Nissan EPORO Robot Car "Goes to School" on
Collision-free Driving by Mimicking Fish Behavior - Advanced Robotic Concept Debuts at CEATEC JAPAN 2009 -
YOKOHAMA
(Oct. 1, 2009) - In 2008, it was the flight of the bumblebee that
inspired Nissan's Biomimetic Car Robot Drive "BR23C" concept. In 2009,
fish-inspired technology takes center stage in Nissan Motor Co., Ltd.'s
new Nissan "EPORO*1" robot car concept,
which is designed to travel in a group of like-vehicles, mimicking the
behavioral patterns of a school of fish in avoiding obstacles without
colliding with each other.
Nissan will demonstrate
this breakthrough technology with a group of six EPOROs when they make
their world debut at the CEATEC JAPAN 2009, October 6 - 10 at the
Makuhari Messe.
EPORO robot car
CEATEC
JAPAN is an annual exhibition showcasing cutting-edge electronic and
information technologies. Nissan is the only auto manufacturer that has
been a participant in this exhibition since 2006. In addition to
displaying the futuristic EPORO, Nissan Senior Vice President Minoru
Shinohara will deliver a keynote speech, titled "The Future of the
Automobile with Electric Vehicles and Car Robotics Evolution," and
participate in a panel discussion on "EV leads to a society of 'All
Electrification' and 'All Mobilization.'" Nissan will also exhibit the
new Skyline Crossover's*2 current collision prevention technologies and provide test drives of an eco-drive diagnosis system utilizing an iPhone®*3 application.
EPORO Robot Car
So what do a bumblebee and a school of fish have in common? Both
demonstrate extraordinary "anti-collision" abilities, navigating
instinctively and intelligently through challenging terrain by
detecting and avoiding obstacles - just as future Nissan safety
vehicles may have the
capability to do. But where bees - and the BR23C robot car - are likely
to travel alone, the schooling behavior of fish, or a group of
vehicles, presents a far greater challenge in terms of collision
avoidance. In developing EPORO, three rules of fish behavior were
applied to its driving control.
School of fish swimming
Generically,
fish recognize the surroundings based on lateral-line sense and sense
of sight and form schools based on three behavior rules. A laser range
finder*4 is used for lateral-line sense, while UWB*5 communications technology is utilized for the sense of sight.
Fish Behavior Rules AREA 1: Collision Avoidance
Change traveling direction without colliding with other fish. AREA 2: Traveling Side-by-Side
Travel side-by-side with other fish while keeping a certain distance between each fish (to match the speed). AREA 3: Approaching
Gain closer proximity to other fish that are at a distance from them.
"We,
in a motorized world, have a lot to learn from the behavior of a school
of fish in terms of each fish's degree of freedom and safety within a
school and high migration efficiency of a school itself. In EPORO, we
recreated the behavior of a school of fish making full use of
cutting-edge electronic technologies," said Toshiyuki Andou, Manager of
Nissan's Mobility Laboratory and principal engineer of the robot car
project. "By sharing the surrounding information received within the
group via communication, the group of EPOROs can travel safely,
changing its shape as needed."
This is
the world's first development of a robot car that can travel in a group
by sharing the position and information of others within a group via
communication technologies.
While Nissan's ongoing research aims at creating collision-free vehicles based on its safety concept "Safety Shield*6,"
new technologies used in EPORO also aim to improve migration efficiency
of a group of vehicles and contribute to an environmentally friendly
and traffic jam-free driving environment.
[Keynote Speech]
Minoru Shinohara, Senior Vice President in charge of Research &
Development, will make a presentation on "The Future of the Automobile
with Electric Vehicles and Car Robotics Evolution," talking about an
impact of EV on society and a safer automotive society in the future
with collision-free vehicles.
Time and Date: 11:00 - 12:00, Wednesday, October 7, 2009
Venue: Convention Hall B, International Conference Hall
[Panel Discussion]
The trend toward the prevention of global warming and reduced
dependence on oil are expected to create new industrial fields.
Combined with new technologies, they will help contribute to a
sustainable society. In this session, titled "EV Leads to a Society of
'All Electrification' and 'All Mobilization,'" executives from leading
companies of related industries and local government officials will
discuss business opportunities and challenges for this new energy
revolution.
Time and Date: 14:00-16:00, Wednesday, October 7, 2009
Venue: Convention Hall B, International Conference Hall
* For details, please refer to the official web site.
[Other Presentations and Exhibits]
□Exhibition of Advanced Technologies for Collision-free Vehicles
Nissan will exhibit current cutting-edge autonomous safety technologies
including Distance Control Assist System, Lane Departure Prevention and
Around View Monitor with Parking Guide as well as cooperative
technologies like Intelligent Transport Systems. Nissan's latest model
Skyline Crossover, which was released in Japan in July 2009, will also
be displayed.
□Test Drive Event for Eco Drive Check with iPhone®
In September 2009, Nissan and Yokohama City began a cooperative project
called "E1 Grand-Prix," in which drivers compete in a fuel efficiency
challenge. Aiming to encourage more people to participate in the
project, Nissan will conduct a trial test ride event with an eco-drive
diagnosis system. Utilizing an iPhone®*3
application on the roads around Makuhari Messe, participants will drive
on a two-to-three-kilometer public road course and check how close they
can come to the benchmark fuel-efficiency target.
* CEATEC JAPAN: Cutting-edge IT & Electronics Comprehensive Exhibition.
Official website: http://www.ceatec.com
*1: EPORO: Abbreviation of EPisode O (Zero) Robot (Episode aiming to be CO2-free and accident-free).
*2: Skyline Crossover: Infiniti EX outside Japan.
*3: iPhone® is a registered trademark of Apple Inc.
*4: Laser range finder: Ranging sensor which measures the distance to an obstacle with reflection of laser light.
*5:
UWB: Ultra Wide Band: Short-distance radio communications technology
that measures the position of the target and the distance to it through
calculation of the time lag from transmission to reflection of the
pulse signal.
*6: Safety Shield: Nissan's
advanced and active safety concept based on the idea the vehicle that
always helps protect the people from normal driving situation to after
the collision. It focuses on supporting drivers not to let them face
the risk.
Published: December 1 2009 00:06 | Last updated: December 1 2009 00:06
A
cobalt bracelet in the shape of a wreath worth £525 and a £10 water
bottle decorated with a William Morris anemone print are among the
items the Victoria and Albert museum hopes to entice you to buy this Christmas from its online shop.
The
recession is making museums and galleries increasingly seek commercial
revenue streams, with more emphasis on online transactions. Culturelabel.com,
a commercial website that launched in July, hopes to profit from what
it sees as the relatively underdeveloped online retail operations of
museums and galleries.
David Gilbert is executive chair of
Culturelabel.com and a former managing director of Currys, the
electronics retailer. He believes the sector has not tapped its online
potential. “E-commerce is still relatively new in the cultural sector,”
he says.
Mr Gilbert hopes that aggregating museums’ merchandise will
increase their impact. The creation of a large online museum shop,
where customers can buy a Tracey Emin bag from Tate Modern or a pair of wooden owls from the Barbican, will broaden the appeal of such merchandise and open it up to new audiences.
From high street to high culture
David Gilbert compares selling cameras online at electronic goods retailer Currys with marketing cultural products.
● Pricing Camera
retailers face much fiercer competition. Cultural retailers are freer
to set their own prices, because most products are unique to the
marketplace.
● Market size There
are fewer potential buyers of cultural products than of cameras. But
the opportunity to expand the market is much greater. The camera retail
market is saturated.
● Marketing Cultural
retailers have to educate their market about the existence of their
product, whereas shoppers are already well-informed about cameras.
● Online tools The e-commerce tools used for the job are the same, such as search optimisation and pay-per-click marketing.
So
far Culturelabel.com has only British galleries and museums on board
but it is in negotiations with possible international partners.
It
is not a new idea. In 2000, Richard Price, a US entrepreneur, founded
Museumnetwork.com. Its aim was to profit from aggregating merchandise
from more than 40 museums, including New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art and London’s Tate. But it was forced to close when the dotcom bubble burst.
Mr
Gilbert is pragmatic. He says it will take three years for the
privately funded website to become viable (although he says it made a
small profit last month). But the environment is very different from
the one in which Museumnetwork.com operated, he says. Since then,
e-commerce has had time to bed down and museums and galleries have
become more commercially minded.
This year, for example, while
the iPhone topped a list of 100 cool brands, in a poll of the British
public, Tate was listed 12th, and the V&A, British Museum and Design Museum also featured on the list.
Stephen
Cheliotis, chief executive of the Centre for Brand Analysis, which
oversaw the survey, says: “It reflects a broader consumption of culture
– for example, strong cinema ticket and theatre sales. But also museums
have become savvier at seeing themselves as businesses, advertising
themselves as brands. The tie-ups between commercial brands – such as
Ernst & Young and Credit Suisse sponsoring exhibitions – mean there
has been greater crossover between the two worlds.”
‘An online retail offering can attract a new kind of visitor’
Jo
Prosser, managing director of V&A Enterprises, the trading company
of the V&A, is proud that the museum is recognised as a brand. “The
V&A stands for good design so ‘brand’ is in our DNA, our soul,” she
explains. “We’re very comfortable with the idea. We’re a commercial
museum which displays good design. We work on our products with the
creative industry and designers such as Vivienne Westwood and Betty
Jackson, and the museum has relevance to the commercial world.”
Still, UK institutions are some way behind their US counterparts. New York’s MoMA has standalone stores in New York and Tokyo.
Not
everybody in the sector is gung-ho about commercialisation, according
to Helen Watts, director of finance and administration for the British
Museum Company, the charity retail operation owned by the museum’s
trustees. She sees part of her role as winning over the curators.
