As usual, Renate Stendhal's review is articulate and engaging. However, I have to disgree with her. I found this performance flat and slow. And I didn't see the all the cross-gender innuendoes that Miss Stendhal so artfully unveiled.
T.S.
read Renate Stendhal's article
Renate Stendhal's article on "Der Rosenkavalier" was intensely interesting as to the opera's emotional and sexual nuances. Her suggestion of casting a physically attractive singer as Ochs, as a way of shaking up the opera's dynamics, was particularly intriguing, and caused me to think the following: has any opera company ever cast a male countertenor, instead of a female mezzo, in the role of Octavian? I don't even know if this is possible musically (being ignorant of how, or even if, the vocal ranges of mezzos and countertenors overlap), but it's an intriguing concept.
Miles Moore
read Renate Stendhal's article
Once again you capture a choreographer and her dance in words the way few reviewers can. Wonderful. Wunderbar. Thank you. Here is more praise that Pina will live forever.
Peter Meyer
How enriched my trip to Paris in July will be for having read your musings!
Cynthia K
read Renate Stendhal's article
Illustrious, illustrious, illustrious.
Merci, merci, merci.
P.T. Cuve
read Renate Stendhal's article
Frida lives! And so does your review!
Mary Ann Whitney
read Renate Stendhal's article
Perhaps, though, he owns more or less than he knows: a "Picasso" from the agile hand of Elmyr de Hory? Unrecognized fake chef d'oeuvres of Picasso, Matisse, Cézanne, Renoir etc. still populate the museums and living rooms of the world. The greatest faker of the last century did not copy, he created the masterpieces. And he did so very fast. Have a look (again) at the amusing film-essay by Orson Welles, "F for Fake", meet the master painter and see him at work. You will also meet his Ibiza neighbor, the equally brilliant literary faker Clifford Irving, who not only wrote the invented autobiography of Howard Hugues ("Hoax") but also a biography of his friend and inspiration, Elmyr de Hory. And if you rent the additional DVD from Netflix you will learn that the fake Picassos have become a collectors' item in their own right. What is more thrilling these days: a Picasso on your wall or an Elmyr de Hory that even Picasso himself could not tell apart?
Renate Stendhal
I cannot read nor hear too much about Lorena Feijoo. And apparently neither can Renate Stendhal. Lorena is a choreographer's gem and an audience's dream. I do hope that Ms Stendhal will never tire of experiencing Lorena's wondrous creations and will continue to share those experiences with her equally wondrous prose.
Hinton Faxman
Terrific review but white print/black background is much to difficult to read for an entire article. An occasional white on black "punch" field may be fine, an entire article too tedious to read. Too bad, it was a welcome review.
Barbara Witte
Yesterday I saw a performance of "Carmina Burana" and this morning I read your article. All wonderful fodder for my tiny brain that is trying to add a little more culture to its life (my next amble being an attendance this week at an outdoor opera simulcast). Brilliant article.
Irene Hendrick
I appreciate Ms. Stendhal's keen powers of observation in this well-written article. I have seen the performance of Lucia and am amazed at how well Ms. Stendhal describes the beauty of this production. I have not see the Rene Fleming performance, but I am sure now that I do not ever need to!
Larissa Chernin
Extremely insightful, Renate. And isn't it amazing, that at this point apparently 200000 Jews live in Germany?
Andrea Kapsaski
Thanks, Andrea! It's hard to believe the numbers you are quoting. Who, do you think, is doing the numbers and keeping book? Of course, one could argue that right now, there is no safer country on earth for Jewish people than Germany... Disturbing thoughts. Before Hitler, there were ca 523,000 Jews living in Germany (according to the US Holocaust Museum). "Prophets Without Honor" by Frederic v.Grunfeld, which I read again and again, shows that this tiny percentage of the population produced some 85 % of Germany's culture and science during the peak of the assimilation period and the Weimar Republic. Any conclusions for the future of German culture?
