Latest news with #FuneralMarch
The Guardian
27-03-2025
- Politics
- The Guardian
Is coup trial ruling the beginning of the end for Bolsonaro and his supporters?
There were cries of joy in progressive parts of Rio on Wednesday as Brazil's supreme court ruled that the former president Jair Bolsonaro should stand trial for an alleged coup plot. 'No amnesty! No amnesty!' one elated lefty roared from his balcony into the sunny autumn afternoon. Across the bay in the city of Niterói, the composer Edu Krieger was so delighted by the prospect of Bolsonaro serving time he wrote a song – a parody of a Tom Jobim bossa nova classic called Waters of March – celebrating the downfall of the 'coup-mongering fascist'. 'It was a feeling of relief,' Krieger, one of many progressive Brazilians who abhor the far-right populist for his attacks on culture and human rights, said of the court's decision. Thousands of miles north, deep in the Amazon, the Yanomami leader Júnior Hekurari also voiced satisfaction. 'Never before were we so abandoned by the Brazilian state [than during Bolsonaro's 2019-23 administration] … His words encouraged thousands of illegal miners to infiltrate our forests, bringing mercury, violence and environmental destruction,' Hekurari recalled. Bolsonaro's critics have said they hope this week's ruling will end his divisive and hate-filled 36-year career, in which the paratrooper-turned-politician underwent an astonishing transformation from eccentric backbencher to the country's most powerful man. 'He turned his back on us – and now the world can see the consequences of his acts,' said Hekurari, condemning how Bolsonaro's 'negligence and omission' plunged his Yanomami people into a deadly crisis of hunger and pain. Bolsonaro's future looks bleak after the unanimous ruling. When he goes on trial, possibly later this year, few believe the politician will escape punishment for allegedly leading a murderous conspiracy to stop his left-wing successor, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, taking power after his 2022 election win. Those crimes could earn the 72-year-old a sentence of more than 40 years. As she voted for Bolsonaro to be put in the dock, the supreme court justice Cármen Lúcia Antunes Rocha launched a searing attack on the kind of authoritarian takeover the far-right politician is accused of plotting. 'Dictatorship kills. Dictatorship lives off death – not just the death of society and of democracy, but of human beings made of flesh and bone who are tortured, mutilated and murdered,' she said. Bolsonaro tried to strike a defiant tone during a rambling, peevish 45-minute pronouncement to reporters, insisting he was innocent of 'unfounded' accusations. 'I'm not obsessed with power, I have a passion for Brazil,' he shouted, before a prankster trumpet player gatecrashed the press conference with a sarcastic rendition of Chopin's Funeral March. Maria Cristina Fernandes, a columnist from the Valor Econômico newspaper, said she believed Bolsonaro cut a diminished figure. 'It was the speech of someone who is bewildered, who doesn't have a strategy … I saw a Bolsonaro who was lost and I think [in his position] anyone would be,' she said. Fernandes said she thought Bolsonaro – who she expected to be convicted – would try to grab two lifelines as he battled for political survival. The first involved securing a presidential pardon by helping to elect a right-wing president in next year's election, in which he is banned from running. Bolsonaro had hoped his congressman son, Eduardo, might stand in his place. But Fernandes said she believed the court's verdict meant he would instead be compelled to support São Paulo's less radical right-wing governor, Tarcísio de Freitas, who stood a better chance of winning. Secondly, Fernandes said, Bolsonaro would fight to ensure a large number of right-wing senators were elected, wagering they would help impeach the supreme court judge Alexandre de Moraes – the man Bolsonaristas suspect would spearhead efforts to strike down any such pardon. 'This is Bolsonaro's absolute top priority,' she said. It is far from certain Bolsonaro will achieve those goals. When the ex-president summoned supporters to rally on Rio's Copacabana beach this month, allies anticipated a million-strong crowd. About 18,000 people turned up, according to an estimate by one of Brazil's top universities. 'For me, the protest in Copacabana was a sign that people want to turn the page,' Fernandes said. 'I really think Bolsonaro is running the risk of becoming yesterday's news. 'I'm not saying Brazil's right and extreme right are doomed,' she added, but Bolsonaro looked a spent force and the populist's hopes of staging a Donald Trump-style comeback were not good. 