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“THE INEXTINGUISHABLE”

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I’ve just listened to a recent recording of Carl Nielsen’s Fourth Symphony by The Hallé Orchestra conducted by Sir Mark Elder. Nielsen named it “The Inextinguishable” and gave us to understand that, in a very broad way, it’s about the spirit of humanity surviving whatever is thrown at it.

I’ve always liked this symphony since the first time I heard it on a recording by the Cincinnati Symphony long long ago. (I think I’ve heard it only once in a concert hall, I’m sorry to say.) Now, “like” is the wrong word, of course. I don’t exactly like being battered about and whipsawed and overwhelmed by dissonant battles between two sets of timpani. It might be better to say that I’ve always been captured by the piece. It takes command of my attention and never turns it loose.

There are elements of it, to be sure, that are quite pleasing to the ear, even occasionally quite lovely. And I think they’re essential to the work’s power, just as they’re essential to any account of human life. But what makes all the violence of the symphony so riveting—at least to me?

One clue comes from the coincidence that I’m currently re-reading Euripides’ Medea to accompany my friend Nancy through it. She is gamely tangling with the complexities of Attic tragedy, its complex constructions, specialized vocabulary, and allusive style—a challenging job for someone whose first exposure to ancient Greek was in terms of the New Testament. And, I confess, it’s been challenging for me, too. But then it has been more than fifty years since I first read it in an undergraduate Greek course.

But there is something mysteriously powerful about reading Greek tragedy in Greek, something no translation that I have encountered quite manages to convey. The performances of Greek tragedy I’ve seen have also missed it. The problem seems to be that a Greek tragedy starts at such a peak of crisis and emotion that there is no place for modern actors, used to more realist styles, to go from there. The first scene is already fraught and well before the play is over my emotions are exhausted and increasingly unresponsive.

So what makes a Greek tragedy so powerful when read in Greek? I often think one vital component is that the tragic course of events is presented in a poetic speech that was distinct from everyday language and so created a sphere of action that was not itself realistic but aimed at going deeper than realism. In some ways that may sound like modern Surrealism, but it’s not at all the same. It doesn’t replace the everyday world with one full of private symbols (melting watches and so forth); it just gives you, as it were, a different set of eyeglasses with which to view it. Another vital component is the poet’s capacity and willingness to evoke great beauty even in the context of the tragic action. Somehow, in the face of disaster, the poetry manages to give us reminders of beauty, coherence, hope, endurance.

Elder’s interpretation of “The Inextinguishable” is certainly among the best I have heard, possibly the very best. Disparate elements—the struggling charm of the allegretto, the grimness of the adagio, the hopeful theme of the finale, the brutal interruptions, the approach to chaos, the final reassertion of the human will to continue despite it all—all stand alongside one another without apology and therefore interpret one another and limit one another.

Julian Haylock, who wrote the liner notes for this recording describes the ending as “a blaze of E major that, far from being an exultant triumph, sounds as though it is pounding the music into submission.” Actually, in this performance, not quite. “Pounding” suggests desperation. There is a strength in the E major intervention that belies that. Perhaps we should be desperate after so many reminders of human frailty, but we are not. We’ve been reminded that there is something more beneath the surface, that there is a beauty and wonder in human life, even when it is under enormous pressure. The conclusion, as a result, is not merely defiant. It is, as Nielsen christened it, “inextinguishable.”

“HEAD OF PASSES”

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In April, I saw the most impressive play I have seen in many years: Tarell Alvin McCraney’s Head of Passes. The production at The Berkeley Rep did a distinguished job of staging—such a lot of water that, even sitting high up in the theater, I could not help feeling a little at risk. But it was the acting and the play itself that made the evening truly memorable. I am still mulling it over.

The action on stage occurs over a single day and night before and during the passage of a hurricane. The Louisiana town for which the play is named lies in a particularly vulnerable place, but the protagonist, Shelah (played with splendid conviction by Cheryl Lynn Bruce), despite urging from her oldest son and her physician, refuses to be evacuated, and we wind up experiencing the violence of the storm along with her.

That alone contains the makings of a good drama, but this is more. In some ways, it is the thoroughly modern offspring of a fifth-century Greek tragedy with its compressed time and location, the dread news arriving by messenger, the terrible fall of a person who has deep claims on our respect.

One could also see the play as a reworking of the Book of Job—or rather of its first few chapters, which narrate Job’s loss of family and wealth. From this point onward, however, it moves in a different direction. Rather than defending her innocence like Job, Shelah digs deep into her conscience to accuse herself of a very human array of failings. She doesn’t need her equivalent of Job’s comforters to make the point of her guilt (though some of them do prod her along). She takes up the task herself.

And, yet, there is a sense in which her guilt makes no difference. She is a human being struggling against long odds to make and sustain a life—and failing, sometimes at critical points. But she is no more the chief of sinners than she is a saint. It is impossible to see the storm’s mortal assault as anything like just punishment.

Unlike Job, Shelah gets no face to face confrontation with God at the end. Although the violence of the storm and its eerie passing come close to Job’s whirlwind, no audible voice speaks out of it. The play doesn’t merely turn its back, however, on the transcendent or resign itself to complete meaninglessness in human life. The strange and powerful figure of The Angel, mimed (one might almost say “danced”) by Sullivan Jones, somehow combines the challenging role of Satan, the protective role of a guardian angel, and the threatening role of the angel of death. The character is impossible to decipher exactly, though strongly engaged with the action.

In other words, the divine remains as inscrutable in the play as in the Book of Job itself. Inscrutable, above all, to Shelah, who is unaware of The Angel’s presence. Only the audience sees him. We are allowed to spin out our thoughts and theories about who he is and how he is involved. Shelah can only present her case to God in what mostly seems like a one-sided conversation.

Perhaps I appeal to Job too much here, for the play is by no means simply a retelling or recasting of the ancient work—or, for that matter, a revival of Attic tragedy. It is a new creation shaped out of the same age-old realities of suffering as its earlier counterparts—realities no less familiar now than two or three thousand years ago.

The Berkeley Rep production was excellent throughout. There were no weak performances. The pacing was perfect. It was already near the end of its run when I saw it. But this is a play that deserves to be repeated many times. When you get a chance, go see it.