In real life, we never know when we are in our last season or when anyone else is.  The Downton writing crew, however, knows that they are facing the end.  It is mere weeks away.  Are we going to end on a note of gloom or one of hope?  The battle is going to be just as fierce as anything that Isobel and Violet have gotten on.  The forces of gloom seem to have a strategic advantage, but hope manages to get in a few good licks.

As Exhibit A on the hope side of the equation, we have Anna and Bates, but their version of hope is so tiring that they actually make gloom look good.  Here is how I expect one of their early morning conversations might go when no particular tragedy is looming on the horizon:

Bates: “Good morning, my darling.”

Anna: “How can it be a good morning when I am so unworthy of you?”

Bates: “You could never be unworthy of me or of anyone.  You are the most perfect angel and my only hope is to provide you with a fraction of the happiness that you have provided me.”

Anna: “You are so kind to pretend that you are happy when I know how disappointed you must be.”

Bates: “My darling, is that smoke coming from the toaster?”

I expect that in later years, the Bateses will find conversation on any topic to be exhausting.  The lightest subject leads the two of them almost immediately into narrow channels of self-recrimination, adoration, and devotion.  It will soon become impossible for either of them to get anything done if the other speaks.  I don’t think the Hallmark card people were selling in England in 1925, but when they get there, I picture the Bateses filling their back room – the room that, alas, might once have served as a nursery – with cartons of Hallmark cards.  If either of them starts a conversation on any topic, the other one hands over a card and that’s an end to it.

The ray of hope that finds its way through the gloom surrounding Mr. and Mrs. Bates is generated by the good news that the case against Anna may finally be closed, pending collection of perhaps just one more piece of evidence.  I thought the whole case had been dropped at the end of last year, but it was not so.  The case against Anna remains alive even after a different victim of Mr. Green has confessed to killing him.  The legal system that sent Bates to prison for a crime he didn’t commit and that has held Anna in the grip of its suspicion for some three story years, suddenly turns skeptical when the true killer shows up and confesses.  “Sorry, Miss.  We need more than your word.  We’d have to double the size of our prisons if we started convicting murderers based on nothing more than a confession.”

Not to worry.  An eyewitness appears and supplies the police with the missing piece of the puzzle.  She did not witness the crime, but she saw Mr. Green and his self-confessed killer together in a pub.  That’s good enough for the police this week.  And it’s a good enough excuse to break out the gramophone and the Veuve Clicquot – not properly chilled, but cold enough for an impromptu celebration with the staff – to chase the blues away from Downton Abbey, if only for one evening.[1]

But the gloom keeps pressing in.  The Abbey’s finances are beginning to pinch.  Many great houses must have faced the same dilemma.  They needed lots of staff to run a place that large, but the wage necessary to attract the required number had grown beyond the owner’s means, unless, like Lord Sinderby or the newly rich Mr. Henderson down the road, the owner had an income apart from the estate itself.  (How wages went up must remain a mystery.  Britain had no minimum wage law at the time.  Could wages rise on their own, without intervention from the state?  That’s a puzzle.)

So far, Robert has managed staff reductions through attrition, not replacing a footman here or an under-house-parlor maid there when they move on to other work.  Carson points out that this can’t go on.  He is practically down to his last hall boy.  On the other hand, the estate sale down the road points out too clearly what lies ahead for a landed family that doesn’t husband its resources.

The Crawleys could move to a more modest house and still live better than all but a handful of landed families, but it would mean a downgrade to their social standing.  And it would mean a downgrade to their self-respect because they would have to lay off so many honest hardworking people who had come to rely on them, and who would now have to find their own way.

The way the board divided over the future of the hospital was telling.  Violet and Dr. Clarkson oppose joining the Royal Yorkshire Hospital for purely parochial reasons — it would diminish their positions.  Violet likes ruling her local roost and Clarkson does not like professional interference.  Lord Merton likes to be on the same side as Isobel, so he sides with her after making sure that he understands what her position is.  Isobel is not to be bought off so easily.  She wants loyal, heartfelt support or none at all.  So far, her only ally is Cora.  This will be a bitter fight.  Isobel sees a clear opportunity to improve the work of an important local charitable organization.  Violet intends to defend her turf.  Neither of them will be easily deterred from her goal.

Several other characters showed steel resolution.  The least successful of these was Daisy, who may have learned her lessons in social engineering from Miss Bunting only too well.  We recall that the Bunting method is to express outrage and then develop a plan.  Daisy streamlines this process even further by eliminating the second step.  We can imagine an English landlord, newly installed in his Yorkshire residence, who likes a tenant family with a bit of spunk and immediately reinstalls dear Mr. Mason at a reduced rent as soon as Daisy has finished her oration.  Unfortunately, Mr. Henderson is not a landlord of this type.  Instead, he states in the clearest terms that if he should happen to decide to let a tenant or two back onto the estate, Mr. Mason will not be among them.  So, gloom appears to be winning the day in the Mason family.  However, I see a potential ray of hope.  Perhaps Mr. Mason will move to Downton Abbey and assist Mary in managing the agricultural end of the business.

Mary is getting the job of business agent for the Abbey because she demonstrated resolution of her own, facing blackmail in her case rather than eviction.  It’s interesting how a Yorkshire accent can emphasize a person’s basic character.  A kind soul such as Mrs. Patmore sounds even more kind and down to earth when she turns every second vowel into a double o.  Daisy’s passion for justice burns even hotter and Ms. Bevan’s contempt for her betters becomes even more toxic when expressed through the long, broad vowels of a Yorkshire tongue.[2]

Ms. Bevan is one of those nasty pieces of work that wander through this story from time to time.  The thousand pounds she wants for her silence would have been a spectacular sum at the time.  I found a source that indicates that in 1925 a fireman earned 15 pounds a month, while a bricklayer might earn 8 pounds a week.  A thousand pounds would have been several years pay for either of them.  Hats off to Mary for telling Bevan to go do her worst and take a hike.

The strength of her resolve does not have to be tested because Robert turns out to be even steelier, and a master negotiator to boot.  He gets Bevan down to a mere fifty pounds and to get even that she has to sign a statement confessing to blackmail, which will ensure that she goes to jail if she ever breathes a word of the scandal on which she was trading.  Mary is in the clear, and her father has come to see her as a force (what with riding astride her horse, arranging pre-marital assignations in York hotels, and staring down would-be blackmailers) who can take on the management of the estate and, if need be, a lot more.

I thought that Edith found herself in the most interesting situation of all the Crawleys.  When you consider that she was never actually engaged to Michael Gregson – he couldn’t undertake to marry her while he had a wife still living – and that Michael could not have known that Edith was carrying their child, she seems to have done quite well out of the relationship.  He left her his publishing business and his Bloomsbury apartment.  I’ve raised the point before, but you have to wonder what Mrs. Gregson was left with.  She is a patient in a mental hospital and is going to require skilled care for the rest of her life.  Yet none of her legal representatives seems to mind at all that Mr. Gregson has left a string of valuable assets to a woman who – how does one put this delicately? – solemnized her relationship with him through one overnight visit to his flat.  It’s another of these little curiosities in the plotting that don’t make a lot of sense.

Apart from that, Edith has some terrific alternatives to choose from.  She can pursue a career in editing, publishing, and writing in London, using her fabulous Bloomsbury flat as a base of operations.  She can install Marigold there, or she can leave Marigold to mature into a country lass in Yorkshire, visiting on the weekends and on holidays.  Or, she can pursue the life she was born into as a member of the Yorkshire gentry.  If she chooses not to run the publishing business, she will still have the income from it and if she chooses not to live in the flat, she can have the income from that.  She appears to have some family money to boot, so her finances will be secure for years to come.  We all know that the Great Depression is looming up ahead, and may ruin the entire family, but at the rate we are going the story will be long over before that arrives.  We needn’t worry about it now.  I look forward to learning which path Edith chooses.

There was a fair amount of big-time name dropping in this episode.  Edith tells Rosamunde that she met Virginia Woolf and Lytton Strachey in the flat, when it was Michael’s.  Rosamunde had just commented that she expected to see members of the “Bloomsbury Set” sitting in the corner.  Woolf and Strachey were both in it.

The final name to be dropped was that of Oliver Cromwell, who had told his portraitist that he wanted to be shown “warts and all”.  That’s how Mrs. Hughes offers herself to Mr. Carson, who gladly accepts, good fellow that he is, after the most awkward sequence of oblique sexual references this show has produced since Thomas Barrow’s experiments with a hypodermic needle last season.  Is English richer in euphemisms than other languages?  When a cook, and a housekeeper, and a butler discuss the groom’s amorous intentions in Spain, or Germany, or Russia – I refuse to believe that the subject would even be thought of in France or Italy – can their language bear the strain of so much indirection?  Let us wish Mr. Carson and Mrs. Hughes all happiness, and for my money, if they care to shield their private affairs from the eyes and ears of the audience from this point forward, I for one will not object.

A final note about the “hunting” scene.  I count this the second such scene in the series.  The first one came in one of the early seasons, Season One or Two I think, and contained a bit of self-referential humor that Mr. Fellowes seems to enjoy.  The 19^th century novelist Anthony Trollope was an avid fox hunter and included an extended hunting scene in one of his “Palliser” novels.  (There may be lots of others in other Trollope novels.  I don’t know.)  When Downton had its first hunting scene years ago, one of the characters said that he felt like he had just walked into a Trollope novel (or something along those lines).  Now it’s 1925 and we have another hunting scene.  However, this time the hunting party is much reduced.  There couldn’t have been more than ten riders, while I recall a near mob of horses in the earlier scene.  Perhaps this is further evidence of the slow decline in the fortunes of the Crawley family.[3]

I look forward to the continuation of this last season.

 

[1] Robert’s toast to British justice is another example of his abundant self-satisfaction, although as I think about it, if you were accused in 1925 of a crime you didn’t commit, your chances of acquittal were probably better in Britain than almost anywhere else.

[2] A friend who grew up in Sheffield told me that a Yorkshireman is very much like a Scotsman, but lacks the Scots sense of generosity.

[3] When Ernest Hemingway was asked how he went broke, he is supposed to have said, “Slowly at first.  Then all at once.”

On Christmas Day, my children gave me a gift that I could not identify even after I unwrapped it.  I removed the wrapping paper, opened the cylindrical package and took the gift out of its protective case, and I still didn’t know what it was.

It was a sous vide cooker from a company called Anova.  “Sous Vide” is French for “under vacuum” which is not a particularly clear description of what the device does.  You fill a tall pot to create a water bath, you attach the Anova Sous Vide device to the side of the pot, you plug it in and set if for a desired temperature.  The device takes the water to the desired temperature, keeps it there for as long as desired, and gently circulates it around the pot to maintain an even temperature throughout the water bath.

The item you are going to cook – principally proteins, although it works fine on vegetables – is placed in a sealed plastic bag.  I don’t have a Foodsaver home vacuum, so I used a zip lock bag with the air removed via displacement.

The Anova company directs users to the Serious Eats website, which goes into a lot detail about how to use the device.  The website says that the first thing anyone ever cooks sous vide is a steak.  I signed up right away.

Earlier, I posted a blog about my favorite method for cooking steak.  I know that blog has influenced steak preparation in three, possibly four, households, so I felt I owed the readership an update now that a revolutionary cooking method has walked through my front door. The basic idea is that the steak goes into its sealed plastic bag.  Once the water is at the desired temperature, the bag goes into the water.  I was cooking a prime tenderloin, so I set the temperature to 129 degrees F, which is at the rare end of medium rare.  It takes a tenderloin steak about 45 minutes to get to 129.  At that point, it can be held in the bath for as much as an additional 75 minutes, possibly longer.  When I was within three or so minutes of having everything else ready, I put it on a grill for about 1-1/2 minutes per side to give it a bit of a char.

Here is a step by step, along with some photos.

Two hours before dinner:  Take the steak out of the refrigerator, pat it dry, salt with Kosher salt, put it on a rack over a plate to sit for an hour.  I made oven-browned potatoes, so I microwaved two large Yukon potatoes for three minutes, flipped them over for another three minutes, then let them cool.

Ninety minutes before dinner:  Fill a deep pot about 2/3 full with hot tap water.  Put it on the stove (which is not turned on for this use), or other heat-proof surface, attach the Anova device, set it for 129 F, and wait for it to come to temperature.  Also, I turned the oven to 400 degrees so it would be ready for the potatoes.

One hour before dinner: (1) The steak, nicely sealed in its plastic bag, goes into the water bath.  (2) A roasting pan with a couple Tb of olive oil and a couple Tb of butter goes into the oven to heat and melt.  (3) A diced onion goes into a sautee pan lubricated with olive oil to cook over medium low heat.  (4) The potatoes are cut into 3/4 inch wedges and placed in the roasting pan, then stirred to coat.  [This paragraph edited on 1/1/16 to get the potatoes into the oven.]

I occasionally stirred the onions and the potatoes to prevent burning.

Thirty minutes before dinner, I turned my grill on to high.

Fifteen minutes before dinner, I added a half pound of sliced mushrooms to the onions, along with about 1-1/2 Tb of butter, and turned the heat up a bit.  The potatoes might need to come out at this point.  I just keep checking.

When the sous vide hour was up, I used tongs to pull the plastic bag from the water bath and to remove the steak from the plastic bag.  I patted it dry, to help it get a char on the grill.  I put it on the grill at a NW-SE angle for about 45 seconds, then turned it 90 degrees to a NE-SW angle for another 45 seconds.  Then I turned it over to cook for about a minute.

I didn’t think it needed to rest at that point, so I brought it inside and started slicing.

The results were spectacular.  The steak was meltingly tender.  The gentle heat had not caused the protein to shrink much, so the steak had a slight resistance to the tooth and was as tender as any steak I have ever eaten.  I hope these pictures give you an idea.

Here is the sous vide device at work:

This is the way the steak looked when it was removed from the bag.  It’s medium rare pink all the way through, even at the surface.

It’s not the most beautiful sight a meat-lover has laid eyes on, but here is what it looked like after about three minutes on the grill:

And a minute later, after a couple of slices were cut:

Finally, here is the assembled plate:

This is said to be a terrific method for cooking salmon and other fish, as well as boneless skinless chicken breasts and pork.  I look forward to trying it for all manner of foods, but if it does nothing but turn out steaks this good, I will be delighted.

Thanks, kids!

Bon appetit!

How many pianists are there at any given moment in time who are capable of playing any piece in the vast repertoire of music written for the piano?  Of course, no one plays everything.  It takes time to prepare a piece for performance and not every composer or every work will be of interest to any particular musician.  But how many concert pianists who forego learning, say, Beethoven’s “Hammerklavier” Sonata, do so because the piece doesn’t speak to them rather than because they find it impossible to play?  I would guess that the number of such individuals is in the low triple digits, perhaps 250 at any moment in time.  That’s a pure guess and it may be high.

A surprisingly large number of those gifted pianists have turned to Bach’s Goldberg Variations in recent decades.  Any number of gifted harpsichordists have done the same.  I have read that there are 193 recordings of the work.  That article was written a few years ago; some recent recordings were not included.  There may be 200 recordings by now.  I am giving serious consideration to a project of listening to all of them.  I have made a start.

On occasion, I will obsess over a piece of music, listening to it repeatedly until the desire to hear it dies from overfeeding after a day or two.  I have been listening to Bach’s Goldberg Variations (BWV 988)[1] and virtually nothing else for over two months, so in this case obsession has graduated into mania.  I thought I would summarize what I have learned about the Goldberg Variations so far.  I may continue exploring the piece, so I reserve the right to supplement this note with additional comments.

Except for the comments on individual recordings, none of what follows will be news to anyone familiar with the work, but perhaps the phrasing will be different.  This is a long post on a modestly obscure topic.  I hope anyone reading it finds it interesting.  The length of the post is a measure of the intensity of the therapy required to move me to a different piece of music.