'Voters want to look to the future.' Not everyone is so sure. Bernardo Mello Franco, a political columnist for the newspaper , said he also expected Bolsonaro to be found guilty and jailed – if he didn't flee abroad or hide in a foreign embassy first. Mello Franco said he believed the ex-president was hoping the 'global extreme-right alliance' – spearheaded by Trump and Elon Musk – might somehow rescue him, even if the US president appeared to have more urgent priorities than a septuagenarian South American politician who no longer held power. But was Bolsonaro truly finished? 'In Brazil, we can never say someone's politically dead and buried,' Mello Franco replied. 'Just look at the case of President Lula,' whose career looked over when he was jailed in 2018 but reclaimed the presidency four years later. 'Sometimes people seem to be out of the game and then suddenly there's a twist.' Krieger, the musician, voiced similar fears. 'When it comes to politics, everything is so unpredictable,' Krieger said, warning of the emergence of a new generation of social media savvy far-right figures. 'While it might be the end of the road for a specific person, it isn't, unfortunately, the end of the road for conspiratorial, coup-mongering, fascist ways of thinking,' he said. 'This seed wasn't planted in Brazil by Bolsonaro – it was planted more than 500 years ago when Brazil was invaded by the Europeans, and native people began to be exterminated and slavery [took root] … These far-right ideas are still very much alive.'
Telegraph
23-03-2025
- Entertainment
- Telegraph
‘My mind was wearing away': what it feels like to take on the ultra-marathon of music
Next month, one of classical music's rarest monsters will be heard on the stage of London's Southbank Centre: Erik Satie's Vexations. The famed pianist Igor Levit will play this extraordinary piece, which can last anything from 12 to 20 hours, depending on whether the musician canters through at speed or, more commonly, at a reverent slow tread. (On past form, the German will clock in at the 'quicker' end.) There is no work stranger and more extreme, nor more threadbare and apparently simple. It consists of just one page of music: we hear a strange, gaunt little melody, accompanied by disconcertingly ambiguous chords, which stops rather than actually ending. Then – as if that weren't austere enough – we hear the bass line of those chords again, followed by the same hollow-eyed procession of harmonies with the notes swapped round, then the bass again. That is the sum total of the musical material of Vexations. And yet this bowl of extremely thin gruel has become one of the cornerstones of cutting-edge music. For playing the piece once, as above, isn't sufficient. On the manuscript, Satie wrote in his exquisite hand that 'in order to play the motif 840 times in succession, it would be advisable to prepare oneself beforehand, and in the deepest silence, by serious immobilities'. That note has been taken, from the outset, as an instruction to repeat the piece 839 times. Levit will almost certainly follow suit. Yet notice the wording: Satie does not say 'this piece must be played 840 times'. He only says that anyone who wishes to play the piece 840 times has to be spiritually prepared. Given his reputation as a joker, it's surprising more people haven't wondered whether this is a typical piece of Satie mischief. One imagines him in some musical heaven, still dressed in his signature banker's suit and bowler hat, tittering at our gullibility. After all, this is the man who once co-authored pieces he labelled 'musique d'ameublement', or 'furniture music'; such stuff was designed to be ignored, and at the first performance, Satie ran around advising the bewildered audience to keep talking and not to listen too hard. He once wrote a set of three pieces called Desiccated Embryos, which portray various species of crustacean: one piece quotes Chopin 's Funeral March, which is described in the score as 'a famous mazurka by Schubert'. And Satie loved to pepper his scores with silly performance directions, such as 'play like a nightingale with toothache', 'don't eat too much' and 'with great kindness'. But, no. Rather than take Vexations as a joke, posterity's judgment has been to take it very seriously indeed. On the strength of this tiny-yet-huge piece, Satie has been hailed as a spiritual godfather by all those experimentalists who placed a bomb under classical music in the mid-20th century. The best known of them is John Cage, who liked to quote Satie's dictum that 'boredom is mysterious and profound' – and went on to compose enormously long, aimless pieces himself, devised with the aid of chance procedures such as tossing a die. He wasn't the only one. The young artist Joseph Beuys loved Satie, as did Andy Warhol. So, what is Vexations all about? The most straightforward answer is that when Satie composed the piece in 1893, he was indeed vexed, and needed to get something out of his system. The cause of his upset was the painter Suzanne Valadon, who had started life as a circus artist and turned to painting after an injury. Valadon had become a denizen of the Montmartre café scene in Paris, hanging out with and often posing for the great artists of the day, such as Puvis de Chavannes and Toulouse-Lautrec. It was probably over a glass of absinthe in Le Chat Noir that she met Satie, who in the early 1890s was struggling to establish himself as a composer. He had already achieved some small fame with his Gymnopédies, piano pieces that had caught the attention of two more successful composers, Maurice Ravel and Claude Debussy. They acknowledged their debt to his graceful 'Grecian' melodies – but with a note of condescension that the insecure Satie surely noticed. By the time he met Valadon, Satie was leading a strange double life. By night, he was a cabaret pianist, making the six-mile journey to Montmartre on foot from his austere single room in the south of Paris, stopping often for a fortifying glass of absinthe along the way. By day, he was a composer of strangely austere music, some of which sounds quite close to Vexations. At this point, Satie was in his 'mystical' phase, composing music for a peculiar form of Rosicrucian ritual led by one of Paris's many occultists, while setting up as the pope of a rival 'church' of his own. The relationship between the eccentric Satie and the fiery Valadon was over in six months. It's fairly clear that this break-up was the inspiration for Vexations, as the harmonies are identical to those contained in a musical 'greeting' sent to Valadon by Satie. Most men would mark a break-up with sardonic humour, or anger, or desolation. Satie, true to form, marked it with a piece that seems to leave all human feeling behind. But that doesn't mean it's empty. For a composition so seemingly thin, Vexations is rich in cultural resonances. The alternation of harmony and bass line reminds us of church music, and the ingenious construction from the scantest material is 'minimalist' before the term was invented. However, the actual inspiration behind the repetition of almost-identical harmonies may have been the clever-clever poetry – in one style, almost every word in two lines would rhyme – dreamt up by the cabaret poets with whom Satie drank. Lurking under the troubling, almost aimless harmonies is an extraordinarily strict compositional method. Almost all the chords are of just one type, and they're disposed in a way that foreshadows the 'mathematised' music of the next century. In short, this exiguous little piece is remarkably full under the surface. But can it sustain 840 repetitions? And isn't that an endurance test that would tax most performers beyond their limit? One common solution to the endurance problem is to perform the piece with a team of pianists, each of whom plays for one or two hours before handing over to the next. While one pianist edges gently off the piano stool, the next slides gently on, picking up those chords without an audible break. This was the method used by Cage when he organised the first ever public performance of Vexations, at the Pocket Theater in New York City in September 1963. Among the pianists were experimental musicians such as David Tudor and Christian Wolff, but there was also Joshua Rifkin, who later became famous for popularising the ragtime composer Scott Joplin, and The New York Times critic Howard Klein, who was roped in to play. Wolff recalled that at first the style of playing varied from 'the most sober and cautious to the wilful and effusive'. But after a while, 'the more expansive players began to subside, the more restrained to relax... the music simply took over. At first a kind of passive object, it became the guiding force. As the night wore on, we got weary, or rather just sleepy, and the beautiful state of suspension of self now became risky.' Stephen Montague, a London-based American composer and pianist, is a grizzled veteran of Vexations, having taken part in four or possibly five performances in the past 50 years. (It's symptomatic that he can't quite remember whether it's four or five. Vexations defeats memory at every level. Even after playing this little piece hundreds of times, pianists can forget how it goes.) 'The first half-hour is easy,' Montague says, 'but after that it's a massive challenge to keep one's concentration. It's so easy to forget whether you've just played the bass line or the first harmonisation, so you don't know what comes next. The piece is so simple, but it's actually very tricky to hold in your mind, so you rely on muscle memory – and that's always a disaster because it sends the mind to sleep.' Does he try to make his contribution sound individual in some way? 