In 1585, William Shakespeare, resident of Stratford in Warwickshire, England was 21 years old.  He had been married for three years and had three children.  The first, Susanna, was born six months after her parents’ hastily arranged wedding.  The second and third, Hamnet and Judith, were twins, baptized in February 1585.

In 1592, William’s character and reputation were attacked in a pamphlet written by a dying man, Robert Greene, a writer active in the London theater.  His charge:

[T]here is an upstart crow, beautified with our feathers, that with his Tiger’s heart wrapt in a player’s hide, supposes he is as well able to bombast out a blank verse as the best of you; and being an absolute Johannes Factotum, is in his own conceit the only Shake-scene in a country.

“Shake-scene” is an obvious reference to Shakespeare.  The “tiger’s heart” business is a variation on a line from Henry VI, Part Three: “O tiger’s heart wrapt in a woman’s hide!”  It was William Shakespeare in Greene’s cross-hairs.

Greene died with his pamphlet in manuscript.  His friend Henry Chettle prepared the text for the printer and supervised its publication.  After the pamphlet was published, Chettle received complaints from Christopher Marlowe and William Shakespeare, each of whom felt he had been treated unfairly by Greene.  Chettle published his defense.  He had not been acquainted with either of them, and as for Marlowe “I care not if I never be.”  Shakespeare may have visited Chettle in person to state his case.  Chettle’s reaction:

[M]yself have seen his demeanor no less civil than he excellent in the quality he professes. Besides, divers of worship have reported his uprightness of dealing, which argues his honesty, and his facetious grace in writing that approves his art.

“Divers of worship” refers to people of rank, persons of influence.  When Chettle asked around about this Shakespeare fellow, he found that the man was well thought of both for his character and his skill as an actor and writer.

In the course of seven years, the Stratford townsman had become a part of the London theater scene, recognized for his art by his colleagues and for his character by “divers of worship”.  How this came about is a profound mystery.

Some of the early plays were written during those seven years, although experts disagree on the dates and the order of these early works.  One scholar[1] says that both The Comedy of Errors and Love’s Labor’s Lost could date from as early as 1588 (or as late as 1593 for Comedy and 1594 for LLL).  Others think the earliest play – possibly Henry VI, Part Two — might be as late as 1591[2].

The timing here is delicate.  It’s hard to imagine that a lad from Stratford arrives in London – how did he travel? — walks into a theater and starts working as a playwright.  But if the earliest play was finished and on the stage by 1588, and if William stayed in Stratford until the twins were toddling about the house, there would not have been time for much of an apprenticeship in the theater.

On the other hand, you have to allow enough time for his reputation as “the only Shake-scene in a country” to have reached Robert Greene.  Greene died in September 1592.  Shakespeare’s reputation must have been established well before then to give Greene something to be annoyed about (not that it took a lot).

The puzzle over timing sits inside the mystery of the creation of the plays and poems.  The puzzle, if not the mystery, is taken on in a very entertaining way by the TV show “Will” airing on TNT.

The writers solve the timing puzzle by having Shakespeare arrive in London in 1589 with a play already written.  He walks into James Burbage’s theatre at a moment of crisis.  Burbage has advertised a new play by Christopher Marlowe to open next day.  Marlowe has double-crossed Burbage by signing an exclusive contract with Phillip Henslowe, Burbage’s rival. There is no play.  Burbage will be ruined.  (Incidentally, all of the names are of historical persons who were active in the Elizabethan theater and were associates in one way or another of William Shakespeare.)

Will announces that he has a play to offer.  After the obligatory round of “Who are you?” bellowing, Burbage reads the script and decides that he can make something of it.  After a massive re-write, with Burbage’s beautiful daughter Alice[3] acting as Will’s scribe, the play, Edward III, is offered to the public.

Ironies abound.  The play is written – at least in part – by William Shakespeare but is presented to the audience (in the story) as a play by Christopher Marlowe, who was a marketable commodity.  Centuries later, one theory offered by Anti-Stratfordians is that the Shakespeare canon was written by Christopher Marlowe.  Here, a Marlowe play was written by Shakespeare.

Except it wasn’t a Marlowe play.  The writers are having a little fun.  There was a play titled Edward III of unknown authorship published in 1596. It has been attributed to Shakespeare from time to time.  It was not included in the 1623 Folio but some recent scholars say it is at least partly the work of Mr. Shakespeare.

So, the TV show starts Will’s career in the theater with a play partly written by him, attributed (in TV world) to Christopher Marlowe, and in fact attributed by some scholars – possibly correctly, possibly not – to William Shakespeare.

The writers have a bit more fun with Robert Greene.  On TNT, he doesn’t wait to deliver his insults to Will posthumously.  He engages Will in a battle of wits in a tavern after the theater has closed for the night.  We can always tell who Robert Greene is because the director dresses him in green from head to toe.  He calls Will an “upstart crow “and a “Shake-scene” three years ahead of schedule.  Will’s reply establishes his reputation as a wit who can hold his own with a university graduate such as Greene.

The writers have to grapple with another problem.  This is a story about a writer. Writing is a private activity, not very dramatic.  A clever device adopted by the writers is to have characters pop in and out to provide material for Shakespeare’s development as a writer.  A heavyset neighbor appears to say “Banish plump Jack, and banish the world.”  The line will come in handy in about seven or eight years’ time when Sir John Falstaff speaks it in Henry IV, Part One.

To keep the romantic interest going, and to show that it wasn’t only men who could write, Alice Burbage, played by Olivia DeJonge, who almost ignites the TV screen every time the camera passes by, helps Will finish a line now and again.  He’s working on a future play but is stuck for a word.  “What light through yonder window . . . . . .”  He stalls.  Alice says, “breaks.”  Will: “What’s that?”  Alice: “Breaks.  What light through yonder window breaks?” Will: “Oh yes.  Very good. Thanks.”

Will has already kissed Alice and had to pull away to tell her he is married with three children.  Still, I don’t think he will be able to resist her for much longer, nor she him.

There’s another plot complication to help draw our attention away from the wretched ink-stained work of writing.  In this story, Will is a Catholic.  Catholicism was politically inflammatory in 1589.  The Spanish Armada had been blown onto the rocks in the previous year.  The issue went deeper.  Elizabeth was the daughter of Anne Boleyn, with whom Henry VIII had fathered Elizabeth while he had a wife living.  Henry’s divorce from Catherine of Aragon was not recognized outside England.  As far as the Catholic Church was concerned, Elizabeth was not a legitimate monarch because her birth was not legitimate.

There has long been speculation about Shakespeare’s faith.  In the late eighteenth century, a document was discovered that purported to be the “Spiritual Testament” of William’s father, attesting to his adherence to the Catholic Church.  Its authenticity has been questioned by experts.  Unfortunately, the document disappeared a few years after it was found.

Beyond the question of the father’s faith, some scholars see evidence of an affiliation to Rome in William Shakespeare’s last will and in some of the plays.  Samuel Schoenbaum in Shakespeare’s Lives notes the tendency to project one’s own background onto the scant facts available to us about Shakespeare’s life.  Thus, lawyers tend to believe he had read law; sailors tend to believe he was a seaman; enthusiasts for Italy think he must have traveled there, and so on.  It’s possible that the same phenomenon is at work when we ask about Shakespeare’s faith.

Elizabeth’s government took an interest in anyone openly professing the Catholic religion.  It wasn’t a crime per se to be a Catholic, but participation in a Catholic Mass was punishable by a fine.  Yet, when TNT’s Will leaves Stratford, his mother gives him two items to take with him.  One is a rosary wrapped in a thick cloth.  The other is a sealed letter addressed to a Robert Southwell, a loyal Catholic who later was tortured and martyred for his faith[4].

Carrying those two items together in England in 1589 was not a great way to extend your life expectancy.  The letter is stolen before Will can deliver it.  In the course of the robbery, the cloth-wrapped rosary falls to the pavement and opens to reveal its contents.  The thief knows that Will is a Catholic.

The thief retails the letter to Richard Topcliffe, another historical person, who served Elizabeth by torturing anyone who might do her harm, including particularly adherents of the Roman Catholic faith. (Topcliffe subjected Southwell to torture in the 1590s.  His technique was designed to leave no outward mark on the body of his victim so that he could deny the act.)

At the end of Episode Two, Topcliffe knows that a Catholic agent wants to deliver a treasonous letter to Southwell.  Therefore, the agent knows where Southwell is located, something that Topcliffe would dearly like to know.  To make matters worse, Topcliffe has reason to think that the agent is connected to Burbage’s theater.

Things are looking very dark for Will.  My working assumption for the present is that the suspense is artificial because we know that the real William Shakespeare stayed alive until 1616.  So, I am not too worried about his ability to survive.  However, he has put at risk anyone who knows his secret.  Unfortunately, he has told Alice Burbage of his faith.  I can only hope that the writers are not so heartless as to send Alice into the iron embrace of Richard Topcliffe as the means to remove the temptation that might wreck Will’s marriage vows.

I look forward to the next episode.

 

[1] Sylvan Barnet, General Editor of the Signet Classic Shakespeare.

[2] E.K. Chambers (1930) gives 1590-91 for 2 Henry VI.  Royal Shakespeare Company gives 1591 but hints that Taming of the Shrew may be earlier.

[3] The real Alice Burbage was born in 1576.  She would have been 13 when Will arrived at her father’s theater.  The Alice in the TV show is about Will’s age.

[4] He is Saint Robert Southwell as of 1970, which I am sure he finds very gratifying.

June 4, 2017 is the 75^th anniversary of the Battle of Midway, the turning point in the Pacific Theater in World War II and one of the most dramatic engagements in the history of naval warfare.

At 10:15 that morning, Admiral Nagumo Chiuchi might have taken a deep breath for the first time that day.  His fighter aircraft had just seen off the last of eight different U.S. squadrons that had launched attacks that morning against the Kido Butai, the fleet of four fleet aircraft carriers and attendant support vessels that was the core of the attacking force of the Imperial Japanese Navy (IJN).  Some 95 U.S. aircraft had taken aim at the Kido Butai.  Not a single U.S. bomb had scored a hit.

Admiral Nagumo’s morning had begun at 4:30[1] when he launched an air attack on Midway Island, some 200 miles to the southeast.  In keeping with IJN doctrine, he had sent half of his bombers to the target, keeping the other half in reserve.

Both navies employed three types of aircraft on their carriers: torpedo bombers, which delivered their bombs from low, level flight; dive bombers, which delivered their ordnance out of a dive from high altitude; and fighter aircraft, which could be used to protect friendly bombers or to fight off those of the enemy.

Nagumo had sent half of each type of bomber together with fighter cover against Midway.  His reserve torpedo bombers were armed in case any U.S. ships appeared.  His reserve dive bombers were left unarmed for the time being so that they could be armed for use against ships or land targets as the need arose.

As the first wave of Japanese planes approached Midway, they spotted U.S. planes headed the other way, toward the fleet.  Somehow, the Americans knew that the Kido Butai was in the vicinity!