“There is always a tension between curatorial and commercial teams, but
we work very closely with the collections side to get their input.
People have to be realistic about the fact that we need to increasingly
fund ourselves,” she says.
Ms Watts believes that e-commerce
has a role in persuading curatorial teams of the benefits of doing
business. “An online retail offering can attract new visitors to the
museum. It’s another way of getting collections to the world. That
helps overcome some of the hostility to commercialisation.”
Mr
Gilbert agrees. “If there’s a portion of non-gallery-goers who buy
online, then they might be more likely to do so if we promote gallery
shops online,” he says.
He denies the charge that he and others
like him are trying to dumb-down cultural attractions. “That is
fundamentally incorrect. It’s about bringing in a much wider audience
to the arts. I think people will buy stuff and then go to the gallery.
It’s a tangible hook for people who don’t know about art and are
intimidated by it. They can be drawn in.”
While museums and
galleries have become more commercially savvy, they are still lagging
behind conventional retailers on e-commerce. According to David Smith,
director of operations at IMRG, the web retail association, only about
3 per cent of the retail revenues of museums and galleries came from
online in 2008 compared to 15 per cent of overall UK retail sales.
These
numbers suggest that there is room for improvement, he says. “You don’t
see museums really pushing themselves online, so if someone is pushing
them on their behalf, it’s a good thing,” Mr Smith says.
“Moreover, they can go for the international market in a way that many British retailers can’t, due to the brand recognition.”
Ms
Watts says cultural products have become more attractive to shoppers
because of a shift in values related to the downturn. “The popularity
of museums’ retail products is in part due to people returning to core
values,” she says. “The days of people spending on disposable products
are over for the moment – they seem to want durable and valuable
products. Whether that will last beyond the recession, I’m not sure.”
Ms
Prosser says cultural retailers have to be savvy about targeting
customers. “More people are coming into the museum looking for an
interesting and inexpensive way of spending time, so they won’t spend a
lot in the shop. There’s another batch of people who care about
provenance and quality. Overall spending in our shop and website is up
but it’s because fewer people are spending more.”
According to
Ms Watts, online shopping can be a way of creating loyalty among a
younger generation. “Unlike members [of the British Museum], our online
customers tend to be women, from their late 20s and early 30s, who have
a degree and professional background.”
Culturelabel.com hopes to
persuade museums to expand their digital strategies beyond e-commerce.
The company has just announced an iPhone app, Artful, to bring images
from collections to handsets, with an e-ticketing solution and a
digital store. “We’re trying to broaden the reach of cultural
institutions,” says Mr Gilbert.
McKellen says celebrity has allowed him to finally relax as an actor. "The Lord of The Rings
changed my life," he says. "[Becoming a star] confirmed that all that
hard work, getting good as an actor, had paid off. People now accept
that I am what I always wanted to be." The proof, says McKellen, is
that he can afford to be "a bit cheeky" in the roles he chooses. What
he means is that he can do precisely what he wants. And he's achieved
that by doing exactly as he pleases. Which, whenever the curtain does
finally fall, wouldn't be a bad obituary.
In a trailer on the edge of a film set beneath an underpass in
downtown Cape Town, Ian McKellen, 69, is musing about fame and death,
and what the papers will say when he goes. " 'GANDALF DIES,' I expect,"
he says. The thought tickles him. Not the dying part. The part about
being a classical actor and having billions of fans, most of whom are
12. "When you spend as long as I have doing beautiful work which is
only seen by a few thousand people, to be involved in popular
entertainment without lessening one's standards ... that's fairly
appealing," he says. "You become part of the culture." It's not that
McKellen ever shied away from fame. On the contrary, he sought it out
"to publicise myself to people who might employ me." You might say he
overachieved. "Now it's ... well, it's gone well beyond that."
McKellen has been thought of as one of the world's great actors for
more than half his life. But in the last decade, he has also
transformed himself from a strict stage thespian — highly rated, seen
by very few — into a big screen star. This year, he can be seen on the
stage around Britain as Estragon in Waiting for Godot, and on
television in the U.S. and Britain opposite Jim Caviezel as the
villainous No. 2 in a remake (partly shot in South Africa) of the 1960s
British cult series, The Prisoner. He combines high art and mass appeal once more next year when filming begins on The Hobbit,
a fourth movie adaptation of J.R.R. Tolkien's books, in which he will
again appear as the great wizard Gandalf. McKellen claims no great
strategy for combining critical and commercial success. "How am I
expected to make sense of a career which has basically been about me
enjoying myself and hoping people would come to see me too?" he asks.
But the result, as The Prisoner's producer Trevor Hopkins
says, has been to grant him a position of which every actor dreams:
"Ian's really in a place to do whatever he wants to do." (See pictures from the 2009 BAFTAs.)
A long time ago, when a Hilton was a hotel and Big Brother was a
character in a book, there was acting and the stage — and a generation
of British actors to whom those were the only things that mattered. On
any given night in the small provincial theaters of Britain of the
1960s, you might catch the likes of Judi Dench, Michael Gambon, Ben
Kingsley, Vanessa Redgrave or Patrick Stewart plying their trade. All
were born or grew up during World War II, many in northern English
counties known for their booming diction, and all shared the same
obsession. Says Stewart, 68: "All we wanted to do was be on the stage
doing great plays with great actors. We spent years and years doing
play after play."(See the 100 best movies of all time.)
McKellen was a leading light in this group. Leaving Cambridge
University in 1961 with no formal training in drama, he dove into
British regional theater — and stayed for decades. "I took jobs other
people would not," he says. "I wanted to find out how to act. I learned
on the job." By the 1970s, McKellen and many of his contemporaries were
often to be found in one place: at the Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC)
in Stratford-upon-Avon, where the bard was born. There, in 1976, on a
bare stage in a tin hut called The Other Place that could seat 150,
McKellen and Dench gave two of the great stage performances of all
time. "No interval, but straight through," says Dench, 74, of their Macbeth.
"And not a normal kind of production at all. Plain black costumes, all
very simple in a very small, dark place. We all stood round an orange
box." The play was, as Dench says, "a breakthrough." The minimalist
production, directed by Trevor Nunn, spawned a thousand imitations. Of
McKellen, Shakespearean scholar Bernice W. Kliman gushed: "No other
actor has so well depicted the existential nausea of a man who has
chosen evil."
Fame, fortune and Hollywood should have followed. But little changed
for McKellen. "I am an RSC sort of actor," he says of his decision to
stay in Stratford. "There is nothing more sinister or enlightening than
that." Besides, the RSC was in its golden age. The concentration of
talent intensified with the arrival at Stratford of a new generation of
actors including Kenneth Branagh, Jeremy Irons, Charles Dance and Sean
Bean. By then, the veterans had developed an informal set of rules for
themselves: Take the craft seriously (Dench: "deadly"). Don't take
yourself seriously (Stewart: "That's death to creativity"). Never think
you know it all (Dench: "Absolutely fatal"). And if the part was good
and you were mindful that anything you did onscreen came from what you
learned on stage, then by all means take a role on television or in
film.
Many of them did — to both acclaim and fame. Kingsley took the lead, and an Oscar, for Gandhi in 1982. Stewart stepped into the uniform of Captain Jean-Luc Picard in 1987's Star Trek: The Next Generation. Dench took the lead in a British sitcom, A Fine Romance,
and then hit the big time in 1995, when she played M in the James Bond
films, and four years later, when she won an Oscar for her eight
minutes in Shakespeare in Love. (See pictures of the best Oscar dresses.)
McKellen didn't follow his friends to Hollywood at first. Though he
left Stratford for London and Broadway — where he won a Tony Award in
1981 for his role as Salieri in Amadeus — he stuck with the
theater. In 1988, he came out on BBC radio during a debate over a
British law, Section 28, which restricted how schools approached
homosexuality. He went on to cofound Stonewall, a gay and lesbian
rights lobby group, and regularly leads marches and protests across
Europe (joking to the crowds that they should call him "Serena" after
he was knighted in 1991).
It was campaigning that finally introduced McKellen to the joys of
mass appeal. "If you spend most of your time being a classical actor,
you do feel you are not quite in touch with what is going on in the
street," he says. "The minute you talk about gay people, you are in
touch, you are making a difference, you do really join the human race.
It was very satisfying to me."
Encouraged, McKellen decided to join the human race as an actor too.
He still takes classical theater roles, touring the world as Peter
Sorin in Chekhov's The Seagull in 2007 and as King Lear in 2008. But he now also does blockbusters, investing Gandalf with impressive gravitas in The Lord of the Rings trilogy and reveling in superior evil as Magneto in the X-Men films. And, yes, television too: a 10-week part as an author in Coronation Street, Britain's biggest soap; an Emmy-nominated turn as a hyper-homosexual version of himself in Ricky Gervais' comedy series, Extras; and, of course, The Prisoner. (See pictures of Ricky Gervais.)
McKellen says celebrity has allowed him to finally relax as an actor. "The Lord of The Rings
changed my life," he says. "[Becoming a star] confirmed that all that
hard work, getting good as an actor, had paid off. People now accept
that I am what I always wanted to be." The proof, says McKellen, is
that he can afford to be "a bit cheeky" in the roles he chooses. What
he means is that he can do precisely what he wants. And he's achieved
that by doing exactly as he pleases. Which, whenever the curtain does
finally fall, wouldn't be a bad obituary.
This focus on education is not surprising.
Journey of a Thousand Miles, Lang Lang’s autobiography, published next week in the UK, could be called Journey with a Thousand Teachers
instead. At almost every step in his life, a teacher played a crucial
role... At four, Lang Lang had his first
lessons with a woman named Zhu Ya-Fen. Her own teacher committed
suicide during China’s Cultural Revolution, when western classical
musicians were ridiculed by students. The legacy she had passed on to
Zhu was Bach and Mozart, which in turn Zhu handed on to Lang Lang. “She
was a wonderful foundation tutor. And the thing is, not many Chinese
teachers know how to play Bach. She’s probably the best Bach teacher in
China,” Lang Lang recalls. This was partly a legacy of the Cultural
Revolution, he explains: “Many of the teachers were trained in the
Soviet Union in the Russian repertoire.”
