Reviewed by Helen Epstein

For a truly worthwhile evening of music drama—free admission no less—get yourselves to the Boston Center for the Arts to what seems to be the Boston premiere of Alexander Zemlinsky’s Der Zwerg.

This opera (1919–1921) draws on several rich sources: the composer’s long and unrequited love for his young and beautiful composition student Alma Schindler Mahler; “The Birthday of the Infanta,” a short story by Oscar Wilde; and a celebrated painting by Velasquez titled Las Meninas (The Maids of Honor) which features the Infanta/princess and her entourage, including two dwarfs.

The one-act (90-minute) opera, performed without a break, centers on the relationship between the vain, vapid, and beautiful Infanta and the grotesque but idealistic and credulous dwarf who has never seen his reflection and does not know what he looks like. Zemlinsky set the piece in imperial Spain, but this production updates it to an unnamed, contemporary beach resort. Performed with piano rather than an orchestra, the opera obviously loses a great deal, but in the small theater there’s the considerable gain in extraordinary intimacy. English subtitles are projected behind the stage space.

The production utilizes Boston’s pool of wonderful musical talent, mostly graduates of the local conservatories. Baritone Adrian Packel sang a convincingly pompous and strong Don Estoban; soprano Erin Pedersen a heartless and accurate Infanta; and Sarah Kornfeld a satisfying Ghita. Tenor Sean Malkus sings the demanding role of the Dwarf, the only compassionate character in this opera.

In fact, the role of Dwarf was divided between Malkus as the Dwarf as Illusion and dancer Christina Chan as the Dwarf in reality. Her choreography was fascinating to watch.

Overall, the 90 minutes flew by. Although the tiny stage space was often overwhelmed by the 14-member cast and the acting and quality of voices were sometimes uneven, OperaHub is doing exciting work on a shoestring. Check them out and send them a check!

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Helen Epstein is the author of “Music Talks,” a volume of 4000-word-and-under profiles of celebrated musical artists, including such stars as Vladimir Horowitz, Leonard Bernstein, violin teacher Dorothy DeLay, James Galway, and Yo-Yo Ma. The new edition is available online and at music outlets like the shop at Symphony Hall in Boston. Order through the link below to Amazon and The Arts Fuse receives a (small) percentage of the sale.

An hour and a half before curtain, operagoers are lining up at the AMC 10 cineplex in Burlington, Massachusetts across the road from the mall. Forty-five minutes later, the only available seats in Theater 3 are in the first two neck-craning rows. It’s 12:15 p.m., a sunny Saturday in February when most New Englanders are outside, but like several million people in over 40 countries around the world they have assembled for The Met: Live in HD.

Unlike the audience actually at the Metropolitan Opera (the Met), they’re dressed for comfort not display, in sweaters, parkas, insulated boots, and layers of fleece. Instead of crossing Lincoln Center plaza, they’ve crossed an enormous parking lot. Instead of a grand staircase and glittering chandeliers, there’s an industrially carpeted lobby lined with posters and neon signs. The smell of popcorn rather than perfume wafts through the air, and inside the dim theater there are no ushers, no plush boxes or loge of the kind that Flaubert and Wharton described and that the Impressionists painted—not even reserved seats.

It’s too dimly lit to see much of anything and some of the early birds have brought small flashlights with which to read their newspapers or clipped tiny bed lamps to their books. Others are eating a smuggled-in lunch—whole-grain bread, fresh fruit, nuts and cheese—out of Tupperware. Some are examining the program—no thick, glossy brochure but a poorly-designed handout printed on two sides that lists the conductor’s name, approximate time and duration of the performance, main characters and performers, and a synopsis of the opera.

More upscale locales, such as the Mahaiwe Theater in Great Barrington, MA, hire a lecturer to introduce the opera, which extends the time frame of a typical performance from three and a half to four and a half hours.

The Metropolitian Opera in New York: It is easier and cheaper to see the productions in your local mall.

It’s light enough to see that, at 62, I’m on the younger side of this very straight, suburban crowd. They appreciate the schedule: live Saturday telecasts at 1 p.m.; Encores at 6 p.m. on Wednesdays, though driving on the edge of rush hour can sometimes be a problem. They like the intimacy of the space (250 seats instead of the Met’s 3,800) and the ticket price ($20, as compared to the $30-$300 plus hotel room, meals, and parking they’d have to spend if they drove to New York). Yet the price alone doesn’t explain the enormous popularity of The Met: Live in HD.

Last week’s “Simon Boccanegra” was packed, people were saying, because the sympathetic and internationally famous 69-year-old tenor Placido Domingo was making his debut as a baritone, and local idol, the Boston Symphony Orchestra’s artistic director James Levine, was conducting. The week before, “Carmen” was packed because, well, it’s one of the most accessible operas in the canon and had the young, beautiful, vocally perfect, Latvian mezzo Elina Garanca to sing the title role.

Next month’s “Hamlet” (by the little known, French composer Ambroise Thomas) is already sold out, they say, because everybody knows the story and Ophelia will be Nathalie Dessay, who’s as gifted an actress as a singer. But the bottom line is that Met: Live in HD is a huge hit at movie houses all over the United States and is transforming the art form as it succeeds.

“This is NOT opera,” say the purists, echoing Walter Benjamin’s famous 1936 essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” and in one sense they are right. No amount of Dolby Surround Sound can replicate the experience of hearing an orchestra and singers live. Nothing can replicate viewing the operatic spectacle in its entirety—audience, orchestra, curtain, stage, performers—as well as the architecture of the house, its location in the city, and its place within cultural tradition and the social hierarchy.”

“Mechanical reproduction separates art from its basis in cult,” wrote Benjamin. “Even the most perfect reproduction of a work of art is lacking in one element: its presence in time and space, its unique existence at the place where it happens to be.”

My musician friend Susan Miron used to drive from Newton to Framingham to see The Met: Live in HD but stopped because she missed what Benjamin called the “aura” of the authentic.

Placido Domingo as Simon Boccanegra

“I’m a huge opera snob,” she says. “I love driving down to New York, the anticipation, getting dressed, standing in line, the smells of perfume. You look at what other people are wearing. The fabrics, the gowns. There’s a sense of occasion. That evening may turn out to be one of the highlights of your life, something you’ll remember until you die. It’s like going to a palace. You drink from the Ezio Pinza fountain. You get to have your own subtitles on your own little screen. There are people from all over the world: India, Oklahoma, the old ladies, the gay guys in velvet. Even the seats are beautiful. It’s a rite; a grand experience. I can’t stand the smell of popcorn at the movies. I feel like I’m slumming.”

Not me. I’ve become a fan of the Met at the mall. Like some of my Lexington neighbors, I’m an unreconstructed New Yorker who went to the Met and listened to its Saturday afternoon radio broadcasts as I grew up. Although I liked using my mother’s opera glasses, I never found looking through them a pleasurable way of following the action —miles away, it seemed—onstage.

When subtitles were introduced, I was glad to have a translation but uncomfortable shifting my gaze between text and the stage. The Met’s hi-tech telecasts put text and image onscreen in a way that’s easy on the eye; in their integration of literature, music, dance, and the visual arts, they provide a more cohesive form of gesamtkunstwerk (the total work of art) than what Wagner imagined and a different but in some ways superior experience of opera than I’ve experienced (even up close) in person.

The Met has been broadcasting for 77 years over the radio. Cinematographers have been filming operas for about as long, both in Europe and in the United States. Joseph Losey’s “Don Giovanni” (1979, shot in the palaces and on the canals of Venice) and Zefferelli’s lavish “La Traviata” (1983) are two of my favorites. The practice of broadcasting operas and plays live began with the birth of television and PBS has accustomed us to telecasts from around the world. Digital technology, bolstered by the money and power of the Met, dwarfs them all in creating what is, in effect, a new form that draws on the techniques of narrative film, documentary, and TV journalism.

Some of Benjamin’s arguments have become obsolete. No longer is it impossible “to assign to a spectator a viewpoint which would exclude from the actual scene such extraneous accessories as camera equipment, lighting machinery, staff assistants, etc.—unless his eye were on a line parallel with the lens . . . (rendering) superficial and insignificant any possible similarity between a scene in the studio and one on the stage.”

The Met: Live in HD utilizes 10 cameras, many cameramen behind many different lenses, and the visual gains for the operagoer are huge. Not only are we drawn intimately into the action onstage, but we can see what the Met audience cannot: we see the conductor as the singers and musicians see him; we see individual musicians and their instruments when their solos occur; the action onstage seems to be happening at a distance of a few feet, and we can follow the protagonists into the wings and backstage.

This is most obvious as the cameras zoom in for close-ups. “Fifty years ago,” Benjamin wrote in 1936, “a slip of the tongue passed more or less unnoticed. Only exceptionally may such a slip have revealed dimensions of depth in a conversation which had seemed to be taking its course on the surface. Since the Psychopathology of Everyday Life things have changed. This book isolated and made analyzable things which had heretofore floated along unnoticed in the broad stream of perception.” Similarly, he argues, photographic processes make available aspects of the original “that are unattainable to the naked eye yet accessible to the lens.”

Operagoers who have used opera glasses for years tend to focus on the facial expressions of performers and their small gestures that get lost beyond the first few rows of the orchestra. But The Met: Live in HD broadcasts reveal so much more than that: we can appreciate the intricate patterns of costumes as though we were standing before an oil portrait in a museum; we can see the details of significant operatic props such as daggers and vials of poison as though we were in a small room; we can almost feel the dankness of a dungeon wall or the freshness of a leafy garden.

“The camera that presents the performance,” Benjamin wrote, “need not respect the performance as an integral whole.” True, but here the cameras enhance a form that’s often visually boring and, at other times, hopelessly muddled. Even the convoluted story of Simon Boccanegra made sense in the movie. “He knows where the bodies are buried,” I overheard someone whispering in the dark, “Get it?”

The telecasts reward the photogenic performers who can act and sing, such as Latvian mezzo-soprano Elina Garanca

The new telecasts privilege the visual and will affect opera performance accordingly. They are unkind to old-fashioned directors, set designers, and performers. Stock stances, gestures, and choreography look obsolete. Singers who are too old for their roles or too fat or short or unattractive are out of luck. The camera is unforgiving of wobbly double chins and flabby bellies.

The Hollywood ceiling on age for star women performers looms ahead —maybe for men too. Younger, more versatile singers who can act as well as dance like Elina Garanca and Nathalie Dessay stand to benefit the most in this new operatic world. So do singers and directors who are witty and whose accents don’t preclude making themselves understood when interviewed between the acts.

Renee Fleming does well as an articulate, elegant, and photogenic interview as well as interviewer; Placido Domingo is always nice to look at but at times barely intelligible. It’s unfair to singers with great voices who don’t meet the new standards, but it seems to be the future.

“In New York, there’s electricity,” said the woman sitting next to me, “but here I’m more involved. I know it’s not the real thing, but it’s a more intimate alternative.”

Will these telecasts create a new, younger audience that doesn’t already love opera? The Met: Live in HD has a program for distribution to schools, but the jury’s still out on that and a host of other questions. Does a Met broadcast affect a live, local production of the same opera? Will the opera movies spur attendance for local opera companies? Have the Met’s own appeals for donations during the broadcasts had results? Will the current movie audiences grow?

Next month, it’s Ambroise Thomas’ “Hamlet” at the mall. You probably haven’t seen or heard it. I’m planning to go.

The new edition of Helen Epstein’s Music Talks is available online and at music outlets like the shop at Symphony Hall in Boston. She is also the author of Joe Papp. Order these books through the link below to Amazon and The Arts Fuse receives a (small) percentage of the sale.

By Helen Epstein

Josh Aaron McCabe and Elizabeth Aspenlieder of Shakespeare and Company

Les Liaisons Dangereuses by Christopher Hampton. Adapted from the novel by Pierre Choderlos de Laclos. Directed by Tina Packer.
Presented by Shakespeare & Company at the Elayne P. Bernstein Theatre, Lenox, MA, through March 21.

Tina Packer has directed the Hampton play based on the epistolary novel of France’s ancien régime by Pierre Choderlos de Laclos, said to have been a favorite of Marie Antoinette. Sexual seductions, abuses of power by court and church, obfuscations of truth, paper trails, corsets, fans, and hankies are all part of this costume drama that has been adapted for film and opera as well as for the stage. Shakespeare & Company’s versatile and much-loved Elizabeth Aspenlieder stars as La Marquise de Merteuil opposite Josh Aaron McCabe as Le Vicomte de Valmont.

Helen Epstein is the author of the memoirs Children of the Holocaust and Where She Came From.

Nothing Was the Same by Kay Redfield Jamison, Knopf, 208 pp., $25

by Helen Epstein

In 1995, a psychology professor named Kay Redfield Jamison took the unusual step of publishing an article in her local paper, the “Washington Post,” about her battle with manic depression; later that year, her extraordinary and extraordinarily-well-written memoir An Unquiet Mind, became a best-seller.

Before 1995, Jamison was known primarily as a researcher, the co-author with Frederick K. Goodwin, MD of the textbook Manic-Depressive Illness, published in 1990 and author of a second text on creativity and manic depression titled Touched with Fire. Unlike most authors of memoir, Jamison was putting her professional life at risk by publishing her book. As a clinical psychologist and professor of psychology, her decision to go public as a woman suffering from “manic-depression” (she has said that the term “bipolar” minimizes and distorts the illness) was antithetical to many of her colleagues. How could she continue to work as a clinician if patients knew she took lithium? How could she effectively teach students if they knew about the tumult of her mental life?

Jamison returns to this cost-benefit analysis in her new book Nothing Was the Same, but this time through the prism of her marriage to Richard Wyatt, the scientist and specialist in schizophrenia with whom she lived for nearly 20 years.