The U.S. Navy had broken the Japanese naval code.  The code was changed from time to time and had been replaced with a new one on May 25, which the U.S. codebreakers were still working on.  The information the U.S. Navy (USN) needed to plan the upcoming battle was extracted from coded messages sent prior to the change in codes.

Breaking a code is not an all or nothing proposition.  U.S. codebreakers could not read every word, but they knew that Japan planned an operation against a target designated as AF.  They were nearly certain that AF was Midway, but they were not absolutely sure.  The command at Pearl Harbor used a secure underwater cable to direct Midway to send an uncoded message that Midway’s water purification system had stopped working[2].  Soon, the codebreakers were looking at intercepted IJN messages stating that AF was running out of water.  Midway was confirmed as the IJN’s objective.  IJN intelligence never questioned why Midway sent such an important message uncoded.  The deception was complete. The IJN invasion force carried barrels full of potable water.

What were four IJN fleet aircraft carriers and the massive armada supporting them doing in the middle of the Pacific Ocean on that June morning?  By the end of March 1942, the Japanese Empire faced a problem that few conquest states have had to worry about.  They had achieved all of their war aims.  Starting on December 7, 1941, the Imperial Japanese Army and Imperial Japanese Navy had experienced a run of success rare in the history of warfare.  Everything had gone their way.  During those four months, they had moved against Australia, Britain, Holland, and the United States and were now in possession of the vast island empire they had dreamed of controlling, along with impressive possessions on the mainland of Asia.

Now the need was to consolidate.  The idea was to set an enormous defensive perimeter that would start at Port Moresby in New Guinea, run through Midway, and end far to the north in the Aleutians.  (An action against the Aleutians was underway simultaneously with the Midway attack.)  The Port Moresby connection had been checked in early May 1942 at the Battle of the Coral Sea.  Admiral Yamamoto intended to renew his string of successes at Midway.

The Kido Butai was one of three IJN fleets operating in the area.  Midway was the tangible objective of the operation, but the IJN command hoped to tempt the U.S. Pacific Fleet into a decisive naval engagement that would give Japan free run of the Pacific for the foreseeable future.  The plan was for the four aircraft carriers to bomb Midway to soften up any resistance.  To the south of the Kido Butai was an invasion force that would occupy Midway after the bombers had done their work. Some 200 miles behind the Kido Butai was the IJN’s First Fleet with Admiral Yamamoto himself in command.  This force, including no fewer than ten battleships, was ready to demolish any U.S. vessels that sortied in response to the attack on Midway.

Yamamoto kept the First Fleet back as part of the lure he was holding in front of the U.S. Pacific Fleet.  The U.S. would not know its enemy’s strength until it was too late.

Throughout the morning, Admiral Nagumo had to make a series of decisions based on information that rolled in one piece at a time.  Although the outcome was disastrous for his command, it is difficult to find fault with any single decision he took that morning.  The first message came to him from the aircraft that had been sent off at 4:30 to bomb Midway.  They reported that U.S. aircraft were headed his way.  He prepared his defenses.

At 7:00 he received the report from the first wave of bombers that a second attack would be necessary to prepare the island for the invasion.  He ordered the remaining bombers to be made ready for a second attack against Midway.  That meant arming his dive bombers and removing the torpedoes from his torpedo bombers and replacing them with general purpose bombs for use against Midway.

Before those aircraft could be prepared for take-off, sometime around 8:00 a.m.[3], he received a report from a scout plane that U.S. ships had been located to the north.  He did not know right away that these ships included an aircraft carrier, but he knew that he had to take out whatever was sitting on his flank.  In fact, there were three U.S. fleet carriers north of him.  These were Yorktown commanded by Admiral Jack Fletcher and Enterprise and Hornet commanded by Admiral Raymond Spruance.

Nagumo ordered the torpedo bombers to be re-fitted with torpedoes.  His crews went to work making yet another change.  The decks of his aircraft carriers were becoming disorganized.  Bombs were on the deck waiting to be put back in their racks.  Fuel lines stretched across the deck as the planes were being fueled.

In the middle of all this, five different squadrons of U.S. aircraft based on Midway attacked the Kido Butai.  Two squadrons arrived at 7:10.  Three more kept coming until nearly 8:30.  Nagumo had to launch fighter aircraft to protect the fleet.  While he was dealing with those attacks, the bombers from the first wave were making their way back to their ships.  Did he have time to launch the reserve aircraft against the U.S. fleet to the north before the arrival of the aircraft returning from the attack on Midway?

A subordinate urged him to get as many aircraft launched as possible and on their way to the U.S. ships before the return of the first wave.  Nagumo declined.  IJN doctrine called for organized attacks by full squadrons.  Piecemeal operations were frowned upon.  He decided to collect the returning aircraft.  When they were recovered, he would attack the U.S. fleet.

Then further complications were presented as three different squadrons of USN torpedo planes arrived from three different directions.  Each squadron had come from one of the three U.S. carriers.  The torpedo planes were slow, cumbersome aircraft that flew low to the water.  They were designed to drop torpedoes that would then skim below the surface and do monstrous damage to their targets when they hit.

The U.S. torpedo bombers had terrible luck that morning.  Some of them lost their torpedoes shortly after takeoff due to a design flaw in their arming switches.  The flaws in the design of the torpedoes themselves became a scandal later on.  On June 4, it was all the torpedo bomber crews had.

The torpedo bombers were easy targets for IJN fighters.  37 of the 41 planes were shot down.  Not a single torpedo did any damage.  The crews of those planes must have known that their chances of scoring a hit on an enemy carrier and getting out alive were low, but they went in anyway.

At this point in the historical novel War and Remembrance, Herman Wouk does a very fine thing.  He breaks off the narrative and lists the names of the members of each squadron, separating the names of those who gave their lives from the much shorter list of survivors.  His gesture is a solemn way to acknowledge the sacrifice that led to the stunning U.S. success that followed.

The last of the torpedo planes was dispatched by 10:15.  Eight different squadrons of U.S. aircraft had attacked the Kido Butai.  Not a single hit had been scored.  The paint on each aircraft carrier was as clean as it had been when the ships left port.  It was at that moment that Admiral Nagumo might have allowed himself to relax for the first time in hours.  With a little reorganization, he could resume the attack.  The decks of his four aircraft carriers were a mess.  Bombs were lying on the deck.  Armed bombers full of fuel were waiting for the chance to take off.  Fuel lines were snaking in every direction.

Overhead, there was no air cover.  The fighter aircraft had descended almost to sea level to take out the torpedo bombers.  Many of the fighters were low on fuel.  They would have to be recovered, the decks organized, and the bombers launched against the U.S. fleet.  After that, the attack on Midway itself could resume.

At 10:20, two squadrons of dive bombers from Enterprise arrived overhead.  Due to a miscommunication, they both began to attack the same carrier, Kaga.  They sorted the situation in the middle of their dive.  One squadron changed course and attacked Akagi, Nagumo’s flagship.  Only one bomb hit that ship, but it struck right at the elevator.  Numerous bombs struck Kaga.  Both carriers were immediately in flames.  At 10:22, a squadron of dive bombers arrived from Yorktown and took out Soryu.  In seconds, all three carriers were out of action and in flames.

The fourth IJN carrier, Hiryu, survived these attacks because the dive bombers from Hornet had taken the wrong course and never found Kido Butai.  That was the only piece of luck the Kido Butai had that morning.  While the other three IJN carriers burned, Hiryu launched a counter-attack.  Its planes followed departing U.S. dive bombers back to Yorktown and did enormous damage when they found the ship.  They thought they had sunk her.

Somehow, Yorktown survived an attack that should have destroyed the ship.  In the meantime, Enterprise launched a second attack that found Hiryu and sank her, although not before another IJN sortie found the damaged Yorktown and crippled her.  IJN forces had reported Yorktown sunk three times – once at Coral Sea, and twice at Midway.  The ship remained afloat, although it was disabled.  It was being towed back to port for another lease on life when an enemy submarine found Yorktown on June 6 and sank her.

None of the IJN carriers could be saved.  Of the six fleet carriers that had attacked Pearl Harbor, the only two that survived Midway were the two that stayed in port.  One of those, Shokaku, was so badly damaged at Coral Sea that she could not participate in the Midway operation.  The other one, Zuikaku, could have participated.  The ship was in satisfactory condition, but her air crews had been depleted at Coral Sea.  IJN doctrine held that the ship and its air crews were a unit.  Because new crews had to be organized and trained to operate with Zuikaku’s on-board personnel, the ship was not deemed to be ready for the Midway operation.  U.S. doctrine held that air crews were interchangeable.  Had the situation been reversed, the USN would have put the ship to sea with an unfamiliar air crew.

The additional aircraft might have made a significant difference on June 4.  The additional force might have allowed Nagumo to launch against the U.S. carriers earlier than he did.  The Kido Butai would probably have suffered massive damage in any event.  Spruance’s carriers had launched before Nagumo knew they were in the area, while Fletcher launched before any IJN planes could have found him.  But the counterstrike might have been more effective with those additional planes.

The face of the Pacific war changed in the course of ten minutes.  One of the most formidable naval forces the world had ever seen was in full operation at 10:20 on June 4, in flames by 10:30.  Kaga and Soryu sank on June 4.  Akagi and Hiryu had to be scuttled the next day.  Japan never recovered.

The loss was not limited to the carriers.  The pilots, deck crews, and all of the know-how that had accumulated through decades of training were lost in ten minutes and proved to be irreplaceable.

After Midway, the two navies were of comparable size and power.  But the initiative had passed to the U.S.  After that, the industrial prowess of the United States was an overwhelming advantage. Japan launched only one new fleet aircraft carrier after Midway, and that not until 1944.  Between Midway and Japan’s surrender in 1945, the U.S. launched 24 fleet carriers.

One of the great ironies of Midway is that the recipe for the U.S. victory was presented to the IJN command a month before the battle began.  Twenty admirals and their attendant staff officers had gathered on the flagship Yamato for four days of war games from May 1 through 4 to put the plans for the Midway invasion to the test.  Unfortunately for the Japanese forces, the exercise appears in hindsight to have been aimed at hiding the flaws in the Midway plan.  Whenever a problem appeared, it was explained away.  Whenever U.S forces achieved a hit against IJN targets, the level of damage was reduced by the referee.

Most intriguingly, the Japanese “Red Team” commander assigned to simulate the U.S. side of the engagement proposed placing three aircraft carriers some 300 miles north of Midway Island, on the flank of Kido Butai.

The IJN command disallowed the Red Team plan on three grounds.  First, it was doubtful that the U.S. had three fleet carriers in the Pacific.  The Battle of the Coral Sea ended on the last day of the conference.  Lexington was believed sunk in that battle and Yorktown was either sunk or too badly damaged to be ready for action at Midway.  Second, whatever number of carriers were available to the USN, if they tried to leave Pearl Harbor they would run into the submarine picket that would be in place to stop them.  Finally, U.S. forces were thought to lack the fighting spirit necessary for the attack proposed by the Red Team commander.

The spot 1400 miles north of Oahu and 325 miles north of Midway where the Red Team commander wanted to place three aircraft carriers was designated by the U.S. command as “Point Luck”.  Three U.S. fleet carriers were there by June 3, waiting for the Kido Butai.