Form of the Work

The work begins with a melody, titled an “Aria”, followed by thirty variations.  Bach concludes the work by repeating the Aria.  Thus, the piece consists of 32 individual compositions.  The Aria itself is 32 bars long, which is not a coincidence.

The Aria is a long, slow, highly decorated, wandering affair.  The 30 variations display a staggering range of styles, emotional content, and technical challenges.  They include dance movements, fughettas, canons, toccatas, as well as others that don’t fall into any particular classification.

Contrasts between pieces, or between different performances of the same piece, can be startling.  Variation 7 is a pleasant dance movement (a “gigue”) followed by a piece that, as played by some musicians, sounds like we have entered the Bach Pump House where rows of perfectly tuned machines are running at full speed.  Yet there is one performer (Gustav Leonhardt) who can make the same piece sound almost like a lullaby.  Variation 13 is one of the most beautiful pieces of music I have ever heard, but some performers seem intent on draining any beauty out of it.  The next variation, number 14, is a drunken riot where the performer’s fingers tumble up and down the keyboard.  Number 25 is the longest and slowest of all the variations (nicknamed the “Black Pearl” by Wanda Landowska) and is followed by four pieces calling for extreme dexterity and virtuosity.

After the 30^th variation, the Aria returns.  One of the many oddities of the piece is that, when the Aria makes its second appearance, we realize (as the pianist David Jalbert points out) that the melody has disappeared for more than an hour (much less if you listen to a Glenn Gould performance of the work).  The Goldberg Variations were not built by varying a theme, the way the “Theme and Variations” compositions of Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Schumann, or Brahms are constructed.  Rather, the variations are built on the Aria’s bass line and the harmonies it implies.

That harmonic structure is not complicated.  After presenting the first part of the Aria in eight bars of G Major, Bach moves the next eight bars into the dominant, D Major.  A repeat sends us back to the beginning to hear those sixteen bars again.  Some performers ignore the repeat.  The second half of the Aria gives us eight bars in the key of E Minor (the relative minor, that is, the minor key with the same signature as G Major), after which the Aria finds its way back to G Major and closes with a few bars of sixteenth notes, the fastest-moving part of the Aria.  Again, the performer is directed to repeat the second sixteen bars, although many don’t take the repeat.

Of the 30 variations, 27 follow this harmonic pattern.  The three exceptions, numbers 15, 21, and 25, are written in G minor.  Jeremy Denk calls these “three oases of sadness in a desert of joy”.  All of these give us eight bars in G minor followed by eight bars in D minor.  Two of them, numbers 15 and 21, begin the second half with eight bars in E-flat major, to give us a little ray of sunshine through the minor key gloom, before returning to G minor to take us home.  The third of the minor key variations, number 25, the “Black Pearl”, stays in minor keys all the way through and ends on a note of desolation.

Bach was a happy, optimistic person, so it is not surprising that the overwhelming tone of the piece is one of joy, playfulness, and spontaneity.

Some History

The piece was published in (or about) 1742, when Bach would have been 56 or 57.  Bach did not have a lot of his music published, so the publication of the Goldbergs indicates the importance he attached to the work.  The Variations were composed sometime between 1738 and 1741.  Bach’s first biographer, writing in the first decade of the nineteenth century, explained how the piece came to be written.  The story has become the stuff of legends.  The Russian ambassador to the court of Dresden, a man named Hermann Carl, Count von Keyserlingk, suffered from insomnia.  His house musician, one Johann Gottlieb Goldberg, was a former student of Bach.  The Count was a music lover and a friend of Bach.  He commissioned Bach to write some pieces that Goldberg could play at night when the Count was having difficulty getting to sleep.  The piece we call the Goldberg Variations was the result of this commission.  In payment, the Count gave Bach a golden goblet filled with 100 gold coins (“louis d’or”).

Scholars now doubt the truth of this tale, but it was accepted as late as 25 years ago.  The story is repeated uncritically in the notes to recordings from 1980 (Trevor Pinnock, harpsichord) and 1988 (Rosalyn Tureck, piano).  Both sets of notes were written by the respective performers, each of whom is a reliable Bach scholar.  There are numerous reasons to doubt this romantic tale.  First, the story appears in a biography written in 1802, more than sixty years after the piece was composed.  The story was told by two of Bach’s sons, neither of whom was present in the Bach household when these events are said to have occurred.  Second, the title page of the work does not contain a dedication to the Count, which would have been customary then and now to honor the patron of a work.  Third, no one ever mentioned seeing the gold goblet and it was not listed among the effects in the Bach estate when he died in 1750.  Fourth, the estimable Herr Goldberg would have been about ten years old when Bach began work on the Variations.  He would have been a mere Kindsklavierspieler[2]  It is not likely that he was in the employ of an ambassador at such a young age.  It would be interesting to know if anyone referred to this magnificent piece of music as the “Goldberg Variations” prior to the publication of the story in 1802.  Finally, if you were looking for music to help you sleep, there is little in the Variations that would help.

The truth is probably that at some point in the 1740s, young Goldberg, who had become the house musician for Count Keyserlingk, asked Bach, his former teacher, for some music to keep his patron entertained.  Bach drew a printed copy of the Variations out of inventory and gave it to his former pupil, someone, Bach knew, who could actually perform the piece.  The 1802 version is a story that is too good to check, but the likelihood is that things didn’t happen that way.

As to the Aria itself, it used to be an accepted fact that it was written no later than 1725 and possibly not by Bach.  The reason for dating the Aria to such an early point in time is that it was found in one of the notebooks of Anna Magdalena Bach (J.S.’s second wife), a notebook that bears the date 1725.  It appears to have been copied into the notebook by Anna Magdalena.  The original notebook survives and investigators have determined that the Aria was copied into the notebook in the late 1730s.  Apparently, a couple of pages were left blank when the notebook was first used in 1725 and those pages were available to receive the Aria when it was copied around the time the Goldbergs were composed.  Chemical analysis of the ink seems to establish the later date to the satisfaction of the leading scholars in the field.

The Larger Structure of the Work

The work has a mathematical structure, or rather several overlapping mathematical structures.  As I mentioned, the Aria is 32 bars long, while the entire composition contains 32 individual pieces (the Aria, 30 variations, and the return of the Aria).  The first 16 bars of the Aria have a different character from the second 16.  The first 16 have a lighter mood than the second.  The first half is written in major keys, starting in G major, while the second half starts off in a minor key before using a series of sixteenth notes to take us back to G major.

Variation 16, labeled an “Overture” by Bach, sitting at the half-way point of the piece, has two distinctly different halves.  The opening half with block chords and dotted rhythms, can be thought of as summing up the first half of the piece.  The second half of Variation 16, a lighter, quicker, fugue-like affair, points us to the second half that still lies before us.  Murray Perahia thinks there is more to it than that.  He argues that if you divide the 32 compositions into four groups of eight, just as the Aria has four distinct eight-bar sections, each group in its mood and tone corresponds to the four respective elements of the Aria.  Some parts of the work fit this pattern more closely than others.  For example, the first eight pieces (Aria and Variations 1 through 7), can be likened to a Bach dance suite, ending in a “gigue,” a practice that Bach often followed.  (I would point out that Variation 7 does not sound like a piece to conclude with, but that’s a subjective impression.)

The last eight pieces can be mapped more comfortably onto the last eight bars of the Aria.  Measure 25 of the Aria is a pivotal moment, when the melody slowly moves from E minor and starts the meander toward G major.  Variation 25 is a long, slow, highly chromatic piece that performs a similar function for the piece as a whole.  The next four variations are quick moving numbers, the last two of which approach the limits of what can be sounded on a keyboard instrument.  These four correspond roughly to Measures 26 through 29 of the Aria, when a series of sixteenth notes carry us close to the Aria’s conclusion.  However, I think one can push this kind of mapping too far.  I think the best that can be said is that there is a rough correspondence between the form of the Aria and the structure of the 30 variations.

Trevor Pinnock notes another structural element.  There are two particularly monumental fugue-like variations, numbers 10 and 22, that each stand exactly six numbers away from the central Overture, acting as pillars holding up the rest of the structure.  His insight suggests a three-part division of the work, possible further evidence of the attention that Bach lavished on the piece.

One mathematical pattern in the piece is much less speculative because the variations in question are labeled by the composer to point it out.  Every third variation is a canon, a piece where two different voices play the same theme, starting at different times.  (“Row, row, row your boat” is an example.)  All of the canons are in two voices and all but the last have a free, non-canonic, third voice in the bass.  The canons have a particular pattern.  In the first canon, Variation 3, the leading voice and the following voice start on the same note; the canon is at the “unison”.  In the second canon, Variation 6, the following voice starts one note higher than the leading voice, so the canon is at the “second.”  This continues right up to Variation 27, which is a canon at the ninth.  Variation 27 differs from the other canons in that there is no free voice in the bass.  The two canonic lines roll up and down the keyboard nine notes apart.  Ninths don’t sound all that pleasant together, so it is a remarkable achievement to send the two voices all over the keyboard with no harmonic cover or diversion of any kind.

There are a few Bach tricks in the canons.  A couple of them are in contrary motion – the following voice does not mimic the leading voice in the usual way.  Instead, when the lead voice, say, goes up a third, the following voice goes down a third.  The rhythmic pattern is the same in both voices but every motion by the lead voice is met by the opposite motion from the following voice.  In a couple of variations, the lead voice and following voice change places here and there.

None of this mathematical wizardry is part of anyone’s conscious enjoyment of the music.  I doubt that anyone who hadn’t looked at the score or read a mathematical analysis of the music has ever listened to the piece and thought, “Ah, yes, the canons keep rising, one tone every three variations.”  It’s the kind of thing you would discover only if you were reading the score.  However, the continued rising of the tones separating the voices is undoubtedly felt by the listener as the piece progresses, even if we can’t say what we are feeling or why.  We can feel the structure, as we feel the structure of a great architectural masterpiece, even if we do not understand the elements that produce it, or even know what they are.

In addition, because we know that this kind of in-depth planning went into the construction of the music, we know that the composer saw the work as something more than a gold cup of coins’ worth of sleeping pills.  He didn’t build the piece on such a complex foundation so that we would have the pleasure of decoding a puzzle over the course of centuries.  He produced the Variations with patterns of such complexity in order to enhance the enjoyment of his music by those who would play it and hear it, to “refresh their spirits” as he put it.

When we come to the final variation, number 30, the previous pattern has led us to expect a canon at the tenth.  Instead, we get a piece labeled “Quodlibet” – “What pleases you”.  It was the custom at Bach family gatherings for the guests to entertain themselves after a heavy meal by blending disparate melodies together into a workable counterpoint.  These efforts must have produced some remarkable impromptu compositions while the Madeira and Schnapps were circulating round the table.  Bach had 19 children, some of whom became important composers in their own right.  In addition, there were older and collateral members of the Bach family who had been composers and court musicians for generations.  Doubtless many family friends were musical.  So when this group decided to blend a couple of melodies, they got blended.  And, if somehow the group got stuck due to a particularly obdurate passing tone, they had history’s greatest composer of counterpoint available to bail them out.  It would be like having Richard Sherman playing defense on your touch football team.

In the same spirit of fun and good fellowship, Bach fitted two popular songs of the day[3] to the harmony of the Aria and offers the result as the final transformation of the bass pattern that inspired the previous 29 variations.  The counterpoint is so seamless that it is not always obvious that more than one melody is in play.  The composer is having some fun, digging an elbow into the sides of the performer and the listener, and invites us to do the same back.  A good performance of the Quodlibet leaves us smiling, and it’s easy to imagine the composer smiling back at us across nearly three centuries.

After all that, the Aria returns, just as quiet and contemplative as before.  Even though the notes are identical to the ones that opened the piece, a good performance leaves us feeling that the Aria has gone through the fire and has been transformed.

Thoughts on Recordings

In general, my favorite recording is the one I’m listening to at the moment.  There are only three that I would label “Avoid” and one of those is very much a specialty item.  Here are some impressions of the recordings in roughly chronological order of recording date.

Rudolf Serkin 1928.  Before high fidelity recording was ever thought of, the Aeolian Company was using a sophisticated method to record piano performances using piano rolls.  The company developed a “Duo-Art” reproducing piano and persuaded Steinway to manufacture a few pianos that were fitted with the Duo-Art mechanism.  From 1916 to the late 1920s, many famous pianists of the early twentieth century recorded this way.  During the stereo era, it was possible to play these rolls through the old Steinways and record the result onto then-modern tape.  Everest records produced several of these recordings.  I have an old LP of Jan Paderewski and another of Vladimir de Pachmann[4], both performing a variety of pieces by Chopin.  Rudolf Serkin used this method to lay down a record of a Goldberg performance in 1928.  It’s a survivor in the twentieth century of what we understand performance practice of Bach’s works to have been in the nineteenth century.  The idea was to use then-modern instruments to create a massive wall of sound, through which the searing genius of Bach would somehow emerge.  The 1928 recording fits right in.  There is little in the way of line or definition.  The notes run together in a way that makes the music unrecognizable.  Serkin omits Variations 6 through 10.  I would not plan to return to this recording (which can be heard on YouTube).

Wanda Landowska 1933.  Landowska trained as a pianist and then decided around the turn of twentieth century that the harpsichord was her instrument.  The critic/composer Virgil Thompson said that “Landowska plays the harpsichord better than anyone else plays anything.”  She was a great collector of old keyboard instruments but decided that her needs could be met only by a modern instrument built to her specifications.  She hired the venerable Paris firm of Pleyel, the firm that built Chopin’s pianos, to construct a harpsichord along the lines of a Sherman tank.  She had the strings laid on a steel harp, just as they would be for a modern grand piano.  The bass register included strings that were sixteen feet long.  One problem with the massive construction of the central core of the instrument is that the floor and walls of the instrument had to be equally massive to support the weight of the steel.  That meant that the instrument’s sound would be affected by the thickness of the wood.  To overcome this problem, she had Pleyel install steel plectrums (the part that plucks the string of the harpsichord).  This alteration helped, but evidently the sound engineers decided during recording sessions that it was necessary to bring the microphones closer to the instrument than would have been ideal.  The result is an instrument that has a unique sound, not necessarily the sound that Bach would have recognized as native to the harpsichord.  It reminds me somewhat of an acoustic steel guitar.

Yet, when the great cellist Pablo Casals suggested to Landowska that her performances might not be authentic, she drew herself up to her full height of four foot eight inches and said, “You play Bach your way, and I’ll play him his way.”

In the early decades of the twentieth century, she began to present the work to a public that was largely unfamiliar with it.  Evidently, she was quite a show-woman and people flocked to her concert performances of the piece to watch (she said) the dramatic crossing of hands necessary to bring off the effects demanded by Bach.  In 1933, she made the first ever recording of the full work, also available on YouTube.  Her intense commitment to the music is evident from the first note, and one quickly gets used to the fact that the sounds she produces from her harpsichord have to be marked with an asterisk.  She uses rubato where few modern performers would and she adds romantic touches that are, one feels, her own invention.  But when you listen to her play this music, none of that matters.  Her intense commitment, virtuosity, and obvious joy in sharing her discoveries ultimately carry the day.  This would not be anyone’s first choice of a recording of this work, but it is well worth listening to for its historic importance and for the power of the performer.

Glenn Gould 1955 and 1981.  Landowska opened the door to the Goldbergs in 1933 and Gould kicked the door down in 1955.  A few recordings were made between those dates, but the 1955 recording is a landmark.  Gould had given his first U.S. concert in New York in 1955 and the head of CBS Masterworks immediately signed him.  For some reason, they decided that Gould’s first recording would be the Goldberg Variations, a piece that was not a household term in 1955.