“It is in our nature to want to hold on to love,” she writes simply. Like Lynn Caine (Widow) Joan Didion (The Year of Magical Thinking), Anne Roiphe (Epilogue), and Madeleine L’Engle (Two-Part Invention), who have written memoirs of their marriages after a beloved spouse has died, Redfield is only partially successful in transforming a ritual of mourning into literary art. While Jamison often writes with the lyricism and precision of a poet, Nothing Was the Same is nowhere near as affecting nor as revelatory as An Unquiet Mind, a classic of memoir that I have bought for dozens of friends and recommended to many students. That book is a meditation that succeeded in conveying both the rawness of lived experience and the wisdom of long reflection.

Though the writing in Nothing Was the Same is often beautiful and moving, it failed to fully engage me. Memorializing one’s marriage is a dicey assignment. How many times can one write, as Jamison does, “We had fun” or “I want him back,” before the reader puts the book down.

Jamison is such an intelligent and honest writer, and one whose voice I enjoy so much that I read until the end. There are many wonderfully dry passages such as this one describing herself, before An Unquiet Mind, as an unlikely memoirist who “like most people, had been brought up to be private about personal matters….Being an Episcopalian didn’t help. The Frozen Chosen had thawed over the years but still veered toward immoderate discretion…I did not confess, concede or admit. It wasn’t done.”

While Jamson was able to transcend her reticence about personal matters in her memoir of mental illness, she does not in Nothing Was the Same. In a foreword that promises far more than she is able to deliver, Jamison writes: “He was my husband, colleague, and friend: when he became ill and we knew he would die, he became my mentor in how to die with the grace by which he had lived. What he could not teach me — no one could — was how to contend with the grief of losing him.” We never get a real picture of what Dr. Wyatt was like as a man, a doctor or a husband, nor how she and he first got together and developed as a couple. Although the memoir is billed as a meditation on mortality, grief and loss, I finished it wondering what I had learned. Perhaps this memoir was written too soon and needed another couple of years to steep.

I look forward to reading Jamison’s next book.
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Helen Epstein is the author of the memoirs Children of the Holocaust and Where She Came From. Order through the link below to Amazon and theartsfuse receives a (small) percentage of the sale.

In Search of Beethoven, a documentary by Phil Grabsky (UK, 2009, 139 min).

At the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA, Wednesday Jan. 13 at 3:05 pm, Thursday January 14 at 5:10 pm., and Friday January 15 at 3:15 pm. Contact the MFA Film Box Office at 617-369-3306 or go here.

Ludwig Van Beethoven: He wrote music with eternity in mind.

By Helen Epstein

“If you were to pick 10 best things about humanity,” runs the voiceover at the opening of Phil Grabsky’s new documentary, “the music of Beethoven would be among them.”

Be that as it may, Ludwig van Beethoven didn’t seem to me the most promising subject for a new film on the frigid Saturday morning I drove to the MFA. But the English documentary filmmaker enjoys extensive word-of-mouth, based in part on his successful 2006 doc “In Search of Mozart,” and several nonmusical docs and, at 10:30, the auditorium was filled.

Grabsky serves as writer, producer, director and cinematographer of this excellent and exhaustive documentary. His method is straightforward. He begins with Beethoven’s birth in Bonn in 1770, avoids flashbacks and digressions, and ends 56 years later with the composer’s death near Vienna in 1827.

In following Beethoven’s solitary, sometimes glorious, increasingly bitter career, Grabsky blends meticulous research, an eye for interesting locations, an interest in close-ups of Beethoven’s manuscripts (including the original of the Eroica Symphony where Beethoven scratched out his original dedication to Napoleon so fiercely that he tore holes in the pages), judicious excerpts from his letters, long considerations of portraits, drawings, and etchings intercut with performances by singers, soloists, chamber groups and orchestras, and — best of all — interviews with an international series of musicians and Beethoven experts — with nary a music critic among them.

Filmmaker Phil Grabsky: One hell of an interviewer

As a former music journalist, I can only imagine the thousands of hours Grabsky spent filming the 100 interviews and 55 performances from which the documentary was culled and then piecing the segments together. Which of his many wry, intelligent and articulate interviewees to feature? Should he focus on their hands, faces, or words? Which part of the interview? Which piece of music? Which movement or phrase in it? Grabsky must be one hell of an interviewer. Every one of his interviewees seems to the point, delighted to be part of the project, relaxed, candid, humorous, and seemingly oblivious to the camera.

Out of this embarrassment of riches, Grabsky culls glimpses of various conductors including Roger Norrington, a string of pianists including Emanuel Ax, Helene Grimaud, and Jonathan Biss, string players, singers, musicologists, and social historians, each with an interesting take on performing Beethoven, on the difficulties and delights of Beethoven as a virtuoso pianist, ever-more revolutionary composer, self-indulgent sensualist, unrequited lover, troublesome tenant, imperious businessman, and demanding employer, living out his life against the background of the French Revolution and Napoleonic Wars.

Grabsky focuses on several aspects of the composer: his lifelong fiery, hedonistic personality; his virtuosity as a pianist following in the steps of Haydn and Mozart (several of the pianists ruefully note the difficulties in performing some of his passages); his negotiating the transition in patronage that occurred in the late 18th century when church and court were joined by wider audiences for music; his long, anguished struggle with deafness and simultaneous belief in the greatness of his work.

“Mozart was writing for Saturday,” Roger Norrington says in one of his succinct remarks, “Beethoven was writing for eternity.”

In one of the most dramatic parts of the film, Grabsky dramatizes the effect of Beethoven’s increasing inability to hear. During a well-attended four-hour winter concert of 1808, Beethoven performed in public for the last time, playing his Piano Concerto No. 4, which was “tailor-made for his own abilities.” That performance marked the end of his career as a soloist. Afterward, he became increasingly erratic in behavior, neglecting his personal hygiene, quarreling with family and friends, writing to friends “My servant has been quite different since I threw those books at her head” and “I am not at all well.”

The many experts from many countries interviewed share in gratifying detail their insights about and reactions to Beethoven. “He doesn’t care if an aria can be sung or not!” grumbles a hefty German bass. while a series of pianists take up the theme of Beethoven’s interest in the repetition of a single note and his ability to build musical dramatic tension in a way no previous composer had.

“In Search of Beethoven” might have benefited from being cut to two hours but, like his subject, Grabsky prefers even more to more. This documentary of “a man of huge intellect and huge heart” is big and filled with great insights, musical and other. Catch it while you can.

Here’s an interview with Phil Grabsky about his documentary.

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Helen Epstein is the author of “Music Talks,” a volume of 4000-word-and-under profiles of celebrated musical artists, including such stars as Vladimir Horowitz, Leonard Bernstein, violin teacher Dorothy DeLay, James Galway, and Yo-Yo Ma. The new edition is available online and at music outlets like the shop at Symphony Hall in Boston. Order through the link below to Amazon and theartsfuse receives a (small) percentage of the sale.

Director Pedro Almodovar and Penelope Cruz: Their new film probes the varieties of love.

By Helen Epstein

“Broken Embraces” at Kendall Square and Embassy Cinemas

1: Pedro Almodovar, one of the most interesting directorial sensibilities of our time, whose films probe our infinite varieties of experience in love and work

2: Penelope Cruz, an original who also incarnates the best of the many movie stars — American and European — who came before her

3: A meditation on forgiveness that draws, like Almodovar’s colors, on a full and many shaded palette of emotions

4: A multilayered and complicated story, involving a variety of characters whose class, age, and gender cover a wide spectrum of society

5: A Truffaut-evoking meditation on filmmaking, jealousy and revenge

6: A repertory company of skilled actors

7: Wonderful roles for women (as usual, not one or two but several great parts)

8: A fabulously seductive soundtrack

9: A striking tenderness in portraying difficult interpersonal transactions

10: A script so smart and a pace so swift that (unlike in a Bergman film, say) there is no time to read the subtitles and take in the visuals at once

11: A film you want to go back and see a second, perhaps third, time and still not be sure you grasped 90% of what you saw.

Helen Epstein’s essay on “Narrative in Memoir and Psychoanalysis” appears in this winter’s issue of “Psychoanalytical Perspectives” and in the newly published “Ecrire la Vie.

For those interested interested in the work and lives of classical musicians, or if you teach feature writing, magazine writing, cultural reporting or non-fiction narrative, the profiles in “Music Talks” make a perfect holiday gift or useful addition to the classroom.

It is a volume of 4000 word-and-under profiles of celebrated artists by resident Culture Vulture Helen Epstein. The line-up includes such stars as Vladimir Horowitz, Leonard Bernstein, violin teacher Dorothy DeLay, James Galway, and Yo-Yo Ma. Many of these interviews appeared in the “Sunday New York Times” or other national publications.

Jonathan Baldo of the Eastman Music School has been using these pieces for 20 years and persuaded Helen to get the book back in print. Luckily the Authors Guild Back-in-Print program made that possible. David Hajdu at Columbia and Megan Marshall at Emerson are among the professors who find them helpful to students.

The new edition is available online and at music outlets like the shop at Symphony Hall in Boston. Order through the link below to Amazon and theartsfuse receives a (small) percentage of the sale.

THE RED BOOK by C.G. Jung. Edited by Sonu Shamdasani. English translation by Shamdasani, Mark Kyburz, and John Peck. W.W. Norton & Co. 404 pages, $195.

By Helen Epstein

C. G. Jung's image of Philemon, his spiritual guide

In its Red leather cover, its language and its ornate calligraphy, “The Red Book” reads as a revelation of a new (religious) psychology, which – for Jungians – it is. The underlying narrative is, like many myths and memoirs, the spiritual quest of a man who loses his soul and undertakes a journey to find it.

Jung repeatedly rejected the idea that the “Red Book” was an artistic product – either literary or visual. He insisted that his journey through his unconscious was that of a psychologist, and that working through his visions and the meaning of the symbols in them would result in a new understanding of psychotherapy.

The psychiatry of his time, he believes, was incapable of distinguishing between deeply spiritual experiences and psychopathology. He, on the other hand, believed it imperative to utilize the terrors and beauties of his self-induced spiritual visions and integrate them into consciousness. His “journey” into self, his “journaling” of it, and his belief that the individual had the means to cure him or herself from within thus became the model not only for a psychotherapy of self-realization (Jung called it “individuation”) but for much of the New Age literature in our bookstores.

The “Liber Primus,” or first part of the “Red Book”, consists of a Prologue and eleven chapters with titles such as Refinding the Soul, Experiences in the Desert, Instruction, Resolution. They are written in tiny, cramped calligraphy, two or three columns to a page, with some small but no large illustrations. The first initial is an illuminated D for Der Weg (The Way) embellished with a pot of fire and a crowned black serpent, surrounded by the scene of a lake, a lakeside town with church, and the background of mountains against an azure blue sky.

In this first book he restricts his illustrations to historiated initials like that first D, which is followed by Latin calligraphy that invokes Isaiah (Who hath believed our report? And to whom is the arm of the Lord revealed?) and the Gospel of John (And the word was made flesh, and dwelt among us…) then Isaiah again. When Jung begins in his own voice, he writes:

“If I speak in the spirit of the this time, I must say no one and nothing can justify what I must proclaim to you….I have learned that in addition to the spirit of this time there is still another spirit at work, namely that which rules the depths of everything contemporary. …The spirit of the depths has subjugated all pride and arrogance to the power of judgment. He took away my belief in science, he robbed me of the joy of explaining and ordering things, and he let devotion to the ideals of this time die out in me. He forced me down to the last and simplest things.”

The First Book includes this encounter and dialogue:

“I: Who are you?
“E: I am Elijah and this is my daughter Salome.”
“I: The daughter of Herod, the bloodthirsty woman?”
“E: Why do you judge so? You see that she is blind. She is my daughter, the daughter of the prophet.
“I: What miracle has united you?
“E: It s no miracle. It was so from the beginning. My wisdom and my daughter are one.
“I am shocked. I am incapable of grasping it.”

The figure of Elijah eventually morphs into another old man whom Jung called Philemon and adopted as his spiritual guide. In Roman mythology, the (pagan) Philemon and his wife Baucis, offered hospitality to the gods Jupiter and Mercury when they went from house to house in disguise and no one else would take them in. Jung painted him into the “Red Book” where Philemon represents superior insight. The psychiatrist regarded him as his guru and he reportedly conducted conversations with Philemon as he walked through his garden.

While all this was going on in his mind, Jung was maintaining a growing private practice that was attracting both local and international patients (including some, spectacularly wealthy, Americans), maintaining a presence at Zurich’s Psychoanalytical Association, performing his annual obligatory military service, maintaining a lecture schedule that involved a great deal of travel, having meals with his wife and children every day in the dining room, analyzing his waking fantasies with his lover in his study, and lecturing on behalf of the international psychoanalytic movement.

He finally resigned his presidency of the IPA in 1914 and was ostracized by the Freudians as an apostate.

In addition to keeping track of his own dreams and waking fantasies, Jung began to urge his patients to produce their own, to paint them out, and then use their time in session to examine and integrate them.

One American patient, Christiana Morgan, wrote down his instructions into her own journal of 1926 and later presented him with her own “Redbooks” (that, according to her biographer, Jung used to suit his own theories).

Image from the Red Book

After producing what he called “active imaginations” in session, without hypnosis, Jung advised her to “put it all down as beautifully as you can – in some beautifully bound book. It will seem as if you were making the visions banal – but then you need to do that – then you are freed of the power of them. …when these things are in some precious book, you can go to the book & turn over the pages & for you it will be your church – your cathedral – the silent places of your spirit where you will find renewal. If anyone tells you that it is morbid or neurotic and you will listen to them — then you will lose your soul – for in that book is your soul.”

The “Liber Secundus” is more varied in style. The tight tiny columns of text give way to large and sometimes huge calligraphy and full and half-page images. It has 21 chapters and begins with another big historiated D for Die Bilder (The Images of the Erring), this one enclosing an eye with a red pupil against a geometric pattern of colors.

