he played concertos by Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms. He played the Elgar concerto under the tutelage of Elgar himself in 1932. The Bartók violin sonata was written for him in 1941. His sisters Hephzibah Menuhin (1920-1981) and Yaltah Menuhin (b. 1922?) were both famous pianist who often played with him, especially Hephzibah. Two performers from other traditions he loved playing with were Ravi Shankar and Stephane Grappelli. During the war he performed many concerts for Allied soldiers, and he also gave performances for recently released prisoners. This experience led him to work for humanitarian causes for much of his life. Awarded an honorary knighthood in 1965. Lived in Britain for many years, including in Highgate, where he was associated with Highgate School's noted musical tradition, and was director of the Bath music festival and chamber orchestra from 1959 to 1968. He took British nationality in 1985 (enabling him to be called Sir Yehudi), and was created Lord Menuhin in 1993. He died in Berlin on 12 March 1999.
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© JudyT 1999-2003.
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