Gould is often described as an eccentric, but if we give him that word we have to find another weaker term to describe the people who merely cover their windows with aluminum foil or who stand on street corners talking into cell phones that have not been activated.  Once his recording career provided him with sufficient security that he could give full vent to his eccentricities, they began to pile up and became the stuff of legends.  To name just a few: By the early 1960s he stopped giving concerts.  All of his public performances were via studio recordings.  On top of that, he remained secluded in an apartment in a Toronto hotel.  When he went out, he wore an overcoat, scarf and heavy gloves, even in summer.  When he practiced the piano, he played numerous radios, each tuned to a different station.  When cable television came in, he replaced the radios with TVs, each tuned to a different cable station.  He would arrive at a recording studio with several towels because he soaked his hands and forearms in hot water for about twenty minutes prior to a performance in order to loosen his muscles and tendons.  Observers reported that his skin turned red from the heat.  He was notorious for humming along when he recorded.  The best efforts of the engineers could not remove all of it and his hums can be heard still.

That is just a sampling of what Gould would later become.  In 1955, all of that was still in the future but the seeds were there.  You can hear it in the performance, and not just because he hummed.  His tempos are lightning quick.  He takes no repeats, so that we have barely begun to digest Bach’s latest idea in time to hear Mr. Gould race to the final bars of the variation, take a breath and start the next one.

Throughout his career, Gould made negative comments about famous composers or notable works.  He at one point said that Bach was a better mathematician than he was a composer.  He wrote about how Mozart became a “bad” composer, and indicated that Beethoven’s Appassionata Sonata was, as far as he was concerned, among the least important of that composer’s works.  These comments and others like them seem to be more of an adolescent desire to shock the grown-ups than sincerely held opinions.  That trend is already evident in the liner notes to the 1955 recording, which have a decidedly snarky tone.

Here’s a small conundrum.  Gould plays the piece faster than anyone on record that I am aware of.  His timing for the 1955 recording was just over 38 minutes.  But he takes no repeats.  If he had taken all of the repeats, his timing would have been about twice as long, or one hour, sixteen minutes.  That makes his pace slightly slower than Rosalyn Tureck, the “High Priestess of Bach,” who is generally regarded as rather slow and deliberative in this music.  Her 1988 recording of the Goldberg Variations runs one hour fifteen minutes.  So, Gould the speed demon plays the work in slightly more than half the time than a slow performer requires to perform all the repeats.

The answer to the riddle is that Gould takes everything at blazing speed except for the three minor key variations, which he plays at a very slow pace.  To take only the Black Pearl as an example, and not to belabor the point overmuch, Gould takes about six and a half minutes on Variation 25 without taking a repeat.  Tureck, noted for her deliberate pace, takes 4:11, omitting the repeats in that variation.  Angela Hewitt, who takes a very measured hour and nineteen minutes for the entire work, devotes 7:54 to Variation 25, taking both repeats.

When Gould came to record the Goldberg Variations a second time, in 1981, he said that he had made the Black Pearl sound like a Chopin Nocturne.  Even so, he played the variation the second time in 6:03, again without repeats.  The 1981 recording is marked by slower tempos and a gentler handling of the piece.  One of the raging debates in this music seems to be whether one prefers the 1955 to the 1981 performance.  I know that there are many who revere Gould as a great musical genius and an important interpreter of the music of Bach in general and this piece in particular.  There are enough recordings of this work for every taste to be indulged.  For myself, I believe there are so many more compelling performances that I don’t think I will return very often to either of the Goulds.

I should note a few other points about the 1981 recording.  Gould recorded it in April and May 1981.  He did an audio interview on the work in August of that year.  In late September he suffered a stroke and died on October 4, 1981.  The 1981 recording was released after his death.  It was the last recording made at CBS Masterworks studio in New York.  Gould made one other recording, in September 1981 for Decca, but it is nevertheless remarkable that his controversial recording career began and (almost) ended with the Goldbergs.

In an interview during his prime recording years, Gould had indicated that his only pianistic idol was Rosalyn Tureck.  This was surprising to many, because their styles are so different.  When this comment was passed on to Ms. Tureck when she was interviewed some time later, she appeared not to be terribly pleased to have been identified as the mentor of someone whose approach to Bach she disagreed with.  When he died of a stroke, she is supposed to have said that it was no wonder given how fast he played.  When she herself died a number of years later, a Gould loyalist posted the comment that the world-wide average speed of Bach performances would now increase by ten percent.

The 1981 recording was made at the very dawn of the age of digital recording.  The theory behind the technology appeared to be sound, but the equipment in use at the time sometimes produced harsh results.  Engineers were enamored of their newfound ability to produce a broad dynamic range and sometimes forgot that the objective was to reproduce music, not “perfect sound forever,” which was the motto adopted at the time by the pro-digital forces.  The Gould 1981 digital recording is perhaps not the highest example of the recording engineer’s art.

Then, about two decades later, someone discovered – or remembered – that it had been the custom in the early days of digital recording to run an analog tape as a back-up, just in case.  In the first years of the new century, the producer and sound engineer dug out the 1981 analog master tapes and compared them note for note against the digital recording.  They decided that the analog recording was superior.  In 2002, Sony, who had purchased the CBS Masterworks library, released a three disk set consisting of the 1955 recording, the 1981 recording remastered using the original analog tapes, and a third disk containing interviews with Gould from 1981 and out-takes from the 1955 recording.  The three are released together in a set titled “Glenn Gould – A State of Wonder”.  It is well worth owning for anyone who is an admirer of Gould or who has an interest in how the performance of this piece has developed over time.

Rosalyn Tureck 1957 and 1988.  I have listened to Tureck’s 1957 recording on YouTube.  I have a CD of her 1988 recording.  A mere two years after Glenn Gould provided us with his groundbreaking, high-speed, high energy performance of the Goldbergs, Tureck gives us the anti-Gould performance.  The 1957 recording is possibly the longest one ever made.  Where Gould gets through the piece in 38 minutes with no repeats, Tureck takes more than 90 minutes, taking every repeat.  It’s really hard to believe that Gould viewed Tureck as his musical model.  The remarkable thing about the 1957 performance is that, once you get used to the idea that this is an extremely slow performance, it makes perfect sense.  She is absolutely committed to her approach.  The slow tempos allow her to emphasize rhythmic elements that might be lost in a brisker reading.  In addition, the lax speeds necessarily prevent the creation of what I think of as a “wall of sound” so that the intersecting planes of the music stand on their own more clearly than they might in a rapid-fire performance such as Gould’s 1955 recording.  The 1988 recording is decidedly brisker; she gets through the piece in 73+ minutes, but still has the same commitment to rhythm and clear articulation.

Gustav Leonhardt 1965 (harpsichord).  Leonhardt recorded the piece three times that I am aware of: 1953 (ahead of Gould); 1965; 1976.  I listened to the 1965 version and did not compare it to the earlier or later renditions.  Leonhardt plays at an extremely slow pace.  The 1965 version as heard on YouTube is 48 minutes long without repeats, implying a performance time of one hour 36 minutes if he had taken all repeats.  That makes even Tureck’s 1957 recording look speedy.  Frankly, if you are planning to conduct a study of 20^th century harpsichord performance practices, you need to listen to this disk, but otherwise you don’t.

Trevor Pinnock 1980 (harpsichord).  Trevor Pinnock was a stalwart of the “authentic performance” movement that was the rage in the 1980s.  The idea was to perform the music of the Baroque and Classical periods on instruments that were authentic to the period, using orchestral forces and tempos that were proper to the time and place of composition.  He and his colleagues Christopher Hogwood, Nikolaus Harnoncourt, Roger Norrington, John Eliot Gardiner, and a number of others created an atmosphere in which audiophiles and music lovers, myself very much included, would race around to find the latest recording on ancient instruments that could then be played through the most modern stereo playback equipment available.  It never occurred to me to insist that we could have a more authentic experience if we used wax cylinders and wind-up Victrolas to listen to these recordings.

Apart from all of that, Mr. Pinnock is a superb musician and has an obvious love for this music.  His recording is my favorite rendition on the harpsichord.  He performs the work on an instrument that appears from the date on the soundboard to have been constructed in Antwerp in 1646.  There is a record of numerous modifications made to the instrument.  It was updated in 1756, 1770, and 1780, then completely restored in 1881 and again in 1968.  It has a marvelous sound, if you like the sound of harpsichord.  (Sir Adrian Boult said that a harpsichord sounds like two skeletons copulating on a metal roof.)

Pinnock omits about half of the repeats (including in both occurrences of the Aria).  His tempos are nicely judged and the entire performance has a pleasant, natural feel.  He does not rush anything, nor does he turn the slow variations into extended studies in anguish.  This is the first performance I ever heard on harpsichord and it remains my favorite on that instrument.

Grigory Sokolov 1982.  This is a recording made in performance, in February 1982 in Leningrad (as it was then called).  I understand that Sokolov records no other way.  He records the work as it comes to him on that particular evening, with no attempt made at editing.  Sokolov has been called the world’s greatest living pianist.  Listening to this performance, I can believe it.  He draws effects from the piano that are breathtaking.  At the same time, the performance is highly idiosyncratic.  What you get when you listen to this performance is Sokolov’s impression of the music on this particular night.

His advice to a younger pianist was to practice the right way so you can say what you want to say.  It was an off-hand comment, but it suggests that when he performs, it is he rather than the composer who is speaking.  Sokolov is said to spend his entire waking life practicing when he is not performing.  So, he is one of the small band of brothers and sisters I referred to at the beginning who can do anything on the piano.  He certainly proves it in this performance.  The question I am left with is whether I have just heard brilliant pianism or a profound exploration of one of Bach’s masterpieces.  Every listener will have to decide for him/herself, but I lean to the former.  After I have succeeded in getting away from this music for a couple of months, I will plan to return to this performance to see if I have a different opinion. 

Tatiana Nikolaeva 1985.  Nikolaeva recorded the work five times: 1970, 1983, 1985, 1987, and 1993.  The last of these was recorded by Hyperion (that is, in the West) and is available on Amazon.  Amazon has one other version also available, but it is not clear which one it is.  The first two and the fourth are Russian pressings.  The one that I heard is the 1985 recording, recorded in performance by the BBC.  There is wild, massive applause at the end of the recording, but it is a measure of the respect that the audience had for the performer and the power of her performance, that they waited for the last quiet note to die down before erupting.

Nikolaeva won fame in 1950 when she placed first at a competition held in Leipzig (then in East Germany) to commemorate the 200^th anniversary of Bach’s death.  The idea was that each competitor would come to the stage and play a prelude and fugue from The Well-Tempered Clavier that the performer had prepared for the judges.  When Nikolaeva’s turn came, she went to the stage and said to the judges, in effect, “Which one do you want me to play?”  I don’t know which one they asked for, but she played the prelude and fugue from memory and won the competition.  Dmitri Shostakovich was one of the judges and was so impressed that he composed his own set of 24 preludes and fugues specifically for Nikolaeva to perform.

This is the most lyrical performance of the Goldberg Variations that I have heard.  The music sings under her fingers.  She produces drama, pathos, joy as she feels them.  She also produces a wide range of pianistic effects.  She clearly loves Bach and loves the piano.  I thoroughly enjoyed listening to this performance, but I am not sure I would return to it.  Her approach to many of the pieces is highly romanticized and emotionally charged.  She is obviously a brilliant performer, but if my objective is to discover what Bach is doing in this music, rather than what the performer is feeling, I think I need to look elsewhere.

Zhu Xiao-Mei 1990.  This is one of the finest performances I have heard.  Zhu was born in Shanghai in 1949 and was giving concerts on Chinese radio and television by the age of 8.  At the age of ten she entered China’s national music school for gifted children.  Unfortunately, she ran afoul of the Cultural Revolution and spent five years in a labor camp in Inner Mongolia.  She was forbidden to play the piano, but somehow her fellow prisoners found one for her to use, so she was able to keep practicing during her imprisonment.  She left China in 1979, lived in the U.S. for a while and then moved to France, where she now lives.

Her performance is clear, sensitive, beautifully performed.  Her tempos are sensible and well-judged.  She has a unique solution to the problem of whether or not to take repeats.  She avoids the school that takes them all, the school that takes none, and the school that takes some.  She takes first repeats (with the exception of number 16) and she avoids second repeats (with the exception of number 30).  It’s a superb performance, but ultimately her eccentric decision regarding repeats puts me off.  The individual variations sound unbalanced because what should, to my ear, be something made up of twos or fours is made up of indivisible threes.

Angela Hewitt 1999.  Angela Hewitt is an artist of great subtlety and intelligence.  She definitely belongs to the “slow” school of Goldberg performance.  Her performance runs more than one hour eighteen minutes.  Every minute is enjoyable.

The story is that she spent several days recording the piece in studio during August of 1999.  After five days of recordings, she went back to the studio one evening with some friends to do a run-through.  The engineers were in the studio and recorded the performance, which they and the artist agreed was the one they had been looking for.  That is the performance that is presented on this disk, although they did a few patches and edits.

There is no heavy sentiment in her performance, but she wrings the emotional content from each piece.  Her judgment of tempos is perfect and she gives us a clear view of Bach’s counterpoint when it is in action.  The recording likewise is superb.  This would have to be on anyone’s short list of best Goldberg recordings.

Murray Perahia 2000.  This is another fine performance with well-judged tempos and superb musicianship.  It sounds like damning with faint praise, but Perahia is always reliable.  He never tarts up a piece of music to give you his impression.  Rather, he plays everything with great integrity and humility.  He does the same here.  If this were the only version of the piece available to me, I would be well contented to use this as my reference for what the Goldbergs are meant to sound like.  Because there is a much wider field, I have tended to gravitate to other performances as my favorites, but not because of any perceived flaws in Maestro Perahia’s presentation of the work.

Andras Schiff 2003.  This is said to be his third recording of the work, but the only other one I could identify was made in 1983.  The 1983 recording was made in the studio, the 2003 was recorded in performance.  I found a video performance on YouTube and listened to that.  The performance is lively and lyrical, which is what one expects from Schiff.  The audience was also active and could not quite synchronize their coughing, although they worked on it constantly throughout the performance.  It may be that the sound engineers were able to deal with audience noise when they mastered the CD, but it certainly detracts from the performance I heard.  

Sonia Dinnerstein 2007.  I am going to make some negative comments about this disk, but before I do, I want to acknowledge that anyone who can play this music has a relationship to it and with the composer that those of us who listen do not have.  I grant that anyone who can play the music has a right to his or her interpretation.  We listeners may comment, but I concede that the performer has a prior claim to understand the music.

Before I listened to this disk, I learned that Ms. Dinnerstein had been a guest on the Oprah Winfrey show and her performance of the Goldberg Variations had received the endorsement of Ms. Winfrey[5].  On top of that, Ms. Dinnerstein has an inspiring personal story.  I haven’t looked her up to find out what it is, but a classical pianist can hardly expect to earn air time with Oprah without one.  After receiving Oprah’s recommendation, her recording shot to the top of the Billboard classical charts.

Knowing that much, I was predisposed to dislike the recording.  However, as a fair-minded person, I held my prejudices in check as I listened.  There is nothing worse than snobbery and I worked as hard as I could to retain my objectivity and my sense of fair play.

After listening to the performance, I imagined two possible, but obviously fictional, scenarios that would explain how it came to be produced.  (1)  In a variation on the Mel Brooks script The Producers, the producer of the disk needed, say, 100 investors to fund the project.  He sold the project to 3,000 investors.  His plan was to produce a record so bad that the project would be a total loss.  He would tell each group of 100 that he had unfortunately lost their money, while he pocketed twenty-nine times the amount of the investment required to produce the disk.  It took months to find the right artist, but when Sonia turned up, he knew he had struck gold.  Then the artist had to volunteer to appear on Oprah, the record soared to the top of the charts, and the producer was ruined.  (2) Ms. Dinnerstein had read the history of the Goldberg Variations, believed the literal truth that the piece had been composed to help an ambassador fall asleep, and calibrated her performance to have the same effect on a modern audience.