The Second Book begins with a text from Jeremiah in Latin “Hearken not unto the words of the prophets that prophesy unto you: they make you vain: they speak a vision of their own heart, and not out of the mouth of the Lord.” And a second, “What is the chaff to the wheat? saith the Lord.”

The images, like the text of the “Liber Secundus,” cover a wide range of styles and moods. They include miniatures, sketches, watery evocations of dreams that bring to mind the work of William Blake, full-page tempera landscapes with symbols and figures rendered in great detail; decorative patterns in deep reds and blues that evoke Oriental art; others that resemble the pale Ravenna mosaics that impressed him; as well as work that is indistinguishable from psychedelic art.

The “Liber Secundus” is followed by “Scrutinies,” a reconsideration and revision of the material that precedes it, and a series of mandalas that he originally sketched into notebooks during his annual reserve duty in the Swiss military and then reworked for the “Red Book.”

In addition to echoing the style of many of the texts he took in over the years – the Old Testament, The New Testament, the various non-Western holy books, and the major writers of the European intellectual tradition, Jung can also sound very much like his contemporaries Herman Hesse and, poet/philosopher Khallil Gibran: “The knowledge of the heart is in no book…but grows out of you like the green seed from the dark earth. ”

But some of the “Red Book” has a distinctly contemporary quality, and brought to mind Bob Dylan: “The images of Eve, the tree, and the serpent appear. After this I catch sight of Odysseus and his journey on the high seas. Suddenly a door opens on the right and the old man says to me “Do you know where you are?”

As I dipped in and out of reading Jung’s text and staring at his intriguing, often beautiful, sometimes compelling images, I found myself needing more context. I consulted books by and about Jung – everything from his problematic “Memories, Dreams, Reflections,” an uncertain mix of memoir, biography and edited interviews that the publishers Helen and Kurt Wolff tried for years to get him to complete; the biographies by Blair and Hayman, Claire Douglas’ “Translate This Darkness : The Life of Christiana Morgan”; Laurens van der Post’s admiring memoir; and even the satirical and reductive “Jung for Beginners,” which includes a very helpful glossary of Jungian terminology.

I also went to see the exhibit, featuring the original, leather-bound “Red Book,” at the Rubin Museum of Art in New York City.

The RMA, specializing in the art of the several cultures traversed by the Himalayas, is a spectacularly well-endowed, five-year-old museum, housed in the retrofitted former Barney’s clothing store off Seventh Avenue and 17th St in Chelsea. “The Red Book of C.G. Jung: Creation of a New Cosmology”, is one of three overlapping exhibits called The Cosmology Series, investigating how different cultures have visually represented the universe, from the solar system to the self.

The small, compact and rewarding exhibit runs until February 15, 2010, and begins with two small landscapes of the Swiss countryside that Jung – an amateur painter – had made, along with other oils on cardboard. The original “Red Book” is displayed in a glass case. Other cases allow you to walk through his creative process. They show some of the original black notebooks into which he jotted his dreams and waking visions, the sketches that were source material for the “Liber Novus,” and pages from the typescript that Jung showed to colleagues and revised before writing his final version in calligraphic form.

To complement the exhibit, the RMA has programmed a series of Redbook Dialogues –- conversations between analysts and assorted other people –some quite famous, some relatively obscure. Each begins with a reading from the “Red Book” and a projection of one or more of Jung’s images onto a large screen. The dialogue then takes off to wherever the two people onstage wish to go in the spirit of Jung’s work.

The very interesting dialogue I attended paired Sas Carey, a holistic nurse, Quaker and spiritual guide from Vermont, with Dr. Eric Hollander, a New York psychiatrist and expert on autism. Gray-haired, diminutive Carey has been traveling to Mongolia, partly by plane, partly on horseback, for 15 years to research the practices of local shamans. Eric Hollander, whose tall confident bearing recalls C.G. Jung’s, is former Chair of Psychiatry at the Mount Sinai Medical Center.

The psychiatrist spoke in scientific language, e.g. “core symptoms, social deficits, and repetitive behaviors.” The healer conveyed the persona (to use one of the many Jungian terms that have become part of our daily language) of a practitioner of alternative medicine: “My hands are guided by a knowing force.”

The pairing of these two strikingly different medical professionals, got me free associating back to the binary principle that runs through Jung’s life and work: male and female; good and evil; his personalities #1 and #2; the “spirit of the times” vs. “the spirit of the depths,” anima and animus, the shadow and the light – an approach that seemed out-of-date and of limited value to a dialogue co-sponsored by the National Autism Association and attended by an audience comprised largely of families of autistic children and the professionals who work with them.

Image from the Red Book

After a brief consideration of Jung’s images, Carey talked about going to Mongolia, where she worked with the shaman brought to western attention in the memoir and film “The Horse Boy,” a little boy with autism whose parents take him to Mongolia in search of a cure.

During the Q and A, audience members made clear their frustration with the limits of western science and its alternatives. The two experts onstage did their best to respond to and open up these issues, in what seemed to embody the best of Jung’s multi-cultural, multi-disciplinary legacy but it was clear that, one hundred years after Jung’s time at Burghölzli, there are still far more questions than answers in the treatment of mental illness.

Watching these two sympathetic healers address autism brought to mind Jung’s multitudinous interests: parapsychology as well as psychiatry, the European as well as many non-western traditions of arts, medicine, and culture, the Christianity that imbued his spiritual life and his crucial role in introducing such non-western spiritual classics as the “Tibetan Book of the Dead” and the “I Ching” to the West, his interest in the esoteric theories of alchemy, and his use of psychotherapy both to cure the mentally ill and as a means of connecting the individual unconscious to the world.

“The Red Book” and the RMA’s Red Book exhibit and programming (including interviews and Jung-influenced films) which continues through February 15, 2010 means many different things to different people. Whether you’re a Jungian or a Freudian, think Jung was a genius or charlatan, or even if you’re someone who’s never given much thought to psychotherapy, it’s worth a visit.

Helen Epstein’s essay on “Narrative in Memoir and Psychoanalysis” appears in this winter’s issue of “Psychoanalytical Perspectives” and in the newly published “Ecrire la Vie.”

THE RED BOOK by C.G. Jung. Edited by Sonu Shamdasani. English translation by Shamdasani, Mark Kyburz, and John Peck. W.W. Norton & Co. 404 pages, $195.

By Helen Epstein

The Light at the Core of the Darkness in C.G. Jung's Red Book

In 1900, at 25, Jung was an assistant staff physician and psychiatric trainee of Dr. Eugen Bleuler, working with severely disturbed patients at the Burghölzli, the world-famous insane asylum and university clinic of Zurich. His medical dissertation “On the Psychology and Pathology of so-called Occult Phenomena,“ inspired by the research of French-Swiss psychologist Theodore Flournoy, was accepted a year later.

The volume’s editor, Sonu Shamdasani, does not give us a sense of what Jung was like at the time but his biographers, Ronald Hayman and Deirdre Bair both portray him as a tall, blond, loud, self-confident figure, who aroused strong competitive feelings among his peers, partly because of his blunt and out-sized personality, partly because he was a favorite of Burghölzli’s director Eugen Bleuler.

Bleuler took a special interest in Jung’s research in word association, long, rigorously controlled experiments demonstrating the role of the unconscious that some regard as his most important contribution to psychoanalysis.

Pierre Janet, one of Jung's intellectual mentors.

Bleuler and Flournoy both initially served as Jung’s intellectual mentors yet, in 1902, Jung chose to study with a third, Pierre Janet, in Paris. In addition to attending Janet’s lectures and working in his laboratory, Jung explored the city, especially its vast collections of Near Eastern and European art, sometimes copying what he saw in oils and watercolors. He also spent two months in London, where he perfected his English and first saw Aztec and Inca art.

When he returned to Zurich in 1903, he married Emma Rauschenbach and took a higher-ranking position at the Burghölzli. His wife belonged to one of the richest families in Switzerland. Her money would later enable Jung to build a large house on Lake Zurich, leave Burghölzli (where he disliked his administrative duties) and establish a private practice.

He was a very successful young psychiatrist — distinguished lecturer in psychiatry at the University of Zurich, busy consultant and senior staff physician at the Burghölzli — when Jung, early in 1906, initiated a correspondence with Sigmund Freud. Freud was about to turn 50 and although internationally famous, unacknowledged in academic circles; Jung was 19 years younger, a rising star at the University of Zurich.

He sent Freud a copy of his book “Diagnostic Association Studies,” research that confirmed Freud’s theories about the mechanisms of repression and included a chapter that drew extensively on one of Freud’s published cases. A year later, Jung traveled to Vienna with his wife and a young protégé of his own who recorded that Freud named Jung his “scientific son and heir.”

After Jung arrived at Freud’s home for lunch on March 3, 1907, the two went into Freud’s consulting room and talked until one o’clock in the morning. During that first long meeting Freud became convinced that Jung was his great white hope for psychoanalysis. While Freud was Austrian, Jewish, and worked outside the academy, Jung was Swiss, Christian, and on the medical faculty at the University of Zurich.

He had just completed a new book on schizophrenia, “The Psychology of Dementia Praecox,” that would attract even more world attention to the already prestigious Burghölzli. Jung was in Freud’s assessment the psychiatrist who could bring the Swiss into the Freudian fold and transform the largely Viennese-Jewish society into an international movement.

C.G. Jung

Apart from organizing his colleagues back in Zurich, Freud also wanted Jung to organize and edit an international journal dedicated to psychoanalysis. Jung biographer Dierdre Bair notes that Jung fell into intense and instant intimacy with Freud. In a letter to him six months later, Jung compared his “veneration” of the older man to a “religious crush,” and, in a peculiar foreshadowing of the future of their relationship, revealed that he had once been sexually victimized by a man he had “worshiped” and since then had difficulty with any man who tried to become a close friend.

Jung returned to Switzerland committed to Freud and stayed committed for six years. But he had many other things on his mind during those years. At the time, he was, after Eugen Bleuler, second in command at Burghölzli, charged with what he found onerous administrative tasks, and the more interesting but very time-consuming supervision of new physicians at the hospital and new medical students at the university.

He had his own patients. He lectured extensively. He welcomed international visitors. He testified in court cases. He had purchased a piece of land and was supervising the building of a large house. His wife was pregnant with their third child and insisted he spend “family time” with them.

Jung’s response to the pressure was to succumb to flu for much of the year. He was frustrated to have no time for his own research and irritated by the politics at Burghölzli, where other doctors felt he was not doing his job. Despite all of that, he organized a Swiss society for Freudian Researches and investigated the means of publishing The Jahrbuch, a psychoanalytic journal that Freud desired.

Shamdasani in his introduction to the “Red Book” downplays the role Freud played in Jung’s life and spiritual crisis. Jung’s relationship with Freud has been “much mythologized,” he argues, and a “Freudocentric legend” established that has led to “the complete mislocation” of Jung’s work “in the intellectual history of the twentieth century.” To fill in the blanks, I turned back to Deirdre Bair’s biography.

In her account, Freud pursued the younger man by mail, urging him to convert his boss, Dr. Bleuler, as well as the rest of Swiss psychologists to his cause. Jung was an erratic correspondent, too preoccupied by his many duties and interests to write back right away.

In September 1908, Freud made a visit to assess Jung’s progress. The two men again talked non-stop for four days in another operatic episode of intense intimacy after distance. Freud observed some of Jung’s patients at the Burghölzli (but did not even stop in to say hello to its director). The two men were totally absorbed in one another, thrashing out editorial details of the upcoming “Jahrbuch” and discussing the psychoanalytic movement.

After Freud left, Jung had an unpleasant surprise. Bleuler fired him. Since Zurich was a small place, both men were interested in saving face and since Jung and his family were still living on the asylum grounds as was the custom in Zurich, and his new house on Lake Zurich was still in the process of being built, Jung negotiated a deal that allowed him to formally resign the following spring.

As Shamdasani spins it, “In 1909, Jung resigned from the Burghölzli to devote himself to his growing practice and his research interests …that shifted to mythology, folklore and religion…these researches culminated in ‘Transformations and Symbols of the Libido.’” In its pages, Jung would publicly part ways with Freud by denying the primacy of sex in Freud’s theory of libido, and taking issue not only with his interpretation of dreams and the importance of religion, but with Freud’s views on the centrality of infantile sexuality.

Bair writes that Jung was so terrified by the probable consequences of writing the second part of his book that he began to practice yoga to gain the courage necessary even to approach it. In a letter to Freud in 1912, he described “grisly fights with the hydra of mythological fantasy” but did not go into specifics. “Years later he tried to describe what happened,” Bair writes, “but even with distance and time he could not express it in a logical and coherent manner.”

Samdasani’s introduction suffers from some of the same incoherence, possibly because he so wants to avoid a “Freudocentric” approach, possibly because it’s difficult to write coherently about so multifarious a life and seemingly incoherent a body of work. He skips over the deepening of Freud and Jung’s intense and fascinating relationship, omitting not only their increasingly lop-sided correspondence but their intense month-long voyage in each other’s company to the U.S.

In 1909, they set sail from Bremen to be awarded honorary degrees at Clark University, in Worcester, Massachusetts. G. Stanley Hall, Clark University’s president and himself a psychologist, had invited both of them. Freud’s five lectures were titled “The Origin and Development of Psychoanalysis” and Jung’s three lectures “The Association Method.”

Freud later wrote: “In Europe I felt as though I were despised; but over there I found myself received by the foremost men as an equal. As I stepped onto the platform at Worcester to deliver my “Five Lectures upon Psychoanalysis” it seemed like the realization of some incredible day-dream: psychoanalysis was no longer a product of delusion, it had become a valuable part of reality.”

