Two-Faced Puccini

Puccini’s Suor Angelica & Gianni Schicchi

Martina Arroyo Foundation’s Prelude to Performance

The Kaye Playhouse at Hunter College

July 7, 2017

Gianni Schicchi is Puccini at his deftest and best
Photo credit: Jen Joyce Davis

The Martina Arroyo Foundation this year brought us a pair of one-act operas from Puccini’s Trittico. Rather than opt for the more common pairing of Il Tabarro (the first in the trilogy) and Gianni Schicchi (the last of the three), the program included Suor Angelica, which is the one that is most frequently cut – a tradition dating back to its earliest revivals a century ago.

Angelica and her evil aunt
Photo credit: Jen Joyce Davis

It turns out that this tradition is not without reason, since we found Suor Angelica to be a real snore. It is the story of a mother whose extreme reaction to the news of the death of her child leads to suicide and finally the suggestion of religious redemption.

At its best it delivered a couple of moments of extreme beauty in which Puccini is at his most saccharine finest. At its worst it had a lot of pretty much useless fluff about nuns’ mundane activities in a convent courtyard. Not to mention the complete absence of a male voice to ground the whole work and mix things up a bit.

Soprano Michelle Johnson in the title role was competent but not outstanding. Too often it seemed like she was working too hard just to hit the notes. Too often she was simply drowned out by the orchestra. One of the few moments of real dramatic tension occurs during Angelica’s showdown with evil aunt, here depicted as a Goth princess by the uncompromising and stern Leah Marie de Gruyl.

Suor Angelica searches for her salvation
Photo credit: Jen Joyce Davis

How soon the dead are forgotten! The reading of the will
Photo credit: Jen Joyce Davis

When it came to Gianni Schicchi, however, we discovered a whole other side of the composer. Who knew Puccini could be so funny?

Despite famous arias like the immortal O mio babbino caro, this opera is essentially an ensemble piece. Based on a episode hinted at briefly in Dante’s Divine Comedy (Inferno, Canto XXX), Puccini’s fleshing out of the story comes across as something straight out of Boccaccio’s Decameron.

It's dog eat dog once the august patriarch has passed away
Photo credit: Jen Joyce Davis

Buoso Donati, of a noteworthy Florentine line, lies on his deathbed when the curtain rises. As long as the details of his last will and testament remains suspended, his nearest and dearest are short on grief and long on greed. A good deal of hand wringing ensues until they strike on a solution. Everybody wants the same piece of their ancestor’s pie: something to do with a prime plot of land and prized mule. In a move that is more Boccaccescan levity than Dantean solemnity, the outcome is laugh out-loud hilarious.

There were several stand-out performances in what was truly a group effort. And virtually every singer on stage had excellent Italian (essential to convey the hilarious lines of the libretto) and perfect comic timing. Steven Mo Hanan as Simone Donati, the next in line for the role of patriarch in the Donati clan, set the comic tone of the piece with his slightly clueless take on the character that never went completely over the top.

Anna Adrian Whiteway as Lauretta sang a naively ingenuous O mio babbino caro that virtually came out of nowhere. Amidst the rest of the comic mugging and other humorous shenanigans of the story, all of a sudden this incredibly recognizable and heartbreakingly beautiful tune catches you off guard.

Rinuccio has an idea and an agenda of his own
Photo credit: Jen Joyce Davis

Spencer Hamlin sang the role of Rinuccio, her beloved. He was youthfully boyish and bright in his affection for Lauretta as well as in his guileless introduction of the otherwise unwanted intervention of newcomer Gianni Schicchi, notorious trickster, into the family crisis.

And then there was the eponymous hero of the opera. Joshua DeVane leant his Gianni Schicchi a provincial air of an up-and-comer. The indictment of the nouveau riche in this respect falls right in line with both Boccaccio and Dante’s value system. The ways in which he is able to pull the wool over the eyes of everybody involved, from the notaio to Buoso’s heirs, when done right, as it was tonight, is a hysterical piece of comic theater. DeVane and company did it justice. Neither of us could suppress our laughter.

With Gianni Schicchi as their only hope!
Photo credit: Jen Joyce Davis

The comic timing is embedded in the score and fast paced story. Puccini’s Gianni Schicchi is funnier than anything I have ever experienced in the operatic canon. I haven’t had this much fun at the opera in a very long time, if ever. Just hope next time we see this gem of a Puccini it will be paired with Il Tabarro instead!

