Reflections on the month of March

Forgotten Divas: Teresa Carreño

Teresa Carreño, ca. 1903 (picture from Wikipedia)

Born in  Venezuela in 1853, Teresa Carrneño was an internationally acclaimed singer, pianist, composer and conductor. She debuted very early - only 10 years old, she performed for Abraham Lincoln - and moved to Europe in 1866, where she toured as an opera singer and pianist. She composed, among other things, over 40 works for piano, but her greatest hit was a piece called Tendeur. Mme. Carreño also lived a rather interesting personal life, being married no less than 4 times and having altogether 5 surviving children.

By lucky chance, she recorded some music in 1905 so we can actually here her play today. Among pieces she recorded is the Chopin Ballade No. 1 in G minor Op. 23.

 

In December 1902, she appeared in London and played, among other things, this very same Chopin ballade. The Times was reasonably impressed:

"Mme. Teresa Carreño has long held a place of undisputed supremacy among virtuousi of her sex, and the program of her recital, given on Monday afternoon in Bechstein-hall, is surely a sign that she is no laying stress upon the interpretative side of her art rather than on its merely technical side. With the exception of a formidable "étude de concert" by E. MacDowell, with which it concluded, there was not a note which pianists of ordinary calibre could not execute with certainty, and there must have been at least half-a-dozen people in the audiende whose repertory includes all that Mme. Carreño played. The sonatas were the "appassionata" of Beethoven, and Schumann's in G minor, op. 22, labelles in the programme "Sorasch (sic) wie möglich," as if that were the title of the whole sonata, instead of the direction for the first movement. The Chopin selection included two preludes, in D flat and B flat respectively, the nocturne in C sharp minor, the fine and rarely-hear polonaise in E flat minor, the ballade in G minor, and, for an encore, the éurde in A flat. Tchaikovsky's pretty "Chant sans Paroles" in F, and Rubinstein's barcarolle in G, completed the proamme, and Henselt's "Si oiseau j'étais" was given afterwards as an encore. The player was at her best in Chopin and later composers, but parts of the Schumann sonata were finely interpreted; her style has gained very remarkably in breadth and her splendid tone and the absolute certainty of her execution remain what they were."

Source Citation: 

"Concerts." Times [London, England] 10 Dec. 1902: 4. The Times Digital Archive. Web. 9 Dec. 2012.

Teresa Carreño died in 1917 in New York and today, the second largest theatre in South America, the Teresa Carreño Cultural Complex in Careras in Venezuela, carries her name, as does, oddly enough, a crater on Venus.

Blood, Tears and Betrayal: The Shilling Sheet Genre

The Lion's Bride, referenced below (source: Vintage Printables)

In the 19th century, song sheets could be bought most everywhere in Sweden. Mostly they contained only lyrics and reference to an already well-known or traditional melody and cost one or two Swedish shillings ("skilling" in Swedish, pronounced very close to the English word "shilling"). These little booklets appeared already in the 16th century and were very common through the 18th and 19th centuries, until about 1910 when they were replaced by more modern versions of songbooks.

In principle, they could contain any sort of songs – secular, religious, folk songs or newly written – but the most popular variety were tragic stories of death and broken hearts. Hence, in Swedish, this genre of music has become known as "Shilling Sheets" and most people still know snippets of them  You might say they're part of our pop culture heritage every bit as much as ABBA or Stieg Larsson.

One of the most famous shilling sheet songs is Elvira Madigan, written in 1889 by Johan Lindström Saxon about the tragic elopement of tightrope dancer Elvira Madigan and Lieutenant Count Sixten Sparre that I have written about before on this blog. Another example of a well-known shilling sheet song is Amanda and Herman. It tells the story of  fair Amanda who is let down by the faithless Herman and seeks her death in the waves (women betrayed by faithless men is one of the most popular themes in these songs for some reason). It's been recorded many, many times and I found this lovely version uploaded to YouTube by the talented Elina Järventaus Johansson:

 
Quite often shilling sheet songs are translations of foreign poems or songs - like Lejonbruden (The Lion's Bride) about a lion tamer's daughter who is tragically killed by the lion she loves, which was originally written in German by Adelbert von Chamisso (it can be read in original German and English translation here and you can listen to it in Swedish on YouTube).
 