Freudians have written Jung so well out of their history that many people don’t know that Jung was even present at Clark University. In fact, the two men spent four weeks in each other’s company almost every day, arguing, analyzing, sightseeing, accompanied by Sandor Ferenczi, who had studied with both. Jung was an enthusiastic tourist, hiking with his hosts as well as discussing parapsychology, religion and spiritualism with experts like William James and comparing him and other older psychologists favorably to Freud. But during that month, Jung, by all accounts, kept his growing reservations about Freud to and perhaps from himself.

In addition to their differences about the interpretation of dreams, the centrality of infantile and childhood sexuality; and the importance of spirituality, the two men were the products of very different families, intellectual and cultural traditions, and cities. They also had very different personal agendas. Ebullient Jung had wide-ranging interests and a very active family and extra-marital life. Austere Freud was more narrowly focused on psychoanalysis and saw Jung as a proselytizing agent for it.

Pages from C.G. Jung's Red Book

Jung had put together the first edition of the “Jahrbuch” to Freud’s satisfaction and the older man planned to install him as first President of the International Psychoanalytic Association in 1910. But Jung had many other things on his mind (including ongoing problems with patients, colleagues and several women including his wife) and his experiences in the U.S. had complicated his relationship with Freud.

As Shamdasani narrates it, Jung returned to his cultural and religious preoccupations after the trip to America and, in addition to growing his private practice, published –- despite his trepidations –”Transformations and Symbols of the Libido.” The book was based on fantasies of an American woman named Frank Miller who had originally presented them to Theodore Flournoy, who had translated them into French but then gave them to Jung.

Shrinks had a very casual code of behavior regarding patient confidentiality, boundary violations, and many other things during those pioneer days. Jung compared Ms. Miller’s fantasies to images in comparative mythology, religion, and folklore. He differentiated between verbal, scientific, and logical “directed thinking” and passive, imagistic, and mythological “fantasy thinking.” He later viewed this book as “marking his discovery of the collective unconscious,” but he scrawled at the end of the manuscript: “What have you written, what is this now?”

That summer of 1912, he wrote “Nine Lectures,” which he would present in New York City that fall. The document would answer his own question and further demarcate his own ideas from Freud’s.

That period can, in retrospect, be seen as marking the genesis of the “Red Book” although, as Deirdre Bair points out, Jung recycled the narrative so many times that it’s very hard to determine what happened when. The theoretical rifts between the psychoanalysts of the International Association took on the character of religious wars: brutal, uncompromising, and vituperative. Shamdasani’s introduction implies that Jung’s “Most Difficult Experiment” began with a dream he recorded in “Black Book #2″ in 1912 that implicitly challenged Freud.

“I was in a southern town…an old Austrian customs guard or someone similar passes by me…Someone says ‘that is one who cannot die. He died already 30-40 years ago, but has not yet managed to decompose.’ I was very surprised. Here a striking figure came, a knight of powerful build, clad in yellowish armor. He looks solid and inscrutable and nothing impresses him. On his back he carries a red Maltese cross….I hold back my interpretative skills. As regards the old Austrian Freud occurred to me; as regards the knight, I myself.”

Shamdasani continues, straining credulity: “Jung found the dream oppressive and bewildering and Freud was unable to interpret it.” In the same ‘Black Book,’ half a year later, Jung describes a second dream about a beautiful white bird that flew into his family’s apartment and turned into a blond little girl, then back into a bird that flew away.” Jung had no trouble interpreting that dream right away and embarked on a life-long sexual liaison with his former patient and professional colleague Toni Wolff.

In January of 1913, Freud broke off their deteriorating correspondence, setting the acerbic international community of analysts abuzz with speculation of what would happen next. Jung maintained his affiliation with the psychoanalytic movement until October when, after an unpleasant, contentious re-election as president of the IPA, he finally resigned as editor of the “Jahrbuch.”

Then, he had the dream that he describes at the beginning of the “Red Book:”

“It happened in October of the year 1913 as I was leaving alone for a journey [he was on his way to visit his mother-in-law in Schaffhausen, where the Rhine creates a famous waterfall] that during the day I was suddenly overcome in broad daylight by a vision. I saw a terrible flood that covered all the northern and low-lying lands between the North Sea and the Alps. It reached from England up to Russia, and from the coast of the North Sea right up to the Alps. I saw yellow waves, swimming rubble, and the death of countless thousands.

The vision lasted for two hours. It confused me and made me ill. I was not able to interpret it. Two weeks passed then the vision returned more violent than before, and an inner voice spoke. ‘Look at it, it is completely real, and it will come to pass. You cannot doubt this.’ I wrestled again for two hours with this vision but it held me fast. It left me exhausted and confused. And I thought my mind had gone crazy.

“From then on the anxiety toward the terrible event that stood directly before us kept coming back. Once I also saw a sea of blood over the northern lands

“In the year 1914 in the month of June, at the beginning and end of the month, and at the beginning of July, I had the same dream three times…”

Jung retold and rewrote this dream in many different ways in subsequent years but in the “Red Book,” he seems to be using its precognitive vision of World War I to establish the prophetic nature and validity of what he called his “waking fantasies” or “active imaginations. The ensuing account of how Jung lost and found his “soul” contains the materials for all of Jung’s analytic psychology.

Shamdasani summarizes the “Red Book” as an attempt to understand himself; the structure of the human personality in general; the relation of the individual to society and the community of the dead; the psychological and historical effects of Christianity and the future religious development of the West.

He notes that in November of 1914 Jung studied Nietzsche’s “Thus Spoke Zarathustra,” which he had first encountered as a young man, and which now “shaped the structure and style of ‘Liber Novus’ (New Book)….There are also indications that he read Dante’s ‘Commedia’ at this time, which also informs the structure of the work…but where Dante could utilize an established cosmology, ‘Liber Novus’ is an attempt to shape an individual cosmology.”

Helen Epstein’s essay on “Narrative in Memoir and Psychoanalysis” appears in this winter’s issue of “Psychoanalytical Perspectives” and in the newly published “Ecrire la Vie.”

THE RED BOOK by C.G. Jung. Edited by Sonu Shamdasani. English translation by Shamdasani, Mark Kyburz, and John Peck. W.W. Norton & Co. 404 pages, $195.

By Helen Epstein

I was intrigued in September to hear about the publication – ninety years after it was begun – of Carl Gustav Jung’s “Liber Novus” or the “Red Book.”

I’m a student of memoir and his “Liber Novus” sounded like a 20th century contribution to an autobiographical genre that dates back to St. Augustine’s “Confessions” as well as a book of religious or spiritual revelation. Like Augustine and Dante, Jung experienced a profound break in his belief system or what we now call a mid-life crisis.

He had addressed it like many writers: making notes of his thoughts and feelings, reworking his notes into a narrative, showing it to friendly readers (including his wife, his lover, and several colleagues), revising it, having it typed and then – feeling ambivalent about exposing himself so candidly–consigning it to a drawer.

Except that he never entirely consigned it to a drawer. Instead, Jung used his raw material to build a body of psychology, drew on it for a succession of professional publications, and repeatedly showed parts of his “Liber Novus” manuscript to friends and colleagues.

He took it out again in 1959 – two years before he died – and in a handwritten Epilogue that breaks off in mid-sentence added:

“I worked on this book for 16 years. To the superficial observer, it will appear like madness. It would have developed into one, had I not been able to absorb the overpowering force of the original experiences. With the help of alchemy, I could finally arrange them into a whole. …I knew how frightfully inadequate this undertaking was, but despite much work and many distractions I remained true to it, even if another possibility …”

In its outlines, Jung’s process was like that of an artist. His practice of going into his study after a day of seeing patients and having dinner with his family, then inducing altered states of consciousness and writing down what he encountered in them is not that different from what most novelists and many memoirists do.

What was, of course, very different was the nature and scope of his project: Jung was wrestling with the Christianity he had grown up with, creating his own cosmology, generalizing his own inner conflict to the conflict between what he called “the spirit of the time” and “the spirit of the depths.”

C.G. Jung

Before consigning his text to a drawer, Jung rewrote it by hand onto folio-sized sheets of parchment, and then pasted them onto thick white pages that evoke the pages of medieval Gospel books like the “Book of Kells” or prayer books like “Les Très Riches Heures du duc de Berry.”

He did the Latin and German calligraphy himself, illustrating it with vivid, color-saturated miniatures and full-page paintings. He spent what must have been hours laboring over historiated initials – those highlighted first letters of a new verse or phrase illustrated to elaborate meaning.

Even though the book was going into a drawer, he commissioned a bookbinder to produce a volume of expensive red leather embossed with gold leaf to contain his lavishly illustrated folios.

It was that unusual mix of spiritual memoir tradition and sheer grandiosity that piqued my curiosity about the “Red Book”: the translation of visions into images as well as words, the deliberate evocation of The New Testament, the mix of medieval religious style and twentieth century psychology.

I also knew something about the controversies swirling around Jung: his intense attachment to and break-up with Sigmund Freud; his intense relationships and sometime sexual liaisons with a succession of women patients; his equivocal behavior during the second world war; his way of recycling and reworking what he wrote until anyone could take anything from it.

There were many people, I found, who agreed with Jung’s contemporary Walter Lippmann that the psychiatrist’s work was “ a personal adventure in search of a philosophy far more than a contribution to psychoanalytic understanding.” Others proudly called themselves Jungians.

So I ordered a copy of the book.

The volume that arrived on my doorstep measured 18 x 12.3 x 2.4 inches, weighed 9.6 pounds, and was 404 pages long. “The Red Book” was too heavy to hold in my lap for more than five minutes so I read it in small increments at my dining room table. And while I had my customary pencil in hand, I was surprised to find myself oddly reluctant to make any mark on the large and beautiful white pages.

About half of those pages are facsimiles of the original German and Latin calligraphy; the other half includes the English translation of “Liber Primus,” “Liber Secundus,” and “Scutinites,” and an extensive, wide-ranging introduction by Jung historian Sonu Shamdasani, a professor at the Wellcome Trust Centre for the History of Medicine at University College in London. He is also General Editor and co-founder of the Philemon Foundation outside of Philadelphia, which is engaged in publishing everything Jung ever wrote.

The images in the “Red Book” are museum quality and practically throb with color; the text, sometimes captivating, sometimes tedious, echoes the multitude of voices from sacred and secular literature that influenced Jung: Old Testament, New Testament, many eastern religious classics, Dante, Goethe, Nietzsche, Pascal, Swedenborg – to name just a few.

Shamdasani makes over one thousand footnotes, citing changes in the text and as many sources and influences that he can track down. Flipping back and forth between the original German, the art, the English text and those annotations I found myself disoriented and exhausted.

Although the “Red Book” is clearly the record of a spiritual crisis and the author’s repeated attempts to wrest meaning from it, much of its content seems to be more raw than integrated. Throughout, it seems that Jung tinkered with his story – insisting on the veracity of his time frame but, in fact, often collapsing time and creating composites, issues that are live controversies among writers of memoir today.

“The years of which I have spoken to you, when I pursued the inner images, were the most important time of my life,” reads a paragraph placed at the front of the “Red Book.”

It was written in 1957 – four years before he died — at a time he still felt it prudent to keep the object under wrap:

“Everything else is to be derived from this. It began at that time, and the later details hardly matter anymore. My entire life consisted in elaborating what had burst forth from the unconscious and flooded me liker an enigmatic stream and threatened to break me. That was the stuff and material for more than only one life. Everything later was merely the outer classification, the scientific elaboration, and the integration into life. But the numinous beginning, which contained everything, was then.”

Freud (L) and Jung (R): Jung had an intense attachment to and break-up with Sigmund Freud

In his comprehensive and valiant attempt at summarizing the contents and contextualizing Jung, Shamdasani argues that there can be few unpublished works that have ever exerted such influence on social and intellectual history. Jung, he writes, “played a central role in modern psychology, psychotherapy and psychiatry and a large international profession of analytical psychologists work under his name. His work has had its widest impact, however, outside professional circles.”

Words and terms Jung made popular — “introvert,” and “extravert,” “synchronicity,” “persona,” and “collective unconscious” have permeated popular culture. Writers, artists, performers, users of recreational drugs, and spiritual seekers of all stripes have been drawn to Jung’s explorations in expanding consciousness.

Herman Hesse was briefly one of his analysands and his “Steppenwolf” and “Magister Ludi” owe much to Jung, as do Doris Lessing’s novels, Federico Fellini’s films and Joseph Campbell’s research on comparative mythology and religions. Laurens Van der Post thought Jung was the only human being he had ever met “of whose greatness” he was certain, and wrote the memoir “Jung and the Story of our Time,” to show why.

C.G. Jung was born in 1875, the son of a poor, small-town pastor of the Swiss Reformed Church who ended every family dinner with a reading from Luther’s Bible. His parents’ marriage was an unhappy one and Carl grew up a solitary child with a much younger sister, given to ruminating about both his day and night dreams as well as his frequent visual hallucinations.

His mother and much of the maternal (Preiswerk) side of the family were as interested in parapsychology as his father was in the Protestant Church and their precognitive dreams, crystal gazing, trance states and séances were part of daily conversation. Jung also grew up frightened of Catholic priests and by 12, had lost faith in his father’s brand of religion.

As a child Jung believed that he had two distinct personalities. Personality #1 was the school boy who studied the subjects assigned by his rigorous gymnasium: the Greek and Latin classics, the German philosophers, literary masters, world history and science. Personality #2 was the boy who pursued his inner mysteries and communed with nature. That division was to imbue his life and writing.

Swiss painter Arnold Böcklin's Isle of the Dead

In 1895, he entered the pre-med program at the University of Basel, where he read the psychological works of William James and Richard von Krafft-Ebbing, whose “Textbook of Psychiatry” seemed to promise a way to blend his two personalities. While at university, he also studied literature and art. He was particularly influenced by the symbolic and mystical work of Swiss painter Arnold Böcklin. He also took part in many séances, some organized by a female cousin.

