Traditions on Christmas Eve

This morning Ge. and T. bought our Christmas tree from the stand just down the street. It is a plump fir, about four foot tall, and it cost fewer than 30 Euros. With Ge.'s help, Mama set it up on a table in the corner room, and then decorated it.

In the afternoon I decided to go to the Christmas fair at Unter den Linden. So I set off in the U-Bahn, which was not as empty as one might expect, emerged at Französische Straße, and leisurely strode along the two blocks to Unter den Linden. The linden trees have been illuminated by slender tubes of lights that run along the branches, a river of light along which the dark, warmly swathed shapes of passersby made their way. The people were mostly wandering in groups and speaking French or Polish. In front of the Staatsoper an ice skating rink was open, so a modest crowd swept to and fro on it to music, or watched from the perimeters, and two rows of white tents offered seats and warm food and corporate advertising. I walked through to the actual Weihnachtsmarkt. The wooden huts were shuttered up, the cobblestones swept clean, but the scent of frying lingered.

On the way back I decided to walk a station further to Stadtmitte. Friedrichstraße was as subduedly lively as Unter den Linden and it was well-lit. At one point a homeless person was sitting cross-legged with blankets draped over his lap, leaning with his back against the pillar of a building and plunged in its shadow. Though I am usually in a "trust no one" mode when I go out, I forgot this for a moment in sympathy. I was wishing that I could get him cocoa or a hot bun or something of the sort, when he asked whether I had any change. So, for once, I sorted out the large coins (which were not many) in my wallet and handed them over.

At Stadtmitte I stepped into the wrong train through absentmindedness, and ended up at Französische Straße again after all. I forgot my stupidity as I plunged into my present U-Bahn reading, which is Jules Verne's highly readable Tour du monde en quatre-vingt jours. I've come as far as Hong Kong, where the detective Fix perfidiously renders Passepartout unconscious with an opium pipe, and Phileas Fogg and Aouda set forth on the Carnatic. At Mehringdamm I had to switch to the U7 line and waited for six minutes for the next train to arrive. The platform was nearly deserted. At a brick pillar a deep-voiced man was holding forth on sociopolitical matters in slow Caribbean-accented English interspersed with the occasional "mon," and a woman was murmuring assent or laughing in warm but oddly vacant tones. An elderly lady passed by and asked her companion about the Christmas service at St. Marien; on the bench a young man briefly phoned and then waited, hunched over and hands clasped, for the train to arrive.

At home, Mama was preparing dinner: fish, bulgur wheat, tomato salad, and a white sauce with dill and green peppercorns. Papa was watching television. There was one immensely kitschy Christmas concert after another, though one channel varied the entertainment with a documentary about the death of Princess Diana. But then we came across El Dorado, a film with John Wayne and Robert Mitchum. We watched it beginning where Wayne, his new-found friend "Mississippi," and the deputy sheriff concoct a powerful brew of herbs and gunpowder to sober up the sheriff Mitchum, who has been drinking heavily for over a year and is not in the condition to face the band of villains who are threatening him. I find the film most enjoyable. I like John Wayne films in general, but often, as far as I remember, they are too humourless and depressing.

After dinner, we each hurried off to our rooms again. Papa and Mama finished setting up a low shelf that will hold our record collection and will even accomodate the shelf that holds much of our English literature on top. Bach's Weihnachtsoratorium ran on the radio in the background. Until around eleven-thirty I checked my news sites and watched the Queen's first televised Christmas message, broadcast in 1957, on YouTube. It was a concentrated piece of Zeitgeist, elaborately staged, and delivered in Her Majesty's amusingly idiosyncratic high-pitched and sharp voice that verged on sing-song. Her speech seemed the quintessence of the mentality of the hidebound and archaic British nobility; she spoke in her aristocratic accent about the Commonwealth, mentioning in passing that Britain had won the respect of nations by being "honest and kind," lamented the decay of tradition, and in true Victorian vein read aloud a passage from the Christian allegory Pilgrim's Progress by John Bunyan.

At midnight Papa and Mama opened a bottle of red wine, of which they and Ge. and I partook; and we all gathered in the corner room to sing Christmas carols: German, English, and French. We collapsed into giggles during the "Angel Gabriel," because when we reached the line, "most highly favoured lady," we all had in mind the pastiche "most highly flavoured gravy." Hilarity also broke out during "God Rest You Merry Gentlemen," when we came across the lines, "The witch His Mother Mary/ Did nothing take in scorn." (The proper words, I believe, are, "The which His Mother Mary.") As we were singing "It Came Upon a Midnight Clear," the doorbell rang, and W. briefly joined our round.

Television in the late night was full of familiar films. First of all, we watched Casablanca, until shortly after the scene where the patrons of the café sing the "Marseillaise" and drown out the nationalist tunes of the overbearing German officers. Then, before going to sleep, we watched Arsenic and Old Lace with Cary Grant and Peter Lorre. So this Christmas Eve has been a curious mixture of the old and the new.