– Lui & Lei

 

All gather round to hear the moral of the tale
Photo credit: Jen Joyce Davis

From Farce to Fantasy: Ravel at La Scala

Ravel’s L’heure espagnole and L’enfant et les sortilèges

Teatro alla Scala, Milan

June 3, 2016

What's a desperate housewife to do?
Photo credit: Teatro alla Scala

It was a rainy late spring evening in Milan that found us at La Scala for a double feature of little-performed one-act operas by Maurice Ravel. The program was virgin territory for both of us, so we arrived with a mindset of pure discovery. Had it not been for the warm solicitations of an acquaintance not to miss it, we would have skipped this one. Instead, we took the Ravel plunge and were happily surprised.

Seize the day, says the true poet to her lover.
Photo credit: Teatro alla Scala

The first of the two, L’heure espagnole, was a one-act opera comique, a Boccaccio-esque romp into the life of a desperate housewife, along the lines of Peronella and her lover Giannello (Decameron, Day VII, Story 2). Only this time in the place of her famous tub we find twin grandfather clocks endowed with human-sized hiding places in their capacious chests. The piece is a frivolous and fun divertissement, all about an insatiable woman trying to lure into her bed a lover or two (actually, three!) during the one hour her husband is out on business.

The production directed by Laurent Pelly that premiered at the Glyndebourne Festival in 2015 updates the action of the opera from the 18th century to the present day. The costumes have a distinctly 1970s feeling, but the modern washing machine placed front and center in the active bottega of a set brings it squarely into the last couple of decades, at least. The staging is simple yet effective: a saturated store that clearly doubles as living quarters for the clockmaker and his wife is developed into two levels, with a staircase that leads into the wife’s bedroom and the related heavy traffic of lovers being carried back and forth while hiding in grandfather clocks. The very cluttered sets (clocks, next to mock bulls next to laundry baskets, next to car parts) provided a lively, messy yet joyful backdrop for the comic action and, at times, even seemed to mirror the multi-layered effects of the complex score.

But the narcissist always has the spotlight on himself
Photo credit: Teatro alla Scala

Mezzo Stéphanie D’Oustrac sang the role of the lonely wife, Concepcion, who seems to have a little too much time on her hands. She played her character’s ennui with a real working class nonchalance and rendered her desperate craving for sexual fulfillment with gusto. When her husband the clockmaker, Torquemada, played here by tenor Jean-Paul Fouchécourt in a mad scientist’s white wig and nerdy lab coat, is called away on his regular mission to adjust the municipal clocks, the pussycat is free to play. This is the moment in which she habitually receives her poet-lover, but today an unforeseeable visitor has happened upon the shop: Ramiro the mule driver who is looking to get his watch fixed. He is a hulking hunk of a man sung by baritone Jean-Luc Ballestra in a form fitting t-shirt. The watchmaker has invited him to wait until he returns. How inconvenient! How is she to get any satisfaction with this unwanted guest hanging around. But like any desperate housewife: where there’s a will, there’s a way, particularly if a hot man with bulging muscles is around.

The ennui of a woman alone, while her men play hide-and-seek
Photo credit: Teatro alla Scala

The lover whom she awaits it turns out is none other than Gonzalve, sung by tenor Yann Beuron. In bellbottomed pants and mutton chops, he is an egomaniac of a lyric poet who is more consumed with the poetic idea of being in love than ever turning his thoughts to consummating the actual act of love that Concepcion is hungry for. She pines for him, gropes for him, all but throws herself at him. All he can do is come up with lines for sonnets, ballads and songs that only serve to keep her at bay. At one point she even appeals to him twice saying, “Ne perdons pas, à de vaines paroles, / L’heure qui s’envole, / Et qu’il faut cuellir.” In short: cut the crap and seize the day! The real Horace in this play is not the poet but, as it turns out, is none other than the sexually frustrated housewife. The satire on the impotence of literati is acutely felt and evokes a series of laughs as the ongoing gag plays out.

The superhuman strength of the muleteer
Photo credit: Teatro alla Scala

We have yet to meet one final caricature. The fourth of our ridiculous male figures is Don Iñigo Gomez, sung by bass-baritone Vincent Le Texier, a randy financier playing hooky from the bank. He is yet another even more pathetic pretender to the affections of the highly sought after watchmaker’s wife. She must have something to recommend her in order to justify the attentions of so many men. And so the delicate dance steps up a notch. Concepcion spends the rest of the opera playing duck and dodge as she attempts to get what she wants from this steady stream of suitors during the short heure her husband is away.

