Cynthia Peck

Early music musicians are often far more than mere instrumentalists. They are historians, archivists and sleuths, musicologists, music theorists and improvisers. They are conversant in lost tongues and read illegible scripts. Searching for forgotten musical treasures, they are at home in the storerooms of museums, in the choir lofts of Gothic churches, and in the manuscript vaults of libraries, with their steel doors and humidity-controlled rooms. And when a treasure is found, they find a way to play it. Such musicians are fanatical in a way others are not.

Before I had ever been to Europe, I was served a Viennese meal by a Viennese friend in California. It was Wiener Schnitzel with Austrian-style potato salad and sour white wine.

You never get tired of The Merry Widow. Whether you are a fan of the famous Viennese lilt, or just would like some high-class schmaltz, the love story of Hanna Glawari and Danilo Danilowitsch is always worth seeing.

I played chess again one hot afternoon this summer. It had been a number of years. Surprising myself, my approach had changed radically: I had become aggressive. Lost was the long-ago
defensive game I played with my brother. And lost was the careful game I had needed with my son, who already at seven could put up an excellent fight.

Two vaporetto stops from the Piazza San Marco and its maddening crowds, junk souvenirs made in China and glowing heat, we land at the Giardini and the site of the Venice Biennale.

“The good has never been perfect … always some flaw … some stammer in the divine speech.” Thus begins Billy Budd, Benjamin Britten’s operatic masterpiece and perhaps one of the most powerful dramas of 20th‑century musical stage. It is a story of human crisis, the conflict between law and morality, an inquiry into darker questions of right and wrong, of good and evil.

Based on a novel by Herman Melville, the setting is a British man-o’-war during the French Revolution, the date is 1797. The HMS Indomitable is armed for battle and in search of a French ship to attack. It is a world of men, of rigid hierarchy and autocratic hostility: The threat of mutiny hangs in the air.

How shall I sing a song of a supermarket? Shall I write an anthem to my appetite, or a hymn to the inquisitiveness of my tongue?