.... The two lived
off the $150 his mother sent from Shenyang every month, in an apartment
so cold that his father would get into bed first to warm it up for his
son. Life was miserable and father and son rowed bitterly over how much
he practised. After his father lost his temper one day and shouted
hysterically that Lang Lang should kill himself rather than bring shame
on the family, the boy refused to play for four months...the stand-off between father
and son was ended when a fruit-seller befriended the unhappy boy and
encouraged him to continue to play. Then his first teacher, Zhu Ya-Fen,
unexpectedly dropped by their home in Beijing after a teaching stint in
the US. She arranged for him to work with a professor who got him ready
for admission to the elite conservatory the next summer.
...what ultimately shines
through the autobiography is his father’s obsessive love for his son –
and not the outbursts that reviewers in the US, where the book was
published last year, fixated on. “In the west this is very difficult
for people to understand. Asians have a different view of life.”
Lang
Lang tells me his father said to “a [Chinese] journalist that he was
very touched by the book because he thought it showed I had grown up. I
feel proud that he didn’t get upset or anything.”
In 1997, at 15,
Lang Lang won a scholarship to the US and studied under Gary Graffman,
whose own career had been cut short by an injury to his hand. Like
other piano students at Philadelphia’s prestigious Curtis Institute,
Lang Lang was given an apartment of his own, which he shared with his
father, with its own seven-foot Steinway. Lang Lang woke in the middle
of his first night there and went to touch the piano to make sure it
was real. “It was just like heaven,” he recalls with so much feeling it
might have been yesterday. “The smallest school in the world. The whole
school is like one class of the (Beijing) conservatory. In the
conservatory you used to have five or six people fighting over a
little, stupid upright piano. You needed to have a ticket to play.”...
His
sunny persona is unaffected, and Lang Lang is on to an anecdote about
his former teacher, Graffman. “We live across the street from each
other in New York and we have parties together.” Lang Lang took a
mobile phone photo of Graffman’s flat and sent the photo to Graffman,
who immediately called back. “He said: ‘Show me, show me’ [how to take
pictures]. He’s really cute. He’s 81 and he’s into technology.” Lang
Lang’s easy melding of American slang and informality with a typically
Chinese reverence for a teacher is touching. If this is what it means
to be a global citizen, we need more like him. ===
Lunch with the FT: Lang Lang
By Rahul Jacob
Published: April 11 2009 01:29 | Last updated: April 11 2009 01:29
The
worldwide celebrity that the pianist Lang Lang enjoys makes my initial
reception at the Chinese restaurant in Paris he has chosen a little
disconcerting. The waitress appears not to understand when I say the
table is booked in the name of Lang Lang. As I am led to a small table
at the front of the restaurant, I fret that I have mangled the tones –
so crucial when speaking Cantonese and Mandarin – in pronouncing his
name. While the two words look identical in English, his given name
means “happiness and sunshine” and his surname means “educated
gentleman” in Chinese.
Happily, Lang Lang, 26, soon arrives,
dressed soberly by his flashy standards in a black jacket, black shirt
and jeans. The glow of his fame and his friendliness transforms the
scene. The manager greets him warmly and leads us to a table at the
back of the restaurant, where a bamboo screen gives us the effect of a
private room. This is a fixture at all good restaurants in Beijing and
Shanghai. I ask him if he finds it hard to dine out in China because he
is so well-known. “It is extremely hard – fortunately and
unfortunately,” he says. That remark, I later realise, reflects his
level-headed approach to being a famous pianist. He may be out of
practice ordering at Chinese restaurants, however, because our small
square table is soon heaving with a deep-fried aubergine starter,
sweetcorn soup, delicious sautéed pork and a pot of jasmine tea – and
the food keeps coming until there is barely enough room for my notebook.
No
sooner is a dish placed on the table than Lang Lang’s chopsticks are
flying over the plates as if he were conducting an orchestra, deftly
lifting food on to my plate. (At one point, he lifts a strand of pork
that I have dropped on my notebook and puts it on a side plate. He
intermittently chides me for taking notes instead of eating.) “This
restaurant is so good that every time I am in Paris I come here with
friends and relatives,” he says. He’s in town for a concert. I am just
off the Eurostar from London to meet him. He laughs when I tell him
that when I first moved from Hong Kong to London some years ago, I
looked for flats near Queensway in west London because the local
restaurants have some of the best Chinese food in the city.
I
struggle with my digital recorder for a minute and he can’t resist a
joke – “It must be British-made” – a rebuttal of the cracks people
sometimes make about the quality of Chinese-made products.
Chinese
exports have begun to move upmarket – and Lang Lang has become one of
the most public faces of the new China. He first burst into the
international consciousness in a fairy-tale debut in 1999, aged 17,
when he stood in for André Watts in front of 17,000 people at the
Ravinia festival near Chicago. He had dreamed the night before that his
piano was “a rocketship orbiting the globe”. When he finished playing
the explosive first movement of Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concerto No 1
to wild applause, his career went stratospheric. The assembled musical
luminaries, including the conductor Christoph Eschenbach, the violinist
Isaac Stern, the festival’s musical director and others, prolonged the
night by asking him to play Bach’s difficult Goldberg Variations from memory, in a private recital that began after 2am.
Ten years on, with endorsement contracts ranging from Audi and
Montblanc to Sony and Adidas, Lang Lang is often referred to as a
crossover star, a classical musician who has rock star appeal. (Adidas
now sells a Lang Lang trainer, bearing his name and gold stripes, for
$125.) He played at the Beijing Olympics opening ceremonies, and has a
huge following in both the east and west, with much-watched appearances
on YouTube. Today more than 30m Chinese people are learning to play the
piano – a popularity at least partly attributable to his meteoric
career.
With the recorder finally on, I ask him about this
month’s series of concerts and programmes with the London Symphony
Orchestra. He is particularly excited about a masterclass on April 18,
which will climax with a performance of Schubert’s March Militaire for
100 pianists of all abilities from schools in east London. This is part
of an effort he makes in several cities to make music fun for young
people.
“What I find is the problem is the image of our work.
The kids think that we are very boring people; never talk, like a
robot, and are very arrogant. [They think] we are the elite. Actually,
we’re not. We’re just a normal person. And that is the first thing we
need to change when we go to all the schools, to inspire them and to
say, ‘Look, guys, we are a normal person.’ ” Being closer to the age of
students helps as well: “Many parents say, ‘Can you say something to my
kids because if you say something they will listen.’ If you have
learned wonderful things from other people then it is important to
share that with young people.”
Lang Lang is evangelical in his
efforts to spread the popularity of classical music. For a man who does
as many as 130 concerts a year at about $50,000 each (according to
figures published in The New Yorker), he still spends a lot of time in
schools. Last November he started the Lang Lang Foundation to promote
musical education in the US, Europe and China. He is also chairman of
the Montblanc Cultural Foundation, which gives patrons of the arts
€15,000 to donate to their favourite cultural cause.
This focus on education is not surprising.
Journey of a Thousand Miles, Lang Lang’s autobiography, published next week in the UK, could be called Journey with a Thousand Teachers
instead. At almost every step in his life, a teacher played a crucial
role. Lang Lang was born in June 1982 in the northeastern Chinese city
of Shenyang. His mother was a telephone operator; his father was a
policeman by profession and a musician by vocation. Lang Guoren, who
played a two-stringed Chinese fiddle called the erhu, started
his son playing the piano at three. At four, Lang Lang had his first
lessons with a woman named Zhu Ya-Fen. Her own teacher committed
suicide during China’s Cultural Revolution, when western classical
musicians were ridiculed by students. The legacy she had passed on to
Zhu was Bach and Mozart, which in turn Zhu handed on to Lang Lang. “She
was a wonderful foundation tutor. And the thing is, not many Chinese
teachers know how to play Bach. She’s probably the best Bach teacher in
China,” Lang Lang recalls. This was partly a legacy of the Cultural
Revolution, he explains: “Many of the teachers were trained in the
Soviet Union in the Russian repertoire.”
When Lang Lang was nine,
his father gave up his job and took his son to Beijing so he could
study for a place in the prestigious conservatory there. The two lived
off the $150 his mother sent from Shenyang every month, in an apartment
so cold that his father would get into bed first to warm it up for his
son. Life was miserable and father and son rowed bitterly over how much
he practised. After his father lost his temper one day and shouted
hysterically that Lang Lang should kill himself rather than bring shame
on the family, the boy refused to play for four months.
His
autobiography reads like an Amy Tan novel: the stand-off between father
and son was ended when a fruit-seller befriended the unhappy boy and
encouraged him to continue to play. Then his first teacher, Zhu Ya-Fen,
unexpectedly dropped by their home in Beijing after a teaching stint in
the US. She arranged for him to work with a professor who got him ready
for admission to the elite conservatory the next summer.
The book
details his father’s outbursts and high-handedness but is dedicated to
him and to his mother, Zhou Xiulan. I say that what ultimately shines
through the autobiography is his father’s obsessive love for his son –
and not the outbursts that reviewers in the US, where the book was
published last year, fixated on. “In the west this is very difficult
for people to understand. Asians have a different view of life.”
Lang
Lang tells me his father said to “a [Chinese] journalist that he was
very touched by the book because he thought it showed I had grown up. I
feel proud that he didn’t get upset or anything.”