Shamdasani begins his introduction to the “Red Book” with a brief consideration of the “cultural moment” – the first decades of the twentieth century in Central Europe when psychologists, artists and writers lived and worked in more overlapping ways than now and shared an interest in the relatively new fields of comparative religion and folklore, the dissemination of literary and artistic artifacts from the East, occult phenomena, somnambulism, visions and fantasies. Many used “automatic writing,” in their quest for new forms and ways of perception.

Jung not only shared artistic ideas but would meet and treat some of Zurich’s artists and writers as his patients.

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Helen Epstein’s essay on “Narrative in Memoir and Psychoanalysis” appears in this winter’s issue of “Psychoanalytical Perspectives” and in the newly published “Ecrire la Vie.”

Reckless by Graig Lucas. Directed by Scott Edmiston. Presented by the SpeakEasy Stage Company at the Boston Center for the Arts through December 12, 2009.

Norton Award-winners Larry Coen and Marianna Bassham in a scene from the SpeakEasy Stage Company production of RECKLESS.

Just in case you haven’t noticed it’s edging on toward Christmas, the SpeakEasy Stage Company unwraps “Reckless,” a bauble of a revival by playwright Craig Lucas, whose work for stage and screen includes “The Light in the Piazza,” “Longtime Companion” and “Prelude to a Kiss.”

“Reckless” is a “dark comedy” first staged in 1985, made into a feature film starring Mia Farrow ten years later, and finally produced in New York in 2004. Slickly staged and acted by an exuberant and expert company who convey their delight in every outrageous scene, this is a play that entertains even as it takes aim at the hypocrisies of the
holiday season.

A contemporary adaptation of “Candide” crossed with “Alice in Wonderland,” “Reckless” starts out on Christmas Eve with Rachel, its manic housewife heroine with logorrhea, being warned by her husband Tom that he has taken out a
contract on her life and that, if she wants to live, she’d better get out — NOW.

“That is the sickest joke,” Rachel declares but, in the fashion of the housewife stereotyped by mainstream gay playwrights — much as sensitive gay men were once stereotyped by straight mainstream playwrights — she follows her desperate husband’s advice and, wearing only her flowered flannel nightgown, exits via the window.

She enters a world where no one is safe from a send-up of political correctness — not homeless people, talk show hosts, criminals, paraplegics, psychotherapists, heads of NGOs — not even deaf mutes. As she makes her way from Springfield, MA to a succession of other Springfields in this best of all possible nations, Rachel finds that life has indeed been “reckless” with many of the people she meets and that they have responded in a variety ofways.

The company of local actors is terrific although Marianna Bassham as Rachel could trust her lines more and attenuate her acting a notch –her Rachel is so irritating that she runs the risk of driving her audience out of the theater as well as her husband to murder and her rescuer to drink. On the other hand, Larry Coen and Kerry A Dowling were entirely convincing in their loopy roles and I especially liked Paula Plum’s witty succession of physicians and psychotherapists.

The sets and costumes are zany and wonderful; the music, evocative; the lighting, enhancing; and the direction smart and elegant. If you’re looking for a light, diverting evening or afternoon of theater, this is it.

Helen Epstein is the author of “Joe Papp: An American Life.”

November 's high technology standout: The MET's production of Turandot in HD

1) Nov 2: This Monday’s free concert at Jordan Hall celebrates Eastern European composers and players. The unusual musical line-up includes the Haydn Piano Trio in E minor, the Boston premiere of Kati Agócs’s “Awakening Galatea,” Bacewicz’s “Suite for Two Violins,” and Dvorak’s Piano Quintet in A Major, Opus 81. Performance starts at 8 p.m.

2) Nov 3: Pianist Sergey Schepkin takes on Bach’s “The Well-Tempered Clavier, Book II” at the Edward Pickman Concert Hall, Longy School of Music, Cambridge, MA. Box office opens at 6 p.m; performance is at 7:30 p.m. (Longy has no advance ticket sales).

3) Nov 7 and 11: I go to the AMC in Burlington, MA, but you can catch the Metropolitan Opera broadcasts LIVE on a weekend afternoon or in rerun Wednesday evenings at 6:30 at malls and select theaters all over New England. (Go to the Metropolitan Opera website to find a site near you). This month’s offering is director Franco Zeffirelli’s staging of Puccini’s last opera, “Turandot,” which shows at 1 p.m., with an encore screening on Wednesday, November 18 at 6:30 p.m. The expected running time: 3 hours 21 minutes, 2 intermissions

Get there early to find a good seat and be prepared to sit for three hours or more. The real-time schedule of performance and half-hour intermissions in New York is worth it. The camera brings you closer to the performers than you would be in the opera house itself; the sound is excellent; and the singers know that they have to work on their acting!

Clear subtitles make a huge difference in the opera experience for me, even though I’ve seen some of these old chestnuts several times. Bring along some snacks and don’t be upset by the smell of popcorn around you. Opera was once the most popular performance form going!!

Helen Epstein’s book of profiles of celebrated musicians “Music Talks” is being republished by the Authors Guild Back-in-Print series and will be available in November.

Reviewed by Helen Epstein

Jessica D. Turner and Liz Hayes in Dead Man's Cell Phone. Photo Credit: The Lyric Stage Company of Boston

Improbable though it seems these days with multiple requests to turn off electronics before performances, a cell phone went off in the row behind me at a particularly still moment towards the end of Act One and the woman behind me — perhaps imagining that she was in a closed telephone booth of the kind alluded to by a character onstage — took a while explaining to her caller that she was in a theater, and that the play was in progress.

Members of the audiences were infuriated and intermission unleashed animated discussion of a recent Dawn Upshaw concert during which a woman pulled out her cellphone during an encore and instructed her chauffeur to pick her up out front.

Using a cell phone during a performance is always a faux pas, but doing it at the Boston premiere of “Dead Man’s Cell Phone” was a truly mindless act that only provided more evidence — as if any were needed — of the timeliness of dramatist Sarah Ruhl’s intelligent and quirky comedy.

According to one of the useful historical background sheets often provided by the Lyric Stage Company, there were over four billion mobile phones in operation across the globe in 2008, 275 million of them in the United States. Ruhl’s genius is to take this now ubiquitous instrument and transform it into a multi-layered symbol as well as catalyst for dramatic action.

Ruhl is the 35-year-old, highly prolific playwright whose earlier work includes “The Clean House” and “Eurydice” and who has won both a MacArthur Fellowship and Pulitzer Prize. Her forthcoming “In the Next Room (or The Vibrator Play)” is set to open on Broadway next week. Her work blends straight drama, comedy and a kind of magical realism in a surrealist style that some critics find persuasive and whimsical; others annoying.

I’m a fan, and the Lyric’s Stage’s sparkling and literate production of “Dead Man’s Cell Phone” perfectly conveys this edgy and unpredictable style using a single glass and steel set. Director Carmel O’Reilly’s excellent design team have collaborated to evoke a variety of venues — cafe, church, luxury apartment, stationary store, airport — heralded by dramatic lighting and sound, and enhanced by striking costumes.

O’Reilly has also chosen a wonderful cast for a rare play that — as I noted with pleasure — features four meaty roles for women and two for men. In this respect alone, “Dead Man’s Cell Phone” is an extraordinary play. As one of the actors remarked at the “Talkback,” she realized one day that she was in a rehearsal with a roomful of women, that she was doing a fight scene with another woman and that she had never been in that situation before.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. “Dead Man’s Cell Phone” starts right off the bat with a dead man, sitting bolt upright in a cafe, facing a nondescript self-effacing, young woman entirely dressed in gray. Her name is Jean. She is a timid soul (after a few non-verbal reactions to the repeated ringing, she creeps up to her fellow diner to query: “Are you ill? Are you deaf” before dialing 911) who evokes the shy female protagonists of Anita Brookner’s novels. Gordon — as the dead man turns out to be named — may have died but his cell phone hasn’t, and, after it rings several times, Jean answers it and is drawn into a stranger’s professional and personal dramas.

I won’t give away the fantastical plot turns or the nutsy yet poignant characters that Ruhl has created and that the cast brings to convincing life. This is a production that entertains but also intrigues, provokes, and engages your mind long after you leave the theater. It addresses classic themes of family drama but brings in new ones such as evolving roles for women, the strange new world of globalization, and the process of our getting adjusted to and becoming addicted to new technologies.

The cast is excellent, especially the four women who seem to revel in their unconventional roles. Liz Hayes as Jean pulls off the trick of making a mousy, recessive heroine take center stage. Beth Gotha, as Mrs.Gottlieb, takes the role of Jewish Mother out of the realm of caricature and into elegance. Bryn Jamison and Jessica D. Turner, as the dead man’s wife and mistress respectively, turn in strong performances. The rapport between the four of them is striking. We feel they are having a wonderful time performing and it is a pleasure to watch their relationships unfold. And it doesn’t hurt that they get to speak lines never before heard in a theater. All in all, a production that makes me want to come back to the Lyric Stage and makes me very curious about the work of Sarah Ruhl.

Helen Epstein is the author of “Joe Papp: An American Life,” “Children of the Holocaust” and a new book of essays on memoir in French titled “Ecrire La Vie.”

I saw “The Laramie Project Epilogue” at the Barrington Stage Company in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, one of a reported 150 venues around the world where staged readings took place this week, the eleventh anniversary of what has become perhaps the most famous hate crime in the world. In October of 1998, twenty-one year old Matthew Shepard, a gay student at the University of Wyoming, was kidnapped, badly beaten, and tied to a fence on the outskirts of Laramie, Wyoming where he went into a coma from which he never recovered.

There are 18 to 20 reported gay homicides in the United States a year, director Moises Kaufman’s points out in his production notes, but the circumstances of this one brought together many contemporary themes that struck him as perfect for a work of theater. Like Truman Capote, living in New York City but riveted by the murder of the Clutter family in Holcomb, Kansas in 1959, Kaufman and eleven actors from the New-York-based Tectonic Theater Project began a series of visits to Laramie, Wyoming.

Instead of one weird outsider journalist walking up to strangers and asking for an interview in Kansas that is so memorably re-enacted in two movies about Capote, this time eleven outsiders with tape recorders descend on Laramie, each driven by his or her own interests. One looks up Matthew’s friends; others, the murderer Aaron McKinney and his accomplice Russell Henderson. Some are interested in talking with students and professors in the university community; others with local law enforcement officials, cowboys, farmers, lesbians and gays. Some actors attend the court trial and their own reactions (recorded in journals) become part of the play, along with edited selections from over 200 interviews and parts of the transcript. The only people the company decided not to interview were members of Matthew’s immediate family.

“The Laramie Project” premiered in Denver in 2000. Then it moved to New York where it garnered some stellar reviews, not least from picky critic John Simon who termed it “Nothing short of stunning … A theatrical event not to be missed.” In 2002, the Sundance Film Festival screened the film version, directed by Kaufman and featuring some TTP actors along with several Hollywood stars.

Like “The Diary of Anne Frank” and “The Vagina Monologues,” “The Laramie Project” became far more than a piece of theater. Widely read and produced at high schools, religious institutions and universities across the country, it has become a teaching tool, a vehicle for raising awareness of the consequences of bigotry, and a rallying point for civil rights for gay and transgendered people. As a theater piece, it evokes “Our Town” and “Spoon River Anthology” as well as courtroom drama and earlier interview-generated works like “A Chorus Line” and Anna Deavere Smith’s one-woman shows. Like her current piece on life insurance, “Let Me Down Easy,” “The Laramie Project” interacts with current events in Washington.

After a decade of stalling, the House last week voted 281 to 146 to pass Bill HR 1913, the Matthew Shepard and James Byrd Jr. Hate Crimes Prevention Act, named after Matthew and the African-American Texan dragged to his death behind a pickup truck that same year. If adopted by the Senate, this bill would expand the definition of violent federal hate crimes to those committed because of a victim’s sexual orientation.

After a decade too, Hudson Street Press last month published Judy Shepard’s “The Meaning of Matthew: My Son’s Murder in Laramie and a World Transformed.” The book is not literary nor probing enough to qualify as a great memoir: Judy Shepard writes that “soul searching” for her is a private affair — not a promising personal quality for writing in this genre. But “The Meaning of Matthew” is literature of witness, so compelling a story that it trumps her proclivities and skills. Though laconic and, at times, self-protective (“I don’t know a lot of the details …” recurs in the narrative), it’s an important, affecting, Mom’s account of the short life Matthew had “before he was tied to that fence.”

Mrs. Shepard briefly describes growing up as the daughter of the postmaster in small town Wyoming, her marriage to fellow westerner Dennis Shepard and first pregnancy: her growing awareness of her smaller-than-average, blond, sensitive, theater-loving older son’s homosexuality; the family’s move to Saudi Arabia after the oil industry falters in Wyoming and Dennis takes a job with Aramco; their reluctant decision to send Matthew to boarding school in Switzerland. She tells us that because of her husband’s frequent absences, she and Matthew were extraordinarily close and recounts Matthew’s interest in Dolly Parton, as well as international relations and the problems of his friends and classmates.

In what turns out to be a horrific precursor to the events in Laramie, she describes getting a telephone call from Matthew in Marrakech where he is visiting with other students from his school. Her son tells her he was attacked and raped by three adult men who took his shirt and shoes, then fled into the night. Although he reported the attack and was well-treated by the Moroccan police, Matthew never, in his mother’s view, recovered from that rape. “After the attack,” she writes, “he seemed to assume the attitude of a beaten-down victim: His posture was slumped, his gait became more of a shuffle, and he purposely chose to wear clothes that were way too big for him, as if he wanted to hide in the fabric…. By far the most disturbing episodes of the aftermath were the nightmares…”

Although the Shepards try to find Matthew a therapist to address the trauma, what goes on in the Shepard family in the immediate aftermath of the rape is skipped. It’s unclear how the parents and younger sibling dealt with their son’s rape, whether they talked about it with Matthew, how long he actually was in therapy (in Switzerland? Saudi Arabia?) before high school graduation and going off to college in North Carolina.

