When my daughter was very young, I was looking for some good kid-friendly music that would suit us both. One of my friends suggested getting a CD of the HMS Pinafore, Gilbert and Sullivan’s opera. It didn’t really click with my daughter then, but I pulled it back out last month and we have been listening to it in the kitchen while cooking. I especially enjoy the sly political satire:
I grew so rich that I was sent
By a pocket borough into Parliament.
I always voted at my party’s call,
And I never thought of thinking for myself at all.
I thought so little, they rewarded me
By making me the Ruler of the Queen’s Navee!
CHORUS. — He thought so little, etc.
Of course, with lyrics like that jumping out at me, completely applicable to the current occupant of the White House, and perhaps to his party in general, I had to go get the whole libretto, which is impossible to decode from the audio alone. And I needed the context. Why would they write this in 1878? Were they clairvoyant, or more likely, do we have the same politicians as they did, perhaps preserved with a fine waxy coating? I wanted to know all about how and why this opera came to be.
Here are the complete lyrics to that song:
SONG – SIR JOSEPH
When I was a lad I served a term
As office boy to an Attorney’s firm.
I cleaned the windows and I swept the floor,
And I polished up the handle of the big front door.
I polished up that handle so carefullee
That now I am the Ruler of the Queen’s Navee!
CHORUS. — He polished, etc.
As office boy I made such a mark
That they gave me the post of a junior clerk.
I served the writs with a smile so bland,
And I copied all the letters in a big round hand–
I copied all the letters in a hand so free,
That now I am the Ruler of the Queen’s Navee!
CHORUS. — He copied, etc.
In serving writs I made such a name
That an articled clerk I soon became;
I wore clean collars and a brand-new suit
For the pass examination at the Institute,
And that pass examination did so well for me,
That now I am the Ruler of the Queen’s Navee!
CHORUS. — And that pass examination, etc.
Of legal knowledge I acquired such a grip
That they took me into the partnership.
And that junior partnership, I ween,
Was the only ship that I ever had seen.
But that kind of ship so suited me,
That now I am the Ruler of the Queen’s Navee!
CHORUS. — But that kind, etc.
I grew so rich that I was sent
By a pocket borough into Parliament.
I always voted at my party’s call,
And I never thought of thinking for myself at all.
I thought so little, they rewarded me
By making me the Ruler of the Queen’s Navee!
CHORUS. — He thought so little, etc.
Now landsmen all, whoever you may be,
If you want to rise to the top of the tree,
If your soul isn’t fettered to an office stool,
Be careful to be guided by this golden rule–
Stick close to your desks and never go to sea,
And you all may be rulers of the Queen’s Navee!
And so, now that I knew the lyrics, I had to know if they were just general or if there was some context behind them, a particular person that would inspire such a song. Indeed, it turns out that Pinafore and Sir Joseph was the 1878 version of The Daily Show’s pokes at our current leaders. In this case, they were skewering William Henry Smith, who became First Lord of the Admiralty in 1877, despite having no experience at sea. The reference was so obvious that he was called “Pinafore Smith” during his three years at the post. Pinafore was not the first to jeer him; one of the lines
SIR JOSEPH. But when the breezes blow,
I generally go below,
And seek the seclusion that a cabin grants;
was inspired by a political cartoon a few months before HMS Pinafore debuted.
When I have come to think of an opera as something written hundreds of years before it is performed, it is almost scandalous to imagine one mocking a contemporary figure, written about current events. It shakes me out of my normal patterns to think of the time when this work was brand new, written and rewritten with the inspirations still in power.
So, what does this have to do with teaching the arts?
I’d never heard of William Henry Smith before following this line from Pinafore; in the process of wanting to know more about the opera and what inspired it, I followed all kinds of interesting tracks via Google, picking up knowledge of history that I hadn’t known I was missing. I wanted to know about all the in-jokes. I was reminded of how our time is similar and yet different to earlier eras: we’ve come to prefer more realistic dramas, but we still love skewering allusions to pompous public figures.
(By the way, I’m still wondering about:
But see, Sir Joseph’s
barge approaches, manned by twelve trusty oarsmen and accompanied by the admiring crowd of sisters, cousins, and aunts that attend him wherever he goes.
Are the Sisters, Cousins, and Aunts just a conceit to get a female chorus into the piece, or is there another inside joke that I’m missing?)
I attended a technical university, but to the surprise of most people, we were required to study a considerable amount of liberal arts. I sang soprano in the women’s choral group, originally just for the social benefit of hanging out with other women. Over time I found that performing a work gave me new insight and new depth into it. When I began, I was annoyed that all the holiday music was religious… and eventually, I realized that so many classical choral works are religious because the reality of the time was that the church, or people trying to look good with respect to the church, were the major patrons of musicians. I came to appreciate this music in its historical context rather than trying to apply the lyrics literally to my modern existence. Performing the music was different than merely listening to it. And the music made me hungry to understand its history.