So much more than a love triangle
Photo credit: Teatro alla Scala

The poet and the banker alternately hide in the two grandfather clocks that Ramiro carries back and forth from the showroom to Concepcion’s bedroom, showing off his masculine strength as he effortlessly carries clocks containing grown men up and down the stairs. After all of these shenanigans, Concepcion comes out chaste and true to her husband who even manages to turn the amorous entrelacement into a sale, much like Peronella's poor lover in Decameron VII, 2. Both Don Iñigo and Gonzalve are persuaded to purchase their respective grandfather clock hiding spots. It’s slapstick silliness that comes full circle and it amounts to a level of Boccaccian revelry that I am just not accustomed to seeing on the opera stage and for that it was a heck of a lot of fun to watch.

Pelly's oversaturated sets
Photo credit: Teatro alla Scala

The vocal writing here is all sung through, mostly declamatory, to add to the humdrum lack meaning in the lives of these self-consciously caricaturesque characters. The only truly lyrical bits are those of the poet-lover but there again, lyricism is used as a parody of artists being too self-absorbed by their art to really live life. Another parodic moment is when Concepcion sings her seduction aria in the finale, which amounts to a mocking riff on the melodic line of Bizet’s Habanera, in a banalization of the seductive gypsy of Carmen.

In Spain, it would seem, time works a little differently than it does elsewhere. It can move slowly. It can open up – quite literally as men emerge from clocks. Love awaits within its gates, and it’s all good fun.

* * *

The Enfant at his studies
Photo credit: Teatro alla Scala

The second opera of the evening, L’enfant et les sortilèges, a fantasie lyrique in two parts, was an awe-inspiring tour de force. Also directed by Laurent Pelly, however it could not have been more different from the piece that came before. Oneiric, fantastic and beautifully enchanting, this production brought to life the Ravel work with intelligence and excellent stagecraft. With a fairy tale driven libretto by the great French polymath Colette, Ravel’s L’enfant et les sortilèges brings together a whole slew of great narrative, theatrical and musical ideas all in the course of just fifty-five minutes.

A child's perspective on an adult world
Photo credit: Teatro alla Scala

The opera opens with one of its highly memorable scenes. The Enfant, sung by a brilliantly infantilized mezzo Marianne Crebassa, is sitting on a larger than life chair on which he is perched on a stack of larger than life books in order to reach his homework on an enormous larger than life table. The curtain opens on him scribbling away there at this notebook, though he seems none too happy. His conflict with the authoritarian iron fist of the adult world becomes evident when his mother makes her way out in the form of Delphine Haidan on a contraption that makes her seem larger than life too, like the table. She too is none too happy that he isn’t concentrating. She scolds him and makes all the threatening gestures of a clueless parent who is completely out of touch with their children.

The furniture comes to live give a scolding
Photo credit: Teatro alla Scala

After his mother is wheeled away on her contraption, it is time to rebel. The boy tears up his school work, jettisons the tea pot, cups and saucers across the room, terrorizes the cat and defaces the wallpaper before crashing out on an armchair to take a nap. Once he is asleep the real action of the opera begins. The morality tale takes over and all of the objects and animals on which he has wreaked havoc all of his young life suddenly come to life to teach him one of life’s most precious lessons: we must be mindful of the world in which we live. We have to be respectful and care for all of God’s creation both animate and inanimate. A series of characters emerge like vivid dreams from the darkness of the stage: a thundering clock, the fire, a storybook princess, various duets (between teapot and teacup, armchair and sofa, boy cat and girl cat) and ensembles (a class of math students, baroque wallpaper characters, the garden’s plants and animals). Each vignette has a different tone, from ironic to pity-inducing, to enraged, to gently scolding, to dramatic storytelling. The overall effect is of a moral phantasmagoria, in a whirlwind of dreamy fantastic fun, very playfully done.