Yorktown hobbled into Pearl Harbor on May 27.  The initial estimate was that it would take 90 days to make her battle ready.  Admiral Nimitz (Commander of US Pacific Fleet) told the engineers he needed the ship in three days.  When Yorktown put out to sea on June 1, repairs crews were still on board, welding sections of deck into place.

The carriers steamed right past the point where the IJN submarines were supposed to be located.  A typographical error in their orders had sent the submarines to the wrong place.  The error was corrected too late.

The third reason for rejecting the Red Team plan masks a contradiction in the IJN command’s attitude toward the Midway operation.  Admiral Yamamoto had brought the massive firepower of his First Fleet halfway across the Pacific so that he could destroy the U.S. Pacific fleet in a decisive battle once the Midway attack had lured U.S. forces out into open water.  But if the U.S. Navy had sufficient fighting spirit to respond to an attack on Midway, might not that same fighting spirit send them out to seek the enemy before the Midway invasion started?  Failure to deal with this point cost the IJN dearly on June 4.

U.S. attitudes about the battle have changed over time.  I was surprised to learn that some early evaluations of the battle were critical of Admiral Spruance because he did not follow the destruction of the Kido Butai with further attacks on IJN ships in the vicinity.  I understand that this criticism was repeated in print as late as 1949.

The criticism appears unfair.  Spruance and Fletcher had been ordered by Nimitz to be guided by the principle of “calculated risk”.  They had accepted considerable risk in attacking the Kido Butai.  All three U.S. carriers sent every bomber they had in a successful effort to strike a devastating blow.  Once they achieved the destruction of four of Japan’s six fleet carriers, it would have been reckless to throw themselves against Yamamoto’s First Fleet.  Spruance’s escorts were getting low on fuel.  All of his torpedo bombers were lost.  Further operations against Yamamoto’s First Fleet would have exposed the USN to the loss of its last two fleet carriers in the Pacific.

In the decades that followed, the theme developed that the U.S. had been the beneficiary of an almost providential slice of good luck.  Gordon Prange’s “Miracle at Midway” and Walter Lord’s “Incredible Victory” express this point of view in their titles.  Herman Wouk provides a more romantic version of the same tale.  On this view, the odds of U.S. success were so low that the outcome depended on every single incident favoring the American side.  There is no question that nearly all the luck on June 4, 1942 ran in favor of the United States Navy, but whether it amounts to a miracle is another story.

Another view of the battle is offered by Craig L. Symonds in “The Battle of Midway”.  Symonds notes that the minute that U.S. commanders got the first report of IJN bombers approaching Midway, they began calculating how much time they had before those bombers returned to their carriers.  On Symonds’ view, the careful calculation of risk, not a miracle, is the reason that the U.S. caught the Kido Butai at the moment of its greatest vulnerability.  The U.S. Navy was in luck that day, but “luck is the residue of design”.

John Toland in “Rising Sun” takes a similar view, while also debiting the planning and command decisions on the Japanese side.  He says “Yamamoto conceived the Midway operation too recklessly and his commander fought it too carefully.  On the other hand, Spruance[4] was bold at the right time – by launching his strike early and with all available planes – and prudent when he should be . . .”.

It’s a fair summation in two sentences of the most important factor on each side that led to the result.  That, and some luck.  Admirals Spruance and Fletcher might have added: ”The harder I work, the luckier I get.”

June 4, 2017.

[1] All times local to Midway.  IJN vessels kept their clocks on Tokyo time.

[2] John Toland in “Rising Sun” seems to suggest that the order to send the uncoded message came from Admiral Nimitz when he was on Midway on May 20.  He does not refer to the underwater cable.

[3] Historians can pin down the time when each of several messages about the U.S. fleet arrived at Nagumo’s ship, the Akagi, but there is some doubt about when the information got to the admiral.

[4] Fletcher should not have been left out of this sentence in my opinion.

Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier is one of the most beloved works for the keyboard.  A clavier can be any keyboard instrument.  But what is a “well-tempered” clavier?

Musical intervals – the perceived space between the notes that make up scales and chords – are based on ratios of integers. Pythagoras, who copyrighted the famous theorem that bears his name, also discovered the mathematical relationship between musical tones.  If a string of a given length is cut in half, the short string will sound one octave higher than the original.  If the long string sounded middle C, the short string will sound the C above middle C.  It will vibrate twice as fast.

If the ratio is 3:2 instead of 2:1, we get a “perfect” fifth.  If the longer string gave us middle C, the shorter string will give us the G above middle C.  It will vibrate 1.5 times faster than the longer string. Pythagorean tuning derives the entire scale of 12 tones using only these two ratios.  They get there by continuing to cut the string in a 3:2 ratio. If you cut the string that produced G, you get D, the “perfect” fifth above G.  The next fifth will be A, and so on.

If you perform this process twelve times, you will produce twelve distinct tones.[1]  You will have completed the “circle of fifths”.  However, there is a flaw in the system.  The circle of fifths does not quite close.  After we stack our 12 perfect fifths, we find that we have not traveled from C to shining C.  Instead, we have ended up at a note that is about a quarter of a semi-tone too sharp.  Instead of landing back at C, we are one quarter of the distance from C to C#.

Another way to say this is that if you start at C and go up six perfect fifths, you will arrive at F# (C-G-D-A-E-B-F#).  If you start at C and go down six perfect fifths, you will arrive at Gb (C-F-Bb-Eb-Ab-Db-Gb).  These will be the same note on a keyboard – the black key between F and G. But in Pythagorean tuning based on perfect fifths, they aren’t the same tone.  They are off by the tiniest fraction.[2] That nearly quarter of a semitone is called the Pythagorean comma.  The difference is audible.  If you go to the Wikipedia article titled Pythagorean comma, you can hear it.  When the two notes are played at the same time, the result is unpleasant and unharmonious.

What is to be done with the comma?  The Pythagorean solution was to dodge the problem by discarding one of the two notes at the ends of the circle of fifths (either F# or Gb if you start the circle at C) and avoiding combinations of notes that highlighted the comma.  In the Pythagorean system, all of the fifths except the last one would produce a beautiful sound.  The “last” fifth (which one it is depends on which note you start with) produced a jangling dissonance called a “wolf” fifth.  The Pythagorean attitude was that there is plenty of beautiful music to be made with the perfect fifths.  All you have to do is avoid the wolf fifth.

Other problems accumulate.  Major and minor thirds don’t sound quite right under Pythagorean tuning.  The Pythagoreans considered thirds to be dissonances.  They were not about to adjust their precious fifths to accommodate an interval that they found unpleasant in the first place.

For those who like major and minor thirds just fine, an alternative is to make the thirds sound better in exchange for less perfection in the fifths.  “Just” intonation recognizes that there are other musically significant ratios of whole numbers in addition to the 3:2 ratio that produced a perfect fifth.  A ratio of 4:3 gives us a “perfect” fourth, C to the F above it.  5:4[3] gives us a major third (C to the E above it) and 6:5 a minor third (C to the Eb above it).  The rates of vibration of the strings, measured in cycles per second, will be in the same ratio.

You can use the 5:4 and 6:5 ratios to build a musical scale that will have “pure” tuning.  If you tune a piano so that the thirds line up with a given note, let’s say C, you will have a scale and chords that will possess great beauty.  You can move up a key or down a key, up to G (one sharp) or down to F (one flat) and all will still be well.  But as you move away from the home key, certain chords will become unpleasant to the ear.  Just intonation improves the thirds at the expense of the fifths, but doesn’t solve the problem.  The Pythagorean comma is still there and will find us out.

Why doesn’t it find us out on the piano that you might have in your parlor or hear at a kid’s school, or on the one that sits in the corner of the derelict bar down the street where you may be reading this? Why do F-sharp and G-flat sound the same on that piano?  The answer is that the tuning of each string on that piano has been altered very slightly to spread the dissonance of the Pythagorean comma over the twelve semi-tones that make up each octave.  The octaves are perfectly in tune but nothing else is.

Before roughly 1700, musicians simply worked around the problem.  If an instrument were tuned to a particular key, composers and performers could not move very far away from that tonal base. They got to know which chords and which changes of key would not work and they stayed away from them.  It appears that early musicians could get 10 of the 24 keys to work, some better than others, and there things stood.

Ingenious musicians and technicians continued to play with the mathematics and by 1700 had found various ways to spread the Pythagorean comma over the octave, to “temper” the notes in the scale so that music could be made in each key. The trick is to face up to the hidden disharmonious factors inherent in the apparently rational musical scale and to put everything except the octaves slightly out of perfect mathematical tuning – just enough to mask the comma without creating other distortions. Scholars say that as many as 150 different methods have been used.

There are twelve semi-tones in a chromatic scale.  A key can be built on each one.  And that key can be either major or minor, so there are 24 possible keys using the traditional western chromatic scale. An instrument is said to be “well-tempered[4]” if it can play harmoniously (but not necessarily identically) in all 24 keys.

Bach published his “Well-Tempered Clavier” in 1722, when he was in his late 30s.  On the title page he describes the work as “Preludes and Fugues in all the tones and semitones, both with the major third . . . and with the minor third . . . .  For the use and practice of young musicians who desire to learn, as well as for those who are already skilled in this study, by way of amusement . . . .”

This has to be one of the most modest, self-effacing descriptions of a work ever written by its author. It’s as if Shakespeare had said, “I have strung together a series of infinitives to explore the mind of a man at a crisis in his life, for the amusement and entertainment of actors and audiences.”  The music that constitutes Bach’s demonstration of the proper tempering of a scale is a staggering achievement, one of the great treasures of western music. And just to show that it wasn’t a fluke, he published a second set, no less beautiful and profound than the first, some twenty years later.  Consequently, we have The Well-Tempered Clavier, Book I and The Well-Tempered Clavier, Book II.  Each book contains 24 Preludes and Fugues, so the whole thing is sometimes referred to as “the 48”.  A nineteenth century critic called the Well-Tempered Clavier the “Old Testament[5]” of piano music.

The emotional and intellectual content of the music is inexhaustible.  The technical and interpretive challenges to the performer must be enormous. Each piece provides a lens through which the performer and listener can view the shape and form of the emotions that the composer invites them to explore.  Each piece presents its own mood and feeling and seduces the listener, for a few minutes, into the composer’s emotional world.  Yet, despite their intensity, the 48 preludes and fugues maintain a clinical distance from their emotional content.  My sense is that Bach is not saying, “Listen to this piece to experience happiness, joy, grief, solemnity, or melancholy (as the case may be)”.  Rather, he is saying, “This is what happiness, joy, grief, solemnity and the rest look like when I put them under the microscope.”  Each performer brings a different point of view.  New insights come with each re-hearing.

How many gradations are there of happiness?  How finely can the emotion be dissected?  The C# major prelude and fugue of Book I present joyful exuberance.  That same feeling is on display in Book II’s G major prelude and fugue, but the composer is now twenty years older and the fires of his enthusiasm have been banked by two decades of experience.  There are different species of cheerfulness and well-being in Book I’s F# major, G major, and B-flat major preludes and fugues.

