Gay wrestling
La Cieca should know by now that any think piece that kicks off with the locution “I have from time to time wrestled with this conundrum” is just going to piss her off and she should just close the tab. But she didn’t, and this is what she found a little lower down (in more than one sense of the word):
I have always been rather disgusted by Benjamin Britten’s distinctly unhealthy interest in young boys. There is no proof he ever engaged in sexual activity with any of them: but his behaviour would today come under the heading of “grooming” and he would have been put on the sex offenders’ register. Much of Britten’s music I find magnificent; he is possibly the only true genius among our 20th-century composers. Yet the homoeroticism of some of his later works, or rather the paedophilia, I find repulsive
That this same Simon Heffer manages to drag in the tiredest of all Wagner canard (the Ring is “laden with half-hidden hints of anti-Semitism”) doesn’t surprise me in the least: those who triumphantly spout one bit of received wisdom are likely to believe just about anything they’re read a hundred times before.
But let La Cieca stay within her bailiwick here and simply remind the smarmy Mr. Heffer that “homoeroticism” and “paedophilia” are two distinctly different things, the confusion of which has led to much hatred and discrimination against gay people. If he finds homoeroticism repulsive, at least he should be be man enough to say it straighforwardly, not with the weasel words he chose.
65. LC
I know the Indian boy is in Shakespeare’s MSD and that there is nothing about sex mentioned in relation to the boy in either play or opera. My question though is why is Oberon willing to risk his marriage for an (underaged) boy and go through all of that crap? Is it a battle of wills? To prove some point? Not too sure about his motives.
You are right about 2nd hand gossip … but as I said I was just saying what I heard. So I repeat, it is what I heard and not what I know for a fact to be true.
However, all this still doesn’t change what I think about her boring music though.
Absolutely correct Noel- in the Polanski case, two people taking pills before sex is a long way from “one deliberately drugging the other” as the media continually reports on.
This talk of ‘another side to the story’ is pure hearsay, and it’s hearsay because Polanski wanted it to be. If he had felt that his treatment was going to be unfair, he could have withdrawn his guilty plea and stood trial.
As it is, he chose to run and therefore let the guilty verdict stand. What people reckon might have happened is very very secondary to that.
Marquise: The Indian Boy is a MacGuffin. He could just as well be a jeweled statue of a falcon or a Champagne bottle filled with uranium.
armerjacquino #73, I agree Polanski had only to present his “side” to the story in a trial. As it stands now, the victim’s grand jury evidence is devastating; 13-year-old girls are human beings, not toys to be used and discarded by men who believe they are above the law.
Most of us that want Polanski to pay for his crimes are expressing the best parts of American culture, the belief in the rule of law and equality. The same way Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld should be prosecuted for their crimes, so should Polanski.
74 cara
For Shakespeare the boy may well have been a MacG – but for Britten Im sure it had another significance. At least this is my belief. Is it so important that we agree on this point?
Let’s talk about Renaaay’s upcoming Armida instead…
Marquise: I think it’s important that we realize that your argument is circular. You note that Britten put an undue emphasis on relationships with children in his operas, and you use the Indian Boy as an example. Then you admit that the Indian Boy as presented in the opera receives no particular emphasis, but then you say you’re sure the motif meant something special to Britten. So it seems to me that that all you’re saying is that you have heard gossip about Britten’s private life that makes you uncomfortable and that the fact that a character in an opera of his happens to be a young boy reminds you of that gossip. This seems to me a very insecure basis for textual criticism.
Cieca,
My two points are:
1. BB’s obsessesion with portraying children in unusual relationships in his works: Turn of Screw, Peter Grimes, DiV, etc.
2. Oberon is obsessed with getting the boy and NOT a champagne bottle full of uranium or a Maltese falcon. If the boy were a falcon or uranium I’d think differently of the situation and Oberon’s/BB’s motivation. Shakespeare’s motivation is a dif story, I think.
And what is Shakespeare’s motivation, and what makes it so different from Britten’s?
The play is pretty unequivocal:
‘For Oberon is passing fell and wrath,
Because that she as her attendant hath
A lovely boy, stolen from an Indian king;
She never had so sweet a changeling;
And jealous Oberon would have the child
Knight of his train, to trace the forests wild;
But she perforce withholds the loved boy,
Crowns him with flowers and makes him all her joy’
I just want to correct Alexthymia in her comment 49 if she thought I, in (comment 39) was trying o make out any case for liberalizing the matter of sex and children. Lady, you are way off the mark. I simply gave a report of a situation where someone had indeliable impressions of sexual fantasies of intimacy, at age 7 using a a perfectly innocent adult as his own created ‘role model’ A person who showed no untowards sign whatsoever to him, as that child. I was showing that children in a era, when shielded from all talk of sex, in fact completely ignorant of ‘how babies are made’ still had
instinctive ‘sexual impulses’.
What happens after such situations, I was not in any way advocating. I was just stating what actually did. Make what you want of it.
Well Alexthymia :Lady, you have me so wiled up at your off the mark accusations I now will reveal who the child was. IT WAS ME! That blows your hysterical argument and conjecture right out of the door!
Print it!