Radio klassik Stephansdom‘s November Spendentag will take place tomorrow, Tuesday, November 18, and this time around the theme is “Land of Sounds — Youth Edition,” celebrating the role that young people are playing in keeping the legacy of European and American art music hale and healthy. Several guests will be live in the Vienna studio, including representatives from the Vienna Boys’ and Girls’ Choirs and the Vienna State Opera School, along with special musical presentations. So tomorrow (or today — why wait?) open up those wallets and toss a few Euros Radio klassik Stephansdom’s way. More information about tomorrow’s Spendentag can be found here, and you can donate online here.
Of course donation drives have been a feature of public radio here in the United States for years (even the defunct and privately-held Philadelphia WFLN station, with which I grew up, was for many years listener-supported; the Philadelphia Inquirer reported on its 1997 closure here). With recent federal cuts to public broadcasting, though, every week has become pledge week, so along with Vienna’s fine classical music outlet I suggest you contribute as well to Philadelphia’s WRTI, maybe the closest thing Philadelphia has to radio klassik Stephansdom. WRTI has been looking to youth as well these days; I’m hoping to listen soon to a stream of Saturday’s broadcast of Mozart’s Così fan tutte, performed by students at Philly’s Academy of Vocal Arts. WRTI’s John T.K. Scherch has more on the production, and interviews with the cast, here. You can donate here, and I’ll add a link to the Così stream when and if it’s available.
Both stations’ web sites provide live streams of their broadcasts, but if you’re looking for something with a little more clarity and bandwidth, I recommend signing up for TuneIn and running it through your music streamer. Sounds great.
Philadelphia’s Mural Arts project keeps Philly’s streets dynamic, and on October 3 the project tipped its hat to the role the city has played in the movies with the unveiling of Marian Bailey’s “Films Shaped by a City” in the Sansom Street rear of the Film Society Center at 1412 Chestnut Street. “The mural includes many films and film related organizations that have impacted filmmaking, film presentation and film-related training in Philadelphia,” reads the description at the Mural Arts web site.
Rocky and the usual suspects receive due recognition, although “[the] exclusion of certain movies from the mural is likely to start some arguments,” Stephen Silver wrote in an article for the Inquirer. I personally was happy to see the inclusion of my favorite Philadelphia film, Elaine May’s 1976 Mikey and Nicky, which captures the desolation and frustration you could find on Philadelphia streets at the time. So hats off to the folks who put the mural together.
Finally, I am grimly amused at the announcement that the Philadelphia Museum of Art has paid a small fortune, I believe, to the Brooklyn-based marketing firm Gretel for a rebranding effort that included a new logo — “Our main objective was to ‘come down the steps’ by putting the museum in dialogue with its community, which is and always has been the city itself,” Gretel’s Ryan Moore said in a masterly demonstration of the bleedin’ obvious– but maybe the most apparent change was a new name. As Gretel’s web site has it:
Along the way, the museum’s name shifted to what much of the city had already called it: Philadelphia Art Museum. It’s simple, casual and approachable. In short: PhAM.
In true City of Brotherly Love fashion, however, Philadelphia magazine’s Victor Fiorillo yesterday suggested another possibility: “The Philadelphia Museum of Art is now the Philadelphia Art Museum or, well, PhART.” I’ll bet he wasn’t paid for it, either. Me, I hope PhART is the one that sticks.
Stefan Zweig (left) and Joseph Roth in Ostend, 1936.
Joseph Roth’s 1932 novel The Radetzky March chronicles three generations in the life of a family in the Austro-Hungarian Empire from 1859 through 1916, and like many Austrian novels and memoirs of the period, it’s also a chronicle of dissipation and collapse. Joseph Trotta, an infantry lieutenant and the son of a Slovenian peasant, manages somehow to save the life of a befuddled Emperor Franz Joseph I on the battlefield, taking a bullet himself in the process; hailed as a hero, he reads about his exploit ridiculously exaggerated in a children’s history book and insists to the Emperor during a private audience that the record be corrected:
“Listen, my dear Trotta!” said the Kaiser. “The whole business is rather awkward. But neither of us comes off all that badly. Let it be!”
“Your Majesty,” replied the captain, “it’s a lie!”
“People tell a lot of lies,” the Kaiser confirmed.
“I can’t, Your Majesty,” the captain choked forth. …
“My ministers,” Franz Joseph began, “must know what they’re doing. I have to rely on them. Do you catch my drift, my dear Trotta?” And after a while. “We’ll do something. You’ll see!”
And Franz Joseph does something; the story is indeed expunged from the children’s book, though not until the story has become legendary among Austrian schoolchildren. It’s all downhill from there.
Over the years, The Radetzky March has become a kind of companion novel to Stefan Zweig’s memoir of the same period, The World of Yesterday, published posthumously in 1942, with some interesting and important differences. Zweig’s memoir looks westward from Vienna and is peopled by intellectuals, artists, and writers; Roth’s novel instead looks eastward, especially to the Moravian and Galician frontiers, and is peopled by unimaginative civil servants, soldiers, and the middle-class bourgeoisie and the peasantry. Zweig himself is a pacifist and a political progressive, admiring Erasmus as the standard-bearer of humanism; Roth once characterized the Strauss march as “the Marseillaise of reaction,” Marjorie Perloff reported in her chapter about the book in her fine Edge of Irony. And of course, as Jewish writers, both Zweig and Roth offer portraits of Jews in both regions: the assimilated Jews of Vienna for Zweig, and the unassimilated Jews of Galicia for Roth.
Though superficially a realistic novel traditional in style, The Radetzky March is also a fabric woven of metaphors and symbols. Roth painstakingly describes the manners and morals of the period in a language both poetic and musical, especially as both begin to disintegrate as nationalism — Roth’s bete noire as well as Zweig’s (read Zweig’s condemnation of nationalism here) — threatens the uneasy stability of the empire on the eve of the First World War (indeed, the narrator is fond of describing the disintegration of dead bodies); painted portraits of both the elder Trotta, the Hero of Solferino, and Franz Joseph occur and recur through the narrative; and of course the march itself, heard in a variety of situations, both exterior and in the minds of the characters.
Like other great Modernist novels such as Ulysses and Remembrance of Things Past, The Radetzky March transcends its time and setting. The decay of private and public behavior and conceptions of honor is, I would hope, a continuing tragedy for all of us (though Roth at the end of the book provides hope for honor and redemption, in an ironic echo of the Hero of Solferino’s own unsuspected courage); in an episode when the civil authorities call out the military to suppress a public demonstration late in the book, there are disastrous consequences. And Roth is no mere nostalgist. He sees bluntly and clearly, as his experience as a journalist must have taught him. His reportage rings true as an eyewitness to this decay.
The Radetzky March covers three generations of a family; I am only three generations on myself from my own Galician peasant forebears who themselves were Austrian citizens at the time, which may be why I’ve reacted to the novel as deeply as I have. Affinity, you know; I wrote more about it here. And some other things never change, either. In 2005, translator Michael Hofmann wrote an appreciation of Roth for the Guardian. “I don’t have a favourite chapter in The Radetzky March … , or even a favourite sentence,” he says. “However, I have always been moved by the majestic paragraph of (frankly) authorial commentary at the beginning of chapter eight.” Perhaps it’ll move you too; here’s Hofmann’s translation:
In the years before the Great War, at the time the events chronicled in these pages took place, it was not yet a matter of indifference whether a man lived or died. When someone was expunged from the lists of the living, someone else did not immediately step up to take his place, but a gap was left to show where he had been, and those who knew the man who had died or disappeared, well or even less well, fell silent whenever they saw the gap. When a fire happened to consume a particular dwelling in a row of dwellings, the site of the conflagration remained for a long time afterwards. For masons and bricklayers worked slowly and thoughtfully, and when they walked past the ruins, neighbours and passers-by alike recalled the form and the walls of the house that had once stood there. That’s how it was then! Everything that grew took long to grow; and everything that ended took a long time to be forgotten. Everything that existed left behind traces of itself, and people then lived by their memories, just as we nowadays live by our capacity to forget, quickly and comprehensively.
Over the years, The Radetzky March has become a kind of companion novel to Stefan Zweig’s memoir of the same period,