Monumental solemnity is on display in the C# minor prelude and fugue of Book I and, combined with a sense of mourning and resignation, in the final prelude and fugue of Book I, in B minor.  Equally fascinating are the numbers where the prelude and fugue offer contrasts of form or feeling.  One that stands out to this listener is the D major pair in Book II.  Listening to the prelude, you can imagine the members of a choir having some musical fun before practice, tossing phrases back and forth from one section of the choir to the other, adding complications and challenges as they go.  Then the fun ends, the choirmaster arrives, and everyone settles down to work through the phrasing of a serious, solemn fugue.

The most remarkable piece may be the very first one, the C major prelude of Book I.  The prelude consists of a series of broken chords, eight notes to the measure.  The second note of each measure is sustained as the remaining six are sounded.  There is no melody; neither is there a sense that one is missing.  In any other hands, this piece would have been considered an interesting accompaniment in search of a top line melody.  Rosalyn Tureck notes that when Beethoven composed something similar – the first movement of the “Moonlight” sonata – he added a simple melody to give the piece the finished sound he was looking for.  Yet Bach, who was gently mocked in his own time as old-fashioned and out of date, manages something that the great revolutionary of classical music did not attempt.

The C major prelude also demonstrates in miniature that the keyboard is correctly tempered.  Every note in the chromatic scale is touched at least once.  There are no wolf tones, no dissonances, only the interplay of light and shade as the composer uses every tone in the scale to introduce the great work that he has prepared for us.

The gothic arch and the flying buttress led to centuries of spectacular achievements in architecture. Did correct temperament lead the way to centuries of great music in the same way?

It’s doubtful.  The paradox is that Bach’s solution is so much greater than the problem.  We have been listening with pleasure and astonishment to Bach’s music for nearly three centuries.  Had he been limited to the ten keys that his Renaissance forebears had to deal with, would the price have been so very high?

Bach does not appear to make use of remote keys in other works written for the keyboard.  The Goldberg Variations are mostly in G major, with excursions into G minor and Eb minor.  The English Suites, the French Suites, and the Partitas, are written in unexotic keys.

It is true that one of the most delightful pieces from Book I of the Well-Tempered Clavier is the C# major prelude and fugue.  C# major is an unusual key.  It requires no less than seven sharps – every tone is raised one half step.  Would the piece be ruined if it were transposed down a half step to C major, a key in which there are no sharps or flats?  I don’t think so.

My guess is that Bach wouldn’t think so either.  He often transposed, re-using material originally written in one key in a new piece where he wanted it in a different key.  The availability of a “well-tempered” keyboard provided the occasion for the production of 24 masterpieces in the prelude-and-fugue format, followed two decades later by 24 more.  Had the pieces all been written in one key or a handful of keys, the work would still be celebrated – under a different name – as one of the great achievements of western culture.

It’s true that a composer may want to modulate into an exotic key to add tension and interest to a piece that starts in an accessible key.  Correct temperament makes such modulations possible, but we can question whether that capacity is what accounts for the accumulation of great music over the course of the eighteenth, nineteenth, and part of the twentieth centuries.

The work was written in 24 distinct keys and each piece presents its own emotional world.  Some critics think that this means that Bach associated a particular color with each individual key.  If each key has its own atmosphere, that would suggest that Bach preferred one of the many forms of unequal temperament.  On the other hand, Bach’s habit of transposing freely between keys argues that he did not associate a piece’s key with its emotional content.

Did Bach use equal temperament, then?  Equal temperament has been the standard method of keyboard tuning since the middle of the nineteenth century.  Every semitone is equally wide.  Every key is identical, except for pitch.  However, the mathematics of equal temperament are complicated and it is doubtful that it was widely used prior to about 1850[6].

Contemporaries reported that Bach could tune a harpsichord in about 20 minutes.  That fact alone argues against his use of equal temperament.  The musician and scholar Bradley Lehman thinks the title page of the work gives Bach’s directions for tuning a keyboard.  The top of the title page contains a series of curls:

Please see:  https:commons/wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Bach-Loops.png

[7]

Note the variation in shape and complexity of each curl.  Lehman thinks that the set is a schematic of a scale on the keyboard.  The different shapes tell the tuner how much to tweak each individual note to produce a correctly tempered scale.  The instruction is not rigid and mathematical.  Rather, it’s a model for how to feel the way to a correct tuning.  The drawing tells the musician or technician where to add, where to subtract, tiny adjustments[8].  Lehman’s insight is intriguing, although controversial among the academics.

I have listened to a lot of recordings of this music, but the catalog is far larger than my limited experience.  The first decision a listener has to make is: Piano or Harpsichord.  I have commented before that Bach performances can be divided between those who produce a “wall of sound” and those who produce “intersecting planes”.  I prefer the latter.  For me, that eliminates the harpsichord, even though this was the instrument for which the music was written.  Perhaps an ear trained to listen to the harpsichord can keep the threads of the music separated better than I can.  I find it much easier to listen to this music performed on a piano.

Robert Levin offers another alternative.  He recorded Book I using four instruments: two different harpsichords, a clavichord, and an organ.  For Book II he used two harpsichords, a fortepiano, and an organ.  He is a wonderful musician.  I thought the pieces played on the organ sounded wonderful, but was less taken with the sound of the other instruments.

If you want “wall of sound” try Grigory Sokolov (known as the “world’s greatest living pianist”) or Glenn Gould.  Sokolov’s recording on YouTube is accompanied by a photo of him holding the score of the Well-Tempered Clavier.  The performance, in my opinion, has less to do with the score and more to do with the demonstration of how the work affects the world’s greatest living pianist.  Glenn Gould does not attract any neutral opinions.  Listeners are either enthralled or repelled.  His recordings are not ones I feel compelled to return to.

Rosalyn Tureck, the “high priestess of Bach”, was a great musician and scholar.  Her love for this composer can be heard in each piece.  She is the antithesis of the “wall of sound” performers.  The problem for me is that she performs the music at a slow, almost ponderous, pace.  Most performances of the complete Book I and Book II require a bit more than four hours.  Ms. Tureck takes about five hours.

My two favorite recordings are performances by Edward Aldwell (recorded 1989 & 1990) and Tatiana Nikolayeva (released 1984).  Aldwell’s career was devoted to scholarship and teaching.  He didn’t record much, but his recordings include these works for Nonesuch.  His tempos are well judged and he lets the music speak for itself.  It’s a performance of great integrity.

Nikolayeva (1924-1993) was somewhat older than Aldwell.  She won the first Bach Competition in Leipzig (then East Germany) held in 1950 to commemorate the 200^th anniversary of the composer’s death.  Each competitor was supposed to prepare a single prelude and fugue from the Well-Tempered Clavier and perform it for the judges.  When it was Nikolaeva’s turn, she went to the stage without a score in hand and asked the judges to name the prelude and fugue they wanted to hear.  She then played the named piece from memory and won the competition.

Her performance is warm-hearted.  Her love of this music comes through every note.  Her recording and Mr. Aldwell’s are two that I return to with pleasure.

Aldwell finishes his notes to the recording of Book I with a quotation from a nineteenth century Bach biographer that provides a fitting close to these musings on Bach’s “Old Testament”:

There is a legend which tells us of a city of marvels that lies sunk beneath the sea: the sound of bells comes up from the depths, and when the surface is calm, houses and streets are visible through the clear water, with all the stir and turmoil of busy, eager human life – but it is infinitely far down, and every attempt to clutch the vision only troubles the waters and distorts the picture.  We feel the same thing as we listen to this music.  All the emotions that stirred the soul of the composer . . . lie deep below the surface: faintly, remotely, we hear their echoes . . ..

 

[1] Double the length of the string and drop down an octave now and again as you perform this operation.  Otherwise, the string will be measured in fractions of an inch as you approach the last few intervals.

[2] Technicians divide the musical scale into “cents”.  There are 1200 cents in an octave.  Therefore, there are 100 cents in each semitone if you divide the 12-tone scale equally.  When all semitones are equal, the distance from C to G, one fifth higher, is an even 700 cents.  But Pythagorean tuning does not divide the scale evenly.  The mathematics of Pythagorean tuning gives us a fifth that is slightly less than 702 cents.  Our hearing cannot detect a difference smaller than 5 cents.  But after you repeat the operation twelve times to generate all twelve tones, you have built up nearly 24 cents of differences.  That’s clearly audible as you can confirm by playing the Pythagorean comma file available from Wikipedia.

[3] The tones of a major third under Pythagorean tuning are in the ratio of 81:64.  Just intonation would use a ratio of 80:64.  That tiny adjustment makes a big difference.

[4] Some experts say “correctly tempered” is a better description.

[5] The same critic, Hans von Bülow (1830-1894), labeled Beethoven’s piano sonatas the “New Testament”.

[6]The mathematics of equal temperament involve an exotic number.  In equal temperament, the rate of vibration of each semitone is greater than the one below it by the same factor, X.  When we stack twelve semi-tones in a row, the last note is an octave above the first note, which means that it is vibrating at a rate twice the original note.  Therefore, X to the twelfth power equals 2.  X is the twelfth root of 2.  This conclusion became obvious to me after I read the explanation three times.

Twelfth root of two is an irrational number.  The approximate value of this number had been calculated centuries before Bach.  However, producing a scale using this number alone would have been technically challenging in Bach’s time.  Note that equal temperament gives up all of the natural ratios except the 2:1 ratio for the octave.

I have read that some Renaissance organs were tuned to equal temperament.  Organs don’t have to be tuned from day to day.  The builder could set it and forget it.  Not so with harpsichords, pianos, and the like.

[7] I regret that I could not figure out how to paste the image, which is in public domain.

[8]  See http://www.larips.com/ for his explanation.  He can also be found on YouTube, where you can hear the adjustments as he makes them.  Daniel Jencka offers a possible refinement of Lehman’s insight.  His website is down.  A link to a paid site can be found here: https://academic.oup.com/em/article-abstract/33/3/545/2928360/Tempering-Bach-s-temperament?redirectedFrom=fulltext.  The paper was available at no charge at one time.  I did not think to download it when I read it.

A few weeks ago, I saw Bill Nye (the Science Guy) interviewed on the subject of global warming and climate change.  At one point the interviewer (Tucker Carlson) asked Bill what the climate would look like now if humans, particularly those of us in the prosperous industrialized nations, had not burned fossil fuels and poured carbon dioxide into the atmosphere for the last 150 years.

Mr. Nye’s answer was that things would look much as they did in 1750.  To underscore how much we have changed the climate, he pointed out that in that year there was no wine produced in England.  Now, because we have burned massive amounts of hydrocarbons, England is so warm that it has become a wine producing country.

I’ll take it as a fact (without checking) that wine was not produced in England in 1750.  Nor will I dispute that average global temperatures were colder in 1750 than they are now.  The year 1750 was smack in the middle of the second phase of the “little ice age” that ran from something like 1300 (some say earlier) to 1900 (some say 1850), with a century-long break starting around 1450.  Average global temperatures were lower in 1750 than they are now, and it is likely that average temperatures in England were as well.