Renate Stendhal
Most Jews in Germany are recent immigrants from the former Soviet Union plus a small number of Jewish families from Muslim countries. According to the Central Council of Jews in Germany (Zentralrats der Juden in Deutschland) ca. 120,000 individual members are officially registered with a total of 107 Jewish communities, but of course not everyone is registered and I have read statistics surpassing the 200.000 number That means, that Germany has the third-largest Jewish population in Western Europe after France (600,000) and Great Britain (300,000) and the fastest-growing Jewish population in Europe in recent years. One could indeed argue if Germany is indeed the safest country for Jewish people. Is there a safe country? Denying the Holocaust is a crime in Germany and is punishable by three months to five years in prison, but does that make Jewish life any better or safer?
Andrea Kapsaski
Beautiful article, Renate! I can't help but wonder what "Stumbling Stones" Americans might feel moved to create 60 years from now reminding us of our own reprehensible behaviors in the world today. Thanks for posting.
Judy Cohen
I think it might be interesting to clarify some things about that soccer team and your perception of it. I understand their appearance and bearing must be frightening or enstranging. I feel the same about being on a train with a load of soccer fans as well. But despite the brown shirts and skulls on the shirts, these were fans of the most leftist soccer team in Germany. They only play in the second league but they are famous for being rather far on the left bordering anarchy. The skull represents a connection to piracy and not bending to the rules of the former middle-class smugness and rules of the hanseatic city. If they play against teams like "'Hansa Rostock" whose fans are known to be often neo-nazis, fans of the soccer team you saw gather for big street fights to get those people out of Hamburg. I am sorry if my English is not good enough to really explain what I'm trying to say. I guess I just hope to clarify that sometimes those first impressions of hostility might turn out to quite something different. Those people couldn't have been further away from those they reminded you of. And sometimes the staring at somebody who watches the stumbling-stones is not hostility or seeing a "Nestbeschmutzer". But if I would see somebody pausing and contemplating to take pictures of the house, I would ask myself if you might be a relative of those who lived there. Or a tourist condemning those now living there, because they "took away" what did not belong to them. I would feel uncertain how to behave towards you. I would also feel ashamed a bit. But I am quite certain that most people would not think of you as a Nestbeschmutzer. And at least the people of my age (in my twenties) think that the Stolpersteine are a great project that helps us to remember. I too wonder who would have gone to school with me if the Holocaust hadn't happened? Did I miss a friend? What is missing from our culture? How did Christmas/Hanukah look before the Holocaust? Were there chandeliers in the windows? Were there not only Christmas songs heard through the closed windows on Christmas eve, but also different tunes? Just some thoughts and I hope I could convey what I tried to say here.
Sabrina S.
Show me God? In movie coinage: Show me the money! James Cameron and his blown-up super video game for the eternally 14-year-old in everyman: Steal a bit from all over the map -- the blue creatures with tails from the sci-fi novel "The Sparrow," the romance from poor old Pocahontas, the clunky war machinery from any Star War offspring, the title from Mother Meera or any serious spiritual tradition in India, the group rituals of arm-waving from Gurdjieff, the Goddess concept from the feminists (or was it Madonna?)... I could go on, but is it worth it? No wonder the silly cocktail is worth a lot of mullah!
Renate Stendhal
You won't be impressed for long, I promise, when you put on those glasses. The effect is no big deal; less impressive than the I-Max next door -- at least in Avatar. The effect is that one gets used to it so fast it's hardly worth losing ink over it. The weirdness of foreground distortion reminds you every now and then, oh yes, this is 3-D, isn't it? Clumsy. Like filming a puppet stage and getting hit by the flat cardboard bushes at the stage edge. Bob Wilson on the theater stage used it (sparingly!) to much better effect than Cameron did. Anyway: Very enjoyable article on Oscar contenders and acting. I wonder if you would find Polanski's new Ghostwriter more adult (in the European way) and find some acting in it, too? I did.