As adults, we tend to laugh at the unbridled sentimentality of these songs, but most children still find them hauntingly fascinating and heartbreakingly sad. During my childhood, me and my friends would beg my mother to sing them to us over and over, and we cried and cried – for some reason singing them ourselves was not the same thing at all. We didn't want control, we wanted the tragedy to sweep over us with purposeful and unrelenting force.

Why, one might debate. Personally, I think there is something about vicarious suffering that appeals to all people, and while we may think ourselves conditioned to prefer the less melodramatic forms of storytelling that our modern culture celebrates, let us not be fooled. What is the movie Titanic, really, but one long film-version of what would have made an excellent shilling sheet song?

ETA: for those who want to hear more, I made a Spotify playlist with some of the most famous ballads, including Elvira Madigan and the other ones mentioned above:

spoti.fi/YZua2c

Images of India: A Bombay Wedding

The following passages is found in Modern India, a book containing a series of letters written for The Chicago Record-Herald during the winter of 1903-04 and recounts the American journalist's experiences at a wedding in Bombay:

"The home of the bridegroom's family is an immense wooden house in the native quarter, and when we reached it we had to pass through a crowd of coolies that filled the street. The gate and outside walls were gayly decorated with bunting and Japanese lanterns, all ready to be lighted as soon as the sun went down. A native orchestra was playing doleful music in one of the courts, and a brass band of twenty pieces in military uniforms from the barracks was waiting its turn. A hallway which leads to a large drawing-room in the rear of the house was spread with scarlet matting, the walls were hung with gay prints, and Japanese lanterns were suspended from the ceiling at intervals of three or four feet. The first room was filled with women and children eating ices and sweetmeats. Men guests were not allowed to join them. It was then half past four, and we were told that they had been enjoying themselves in that innocent way since noon, and would remain until late in the evening, for it was the only share they could have in the wedding ceremonies. Hindu women and men cannot mingle even on such occasions.

The men folks were in the large drawing-room, seated in rows of chairs facing each other, with an aisle four or five feet wide in the center. There were all sorts and conditions of men, for the groom has a wide acquaintance and intimate friends among Mohammedans, Jains, Parsees, Roman Catholics, Protestants and all the many other religious in Bombay, and he invited them to his marriage. Several foreign ladies were given seats in the place of honor at the head of the room around a large gilt chair or throne which stood in the center with a wreath of flowers carelessly thrown over the back. There were two American missionaries and their wives, a Jesuit priest and several English women.

Soon after we were seated there was a stir on the outside and the groom appeared arrayed in the whitest of white linen robes, a turban of white and gold silk, an exquisite cashmere shawl over his shoulders, and a string of diamonds around his neck that were worth a rajah's ransom. His hands were adorned with several handsome rings, including one great emerald set in diamonds, so big that you could see it across the room. Around his neck was a garland of marigolds that fell to his waist, and he carried a big bridal bouquet in his hand. 

/.../ 

The Parsees wore black or white with closely buttoned frocks and caps that look like fly-traps; the Mohammedans wore flowing robes of white, and the Hindus silks of the liveliest patterns and the most vivid colors. No ballroom belle ever was enveloped by brighter tinted fabrics than the silks, satins, brocades and velvets that were worn by the dignified Hindu gentlemen at this wedding, and their jewels were such as our richest women wear. 

/.../

They brought us trays of native refreshments, while the nautch girls danced, handed each guest a nosegay and placed a pair of cocoanuts at his feet, which had some deep significance--I could not quite understand what. The groom did not appear to be enjoying himself. He looked very unhappy. He evidently did not like to sit up in a gilded chair so that everybody could stare and make remarks about him, for that is exactly what his guests were doing, criticising his bare legs, commenting upon his jewels and guessing how much his diamond necklace cost. He was quite relieved when a couple of gentlemen, who seemed to be acting as masters of ceremonies, placed a second garland of flowers around his neck--which one of them whispered to me had just come from the bride, the first one having been the gift of his mother--and led him out of the room like a lamb to the slaughter.

Nautch dancers (picture found in Modern India)

When we reached the street a procession of the guests of honor was formed, while policemen drove the crowd back. First came the military band, then the masters of ceremonies--each having a cane in his hand, with which he motioned back the crowd that lined the road on both sides six or eight tiers deep. Then the groom marched all alone with a dejected look on his face, and his hands clasped before him. After him came the foreign guests, two and two, as long as they were able to keep the formation, but after going a hundred feet the crowd became so great and were so anxious to see all that was going on, that they broke the line and mixed up with the wedding party, and even surrounded the solitary groom like a bodyguard, so that we who were coming directly after could scarcely see him. The noisy music of the band had aroused the entire neighborhood, and in the march to the residence of the bride's family we passed between thousands of spectators. The groom was exceedingly nervous. Although night had fallen and the temperature was quite cool, the perspiration was rolling down his face in torrents, and he was relieved when we entered a narrow passage which bad been cleared by the policemen.