These omissions are characteristic of the author’s self-acknowledged aversion to painful material as well as most emotional and psychological matters and are clear examples of the difference between content and writing. Given the dimensions of the tragedy, it seems callous to point out that Mrs. Shepard is a reluctant memoirist, disinclined to deeply probe “the meaning of Matthew.”

But the fact is that her memoir is more of a distanced narration of events, including her family’s learning of their son’s murder, the trial, the issues and the media circus that followed. It aims to correct inaccuracies about the family that crept into media coverage and to bring attention to the work of the Matthew Shepard Foundation that Judy and Dennis Shepard co-founded to promote tolerance and support for human rights regardless of sexual orientation.

The media, old and new, left and right, have been abuzz with reaction to Shepard’s murder and its significance for years, especially since the ABC program “20/20″ did a piece five years after the fact representing the murderers as methamphetamine-crazed robbers rather than gay-haters. The Right was quick to embrace the “20/20″ version. Congresswoman Virginia Foxx of North Carolina claimed last spring that Shepard’s horrific murder was a “hoax.” “We know that that young man was killed in the commitment of a robbery. It wasn’t because he was gay.” There are many more byzantine and wacky explanations of the murder up on the net but I won’t waste space by reprinting them here.

Dr. Judith Herman, in her classic book, Trauma and Recovery writes about the difficulty both individuals and societies have in retaining accurate memory of unspeakable events: “In the absence of strong political movements for human rights, the active process of bearing witness inevitably gives way to the active process of forgetting. Repression, dissociation, and denial are phenomena of social as well as individual consciousness.”

Given this very large context, “The Epilogue to the Laramie Project” isn’t just an update but a work of artistic witness. The reading I saw in Pittsfield was absorbing but only indicated the work’s performance potential. In the script, Kaufman and his company revisit Laramie a decade later to examine how both the passage of time and deliberate revisionism combine to eradicate the memory of what happened there. The fence to which Matthew Shepard was tied, they find, is now gone. Too many memorials, too many tourists for the owner of the land to deal with. The Fireside bar where Matthew Shepard and his murderer met has been sold, its name changed.

There is a bench dedicated to Matthew at the University of Wyoming (“Beloved Son, Brother and Fried; He continues to make a difference; Peace be with him and all who sit here” ) but new undergraduates interviewed by the TTP have only a vague idea of who Matthew Shepard was.

The company revisited many of their original interviews –- Father Roger, who urges them to try to interview the murderers and discover what Aaron McKinney and Russell Henderson have to teach us; University Professor Catherine Connolly, who was galvanized to run for the Wyoming State Legislature where she has become the first openly gay member and Laramie’s chief law enforcement officer Dave O’Malley who in the aftermath of Matthew’s murder made a 180 degree change, went to D.C. to lobby for hate crime legislation and says in the Epilogue, “What I had been doing all my life was precluding a fine group of individuals from my friendship.”

On the other hand, there are people in Laramie quoted as saying “I do think it’s time to let the boy go” and, as an editorial in the “Laramie Boomerang,” the town newspaper, put it: “Laramie is a community – not a project.” A gay man who found his significant other during the aftermath of the murder and lives in the relative safety of the university community, says: “Finding your safe pocket is what we gay people do – not just in Laramie but everywhere.”

Attending a reading of “Laramie:The Epilogue” and reading Judy Shepard’s memoir raise far more questions than answers. They are of a nature more conducive to the long and reflective process of writing a book rather than a blog post: questions about art, personal and social psychology, law, revisionism, memory, history, the relative strengths of journalism, film, or theater in representing a momentous event as well as who gets to interpret its meaning.

These questions are overshadowed by a far more pressing reality: Senator Carl Levin has reported that the FBI recorded reports of more than 77,000 hate crimes from 1998 through 2007 and that crimes based on sexual orientation were on an upward trend.

Helen Epstein is the author of “Joe Papp: An American Life,” “Children of the Holocaust” and a new book of essays on memoir in French titled “Ecrire La Vie.”

Oct-8-13 Stravinsky, Rachmaninoff and Shostakovich
Symphony Hall
Boston, MA
Vasily Petrenko, conductor

This image by the Swiss painter Arnold Bocklin inspired Rachmaninoff.

Audiences as well as composers project their emotions and fantasies onto every piece of art with which they engage, but I think this is particularly true of instrumental music, whose non-verbal, non-visual yet powerfully emotional expressiveness is as open to multiple interpretation as a Rorschach test. Often composers intend their music to follow a program: to narrate an explicit story, or evoke a season, mood, a place.

But sometimes these extra-musical “handles” are ex post facto — Beethoven’s “Moonlight Sonata” for instance or the association of Rossini’s “William Tell Overture” to the Lone Ranger TV series, Who can say with any certainty what a piece of music is “about”?

I was thinking about this last Friday during the BSO’s unusual and unusually death-suffused program of Russian music, conducted by the brilliant 33-year-old St. Petersburg-born conductor Vasily Petrenko. Both the prospect of hearing a post-Soviet conductor and the novel program brought me to Symphony Hall. The orchestra had performed Stravinsky’s early Scherzo fantastique just three times in its history and its last performance of Rachmaninoff’s “The Isle of the Dead” had been in 1945. Although the Shostakovich 10th was performed twice in this century, it was neglected for the preceding 40 years. I had never heard any of the three pieces in concert.

I prepped by listening to the BSO’s excellent on-line program notes prepared by Richard Dyer. In them (I recommend listening to these audio notes wherever and whenever if you’re interested in a quick classical music tutorial), he points out that Stravinsky was notorious for disavowing any extra-musical connotations of his music. “I consider that music is by its very nature essentially powerless to express anything at all,” Stravinsky (or his ghost) wrote in his autobiography, “whether a feeling an attitude of mind, a psychological mood, or a phenomenon of nature.”

This, as Dyer points out, is a little hard to take seriously from the composer of “the three most famous storytelling ballets of the 20th century” and, as we hear in the Scherzo fantastique. In fact, Stravinsky composed the coolly elegant scherzo — full of swarming and unmistakably bee-like allusions — after reading Maurice Maeterlinck’s “Life of the Bees” and at a time when his teacher Rimsky-Korsakov had a contemporary hit with a piece from one of his operas called “Flight of the Bumble Bee.”

Stravinsky’s is a sparkling short piece performed with great elan by a conductor clearly at home in the idiom. It features every section of the orchestra and two harps. Petrenko’s interpretation kept me on the edge of my seat.

Sergei Rachmaninoff thought very differently from Stravinsky about the relation of his music to outside phenomena. He found it helpful to have in mind a book or picture or poem when composing and made clear the source of his inspiration. In the case of “The Isle of the Dead,” it was a wildly popular, dream-like painting by the Swiss painter Arnold Bocklin that anticipates the surrealists. Hitler allegedly bought one of four original versions of it in 1933 and both Freud and Lenin had prints of it hanging in their rooms. What that means is also open to wide interpretation but the music Rachmaninoff composed for “The Isle of the Dead” is appropriately mysterious, dark, dramatic, and — to me — sounds very Russian — heavily sonorous, lushly orchestrated, and massive.

Conductor Vasily Petrenko

The notion of program music and extra-musical contexts takes on a whole other dimension with Dimitri Shostakovich and the Soviet Union’s political program for the arts. In his comprehensive and useful book “The Symphony”, the late and erudite musicologist Michael Steinberg wrote that Shostakovich (1906-1975) was “a man who could not commit himself to heroism or to moral and intellectual slavery, one whose actions and statements cover the gamut from the noble to the base,,,whose achievement is so uneven, not just between compositions but within them…it is hard to think of another composer whose work is so intensely, so immediately, so drastically affected by life.”

In January of 1936, Josef Stalin attended the composer’s opera “Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk District,” and hated it. Although Shostakovich was neither imprisoned nor killed, he was censored by “Pravda,” condemned by some of his less heroic musical colleagues, and designated an “enemy of the people.” For the rest of his life, everything he composed was heard through the screen of politics. In 1937, he produced his popular “Fifth Symphony” that a reviewer dubbed ” a Soviet artist’s creative answer to just criticism” and that is probably his most popular today but his career and his music were never free of the extra-musical taint of politics.

Despite his lifelong political troubles, Shostakovich wrote 15 symphonies. He began work on the 10th a few weeks after Stalin’s death in 1953 and the work therefore became a political symbol and subject of much discussion at the Soviet Composers Union the following year: is the first movement a lament for the millions dead? is the second a portrait of Stalin? does the composer make clear the authenticity of this — as opposed to other work — by writing his initials of his name into the musical notation?

All these extra-musical considerations play a role in how one hears this music and helps the listener make sense of it but, in the end, you are listening to music, a performance of the work — not an exegesis of it. Apart from the short and savage second movement, I found this performance of the “Tenth” long-winded, proceeding by fits and starts, not well enough put together. But I’m not familiar with this symphony and think that may be a flaw of the piece rather than Petrenko’s conducting of it.

Meanwhile, the Boston Symphony sounds wonderful, even in its maestro’s absence.

Helen Epstein ’s book of profiles of celebrated musicians “Music Talks” is being republished by the Authors Guild Back-in-Print series and will be available in November.

I’m looking forward to what looks to be the best fall foliage season in years in the Berkshires.

American Chronicles: The Art of Norman Rockwell at the Rockwell Museum in Stockbridge, MA through October 12. A very popular summer exhibit has been held over. It covers Rockwell’s entire 65-year career, interpreted and contextualized by new scholarship and archival materials. If you haven’t been to Museum, this is your chance to see it and the artist’s studio in the best possible context.

Contemporary Art at the White-Ellery House presented by the Cape Ann Museum, Gloucester, MA, on October 3. A chance to see the work of artist Susan Erony, for the final date in a series of one-day modern art installations at the historic White-Ellery House in Gloucester, MA.

I interviewed the artist for a recent Culture Vulture piece on the Gloucester City Hall Murals. Erony’s installation includes the works “Ode to Charles Olson: On Preservation” and “Olson Fragments, II,” both works based on Olson’s “The Maximus Poems,” and “Thirty-Six Safe Places,” a piece inspired by Franz Kafka’s short story “The Burrow.”

Susan Erony's Thirty-Six Safe Places

The White-Ellery House, a First Period structure built in 1710 on Gloucester’s historic Town Green (now the Grant Circle rotary) and moved to its present location at 245 Washington Street, will be open for guided tours as part of 17th Century Saturdays, an Escapes North program on Saturday, October 3. This is the final day of the program this year; these programs are free and open to the public.

Kiss Me, Kate, a musical comedy by Sam and Bella Spewack (book), Cole Porter (music, lyrics) at the Lyric Stage Company of Boston through October 10. If you love the golden age of American musicals as I do, you cannot miss the Lyric Stage’s sly, intimate, wonderful production of Cole Porter and Sam and Bella Spewack’s “Kiss Me, Kate.”

Everything about it — from the natural, unmiked voices accompanied by jazz band, to the production’s gloss on period choreography, costumes, and set, to the experience of actually seeing a full-scale musical in a 240-seat theater — works to make this one of the most entertaining 2 and a half hours of theater I’ve ever experienced in Boston.

To begin with, “Kiss Me Kate” has one of the most beautiful scores in American theater, with nary a clunker among its twenty musical numbers. Predating Leonard Bernstein’s “Candide” by nearly a decade, this is music that makes you want to stand up and sing along. Porter seemed to have had no problem spooling out melodies and spoofing other musical genres in songs that have become standards of the American songbook such as “So in Love,” “Wunderbar,” “Too Darn Hot,” “From this Moment on” and the eminently quotable and irrepressible “Brush up your Shakespeare.”

Gangsters Brushing Up on Their Shakespeare in the Lyric Stage Production of Kiss Me, Kate

Sam and Bella Spewack, who are responsible for molding Arnold Subber’s idea into musical comedy (Subber had been a stage manager’s apprentice on a production of “Taming of the Shrew” with legendary actors Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne who squabbled off-stage as much as on) had the temerity to do a Shakespeare on Shakespeare and transform “Taming” into a play-within-a-play that is on tour in Baltimore (standing in for Padua). This may be the source of all subsequent Baltimore jokes in theater: When a character asks for a loan the response is “If I had two dollars do you think I’d be in Baltimore?” the Spewacks’ script, the lyrics, the dancing, the music all resonate with layers of references to post-war America, to other plays and other times as well as providing a satisfying storyline on their own.

The Spewacks were allegedly experiencing marital difficulties; she is said to have poured some of her grievances into the dialogue. If so, this is a refutation of the standard editorial wisdom of needing to have distance from your material.

The company — many of whom are local teachers at or graduates of local performance programs — was almost almost uniformly excellent. Amelia Broome as the Shrew seemed to luxuriate in her lines as both Katherine and Lilli Vanessi and tossed off the intricate coloratura sections of her songs as well as the beer-mug-slamming declamatory “I Hate Men (I can’t abide them even now and then)” as though they were child’s play.

Michele A. DeLuca’s expressive face and voice and body was a satisfyingly cartoonish Lois Lane/Bianca. Peter Davenport as Petruchio /Fred Graham who “conceived, delivered, directed” and “starring” (according to his billing on the curtain of the “Taming of the Shrew”) portrays the bullying egotist who is equal parts attractive and exasperating. Jack Agnew is quietly convincing as the fatherly Harry/Baptista and The show is brought to a dazzling stop twice: first. when the two gangsters played by Neil A. Casey and J.T. Turner sing and dance a magical “Brush Up Your Shakespeare” and second, when an outrageously hammy Timothy John Smith (General Harrison Howell) steals the show.