Renate Stendhal
I have not seen the exhibition but Renate Stendhal's story about it is very revealing and the pictures are mind-boggling and at the same time exasperating. I am not sure that this an answer to the problem of the legacy of the Nazis and that horrendous book. I don't know what the answer is. The book exists and in the spirit of "never again" it is very important that it is never forgotten, yet it is more than a ghost as we see today in the world around us. How do you smell and taste poison without drinking it? Maybe with comedy. But even Mel Brooks and others couldn't hide the awful taste. How to forget without remembering! Praise to Linda Ellia and Renate Stendhal and Scene4.
Aaron Wildau
Thank you for your comment! It's much appreciated. I fully agree with you that there is no answer but I would add that this is because there are a zillion answers to a question as large and complex as this one!
Renate Stendhal
Can't wait to see the film. Excellent review. Teenage awkwardness and the idea of not wanting to act stupid in front of one's peers, wanting to belong and yet not be seen. Brings back images of when I was a teenager and us girls danced around our handbags and were afraid to raise our arms. Even today, I'm fascinated by the way people transfer from a sitting position to the dance floor - the awkwardness of it all.
Irene Hendrick
Renate Stendhal's is a wonderful article that reads like a belated eulogy for Pina Bausch, linking 50s, 70s and today. At a time that researchers fear that present day youth -- who so readily make use of New Media -- are losing the ability to have face to face interaction and lack IRL communication skills, Stendhal suggests that the awkward gender division of the 50s is not just bound to return, but is back where it was or as a greater schism. Ironically,perhaps because of projects such as teens dancing a Bausch piece, this seems a breach easier to mend than the lack of mutual respect, seen in depiction of teens in TV shows and movies. Thank goodness for choreographers who use dance to bring young people together on and backstage and as audience in the auditorium. In Seattle, WA., DANCE This! organized by STG allows for similar positive experiences for young people, alternatives to what might be considered a modern day wasteland. Many thanks to Renate Stendhal and Scene4 for bringing this notion to the foreground! Can't wait to see the documentary.
Judith van Praag
Lovely article, thanks for sharing and the splendid print of the pictures. Thanks.
Michel Ginster
Thanks for the very interesting interpretation of Hoffman's tales and the review of an Opera house which has productions that one wants to visit.
Michel Ginster
I am very grateful for Renate Stendhal's review of those operas I did not see this summer at the Santa Fe Opera. I heard about them, especially the unusual production of Madame Butterfly but what I had not gotten much insight about was The Tales of Hoffmann. Thanks, Renate, for such a thorough review!
Karren Alenier
I enjoyed the review by Renate Stendhal, though have a different take on Black Swan. I walked away also being reminded of Cronenberg, but more of Aronofsky's other films--he has a penchant for characters inclined toward self-mutilation. Overall I was disappointed in this film. I didn't think it was silly (like your colleague), but wanted it to be better, more complex. Portman was simply too wimpy the whole time to be interesting to me--no dancer without a spine gets to be a principal--and though I know this was a function of her "dark" side containing all her power, it still made the movie and the performance less psychologically intriguing than I wanted it to be. Everything was, for me, a little too black and white. And as a feminist, the voyeuristic aspect really began to pall after a while. The whole thing seemed to be tailor-made for the male gaze (cat fights, the lesbian scene, the masturbation scene, the spectacle of one battered female body after another).
M. Dressler
As an admirer of Gertrude Stein I feel I have to come to her aid by pointing out a few misunderstandings in my estimated colleague's interesting article. There is no indication anywhere that Stein didn't finish her murder mystery. The story ends very nicely, in fact, with a little "Thank you"-bow, an ironic finishing arabesque, and the word "Finis.", True, in his afterword to the 1982 reedition of the book, John Herbert Gill states, "'Blood on the Dining-Room Floor' comes to an end, but, as Gertrude Stein herself said of it, is has no ending." What that means, however, is, no ending in the traditional sense of what is expected in a murder mystery: the mystery solved, the murderer found. None of this, of course, in Stein's detective novel. The mystery of "Blood on the Dining-Room Floor" is that of Stein's identity. Who was she, now that she was suddenly famous? "I am I because my little dog knows me." And here we come to another misunderstanding. I believe nobody and nothing ever "forced" Gertrude Stein into writing anything. She was not the kind. What she wanted at all cost was being famous, a "lion." If there were suggestions, from a publisher, for example, they were only stating the obvious: a compulsive author nearing age 60 would necessarily think of autobiographical writing. Doing it in the voice of her lover, as the pretend "Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas," is such a sly, playful move - even Stein couldn't have been that brilliant under any kind of pressure!