Figures emerge from the wallpaper to teach a lesson
Photo credit: Teatro alla Scala

The music oscillates beautifully between traditional narrative operatic passages and more oneiric purely fantasy bits. One of the more traditional narrative moments in the score occurs in the brief interlude in which the shepherds and the shepherdesses descended from the tear in the baroque wallpaper singing bars of a rarefied rococo music, all oboe, flute and tamburello. But, we also have the fire poking out of the fireplace, in a quasi-Queen-of-the-Night coloratura fashion, harshly threatening the child. In the garden, on the other hand, the various insects and frogs engage in an extended and very surreal call and response that evoked something of a mating ritual. 

Sexuality oozed from much of the action
Photo credit: Teatro alla Scala

In fact, much of this staging was rather explicitly sexual. The procreative call of nature was often boiling right at the surface of the choreography. Very little was necessarily family friendly, despite its childish appeal. This was an unabashedly Freudian universe. Many of the directorial decisions were firmly rooted in the music and so I would even suggest that some of this, let’s call it, Dionysian element is most certainly also in the score. Ravel is no fool. The two operas of this double feature cannot be more different from another, the unifying trait being really only the wondrous complexity of the Ravel score, in both instances masterfully executed under the baton of maestro Marc Minkowski.

The forest comes to life in the finale and the Enfant is redeemed
Photo credit: Teatro alla Scala

This Pelly production of L’Enfant first premiered at the Glyndebourne Festival in 2012 and it was one of the most inventive works I’ve ever seen on the stage of a major opera house.  Ravel’s fantasy world was imaginatively executed. The set and costumes were immaculate in their simple attention to detail in the portrayal of a child’s perspective on the adult world that surrounds him. And the stage direction was brilliantly conceived and executed. The timing of all of the transitions and sequence of fantastic scenes unfolded impeccably. I found myself on the edge of my seat wondering what was going to come next. It was truly next level theater making. Some said that it is the best thing that La Scala did this year. I would put it right up there with this season’s big opener, Verdi’s Giovanna D’Arco, which is without a doubt another personal favorite. But this production of Ravel ranks right up there. And to think that we almost did not go writing it off like a kids’ show!

– Lui & Lei

The Queen of the Fire flashes out of the hearth
Photo credit: Teatro alla Scala

The Savour of Falstaff

Met - January 3, 2014

Lei: Tutto nel mondo è burla - that’s how Verdi’s anti-hero Falstaff salutes the public in the composer’s last work: an ode to wine, food, women and earthly pleasures, because “life is nothing more than a joke.” And coming from the father of the most stirring operatic dramas, with heroines and their lovers tragically dying left and right, it’s quite a statement.

Photo credit: Sara Krulwich / The New York Times

Lui: Verdi’s farewell opera is indeed a very Boccaccio-esque romp in the realm of appearances, practical jokes, feints and pranks. The world of the Decameron’s signature beffe and burle. There is even a sort of umbilical cord refrain that repeats throughout the opera linking the Fenton-Nannetta subplot to a kernel of Boccaccian wit. It’s a quote from the seventh story of the second day of Boccaccio’s Decameron: “Bocca baciata non perde ventura, anzi rinnova come fa la luna” (“The mouth that has been kissed does not lose its savor, indeed it renews itself just as the moon does”). The young lovers, apparently avid readers of the medieval Italian author, quote it to each other in their flirty duets, and Nannetta always finishes Fenton’s sentence for him when he starts to utter it. Even the only truly romantic bit of the opera is, thus, a nod to the jesty Boccaccio.

Photo credit: Sara Krulwich / The New York Times

Lei:  Ambrogio Maestri carried the show, not surprisingly since he celebrated his 200th Falstaff performance during this run at the Met. What is truly impressive is that Maestri is only 43, and started performing this role at 31, when Riccardo Muti noticed him in Milan and worked with him on developing a “younger” voice for a role traditionally performed by older singers. Maestri’s acting was superb, with unexpected light and fluid movements and an effortless comic force dotted with a few strokes of tragic awareness. Also, it really makes a difference when someone with his articulation performs Falstaff, really savoring and owning every single word, doing justice to the richness of Boito’s libretto. Maestri was the only singer on stage 100% understandable at any given moment, while some of his colleagues’ Italian diction was not always as clear. 