A Song for All Seasons

Our copy of Tchaikovsky's Seasons had vanished after we moved to Berlin, much to my disappointment. But today I poked among the notes behind the piano, where I had poked a dozen times before, and saw a slim, dark blue volume beside Bach's partitas. "Can it be?" I asked myself. I took it out and realized, "It is!"

The Seasons consists of twelve pieces, one for each month, with a folkloric theme for each, and a quotation from a Russian writer. It begins with January: "At the Fireplace," a thoughtful Russian-sounding song, prefaced by a quotation from Alexander Pushkin, which is in German in our edition:

"Und den Winkel friedlicher Wonne
Kleidet die Nacht in Dunkel,
Im Kamin verlöscht das Feuerchen,
Und die Kerze ist heruntergebracht."*

My favourite piece is August (Harvest), though I've never played it all the way through; I like the melody and its mournful, hurried, uneasy atmosphere, in particular when it is played slowly. One can picture a muddy hay-field with labourers binding the sheaves, or a potato field with farmers digging out the tubers, on a frosty, windy day where the large clouds race before the sun and plunge the world into gloom, in anticipation of winter.

February is at the carneval, March is the song of a lark, April devoted to the snowdrop, and so on and so forth, all the way to the grand waltz that announces "Christmas" for December. I haven't grasped how Tchaikovsky should be played yet; I can tell that the pieces have a distinctly Russian character, for instance, but I don't bring it out properly. There are no other pieces I can recollect where I have made so little progress over time, but I am evidently not discouraged. With every piece I do the best I can at the time I practice; and I'm accustomed to feeling that my version sounds mediocre whenever I compare it to a good recording or the way I play it on days where rather brilliant interpretations come by inspiration.

Besides this, I played Bach's Goldberg Variations (variations 9, 10, and 16), Beethoven dances and sonata movements, Chopin's "Raindrop" prélude, Schumann's Kinderszenen, Schubert's sonata in A major (D 959, Mvt. 1-3), and tried to sightread the first six pages of Liszt's Hungarian Rhapsody No. 2 (c sharp minor).

P.S.: I'll write about our Christmas preparations, etc., some other time.

* "And the corner of peaceful cheer
The night enfolds in darkness;
The flame expires in the hearth
And the candle is sunken."

Link: Recording of "January" on YouTube. If you search for "Emil Gilels Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky" you should also find an excellent recording of Tchaikovsky's first piano concerto.

Arts Articles and Diaries

Today was a rainy and windy day which I passed in a lazy manner, except for a short shopping excursion to Plus. But I immersed myself in food and arts articles in the Guardian and New York Times and the New Yorker.

There are times when either these articles are unusually rich and interesting, or I am simply in a more appreciative state of mind. I enjoyed reading about The Crack in Tate Modern, the newly-built New York Times Building, three British cookbooks, a biography of Rudolf Nureyev, the Vietnam War novel Tree of Smoke, a new staging of Cymbeline, the New Acropolis Museum in Athens, etc.

Besides, I found two photos that I liked well enough to save onto my computer; one was a photo of colourful balloons rising from the dark brown desert in Mexico as part of the International Hot Air Balloon Festival, and another was a photo of a church on a snowy day in Vancouver, by the Canadian photographer Jeff Wall (whose works are being exhibited at the White Cube in London).

Then I read about the Spice Girls concert in Vancouver. Long gone are the days when they furnished a main topic of conversation among my schoolmates, so it's bizarre but not unpleasing how they've suddenly reemerged.

But I was most taken with Louis Menand's essay-review in the Dec. 10 issue of the New Yorker. He wrote perspicaciously first about diaries in general, then concisely and even more delightfully about the journals of Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. and of Leo Lerman. I've read reviews of Mr. Schlesinger's published diaries elsewhere, but find this the most insightful and enjoyable.

I also enjoyed, after the first pang of wounded vanity had passed, recognizing myself in his summary of the "superego" theory of diarizing:

[T]he superego theory, of course, is the theory that diaries are really written for the eyes of others. They are exercises in self-justification. When we describe the day’s events and our management of them, we have in mind a wise and benevolent reader who will someday see that we played, on the whole, and despite the best efforts of selfish and unworthy colleagues and relations, a creditable game with the hand we were dealt. If we speak frankly about our own missteps and shortcomings, it is only to gain this reader’s trust. We write to appease the father. People abandon their diaries when they realize that the task is hopeless.

But I think that taking theories like this one as an all-encompassing explanation means that one does not do justice to the more pragmatic and concrete reasons for writing diaries -- to organize and analyze the events of the day in one's mind, for instance.

Anyway, to really make this post an exercise in self-justification, I will argue here that today's laziness is partly excusable because yesterday was a busy day; we had eight uncles and aunts and cousins over to celebrate the first Advent Sunday. Playing Christmas carols and eating mandarin oranges, chocolate, and a fine Elsässer Bäckeoffe was exhausting. (c;