Renate Stendhal
Gertrude Stein would love that 65 years after her death, she can still stir people about her accomplishments. I respect what Renate Stendhal has to say about Stein's Blood on the Dining Room Floor and The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas. Lots of scholars argue over what Stein meant and did. Diana Souhami in Gertrude and Alice, her biography of the famous pair wrote this: "Gertrude tried, but failed, to write about the strange events of the summer in a book called Blood on the Dining Room Floor. 'It was very bothersome. I thought I would try but to try is to die and so I did not really try. I was not doing any writing.'" Stein based Blood on the Dining Room Floor on some events local to her summer home in Bilignin. There was a dead woman but what happened was unclear as is whether Stein left Blood on the Dining Room Floor a cliffhanger or a neatly tied up literary package.
As for The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, there is no doubt that the writing of this work caused Stein incredible stress. Some people argue (not convincingly to my way of thinking however) that Alice Toklas wrote the work.
Karren Alenier
Several people I know feel the way I do: Miles David Moore's movie reviews are the best around. I remember his review of Polanski's "Ghost Writer" as if I had read it yesterday (well, I also agreed with every word in it). As for "Biutiful", I have not seen the film but read half a dozen reviews (including the New Yorker) trying to decide if it would be worth a one-hour drive to see it. I could not tell. Nothing in these reviews stirred my imagination. Switch to Scene4 and Miles David Moore, where the psychologically thoughtful, elegant writing instantly takes me into a visual, sensual "experience" of the film and connects me. I am told what that experience was like from the "inside", filtered through a critical perspective. There is enough information on every level to keep me reading with interest -- and make up my mind.
Renate Stendhal
The problem is that Edith Stein died and Gertrude Stein hasn't. Edith Stein was a "saint" before the Poppa in Rome made her one. She was a special woman who was at the wrong place at the wrong time. Her "specialness" is what makes her amazing and perplexing life and what she did with it so important, so meaningful. She has been an influence to women everywhere even though so many of them are unaware of it.
Gertrude Stein was in the right place at the right time. She was a mean, self-indulgent keeper and user of other artists work, an accomplished self-promoter who sold her clumsy, deconstructed writing as if she were the scribe of the gods. Today generations of buyers revel in her self-made image and keep her alive. It's a paradox.
Stephanie Anschel
Renate, I love to read your analysis of the whole period. You are such a wonderful and exciting writer. Your articles give me thought and more perspective.Thank you.
Jeanne Stark
Wonderful article, both erudite and personal, and how beautiful these luminous paintings look (at long-distance) on Scene4's excellent screen. Pictures and text brought back a whole European era for me, with the memory of exhibitions in Hamburg, Munich, Paris, and early Kandinsky paintings that inspired my first serious poems as a schoolgirl. A marvelous surprise to find Lissa Tyler Renaud here.
Renate Stendhal
Renate Stendal , your review is extraordinary What a piece, so many complexities, one is left wondering... I love your style and exuberance even when I am left behind Bravo!
