Lincoln Center

Continuing the story of this past Saturday....

We caught a bit of a college basketball game on television before getting a cab to Lincoln Center. We saw that Marquette was winning against a team described on the screen and, so far as we could tell, in the announcer's patter too, simply as IPFW. So we wondered who the heck was IPFW.

Our best guess, putting our collective heads together, was "Institute of Photography at Fort Worth." So we had an image of tall Texan photographers competing with the Marquette Golden Eagles.

Turns out that IPFW actually stands for Indiana-Purdue at Fort Wayne, about whose sports teams (the Mastodons) you can read here.

Anyway, we left before the result of the game was decided, shared a cab with a kindly woman heading to 60th street, and arrived at Lincoln Center.

The Metropolitan Opera House there features a couple of striking murals painted by Marc Chagall. I'll upload one of them, above and to the left of this text.

The opera house also features wonderful chandeliers. I got a good view of the most striking of them the last time I was at the Met, back in February (to see Manon Lescaut) when I sat in a gallery, up with the gods.

For this trip, though, Cicily and I had orchestra seats, and back far enough so that the balconies rose up above us, cutting off the great chandelier from our line of sight. Alas.

I'll say something about the actual performance tomorrow. Today I seem to have gotten myself onto the physical description of the Met, so I'll make a historical observation attendent thereto.

Ground was ceremonially broken on the future Lincoln Center by President Dwight D. Eisenhower back in May 1959, when I was seven months old. As soon as Ike turned that first spade of earth, the New York Philharmonic under Leonard Bernstein struck up Handel's Hallelujah chorus. Who was the Messiah by implication? Robert Moses?

There is an irony in Bernstein's participation, for Lincoln Center was planted right in the middle of the neighborhood that Bernstein had celebrated in the Broadway musical "West Side Story." Well ... I don't know if "celebrated" is the right word. That musical didn't end happily, IIRC. Anyway, the neighborhood was transformed for better or worse (no doubt for both in different respects) into a cultural hub.

And so, 49 and a half years after that ceremony, Christopher and Cicily take their seats in the orchestra section of the Opera House for a performance of Don Giovanni. So moves the universe, wheels within wheels.

More on the Frick Collection

I won't make heavy-water out of this, from the point of view of aesthetic theory or my own psychology, but in the event anybody cares, I've asked myself which among all the works at the Frick were my favorites. We'll leave aside now my fascination with Vermeer's unorthodox cartography.

One of my favorites was a pre-Renaissance Italian work, "The Temptation of Christ on the Mountain," an image of which I have uploaded here.

This is by Duccio di Buoninsegna: and no, I hadn't encountered that name before this trip, either. But his painting wonderfully captures the moment in the fourth chapter of Matthew when the devil takes Jesus to the peak of a mountain and shows him all the kingdoms of this world, offering him them all in return for homage to Satan. A varity of wealthy but fragile looking cities (the capital cities of various kingdoms presumably) are improbably clustered around Buoninsegna's mountain.

Another favorite from my trip was also a work with a New Testament theme: Claude Lorrain's The Sermon on the Mount. I'll supply a link to this one for your delectation.

These two artists worked in very different times and places, but both works have a narrative impetus. Both represent fine art in the service of a story already well known to their viewers/market. I frankly think the narrative quality may be more important than their specifically Christian themes in their appeal to me.

After we left the Frick, Cicily and I began a search for an appropriate spot for lunch. We discovered a French restaurant with a "Gay Paree" theme, which seemed an appropriate follow-up to our morning.

After that repast, we walked downtown, in a leisurely fashion but getting as far as Macy's, then taking an endless series of escalators up to the "North Pole" for a peek at the real Santa. And there were still hours to go before the inspiration for the whole trip, the performance of Don Giovanni at Lincoln Center, of which I shall write at last tomorrow.