Maybe the best summation is in a one-star review on Amazon.  This really should be subtitled “Bach for Lovers.”

Andreas Staier 2010 (harpsichord).  This is one of the most disappointing disks I have heard in a long time.  The piece was performed on an exact replica of a harpsichord built in 1734 by a builder with the delightful name of Hieronymus Albrecht Hass, who worked in Hamburg and was famous in his own time.  The Hass instrument was built with the idea that it could replicate many of the sounds that can be produced by an organ.  According to Staier, Hass’s instruments “are the biggest and most richly equipped with registers of any built before the twentieth century”.  Unfortunately, Herr Staier uses this wonderful instrument to create a “wall of sound” comparable to the 1928 piano roll performance that I complained about some pages back.  To my ear, we end up hearing all the wonderful features that the Hass harpsichord can produce, but we don’t end up hearing the Goldberg Variations in any recognizable form.

David Jalbert 2012.  This is yet another in a series of dazzling performances by a Canadian pianist.  Canada must have more virtuoso pianists per capita than any other country on earth.  Jalbert’s performance is thoroughly engaging, his tempos are beautifully judged, and his command of the piece is impressive.  In addition, the quality of the recording itself is exceptional.  This may be the finest recording of a solo piano I have ever heard.

Kiniko Ishizaka 2013.  This recording is part of the “Open Goldberg Variations” project.  There is more information at opengoldbergvariations.org.  At the site, you can listen for free to a recording of the piece by Kiniko Ishizaka, who is not only a fantastic pianist but has also been a member of Japan’s Olympic weight-lifting team.  At the website, you can download recordings with better audio quality and pay what you choose, or you can buy an audio CD (also available from Amazon).

Another feature of the site is that the score of the Goldberg Variations is available for download on a free license.  You can copy it, print it, send it to friends.  One of the charming aspects of the score is that it was crowd-sourced; those who contributed could “buy” a variation and post a message on that page of the score.  Some of the messages are quite touching.  Some are straightforward: “In memory of my mother, Lorraine Halse Vines, from Rose.  The thought of you is music in my heart.”  One of my favorites is in German: “Für Sylvia von Heiko.  Weil mit Dir alles schönsten ist.”  (I think: Because with you everything is most beautiful.)  A strange one is addressed to all Bach lovers, “now that this work is open and freely available to all of us.”  Up until the publication of the “open source” score, Schirmer would have parted with a copy for about ten bucks, and you still need an internet connection to get the free copy.  Anyway, I thought it was a charming conception, and it is very handy to have the score available on my hard drive.

As to the performance, Ms. Ishizaka’s style is energetic, focused, and a pleasure to listen to.

Incidentally, the “Open” concept has moved on to the Well-Tempered Clavier.  Ms. Ishizaka has recorded Book I.  I assume that Book II is in the works.

Jeremy Denk 2013.  I think this may be the ideal recording of the Goldberg Variations.  Tempos are forward-moving but not brisk.  He treats the bass voice as an equal partner in the eight canons that feature a free voice.  His counterpoint is impeccable.  He performs the Black Pearl with great emotional intensity, but he doesn’t rely on agonizingly slow tempos to achieve that result.  He finds insights in some of the variations (I am thinking of numbers 19 and 20 particularly) that no one else has pointed out.  The recording is first rate.  In addition, if you buy the CD (rather than the MP3), a DVD is included as a substitute for liner notes.  On the DVD, Denk illustrates various interesting features of the Goldbergs.  It’s a nice addition to an already superb recording.

Evaluating the Performances

Putting aside the harpsichord v. piano question and the “to repeat or not to repeat” question, after listening to this piece countless times, and after listening to some of these recordings as many as half a dozen times, I have focused on a few elements in evaluating them.

Variation 8 is a piece alive with energy.  I prefer performances that play it briskly, but with an emphasis on counterpoint.  Some performers over-emphasize the top line (Ishizaka).  A couple, surprisingly, emphasize the bottom (Perahia, Staier).  In my opinion, we should hear the two lines, bass and treble together (Denk, Hewitt, Jalbert).

Variation 13 is the beauty variation in my opinion.  Yet Gould and Tureck insist on excising that quality.  If you want to, you can make the piece sound like an old-fashioned typewriter or chickens pecking at corn.  But why would anyone do that?  At the same time, there is no need to schmaltz the piece up a la Landowska.  I think that Denk, Hewitt, Jalbert, Nikolaeva, Pinnock, Sokolov all do a lovely job with this variation.

The transition from Variation 25 to Variation 26 is a critical moment in this music, again in my opinion.  Number 25 ends on a note of dark desolation.  Number 26 is a lively virtuoso piece.  I appreciate it when the performer opens number 26 gently so that the spell of number 25 is still at work during the first few bars of number 26.  The standard treatment is to start banging on the keys right at the start of number 26.  Denk does a lovely job of opening number 26 gradually.

Variations 28 and 29 are both special cases.  The keyboard is barely big enough to contain the music.  It is as if the wizard has left the workshop for a few minutes to collect some items he is going to need for the Quodlibet that lies just ahead.  During his absence, his imp takes over and inserts these two maniacal gems into the masterpiece.  I prefer performances where the artist treats these variations as a climax that will be relieved by the Quodlibet and, ultimately, the quiet return of the Aria.  Denk provides the best example, followed closely by Hewitt and Jalbert.

In the final variation, the Quodlibet, I prefer performances that emphasize the counterpoint of the piece, which on many performances is not as clearly heard as it might be.

Desert Island Selection

If my desert island recording were to be selected at random, I could be happy as long as I could be guaranteed that the selection would exclude Serkin, Dinnerstein, and Staier.

If I could choose and could only choose one, and with the understanding that I might make a different choice tomorrow, I would take the recording by Jeremy Denk.  However, I would plan to hide the Pinnock, Hewitt, and Jalbert recordings in my luggage.

I feel much better now.  I think I may be able to move on to a different piece of music.

[1] Bach did not use the title “Goldberg Variations”.  That’s a nickname that was applied decades after Bach died.  The formal title, translated into English, is Keyboard Practice, consisting of an Aria with Diverse Variations for the Harpsichord with 2 Manuals. Composed for Music Lovers, to Refresh their Spirits.

[2] Child keyboard player.  It is possible that this is an actual German word, but it’s a coincidence if it is.  I couldn’t resist making it up.

[3] The titles: (1) “I have been away from you so long.  Come closer, come closer.” (2) “Cabbage and turnips drove me away.  If my mother made meat, I’d have opted to stay.”  People were more easily entertained in eastern Saxony in the 1730s than are their descendants.

[4] De Pachmann was a magician.  Search on YouTube for: “Vladimir de Pachmann plays Chopin Nocturnes (piano rolls)”.

[5] I assume it went something like: Best. Bach. Recording. EVER!!

Yesterday, December 7, 1941, is a date that will live in infamy.  Vandals, who may be in some way connected to the Imperial Japanese Navy, used military assault weapons to wreak havoc on Pearl Harbor, outside of Honolulu, Hawaii.  In their mindless destruction, these outlaws showed no respect for human life or for the property of others.  Our thoughts and prayers go out to the thousands of families who lost loved ones as a consequence of this senseless violence.

I have directed my Secretary of the Interior to fly to Honolulu tomorrow to assess the environmental damage resulting from the smoke pouring from fires burning out of control along Battleship Row and the release of naval and aviation fuel into the delicate habitat of Pearl Harbor.  He will report back directly to me.

I know that many of you are upset by these events.  Let me assure you, that I too am upset.  However, if we react with violence, if we fail to control our basest instincts, then we will have handed a victory to the vandals who carried out these destructive acts.

Instead of giving these outlaws what they want, we will conduct a thorough investigation.  I have directed my Secretary of State to contact his counterpart in Tokyo to help us gather evidence concerning who these lone wolf attackers were, and how we and our partners in Tokyo can work together to minimize any future outbreaks of senseless violent extremism.  We need to get to the bottom of this incident, to learn why and how it happened, so that we can work to ensure that it never happens again.

We do not know the motive behind this attack and we will not know it for many months, when investigators from the FBI and the Naval Investigative Service have had an opportunity to gather all of the facts, to interview witnesses, and to build a case against the perpetrators.  For now, I am asking my counterpart, the Emperor of Japan, to cooperate fully with our investigation.  I have already sent him a request for the names and addresses of all pilots employed by the Imperial Japanese Navy who may have had access to assault aircraft during the days leading up to December 7.  I have every confidence that my investigators will in time get the facts necessary to allow us to draw the appropriate conclusions and establish a policy that will ensure the continued peace and prosperity of all the nations of the Pacific community.

In the meantime, let’s put all thought of over-reacting out of our minds.  Let’s focus less on the victory of any one country and renew our efforts to find peaceful solutions to the concerns that may at times divide us from our neighbors.  The pilots who carried out these acts of senseless vandalism are a tiny minority of the personnel assigned to the Imperial Japanese Navy.  Let’s not judge an entire organization by the acts of a few extremists.  If we react with violence, the situation could easily spin out of control.  There has already been substantial loss of life, property damage, and environmental degradation.  I am not going to make the situation worse by adding to this senseless violence.

The best thing we can do right now is to light candles against the darkness, gather flowers to remind ourselves of the blessings of peace, link arms, and lift our voices together in song and prayer.

Thank you, and God bless America.

I am not quite done ruminating over the English Reformation.  If you will indulge me for a few minutes I will then turn to the fight to the death between Cromwell and Anne Boleyn.

It’s a well-known historical phenomenon that if you look at a map of the Roman Empire at its height in say 200 AD and then look at a map of how Western Europe divided between Protestant and Catholic after Luther’s appearance in 1517, more than 1000 years after the last Roman emperor resigned to spend more time with his family, the correspondence is remarkably close.  This has been a commonplace observation among the historians.  They talk about it after dinner while they are passing the brandy around the table, before they start talking about real estate.

The Roman Empire anchored itself to the Rhine and the Danube.  The Romans occasionally tried to take territory beyond those rivers, but never succeeded.  There just wasn’t enough of value beyond those lines to justify the cost of conquest.  The Germans sometimes tried to push west of the Rhine or south of the Danube, but the Romans kept both areas well garrisoned.  The Romans began to lose effective control of their western borderlands in the last quarter of the fourth century.  After 476, there was no Roman emperor in the west.  In 1517, more than ten centuries later, Martin Luther showed up and said, in guttural German, “The way you are worshiping is wrong.  Here is what you must do.”  (Just kidding – the theses, all 95 of them, were written in Latin.)  The response of people east of the Rhine and north of the Danube was “We agree.  We will follow you.”  (Or, following the rules of German word order:  We will you follow.)  The people west of the Rhine and south of the Danube said “We will with Rome stay.”  Why would this be?

For one thousand years, bakers would bake bread, cobblers would make shoes, farmers tilled their fields, priests prayed.  Life went on, day by day, each person devoting nearly all of his or her energy and thought to keeping body and soul together for one more day.  Occasionally, the daily routine would be interrupted by a catastrophe.  The Franks, Burgundians, Alemani, Alans, Vandals, Goths or who knows else would invade, kill some of your friends or relatives, take control of the territory where you lived.  After a few centuries, the Arabs tried to take over, depending on where you were.  Then the Vikings turned up, wreaked havoc, took some people as slaves, killed others, and generally made life miserable.  (I should have put in a trigger warning for readers of Scandinavian descent.)  In between invasions, you could experience visits of plague and famine.  This went on for centuries, with everyone too busy trying to stay alive to give a thought about who used to run the show in these parts.  And yet, when the question arose as to which faith to follow, the people who descended from those who a millennium earlier had been subject to Rome chose the Pope, and the people whose remote ancestors lived outside the Roman orbit chose Luther, allowing in both cases for plenty of local exceptions.

I am of course exaggerating the level to which consciousness of the Roman Empire faded as Rome’s power faded.  There is a very strong case to be made that the Roman way of life continued for centuries, but in reduced circumstances, after the Germanic migrations of late antiquity[1].  Latin continued to be spoken, Roman coins continued to be used.  The Mediterranean was still the pivot on which European trade turned, although much reduced from former times.  There was still a Roman emperor.  He just wasn’t in Italy.  He was in Byzantium, Constantinople.  Until the Arabs closed off the Mediterranean in the seventh century, the eastern Roman emperor continued to play a political role in Western Europe.  And after the Arab expansion ended, when Europe was on its own in a way it had not been before, the Frankish king declared himself the “Holy Roman Emperor”.  So, there was more to it than a brooding historical omnipresence hovering just out of sight for a millennium while people simply did chores and ate bread.

Still, there is no question that these long-term trends for some reason have a life of their own.  Daniel Hannan reports that when Catherine the Great heard news of the French Revolution, her response was “The Gauls are driving out the Franks.”  Hannan himself provides a very credible account that the English for centuries prior to the Norman Conquest had a very different political culture from the feudal system that was imposed on them after 1066.  The pre-Conquest English treated the law as an authority superior to the king.  Kings were required to take an oath agreeing to be bound by the law and could be severely punished if they tried to exercise powers not granted to them.  Hannan sees the Norman Conquest as a catastrophe for the English and views the centuries from the Conquest through Magna Carta, the Petition of Right, the Glorious Revolution, and much more as the working out through history of the recovery by the English of the ancestral rights that were suppressed when they were placed under the Norman yoke.  That process certainly took a long pause while Henry VIII was on the throne.  His most ardent admirers would not claim that he viewed the law as something prior to and superior to his own personal royal authority.

England is the one country that appears to present an exception to the general pattern by which ancestral affinity to Rome predicted the religious decision.  What is today England and Wales is more or less the same territory as the Roman province of Britannia.  But Britannia came into the Roman Empire rather late.  There had been contact, including a visit and a partial occupation by Julius Caesar in the first century BC, but Rome did not truly incorporate Britannia into the Empire until 43 AD.  It took a century after that to complete the process of conquest and colonization.  And even then, the Roman hold was not very strong.  Britain was not romanized to nearly the extent of the continental holdings and it began to fall away from the Empire earlier than other parts of Western Europe.  The Angles and the Saxons were raiding before 300, had established footholds by 350, and were more or less in charge in the first decades of the fifth century.  Physically separated from the continent, Britannia, now under new management, went its own way.

Perhaps that is part of the explanation why, when the break came, it came not over a matter of religious principle but over the question of whether the King’s roving eye (and not only his eye) was to find peace through the charms of Anne Boleyn.  One of the strangest things about the whole episode is how unnecessary it proved to be.  Henry divorced Catherine because she couldn’t bear him a son and no longer attracted him.  He might have stayed married to her, lived apart, and waited for her death if Anne Boleyn had agreed to adopt the role of concubine (the term by which catholic Europe referred to her), but Anne would not have it.  She had to be queen.  She might have remained queen, putting up with concubines herself, had she produced a son.  It’s one of those odd historical coincidences that the day Catherine was buried, January 29, 1536, was the day Anne miscarried for the last time.  She had been carrying a boy.  If Henry had just waited for Catherine to die, he could have gone on marrying four more instead of five more times, had his son with Jane Seymour and skipped the English Reformation and the entire Boleyn parenthesis.  Shakespeare’s history plays might have focused on the Scottish antecedents of Mary, Queen of Scots (whom we would know as Mary II – we call her “Queen of Scots” only because things didn’t work out for her in England) rather than Elizabeth’s Lancastrian ancestors.[2]

Anne and Cromwell had been allies in some areas, opponents in others.  He had worked the legislation that made her queen.  She believed in religious reform, as did he.  However, when he started to take the smaller monasteries apart, she had wanted the profits to find their way to charitable works.  Instead they went to the royal treasury, and quite a bit of it took a detour into the pockets and purses of Cromwell and his friends.  The main problem between them, though, was deeper than policy or peculation.  Anne detested Cromwell right down to his bones.  She had hated Wolsey and Cromwell was Wolsey’s man.  On top of that, he was close to the king and she didn’t like the idea of anyone else having that kind of influence over him.  Add to that some old-fashioned class prejudice brewing in an ungenerous personality and you have the basis for the deep and bitter hatred that Anne felt for Cromwell in the early months of 1536.

The incident in which Henry unloads the weight of his royal temper onto Cromwell in the presence of the court actually happened.  We know the exact date, April 21, 1536, and we know much of the detail about it, because the Emperor’s ambassador Chapuys sent a stream of written reports to his boss and those letters have survived.  Cromwell was trying to move Henry toward an alliance with Germany (that is, the “Empire”) and away from France.  He had held a series of meetings with Chapuys in which he led Chapuys to believe that he could accomplish this goal, but also made it clear that he was acting on his own, without royal approval.  Cromwell was acting as Wolsey might have acted, but did not have the kind of relationship with Henry that Wolsey had at one time enjoyed.

Cromwell made the clever move of putting Chapuys and Anne in the same public space, which forced Chapuys to bow in order not to be rude.  Henry and Anne were now free to treat that bit of courtesy as recognition.  Later that day, Chapuys told Henry about his conversations with Cromwell and suggested that closer relations between England and the Empire could now be pursued.  That’s what put Henry into his rage.  He wanted Cromwell to carry out orders, to administer the government, not to create policy.  It appears that Cromwell had seriously overstepped his authority.  Yet, the situation is somewhat confusing because Chapuys reported a conversation with Cromwell shortly after the king’s explosion in which Cromwell said that he had been acting on Henry’s instructions all along.  Whether this was face-saving or factual on Cromwell’s part, or an inventive bit of butt-covering by Chapuys in a letter to his emperor, is hard to tell.

Cromwell spent the next week away from court.  The novel and the TV show suggest that he was regaining his nerve after the royal dressing down.  His biographer Tracy Bolton does not think Cromwell was that sensitive a soul.  Rather, he used the week away from court to plot Anne Boleyn’s destruction.  The novel and the TV series are highly faithful to the historical facts in broad outline, but a few details are out of place, some of them worth noting.  One point not brought out in the show is that Cromwell came to realize that Anne’s continued existence presented danger both for the present and the future.  If she remained queen, she was a dangerous enemy.  If she found her way back into the king’s affections, something she had done before, she would be sure to destroy anyone who had looked at her sideways during the period of her disfavor.  Beyond that, if she stayed married to Henry, the likelihood now was that she would bear no further children.  That meant that in the course of time there was a good chance that Mary Tudor, daughter of Catherine, would inherit the throne, which would undo all of the religious and political reform that Cromwell had worked so hard to achieve.  (Elizabeth was still an infant and would be under-age far beyond the planning horizon of 1536.)  Either scenario would also include his own death.  Anne’s death would avoid both problems.

The show has a scene in which Cromwell has a quiet meeting with Nicholas Carew, who represents a group of Yorkists who would be willing to work with Cromwell if he would further their interests.  There were some descendants of the brother of Edward IV and Richard III still alive at the time, all of whom were watched by Henry’s agents with some care.  Even fifty years after Bosworth Field, Henry had to keep an eye on possible rival claimants.  (In the novel, Hilary Mantel tells us that Margaret Pole, the matron of this group, considered Henry the “spawn of Welsh cattle-raiders”.)  For this reason, the conversation in Cromwell’s house was seditious and it is doubtful that either man would have said or listened to anything so risky with a person he did not trust with his life.  However, it is true that Cromwell reached out at this time to religious conservatives, including Yorkists, with whom he was not in sympathy in order to have as many people on his side as he could muster in the coming battle with Anne.

The first evidence that Cromwell gathered came from the gossip of the ladies who attended Anne.  Several of them had reason to hold a grudge against her, and Cromwell and his staff knew how to lead them on one by one.  The process began innocently enough, but as he began to put a sinister twist on their reports and they began to see which way the wind was blowing, their reports became ever more damning.

Toward the end of April, Cromwell thought he had enough evidence from the queen’s ladies to let Henry know that there were grave suspicions surrounding the queen.  Henry had been growing distant toward Anne prior to her miscarriage, but the loss of a potential heir in January 1536 seems to have convinced him that the marriage to Anne had to end.  Henry does not appear to have told Cromwell to get up a case against Anne, but an express order would not have been necessary.  The initial meeting, which may have been attended by Nicholas Carew as well as Cromwell, seems to have turned the king against Anne finally and permanently.  But Cromwell needed more evidence in hand to build his case.

In the novel and the TV show, Mark Smeaton is at Cromwell’s house and begins by joking, innocently he thinks, about his relationship with Anne, a little locker room talk before the invention of locker rooms.  Incidentally, Mark Smeaton is the name of a musician in Anne’s employ and he did give the evidence that allowed Cromwell to proceed (and was executed for his trouble).  However, the historical Mark did not wander into a trap the way Hilary Mantel presents the tale.  Rather, Cromwell had him arrested and brought to Cromwell’s house.  Mark had no useful evidence to offer, so he was subjected to torture until he provided what was wanted.  A knotted rope was tied around his head and tightened until he said what Cromwell wanted to hear.  Then he was sent to the Tower.  This happened on the night of April 30 – May 1.

The evidence from that interview was not delivered into Henry’s ear by Richard Cromwell.  Rather, on May 1, Thomas wrote a letter to the king that Richard delivered.  When the king received the reports of Anne’s infidelity, he was absolutely thunderstruck.

Anne was accused of infidelity with numerous men, all but one of them nobles (Mark Smeaton was the exception) and one of those her brother.  The particular noblemen selected for these charges were also Cromwell’s political enemies, which is not a coincidence.  In fact, there were three gentlemen who were somehow or other swept up in the resulting legal melee and temporarily imprisoned who were not enemies of Cromwell.  Two of them were men with whom he was on friendly terms.  All three obtained their release, apparently through Cromwell’s influence.

The whole case was a fabrication, made credible by Anne’s flirtatious manner and her insatiable desire for flattery.  Her female attendants were not necessarily seeking revenge against her.  They may not have liked her, but they told their tales innocently and Cromwell did the rest.  No doubt, the lady attendants became more cooperative when they saw which way the wind was blowing.  The noblemen all denied the charges and in fact could have proven that they were in other parts of the country on the dates on which they were accused of adultery with the queen.  The case against Anne’s brother was that they had spent some time alone in her chambers.  That’s how weak the case was.  The actual evidence did not matter at all.  Henry believed it because it solved his marital problem and allowed him to pursue his dynastic ambitions.  The court knew what it was supposed to do, and that was that.

Henry did bring in a French executioner who was noted for his sharp sword and his excellent technique.  Only Anne received this treatment.  The men all faced a good old-fashioned English executioner wielding an axe.  Not every husband would have been so considerate.  On the other hand, he sent for the executioner prior to the beginning of the trial.  As a final note, I don’t believe Anne was blindfolded at the moment of execution.  Reports of people who were there say that in the instant after the decapitation, her head was held up for public view.  Spectators were horrified to see that her lips and eyes were still moving, which tells us that the eyes were not covered with a cloth.

As the series ended, Henry has a huge grin on his face as he gives the faithful Cromwell a bear hug.  Cromwell has just seen something horrible, a series of bloody executions that he himself arranged on evidence that he had fabricated.  Henry is presented as man with no qualms at all.  He is delighted that he is free to marry again and gives high marks to the service he is getting from his staff.

The historical Henry must have been equally thrilled, although one wonders whether he would have gone as far as giving a bear hug to the man who had just proven the king to be a cuckold.  You have to wonder if Henry ever thought about the merits of the case against his wife and some of his closest associates.  Would he have considered that Anne had to be out of her mind to risk a conviction for treason, to risk her life over extramarital extracurriculars?  He knew that she was a woman who could price out her charms.  It would have been out of character for her to sell at the fire-sale prices set out in her indictment.  And what about her supposed partners in crime?  Some of them were old friends of Henry’s.  They were highly unlikely to turn on him in this way.  Add to that the fact that the accused were all political opponents of the accuser, and you would think that a little bell might have gone off in the back of Henry’s mind suggesting that a different way must be found.  There is no question that he could have had what he wanted eventually, but he chose the first option on offer and put people to death without a care that they were innocent.  They were in his way, and that was all that counted with him.

While the king is dispensing his bear hug, Cromwell is staring into the middle distance, possibly because he is morally conflicted.  Or, it may be that the thought has occurred to him that the process of getting rid of Anne was too easy.  Anyone at court might do the same to anyone else.

The “Wolf Hall” novels were planned as a trilogy.  The first book, Wolf Hall, takes us to the execution of Thomas More and the second, Bring Up The Bodies, ends with the death of Anne Boleyn.  The TV series has taken us to the end of the work published so far.  The third novel is expected later this year according to Ms. Mantel’s website.  I look forward to reading it and to seeing it dramatized.

[1] The Belgian historian Henri Pirenne compared the Roman situation to the immigration experienced by the United States from roughly 1880 to 1925.  Tens of millions of immigrants arrived speaking languages other than English (Irish and British immigrants aside) and bearing different political traditions.  Yet the United States remained a republic with unmistakably Anglo-Saxon political and cultural characteristics.

[2] Possibly not.  Elizabeth’s Lancastrian ancestors were also Mary’s.  Still, it’s difficult to imagine that the plays would have looked the same with the Queen of Scots on the English throne.  For example, Shakespeare puts the magnificent jeremiad in Act II of Richard II (“this earth, this realm, this England”) into the mouth of the founder of the Lancastrian line.  With Mary Stuart in charge, “This royal throne of kings, this scepter’d isle / This earth of majesty, this seat of Mars / This other Eden, demi-paradise” might have needed a rewrite to retain royal favor, as it does not quite fit Scotland.  No doubt Mr. Shakespeare would have worked it out and we would be marveling at the play to this day.

I realize that anyone who might read these notes finished with Wolf Hall weeks ago.  My problem is that I did not get to the episodes when they first aired and then, having finally gotten through episodes three and four, I wanted to read Geoffrey Elton’s history of this period and a Cromwell biography by Tracy Borman before commenting further.  All of this has taken time and I realize that readers are on to other things.  I apologize and offer this late commentary for what it may be worth.  I’ll send something on the final two episodes in less time than it took to pull this comment together.

After watching the first couple of episodes of Wolf Hall, it occurred to me that I had never read Luther’s 95 theses, which he is said to have nailed to the door of the Wittenberg Cathedral, thereby starting the Protestant Reformation.  So I read them.  They are hard to get through unless you are a theologian.  They are strictly business.  He is not concerned with who should marry whom or who is rightfully king or queen.  The whole focus is on religious thought and practice, with a particular emphasis on his disapproval of the sale of indulgences, the purchase of loved ones out of purgatory, and the like.

When the English came to their break with Rome, it wasn’t about something as inflexible as the principles related to actual religious practice or belief, and here is another example of Cromwell’s genius.  Possibly for Henry the biggest part of the story was about whether the King gets to satisfy his desire with a woman who would not part with her virtue without a solemn promise of marriage.  Cromwell’s solution was to find a way to get Henry what he wanted, to use legal process to do so, and to put the process on a ground broad enough to support the religious and political reform that Cromwell had in mind.  If Catherine had died a few years earlier than she did, there never would have been an issue to resolve.  In fact, in the novel Wolf Hall, Cromwell says that if these events were happening in Italy, Catherine would be dead and there would be no questions asked.  But in England, the whole matter was treated as a question of law.

The thing had to be done according to law, but it didn’t have to be done in a way that expanded the role of Parliament to the extent that it did.  Henry might well have been satisfied with a parliamentary declaration of divorce (annulment if you insist on the technically correct term).  Cromwell thought the matter should be resolved on broader principles than the king’s domestic arrangements and set about drafting, passing, and implementing a series of statutes that had the effect of removing England from Rome’s orbit while maintaining the old religion more or less as it was.  He effected a political revolution in the midst of a religious dispute without making major changes in day to day religious practices.  The English spent the rest of Henry’s reign and that of each of his three children working out a solution that left the majority satisfied, or at least less dissatisfied than they would have been with any alternative arrangement.  There were times when the English church was essentially a popeless Catholicism, times when it was nearly puritan, but most of the time it was mildly but not dogmatically Protestant.  All of this was worked out as part of the broader political contest between crown and Parliament and the wider world of foreign affairs.

Geoffrey Elton makes the point that the English Reformation cannot be explained solely as the manipulation of law in order to marry Henry to Anne Boleyn.  He emphasizes the relative ease with which the reforms were put through and suggests that the overwhelming weight of national opinion was on the side of reform.  It is estimated that the Catholic Church took more money out of England than out of any other country in Europe.  It was so believed at the time.  Monks and other members of the clergy were objects of ridicule because their opulent lifestyles were inconsistent with their vows of poverty, and in some cases, chastity.  Local gentry wanted to get their hands on the wealth and the productive lands held by the Church, which amounted to something between a fifth and a third of the nation’s assets.  Henry wanted that wealth for the central government.  There was no great opposition in Parliament.  This mass of potential needed only leadership and Thomas Cromwell arose from relative obscurity to provide it.

According to Elton, Cromwell was a master legislator.  He was the first English political leader to use Parliament’s power to enact law in order to forge a constitutional structure in which power was effectively shared between crown and Parliament.  He knew where he wanted to go and drafted and then passed legislation that took the country to the desired destination in steps each of which was significant, but none of which was in itself comprehensive.  For example, there was at the time a fee called an “annate” that the pope charged bishops when they first took office.  The bishop had to pay one-third of his first year’s income to Rome.  In 1532, Cromwell put through Parliament a statute prohibiting these payments, but added to the statute the proviso that the ban would not take effect until the king took the formal step of implementing it.  That gave Henry, who still had hope that the pope would agree to the divorce, significant leverage to use in his negotiations with Rome.  He could use the “Don’t make me do it” device to move the pope in Henry’s direction.  As it turned out, the pressure did not work and further legislation was required.

The legislation that capped this effort, the “Act of Appeals,” forbade any English suitor from taking an appeal to Rome.  That meant that when Henry’s divorce came before an English ecclesiastical court (as it would through the earlier Act of Supremacy), the decision could not be overturned by an appeal to the pope or any other authority.  The divorce was going to go through, but even more significant were the broad grounds on which the authority was exercised.  This legislation was not just about one marriage but about the way England would be governed.  The appeals statute begins with a preamble:  “[T]his realm of England is an empire . . . governed by one Supreme Head and King.”  England had declared itself a fully independent actor, prepared to follow its own course as an independent sovereignty, not subject to any other authority.  According to Elton, the truly significant feature of this series of statutes was their constitutional nature.  England would for the future be governed by a “king in parliament”.  England was governed from that point on by the combined power of crown, lords, and commons.  The three elements battled over how that power was to be shared for centuries to come.  In the next century, two kings would be removed.  Over time, the power of Parliament increased and that of the crown diminished, but the structure within which those debates and those struggles for power took place was laid down in the 1530s by Thomas Cromwell.

The legislative program effected a revolution.  Elton attributes the modern view that this was a period of significant conflict – a view he demonstrates to be wrong – to the notoriety of the very small number of persons who objected:

The English Reformation under Henry VIII produced, one might say, no victims and only martyrs.  Since among these martyrs there were also some of the most attractive personalities of the day, much attention has always been given to the opposition and its downfall, but the most impressive thing about it is its exiguous size.  After the careful repression of the bishops and the Church in 1531-2, only the adherents of the so-called Nun of Kent (including Bishop Fisher), Sir Thomas More, and a few monks felt strongly enough to call into action the treason legislation passed to protect the revolution.

So, after the events of Episode Four, we won’t have Thomas More to kick around.  I still have to ask the question that I started to ask last time:  Was More’s position anything more than institutional loyalty?  He could not abide a situation in which the king replaced the pope as head of the Church, but was this a matter of principle beyond his loyalty to the institution?  Remember, please, that at the beginning of the break with Rome, the position of the English government was that England was still a Catholic country, fully adherent to the faith.  It simply refused to recognize that the Bishop of Rome (as they referred to the Pope) had any special authority.  Rather, because England was an “Empire” – that is, a fully mature political actor, free from the influence of any other power on earth – it looked naturally to its own head, its king, to lead its church.

Speaking as someone outside the debate between the religious partisans, I suggest that the big decision is whether the relationship between the worshiper and the holy text or the worshiper and the religious ceremony is to be mediated by a priest or other official appointed for the purpose or whether it is to be a direct relationship between the worshiper and God.  Do you read the sacred texts in your own language, or do you have them read to you in a foreign language by an intermediary?

If you take the position, which More did and which Henry also did, that you can’t have a Christian religion without priests, is it all that important what the hierarchy looks like beyond the particular person that the individual worshiper faces?  Consider the equally important (to me, more important) case of food.  I made the decision long ago, as did 98% of my fellow citizens, that my connection to the food I eat would be intermediated by third parties who raise the raw product, prepare it for market, deliver it to wholesalers, then to retailers, and finally to me.  I know that some people live on farms, raise their own food, process it themselves, and consume their own produce.  I am not of them.  Before I can consent to have my food needs met by my purveyor of choice, must I know how the purveyor is organized, who stands at the head of the organization, how the various officials are appointed, what their beliefs may be on a variety of subjects, what contractual obligations they have undertaken in connection with the vast enterprise that has the objective of delivering food to a hungry public?

Why, then, if I have decided that my religious experience is to be managed by a priest, must I further enquire into the hierarchy of which he or she is a part, how the priest’s superiors are appointed, who stands at the head of the organization, how that person was selected, and so on?  I do wish to read the labels, to know what is in the food.  That is the equivalent of the particular religious doctrine to which a worshipper subscribes.  But do I have a need to know how the regional sales manager is selected, or how the bishops and archbishops relate to their head or governor?  It seems particularly officious for the person, like Thomas More, who has decided that his or her religious experience is to be intermediated to take such an active role in evaluating the hierarchy that stands above the intermediary.  Really, what concern is it of the retail food customer or the individual worshiper as to the nature of the organization that stands out of sight of the immediate transaction of interest to purveyor or priest on the one hand and customer or worshiper on the other?

I realize that the analogy may be offensive to some, but consider:  Is it so offensive that you would suffer the torments of imprisonment and beheading (which, remember, was a mercy when compared to drawing and quartering) when you could just shrug your shoulders, read from the prayer book, and keep your own counsel in your own mind?

Elton makes a strong case that Henry went to the extreme step of demanding an oath of loyalty only because the “Nun of Kent” – she is the white-habited young woman named Elizabeth Barton who appears in the TV show — tells Henry his reign will end in a few months if he marries Anne.  She had been making similar statements around Kent, egged on by Henry’s opponents, and Henry and Cromwell both knew she had to be stopped.  They chose the oath on succession to force their opponents out into the open.  The oath required the affiant to swear that the children of Henry and Anne were the lawful heirs to the throne and that the first marriage to Catherine was invalid.  Interestingly, More had no trouble with the first part, on the basis that Parliament could lawfully decide the succession to the throne.  He would not accept the second part because that required him to deny the pope’s supremacy in matters of canon law.

It appears that events leading to More’s execution unfolded along the lines depicted in the show.  The Nun of Kent had to die because her prophecies were creating trouble.  Once the process began of gathering up people who insisted that the first marriage was valid, it developed a life of its own.  Everyone known to be doubtful on the issue had to be tested, and More could not be allowed to stand as an exception.  Add to that the fact that Henry’s enormous temper had been ignited by the stubborn refusal of More, whom Henry had once befriended, to throw Catherine overboard and More was doomed.

Until I read Tracy Borman’s biography of Cromwell, I thought it had been universally agreed that More’s conviction was obtained by the perjured testimony of the Solicitor General Richard Rich.  Borman does not characterize Rich’s testimony as perjury, although she says that he was unscrupulous, which is something that I think even his mother would have agreed with.

There is a slight difference between the novel and the TV show over how the perjury was worked.  In the TV show, Cromwell is at his wits’ end trying to get More to say something treasonous.  He is out of options.  He has had all of More’s books and papers removed by Richard Riche (Hillary spells it with the extra “e”).  He sends Riche back in to see More one last time, figuring that More will be bored enough that he will engage with Riche and that will produce the fatal report.  In the novel, Riche comes back from removing the books and offers his report on More’s conversation without being asked to do so.  It’s a small difference, but the Cromwell of the TV show is more manipulative, more conniving than the man in the novel.  The man in the novel works with the material provided to him, while the man on the screen sends out for a delivery.

In both mediums, it is clear that Cromwell knows the testimony is perjured but his only purpose is to make sure that Riche will stand by it, will make his statement under oath without flinching.  Cromwell did not solicit the Solicitor, but he did not hesitate to use testimony he had every reason to believe was an invention.  The irregularity of the proceedings and the predetermined outcome helped to punch More’s ticket to sainthood and did their bit to sully Cromwell’s reputation.

It is June 23 and I still have not gotten to episodes five and six, but I will soon.

Ted Williams, the last man to achieve a batting average over .400 in the Major Leagues, said that all he asked was that when he walked down the street, people would say “There goes the greatest hitter who ever lived.”  And he is beloved by Red Sox fans not because he was a great man or even a good man, but because he was one of them and gave everything he had to the Red Sox attempt to break the curse of the Bambino.  The curse, it turned out, was not yet half done when Williams retired in 1960.  It still had 44 years to go.

The PBS presentation of “Wolf Hall,” which so far (I have watched two episodes) has done a spectacular job (in my opinion) of bringing the Hilary Mantel novel to the screen, offers us television viewers a new portrait of Saint Thomas More.  Is it possible that Thomas More is revered by the Roman Catholic Church for Red Sox reasons?  Is his historical eminence due to his service to the Church rather than to any great principle for which he sacrificed himself?  It is not quite 500 years since his death, which let us agree was a judicial murder, and in that long span of time More has had a very good press.   He was on friendly terms with the Dutch humanist Erasmus, who was a great admirer of More and wrote a flattering portrait.  And no one ever has a bad word to say about Erasmus.  More was greatly admired by Cardinal Wolsey and by Henry VIII, both of whom made sure to bring him into the Wolsey administration. Henry had More as a dinner guest on many occasions and made him chancellor after he dismissed Wolsey. He was the first layman in English history to serve as chancellor.  How many other men have been made a knight by the King of England and a saint by the Roman Catholic Church?  On top of that, he is the star of “A Man for All Seasons” where he was played brilliantly by Paul Scofield.  In that play, he is the very model of a tolerant, patient, scholarly, saintly man of God.

And yet, there have always been doubters and skeptics.  One might read here and there that while More was a great scholar and a fine writer, he was intolerant of dissent, he tortured and burned heretics – and his notion of heresy took in a very wide field – while his religious observances involved more physical mortification than piety required.

Here is Cromwell quoting More, as imagined by Hilary Mantel:  “More says it does not matter if you lie to heretics, or trick them into a confession.  They have no right to silence, even if they know speech will incriminate them; if they will not speak, then break their fingers, burn them with irons, hang them up by their wrists.  It is legitimate, and indeed More goes further; it is blessed.”

The author of the Catholic Encyclopedia article about More does a masterful job of putting the best face on him as the scourge of the heretics.  He tells us that More enforced the laws against heresy but hated the sin not the sinner.  The skeptic might note, though, that it was the sinner that was burnt.  But the encyclopedia has an answer for that, too:  “[h]e never proceeded to extremities until he had made every effort to get those brought before him to recant”.   “Extremities” refers to burning at the stake, and the article notes that there were only four who required “extremities” at More’s hands.  I am afraid this means that the rest broke under torture so severe and inhumane that our civilized twenty-first century minds cannot imagine it. (Although Hilary Mantel helps us to do so.  Difficult for those of us with morbid imaginations.)

So, he broke minds and bodies, and those he could not break, he burned.  But what was the great cause for which Saint Thomas (he was canonized in 1935, 400 years after his death) exposed heretics to “extremities”?

In “Wolf Hall” More is focused on those who would read the Tyndale Bible.  William Tyndale was not the first man to translate the Bible into English, but his translation was the most current at the time of the story.  He used the English that was then in common use, the language that in the final decade of the century would reach the threshold of maturity at the hands of its finest exponent.  And those who opened the Tyndale Bible learned that many of the institutions and practices of the day were not derived from the words set out in the book itself.  Nothing about Purgatory, or popes, or indulgences.  (I should emphasize that I do not have a dog in this fight.  I am happy for Protestant and Catholic to work out their differences as they will, while we all live under a Constitution that provides that there shall be no religious test for public office.)  Was it for reasons of principle or of comfort that the leaders of the Church suppressed a Bible that the English could understand?

The translation into the common tongue would, it was feared, work to undermine the authority of the Church.  But the Bible of the day was written and read in Latin, which was not the language of the original texts.  More, Erasmus, and all the princes of the Church knew this, of course:  Latin was not the language in which the Bible was originally written.  Most of the Old Testament was originally written in ancient Hebrew (it wasn’t ancient at the time, needless to say) and the rest in Aramaic.  The New Testament was written in Greek.  Why were these books translated into Latin?

I was interested to learn recently that the Latin language lived a double life during the Roman Empire.  Anyone who wanted to be part of the Roman elite had to learn classical Latin, a language whose style was established in the first years of the Empire and was based on the works of exactly four writers.  A student would begin studying grammar at the age of about eight and would study grammar for some seven years.  Sentences of the four canonical writers would be pulled apart word by word, studied, synthesized, and reproduced until the student could write on any subject in the approved style.  Then the student would begin a course in rhetoric that would continue for several years.  Only those who could in their spoken and written language express themselves in the received manner could hope to enter the elite and enjoy the wealth and status that were available to Romans of the upper classes.  Upper class Romans judged people by their ability to express themselves in the approved manner, using the approved forms.

This went on for hundreds of years, even after the central government collapsed in the fifth century.  The result was that classical Latin did not develop or change.  However, the Latin spoken by the ninety percent of the population that was not part of the elite continued to evolve.  The language that the common folk used to buy a drink or a meal, place a bet, tell a joke, and find a date was called “Vulgar Latin” (vulgar meaning “common” not necessarily coarse or crude) or Vulgate.  It was into this common or Vulgate Latin that the elders of the Church had the Bible translated specifically in order to reach the common people.  (“Everyday people” if you prefer.)  During the imperial era and beyond, many Church leaders preached in Vulgate Latin for the very purpose of making sure that they were understood by their parishioners.

Vulgate Latin eventually evolved into Italian, French, Spanish, Portuguese, and other languages, while Vulgate remained the province of monks, priests, and other learned people who continued to use it to communicate with each other.  The impulse to translate from Vulgate (or from the original Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek) into other languages seems to have continued throughout the Middle Ages.  John Wycliffe and his co-workers finished a translation into Middle English (Chaucer’s English) at the end of the fourteenth century.  The impact of this work was sufficiently alarming to the establishment that unauthorized translations were banned by act of Parliament after 1408.   That’s why Tyndale had to move to the continent to work on his translation.

It would seem that the motives behind More’s desire to see Tyndale destroyed were not those of a saint.  But they were those of an adherent, an advocate.  I offer this little discourse on translation as Exhibit One to make the case that More’s canonization was done for Red Sox reasons and not because his adherence to the Vulgate Bible was derived from some great principle that the Church fathers wanted others to follow by example.  The other great stand that he took related to the relative position of King and Church, but I will wait to say anything about that until the Wolf Hall tale reaches that point, which is still some five story years ahead of us.  (I don’t know where the TV series will end, so it is possible that we won’t get to this point until Wolf Hall, Season Two, if such a thing is planned.)

Over the centuries during which More has enjoyed his high reputation, it has been hard to find anyone with a good word to say about Thomas Cromwell.   The great Whig historian G. M. Trevelyan says: “Henry needed also a rougher and less scrupulous servant [than Cranmer] and found one in Thomas Cromwell.”  On the next page, Trevelyan refers to Sir (not Saint) Thomas More as “noble”.  Trevelyan’s “Shortened History of England” was published in 1942.  After World War II, historians began to take a more tolerant, even admiring view of Cromwell.  Geoffrey Elton was, I understand, the most eminent of this point of view and is said to be an important influence on Hilary Mantel’s view of Cromwell.  His “England under the Tudors” is the next book up on my reading list.

The England of this period was in transition from the Middle Ages to modern times.  The War of the Roses, a fight for money and power between competing descendants of Edward III, was the last gasp of medieval times in England and resembled nothing as much as the gang warfare of 1920s Chicago.  That war had ended in 1485, barely a lifetime before the Cromwell-More tale now being told, when (quoting Trevelyan) “a Welsh gentleman named Henry Tudor, Earl of Richmond, was able to put up a very respectable case for himself on the Lancastrian side.”  That is a very generous judgment.  On his father’s side, Henry Tudor was descended from a man who was married to the widow of Henry V, so Henry Tudor’s father was a half-brother to Henry V’s son (Henry VI), but was tied through their mother, who was not in line for the throne.  On his mother’s side, he was descended from an illegitimate grandson of Edward III.  The line had been legitimized by Parliament during the reign of Richard II, and then later by Henry IV after he deposed Richard – he was legitimizing his half-siblings – but this Henry added the condition that the descendants could not succeed to the English crown.  What made the case for Henry Tudor respectable was that everyone else on the Lancastrian side was dead.  It was either Henry or the sitting King, Richard III for whom, Trevelyan tells us, “the mass of his English subjects were ashamed to fight.”  Henry won the Battle of Bosworth Field in 1485.   Richard III died conveniently on the battlefield.  Henry Tudor was crowned Henry VII, and spent the next 24 years increasing the size of the Treasury and marrying off his children.  If anyone had opened his wallet after he died, moths would have flown out of it.

What I do not understand is the bloody-mindedness of his son, Henry VIII.  When he succeeded to the throne in 1509, he wanted to ingratiate himself with the common people, show them that he understood their problems.  Two of his father’s advisers were hated throughout the realm because they had administered Henry VII’s tax policies.  Henry VIII had them removed from office, impeached, tried for treason, and executed.  Would it not have been enough to strip them of their offices, send them to a monastery and forbid them from taking further part in public life?  Why kill two men who were faithfully executing a policy that their sovereign had made?  Incidentally, Henry kept the money they had raised and used it for his own purposes.  Throughout his reign, he continued to execute people who stood in his way.  The list includes two of his wives (numbers 2 and 5) and two of his chancellors (More and Cromwell).  He would have executed Cromwell’s mentor Thomas Wolsey, but Wolsey died before he could be put to death.

You get the sense when reading about other English leaders that they understood at some level that they were governing a free people.  John Milton, a century later, could write to Parliament:  “Consider what Nation it is whereof ye are, . . . a Nation not slow and dull, but of quick, ingenious, and piercing spirit, acute to invent, suttle and sinewy to discours . . . .”  One senses that Elizabeth admired this quality in the English, while her Stuart cousins found it an annoyance, something to be suppressed, but still a fact of life to be reckoned with.  But for Henry VIII, I feel that this quality of the English was in his way.  People who spoke their minds had to be hanged and quartered as traitors or, if he was in a generous mood, beheaded, but it was not his job to rule so as to protect the rights of a free people, a people who had tied a sovereign to the yoke of Magna Carta three centuries before.  It was his job to have his way and to destroy those who slowed him down or tried to stop him.  In my opinion, he was a very nasty piece of work.

Which brings us to the genius of Thomas Cromwell.  I think he had a sense of what his nation could be, of the potential for greatness that was just over the horizon.  He took things as he found them, realizing that for better or worse, the English were to be ruled for Henry’s lifetime by an emotional, stubborn, irrational, vengeful man who nevertheless was prepared to allow himself to be guided from time to time by competent professional advisors, as long as they engaged in sufficient flattery and sycophancy to make it clear at all times that it was Henry and not Wolsey, More, Cromwell or anyone else who was in charge.  Cromwell took that situation as it was, accepted the risks of serving such a sovereign, and played his part in building the foundations of a state that would come to play a special role in history.  I don’t suggest that Cromwell was working to lay the foundations for the Declaration of Independence.  I do think that he is an early and stunning example of a modern political leader, prepared to use the tools of rational management, law, and efficient administration to advance the interests of the nation, including its people and its sovereign, into which he was born.

I am looking forward to the remaining episodes of this series.  I’ll write again after I have had a chance to watch a couple of further episodes.  Until then . . . .

March 4, 2015 is the 150^th anniversary of Abraham Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address.  It is the second shortest inaugural address so far.  Only Washington’s second was shorter.  Recent and current political leaders are notable for many things but brevity is not among them, so this remarkable address to the nation is not likely to be surpassed in the future for conciseness.  Nor is it likely to be equaled in the power of its language in the service of profound insights.[1]

When Lincoln took the oath of office for the second time, the Civil War was nearly won.  Lincoln was not a man given to bragging or gloating, so I doubt that he was tempted to do either at that moment, but most of the men who have held that office would have at least considered it, and a great many would have given in.  Four years earlier, in his First Inaugural Address, Lincoln had laid out with crystalline, Euclidean logic the folly of rebellion.  Yet on the day that he took the oath of office for the first time, assemblies in seven states had already announced that they had ended their relationship with the United States.  Six of them had formed a new government.  Eight slave states were still loyal when Lincoln gave his first inaugural address.  Four of them left when, after an artillery barrage forced the federal surrender of Fort Sumter, Lincoln called for 75,000 troops to put down the rebellion.  The other four remained loyal, but Kentucky and Missouri in particular wavered throughout the more than four years of the conflict.

Lincoln was president for about 1,500 days.  There was a war being fought on American soil on almost every one of them.  It was open to him on each of those days to say, “Enough.  There has been enough pain, suffering, death, maiming, crippling.  If you of the South will have a separate country, we of the North have done all that reason could have asked to prevent it, but the quantum of pain has now exceeded our capacity to endure it.  We will say farewell.”

And the white, slaveholding South would have rejoiced at first, but, I believe, would have eventually paid a very heavy price for their independence.  Before 1861, white southerners complained about lax enforcement of the Fugitive Slave Law if a slave managed to cross into a free state.  But there would have been no enforcement if a slave crossed into a different country.  Before 1861, white southerners insisted that they had the right to move slaves into federal territory, but there would have been no federal territory available to them if they had abandoned the United States.  They might have tried expanding into Mexico or the Caribbean, but they would likely have faced serious opposition from the intended victims, from Europe, and from the remaining United States.  And in the meantime, the slave population would have continued to grow.  The 1860 Census counted more African Americans than whites in South Carolina and Mississippi; the slave population was more than 40% of the total population in Alabama, Florida, Georgia, and Louisiana.  Those percentages would have increased.  How long could a system of chattel slavery continue with a majority of the population held as slaves?  To what levels of brutality and inhumanity would the slaveholding population have sunk before the system crumbled under its own weight?

The southern states might even have come back eventually.  But Lincoln was not prepared to adopt a waiting strategy, one that might have taken decades to succeed if at all.  He never departed from the position that secession was not a legal, constitutional remedy for the South’s grievances, such as they were, and that the action called secession was really rebellion or insurrection.  Once force was used against the United States government, he took steps to put the rebellion down and he never stopped until victory was achieved.

Maintaining that position required a daily cost in human life.  A nation of about 33 million experienced a loss of life of about 750,000 persons.  Proportionally, that would mean a loss of about 7 million lives today.  In our time, we hold a solemn memorial every year to mourn the loss of some 3,000 lives on September 11, 2001.  Where would we find the tears to remember a number 2,500 times greater?  Yet that is what the nation endured as the 47 months from Fort Sumter to the Second Inaugural ground on.  And every morning, Abraham Lincoln had the option to decide that the sacrifice made by the nation in the days preceding that morning were enough, were all that the nation could ask of itself.

During the summer of 1864, Lincoln was pessimistic about his chances in the upcoming election.  It was only when General Sherman took Atlanta in early September that Lincoln began to think he might win re-election.  As it was, he won 55% of the vote, which sounds like a landslide until you consider that the eleven states most implacably hostile to Lincoln did not participate, and nearly half of the voters in the loyal states would have left slavery in place where it existed.  What would have happened to those who were freed by the Emancipation Proclamation?  It was a wartime measure, signed by Lincoln in his capacity as Commander-in-Chief.  The sophistry was readily available to Lincoln’s successor that the Proclamation was without force, without effect once the rebellion ended.  The Democratic nominee, George McClellan was famous for advocating “The Constitution as it is and the Union as it was.”  When you add the 45% in the North who would accept that outcome to the significant, probably overwhelming majority in the South for whom that would have been a minimum condition for ending the bloodshed, it’s easy to conclude that a majority of voters would have acquiesced in a decision to end the fighting, accept a stalemate on the issue of slavery, and then improvise.  Whether that meant reuniting with the original bargain regarding slavery still in place, or allowing the South to go in peace, would have been something the new administration would have had to work out.  What is clear is that it required a grim determination for Lincoln to see the thing through, the same kind of determination that Winston Churchill demonstrated three-quarters of a century later.  But Churchill did not have to face the voters until the conflict in Europe was over and Germany was defeated.

So why did Lincoln keep going, in the face of ongoing brutal destruction of human life on the battlefield and serious, well-organized political opposition in the areas of the country that remained loyal?

The authors of the Confederate Constitution, adopted in its final form on March 11, 1861, paid an unspoken compliment to the United States Constitution by copying nearly all of it word for word.  The differences are revealing.  The first one appears in the preamble.  The confederate version begins: “We, the people of the Confederate States, each State acting in its sovereign and independent character . . . .”  The U.S. Constitution begins with the familiar words: “We, the People of the United States of America . . .”.  This is more than a difference in drafting.  The people who wanted to leave the United States and form a new country believed that the U.S. Constitution was a confederation of states and that rights attached to groups.  At the time of the attempted separation, those groups who enjoyed those rights included, in their view, the several states and the white people inhabiting them (including non-planters with the understanding that planters would be more equal than others). Lincoln was, and his political allies were and have remained, believers in individual rights.  It is sometimes said that in a republic, each person is a minority of one.  That is a logical consequence of the principle of the Declaration of Independence that each individual is born with inalienable natural rights and that the purpose of government is to protect those rights.[2]

Lincoln’s view was that the Constitution created a competent government, one that had a relationship with each of the states, to be sure, but one that also had a relationship with each member of “the People” who founded the government and who retain the ultimate authority over it.  Groups of articulate, argumentative slave owners had held a series of conventions, eventually eleven of them, and declared (in the case of South Carolina) that the “Union heretofore existing between this State and the other States of North America, is dissolved[3]” but under the Constitution that action had no effect on the relationship between the federal government and the state or the individuals within that state.  The federal government continued to have a responsibility to that state and to those individuals no matter the speechifying the various string-tied plantation owners in convention assembled might engage in.

For one thing the speechifiers had no authority under positive law to speak for their state, there being no Constitutional process for establishing de-ratifying conventions.  They, like all humans in all places at all times, had the natural right to revolt against an oppressive government, but the slaveholding South was always quite reluctant to justify its actions on that ground.  Even the sophists of secession would have found it difficult to discover a natural right to hold another person as a slave.  More importantly, the Union that they sought to break apart was older than the Constitution and had deeper roots.  It was in an inchoate and imperfect form prior to the Declaration of Independence, but came into being fully formed on July 4, 1776.  The form of government under which the Union would operate changed between 1776 and 1781, when the Articles of Confederation were finally ratified by the thirteenth state, and again in 1787, when the Constitution was adopted, but the Union that was born in 1776 could not be ended by the unilateral declaration of an assembly in a single state or group of states called for that purpose.  It would have required something more than a de-ratifying convention to break that bond.

But all of that had been gone over in detail in Lincoln’s First Inaugural Address.  He never stopped believing in those ideas, and they might have been enough to sustain him through four years of slaughter, but there was something else.  Richard Brookhiser in his excellent book “Founders’ Son,” which I thought was brilliantly and beautifully done, notes that as early as 1862, Lincoln began to articulate more and more deeply the thought that the Civil War was the price that both North and South had to pay for allowing the institution of slavery to survive.  The North had for the most part ended the institution – it still lingered: New York adopted a very gradual form of emancipation, and there were still a few dozen slaves in New Jersey in 1860 – but had continued to profit from it, both in the use of the commodities produced by slave labor (sugar, cotton, hemp) and through the commerce and finance needed to facilitate the day-to-day operation of the institution and the farms, plantations, and workshops where slave labor was employed.

As the carnage went on and people began to doubt the ability of the government to end the rebellion, Lincoln came to believe that the continuation of the war was God’s will.  I don’t mean that Lincoln thought he was God’s instrument or was doing God’s will.  I mean that Lincoln came to believe that his best efforts to win the war would remain unsuccessful until God decided that the time had come to permit the Union to prevail.  And why would God require such sacrifices?  Because the sin of American slavery had to be expiated.  Lincoln refers specifically to American slavery.  Slavery had been widely practiced in other places, and in 1865 continued in Brazil to name one place, but those societies had not been visited with devastation of this magnitude.  But then, they had not been founded on the principle that all human beings are equal in their natural right to life, liberty, property, and the pursuit of happiness.  A nation so founded should not have countenanced slavery, and having allowed the institution to continue, that nation had to endure the trial of civil war to pay for the sin.

Those thoughts are distilled into three sentences that appear in the address just before the final, affirming conclusion.  The section just before the conclusion (“With malice toward none, with charity toward all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, . . .”) begins with this long, difficult, complicated sentence, containing a fearsome theorem:

If we shall suppose that American slavery is one of those offenses which, in the providence of God, must needs come, but which, having continued through His appointed time, He now wills to remove, and that He gives to both North and South this terrible war as the woe due to those by whom the offense came, shall we discern therein any departure from those divine attributes which the believers in a living God always ascribe to Him?

It is hard to keep in mind that this speech was given five weeks before Lee surrendered at Appomattox.  The final surrender of remaining southern troops continued for some time, but there was little doubt that the end was very near.  The South was facing a devastating, complete collapse of its economy and its social and political order.  It has been estimated that it was only in 1885 that the gross domestic product of the eleven confederate states again reached the level of 1860.  And yet, with only weeks to go before the recognition by the South that all was lost, Lincoln says that this carnage will continue until God wills that it should stop.

The audience is given a short respite from the horrifying prospect presented by this long sentence.  It is followed by a brief moment of hope and prayer:

Fondly do we hope, fervently do we pray, that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. 

We may hope and pray, but it is the “mighty scourge of war” that is the actor.  We can only hope that its passing will be soon.  What follows is if anything even more chilling that what went before, made more powerful by the dark images that Lincoln summons in another long and complex sentence to tell us that this slaughter is the capstone to a historical process that is being worked out on God’s schedule:

Yet, if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman’s two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said “the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.”

Lee surrendered to Grant at Appomattox Court House on April 9.  On April 11, Lincoln spoke to a crowd that had gathered at the White House.  He offered remarks that were highly conciliatory to the South.  One hardline position then developing in the north was that the southern states really had seceded and now had to earn their way back into the Union.  Lincoln suggested instead that “[f]inding themselves safely at home, it would be utterly immaterial whether they had ever been abroad.”  In the course of his remarks he proposed that “very intelligent” African Americans and those who had served with the Union armed forces should have the vote.  In the audience was John Wilkes Booth, for whom this was an impossible proposition.  He vowed that this was the last speech Lincoln would ever give and shot the President in the back of the head at Ford’s Theater on April 14.  Lincoln died the next morning.  I did not want to let the 150^th anniversary of his finest speech pass without offering an appreciation to him, his work, and his principles.

[1] The full text of the speech is available at many sites, including this one:  http://www.bartleby.com/124/pres32.html

[2] The taste for group rights continues unabated to this day, although the identity of the favored groups continues to vary over time.  Harry Jaffa, in A New Birth of Freedom says that “[i]f ever there was a nation annihilated politically on the battlefield that nonetheless imposed the yoke of its thought upon its conquerors, it was the Confederacy.” (page 86).

[3] Declaration of the Immediate Causes Which Induce and Justify the Secession of South Carolina from the Federal Union at http://avalon.law.yale.edu/19th_century/csa_scarsec.asp.

This episode could be subtitled “A Night at the Improv”.  Several story lines turned on the ability of the characters to improvise solutions to problems that they had not anticipated.

Rose provided the most spectacular example.  She immediately recognized the problem for her father-in-law when poor Diana Clark and her son Daniel walked in through the front door, expecting a quiet weekend in the country with Daniel senior.  In the next instant, Rose found a solution, needing only to know the name of the unexpected guest to put her plan into action.  She quickly and silently enlisted Mary and Robert, who played along a bit less naturally than did Rose.  All that practice breaking and entering and stealing correspondence at the end of Season Four paid off.  Then, they saved the reputation (for the moment) of the Prince of Wales; this time, that of a Jewish peer.

Lord Sinderby nearly had a coronary when his unexpected guests arrived, and with all the money at her disposal dear Lady Sinderby could not buy a clue.  What a lovely coincidence that Diana Clark’s little boy has the same first name as her husband!  No one seemed to question why Rose’s old friend walked in, said hello, and then drove off in the car that brought her, but apart from that, the thing went off like clockwork.  The long-term dividend is that Sinderby now realizes what a prize his son found when he brought Rose into their family.  Also, we learned that Lord Sinderby is far more welcoming to shiksas than he first let on.  He just draws the line at marriage, and that line has now been moved back.

One other thing we learned is that Mr. Barrow still has his fangs and it is never a good idea to cross him.  If Sinderby had collapsed under the strain of Miss Clark’s brief visit, he would have had only himself to blame for antagonizing Barrow.  Incidentally, I thought it was very clever of Mary to recognize that she had set Lord Sinderby’s humiliation in motion.  It took quick thinking to picture the sequence of events that led to Miss Clark’s arrival.  If Mary had stayed with Gillingham, she would have been up all night explaining it to him.

Tom did a nice bit of improvisation himself when he prevented Robert from giving a drunken Christmas speech by making a sober one of his own.  It came off very well, but talk about a reversal of stereotypes!

Finally, Violet had her moment of improvisation when she pretended that Denker’s soup was edible by forcing herself to swallow a small spoonful and declaring it delicious.  She then used Denker’s momentary victory to impose peace in the household.

Bates and Molesley engaged in creative problem-solving, not quite amounting to improvisation because both plans were thought out ahead of time.  It seemed obvious last week that Bates would take the blame for Green’s murder in order to obtain Anna’s release. The plan was flawed because Bates actually has an alibi, even though he doesn’t want it.  On top of that, could he really hope to avoid discovery?  It’s a nice try to disappear to some unknown location in Ireland, but in all likelihood an Englishman with the manners of an upper class servant who walks with a limp and a cane would have been easily found, even if the Irish authorities did not particularly like cooperating with the English police.  He can’t expect to get around the fact that he actually has a rock solid alibi.