Photo credit: Ken Howard / Metropolitan Opera

Angela Meade confirmed herself as a strong solid singer, who performed Alice Ford with verve and confidence. I found Meade’s acting to have improved, looking a bit more mobile on stage when compared to when I saw her in Ernani. Mezzo Stephanie Blythe was very impressive as Mistress Quickly, her deep dark timbre was so clear and powerful that she dwarfed everybody else, including Maestri. I’ve seen her before as Azucena in Trovatore but this was the first time I was so struck with the strength and fullness of her voice. Lisette Oropesa’s Nannetta was pretty good though at times her lyricism was a tad too frail for my taste. Her duets with Paolo Fanale’s Fenton were pleasant but lacked punch, coming across as more nostalgic than ardent young love. 

Photo credit: Catherine Ashmore / Royal Opera House

Lui: The setting is mostly successful in making the material more approachable, moving the action of the first act from a medieval tavern to a 1950s wood paneled hotel, where Falstaff gorges himself on room service. Carts of food litter his chamber. In addition to the symbolism of the environs Falstaff inhabits, the thematic importance of class difference is further conveyed through the contrast between the protagonist’s grandiose old world aristocratic outfits and the mid-century modern Mad Men sorts of costumes that adorn the rest of the cast. Setting a piece like this in the pivotal postwar period, with its explosion of suburban life so vividly represented by Alice Ford’s humongous yellow kitchen in Act II, is a perfect fit for the central tensions of the story. Falstaff is, after all, a decadent and debauched minor aristocrat trying to fit into a petit bourgeois society that is on the verge of supplanting the old order, the values of which he is the lingering embodiment, and that manages to have its way with him. In the final sequence the tables are turned (and quite literally so in Carsen’s choreography of the climactic scene) on the voracious appetites of our omnivore. The man who once held the fork and knife is now under the forks and knives of the bourgeois society that is out to teach him a lesson. He is now on the table being poked and prodded so he knows what it’s like to be on the other side of his careless appetites.

Photo credit: Ken Howard / Metropolitan Opera

Lei: While I am all for freshening up productions with modern takes, I cannot stand it when for the sake of modernization things are pushed too much and the action does not match the words that are being sung. This happened in Scene II of Act II, here set in Alice Ford’s kitchen, when the libretto makes multiple references to a paravento (dressing screen) that the ladies set up in a specific way at Alice Ford’s instructions and that serves as hiding place for Falstaff first and for Nannetta and Fenton later. In this production when folks mention the paravento they mean alternately a cupboard and a tablecloth. I recently saw a video of the 2001 La Scala production of Falstaff where a real paravento was used that not only corresponded to the libretto but also worked as a better theatrical prop since it divided the space with a split screen effect that was much better than hiding singers in a cupboard or under a table. Also, I did not fully understand the sense behind the crowd of men, dressed like private detectives, who stormed into Alice Ford’s kitchen and proceeded to throw stuff from all of her cabinets. While it may have been intended as an absurdist comic touch (many in the public laughed), to me it just seemed awkward.

Photo credit: Sara Krulwich / The New York Times

Lui: Perhaps it is meant to be a comment on the prewar social order that is now being undermined by consumerism on a different scale and of a different kind. The shower of suburban consumer goods that pours from the cabinets and cupboards of Alice Ford’s kitchen in the mad manhunt scene is reminiscent of the finale of Michelangelo Antonioni’s 1970 film, “Zabriskie Point,” with its surreal clouds of conspicuous consumption raining down from the sky after a desert mansion is destroyed in an presumably imaginary explosion. Carsen’s production of Falstaff seems to level a lighthearted critique of postwar capitalism. The suburban mores of Alice’s brave new world present a petty substitute for Falstaff’s corrupt aristocratic appetites. His love of endless bottles of Xeres, polli, tacchini, fagiani and acciughe finds its kindred spirit in her kitchen full of copious amounts of consumer products.

Photo credit: Ken Howard / Metropolitan Opera

Lei: On a separate note, do we really need to have a real horse chewing hay onstage at the beginning of Act III? I am not sure what bothered me more, its entirely superfluous presence or the public cheering for it. I saw on archive photos that in the London run of this production Ambrogio Maestri actually rode a horse in the park scene. My guess is that the riding may have been such a scary experience for all parties involved that this time they kept the horse on the side just munching hay, while Falstaff drinks mulled wine. In any event, while real livestock may be acceptable in Aida’s triumphal march in the outdoorsy Arena di Verona, dragging drugged beasts on any other operatic stage as some sort of extra realistic touch or comic relief is never a good idea. I think I may still be haunted by the couple of sad big grey dogs used for the Met's Anna Bolena hunting scene in 2011.