The 7-piece band of keyboard, bass, drums, and reeds was simply fabulous, exuberant, exact, full of unobtrusive charm. The chorus was full-bodied, full-voiced and great fun. As one of the men remarked on his way out when asked if he had a good time, “This is my playground.”

Credit for all this must go to the Lyric’s Artistic Director and director of “Kiss Me, Kate,” Spiro Veloudos whose hands-on approach to theater and unpretentious artistic sensibility was evident the evening I attended: he was acting as chief usher and directing theatergoers to their seats. His production is subtle, intelligent and great fun both for theatergoers who know the play and those seeing it for the first time. In the pre-performance talk that has now become de rigeur in this time of financial crisis for the arts, he urged people not only to turn off their cell phones but to spread the word if they enjoyed the evening and keep quiet if they did not! Let me shout it from the rooftops: GO SEE KISS ME, KATE!

First Monday at Jordan Hall, Boston, MA, October 5, continuing on Mondays through May, 2010. This year marks the 25th Anniversary of “First Monday at Jordan Hall,” a series of free chamber concerts performed by New England Conservatory faculty and friends. I live in the ‘burbs and hate the rush hour traffic but the programming is so attractive that I will brave the problems of getting into the city and finding a place to park. Monday’s First Monday concert includes a brass fanfare by Giovanni Gabrieli; J.S. Bach’s Wedding Cantata “Weichet nur, betrübte Schatten” BWV 202; and Mozart’s Quintet in g-minor K. 516.

All-Russian Program, The Boston Symphony Orchestra at Symphony Hall, Boston, MA, October 8 through 10. Given James Levine’s sudden back surgery, it’s impossible to predict whart the BSO will be doing this month, but I’d been planning to go hear Russian conductor Vasily Petrenko makes his BSO debut in what is sure to be an exciting all-Russian program. The line-up includes: Stravinsky’s “Scherzo fantastique,” Rachmaninoff’s “The Isle of the Dead,” and Shostakovich’s “Symphony No. 10,” his first major work after the death of Stalin.

Leonard Bernstein once remarked that it helps to understand a nation’s language when conducting its music. I always listen with special attention to a musician performing the music of his or her country. Vasily Petrenko, born in 1976, was trained at the St. Petersburg Capella Boys Music School – the oldest music school in Russia — and the St. Petersburg Conservatoire.

The Laramie Project: Ten Years Later (An Epilogue), at the Barrington Stage, Pittsfield, MA, on October 12. Part of a mass reading (in more than one hundred theaters across North America) of the critically acclaimed play that dramatized the murder of Matthew Shepard, a 21-year-old gay man in Laramie, Wyoming. I missed seeing the original play.

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Culture Vulture News: Francophone Edition: Helen Epstein’s new book of essays on memoir and psychoanalysis has just been published in Paris by La Cause des Livres, with a preface by analyst and memoirist Philippe Grimbert. The book began as a lecture on Narrative in Memoir and Psychoanalysis for the relational psychoanalysts of the Stephen Mitchell Center at the New School in New York City.

For more information go to www.helenepstein.com or to La Cause des Livres. An English version is in the works.

Nobel prize-winning author Orhan Pamuk -- With Book in Hand

By Helen Epstein

A friend of mine who used to teach at Harvard says, “the place is filled with pompous people who think they have to be the smartest and most sophisticated in the world — at least in their field,” so it was a delight this afternoon to hear the unpretentious and visibly agitated Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk give the Charles Eliot Norton lecture in Sanders Theater.

Pamuk is one of the youngest writers to have received the Nobel Prize for Literature, the author of eleven books of fiction and non-fiction that have been translated into 56 languages. It seemed to me that Harvard was lucky to have him visit but Pamul began his talk by noting his “debts” to the institution: his translators, publisher and agent, it turns out, are all “from Harvard” as well as the Turkish and American literary critics who have written most extensively about his work. When an Indian student from Calcutta asked about the method and mentors he had experienced in studying literature in Istanbul, Pamuk replied quickly: “I had no mentors. I was an autodidact who went to bookshops and bought books in an accidental way. To say this in this place of learning is dramatical [sic]– but that’s the way it was.”

His six lectures (he’ll give five more over the coming weeks) are grouped under the heading “The Naive and Sentimental Novelist,” taking off from the the title of Friedrich Schiller’s essay On Naive and Sentimental Poetry. This first lecture explored “What Happens to Us as We Read Novels?” and it was interesting not only to hear a writer describe what happens to him as he reads novels but to do it in language very different from the one western literature teachers and writers use when they talk about literary art.

Pamuk talked about entering imaginary worlds so vivid that we confuse them with real life, books that evoke reality and authenticity so powerfully that we are as loathe to finish them as we are to wake up from a satisfying dream. Unsurprisingly, Pamuk finds Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina the world’s greatest novel “for its lucidity, its observations of daily life, because it’s so real. I feel jealous reading it.” He used no psychological references at all, although some of the reader’s “operations” he alluded to translated to me as Pamuk’s way of describing what we would call “unconscious” and “conscious” process.

“Novels are second lives — like dreams,” he said. Reader as well as writer, in Pamuk’s view, are like automobile drivers, in that they forge ahead on what we would call “automatic pilot” without much awareness of what “operations” they are, in fact, performing as they follow the road. Taking his cue from Schiller, Pamuk divides novelists into the “naive” and the “sentimental” — confusing terms for the twenty-first century. By “naive,” Schiller meant poets like Goethe, whom he -perceived as serene, spontaneous, naturalistic, and child-like in the certainty of their ideas and perceptions. The “sentimental” poet, on the other hand, is reflective, doubts his abilities, is suspicious of what he perceives and burdened by artificial, extraneous concerns.”

Pamuk was a painter before he turned to writing and his talk was peppered with references to the visual arts. Reading a novel for him is like “entering into a landscape painting” where we see a world through both the eyes of the writer and the eyes of his characters. We read on to see what happens next but also to soak up the atmosphere of another world, our minds constantly searching for meaning and motive. A novel, in Pamuk’s view, depends on a kind of complicity between writer and reader: “To derive pleasure from a novel is to transform words into images in our imaginations.”

Orhan Pamuk belives that novels address the meaning of life or what it is like to live.

As he reads, Pamuk contends, the reader is wondering: what part of this narrative is based on real experience and what part is invented? Does the story conform to what we know of real life? How do all the parts fit together? A search for the “hidden center” is, Pamuk argues, what sets the novel apart from other art forms. And that center must in some way address the meaning of a life or what it’s like to live.

Pamuk reminded me of what I so often forget when I read only Western literature: that language conditions representations of life even more than storylines. I’m not sure I entirely understood some of what Pamuk had to say and didn’t agree with parts of it. But it was bracing to listen to a writer talk about writing without any of our lit-crit jargon and to hear what happens to Pamuk when he reads novels.

Helen Epstein is the author of “Joe Papp: An American Life” and “Children of the Holocaust.”

The Founding of Gloucester, as depicted on the wall murals at Gloucester City Hall.

CV: Given the resemblance of our current economic problems to the Great Depression, many of us have a new interest in the WPA and public art. Tell us what’s in Gloucester’s City Hall and how it got there.

Gloucester artist and curator Susan Erony

SE: Gloucester has a remarkable collection of WPA and other New Deal program murals that were painted between 1934 and 1942. American artists had been coming to Gloucester regularly since about the 1880s, after Fitz Henry Lane, Winslow Homer, William Morris Hunt planted the seeds of an art colony. By the 1930s, artists of the stature of John Sloan, Stuart Davis, Milton Avery, Marsden Hartley, and Edward Hopper made Gloucester one of the most important places in this country for the development of American art.

CV: Is their work among the murals in Gloucester City Hall?

SE: Unfortunately, no. Most of the murals are by Charles Allen Winter, who grew up in the Midwest, studied in Paris and Rome, and began to summer in Gloucester with his wife, Alice Beach Winter, also a painter, in 1914. They became full time residents in 1931.

CV: Was there something about Winter that predisposed him to public art or was he in desperate need of money?

SE: Both Winter and his wife were political people. Alice was a suffragette who in 1912, had joined with John Sloan, Stuart Davis, and others to start the socialist magazine “The Masses,” and became its art editor. Charles was the political cartoonist for the “Pittsburgh Post” and illustrator for “Colliers Weekly,” Hearst and other magazines. So when FDR proposed his New Deal for the American people – which came to include the WPA — the Winters were ready.

CV: Tell us how the WPA got involved with visual artists.

SE: In 1933, George Biddle, who was himself a painter, friend and former classmate of Franklin Roosevelt, saw the Depression destroying the arts community. He appealed to F.D.R. to create work specifically for artists, rather than putting them to work as general laborers. His ideas were based on a prototype of the Mexican government, which paid artists to work at plasterers’ wages “in order to express on the walls of the government buildings the social idea of the Mexican revolution.” Biddle’s appeal led to the establishment, in 1933 and 1934, of the Public Works of Art Project (PWAP), to provide public service jobs during the bitter winter of 1933-34.

CV: Who chose the art and what was its stated objective?

SE: Its stated goal and the goal of its successor program, the Treasury Department’s Section of Painting and Sculpture, was to collect “masterpieces” for the government. There was an advisory committee of established and respected American painters – including Thomas Hart Benton, Grant Wood, Rockwell Kent, and Reginald Marsh — that was antagonistic to European modernism. PWAP lasted less than one year, but it provided employment for approximately 3,700 artists who created nearly 15,000 works of art – including one of the murals in Gloucester’s City Hall.

CV: So there were in fact at least two separate New Deal projects for artists?

SE: In August of 1935, another project, the Federal Art Project (FAP) was established by the WPA that continued until 1943, when World War II redirected all priorities and economic recovery was on its way. Thus ended the first major era of government patronage for art in the United States.

CV: How would you describe that era for artists?

SE: Many New Deal Administrators, including WPA Director Harry Hopkins and FAP Director Holger Cahill, believed that art could and should be a part of the daily lives of all Americans, not just the elite. So artists were both legitimized in a new way and reached a larger audience. Millions of Americans experienced concerts and plays for the first time, as well as original professional paintings and drawings – almost always for free. Thousands of children were offered free art and music classes, which attracted adults as well. Artists were enlisted to help bring together peoples of different ethnic, demographic and racial groups into a common task, to serve as catalysts for regional community and democratic activity – a commons for the people.

By 1940, there were 84 community art entries with an average monthly participation of 350,000 people. The FAP reframed artistic work as productive labor whose client was the American people. One of their early press releases read: WPA artists are interpreting America to Americans.

CV: It seems to me that while most of the artists would have welcomed the income, not all artists would have been enthusiastic about such democratization of the arts. How did the artistic community, in fact, respond?

SE: The WPA was not universally well-regarded by visual artists. Art and democracy do not necessarily sit easily with each other. Art works are by traditional definition unique and special. Artists are outsiders, not like most people. But democracy implies equality and popular will. So those who came to see their work as democratic included commercial, product, window, and trade show designers, American Scene painters, abstractionists and realists. Communists and Madison Avenue pr people were all suddenly part of a democratic culture.

What is wondrous is that during this period, the meanings of both democracy and art were debated at length by everyone from housewives to religious leaders to academics and government workers. The arts programs marked the Federal Government’s first acknowledgment of the significance of the arts in American life and encouraged a communal spirit among artists. But it’s surprising how many kinds of artists worked under the Federal Art Project. They included Arshile Gorky, Thomas Hart Benton, Ben Shahn, Jacob Lawrence, Mark Rothko, Jackson Pollock, Ad Reinhardt, and Willem de Kooning.

CV: Am I wrong to think that none of these painters you mention actually created murals?

SE: Some of them did murals as well as easel art. But the arts programs were constantly under attack as boondoggles and public murals were the easiest form to sell to the public as having public worth. The Treasury Dept. was in charge of post offices and all federal buildings, the WPA had schools, libraries, municipal buildings, hospitals, airports and colleges under its aegis. Hospitals saw the murals as therapeutic; schools saw them as educational. Art could be used to educate students, the poor, even prisoners to prepare for a better and more useful and fulfilling life. Artists became a bit like social workers.

CV: So tell us a bit about the murals in Gloucester City Hall.

SE: Two painters were responsible for most of the murals in the building. The first was Frederick Mulhaupt (1871-1938), born in Missouri. He first came to Gloucester in the summer of 1907 after study in Paris and New York. In 1923, he settled permanently on Rocky Neck. He was known as the “Dean of the Cape Ann School” and died of a heart attack in 1938 at his easel.

Frederick Milhaupt: De Champlain Surveys ‘Le Beauport’ (1936)

Frederick Mulhaupt: Landing of Dorchester Colonists – 1623 (1936)

Mulhaupt painted these two historical murals for the former Central Grammar School across the street from City Hall. The first depicts Samuel de Champlain landing in Gloucester Harbor in 1606 and naming it Le Beauport, the beautiful port. Following de Champlain, a group of English from the Dorchester Company landed at Half Moon Beach and set up in what is now Stage Fort Park. The settlers worked on establishing fishing and trading industries, built fish treatment stages, farmed, and built ships using the wonderful oak trees of Cape Ann.

CV: As an artist yourself, how would you describe these murals to someone who’d never seen them?

SE: Mulhaupt’s depictions of these historic events highlight idealized, heroic and upright individual figures. The dramatic use of shadow, flatness of paint application and muted color contribute to their solidity. Foliage and figures alike seem to exist in two frozen moments of history. The borders, stylized and muted as well, isolate the scenes, almost as if they are illustrations in a book on Gloucester history.

CV: What about Charles Allan Winter whom you mentioned earlier? He painted the majority of murals we see in City Hall.