That was +/- 250 years ago.  What about +/- 250 years before that, right around 1500?  We have a good historical record of the state of wine-making and grape-growing in England in the early part of the 16^th century.  Henry VIII took over the English throne in 1509.  In the course of his reign, he took England out of the Roman Catholic Church and in the process put all of the monasteries out of business.

In the process of taking over the monasteries, he sent his agents (who bore the friendly name of “visitors”) abroad throughout England to inventory what the monasteries had.  Henry’s inventory found that there were some 52 monasteries with vineyards.  According to www.english-wine.com, there were also at that time 11 wineries owned by the Crown, plus 67 owned by noble families, making some 130[1] in all. (The same source says there are roughly 400 today.)

We have a good historical record that is about 450 years older than Henry’s inventory.  William the Conqueror was an astute and aggressive administrator.  After he took over the management of the English government in 1066, he compiled a record of all the taxable property in the kingdom.  The Domesday Book told him, and now tells us, that in the year 1086 there were 46 places in southern England where wine was produced. (Again, www.english-wine.com.) That would be right in the middle of the warm period from roughly 950 to 1250, sometimes called the Medieval Climate Optimum.

There must be many factors that go into deciding whether to use a bit of English ground to produce wine. The cost of growing, harvesting, and vinifying the grapes will be substantial and could be invested in other projects. Better wine can be purchased abroad than can be produced in England: the best wine in the world is produced not so very far away, in France.  Apart from matters of cost and taste, the grower needs to find workers with the necessary knowledge and experience.

Climatic conditions have to be considered as well. If the weather turns cold year after year, as it did during the “little ice age”, there is not much point in putting money into an English vineyard. Existing facilities will eventually be abandoned to other uses. It appears that English winemakers hung on during the first episode of the little ice age.  They were still active in the time of Henry VIII, but gave up as the second phase set in. When climatic conditions are more favorable, as they are now and were at the time of Henry VIII and before him of William I, it may be possible to proceed if other factors permit it. But a producer will have to take climate into account.

The Science Guy uses English wine production as evidence that the burning of fossil fuels has created unique climatic conditions. When we look at the 900-year record of English wine production and not just the period he selected, we can see that this is not so; the climate has changed during historical time, slowly, inexorably, and not always in the same direction. Sometimes it’s warm enough to grow wine in England.  At other times, it’s not.  And, we can see that humans have adjusted to these climatic changes. If you can’t grow your own, you can buy better wine from France if you have the money. Another solution much favored by the English is to drink beer and ale. Nothing like it at the end of a hot day, or a cold one.

I agree that putting more English wine into bottles is an unwelcome development.  To list it among the disasters that a warming climate will visit upon us is, I think, overdoing it.

[1] The website gives 139 as the total, leaving 9 wineries unaccounted for.

On the Saturday night following the presidential inauguration, after the women’s march had ended, my doorbell rang. On my porch stood a pleasant young woman who had just come from the march. I could tell because she had wedged her protest sign between her coat and her backpack. Her head blocked the top three lines of the sign, but I could see that the fourth line contained the name Trump.

She said she was a high school senior and named a college in Louisiana she would be attending in the fall. She and her classmates were raising money for a school trip and found themselves 47 dollars short of their goal. As she made her pitch, complete with illustrations held to a clipboard, she repeated that number several times. Her situation was transparently genuine. A non-round number, a prime in fact, repeated several times had to be the real deal.

I don’t like dashing the hopes of sweetly dispositioned young women, but I declined to contribute. As she turned to leave, I could see that the back of her sign was identical to the front. It was a clever piece of work, printed in bulk but designed to look as if the sign had been hand-lettered with grease paint. The bottom of the sign read “F- – – Trump.” Both words were spelled out in bold capital letters.

I once attended a garden show at a place called the Scottish Rite Temple. I have always had a weakness for the Scots and the mystery of a temple where the story of their rites might be told was an added attraction. The temple contained several large rooms, each devoted to a different type of flowering plant.

After a time, I was in the Fuchsia room. There were several other devotees, including a docent. However, the person in the room that I best remember was a woman who was the most enthusiastic fan of a plant species I have ever encountered.

The name of this plant is pronounced FYOOsha, but a pedant would note that this pronunciation is inaccurate. The plant is named for a botanist, Herr Doktor Leonhardt Fuchs[1].  The proper German pronunciation of his name rhymes somewhere between “books” and “spooks”, the “ch” making a sound closer to an x than to a k.

When it came to pronouncing the name of this plant, the woman was just enough of a pedant to recognize that the standard pronunciation was technically incorrect. She dropped the “Y” sound in the first syllable, but she made a fresh error. Where you, dear reader, and I see the letter “h” in the middle of the word Fuchsia, she saw the letter “k”. She pronounced the first syllable the same way the high school student at my door would have pronounced it before speaking Donald Trump’s name.

The woman whose story I tell was transported by the Fuchsia flower. She spoke to the docent at length, describing the number, variety, and beauty of her Fuchsia plants. Her voice was very loud and could be heard even in the distant rooms where roses and dahlias were displayed. I still carry with me the image of fellow visitors to the Scottish Rite Temple flinching reflexively every time this enthusiastic woman shouted out the name of her favorite flower.

Times change. The flower lovers of yesteryear who winced when they heard that pungent monosyllable have been replaced by marchers who use it to speak truth to power.

The news reports of the January 21 D.C .march gave the impression that the main point of the speakers and participants was to join that expressive word to the Trump name as often as possible and to attack him personally, just as he attacked people on a personal level during the campaign. He had held certain women up to ridicule for their appearance, and some of the speakers paid him back in kind.

All fair enough. If he insists on handing out personal insults, he should expect to receive them in return. But do the protestors intend to do anything other than deride Mr. Trump’s distinctive appearance? After the fun of attaching his name to their favorite expletive, what comes next?

In the weeks since the inauguration, it appears that the original obscenity-laden line of attack will continue. But it has been supplemented by two additional ones. These are the two Rs: Resistance and Russia.

It’s a curiosity that the Resistance seems to have more power than those it resists. The Resistance can stop traffic on freeways, but the targets of the Resistance have no such power. The Resistance decides when airports will be shut down.

The Resistance has power over commerce. It required retailers to drop the Ivanka Trump line. Nordstrom obeyed orders but felt just enough discomfort that they offered the explanation that her stuff wasn’t selling. There is reason to doubt this. They had to cancel an existing order. And after her line was dropped, it has sold well on its own. None of that is to the point, however. No retailer has any obligation to offer a reason for carrying or not carrying any item or line. Any store, whether or not acting at the direction of the Resistance, has the unlimited authority to drop any line they choose. But the same privilege does not apply to those who do not have the approval of the Resistance. Bakers, florists, caterers who decline to provide their services to a same-sex wedding have been successfully sued and in some cases financially ruined. They have no authorization to resist.

The Resistance gets to decide who can speak and who can’t. Charles Murray, a careful, humane scholar of libertarian leanings who relies on facts, data, and peer-reviewed studies to reach conclusions that his critics find objectionable, is shouted down and physically assaulted at Middlebury College. In reporting on the incident, the Associated Press, little more than a stenographic service for their political allies, has the gall to refer to Mr. Murray as a “white nationalist” (a term earlier applied to him by the Southern Poverty Law Center). Incidentally, before Mr. Murray appeared at Middlebury, some 450 alums of the college sent a letter to the administration objecting to the invitation. Various faculty members had sent a letter of their own. Will any member of the Resistance suffer any serious consequence as a result of this incident? Will any member of the Resistance be asked even to provide the facts and data that demonstrate Mr. Murray’s errors?

I have never read anything written by Milo Yiannopoulos, so I don’t know why the Resistance found him objectionable. He was the subject of a riot here in Seattle and then a few days later in Berkeley. The Berkeley police stood by as members of the Resistance broke plate glass and committed mayhem. In Marxist ideology, the police are the enforcers of norms imposed by the ruling class. So, who was in charge?

Have any speakers favored by the Resistance been shouted down? As a politician who should be much favored by the Resistance once asked, Who/Whom? Who has the power and who is on the receiving end? The Resistance is filling the “Who” role comfortably.

And that brings me to Russia. To put cards on the table, I think the case that Russia affected the outcome of the 2016 election is tissue thin to the point of being laughable. The word “hack” gets used very loosely in this context. Assuming for the sake of argument that the active parties were Russian state agents, what they “hacked” were the servers of the Democratic National Committee and various prominent Democratic operatives. What they accomplished through their hack was the publication of private email correspondence connected to the Democratic National Committee and the Clinton campaign, but nothing more than that.

There is no suggestion that the “hackers” caused illegitimate votes to be cast or that they got into the vote-counting systems and affected the outcome that way. As President Obama pointed out two weeks before the November 2016 election, the U.S. voting system is operated at the county level. The system’s mechanics are spread so diffusely across the landscape that it would be impossible for even the most stealthy and sophisticated hacker to affect the result nationwide through remote means.

Local means are something else. Naturally, results can appear questionable in extremely close elections. When the result hinges on a few hundred votes out of millions cast, we start looking at hanging chads, asking about missing ballot papers, looking into the sudden appearance of previously missing ballot boxes. Witness Florida 2000 (presidential election); Washington state 2004 (gubernatorial election); Minnesota 2008 (U.S. Senate).

When the difference is measured in tens of thousands of votes as it was in the three states in 2016 where Trump broke through the “blue wall” – Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania – the likelihood that the result is due to computer hacking drops practically speaking to zero, whether we are talking about fraud in the casting of votes or in counting them. That’s not to say that fraud doesn’t occur, only that it isn’t achieved through computer hacking operations conducted from remote locations.[2]

There appears to be almost universal agreement that what the “hackers” did to influence the election was to steal and then publish emails sent to or from various Democratic agents and operatives, some of them employees of the DNC, others part of the Clinton campaign, still others members of the press or media. The hackers did not create fake correspondence that they falsely attributed to those agents and operatives. They stole the private correspondence of these individuals and published it verbatim.

What was the impact of the hack? While no candidate obtained a majority of the popular vote nationwide, Mrs. Clinton received more votes in aggregate than did Donald Trump. The problem for Mrs. Clinton was that millions of those votes were obtained in states that she had already won easily. Nevertheless, the hack has to be deemed a failure. The candidate that the Russians are said to have favored received fewer votes nationwide than the one the Russians were supposedly trying to defeat.[3]

Trump won because he was able to put together narrow victories in Ohio – a state that no winning Republican candidate has ever lost – and Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania. George H. W. Bush carried Pennsylvania and Michigan in 1988. No Republican has carried Michigan, Pennsylvania, or Wisconsin since then. Hence, the “blue wall”. Who predicted that result? Some people in the Trump campaign, perhaps. Where are the independent pundits who saw it coming? Is it likely that the Kremlin’s experts on American elections figured their intervention would be particularly effective in those three key states, enough so that they could concede a 2.8 million vote advantage nationwide to the woman whose presidency, we are asked to believe, they feared and wanted to avoid?