I took a class, Survey of Drama, where for a year we read a new play every week. Because there were no essays, it was set up as a pass/fail course and not usable to meet the literature requirements; it was regarded as easy units. But as it turned out, I loved it, and it was one of the more influential humanities classes I took. We read the earliest extant plays and watched drama change in fashion and sophistication. We read plays innovative in their time because they were the first known occasion of action taking place off stage. They weren’t all necessarily “great,” but with the context of time and history, they gained more meaning than as individual works. We read a Shakespeare that was going to be performed on campus, and the professor arranged for us to attend. That was perhaps the first time where I really understood the appeal of Shakespearean plays. They need the time, and the chance to digest the writing more than once, to experience it in more than one dimension. And while I’d seen some of them as movies, there is a different feel to a live performance – the clarity that there are real people creating this experience, living this bit of literature – that a movie does not duplicate.
And so that brings me to this weekend, where Grandma treated my daughter (and me) to a performance of The Nutcracker. Although it is traditional, and although my father in particular is a classical music person, I had never actually been to The Nutcracker, or any serious live ballet, before. My daughter is 7, has done three years of ballet, really enjoys it, and has a gift for it. Not the Prima Ballerina gift, I don’t think, but she naturally has a beautiful line and regularly invents her own dances. She is graceful and fun to watch. So, she and I have been to three years’ worth of rehearsals and performances, where I’ve watched three year olds remarkably hit synchronization; watched 11 year olds execute serious choreography; watched their teachers do their own independent dances. I’ve been behind the scenes fixing hair, doing quick costume changes, watching for cues and hearing the same music again and again. (Some of it good, some of it awful!) I have not performed ballet myself, but I have been a part of the blood, sweat, tears, mishaps, and triumphs as real people bring a dance to the stage.
It was a lovely performance. I can imagine True Connoisseurs picking this medium-town performance apart. But, I enjoyed every minute, as a spectator and through a bit of my performer’s eyes. I was struck by the realization that when everyone was on stage, that between the dancers and the musicians and the stagecraft, around 100 people had to each do their part, and do it just right, or the whole thing would fail, right then. One hundred people, amateurs and professionals, performers and teachers and students, putting this performance together for the love of the performance, working hard, all able to count on each other. The dancers all in sync. The musicians all together. And they created this performance out of nothing, before our eyes.
I watched young girls, only a bit older than my daughter, executing the moves that she has learned, but with more confidence, more brilliance, more surety, and a tear came to my eyes. Although I did not know these girls, I could remember the excitement from my daughter the first weeks when she learned to change her fifths accurately with a jump, and I thought how wonderful it was to see that skill matured in a proud 12-year-old. I watched the older dancers and marveled at all the choreography that they had learned and internalized for so many separate pieces. While I appreciated the beauty of the whole dance, I could also feel their internal thoughts of each move, each spot, each cue, and the tension of remembering your own part and executing it to the best of your ability.
My daughter’s eyes were large and shining. She had seen what she and her friends could do, and she had seen the Baryshnikov DVD. She has seen a PBS series, Toy Castle, which uses dancers. But never had she seen anything quite like this. She was rapt with attention, and I could feel the connections snapping into her brain: “Ohhh! THIS is what we were learning to do! THIS is what it is all about.” She had a sudden shyness that for her means that she is deeply impressed. During the intermission and after we left, she did shy little dances, playing out some of the moves the hallway, in her ballet hair and party dress and sneakers. And she was clearly exhausted with the effort of taking it all in.
To perform a piece like this is to live it. It becomes more than a bit of pleasant music you hear while shopping: the internal rhythms and structures and themes can only really be discerned through repeated listenings. The different instruments are revealed as individual lines that come together in the tapestry of the whole. The costumes are a whole discipline of expertise, choosing a fabric for the mice that will glisten in the dusky lighting, yet move with the dancers, and give the effect of magical mice. I think: my goodness – the act of composing such a score, something that would complement the dancers and tell the story – it is an amazing accomplishment. This is not something I feel when listening to The Sugar Plum Fairy’s theme in an elevator. Every element on stage has been carefully created, in a way that is intended to be invisible to the audience. And yet, I personally cannot fully appreciate a work until I have been privy to all those details, seen them in the rough and polished until they shine.
In education, frequently ‘the arts’ are the first things jettisoned when budgets and time are tight, as they always are. Performances are a distraction from the real work of learning literature and mathematics, we think. No one is testing mouse-costuming for No Child Left Behind.
And yet. There is no better way to understand the literature of Shakespeare or any playwright than by performing it, saying the lines again and again until you are ready to present them to an audience. There is no better way to learn mathematics than by applying it, whether that is in set building or sewing costumes or discovering the patterns in a choreographed movement or a piece of music. There is no better way to learn history than to temporarily live it, to understand what people hundreds or thousands of years ago had on their minds and how they dressed and how they expressed themselves. The skills needed to do these things naturally create an interest in the underlying academics, making it possible for students who are not inspired by a printed page alone to find purpose in the tasks before them each day in school.
The arts give us a connection to our history, to our discovery as a species and a people of all the things that we do today without effort, that give us an understanding for how the world works as it does. Knowing the structure of the solar system is more interesting when you realize that once it was a daring, dangerous, dissonant idea to the powers that be, and the hard work and long hours that went into the final conclusion that the Earth and other planets revolved around the Sun.
And so, I am pleased to be reminded that biting political satire was as in fashion in 1878 as it shall be in 2008. And, I will keep these lessons in my own heart as I attend the school winter concert next week. Finally, I pledge to support our little school in keeping mouse-costuming and the like as part of our curriculum. (Maybe I should lobby to have it added to the state exams. “When creating a form-fitting dance costume, what is an appropriate seam allowance?”)