SE: Winter immortalized ordinary workers and community members – teachers, ex-mayors, high school students, city workers, etc. He used real models for portraits. Poetry was originally painted for the Central Grammar School. In the academic schools, they showed the history of civilization and culture. So here we have an academic school mural.

Charles Allan Winter: Poetry (1936)

Poetry is an allegorical piece, a symbolic depiction of the spirit of poetry. Winter used figures from classical mythology, as well as Dante and Virgil, the fathers of poetry as his subjects. At least two of the figures are Greek muses — Clio, the Muse of history holds a scroll; Terpsichore, with a Lyre, was the muse of dance and choral songs. Between them is a woman pouring water from a jug, perhaps symbolizing rhythm, perhaps poetic fertility. The figure of Life trims a lamp, bringing light to the mind, and imagination is on a winged horse, a horse of fantasy and flight. Dante and Virgil stand to the left, serious and confident men.

The color in this mural is intense, as opposed to the muted tones in Mulhaupt’s. Winter used a color system espoused originally by Robert Henri, the great art teacher and leader of the Ashcan School group of painters. There were 24 evenly spaced hues and a formula for achieving a color harmony. John Sloan, another proponent described it like a musical system, with 12 major color divisions corresponding to a 12 tone system in music.

CV: There are several other murals you could talk about but, to close, let’s focus on Winter’s rendering of the founding of the city itself.

Charles Allen Winter: The Founding of Gloucester (1934)

This was the first mural painted in City Hall, by the PWAP. The uppermost figures on the right represent the earliest European settlers on Cape Ann, sent by the English Dorchester Co. in 1623, three years after the settlement in Plymouth, Massachusetts. The Native American who watches as the Europeans unload their supplies smokes a peace pipe similar to one found in an Essex Native American archeological dig. Old Mother Ann, a rock formation thought to resemble an old woman looking out to sea, is in the background, and Norman’s Woe, an island off the coast named for the boats that had foundered there, in the distance.

In the upper left the city fathers, the first selectmen, discuss plans for the building of Gloucester. Their faces are portraits of contemporary city officials. As they plan, carpenters build stages, now called wharves, which gave the name Stage Fort Park to the site of the first settlement. Moving down on the left, a woman with a spinning wheel, and a mother with her child — painted by Alice Beach Winter a specialist in children’s portraits — symbolize Gloucester’s weaving industry and its home life.

In the center of the painting, “History,” a gray-robed woman with a quill and book, records events. To her right is the Seal of Gloucester with its fish, sail, anchor and arm and hammer that was used until 1873, the year it became a city. At “History’s” feet, almost coming off the canvas at the edge of the frame, is “Vision,” a boy looking outward and upward, into the future.

CV: So if you had to tell people in one sentence why they should come take a look at Gloucester’s WPA murals, what would you say?

SE: The works I’ll be discussing at Gloucester City Hall emblemize New Deal philosophy regarding the role of the arts. And they also remind us of what’s important about the wonderful and too-often-dismissed aesthetics of American Scene painting. They’re well worth a visit.

Tours will begin shortly after 1:00pm both Saturday and Sunday in the lobby of Gloucester City Hall and will last approximately 45 minutes. City Hall is handicap accessible and is located at 9 Dale Avenue, Gloucester. Mural tours not appropriate for children or dogs on leashes.

The Gloucester Committee for the Arts is the steward of the New Deal murals in Gloucester, as well as the City’s own art collection. For more information go here.

Helen Epstein is the author of “Joe Papp” and “Music Talks.”

Ventfort Hall: A Berkshire Cottage rescued from the scrapheap.

By Helen Epstein

When you’re sitting in a traffic jam on the Mass Pike or the Taconic Parkway it’s instructive to reflect that one hundred and fifty years ago, it often took less time to get to the Berkshires from Boston or New York City than it does today. The Berkshires were then a major summer destination for the rich; trains brought them, their guests and servants directly to the towns of Lenox and Stockbridge.

Between the end of the Civil War and the beginning of World War I, this social elite was responsible for the construction of some 75 Berkshire Cottages (actually large country houses). Of these, 35 survive, some thanks to the tireless efforts of local preservationists. Two — rescued from years of neglect — are the projects of women. Both offer exhibits, lectures, plays, small gift-and-bookshops and the opportunity to have high tea or lunch on spacious verandas where luminaries of another era once contemplated the view. Both are still works-in-the-process-of-restoration and they make an interesting contrast for anyone interested in woman, architecture, and history, particularly the era known as the Gilded Age.

The more famous Cottage is The Mount, built on the 113-acre property that author Edith Wharton bought in 1902 in part with money from her book royalties. I first visited The Mount back in 1981 — when Shakespeare & Company was both inhabiting the premises and using the property as a theater — after I bought my own small and real Berkshire cottage. Like many other women writers and artists in the Berkshires, I was curious about Wharton’s decision to leave the city and curious about the place where she wrote “The House of Mirth.” In 1897, she had published the non-fiction book “The Decoration of Houses” with architect Ogden Codman and it was Codman whom she chose to design the Mount.

The Mount: Edith Wharton wrote The House of Mirth in one of its bedrooms.

Wharton wrote “The House of Mirth” in her bedroom, looking out at the Berkshire hills. She had expended a great deal of time and thought on creating the perfect environment for her writing as well as for her private and social needs. Unlike the party-loving socialites who inhabited the majority of other Berkshire Cottages for the summer season, she used her elegant white stucco house year-round between 1902 and 1911. She liked to have her friends visit one at a time and housed them in her one guest bedroom. Her dining room was relatively small; the table seated six.

The Mount, by Berkshire Cottage standards, is modest, graceful, thought-through, set far back from the main road, surrounded by woods and gardens, an elegant memorial to its owner.

Ventfort Hall, on the other hand, is a huge, rambling hodgepodge of a structure in the center of Lenox that film buffs will remember as the orphanage in “The Cider House Rules.” It was built by Sarah Morgan (sister of financier J.P. Morgan; wife of George Morgan) after her father Junius Morgan died in 1891 and left her three million dollars. There was already a large house named Vent Fort (Strong Wind) on the 26-acre property but Sarah wanted an English Manor House so in lieu of what today would be called a tear-down she simply had it moved across the road for her kids and spent another $900,000 on the new Ventfort Hall. Completed in 1893 and used only in the summers, it was the most expensive Cottage in the Berkshires.

I learned most of this from the energetic and enthusiastic volunteer guides who have, since 1999, watched Ventfort Hall morph from a wreck with “a slab of ice you could skate on in its Great Hall” to a superbly-restored, darkly satisfying Museum of the Gilded Age. It was — after a history of decay and use as a dormitory, B & B, and summer camp — slated for demolition by a developer interested in building a nursing home on the property and rescued at the last moment by two women for $500,000.

A quiet nook in Ventfort Hall (Photo credit: Norm Walsh)

Unlike The Mount, Ventfort Hall was intended to be a party house. There are fifteen guest bedrooms and 10 servant’s rooms, comfortable enough to be used to house male guests in a pinch. The stained glass windows overlooking the entry, according to my guide, depict the Morgan Coat of Arms and the motto aptly reads “She Who Perseveres Wins.”

Sarah’s Great Hall with a rarely-used (it was a summer house after all) but an imposing fireplace served as a ballroom, with a balcony large enough to house a small orchestra. Guests can amble, two or three abreast, easily between the Library, the Cuban mahogany dining room (Sarah’s dinner table could seat 40), and the equally large Billiards Room. And because there are no original furnishings in the house, you can actually sit down pretty much anywhere you like.

At the moment the exhibit on view is “Les Petites Dames de Mode” — the extraordinary private collection of John R. Burbridge, former dress designer for Priscilla of Boston — that traces the evolution of fashionable women’s clothing from 1855 to 1914.

Best of all was the Victorian Tea and Picnic on the Porch. I sat with my guests up from New York and Boston, gazing out over the Berkshire Hills, delighted that both these houses had been saved from the wrecker’s ball — at least for the time being.

Helen Epstein is the author of “Joe Papp” and “Where She Came From.”

No one reviews talks but I’ve just attended two by some highly gifted women that deserve wider notice. Director Anna Brownsted and actress Dana Harrison discussed their work on R.T. Rogers’ provocative play “White People” at Shakespeare & Company last week and author Brenda Wineapple gave a brilliant mini-seminar in American cultural history, focusing on the friendship of Emily Dickinson and Thomas Wentworth Higginson.

Talk is cheap, the saying goes, and in the 21st century it seems to have become even cheaper. I became an unwilling captive of AM Talk Radio last month when my contractor brought it with him and left it on as he worked. I sometimes tune in to NPR talk shows but find their false intimacy irritating and their focus too broad. The guest is often more interested in selling his book or movie than in any idea. And the call-ins are too often irrelevant, superficial.

Talks at cultural institutions are more narrowly defined. The audience is self-selected and invested in the theme or art form in question. The need to sell is there — that’s why theaters and historic houses in the Berkshires maintain lecture series — but their growing popularity is also driven by enormous consumer interest in cultural work: why does a writer choose a subject or a director a play? How does an actress approach her work? What challenges do each of them encounter and how do they address them?

Anna Brownsted, Dana and Brenda Wineapple are not only highly intelligent women but passionate about their work.

Passion is, of course, at the core of “White Heat,” Wineapple’s examination of the epistolary relationship between the poet and the Abolitionist-Author-Minister. And she is one of those impassioned, exhaustive lecturers that you wish you had had more of at school. Her book is set in the 1860s, beginning during the Civil War when Emily Dickinson was thirty-one and Higginson, thirty-eight. He was a writer for “The Atlantic Monthly” who would command the first Union regiment of black soldiers.

Brenda Wineapple -- She couldn't resist writing about Emily Dickinson

One of his articles, “Letter to a Young Contributor,” elicited a response from the reclusive, then-unknown poet in Amherst: four poems and a question “Are you too deeply occupied to say if my Verse is alive?” He was not too deeply occupied to write back and she felt heard, read, and validated. They began a 25-year correspondence that led to the publication of Dickinson’s poetry. “You were not aware that you saved my life,” she later wrote.

What sets these talks in the Berkshires apart from your run-of-the-mill book store series or university lecture is the nature of the audience and the nature of the Venue. The library of Ventford Hall — more about this mansion and Gilded Age Museum in a forthcoming blogpost — is the perfect venue for a talk about Wineapple’s 19th century protagonists. And, judging by its questions, the audience seemed to be perfect: self-selected, highly-informed, and highly motivated.

When asked why she wanted to write about Dickinson, Wineapple replied: “What writer DOESN”T want to write about Emily Dickinson?” The prospect, however, was daunting. She didn’t “fish and fornicate” like Earnest Hemingway. Apart from her poems and letters, there are few documents of her life. We don’t know why she was reclusive nor the identity of “The Master” to whom she wrote.

What Wineapple kept “bumpIng up against” as she researched her previous book on Nathaniel Hawthorne, was a very unusual man named Thomas Wentworth Higginson, who was an early champion of Henry David Thoreau, women’s rights and physical exercise for women (in 1862, he taught women weight-lifting), was a minister, a journalist, a sometime ethno-musicologist (he transcribed Negro spirituals during his military service in the Civil War) and what was then construed as a political radical.

“The soul selects its own society,” Dickinson had written; as a real-life friend, she chose Higginson.

Wineapple blends cultural history, biography and literary criticism into a heady brew that made her listeners who had not yet read the book feel like running out to get “White Heat.”

Racism was on everyone’s mind in Shakespeare & Co’s new state-of-the art Production and Performing Arts Center (Studio 3)last Tuesday when director Anna Brownsted and actress Dana Harrison sat down to talk about “White People.” Unlike Ventford Hall. Shakespeare & Co doesn’t serve a full Victorian tea at its lecture series (the price of admission is $6 compared to Ventford Hall’s $15) but its program was, like Brenda Wineapple’s, a highly informed, engaged 30 or so people, some of whom had seen the 90-minute play by J.T. Rogers, some of whom were planning to. All wanted to talk about the issues raised in this provocative and pertinent American comedy

At 35, Brownstead is a young Texan director now finishing her degree at Central School of Speech and Drama in London. She read White People two years ago, she explained, after meeting playwright T.J. Rogers at a theater festival. His play “Madagascar” was having a reading and Brownsted was taken with Rogers’ language, his sensibility and “his way of delving into questions that he leaves for the audience to answer.” She also thought that the playwright’s subject matter — Americans encountering The Other in various ways — would appeal to then-Artistic Director Tina Packer and submitted the script tot last year’s Studio Festival of Plays.

Packer is always up for socially or politically provocative plays and had a history of encouraging women directors. and Rogers, who had originally written White People in the late 1990s, tinkered with the script after President Obama’s election put a new spin on race in America.

“People are a little scared of this play,” Brownsted said, and the audience members lost no time in asking why.

Playwright J. T. Rogers: His play White People stirs up discussion about racism in America.

“It’s scary to put on three people talking in monologue for 90 minutes,” she said initially. “Producing organizations have been reluctant.” When pressed, she elaborated: “The issues, the language. We asked a black company member to come in and watch rehearsals. It was scary for some of the actors to say some of their lines. They wondered: are these racist thoughts I’m expressing in me as a person or me as an actor?”

Dana Harrison, who portrays a backwoods North Carolina housewife and ex-homing queen in “White People” said she had more difficulty articulating the sexual than the racially-fraught content. “It’s not like the racist lines were new or came as a surprise to anyone!” she said,

Members of the audience peppered director and actress with questions: they brought up the recent Professor Gates/Police Sgt Crowley drama in Cambridge; the Obama Administration; their identification with all three characters in White People; their own difficulties in talking about race. Everyone agreed that White People broke a silence in their own lives that begged for more discussion. Anna Brownsted promised a Talkback later in the short run. “White People” plays until September 4.

Helen Epstein is the author of “Joe Papp” and “Where She Came From.”