Did Mr. Trump win those states and did Mrs. Clinton lose those states because of the “hack” – the release of stolen emails? The two demographic groups that appear to have been decisive in those three states were African-American voters and blue-collar white voters. African-American turnout in 2016 was slightly less than 90% of that in 2012. Of those African-Americans who voted, about 8% voted for Donald Trump, which is up from the 4% or so who voted for Mitt Romney. So, Trump received a slightly higher percentage of a decidedly lower total number of votes from African-American voters. A Democratic advantage was reduced.

White blue-collar voters tend to vote for Democrats. When they went for Ronald Reagan in 1980 and 1984, they were called “Reagan Democrats”. After him, they went back to being just plain Democrats. They were important parts of the formerly impregnable blue wall. This time, they favored the Republican. Theirs is an economic interest often persuaded by protectionist rhetoric. (“I can sell you the exact same thing, but at a higher price.”) Possibly Mr. Trump’s protectionist message seemed more genuine than did Secretary Clinton’s.

The question then is: Did African-American voters stay home because they were disgusted by the DNC shenanigans disclosed by the “hackers”? Did blue collar workers rally to Donald Trump because they were fed up with reporters submitting their work to the Clinton campaign before publication? Did voters from either group decide that they could not forgive the DNC for ending the candidacy of a 74-year old Vermont Socialist[4] with an outer-borough accent that puts Donald Trump’s to shame? I think it’s fair to say that the publication of DNC emails was not important to the Trump victory in the three key states.

We must wait to see if the Democratic party, with all of the power and influence from academia, Hollywood, and new outlets behind it, can organize an opposition based on more than what we have seen so far. The opposition group that has had an impact so far is the Freedom Caucus in the House (fka the Republican Study Committee). Their behavior demonstrates that Republicans appear to be more comfortable as an opposition party. Facing significant opportunities for governmental reform, the Republicans seem not to know what to do when they win, even as the Democrats appear to gain power by refusing to recognize that they lost. Events will unfold and we will, I hope, witness an opposition based on something more than what we have seen so far. There is plenty to oppose. But it’s going to take more than name-calling, expletives, and broken glass to accomplish anything.

 

[1] Had the good doctor been an Englishman instead of a German, his name would have been Leonard Fox. Mark Twain notes that many German names mean something. When Twain was studying German, he read a newspaper article that said in German that a fierce tigress had eaten an unfortunate fir forest (Tannenwald). Twain was about to protest that such a thing was impossible when he learned that Tannenwald was a man’s name.

[2] During the Michigan recount back in November and December, votes from 248 precincts in Detroit were not recounted due to irregularities. The number of votes originally counted in those precincts was greater than the number of votes cast. Those precincts gave some 95% of their ballots to Hillary Clinton. This kind of outcome is not unheard of in America’s large cities and is attributable to conventional methods older and less sophisticated than computer hacking.

[3] A couple of results underscore how fragile is the claim that Mrs. Clinton’s national vote plurality tells us anything. The aggregate tally in California and New York favored Mrs. Clinton by some six million votes. Yet her nationwide plurality was roughly 2.8 million votes. In other words, taking the 48 states apart from New York and California as an aggregate, Mr. Trump had a plurality of some 3.2 million. Data found at: http://cookpolitical.com/story/10174. Taking a closer look, subtract five counties from the total – New York, Bronx, Queens, and Kings counties in New York (that is, New York City minus Staten Island) and Los Angeles County in California – and Mr. Trump had a 526,000-aggregate vote plurality in the remaining 3000+ counties. Data found at: http://www.nytimes.com/elections/results/president.

[4] An inaccurate label, surely. His philosophy seems to be distribution rather than socialism, properly understood. Incidentally, I have read that his wife formed a firm to broker all of the advertising purchased by his campaign. Brokers receive a 15% commission. Redistribution has to start somewhere, and that might as well be at home.

 

Summary of a meeting in the Situation Room, the Kremlin, 10:00 a.m. (Moscow time), November 9, 2016

Attending: [Redacted]

The Chairman:  You, the two of you, owe me an explanation. I expected that we would be watching Mr. Trump’s concession speech while we ate breakfast.

Attendee B:       I am sorry to say that the returns so far have been inconclusive, Comrade Colonel.

The chairman was seen to wince noticeably at this form of address. It was one thing to relive the old times on the weekend, in the dacha. It was not appropriate here in the Situation Room. The chairman looked over his shoulder to check that the recording device was turned off. In his annoyance, he may have forgotten momentarily that the backup system would be turned off only on his personal written authorization, countersigned by the head of state security. No one had thought of it.

Attendee B (realizing the error in his previous form of address): It was, as their president said, difficult to make the necessary arrangements due to the diffuse nature of their voting system. We had help in Detroit, Philadelphia, and Milwaukee. Perhaps it will yet prove to have been sufficient.

Attendee C, addressing Attendee B: What have we heard from [Code Name Redacted]?

Attendee B:       His information was that she would win by nearly three million votes.

The Chairman:  He’s reliable?

Attendee C:       He has been until now.

The Chairman:  He voted our way, I believe, years ago?

Attendee B:       So he says.

Here the chairman cocked an eyebrow. He had found over the years that by cultivating a persona with nearly no facial expression, he could communicate very effectively through small gestures. Here he was expressing skepticism over the reports of [Code Name Redacted]’s political allegiances.

Attendee C:       We can’t be sure. The secret ballot, you understand, sir.

The Chairman:  The secret ballot. Of course.

{All three laugh.}

Attendee B:       You understand, Comr . . ., You understand, sir, that they tally votes by province. The nationwide total is of technical interest only. It’s the votes in the provinces that matter. Three of them, places called Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania have not yet completed their count.

Attendee C:       And if the worst were to occur, we understand that there is the possibility of a recount.

The Chairman:  Yes, who was it who said that casting the votes is important, but counting the votes is everything?

Everyone knew the answer. No one spoke the name.

The three observe the television, where Donald Trump and his family are taking the stage somewhere in New York.

The Chairman is turning over in his mind the names of the operatives who will replace these two. B lives near the Kremlin and frequently walks to work. Convenient. C might take more time.

He watched the next American President basking in the glow of victory. Another one he had underestimated. Reagan. Then there was the pretentious cardinal, promoted above his ability, who had somehow survived a bullet. Yeltsin, who was more effective with half a bottle of vodka in him than any of the generals who had attempted a coup. A military coup to save a socialist government! The absurdity. Not Thatcher. He had never underestimated her. But this one! It was impossible. They would find a way. They always did. But it would have been so much simpler if things had gone according to plan.

Attendee C:       Sir, a suggestion if I may?

The chairman lifted an eyebrow. It is possible that his head nodded as much as a half inch.

Attendee C:       Sir, you remember the concept of “breadcrumbs”?

Here the corners of the chairman’s mouth turned down by a quarter of an inch. Anyone who knew him recognized this as a sign of intense displeasure. There was no need for C to remind the Chairman that he had never been in the operational wing of the, the Agency. He had been an administrator, a bureaucrat, a member of the nomenklatura. But who had survived? Who was in charge? If C was such a great operative, where was the government on whose behalf he had operated?

Attendee C:       We left some breadcrumbs near the WikiLeaks organization. Just in case. A few words in the right ears and we could create the illusion that we were behind all those leaks. With a little help from American reporters, we could undermine Trump before he ever gets started.

The Chairman:  And how do you put them on the trail of the breadcrumbs?

Attendee B starts to speak. This had been his idea! Attendee C cuts him off. The Chairman glares at him.

Attendee C:       [Code Name Redacted] or even better one of his low-level agents leaks a few tidbits to a reporter. Enough that the reporter can fill in the blanks without having to do much work. Once one of them has it, the rest start repeating it. It never fails.

The Chairman:  None of them asks any questions? No one is the slightest bit skeptical?

Attendee C:       Sir, the reporters from Izvestia had more intellect and more curiosity. This lot falls in line without even the threat of the Gulag. It’s actually embarrassing.

The Chairman:  (Addressing only C, ignoring B) There’s not much downside and frankly there is no better alternative. But if I don’t see results before this one is inaugurated, we’ll have another meeting. A much shorter one.

Attendee C:       Yes, sir.

Transcriber’s note:  Although Attendee C’s current status is unconfirmed, he has been observed at meetings in the Situation Room as recently as March 5, 2017.

 

ALABAMA v. LINCOLN

In the Federal District Court for the Eastern District of Maryland, James Trabor, presiding

January 2, 1863

This case, which raises novel questions of the scope and reach of federal power, comes before the Court in an unusual posture.  The State of Alabama, acting through independent counsel residing in Maryland but retained by the Attorney General of Alabama, seeks to restrain the enforcement of the executive order issued yesterday, January 1, 1863, by the President and popularly, if inaccurately, known as the Emancipation Proclamation.

During the 1860 presidential campaign and while he delivered his Inaugural Address after taking the oath of office on March 4, 1861, the President stated publicly on numerous occasions that he had no intention of interfering with slavery where it existed.  In fact, he emphasized – correctly in this Court’s opinion – that he had no power to interfere with the institution where it existed.  The proclamation issued yesterday indicates that the President has had a dramatic change of mind and heart on this question.  That the President acknowledges this sea change is evident from the sophistry he adopted in his manner of signing the order.  He signed it as “Commander in Chief of the Army and Navy.”

The President is, of course, the commander in chief.  But whether the President acts as the nation’s supreme military commander, or as the chief administrative officer of the executive branch, or as the Head of State, he is subject to the nation’s laws and its Constitution.  Alabama argues that there is no aspect of the President’s executive authority that gives him the power to take the action he took yesterday.

The federal government, acting through the Attorney General, has argued that Alabama cannot be heard on this subject because it has declared itself free and independent of the United States.  Because Alabama denies the authority of the federal government within its borders, so argues the federal government, Alabama cannot be heard to complain about an action taken by the government it has disclaimed.

The Court judges that the critical point is that the federal government does not recognize Alabama’s secession.  The fact that Alabama takes a different view on that related but independent issue is irrelevant to the question whether the federal government must respect and adhere to the nation’s laws and its Constitution in its relationship to Alabama and the other so-called Confederate States.

The Constitution gives the government the authority to suspend Habeas Corpus in time of rebellion.  Alabama does not dispute this point.  However, Alabama argues that nothing in the Constitution gives the President the authority to disrupt the property rights of the citizens of certain states.

Alabama and its sister slave states may be thought of as sanctuaries where citizens may hold certain types of property that are not recognized in other states.  It is this rich diversity among the types of property held and used in the several states that has been one of the strengths of this great republic.

Yesterday’s proclamation disrupts this system of diversity.  The entire burden of the order falls on certain citizens within the slave states.  They and they alone must bear the burden of the misplaced philanthropy on display in yesterday’s order.

But is there any evidence that slave-owners in the Southern states have participated in the rebellion against the United States?  The federal government does not provide any.  If slave-owners have participated in the rebellion, is there any evidence that they have produced casualties in the Union ranks?  Again, the respondent’s silence is a powerful testimony.

Fortunately, the Court is not called upon today to decide this case on its merits.  Alabama has shown that the order is suspect, that it is likely that this action was taken out of motives of vindictiveness or bias, and that the statutory and Constitutional authority for the action is questionable.  The federal government has not shown to the satisfaction of this Court that there is a high degree of likelihood that it will prevail on the merits if and when this case is heard on the merits.

