The Feast of St. George

I.



Today is the Feast of St. George. All you worms, serpents, and dragons, beware.

II. Moll Flanders
You can analyze almost anything in terms of power, money, and sex. Take, for instance, the orchestra concert that I'm going to play tonight--Songs of a Wayfarer and the Brahms Requiem. Both works require big-name vocal soloists, and the Requiem uses a chorus. A cynical view on the programming would be that the works were selected to draw an audience that would be composed of families from the massive chorus involved and to attract a crowd of vocal music enthusiasts who would be drawn in by the glitz of the soloists. The Requiem (written in German, not Latin) was Brahms' break with the traditional use Latin texts for a Requiem mass as part of the German nationalist movement that was gaining steam at the end of the 19th century.
Or you could analyze the program in terms of money. A better 2nd half pair for the Mahler would be the 1st Symphony, which uses much of the same material. But the instrumentation is much expanded, which adds up to a prohibitively high cost.
Or you could analyze the works in terms of sex. For Mahler, the whole song cycle was written in the wake of a failed courtship with a soprano. The titles of the tunes are "When My Sweetheart is Married," "I Went Over the Field This Morning," "I Have a Gleaming Knife," and "The Two Blue Eyes of My Beloved." About the Freudian connections between the process of grieving the dead and a compensatory urge to reproduce I'll make no mention.
None of these "angles" entirely explain why there is a concert tonight or how the music came to be, but each explanation illuminates something hidden and powerful in the process of a particular musical performance happening in a particular city.
Moll Flanders is an interesting book because it explains the life of a particularly unsavory character (Moll, based on a one-time real prisoner of Newgate) who is at various times a prostitute and a thief in terms of her financial needs. Every wicked deed, double-cross, and cheat has a price tag or pay-out that is explained in exact pounds, shillings, and pence afterwards. And then she lives for a time on what she has until she runs out and is forced into some new crime. The redeeming bit about the book is that she's quite funny and a genuinely sympathetic character. I don't know how he can keep it up for 300 pages, but so far I like it much better than Robinson Crusoe. (Really, the scene at the end of the first book when he gets attacked by wolves as he's crossing the mountains after finally getting off the island is almost as bad as the bit in Die Hard when the big Austrian guy climbs half dead out of the collapsed building and tries to fire off one final shot just as you think the movie is going to end.)