Jeanne Stark
Karren Alenier's article on the Washington Post's obscene review of Gertrude Stein and the exhibition Seeing Gertrude Stein: Five Stories at the National Portrait Gallery in D.C. brilliantly analyzes one particular case of openly declared "hatred" for Stein. This sort of hatred has followed Stein from the moment she began to publish, in the early twentieth century, but it is worth noting the context that gave rise to this "indecent exposure" in a serious newspaper like the Washington Post. Stein's present renaissance with two epochal traveling exhibitions has brought out people like critic Phil Kennicott who, as Alenier reminds us, assigns himself, a "seat in the corner with the Stein haters that include 'the worst sort of critics--anti-Semites, misogynists, homophobes and philistines.'" It is worth noticing that Stein's old enemies found new fodder and an academic seal of approval for their attacks in Barbara Will's book, Unlikely Collaboration: Gertrude Stein, Bernard Faÿ and the Vichy Dilemma (2011). The inflammatory book fed into the Stein controversy that was triggered by the exhibition Seeing Gertrude Stein: Five Stories at the Contemporary Jewish Museum in San Francisco, linked to the question how Stein and Toklas had managed to survive in Nazi-occupied France. Will's speculations about the "true Stein" and her alleged "collaboration" with a fascist friend and fascist regime unleashed a cultural hysteria, a sort of license to kill that took over the media and blogosphere. I have no doubt that this cultural atmosphere provided the justification for the Washington Post to publish the infamous article. Will camouflages the fact that her book is in fact about Bernard Faÿ, an intellectual friend of Steins's from the twenties, a once respected historian and author who during the war became a Gestapo informer and persecutor of the Freemasons in France. Hardly anybody today would care about Bernard Faÿ and his twisted fate as a condemned collaborator who was ultimately pardoned by French President Mitterand. Gertrude Stein is being used to create a story that pretends to be sensationalist news when the facts and allegations have already been published and rehashed numerous times, most recently by Janet Malcolm in Two Lives: Gertrude and Alice (2007).
With all due respect to Renate Stendhal, who I cherish as a person Steinian, I find the work that Barbara Will published in Unlikely Collaboration: Gertrude Stein, Bernard Faÿ, and the Vichy Dilemma refreshing for its non sensationalization of a tough Stein scenario.
I am on the record and urge you to read what I said in my recent Scene4 article An Invitation to Gertrude Stein's Tea Party.
As noted Stein scholar Catharine Stimpson said recently at a conference held partially at the National Portrait Gallery where the exhibition "Seeing Gertrude Stein" just closed, "Gertrude Stein was stupid about politics."
I consider Gertrude Stein, Renate Stendhal, and Barbara Will part of my Steinian family. I won't stop loving any of them.
Karren Alenier
Karren Alenier is a much cherished part of the Steinista tribe, indeed, and we agree quite happily to disagree. We all have a blind eye somewhere and Stein herself was the first to admit her political stupidity and inexperience: "Writers are not really interested in politics..." etc. To be on the record, this was the point of my detailed article in the Los Angles Review of Books, Was Gertrude Stein A Collaborator? (In a shorter version - Exclusive: Was Gertrude Stein A Hitler Fan?
An academic like Catharine R. Stimpson has begun to see Will's book with different eyes, as I was privileged to hear from herself. Others, like the great Stein expert Marjorie Perloff, have never been taken in. If you want a non-sensationalist account of Stein's war years, I refer you to the book by Dominique Saint Pierre, "Gertrude Stein, le Bugey, la guerre" -- an impeccable study by an historian, devoid of the inflated speculations in Barbara Will's book.
Renate Stendhal
To have two views of one of my favorite ballets is a treat. I know it's an "old chestnut" but Onegin is where ballet came from and where, in one sense, it still is. I wish I were in San Francisco but many thanks to both Catherine Honig and Renate Stendhal for taking me with them.
Judy Moritz
read Catherine Conway Honig's review
read Renate Stendhal's review.
"The effect is like going to an art gallery and discovering a Titian among the post-modern works plastered all over the walls." A well-turned phrase in another well-turned review by Ms Renate Stendhal. Always appreciated.
David Szersnic
This page contains an archive of all entries posted to Scene4 Magazine | letters to the editor in the Stendhal category. They are listed from oldest to newest.
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