The federal government argues that it is in possession of “facts, evidence, intelligence, and analysis” tending to show the effectiveness of the order and its supposed salutary impact on the national war effort.  The Court stands ready to evaluate all this information if and when the federal government deigns to produce it.  In the meantime, the Court believes that its understanding of the complex factors involved in this matter must take precedence over such “facts, evidence, intelligence, and analysis” until they have been fully presented to and evaluated by the Court.

Because of the inherently discriminatory impact of the order on owners of a form of property that is lawful under the Constitution and has been for the three score and fifteen years since the ratification of the Constitution, and because of the unfair burden of the order on selected citizens of the State of Alabama, enforcement of the Emancipation Proclamation is hereby restrained until such time as this case can be heard and argued on the merits.  Because identical issues will be raised with respect to other states that were not represented in this Court, this restraining order shall be in effect nationwide until further notice.

So ordered,

James Trabor, Judge

Harry Jaffa opens A New Birth of Freedom with a review of the election of 1800. That election was, like its predecessor in 1796, one of the most contested and partisan in American history. Unlike its predecessor, the 1800 contest resulted in power changing hands for the first time under the Constitution. The electorate that was prepared to allow John Adams to continue the Washington presidency for four more years decided in 1800 to throw Mr. Adams and all his minions out in favor of a new administration under Thomas Jefferson.

Jaffa points out that throughout human history, when one group of partisans takes power from another, the losers have suffered imprisonment, forced exile, confiscation, or execution. The losing faction in Rome or Byzantium, in the English Civil War, in the French Revolution and the Russian, and in countless other political fights had one or more of those fates visited upon them. Even in the less bloody American Revolution, many American Tories fled to Canada or to Britain and did not return. Yet, after the election of Thomas Jefferson, the losers returned to their law practices, printing presses, and businesses to continue the same partisan activity that had led their opponents to victory at the polls in 1800 .

Jaffa tells us that this was the first time in human history that such a thing had happened. He contrasts this world-historical event — the peaceful transfer of power – to the storm that broke when Lincoln won the election of 1860. Before Lincoln took office, seven states had declared their secession from the Union, their “de-ratification” of the Constitution. The “Great Secession Winter” witnessed the most dramatic transition of presidential power in American history. Six of the seceding states had formed the Confederate States of America in February 1861. Even before that, partisans of the rebel government had been seizing federal property, including military installations, arms, and port facilities while the Buchanan administration looked on. Buchanan had developed a detailed rationale to explain that while the states had no right to secede, the federal government lacked the power to prevent them if they tried. When Lincoln took the oath of office, a rival government was operating within the borders of the United States without interference by the departing administration.

The transition from the Lincoln presidency to the McClellan administration, had it taken place, might have been nearly as dramatic. In the summer of 1864, Lincoln believed he was going to lose the November election. His Democratic opponent, George McClellan, wanted to restore “the Constitution as it is and the Union as it was”. The Constitution prior to the Thirteenth Amendment permitted each state to make its own decision about the legality of chattel slavery within its borders. The Union had been built on a series of compromises that had kept the South’s “peculiar institution” in place in fifteen states. During the 1860-61 transition, Lincoln had rejected a compromise that would have extended the Missouri Compromise line to the Pacific Ocean. The practical effect of the compromise would have been to protect slavery south of that line. McClellan’s proposal was to end the war and reunite on a basis that would implement the failed Compromise of 1861 as the Compromise of 1865.

When General Sherman captured Atlanta at the end of August 1864, Lincoln’s election prospects brightened. But had he lost, he was prepared to act aggressively to make it virtually impossible for his successor to reverse the Emancipation Proclamation and stop the momentum then building toward a constitutional amendment that would abolish slavery. He would be defying the will of the voters, true, but in the cause of the paramount moral issue of his day.

Something like the reverse of that situation occurred after the 1932 election. Hoover is known as a “do nothing” president, but there are historians and economists who think his problem was that he was a “do something, anything” president. Calvin Coolidge said that Hoover, his Secretary of Commerce, had advice for him every day of his presidency, “all of it bad”. When a sharp economic downturn began in 1930, Hoover was ready with a prescription of high tariffs, increased taxes, and jawboning to keep wages high. The resulting economic contraction caused a massive rejection by the electorate at their next opportunity. The man who won 40 of 48 states in 1928 carried six states in 1932. But Hoover remained a man of action during the transition. As a banking panic began to spread in early 1933, he saw an opportunity to implement deposit insurance, a long-standing goal of progressive politicians in both parties. The problem was that Franklin Roosevelt was opposed to deposit insurance. He did not like giving assurances to bank managers that they had no need to worry about the safety of their depositors’ money. FDR avoided Hoover’s snares, although deposit insurance was de facto adopted in March 1933 and fully in place by June 1933 when Roosevelt, once in office, was outflanked by his own party.

The 2016-17 interregnum has been one of the most dramatic in my lifetime. We had barely adjusted to the idea that a candidate who received one percent of the vote could demand a recount when we learned that the CIA had issued a press release outlining Russian activity during the 2016 election. The President who assured us before the election that the decentralized nature of our electoral processes immunized us against foreign hacking decided after the election to impose sanctions on Russia as payback for their role in arranging for the publication of stolen Democratic National Committee emails. Reports of the impact of fake news damaging to Mrs. Clinton were followed by the leak by an unidentified agency of 36 pages of salacious but unsourced and unverified information about the private life of Mr. Trump and the alleged nefarious activities of his aides.
The drama of earlier transitions derived from events of great historical importance then unfolding. What is the substance driving the drama we witnessed during the interregnum of 2016-2017? Like 1800, we will have a peaceful transition of power after a bitterly contested election. The potential for exile or expropriation of the losers exists only in the imagination. Unlike 1860 or 1864 the survival of the republic is not hanging in the balance. The economy is not in crisis as it was in 1932-33 (or in 2008-09, but in that case the Bush administration’s bailouts were done in coordination with the incoming administration). Many people are afflicted with a generalized sense of unease and distemper and there seems to be a widespread feeling that things are bad because they could be better, but the underlying social and political realities do not justify the transition melodrama now ending, possibly to be replaced by melodrama of a different kind.

When the southern states were faced with the reality of Abraham Lincoln’s election, the impulse to secede was tempered by voices that counseled caution. Alexander Stephens, soon to be the vice-president of the Confederacy, argued to the Georgia Convention in January 1861 that the South’s best course was to stay in the Union. The Democrats had a majority in the Senate. Lincoln would need southern votes to take any action, even to confirm his cabinet. The door would be opened for compromise. Leaving would give the Republicans a free hand.

It was good advice, drowned out by the pounding of hot blood in southern ears as they absorbed the insult that the nation had elected a man who had the bad taste to state plainly that slavery was evil. Opinions hardened, tempers flared and in the end a potent emotional reaction overcame prudence.

May I suggest, respectfully, that the reaction to the election of Donald Trump has some of these same characteristics, that the emotions of the moment are overcoming the better angels of our nature that Abraham Lincoln invoked in his first inaugural address? May I go further and suggest that too much energy has been devoted in recent years to silencing critics, to suppressing honest debate, and now to boycotting the side that had the gall to win a round? Oliver Wendell Holmes said that a constitution is made for people of fundamentally differing views. The corollary was stated by Abraham Lincoln in his July 4, 1861 address to Congress: “when ballots have fairly and constitutionally decided . . . there can be no successful appeal except to ballots themselves, at succeeding elections.”

German Romantic poets have been fortunate – putting aside that they are all dead – to have had their work immortalized in song.  German poetry flowered at a time when the powerhouses of Austro-German music took time out from the heavy work of composing symphonies, concertos, string quartets, and piano sonatas to focus immense talents on the creation of Lieder, miniature compositions in which a poem is set to music.

Mozart and Beethoven set songs, but it was Franz Schubert (1797-1828) who established the Lied as a distinctive product of Austro-German music.  He set over 600 poems for voice and (mostly) piano accompaniment.  You can get a sense of how Schubert worked his magic by listening to An die Musik, which runs about two and a half minutes, or if you prefer something a little less somber and philosophical, try Die Forelle[1], which runs less than two minutes.  As a newcomer to most of this music I have been particularly taken with Auf dem Wasser zu singen, which you can enjoy for an investment of less than four minutes of your time.

German has produced beautiful poetry, which is (to me at least) a surprise In light of the guttural sounds of which the language is capable, and considering the stiff and formal stereotypical image of the German character that many of us carry in our heads.  In an essay[2] in which he skewers the German tongue, Mark Twain puts satire aside for a moment to make the point:

There are some German words which are singularly and powerfully effective. For instance, those which describe lowly, peaceful, and affectionate home life; those which deal with love, in any and all forms, . . . ; those which deal with outdoor Nature, in its softest and loveliest aspects — with meadows and forests, and birds and flowers, the fragrance and sunshine of summer, and the moonlight of peaceful winter nights; in a word, those which deal with any and all forms of rest, repose, and peace; . . . and lastly and chiefly, in those words which express pathos, is the language surpassingly rich and affective. There are German songs which can make a stranger to the language cry. That shows that the sound of the words is correct — it interprets the meanings with truth and with exactness; and so the ear is informed, and through the ear, the heart. [Emphasis in original.]

He might have been describing the poem “Gestillte Sehnsucht” – “Stilled Longing” – by Friedrich Rückert (1788-1866), which Johannes Brahms set to music in the early 1880s.

In the first of four verses, the poet places us in a woodland scene at sunset.  After stopping to note the wind whispering through the trees and the soft song of the birds, the poet gets down to the real business at hand, an examination of his emotions.  In the second verse, he addresses them directly.  How long will you feelings of longing persist?  When will you rest?  When will you sleep?  The remaining two verses tell us that these feelings will go on his whole life through.  I feel, therefore I am.

Each verse has six lines; the last two lines of each verse are a refrain that explores the meaning of those whispering winds and birds.  Each appearance of the refrain provides a slightly different answer as the poem unfolds.  So powerful are the poet’s feelings that he never takes time to identify the object of his longing.  For all we know, it might be nothing more than a serving of schnitzel mit nudeln, and poems to food are not unheard of (e.g., Robert Burns’ “Ode to a Haggis”).  But from what we know of the Romantic poets, the longed-for subject is likely to be a fair member of the opposite sex.  Still, it would have been considerate to let the reader in on the secret.

Brahms wrote his song for contralto, viola, and piano, an unusual combination.  It is one of two for the same forces written for his friends Joseph Joachim, a famous violinist and violist, and his wife Amalie, born Schneeweiss[3], (“Snow White”), a noted contralto.  When the couple had a child, a boy whom they named Johannes, Brahms composed a lullaby for contralto, viola, and piano, intending to distribute the parts to the two Joachims with himself at the keyboard.  That song, Geistliches Wiegenlied (“Spiritual Lullaby”), was not published at the time of composition.  Later, the marriage went on the rocks when Herr Joachim accused Frau Joachim of infidelity, apparently without evidence or reason.  Brahms wrote a second song for the same voice and instruments, perhaps hoping to repair the marriage of his friends.  He published the two songs in 1883 as his Opus 91, designating the later song – Gestillte Sehnsucht – as Opus 91, Number 1 and the lullaby as Opus 91, Number 2.