In 1997, at 15,
Lang Lang won a scholarship to the US and studied under Gary Graffman,
whose own career had been cut short by an injury to his hand. Like
other piano students at Philadelphia’s prestigious Curtis Institute,
Lang Lang was given an apartment of his own, which he shared with his
father, with its own seven-foot Steinway. Lang Lang woke in the middle
of his first night there and went to touch the piano to make sure it
was real. “It was just like heaven,” he recalls with so much feeling it
might have been yesterday. “The smallest school in the world. The whole
school is like one class of the (Beijing) conservatory. In the
conservatory you used to have five or six people fighting over a
little, stupid upright piano. You needed to have a ticket to play.”
In
spite of such fine schools as the Curtis and the Julliard, the crisis
in music education, Lang Lang says, is in the US, not in China. Perhaps
mirroring Asia’s ascendancy, while classical music audiences in London
and New York seem to be greying rapidly, in Taipei or Hong Kong it
sometimes seems as if the average age of the audience is about 10. Lang
Lang replies that in the US, budget deficits mean that “the first thing
they cut is music and art and many of the schools don’t have a music
programme any more. There’s no training really for how to listen to
Beethoven and Mozart. It’s [as] if you are a student and you don’t
learn Hugo and Shakespeare. You can’t expect someone who has never
listened to classical music to suddenly start listening to it when he
is 30 years old.”
For all his technical fluency, Lang Lang has
been criticised for “self-indulgent” playing. In part to help rein
himself in, he has enlisted the conductor and pianist Daniel Barenboim
– a former boy wonder himself – to be his latest mentor. (Lang Lang
asked the legendary Israeli musician to teach him on their first meet
ing.) Every few months Lang Lang visits Barenboim in Berlin. “He
teaches me how to control myself ... and not to let the emotion take
over the knowledge. But the thing is, you need to have the fantasies –
otherwise everyone plays the same.”
Lunch
winds down and the table is cleared away speedily – sautéed mutton,
Chinese scrambled eggs and heavy fried bread go back almost untouched –
to make room for a huge platter of exotic fruit, which we pick at until
it is time for him to go and have a nap before the evening’s concert.
Lang
Lang’s conversation roams from Beijing’s transformation into an
outward-looking city as a result of its hosting the Olympics to the
Sichuan earthquake last May. The pianist helped organise a concert to
raise money for victims. I ask about the plight of Huang Qi, an
activist jailed for championing the cause of parents of some of the
10,000 children who died when shoddily made schools collapsed. He
glides past this political question, saying he doesn’t know about it;
as a Chinese superstar, he probably deems it unwise to answer.
His
sunny persona is unaffected, and Lang Lang is on to an anecdote about
his former teacher, Graffman. “We live across the street from each
other in New York and we have parties together.” Lang Lang took a
mobile phone photo of Graffman’s flat and sent the photo to Graffman,
who immediately called back. “He said: ‘Show me, show me’ [how to take
pictures]. He’s really cute. He’s 81 and he’s into technology.” Lang
Lang’s easy melding of American slang and informality with a typically
Chinese reverence for a teacher is touching. If this is what it means
to be a global citizen, we need more like him.
Lang Lang is at the Barbican Centre with the London Symphony Orchestra from April 20; www.barbican.org.uk
Published: March 27 2009 23:25 | Last updated: April 1 2009 17:35
In
1979, an exhibition of Andy Warhol’s portraits, ranging from Chairman
Mao, Jimmy Carter and Golda Meir to Yves Saint Laurent and Liza
Minnelli, occupied an entire floor of New York’s Whitney Museum. At the
champagne opening, many of the subjects – Truman Capote, Lord Snowdon,
Sylvester Stallone – turned up as guests, confirming the show as a
microcosm of 1970s society. Critics panned the lot as shallow, boring
and brutalised, and the works have not been exhibited together since.
At
the tail end of the hippy era, the dizzy spiral with which Warhol
abandoned 1960s austerity images such as soup cans and Brillo boxes for
shameless glamour was reckoned a moral as well as an aesthetic outrage.
“The faces are ugly and a shade stoned, if not actually repulsive and
grotesque,” wrote The New York Times. Warhol responded only that the
canvases were the same size “so they’ll all fit together and make one
big painting called Portraits of Society. That’s a good idea isn’t it?
Maybe the Metropolitan Museum would want it someday.”
Or maybe not. Instead, 30 years later, in Le Grand Monde d’Andy Warhol,
Paris’s prestigious Grand Palais commemorates the series, placing it in
the context of Warhol’s long, uneven oeuvre as a portraitist from the
1960s to the 1980s. The sweeping style with which some 100 paintings
are displayed, across vast galleries linked by a belle-époque
staircase, would surely have made Warhol delirious with snobbish glee.
His best works – “Red Jackie”, “Silver Liz”, laconic 1963-64
self-portraits in dark glasses, interleaved with paintings of a
glittery dollar sign and an electric chair – have never looked more
seductive or more classical. Warhol, New York soup can prince of
conceptualism, becomes in Paris an opulent society portraitist in the
tradition of John Singer Sargent or Kees van Dongen: master of colour,
texture, clarity, precision, ravishing yet chilly, flattering even as
he anatomises triviality and brittleness.
The show opens in
1962, when Warhol discovered the silkscreening technique that would
define his portraiture. Months later Marilyn Monroe killed herself, and
the romance of her death charged him to exploit silkscreening’s
potential fully. Choosing a black-and-white publicity shot, he outlined
the shape of Monroe’s head and shoulders on canvas, painted in a
background, adding eyes, lips, face, before stencilling on the
photographic image. “Peach Marilyn” typifies the garish result:
brilliant yellow hair, chartreuse eye shadow, deep red lips, face a
pink mask set against clashing orange ground.
“Twenty Marilyns
(Marilyn in Colour)”, and “Marilyn Monroe in black and white
(twenty-five Marilyns)” repeat the image. Misprints and clogging lend
variations in tone, look, intensity, the smudges and blurs recalling,
Warhol said, out-of-focus television sets. In contrast, “Gold Marilyn”,
a single image silkscreened on to a gold field, emphasises Warhol’s
roots in Byzantine iconography. Fame, beauty, death, terror are made at
once more banal and more majestic through repetition as Warhol hit on
an original expression of themes that had obsessed him since, as a
sickly child convinced of his unloveliness, he had quivered with joy
and fright at Saturday movies and, on Sundays, before the icons at the
Byzantine Catholic church of his Slavic immigrant parents.
A
first commission followed immediately: from collector Robert Scull, for
a portrait of his wife Ethel, who, designer-dressed, expected to trip
off to Richard Avedon’s studio to be photographed for the silkscreen.
Instead, Warhol, jangling $100-worth of coins, pushed her into a
Photomat machine with instructions to “watch the little red light”.
Warhol poked, joked, jostled Ethel into hundreds of dynamic poses, then
chose those with the strongest light/dark contrasts, to make “Ethel
Scull Thirty-Six Times”. It was, said Metropolitan curator Henry
Geldzahler, “the most successful portrait of the 1960s. It was a new
kind of look at a single human being from 36 different points of view,
obviously influenced by the cinema and television. He was creating an
image of a superstar out of a woman who could have been any one of a
series of women.”
Soon Geldzahler – bulky, intellectually solid,
camp, overdressed, with piercing eyes and a massive cigar – sat for his
own double portrait. A shock-blond, eagerly curious young David Hockney
in pink and green, an aged Georgia O’Keeffe, a lanky, disorientated
Jean-Michel Basquiat in the pose of Michelangelo’s “David”, and Joseph
Beuys peering insistently through Green Party camouflage colours are
among the artists depicted here. Strict, perceptive Dominique de Menil,
nicknamed “Mother Superior”, eyes darting as if in conversation, set
against abstract panels, and her emotionally lacklustre opposite,
Baroness von Thyssen – all glitz: face flattened; ice-maiden eyes,
embellished with turquoise and full sensual mouth exaggerated; lustrous
hair melting into near-expressionist rose and violet brushstrokes – are
acute portraits of leading collectors.
Warhol’s women are
usually more interesting than his men. “He admired women. He wanted to
be one. He wanted to be involved in their creation,” suggested
Geldzahler. Among political portraits, the greatest are the 16-panel
mourning canvas “Jackie”, based on newspaper shots taken hours after
Kennedy’s assassination, painted in the blues and greys of civil war
America, and the spectacular, shifting, Technicolor images of Mao,
imbued with sexual ambiguity and a sinister play on the link between
eroticism and power.
Understanding this relationship lay at the
root of Warhol’s voyeuristic genius. “He cringed from physical contact.
It was that celibacy that gave him enormous manipulative power over the
magnificently beautiful people he brought together,” recalled his
Factory friend Gerard Malanga. Detachment, the aestheticising stare of
the ascetic as well as the dandy, determined the neutrality with which
Warhol fixed the materialistic, spiritually bankrupt mood of western
late capitalism, co-opting even Mao into his vision of psychedelic
emptiness.
The repetitions of the silkscreen process were his
double weapon here. “Isn’t life a series of images that change as they
repeat themselves?” he asked. Repetition was a lesson in looking –
every individual, every face, every expression, was different. But
Warhol also believed, according to his biographer Viktor Bockris, that
“repetition was the bane of existence ... that people never changed and
that his own problems would repeat themselves throughout his life”.
Frivolous in appearance but deadly serious in intent, his mechanical
repetitions put painting in its place, within a continuum of the 1960s
media of mass production – particularly photography – only to exalt it
again by the conviction and beauty of his painterly surfaces. This is
an utterly enjoyable show which illuminates the artist’s lifelong
concerns, methods and his discomforting, prophetic take on an epoch
that continues to shape our own.