'No, I try to fit with the overall mood, which is what I think most pianists do, but the interesting thing is that each performer does sound a little different to the one before. Maybe adding something a little individual each time round is the only way to stay sane.' That's the 'team' method. But what about those heroic or possibly foolhardy souls who decide to perform the entire piece solo? The pianist Peter Evans tried in 1970 and wished he hadn't. He gave up after the 595th repetition, as he felt his mind was 'wearing away. I had to stop. If I hadn't stopped, I'd be a very different person today. People who play Vexations do so at their own peril.' Levit, who'll begin playing on the morning of April 24, is clearly made of sterner stuff. He knows he can pass the endurance test, having done a live-streamed performance of Vexations from his studio during lockdown. In fact, if anything, he actually seems to enjoy playing the piece. In 2020, before embarking on the pandemic recital, he declared that 'the sheer duration... doesn't feel like a nuisance or torture to me, as the title would suggest, but rather a retreat of silence and humility, reflecting a feeling of resistance'. Perhaps next month's concerts really will be a sublime experience, for Levit and his audience. But I can't help suspecting that Satie's ghost will be laughing behind one raised hand. Igor Levit performs Vexations at the Southbank Centre, London SE1, ( on April 24
Telegraph
17-02-2025
- Entertainment
- Telegraph
Götterdämmerung, Regents Opera: an ambitious, skeletal take on Wagner
Mounting Wagner's massive Ring cycle in a venue that has been described as 'the spiritual home of British boxing' takes some imagination. But Regents Opera has never been short of either imagination or ambition; they previously staged the first three instalments of their scaled-down Ring at the Freemasons Hall in Covent Garden. Now they have moved to York Hall in Bethnal Green (a leisure centre that was formerly a sports hall with a famous boxing ring) for Götterdämmerung as the tortuous struggle for the Ring reaches its climax in a death-filled denouement. It's an effective but problematic venue, since the audience wraps around three sides of the small platform, leaving the reduced orchestra slightly stranded at the back, on the hall's raised stage. The positive result is a quite exceptional level of direct communication between singers and audience, which was galvanised with attention throughout the five hours of this denouement of the cycle, especially as the personal conflicts reached a height of intensity. The skilful reduction of the band (by Ben Woodward, the conductor) down to 23 players from Wagner's gargantuan forces means 6 violins instead of 32, some woodwind and trumpet, though there are five horns and a bass trombone, with an occasional organ to add weight. The music flows constantly, and only occasionally flags in some interludes: inevitably perhaps, the climactic Funeral March for Siegfried does not make its earth-shattering impact in this form. Regents Opera have built a solid following for their ambitions, and their achievement is to be judged on the highest level: they fielded a cast with some outstanding singer-actors, led by the glorious Brünnhilde of Catherine Woodward, resplendent and assured both in passion and anguish, as the opera leads to her immolation. Her Siegfried, Peter Furlong, is commendably accurate but drier of tone, yet she is well matched by Simon Wilding's commanding, evil Hagen, manipulating all around him, disposing of his father, brother, and Siegfried to recapture the Ring, until the three Rhinemaidens (Jillian Finnamore, Elizabeth Findon and Mae Heydorn) bundle him into the river. The other standout singer is Catherine Backhouse as Waltraute, her long accusatory monologue to her sister Brunnhilde perfectly sculpted; the preening Gunther of Andrew Mayor and the red-head siren Gutrune, Justine Viani, are not quite on this level. Oliver Gibbs's Alberich has only a brief return in this opera, firmly grasped; the black-garbed chorus of Vassals, members of the London Gay Men's Chorus, are admirably forceful. It is the gripping personal interactions between the characters in Caroline Staunton's direction that makes her view of the drama work. There is no magic Tarnhelm helmet to enable disguises, and no funeral pyre for Brunnhilde, just a constant fussy rearrangement of white blocks on the platform, and irritating references to Entartete Kunst (the Nazis' Degenerate Art) which seem to be the puzzling reason why there's a fire extinguisher, cans of beans and a cactus on stage. Stripped to its essence in drama and music, this Götterdämmerung has great potential, and needs no elaboration.