Photo credit: Sara Krulwich / The New York Times

Lui: The absurd and unnecessary exchange with the horse is actually one of my favorite scenes in the opera. This is where Falstaff seems to have reached rock bottom. He has been thrown out with the dirty laundry and he’s hanging himself out to dry in what we could call, in the arc of his character development, his deepest darkest cave.

Io, dunque, avrò vissuto tanti anni, audace e destro

Cavaliere, per essere portato in un canestro

E gittato al canale co’pannilini biechi,

Come si fa coi gatti e i catellini ciechi.

Che se non galleggiava per me quest’epa tronfia,

Certo affogavo. Brutta morte. L’acqua mi gonfia.

Mondo reo. Non c’è più virtù. Tutto declina.

Va’, vecchio John, va’, va’per la tua via; cammina

Finché tu muoia. Allor scomparirà la vera

Virilità dal mondo. Che giornataccia nera!*

In this bit, the musicality of the language of Boito’s libretto is phenomenal. His spirits are crushed and the sound of his words are heavy and gloomy. His couplets rhyme on sounds like biechi and ciechi, tronfia and gonfia, vera and nera. Then he takes his fateful first sip of mulled wine, which opens his eyes and his mind to the brighter side of life and the sound of his language follows suit.

Buono. Ber del vin dolce e sbottonarsi al sole,

Dolce cosa! Il buon vino sperde le tetre fole

Dello sconforto, accende l’occhio e il pensier, dal labbro

Sale al cervel e quivi risveglia il picciol fabbro

Dei trilli; un negro grillo che vibra entro l’uom brillo.

Trilla ogni fibra in cor, l’allegro etere al trillo

Guizza e il giocondo globo squilibra una demenza

Trillante! E il trillo invade il mondo!...**

Photo credit: Ken Howard / Metropolitan Opera

His solitary reflection on the pleasure of drink is punctuated by alliterative speech patterns full of internal rhymes on the sounds of words with rolling R’s and double L’s. The rapid succession of trillo, grillo, brillo, allegro, squlibra, and trillante all roll off the tongue like a birdsong. His newfound happiness is inscribed in the text itself. Now Verdi is famous for his drinking songs and I’ve counted one in virtually every Verdi opera I’ve yet to see: from Libiam nei lieti calici in La Traviata to Ernani’s Evviva, beviam beviam, a libation is never lacking. In Falstaff, Verdi gives us different kind of ode to wine. This time it is melancholic and solitary but uplifting nevertheless.

Lei: This was my first live Falstaff and I had low expectations of enjoying it much due to its unconventional format (no real arias, music often feeling like schizophrenic virtuosism). Three things made me reconsider after seeing the Met’s production: the complexity of the libretto, the highly pleasurable action on stage and Levine’s electrifying conducting. Boito’s language is rich and poetic while at the same time light and funny, with lines such as “L’enorme Falstaff vuole / entrar nel vostro tetto / beccarvi la consorte / sfondar la cassa forte / e sconquassarvi il letto.” (“the enormous Falstaff wants / to enter your house / pinch your wife / break open your coffer / and smash your bed”). Maybe the cast was excited about working with James Levine or Robert Carsen’s direction deserves the credit. No matter the reason, the action on stage was energetic and accurate across the board, bringing to life the score and the libretto as a delightful yet explosive package. James Levine made fireworks out of Verdi’s music, with an intensity and pace that left this Falstaff skeptic out of breath – in a good way.

Photo credit: Sara Krulwich / The New York Times

Photo credit: Ken Howard / Metropolitan Opera

* I, then, having lived so long as a brave and skillful Knight, end up carried in a clothes-basket, tossed

in the river with the stinking wash, like a kitten or a still blind pup. Without this buoyant paunch, I’d surely have drowned. A nasty death. Water swells me! Evil world! There’s no honor left, all goes to pot. Go, old Jack, go thy ways; travel until thou’rt dead. Then true manliness will be gone from the world. What a black day!

** Good. To loosen one’s vest in the sun and drink sweet wine. A sweet thing! Good wine chases away the gloomy thoughts of sorrow, lights up the eye and one’s thoughts; from the lips it rises to the brain, wakening the fairy smith of trills, a black cricket who sings in the reeling brain, waking to trills every fiber of the heart. The joyous air quivers to the trill, a thrilling madness intoxicates the happy globe, the trill quivers through the entire world!