Brahms conceived the song in A-B-A format, or more accurately A+ refrain – B + refrain – A + refrain, which meant that the poem had one verse too many.  He jettisoned the third verse and set verses 1, 2, and 4.

The song opens with an extended introduction by the viola accompanied by the piano, which hints at some of the melodic riches ahead.  After nearly a full minute, the contralto enters and sings the first four lines of the opening verse to a melody of round autumnal ripeness.  The two lines of the refrain are set to an ambling rhythm, lightly syncopated, that ends all three verses.

The mood changes with the second verse.  The emotions accompanying the poet’s address to his feelings generate shorter phrases and an unsettled melody until the refrain returns us to a place where we can breathe more freely.  Even so, echoes from the storm inside the poet’s breast turn the end of the refrain to a minor key.

The final verse returns us to the sunset-tinted melody of the first.  At the end of the refrain, the viola, which has conducted a dialogue with the contralto throughout, works with the piano to take us home.  Just before the final note, the viola and piano hit a dissonant chord, which is resolved as the piece fades to silence.  Perhaps this was Brahms expressing his hope that the discord in the Joachim marriage would be resolved equally harmoniously.  (It wasn’t.  They divorced.)

The song is so ravishing and there are so many lovely voices singing it on record that a listener would not go wrong by selecting the first version that YouTube throws out or the first download that Amazon suggests.  I have listened to every recording I could find.  Music lovers are truly fortunate to have so many beautiful voices available to sing such a moving song.  My clear favorite is a recording made in 1939 by Marian Anderson, accompanied by William Primrose, viola, and Franz Rupp, piano.

Most of the singers who present this piece have big operatic voices.  Their training and inclination is to project their voices to the back of a large hall.  The concert hall approach is out of place when the singer is asked to interpret a quiet moment, a poet alone with his thoughts as the setting sun bathes a forest in its glow.  Using high notes to shake the rafters seems to be second nature to many operatic singers, but to my ear the method doesn’t work when it comes to music as intimate as Gestillte Sehnsucht.  This criticism applies particularly to Marilyn Horne, Janet Evans, and Ann Murray.

The second line of the song is a key point for distinguishing the back-of-the-hall ladies from the others.  The line reads: “How solemnly the forest stands!”  The singer is asked to begin the line on a high note.  It seems that for many singers, a high note is a loud note.  But a quiet moment in which the poet is awed by the beauty around him should be presented to the listener at something less than full operatic volume.

Another tendency is to overwork the second verse, where the poet in his anguish addresses his feelings of longing.  In too many versions I hear instead Sieglinde running through the forest in Act Two of Die Walküre.  As the curtain comes down on Act One, Sieglinde is preparing to commit the dual sins of adultery and incest with the twin brother with whom she has just been reunited.  When I say “preparing to commit” I don’t mean that she is standing in front of a mirror a-wishin’ and a-hopin’.  If at the original performance the Act One curtain had come down a minute later than it does, the opera would have been banned by the censors and the world would have been denied the remaining twelve hours of the Ring cycle[4].

Once Act Two is underway, Sieglinde, whose longings were so recently un-stilled, is racing through the forest wracked with guilt.  As the old saying goes, commit incest in haste, repent at leisure.  That’s the emotional pitch of Sieglinde at that point in the drama.  That level of emotional turmoil is over the top in Brahms’s song.  Yet so many singers of Gestillte Sehnsucht overdo things that I have developed an informal “Sieglinde Index” to evaluate them.  I can’t listen to a recording when the Sieglinde Index starts to red-line into the “High” zone.  That leaves out Iris Vermillion (who I wanted to make my favorite for the sake of her name), Alice Coote, even Kirsten Flagstad (one of the greatest Wagnerian sopranos, superb in this song apart from the four lines in question).

I have come back repeatedly to Marian Anderson, Kathleen Ferrier, Jessye Norman, Anne Sofie von Otter, and Angelika Kirchshlager[5].  Ms. Norman offers her powerful voice – you sense that she could use it to engrave cold steel if she wanted to – in the service of an introspective performance.  Her Sieglinde Index is moderate.  She has so much power in reserve that she can hit her high notes without strain and without excessive volume.  As against that, she is a dramatic soprano, not a contralto.

Kirchshlager’s performance is outstanding, with a moderate-to-high but still acceptable Sieglinde Index.  Unfortunately, she takes the song at a speed I feel is too fast.  Von Otter’s performance likewise is beautiful.  She adopts a moderate tempo, about halfway between the fastest and slowest performances.  Her Sieglinde Index is acceptable.  And both of these superb singers are mezzos, not contraltos.

Anderson and Ferrier were both true contraltos.  My objection to Kathleen Ferrier’s performance is that, like Kirchshlager, she is too fast.  She moves through the song in some five minutes, where singers such as Anderson and Norman take more than seven.

Anderson’s reading of the song is superb.  Her musical bearing is restrained, patrician.  The emotional content of the music flows out of her without any need for embellishment.  What she provides is less an interpretation than a rendering.  Her accompanists are equally fine.  This most musically reserved performance is also for me the most moving.  She makes the song her own by simply presenting it, not selling it.  The 1939 sound is much better than I would have expected and does not get in the way at all.

It is impossible to listen to Marian Anderson without thinking of her compelling personal story.  We can take pride in the enormous racial progress our country has made since Ms. Anderson’s time, but the vicious stupidity that characterized so much of the treatment she experienced is shameful.  She was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania in 1897.  Her musical talents were first noticed through her church.  When she applied to the Philadelphia Academy of Music, the admissions clerk refused to accept her application, saying “We don’t take colored.”

Two incidents underscore the depth of her talent.  After the Academy turned her down, she sought a private teacher.  She auditioned for a voice coach named Giuseppe Boghetti[6].  This was a man who earned his living by evaluating voices in the cold-blooded way that a baseball scout might evaluate a curve ball.  As she began to sing for him, the beauty of her voice overwhelmed him.  He broke down in tears.  Some years later when she was touring Europe, Arturo Toscanini heard her sing and told her that a voice such as hers is heard once in a hundred years.

Yet when in 1939 her supporters tried to arrange a concert at Constitution Hall in Washington, D.C., a private venue owned by the Daughters of the American Revolution, the DAR refused to book the concert.  They could not abide an African American singer on their stage.  The DC city government had a hall available but refused to offer it because it did not have segregated bathrooms (which believe it or not was a code violation, like having bad wiring).  The Colonial Dames – P.G. Wodehouse’s name – did finally allow her to sing at Constitution Hall in 1943.  With bombs falling and the future of American civilization at risk, it was easier for them to look past the racial divide, apparently.  I was curious whether the DAR was still in existence.  I found an active website that announces that they welcome members – those who can trace their ancestry to a participant in the American Revolutionary War – of all races, creeds, and colors.  Mazel tov.

Her treatment and her response provide important examples for our time and place.  When she was denied admission to the Philadelphia Academy, denied the opportunity even to apply, she did not go off to her safe space.  She showed more tenacity in the face of genuine hostility than many of our contemporaries display in the presence of real or imagined micro-aggressions.  She squared her shoulders, developed her talent, and brought her gifts to appreciative audiences all over the world.

She was magnanimous.  When she finally performed at Constitution Hall in the middle of the Second World War, she took the stage and she sang.  If she felt a desire to lecture the audience in the manner of the script-readers of Hamilton fame, she overcame it.  Her nobility of character and talent contrasted with the base stupidity of those who had denied her a forum.  Her detractors live in footnotes in the story of her life.

She had a successful concert and recording career, first in Europe and eventually in her native country, but her operatic work was limited to the minor role of Ulrica in Verdi’s “Masked Ball”.  Perhaps the lack of an operatic resume is why she sings this song with such intimacy, without projecting drama to the imaginary back row of the theater.  That can’t be the entire explanation; any number of great operatic performers were also superb singers of Lieder.  In this instance, the singer and her accompanists made artistic decisions that fit perfectly with the mood and tone of the song.  It is a measure of the achievement of the composer and the musicians that the full beauty of the song is revealed by a performance that holds so much power in reserve.

[1] I was listening to different performances of this song on YouTube the other day.  I like to read the listener comments.  One person said that he would love to have a particular female singer standing on his washing machine.  I don’t expect to understand every nuance of listener comments, but this one went right by me.  The mystery deepened as other comments talked about washing machines and dryers.  The light dawned when one commenter said that she was “blown away” when she first heard the song.  It’s what her Samsung washer and dryer play at the end of a cycle!

[2] “The Awful German Language”.

[3] Joachim had converted from Judaism as an adult, but even so his family objected to the marriage because the bride wasn’t Jewish!

[4] “Wagner’s music is much better than it sounds.”  Mark Twain

[5] There are a number of unusual arrangements of the song on YouTube.  Some of these substitute a cello for the viola.  I don’t think the cello works here, but this hardly matters because the singers in these versions tend not be up to the song’s demands anyway.  An exception is the German mezzo Angelika Wied, who provides a near-perfect rendition of the song that in my opinion is ruined by the substitution of a cello for viola – it’s the instrument, not the performer.  Other novelties substitute the cello for the voice.  One YouTube commenter: I never liked the lyrics anyway.  Another try is to substitute a string chamber orchestra for the piano.  The most intriguing novelty approach I found was a rewrite that substituted a male baritone for the contralto and a clarinet for the viola.  That version almost worked.  The problem with all of these novelties is their presumption.  Brahms knew what he was doing.  He doesn’t need help.

[6] He was born Joseph Bogash to Russian-Jewish immigrant parents.  A trip to Italy convinced him that he could improve his prospects in the music business by italianizing his name.

We are all tempted to reason backwards.  If desired result R depends on the truth of proposition P, it is sometimes hard to resist arguing in favor of P without regard to its merits.  If your R is that you want Donald Trump’s electoral vote win to be illegitimate, then a handy P is that a candidate must win the nationwide popular vote to be considered the rightful winner of a presidential election.  Many times, the candidate with the most popular votes nationwide does not have a majority, just a plurality.  That was true in 1992, 1996, 2000, and now again in 2016.  Some countries that rely on a nationwide popular vote to select their head of state use a two-round system.  If no one wins a majority of the vote in the first round, the top two finishers compete in a second round.  One of the two will by necessity end up with a majority of the votes cast in the second round.  I know that France and Costa Rica both use this system, so the U.S. would not be breaking new ground.  However, the particular P before us is that a plurality is enough.  I don’t hear any calls for a run-off.

Applying this reasoning to other fields, Cleveland Indians fans can argue that the 2016 World Series has not been settled.  It ended in a tie.  Over the course of seven games, each team scored 27 runs in total.  We have ended up with an illegitimate World Series champion by using the arcane and biased method of counting the games won or lost rather than the number of runs scored over the entire series.  It’s obvious that we need a better method to settle a contest as important as the World Series.  Will Cleveland fans take to the streets until they get the result they desire?  If they are reading this, they just might.