‘Le Grand Monde d’Andy Warhol’, Grand Palais, Paris, to July 13. www.grandpalais.fr
MAN OF THE WORLD: A 17th century wall painting shows Shah 'Abbas welcoming foreigners to his court
Ebrah
By WILLIAM LEE ADAMS
When western diplomats seek concessions from Iran, they
typically dish out tough rhetoric and threaten sanctions. Neil
MacGregor, the cherub-faced director of the British Museum,
uses a more refined arsenal: cultural relics and priceless artifacts.
In January, MacGregor traveled to Tehran to finalize the loan of
treasures from eight of Iran's best museums. In exchange, he promised
to loan the National Museum of Iran the Cyrus Cylinder, a
2,500-year-old clay cylinder inscribed with decrees from the Persian
emperor Cyrus the Great. Following a request by the Iranian Vice
President's office, he also vowed to raise international awareness of
damage done to archaeological sites in Gaza during Israel's recent
military operation. The lofty maneuvering paid off: three weeks later,
dozens of crates containing Persian rugs and 17th century mosque
ornaments were winging their way to London.
At a time when more conventional channels of communication between
Britain and Iran have stalled, MacGregor's cultural diplomacy is
opening up another avenue for dialogue. The British Museum, especially
since MacGregor took the helm in 2002, has used traveling exhibitions
and curatorial exchanges to successfully engage museums from China to
North Korea to Sudan. "The more difficult the political relations are,
the more important it is to try to understand the history of the
country with whom we're having difficult conversations," he says. (See pictures of 250 years of the British Museum.)
With "Shah 'Abbas: The Remaking of Iran" the British Museum seeks to
break down the perception of Iran as a hostile state on the fringe —
politically and culturally — of the modern world. The exhibition, which
runs until June 14, brings together an astonishing collection of
Persian artifacts, many of which have never been seen together inside
Iran, let alone outside the country. The show highlights the
accomplishments of Shah 'Abbas, who ruled Persia from 1587 to 1629,
ushering in a golden age for arts and culture, and opening the country
to European trade. Says MacGregor: "He created a multi-faith society in
touch with the rest of the world. That's why now he is someone really
worth thinking about."
Given recent events, that's an understatement. On Feb. 3, one day
after Iran launched its first domestically produced satellite,
Britain's Foreign Office condemned the move, saying it raised "serious
concerns about Iran's intentions." Two days later, the British Council,
a body that promotes international cultural dialogue, suspended its
operations in Tehran citing "intimidation" of its staff by Iranian
officials. But the organizers of the Shah 'Abbas show were unperturbed.
Curator Sheila Canby says the spirit of inquiry that museums share
helps them transcend political tensions. "We've been told by Iranian
and British officials that this is just the kind of exchange that
should happen," she says. "No matter what else happens, this is a
benign and informative way to exchange ideas."
That may be true, but officials at the British Museum speak from a
privileged position. They don't answer to the government and can freely
pursue a cultural agenda with any country. For Iran's curators,
politics underscores every exchange, and sending relics abroad requires
authorization from some of Iran's most powerful bureaucrats. That makes
the Shah 'Abbas show all the more significant. "Iranians feel they are
misunderstood, misrepresented and sometimes rather snubbed by the
West," says Michael Axworthy, director of the Centre for Persian and
Iranian Studies at the University of Exeter. "There are few things the
Iranians look for more than an appreciation for where they are coming
from culturally and intellectually."
The Iran on show is a far cry from the clichéd picture of an angry,
anti-U.S. Islamic state with a Holocaust-denying President. Under Shah
'Abbas, Iran became a center of diplomacy and trade. Glorious paintings
from the early 17th century depict British envoys who traded gold and
silver for silk rugs; other prints capture negotiations in which
Iranians mingle with Uzbeks and Indians. Like his contemporary
Elizabeth I, Shah 'Abbas waged war to defend his nation's territory.
But unlike England, MacGregor says, the Shah's Iran "accommodated other
faiths," as seen by gospels beautifully illustrated by Armenian
Christians who were forcibly resettled in Iran from 1603.
The legacy of Shah 'Abbas stems from the architecture of his capital,
Isfahan. With its mosques, minarets and brightly colored tiles, the
city's vast central square remains one of the world's most dramatic
public spaces. "A lot of what he did was inspired by the rivalry with
the Ottomans," Axworthy says. "It was intended to create an impression
of magnificence so that Isfahan was taken as seriously as Istanbul."
The idea of using culture as a way to impress is as relevant today.
"For élites and those who visit museums, artistic exchanges can
contribute to soft power," says Joseph Nye, a political science
professor at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government who defines soft power as "the ability to get what you want through attraction rather than coercion."
It's an idea that's enjoying a resurgence in popularity. Last year,
ahead of the Beijing Olympics when China faced renewed criticism over
human rights, the British Museum staged exhibitions on the history of
the Games in Shanghai and Hong Kong, sending more than 110 invaluable
items, including the 2nd century marble statue The Discus Thrower,
which the museum had never allowed overseas. And on Feb. 16, the
directors of Beijing's Palace Museum and Taipei's National Palace
Museum brokered a deal to send Chinese imperial artifacts to Taiwan for
the first time in 60 years. In a show scheduled to open in October, the
pieces will be reunited with objects taken by nationalists when they
fled the mainland after losing China's civil war. Analysts interpret
Beijing's conciliatory approach as a bid to improve China's image in
Taiwan, perhaps to soften opposition to reunification. Whatever's
behind it, Beijing's more amicable stance is welcome news to Chou
Kung-shin, director of the Taipei museum. "Cultural exchanges," she
says, "are the most convenient and effective way to establish
communications across the Strait." (See pictures of the Beijing Olympics.)
There are, of course, limits to the effects of this form of diplomacy.
The Shah 'Abbas exhibition isn't likely to convince visitors that Iran
should have access to nuclear arms. But in chronicling the nation's
former glory, it may help explain why many Iranians feel entitled to
them. Curator Canby says there's also a bigger point. "I don't think of
it in terms of redressing public opinion," she says. "Museum
relationships are based on something other than politics."
That something is an appreciation of beautiful objects and the
history they embody, two things curators will go to great lengths to
protect. After U.S. troops invaded Iraq in March 2003, looters besieged
the country's national museum, stealing 8,000 objects that had come
from ancient Mesopotamia. Donny George, the Iraqi museum's former
director, phoned from Baghdad and described the situation to a
curatorial colleague in London. That curator spoke to MacGregor, who
phoned then Prime Minister Tony Blair's
culture secretary. A few hours later, U.S. tanks were moving into
position to guard Iraq's finest museum. "It was possible entirely
because of the long links kept between curators even through the worst
moments of Saddam Hussein," says MacGregor. In a world where political
relationships can be as fragile as an ancient vase, that's a lesson
leaders would be wise to remember. — With reporting by I-Ching Ng / Hong Kong
Published: March 20 2009 23:18 | Last updated: March 20 2009 23:18
Today
we think of a jig as simply a dance but in late 16th- and early
17th-century England the word was used to describe a short musical
farce featuring songs, dancing and slapstick comedy. By Shakespeare’s
time, jigs were established in the London theatres as the standard
afterpiece to more serious theatrical fare. They could be satirical,
sentimental, libellous or riotous, and often downright obscene,
offering a shameless and subversive antidote to the plays that preceded
them.
The Elizabethan poet and dramatist Thomas Dekker wrote: “I
have often seene after the finishing of some worthy tradjedy or
catastrophe in the open theatres, that the scene after the epilogue
hath beene more blacke about a nasty bawdy jigge, than the most horrid
scene in the play was.”
The origins of the stage jig are probably
to be found in the oral tradition, in the dancing, clowning and misrule
of the carnivals, May Games and festivals held in rural communities
from earliest times. As these local entertainments moved into
professional hands, the term was used to describe anything from a solo
song, dialogue ballad or dance to a full-blown mini-drama.
Cuckolded
husbands, adulterous wives, milkmaids, whores, city wide-boys, muggers
and thieves – the same stock characters turn up again and again. We
also meet lecherous soldiers, fishwives and a variety of street traders
who, as they call out their wares, get drawn into the plot. One of the
most popular characters, and often the unwitting hero of the piece, was
the gullible bumpkin who, with his country dialect, was a constant butt
of ridicule for urban audiences.
The two most celebrated
performers of jigs were strongly associated with the folk tradition.
Richard Tarlton (1530-1588) was, perhaps, the most famous clown of his
era and a favourite of Elizabeth I. He often made his stage entrance
“attired in russet with a buttoned cap at his head” playing the pipe
and tabor, instruments characteristic of a folk dancer.
Although
none of Tarlton’s jigs survive, those of his successor Will Kemp have
fared better. Kemp, a clown in Shakespeare’s company, was one of the 26
actors named in the First Folio, and the original interpreter of such
comic parts as Dogberry in Much Ado About Nothing
. He described himself as one “that hath spent his life in mad jigs and merry jests”.
With
their delight in innuendo and rude gestures, jigs seem to have been a
source of continual trouble to the authorities and disapproval from the
literary world. Shakespeare’s rival, the playwright Ben Jonson, loathed
the “concupiscence of jigs and dances”, believing they prevented
audiences from appreciating plays; Hamlet, after expounding some
particularly vulgar dialogue, calls himself “your only jig-maker”. A
contemporary satirical poet, Edward Guilpin, dismissed the “whores,
bedles, bawds and sergeants” who “filthily chant Kemp’s Jigge”, noting
how “many a cold grey-beard citizen”, on leaving the playhouse fired up
with lust, would sneak into “some odde noted house of sin” – easy to do
as theatres, bearbaiting pits and brothels were situated close together
on London’s south bank, outside the formal control of the city
authorities.
By 1612, jig performances began to attract so many
criminals and disorderly crowds – who often visited the theatre for the
jig alone with no intention of seeing the main play – that “an order
for supressinge of jigges att the ende of playes” was issued, with
instructions to arrest any players who “do persist in these outrages”.