Molesley decides to use Bates’s photograph to establish that alibi and with the aid of Baxter goes on the most abstemious pub crawl ever witnessed in the city of York.  They prove Bates’s innocence, but in the zero-sum game that is the Bates family legal situation, this should have meant that Anna was heading back to the pokey, possibly to swing for a crime she didn’t commit.  Fortunately, the eyewitness that put Anna in quod in the first place is now less confident in his identification, so Bates and Anna can have a carefree Christmas 1924.  Their happiness will always be contingent on the whims of the writing staff, but no one in this story is immune from that malady.

Both Mary and Edith have attracted new beaux and I expect we will see both of the new chaps next season.  Each of them had a connection to the house in Scotland, although I didn’t follow the details.  The fellow who seems to be interested in Edith is the “Agent” which at first sounds like he would be a fellow of a middling station in life who looks after the place when no one is around.  In fact, he is distantly related to the current owner, which might mean that he will inherit the place one day just the way Matthew ended up the heir to Downton.  That would be nice for Edith.  Mary’s fellow somehow did Atticus out of his turn to shoot, although why they all couldn’t fire away together at the poor birds was not clear to me.  I also didn’t understand why Mary had to give the fellow such a hard time about it.  By the end of the episode, we learn that he has sufficient spine to stand up to Mary’s badgering and that he is clever enough to have figured out the story behind Miss Clark all on his own.  Add in that he has money, as evidenced by his expensive car, and he may turn out to be the successor to Messrs. Blake and Gillingham.  I thought Blake was going to be the guy, but this may be another one of those occasions when I am – what was that word?? – wrong.

The love affairs of the older generation are coming apart.  Isobel and Lord Merton are being divided by his willful and unpleasant son Larry.  And Violet is bringing Princess Kuragin back from Hong Kong to reunite with the Prince.  I noticed that Violet has changed her story about why she did not run off with Prince Kuragin back in 1874.  The earlier version, which she told when he first appeared at Downton, was that she was going to run off with the prince when her husband gave her a framed portrait of their two children.  That persuaded her to stay for their sake.  No doubt she had sanitized it.  In the current version, she and the Prince did run away and were pursued by the enraged Princess Kuragin, who caught up with them, forcibly removed Violet from the coach that was carrying her and the Prince, and sent Violet back in the place in the cab that the Princess had vacated.  A rather different tale and far more interesting.

The balance of the episode was devoted to one treacly event after another.  I confess I found it disappointing.  Both Robert and Tom had to tell Edith that they know that Marigold is her child.  Robert wants her to know that all is understood and forgiven, just in case his chest pain turns out to be fatal.  Tom wants her to know that he will be pulling for her from Boston.  Hugs and kisses all around.

Tom, Mary, and Edith hold hands to conduct an impromptu memorial service for Sibyl, which Robert gets to witness.  All very sticky and sweet.  I had thought that when Carson had earlier proposed to Hughes that they buy a house together, he was really proposing marriage in his indirect reserved way, but he did it for real in this episode, closing the loop that opened when they tiptoed to the edge of the sea last season.  All very reminiscent of Maurice Chevalier and Hermione Gingold in Gigi singing “Ah yes, I remember it well.”  Another dose of treacle is dispensed when Robert tells Tom how much he will miss him and Tom tells Robert how much he will miss him.  Add in a few Christmas carols and it’s time to break out the insulin.

Well, on the bright side, no one died, no one ended the season in prison, and no one has a fatal disease.  There are some for whom things could be better – Isobel and Lord Merton – and others for whom things could be much worse, such as Anna and Mister Bates.  Everyone seems to be about as happy as his or her particular circumstances may allow, which is not a bad place to leave things until the start of the next, and so it is rumored, last season of the show.

It happens occasionally at my house or my place of work that an interesting piece of information is in the air and I am not the last to learn of it.  It is a very gratifying feeling to know that you are ahead of the pack, if only for the brief period it takes everyone else to catch up.  The feeling is as rare for Robert as it is for me and I congratulate him on not being the last to know the parentage of wee Marigold.  It’s true that the list of people in the family who don’t know is not very long – Cora did not have to draw a second breath to recite the list.  Still, it must be pleasant for Robert that he figured it out for himself and is momentarily ahead of Mary, Tom, Isobel, and Rose (I think that’s the list).

Susan has now edged out Larry Merton for the “nastiest member of the upper classes” award.  She starts off by trying to insult the Aldridges by asking if they have any “English” relatives.  (It turns out Mrs. Aldridge does, to Susan’s surprise.)  I think the tone of her voice rather than the content carried the insult.  After all, to be English is to be a member of a distinct, identifiable ethnic group.  In that sense, the Aldridges are not English (something that Father Aldridge points out to Atticus during their heated conversation later), but then neither are Rose and her parents.  They are Scottish.  For that matter, neither were Queen Victoria’s antecedents.  If we have to have a name for what they all are — the Crawleys, Aldridges, McClairs, and all the good folk below stairs—I guess it would be ”British” (although Tom might wish to be excluded from that category) and it would have been truly insulting if Susan had phrased her sideways remark that way.

But Susan was just getting started.  It was she who arranged the honey trap at Atticus’s bachelor party.  But how did she manage those arrangements?  She has just taken the long passage from India with her husband, transferred with him to a train at Southampton and gone straight through to Grantham House, the little pied-a-terre, about the size of a museum, maintained by the Crawley family when they happen to be in London.  I assume there was no such thing as ship to shore radio in those days, so she had to make the arrangements on land after she arrived.  She had to find a suitable young woman – did she thumb through the “T” section of the classifieds to find “Tarts”? – and she had to find a photographer who could crank out the prints by next morning.  It was only at dinner that she learned where the bachelor party was being held and on top of that she would have had to learn where to have the snaps delivered for Rose to see them at lunch in the company of her second cousins.  All of this had to be managed from Grantham House without anyone knowing.  I hesitate to say that there is anything that could not be accomplished by a mother who thinks she is protecting her child (as Susan described her motivation for trying to break up the wedding), but this particular feat seems highly improbable.

Under other circumstances, Susan might have hit the jackpot.  The eye contact between Atticus and the contracted young woman and his breezy dismissal of her in the elevator suggested to me that he knows his way around this line of commerce.  Had Atticus been differently disposed that evening, his goose would have been cooked.  As it was, the only trump left to Susan was her announcement, just before Rose’s arrival at the ceremony, that she and Shrimpy are divorcing and when that failed to have the desired effect, she admitted defeat.  She is stuck with a handsome son-in-law, dripping with money, wildly in love with her daughter.  Such problems!

Meanwhile, Lord Sinderby has his own objections, none of which slowed anyone down for a moment, but I was intrigued by his use of the word “shiksa”[1].  The word struck me, first, as anachronistic and second, even if in contemporary usage at the time, unlikely to come from the mouth of someone as reserved and straight-laced as Daniel Aldridge.  I went to the OED to check on this word.  The earliest literary use captured by the Oxford readers was in 1892 and the next was in 1928, well past the date of our story.  So, the word was not in wide literary use in 1924.  I somehow doubt that the Aldridges walk around the house speaking Yiddish, so the word would have found its way into Lord Sinderby’s vocabulary by way of English, if at all.  I just doubt that the word was in common use in British English in 1924.  Obviously, a new word will find its way into the language only when a critical mass of individuals uses it.  Bankers, whether Jew or Gentile, would not have provided the necessary linguistic creativity to produce a new coinage.  (I believe “mezzanine finance” was the last linguistic contribution of the bankers.)  The walks of life that attract more voluble participants – writers, lyricists, lawyers, journalists – would have been more likely to supply a word like that, so I would reckon that when it entered English, it did so on the U.S. side of the water, where there were more Yiddish-speaking immigrants engaged in the lines of work that use language intensively.  I find it hard to believe that there would have been a sufficiently large critical mass of Jewish members of the chattering classes in Britain to have pushed the word over the top in that locale.  And if I am wrong and the word was somehow in common use on London streets in 1924, I doubt that Lord Sinderby would use slang.

Incidentally, did you notice the menorah sitting on the shelf to the side of Lord Sinderby’s desk?  Just in case you thought that maybe he’s not really Jewish, the menorah pretty much seals the deal.

Kudos to Mother Aldridge for steering her son’s bark through the various shoals, rapids, and eddies presented by her husband and her son’s future mother-in-law and landing herself a lovely Scottish daughter-in-law, shiksa though she be.  I hope the newlyweds will be very happy.  In my humble opinion, they are the best looking couple we have seen to date on this show and they seem just as nice as that to boot.

The Amritsar Massacre, discussed briefly by Shrimpy, Sinderby, Isobel, and Robert, was actually in the news in the U.K. on Monday, the day after this episode aired in the U.S.  When World War One ended in November 1918, India had hoped for increased autonomy.  This would have been a suitable recompense for India’s contribution to Britain’s war effort, but what India received instead was martial law.  By April 1919, Indian tempers were flaring and the British were worried about their ability to maintain order.  On April 10, 1919, the general in charge of the Amritsar district in the north of India, a General Dyers, became increasingly concerned about civil unrest.  As it happened, April 13 was a local festival day and large numbers of Muslims, Sikhs, and Hindus came to Amritsar to celebrate, although some historians believe that the crowd was there not to celebrate bur rather specifically to provoke the British.  The crowd entered a square that was surrounded on four sides by walls, with very few exits.  General Dyers and a contingent of native troops arrived and, according to an investigation conducted by the British government shortly after these events, began firing on the crowd.  When people threw themselves to the ground, the troops directed their fire to the ground.  When the crowd tried to flee through the narrow exits, the troops fired on the exits.

The British government has maintained since that day that 379 people were killed and some 1,200 wounded.  The Indian government has maintained that about 1,000 were killed and 500 wounded.  Some 1,600 shell casings were collected from the scene, and there seems to be broad agreement between the two governments that the total number of killed and wounded is roughly equal to the number of cartridges expended.

Opinion within Britain, both in the government and the public, has been divided from then until now.  Here is an excerpt from a long speech delivered to the House of Commons in 1920 by the Secretary of State for War, who was none other than Winston Churchill:

[W]hen the ammunition had reached the point that only enough remained to allow for the safe return of the troops, and after 379 persons, which is about the number gathered together in this Chamber to-day, had been killed, and when most certainly 1,200 or more had been wounded, the troops, at whom not even a stone had been thrown, swung round and marched away.  I deeply regret to find myself in a difference of opinion from many of those with whom, on the general drift of the world’s affairs at the present time, I feel myself in the strongest sympathy; but I do not think it is in the interests of the British Empire or of the British Army for us to take a load of that sort for all time on our backs.  We have to make it absolutely clear, some way or another, that this is not the British way of doing business.

I shall be told that it “saved India.” I do not believe it for a moment. The British power in India does not stand on such foundations.

These events occurred 95 years ago.  No one who witnessed or participated in the events is still alive, but the controversy continues.  David Cameron, the British Prime Minister, was in India last week and was invited to apologize for the 1919 massacre.  He declined to apologize, but adopted Churchill’s formulation that the event was “monstrous”.  On Monday, I found this headline at the website of the (London) Daily Mail:

David Cameron was right not to apologise – the monstrous massacre of Amritsar SAVED thousands of lives, says one of Britain’s top historians

The historian in question is Andrew Roberts, who is indeed eminent but also highly controversial.  He is not at all convinced that the standard account, including the account presented by Churchill in 1920 (and dramatized in the film Gandhi), is correct.

At the time, the House of Commons, under the control of the Liberals, condemned General Dyers.  The more conservative House of Lords did not agree and supported the General.  At the wedding reception, Lord Sinderby takes Dyers’s side, but Shrimpy politely and Robert rather less politely disagree.  Robert insists that Sinderby must defer to Shrimpy, who knows India.  But Shrimpy was based in Bombay (now Mumbai), more than 1,000 miles by road from Amritsar.  It’s as if a person who spent a lot of time in Denver were to be treated as an expert on Chicago politics.  Sinderby does not reply, but I doubt that he is persuaded by Shrimpy’s authority[2].  It is remarkable that this is one of the best documented events of its kind in history, yet the responsibility for the event and significant details are still disputed nearly a century after the fact.  As William Faulkner said, the past is not dead; it is not even past.

In 1984, history repeated itself when the Indian government under Indira Gandhi ended a Sikh protest at the Golden Temple in Amritsar by using armed troops to attack the temple.  Perhaps 1,000 Sikhs died in the same city that had witnessed another massacre by a different government 65 years earlier.

In other news, Anna has been arrested for the murder of Mr. Green.  Two people have guaranteed her innocence in slightly different terms.  Bates tells Mary that Anna will not be convicted, but Mrs. Hughes guarantees that neither Anna nor Mister (Bates that is) had anything to do with it.  Bates, noble fellow that he is, pretty clearly plans to take the rap for Anna.  Since it appears that he was not actually in London on the day of the murder (unless Mr. Fellowes is throwing a second head fake at us), it’s hard to see how this effort is going to succeed.  But how can Mrs. Hughes be so very sure that neither of the Bateses did the crime?  Is it possible, is it conceivable that Mrs. Hughes was in London on that day?  Let me say that as far as the actual character of Mrs. Hughes is concerned, I find the suggestion completely unbelievable.  It’s just that I don’t put anything past this writing crew, who have proven to be alternatively cruel and frivolous when it suits them.

Robert once again demonstrates his innate decency when he arranges for a stone plaque to commemorate Mrs. Patmore’s nephew to be set up on the path near the war memorial.  He can’t put Archie’s name on the memorial, but offering the reason that the lad was not from Downton is a fitting substitute for the real reason, in the interest of healing wounds.

The lines read by Mr. Carson at the unveiling of the memorial are from a poem titled “For the Fallen” written in 1914 by Robert Laurence Binyon.  (Anyone starting out to be a poet should be sure to have three names.)  It was written just after the Battle of the Marne, after the heavy losses of the first month of fighting but before the losses multiplied beyond understanding.  It is said to be a favorite among the British for honoring their war dead.  I confess I find most of it trite and flat.  For example, it starts:  “With proud thanksgiving, a mother for her children, England mourns for her dead across the sea.”   I realize that my certificate from the Literary Critics Society of America is still in the mail, but I find nothing in these lines to capture the heart or the imagination; the image of nation as mother is too tired to count even as a cliché.  The poem continues in that same uninspired vein for six of its seven quatrains, but in the middle, for one moment the poet strikes gold.  The fourth verse begins with the lines that Mr. Carson read:  “They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old: Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.”  And in those two lines, the poet earns his three names and captures some of the sadness that was part of the lives that continued as thousands, then millions, went to early graves.

I noticed that a few household staff members are complaining about reductions in numbers.  Robert needs to sell his prize painting to pay for the cottage construction project.  Money seems to be an issue, if only a marginal one, for the first time since Mr. Swires’s timely death put funds back into the estate just when they were needed.  Still, the Crawleys are better off than Rose’s parents, who seem to be completely tapped out.  Some of the landed gentry appear to be coming under financial pressure.  So far, the Aldridge family seems to be doing fine, no doubt because they are not landed gentry.  They use the income from their banking business to finance the country life that a family like the Crawleys was born into.  Judging from the brief preview, we’ll get a good look at the Aldridge domestic operation during the next episode, the last of the season.

Until next time!

[1] A word meaning “a non-Jewish girl,” which came to English from Yiddish and to Yiddish from Hebrew.  It is from this word that we have the concept of “shiksappeal”.

[2] Perhaps not without reason.  Shrimpy seems to feel that the end of British India is near, but independence arrived only in 1947, nearly a quarter century after Shrimpy’s prediction.