Sketches

The Temperature of Canadian Patriotism

February 9, 2010 · Leave a Comment

As we are approaching the opening of the Vancouver Olympics the temperature of Canadian patriotism is rising dramatically. Even the Leader of the Opposition says he hopes his wife will be able to curb his enthusiasm once the Games start. Especially his enthusiasm for curling.

It is therefore remarkable that patriotic Canadians don’t seem to mind that a new international race is unfolding on another front on which sixty-five years ago Canada – after much initial hesitation – played a prominent role. On that front even today Canada is a modest player – the front of international broadcasting. Few Canadians know about RCI, Radio Canada International, the international arm of the CBC.

Most Canadians do know about CNN and the BBC and have even heard of Al Jazeera, which will soon be viewable on cable. Some know about Russia Today (RT) which may also become available on cable. But very few are acquainted with France 24, which was launched by former president Chirac. But who, until last weekend’s story in The Globe and Mail, has heard of Press TV, the new Iranian propaganda service out of Teheran?

That the Chinese are in the game, too, with their Xinhua CNC, will surprise few. It was launched last year.

Back to l944-1945. The BBC and the Voice of America had been broadcasting to the world for some time when the Mackenzie King government, after considerable hesitations, gently asked the CBC whether it, too, might be able to launch an international shortwave service. The motivation was clear enough: Canadian patriotism – plus political considerations about Canada’s role in the forthcoming peace negotiations – demanded that Canada make its presence felt in the air as it was on the ground, on the battlefields of Europe. After doing extensive feasibility studies the CBC said “Yes.”

Test transmissions out of Montreal did not begin until December, 1944, five months before the end of the war. The service was officially opened in February, 1945. It was a major event. Mackenzie King himself delivered a message on shortwave. Transmissions were in English, French, German, Dutch and Czech. (The word propaganda was taboo – Canada provided information. The sound of the Voice of Canada was to be suitably sober.) Other languages were added later – the three Scandinavian languages, Spanish and Portuguese, Russian, Ukrainian and Polish. Much more recently – Chinese and Arabic. The shortwave service continues but of course RCI also uses the new media. Details can be found at www.rcinet.ca.

So why do so few Canadians know about this service, especially now when the temperature of Canadian patriotism is getting hotter by the minute?

One can guess the reason. The CBC has been so traumatized by the regular ordeal of budget cuts that it has made it its policy not to publicize the service at home. The Corporation is afraid the public won’t understand that, as an expression of Canadian patriotism, RCI is a bargain.

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Music and Murder

February 8, 2010 · 6 Comments

Let us celebrate the four hundred and fortieth anniversary of the birth of the composer of madrigals, Don Carlo Gesualdo (1570-1613), Prince of Venosa. He was the only known multiple murderer in the history of Western music. Not only that, but, according to an edict issued by the Vatican, “although divinely talented,” he had also been flirting with sexual perversions and had “set decency and morality at the feet of carnal desires.” Among those Don Carlo murdered was Donna Maria, his wife, a close relative also of noble blood, who was known as il morte bella, “the beautiful death-bringer.” When her own turn came because of unfaithfulness, her fatal wounds were, so a legal document recorded, “confined almost exclusively to those parts of her body which should have been kept honest.”

On the musical front, Gesualdo’s madrigals were so imaginatively composed that, possibly thanks to their “perverted chromaticism,” none of them survived.

We should also celebrate the anniversaries of two more domesticated composers – Chopin and Schumann – whose marvelous works, unlike those of Gesualdi, are among the most frequently performed today, on the concert stage and by music lovers at home. Both were born in 1810, two hundred years ago. Neither killed anybody, but both, being pioneers of the romantic era, were all their lives on friendly terms with death, a common denominator among romantics.

They had good reason: both were ill. Chopin had TB and Schumann suffered from depressions and in later life delusions and hallucinations, so severe that, in 1854 he attempted suicide by jumping into the Rhine. He was rescued but ended his days two years later in an institution. (His wife Clara was not allowed to see him until two days before his death.) His use of multiple personalities in some of his early compositions, now pensive, now wild and tempestuous, suggest that even then he may well have been aware that the conflicts that took place within himself indicated that he was suffering from mental illness.

There was never any suggestion that there was anything wrong with Chopin’s mental health, unless one considers the agonies he endured at the piano while composing – the torment, the tears and the anger, between the initial inspiration and the writing down of the final work. He was thirty-nine when he died. Even in his good days he preferred playing in salons and private homes to appearing on the concert stage. His enormous reputation as a pianist rested on only thirty public concerts in his entire life.

Thomas Mann was not the only writer who had something to say about the connection between genius and illness. But it never occurred to him, nor to anybody else, that the willingness and ability to commit murder – let alone sexual perversion – was an essential attribute of genius.

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