But the effect was temporary. Audiences, educated and ignorant alike,
still demanded their jigs and during the years of the Interregnum
(1649-1660), when Oliver Cromwell declared the performance of plays
illegal and ordered the closure of the theatres, the jig came into its
own (music and dance acts were not covered by this law), drawing
riotous holiday crowds to the makeshift stages at fairs and the
temporary booths at Bankside.
The jigs were set to popular tunes
of the day and, apart from the few short sections of spoken text, one
can assume that most were through-sung. We can never know for certain
when the actors might have ignored the tunes altogether and simply
spoken the words over the music, and at certain points in the scripts
we find the instruction “the Tune Changet”’.
When I began my
research for the new recording with The City Waites, our group
specialising in the broadside ballads of 17th-century England, it was
frustrating that only about half the surviving jigs print any specific
tune titles. Yet the texts can offer clues: a scene that opens with the
words “As ye came from Walsingham” must surely have been sung to the
popular Elizabethan tune known as “Walsingham”. Elsewhere the
repetition of the words “jog on” suggests an accompaniment of the old
ballad tune of that name (also referred to in The Winter’s Tale),
while the refrain “which nobody can deny” is the title of a version of
“Greensleeves” that fits the jig text perfectly. Where no tune
connections could be made, I researched suitable tunes from
contemporary collections, including Playford’s The English Dancing Master, the Fitzwilliam Virginal Book and various lute and viol anthologies.
For
the choice of instruments I looked to those commonly heard in the
theatre, tavern and village green of the period. Parts for cittern (a
kind of Elizabethan banjo, popular in barbers’ shops), recorder and
bass viol for a “Tarlton’s Jigge” are found in the Cambridge University
Library, and I also made use of Tarlton’s famous pipe and tabor.
An
account of an English troupe performing in Germany in 1599 describes
them playing lutes, citterns, fiddles and pipes, while my choice of
percussion was partly inspired by Shakespeare’s Bottom the Weaver in Midsummer Night’s Dream:
“I have a reasonable good ear in music. Let’s have the tongs and the
bones.” Certainly the many references to dancing suggest a band large
enough to make a lusty sound, especially if we take into account a
noisy audience and an open-air environment. In our recording, the five
instrumentalists of The City Waites play not only lutes and citterns
but curtal, recorders, three-hole pipe and tabor, hurdy-gurdy,
bagpipes, fiddle and bass viol. Eight singers – early music
specialists, actors and folk artists – provide the voices.
After
the restoration of the monarchy in 1660, when the theatres were at last
re-opened, jigs found a place at civic functions and livery feasts, and
occasionally between acts in the indoor theatres. But by the end of the
17th century, under the censure of moral respectability, they had
fallen into decline. Nevertheless, the influence of this peculiarly
English style of music-theatre continued to reverberate in Purcell’s
semi-operas and John Rich’s pantomimes and ballad operas. Theatre
managers such as actor David Garrick in the 18th century customarily
propped up a faltering play with a popular afterpiece, and the spirit
of the jig can still be perceived in today’s Christmas pantomimes with
their stock characters, dancing and slapstick.
Fewer than a dozen
English jig texts have come down to us, some damaged or incomplete.
More have survived in Dutch and German, almost certainly translations
or adaptations of English jigs exported by travelling players. During
the 1580s, Kemp and his colleagues toured the Netherlands, Germany and
Denmark where their repertoire had a powerful influence on continental
Singspiel.
The jig texts are laden with period references,
innuendo and contemporary underworld cant. What went on between the
lines, though – the bawdy gestures, dance steps, instrumental
interludes and improvised spoken asides – belonged to each individual
performer, much like the ornamentation of baroque concertos. With so
little surviving information, we can only guess.
‘The
English Stage Jig: Musical Comedies from the 16th and 17th Centuries
for the Merriment and Delight of Wise Men and the Ignorant’ by The City
Waites is released on Hyperion on April 1; www.hyperion-records.co.uk
Listening to Schroeder: ‘Peanuts’ Scholars Find Messages in Cartoon’s Scores
By APRIL DEMBOSKY
Published: January 13, 2009
SANTA ROSA, Calif. — In a “Peanuts” strip from
the mid-1950s, Charlie Brown walks through the first panel and finds
Schroeder sitting in front of an adult-size hi-fi, his ear to the
speaker. “Shh,” Schroeder says, “I’m listening to Beethoven’s
Ninth.” Charlie Brown inspects Schroeder’s outfit. “In an overcoat?” he
asks. Schroeder leans even closer to the speaker and responds, “The
first movement was so beautiful it gave me the chills!”
Scholars have analyzed the scores played by the piano-mad Schroeder in
“Peanuts” and have found real Beethoven, including the “Hammerklavier”
Sonata. More Photos »
In the world of “Peanuts,” of
course, Schroeder was the Beethoven-obsessed music nerd who lost
patience when Lucy interrupted his practice and who called time-outs as
a baseball catcher to share composer trivia with the pitcher. Yet
musicologists and art curators have learned that there was much more
than a punch line to Charles Schulz’s invocation of Beethoven’s music.
“If
you don’t read music and you can’t identify the music in the strips,
then you lose out on some of the meaning,” said William Meredith, the
director of the Ira F. Brilliant Center for Beethoven Studies at San
Jose State University, who has studied hundreds of Beethoven-themed
“Peanuts” strips.
When Schroeder pounded on his piano, his eyes
clenched in a trance, the notes floating above his head were no random
ink spots dropped into the key of G. Schulz carefully chose each snatch
of music he drew and transcribed the notes from the score. More than an
illustration, the music was a soundtrack to the strip, introducing the
characters’ state of emotion, prompting one of them to ask a question
or punctuating an interaction.
“The music is a character in the
strip as much as the people are, because the music sets the tone,” Mr.
Meredith said. To understand what gave Schroeder chills, he said, you
have to listen to the musical passage. “When you actually hear the
symphony, the whole thing feels completely different.”
That
linkage is the central theme of “Schulz’s Beethoven: Schroeder’s Muse,”
an exhibition at the Charles M. Schulz Museum and Research Center here,
which was jointly organized with the Beethoven center. (It continues
through Jan. 26 at the museum and will reopen on May 1 at the center in
San Jose.)
Mr. Meredith spent more than a year identifying the
compositions, gathering recordings and reinterpreting the strips; Jane
O’Cain, the museum’s curator, researched Schulz’s artistic process and
music-listening habits.
In the resulting show visitors can gaze
upon the Beethoven strips, then tap a number into their audio guide and
hear the music Schroeder is playing.
In a strip from 1953
Schroeder embarks on an intensive workout. He does push-ups, jumps
rope, lifts weights, touches his toes, does sit-ups (“Puff, Puff”),
boxes, runs (“Pant, Pant”) and finally eats (“Chomp! Chomp!”). In the
last two panels he walks to his piano with determination and begins
playing furiously, sweat springing from his brow.
The eighth
notes above Schroeder’s head are from the opening bars of Beethoven’s
“Hammerklavier” Sonata (Op. 106), a piece so long, artistically complex
and technically difficult that it is referred to as the “Giant” Sonata.
When Beethoven delivered it to the publisher in 1819, he is believed to
have said, “Now you will have a sonata that will keep the pianists busy
when it is played 50 years from now.”
According to the exhibition
notes, classical music was as much a priority for Mr. Schulz as drawing
was when he attended art school in the 1940s. He once said of his
classmates, “We all collected classical albums, which we frequently
shared on evenings when we got together to listen to music and
challenge each other in wild games of hearts.”
Sue Broadwell,
who worked as Schulz’s secretary from 1963 to 1967, said he played
classical and other records — “he had a weakness for country western,”
she said — in his studio while he worked. “He encouraged me to take a
music appreciation course, which I did,” she said. “Every once in a
while, as I was learning different pieces, he’d whistle some for me and
I had to guess them.”
Mr. Schulz also regularly attended classical music concerts here with his family.
“He
could sit almost perfectly still the whole time, without squirming,
without crossing his legs,” said Jeannie Schulz, the cartoonist’s
widow, who helped found the museum and serves as president of its
board.
During concerts, she said, “he would pull a notebook out
of his breast pocket and write something down,” adding: “Later in the
car, he would say, ‘How would it be if Marcie and Peppermint Patty were
at a concert, and ...’ He was always thinking about his characters.”
Although
Schulz greatly admired Beethoven, his favorite composer was actually
Brahms. He simply found that the name Beethoven — the way it sounded
and the way it looked on the page — was funnier, the exhibition notes
remark.
Accuracy and authenticity are hallmarks of the strips,
whether they deal with music, sports or medical conditions, Ms. O’Cain,
the museum’s curator, said. “With figure skating, he would carefully
study books to make sure the jumps or spins that he had characters
portraying, that they were correct,” she said. He would add subtle
twists or inside jokes for readers familiar with skating or surfing or
shorthand.
Mr. Schulz also mined Beethoven’s life for material.
He had numerous books in which he underlined details about Beethoven’s
love life, clothing, even his favorite recipe (macaroni with cheese).
“I
have read several biographies of Beethoven — being strangely fascinated
by the lives of composers, much more so than the lives of painters,” he
said in 1975. As a result, Schulz fans like to point out, the strips
are as educational as they are entertaining.
“What you thought
was a funny tagline was an absolutely true story out of Beethoven’s
life,” said Karen Johnson, the Schulz museum’s director.
Beethoven’s
birthday was a perennial “Peanuts” event. Schroeder appeared in
“Peanuts” for 49 years, and the composer’s birthday was acknowledged in
27 of them. Sometime in the 1960s Mr. Schulz hosted a real-life
birthday party for Beethoven in his home in Northern California,
according to Ms. O’Cain’s curatorial research. He drew Beethoven
sweatshirts for each of the guests, two of which have been tracked
down. One with the composer’s portrait is in the show.
