An Italian opera about a Chinese princess, based on a Persian story about a Russian princess (whose name nevertheless means “daughter of Central Asia” in Persian), where the central moral seems to be the importance of having a strong password: Puccini’s Turandot (Operavox, 1995), presented in the style of Chinese art.
The title character beheads suitors and tortures slave girls, but – as in yesterday’s Winter’s Tale – the ruler’s horrific misbehaviour is all forgiven at the end, because Love.
Note the copyright reference at the beginning; Turandot premiered in 1926, making it the only work adapted for the Middelboeverse that is recent enough to be still under copyright.
In his favourite author he is not shocked with the continual breaches of probability, the confusion of times, the offences against manners, the trampling upon geography; for he knows nothing of geography and chronology, and he has never examined the grounds of probability. He perhaps reads of a shipwreck on the coast of Bohemia; wholly taken up with so interesting an event, and only solicitous for the fate of his hero, he is not in the least troubled at this extravagant blunder. For why should he be shocked at a shipwreck on the coast of Bohemia, who does not know but that Bohemia may be an island in the Atlantic ocean?
— Edmund Burke
Shakespeare wrote several plays about shipwrecks; in addition to The Tempest (yesterday’s Middelboeverse entry), there’s also Twelfth Night, The Winter’s Tale, A Comedy of Errors, and Pericles, Prince of Tyre.
I’d intended to follow up yesterday’s The Tempest with the Middelboeverse version of Twelfth Night, but it doesn’t seem to be available online.
However, there’s also a Middelboeverse version of The Winter’s Tale (“Shakespeare: The Animated Tales,” 1992), and that one is online, so here ya go:
As for the Middelboeverse Twelfth Night (likewise “Shakespeare: The Animated Tales,” 1992), you can at least see some clips from it in this compilation:
Yesterday I was reading through a collection of mediæval verse when, in the section on the 15th-century poet and scalawag François Villon, I came across two poems that were remarkably similar to two songs in Brecht and Weill’s Threepenny Opera. I did some googling, and yes, this is well-known (and Brecht apparently borrowed more than just the two I’d found), but it was news to me.
What though the beauty I love and serve be cheap,
Ought you to take me for a beast or fool?
All things a man could wish are in her keep;
For her I turn swashbuckler in love’s school.
When folk drop in, I take my pot and stool
And fall to drinking with no more ado.
I fetch them bread, fruit, cheese, and water, too;
I say all’s right so long as I’m well paid:
“Look in again when your flesh troubles you,
Inside this brothel where we drive our trade.”
But soon the devil’s among us flesh and fell,
When penniless to bed comes Madge my whore;
I loathe the very sight of her like hell.
I snatch gown, girdle, surcoat, all she wore,
And tell her, these shall stand against her score.
She grips her hips with both hands, cursing God,
Swearing by Jesus’ body, bones, and blood,
That they shall not. Then I, no whit dismayed,
Cross her cracked nose with some stray shiver of wood
Inside this brothel where we drive our trade.
When all’s up she drops me a windy word,
Bloat like a beetle puffed and poisonous:
Grins, thumps my pate, and calls me dickey-bird,
And cuffs me with a fist that’s ponderous.
We sleep like logs, being drunken both of us;
Then when we wake her womb begins to stir;
To save her seed she gets me under her
Wheezing and whining, flat as planks are laid:
And thus she spoils me for a whoremonger
Inside this brothel where we drive our trade.
Blow, hail or freeze, I’ve bread here baked rent-free!
Whoring’s my trade, and my whore pleases me;
Bad cat, bad rat; we’re just the same if weighed.
We that love filth, filth follows us, you see;
Honour flies from us, as from her we flee
Inside this brothel where we drive our trade.
Rain has unsmirched and washed us
And the sun has dried and blackened us;
Magpies and crows have carved out our eyes,
And torn off our beards and eyebrows.
We never sit for a moment;
Now here, then there, as the wind changes,
at its pleasure, without cease it tosses us,
More pecked by birds than thimbles,
Do not then be of our brotherhood,
But pray God that he wills to absolve us all! …
Human brothers who live after us,
Do not have your hearts hardened against us,
For, if you take pity on us poor fellows,
God will sooner have mercy on you.
You see us tied here, five, six:
As for the flesh, that we nurtured too much,
It is already long-time consumed, and rotting,
And we, the bones, become ashes and powder.
Of our pain let no one make fun,
But pray God that he wills to absolve us all!
with this Brecht song:
I’ve used the Threepenny Opera versions from the excellent Raul Julia stage production (not to be confused with the sadly unbearable Raul Julia movie version) because the translations are more accurate than most.
Here’s another version of the “Zuhälterballade,” featuring Alan Cumming and Cyndi Lauper. This translation is in some respects more accurate, and in other respects less accurate, than the Raul Julia / Ellen Greene version above:
While I’m on the subject of Threepenny Opera, I can’t resist adding this performance of “Seeräuber-Jenny,” by Anne Kerry Ford. This song has nothing to do with Villon, and the translation is not terribly accurate, but Ford’s performance is amazing:
For comparison, here’s the Ellen Greene version – a more accurate translation, and an excellent performance, but not quite as excellent as Ford’s:
