Miscellaneous Fantasias

Did you know that Mily Balakirev composed brief fantasias to precede each of the five acts of King Lear?

Never heard of Mily Balakirev? Me neither, until yesterday. He was a mentor to Tchaichovsky, a partisan of the Russian nation, a hard-working nineteenth-century musician.

A music lover can download the King Lear suite on iTunes. (They refer to him as “Balakirew.” These pieces are on the same CD as some works of a 20th-century Armenian composer, but iTunes amazingly allows you to download just the Balakirew material for $4.95.) The music was performed by the Berlin Radio Symphony Orchestra, I believe in the 1990’s.

Listening provokes many reflections…

Was Balakirev just mailing this in, or does the largely sanguine aura of the music express a profound insight into the play? Yes, King Lear is a bitter tragedy, an enormously ugly exploration of the worst that “whoremaster man” can display of his “goatish disposition.”

But beauty emerges: the divine loveliness of pity. The King and Gloucester teach us how to look at human weakness without judgment or contempt. Maybe Balakirev intended his music to bring this aspect of the play to the fore.

The first fantasia, to precede the play’s opening scene, reminded me of just how stupendous that scene is. Don’t quote me, but I believe it is the Bard’s longest. As I think I once mentioned before, more happens in the opening scene of King Lear than has happened in many of the centuries of human history.

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…Speaking of all things Shakespeare: I am sure you know that the obscure Henry VI trilogy recounts the “War of the Roses.” These plays are rarely performed; the intricate history is even more rarely grasped.

If you were a Shakespeare troupe undertaking to perform Henry VI, Part 3, would you open the action by slowly unfurling a long banner which is emblazoned with a summary of the first two plays, while playing the Darth Vader theme in the background? Would you title the summary “Rose Wars, Episode III”?

If so, you would have done what the American Shakespeare Center did last night at the opening performance of their short-running rendition of this obscure play. It was the beginning of an enchanting two hours. These players do better with a shoestring budget than the so-called big boys in downtown Washington do with their wasted millions. Long live the American Shakespeare Center!

King Lear is King

For fifteen years I have unswervingly held that Richard II is Shakespeare’s best play. My reasoning was this:

1. There is not one wasted word in Richard II. Every line of every speech contributes to building up the tragedy.

2. No one has ever defended the idea that kings rule by divine right so beautifully as King Richard does.

3. Even though he comes out of the gate at the beginning of the play as an insufferable, self-deluded madman, Richard winds up winning your sympathy anyway. At first he seems to be fatally flawed by delusions of grandeur, but in fact his grand illusions turn out to be truly noble.

These are really solid reasons for thinking that Richard II is best, and there are more reasons which I could offer. But I have to admit that I was wrong. I was totally wrong. Richard II is not the best.

This change of heart has been building for a couple of years. King Lear has always intrigued me. Harold Bloom, a formidable commentator, does not hesitate to choose King Lear as the best. Two summers ago I finally started to get a real grip on the play, when I watched the 1974 Central Park performance, with Raul Julia as Edmund and James Earl Jones as King Lear.

As I drove down to the seashore for my day off yesterday, I listened to the Arkangel King Lear for the fourth time. It utterly crushed me. I will never be the same.

I have always thought that the opening scene of King Lear has even more drama than Alfred Hitchcock’s entire oeuvre. And I would have freely acknowledged years ago that King Lear also does what Richard II does: makes you fall in love with a king who seems insane—who is insane—but who turns out to be the one who really understands things.

The storm scene on the heath, however, has finally conquered me altogether. Don’t get me wrong: it left me breathless before. King Lear raging against the forces of chaos and dissolution, with his Fool under his cloak, is more powerful than all of twentieth-century poetry and philosophy rolled-up together. But yesterday afternoon I felt for the first time the second-part of that scene’s one-two punch: just when you are in the grips of this existential reverie on human solitude, Shakespeare sneaks up and daggers your heart with Edgar, disguised as Poor Tom, seeing his beloved father, who has unjustly condemned him.

I am not given to weeping. I have been accused on being machine-like, emotionally austere. I did not, in fact, weep in the car yesterday afternoon. But I was darn close.

Please allow me to reiterate that it has taken me years of effort to attain the appreciation of King Lear that I now have. (I am rather slow…) King Lear is not exactly easy to deal with. But it is worth it! It is worth it! King Lear is best.