The
other, owned by Lee Mendelson, the producer of the Peanuts animated
specials, features a full-body drawing of Beethoven — in a Schroeder
sweatshirt.
Published: December 27 2008 02:00 | Last updated: December 27 2008 02:00
The Triumph of Music:
Composers, Musicians and
Their Audiences, 1700 to
the present
by Tim Blanning
Allen Lane £25, 384 pages
How
unusual, and how refreshing, to delve into a book that places Joseph
Haydn's first tour to London, Richard Wagner's opening of his Bayreuth
opera house, and the death of Mozart alongside a paragraph that begins:
"Inside the world of hard rock - traditionally a citadel of
uncompromising masculinity - the turning point was the death of Freddie
Mercury, the lead singer of Queen, from an AIDS-related illness in
November 1991."
In The Triumph of Music , Cambridge
historian Tim Blanning describes the story of western music with
confidence, sweeping from the question of how and when composers began
to write for posterity, rather than for more ephemeral purposes, to the
consequences for jazz of the death of John Coltrane, and the place of
mass market popular music in the social changes of our own time. He
never loses touch with the seriousness of his mission yet juggles his
sources and his observations in a dazzling and high speed display. It's
a formidable achievement.
Blanning abandons the linear approach
and deals thematically with his subjects - the composer's calling, the
nature of audiences and their patterns, the imperious march of music as
the dominant art. Discussing music's "places and spaces", for example,
he describes with a clear overview how composers were able to emerge
from the church and the great house to the opera house and the concert
hall, and how a kind of democracy was achieved. As a historian rather
than a musicologist, he gives a convincing explanation of the "triumph"
of his title, showing how the development of the composer in the
western classical tradition marched together with the popularisation of
music, and with what consequences.
In asserting that "music is
the most romantic of all the arts," Blanning maps a masterly course
from the court of the Sun King, obsessed with performance, through the
classical period to the 19th-century romantics who were able to fuse
ideas of heroism and artistic introspection with such bewildering ease.
Blanning's treatments are short - he deals with "Bach, Handel and the
Worship of God" in three pages, for example. But he conjures up such a
pace that only a weary pedant would want to stop along the way.
Underlying
his enthusiasm is the idea that even non- classical music-lovers often
have a feeling for the tradition. They understand that a Beethoven
symphony plays a heroic part in our story; that there is something
about the Italians and opera that helped to shape the country; maybe
even that there is a connection between a 20th-century tunesmith and
the old masters of the art song.
It is easy to imagine a po-faced
browser picking up this volume, noticing that the first illustration is
of Brian May with his guitar on the roof of Buckingham Palace at the
Queen's Golden Jubilee, and dropping the book in horror. That would be
a mistake. The urges that drive composers and performers cross the
centuries and every genre, and they're explained more clearly when the
story is told in this manner. Above all, it's important to demystify
the social story of music. Genius - even mere brilliance - may be
impenetrable; surely Mozart's "divine simplicity" can't be reduced to
anything more. But everything else can be explained - how audiences
changed; how musicians refined their techniques and found new
instruments; how music played its part in politics and social change.
Blanning
is too sensitive a cultural historian to suggest that the story is
fascinating simply because it can be told. He is driven by a belief in
the power of music, a feeling for its permanence. He writes with
passion and manages to cast such a wide net that he never needs to
pause to make that case: its thread runs through every page. This is a
believer's book, to be savoured.
James Naughtie is a presenter on 'Today' on BBC Radio 4 and author of 'The Making of Music: A Journey with Notes' (John Murray)
Dec 18th 2008 | BRUSSELS
From The Economist print edition
A
Tintin blockbuster is on the way. Baffled Americans hoping to
understand him should look at him through the prism of post-war Europe
Moulinsart-Studios Herge
IT
IS one of Europe’s more startling laws. In 1949 France banned
children’s books and comic strips from presenting cowardice in a
“favourable” light, on pain of up to a year in prison for errant
publishers. It was equally forbidden to make laziness or lying seem
attractive. The law created an oversight committee to watch for
positive depictions of these ills, along with crime, theft, hatred,
debauchery and acts “liable to undermine morality” among the young.
Taken
literally, the law suggests that an ideal comic-book hero would
resemble an overgrown boy scout, whose adventures involve pluck, fair
play, restrained violence and no sex. That is a pretty accurate
description of Tintin, the Belgian boy reporter who enjoyed spectacular
success in post-war Europe.
Tintin’s
slightly priggish character fitted the times. His simple ethical
code—seek the truth, protect the weak and stand up to bullies—appealed
to a continent waking up from the shame of war. His wholesome qualities
help explain the great secret of his commercial success—that he was,
and remains, one of the rare comic books that adults are happy to buy
for children.
But probity
cannot explain why Tintin became a cultural landmark in Europe, as
important on his side of the Atlantic as Superman on the other. There
were plenty of wholesome comics in post-war Europe, most of them justly
forgotten. Something else in Tintin spoke to children and adults in
continental Europe. Even in the straitened years of post-war
reconstruction, he was soon selling millions of books a year.
Admirers
point to the quality of the drawing in Tintin, and the tense pacing of
the plots, and they are right. Any child reared on “King Ottokar’s
Sceptre”, a Balkan thriller; or “The Calculus Affair”, about a
scientist’s kidnap, will later feel a shock of familiarity when
watching Hitchcock films or reading Graham Greene. It is all there: the
dangerous glamour of cities at night; the terror of a forced drive into
the forest; a world of tapped hotel telephones and chain-smoking
killers in the lobby downstairs.
Yet even
excellence does not explain Tintin’s success in Europe. For, despite
his qualities, Tintin has never been a big hit in the Anglo-Saxon
world. In Britain, he is reasonably well known, but as a minority
taste, bound within narrow striations of class: his albums are bought
to be tucked into boarding school trunks or read after Saturday morning
violin lessons. In America, Tintin is barely known.
All societies reveal themselves through their children’s books. Europe’s love affair with Tintin is more revealing than most.
Any
exploration of Tintin’s hold on continental affections must start not
with culture, but with history. For all the talk about morality,
France’s 1949 law on children’s books had ideological roots. It was
pushed by an odd alliance of Communists, Catholic conservatives and
jobless French cartoonists, determined that French children should be
reading works imbued with “national” values. Pascal Ory, a historian at
the Sorbonne university (author of “Mickey Go Home. The
de-Americanisation of the cartoon strip”), writes that the main aim of
the law—which, remarkably, remains in force today, tweaked in the 1950s
to add a ban on incitement of ethnic prejudice—was to block comics from
America.
The question
of the transatlantic gap remains current. The coming year is a big one
for Tintin. In 2009 it will be 80 years since the boy reporter embarked
on his first adventure, a trip to the Soviet Union. In Belgium a museum
is to open, dedicated to the work of Hergé, Tintin’s creator, whose
real name was Georges Remi. (His initials, when reversed, are
pronounced Hergé in French.) Even under construction, the museum is
impressive: a soaring structure of concrete and glass, wrapped around a
large wooden form like the hull of an upturned ship. The seriousness of
the architecture carries a message. This is not a theme park, but a
gallery for high art. That is an uncontroversial view in continental
Europe, especially in Belgium and France, where cartoon strips are
reviewed in critical essays and dissected in academic theses.
In America
filming is supposed to begin in earnest on a trilogy of Tintin films to
be directed by Steven Spielberg and Peter Jackson, using digital
“performance capture” technology to create a hybrid between animation
and live action. Mr Spielberg secured an option to film Tintin shortly
before Hergé’s death in 1983. The delays seem to have been caused
partly by American puzzlement at Tintin. In September 2008 Universal
Pictures pulled out of a plan to co-finance the project. The Hollywood Reporter,
a trade publication, describes the films as being about “a young
Belgian reporter and world traveller who is aided in his adventures by
his faithful dog Snowy”, and explains that this storyline is “hugely
popular in Europe”. You can almost hear the baffled shrugs.
Moulinsart-Studios Herge
As a
journalist, Tintin is spectacularly unproductive, even by the idle
standards of his trade. In all 24 albums he pauses perhaps twice to jot
down a note. He happily gives rival reporters the details of his latest
scoop. Only once is he seen with a completed article, on his inaugural
1929 trip to the Soviet Union. He briefly ponders how to get the
manuscript to his office, before yawning and heading for bed,
declaring: “Oh well, we’ll think about that tomorrow.” Four frames
later, secret policemen are climbing the stairs to arrest him, and the
article is never mentioned again.
Unlike
another fictional adolescent with a media job—the American comic
character Spiderman (portrayed as a freelance photographer in civilian
life)—Tintin is not an outsider, or a rebel against the established
order. He defends monarchs against revolutionaries (earning a
knighthood in one book). His first instinct on catching a villain is to
hand him over to the nearest police chief. He does not carry his own
gun, though he shoots like an ace. Though slight, he has a very
gentlemanly set of fighting skills: he knows how to box, how to sail,
to drive racing cars, pilot planes and ride horses. He has few chances
to rescue girls or women, moving in an almost entirely male, sexless
world, but is quick to defend small boys from unearned beatings. His
quick wits compensate for his lack of brawn. André Malraux, a French
writer and politician, claimed that General de Gaulle called Tintin his
“only international rival”, because both were famous for standing up to
bullies.
Tintin is
grandly uninterested in money. He is indifferent when—on occasion—he is
offered large sums for accounts of catching some villain. Hergé’s
disdain for transatlantic capitalism is portrayed in the 1931 “Tintin
in America”, in which businessmen bid each other up to offer Tintin
$100,000 for an oil well. When the young reporter explains the well is
on Blackfoot Indian land, the businessmen steal the land from the
Indians.
European
snobbery about money permeates the books. Villains are frequently showy
arrivistes. Old money is good. A gift (as opposed to gainful
employment) allows his best friend, Captain Haddock, to buy back his
family’s ancestral mansion. The captain takes to castle life with
relish. Enriched by a treasure find, he swaps his seaman’s uniform for
an increasingly Wodehousian wardrobe involving cravats, tweeds and at
one point a monocle.
Hergé did not
share his creation’s lack of interest in money. He paid minute
attention to marketing (in total, some 200m albums have been sold) and
the production of puzzles, colouring books and toys. Though Hergé is
routinely voted onto lists of “10 famous Belgians”, he had no illusions
about his homeland’s limitations as a market. He quickly began excising
references to Tintin’s Belgian roots to boost his appeal on the French
and Swiss markets, referring to him in 1935 as a “young European
reporter”. He was happy for English-language editions to leave the
impression that Tintin was British. Captain Haddock’s ancestral mansion
changed from the Chateau de Moulinsart into Marlinspike Hall, and his
most illustrious ancestor became a hero of the British royal navy,
rather than a commander in the fleet of Louis XIV.
Assuming that
Tintin does end up the subject of a Hollywood blockbuster, many around
the world will soon think he is American. Hergé’s heirs know Tintin’s
fame will take on quite different, global dimensions, in a way that
will be hard to control. That will mark a big change.
After Hergé’s
death, his wife Fanny inherited the rights to his work. She remains in
overall artistic control of the Hergé Studios in Brussels (day to day
the studios are run by Fanny’s second husband, Nick Rodwell, a British
businessman). The studios are known for the ferocity with which they
guard the works, scouring the world for abuses of copyright from
Hergé’s old offices on a smart shopping avenue.
Mrs Rodwell
confesses to seeing risks in Hollywood doing Tintin. To her, the charm
of Hergé’s work is absolutely “European”—more “nuanced” than an
American comic strip. The American style of telling a story threatens
that European “sensibility”, she suggests: American narratives are
“very dynamic, but more violent, and are much more aggressively paced.”
Hergé wanted
the risk taken. He died days before a planned face-to-face meeting with
Mr Spielberg, but had been briefed on the director’s thinking by a
trusted assistant, Alain Baran, sent to Los Angeles to open
negotiations. Mr Baran later wrote that Mr Spielberg saw Tintin as an
“Indiana Jones for kids”, imagining Jack Nicholson as Captain Haddock.
Such talk did not alarm Hergé. He said a film-maker like Mr Spielberg
should be given free rein, and told his wife: “This Tintin will
doubtless be different, but it will be a good Tintin.”
Such artistic
openness is perhaps surprising, given where Hergé began his career. He
always said the Catholic boy-scout movement rescued him from a “grey”
childhood in lower middle-class Brussels. From there, he fell in with a
slightly hysterical clutch of hard-right priests and nationalists, one
of whom gave him his first job, on a small Belgian Catholic newspaper,
the Vingtième Siècle, which fervently supported the monarchy,
Belgian missionaries in the Congo and Mussolini and loathed the
Bolshevik atheists running Russia and “Judeo-American” capitalism.
Tintin was born in this unpromising environment, in a weekly children’s supplement, Le Petit Vingtième.
Hergé wanted to draw cartoons about the Wild West of America. His
employer, an alarming priest named Norbert Wallez, had other ideas,
ordering that the new fictional reporter be sent to the Soviet Union,
then to Belgium’s colony in the Congo.
The 1930
story “Tintin in the Congo” has done much to feed Hergé’s reputation
for racism. Its Africans are crude caricatures: child-men with wide
eyes and bloated lips who prostrate themselves before Tintin (as well
as Snowy his dog), after he shows off such magic as an electromagnet,
or quinine pills for malaria.
Moulinsart-Studios Herge
In
Scandinavia the staggering toll of African wildlife Tintin
kills—especially a rhinoceros he reduces to blackened chunks with
dynamite—has prompted additional angst. The book remains popular in
Africa, Hergé defenders like to assert. But, in truth, it has lost any
charm it ever possessed. It is a work of propaganda—not for
“colonialism”, as is often said—but more narrowly for Belgian
missionaries, one of whom keeps saving Tintin’s life in evermore
ludicrous ways: first dispatching a half dozen crocodiles with a rifle
then rescuing him from a roaring waterfall, seemingly unhindered by his
advanced age and ankle-length soutane.
Hergé’s
reputation is also marked by charges of anti-Semitism. He received many
complaints about one of his villains, the hook-nosed New York
financier, “Mr Blumenstein”. It does not help that this caricature
appeared in “The Shooting Star”, an adventure written in 1941 while
living in Brussels under Nazi occupation. In the field of devout
Tintinologists, much effort has been put to explaining this “lapse”
away. Michael Farr, a British expert on Tintin, is typical, writing in
2001 that as soon as Hergé realised that his character was “liable to
misunderstanding”, he gave Blumenstein a different name and a new
nationality, having him hail from “São Rico”.
Tintinologists have a ready explanation too for another lapse: the fact that Hergé spent the war working for Le Soir,
a Belgian newspaper seized by the German occupiers and turned into a
propaganda organ. This is usually explained by Hergé’s “naivety”, as an
author of children’s comics (a defence also used for P.G. Wodehouse).
Alas, none of
those arguments survive a reading of a biography of Hergé by Philippe
Goddin, published in 2007. Mr Goddin’s honesty is commendable: his is
an official biography, based on Hergé’s large collection of private
papers.
Mr Goddin returns to “The Shooting Star”, and its initial newspaper serialisation in Le Soir.
This included a strip about the panic unleashed when it seemed a giant
meteorite would hit the earth. In one frame, he writes, Hergé drew two
Jews rejoicing that if the world ended, they would not have to pay back
their creditors. At that same moment in Belgium, Mr Goddin notes, Jews
were being ordered to move to the country’s largest cities and remove
their children from ordinary schools. They were also banned from owning
radios, and were subject to a curfew. In the news pages of Le Soir,
these measures were described as indispensable preparations for an
orderly “emigration” of Jews. A year later, Hergé deleted the drawing
of the Jews of his own accord, when the serialised “The Shooting Star”
became an album.
Mr Goddin
demolishes the excuse of naivety, thanks to papers found in Hergé’s
files. As early as October 1940, he records, Hergé received an
anonymous letter accusing him of luring Belgian children to read German
propaganda, by publishing Tintin in Le Soir’s youth supplement.
A few months later, Hergé had a bitter argument with an old friend,
Philippe Gérard. In a letter, Gérard demanded Hergé either endorse the
“odious propaganda” of Le Soir or make his disagreement with the German occupation known. Saying it was just “a job” would not do, his friend concluded.
By way of
reply, Hergé offered a defence of neutrality. “I am neither pro-German,
nor pro-British,” he wrote back. “As I can do absolutely nothing to
hasten the victory of either England or Germany, I watch, I observe and
I chew things over. Calmly and without passion.” His aim was to remain
an “honest man”, Hergé wrote, which did not mean shouting “Heil Hitler”
or volunteering for the Waffen SS. Some said German occupiers were
pillaging Belgium. An honest man had to acknowledge this was not true.
There is a
link between Hergé, this disappointing man, and his creation Tintin,
who fights against despots so bravely. It lies in the rationalisation
of impotence: a very European preoccupation.
The key to
Tintin is that he has the mindset of “someone born in a small country”,
says Charles Dierick, in-house historian at the Hergé Studios. He is
“the clever little guy who outsmarts big bullies”. And as a little guy,
even a clever one, Tintin’s bravery works within limits: he rescues
friends, and foils plots. But when he finds himself in
Japanese-controlled Shanghai, in “The Blue Lotus”, he can do nothing to
end the broader problem of foreign occupation.
Hergé’s final
complete adventure, the 1976 “Tintin and the Picaros”, offers the
clearest expression of this doctrine of neutrality. Tintin finds
himself summoned to rescue old friends from a civil war between two
Latin American warlords. One general is backed by “Borduria”, a
fictional but identifiably Communist-block nation. The other is
financed by the (presumably American) International Banana Company.
Tintin does not take political sides. He contents himself by backing
the rebel general in exchange for his friends’ freedom, and a pledge
that the revolution will be bloodless, with no executions or reprisals.
That focus on the death penalty is an extremely European way for Tintin
to remain a “man of good faith”, to borrow a phrase Hergé used about
himself. There is no wild talk of promoting democracy, or even regime
change.
Interviewed
late in life, Hergé acknowledged the links between his wartime
experiences and his moral outlook. The second world war lies behind a
great deal in Tintin, just as it lies deep beneath the political
instincts of many on the European continent. It matters a lot that the
Anglo-Saxon world has a different memory of that same war: it is a
tragic event, but not a cause for shame, nor a reminder of impotence.
Tintin has
never fallen foul of the 1949 French law on children’s literature. He
is not a coward, and the albums do not make that vice appear in a
favourable light. But he is a pragmatist, albeit a principled one.
Perhaps Anglo-Saxon audiences want something more from their fictional
heroes: they want them imbued with the power to change events, and
inflict total defeat on the wicked. Tintin cannot offer something so
unrealistic. In that, he is a very European hero.
The
worldwide celebrity that the pianist Lang Lang enjoys makes my initial
reception at the Chinese restaurant in Paris he has chosen a little
disconcerting. The waitress appears not to understand when I say the
table is booked in the name of Lang Lang. As I am led to a small table
at the front of the restaurant, I fret that I have mangled the tones –
so crucial when speaking Cantonese and Mandarin – in pronouncing his
name. While the two words look identical in English, his given name
means “happiness and sunshine” and his surname means “educated
gentleman” in Chinese. 
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