The bride's house was decorated in the same manner as the groom's, and upon a tray in the middle of a big room a small slow fire of perfumed wood was burning. The groom was led to the side of it, and stood there, while the guests were seated around him--hooded Hindu women on one side and men and foreign ladies on the other. Then his trainers made him sit down on the floor, cross-legged, like a tailor. Hindus seldom use chairs, or even cushions. Very soon four Brahmins, or priests, appeared from somewhere in the background and seated themselves on the opposite side of the fire. They wore no robes, and were only half dressed. Two were naked to the waist, as well as barefooted and barelegged. One, who had his head shaved like a prize fighter and seemed to be the officiating clergyman, had on what looked like a red flannel shirt. He brought his tools with him, and conducted a mysterious ceremony, which I cannot describe, because it was too long and complicated, and I could not make any notes. A gentleman who had been requested to look after me attempted to explain what it meant, as the ceremony proceeded, but his English was very imperfect, and I lost a good deal of the show trying to clear up his meaning. While the chief priest was going through a ritual his deputies chanted mournful and monotonous strains in a minor key--repetitions of the same lines over and over again. They were praying for the favor of the gods, and their approval of the marriage.

After the groom had endured it alone for a while the bride was brought in by her brother-in-law, who, since the death of her father, has been the head of the household. He was clad in a white gauze undershirt, with short sleeves, and the ordinary Hindu robe wrapped around his waist, and hanging down to his bare knees. The bride had a big bunch of pearls hanging from her upper lip, gold and silver rings and anklets upon her bare feet, and her head was so concealed under wrappings of shawls that she would have smothered in the hot room had not one of her playmates gone up and removed the coverings from her face. This playmate was a lively matron of 14 years, a fellow pupil at the missionary school, who had been married at the age of 9, so she knew all about it, and had adopted foreign manners and customs sufficiently to permit her to go about among the guests, chatting with both gentlemen and ladies with perfect self-possession. She told us all about the bride, who was her dearest friend, received and passed around the presents as they arrived, and took charge of the proceedings.

The bride sat down on the floor beside the husband that had been chosen for her and timidly clasped his hand while the priests continued chanting, stopping now and then to breathe or to anoint the foreheads of the couple, or to throw something on the fire. There were bowls of several kinds of food, each having its significance, and several kinds of plants and flowers, and incense, which was thrown into the flames. At one time the chief priest arose from the floor, stretched his legs and read a long passage from a book, which my escort said was the sacred writing in Sanskrit laying down rules and regulations for the government of Hindu wives. But the bride and groom paid very little attention to the priests or to the ceremony. After the first embarrassment was over they chatted familiarly with their friends, both foreign and native, who came and squatted down beside them. The bride's mother came quietly into the circle after a while and sat down beside her son-in-law--a slight woman, whose face was entirely concealed. When the performance had been going on for about an hour four more priests appeared and took seats in the background. When I asked my guardian their object, he replied, sarcastically, that it was money, that they were present as witnesses, and each of them would expect a big fee as well as a good supper.

"Poor people get married with one priest," he added, "but rich people have to have many. It costs a lot of money to get married."

Every now and then parcels were brought in by servants, and handed to the bride, who opened them with the same eagerness that American girls show about their wedding presents, but before she had been given half a chance to examine them they were snatched away from her and passed around. There were enough jewels to set the groom up in business, for all the relatives on both sides are rich, several beautifully embroidered shawls, a copy of Tennyson's poems, a full set of Ruskin's works, a flexible covered Bible from the bride's school teacher, and other gifts too numerous to mention. The ceremony soon became tedious and the crowded room was hot and stuffy. It was an ordeal for us to stay as long as we did, and we endured it for a couple of hours, but it was ten times worse for the bride and groom, for they had to sit on the floor over the fire, and couldn't even stretch their legs. They told us that it would take four hours more to finish the ritual. So we asked our hosts to excuse us, offered our sympathy and congratulations to the happy couple, who laughed and joked with us in English, while the priests continued to sing and pray."

Modern India by William Eleroy Curtis (1904)

The British on the Germans: the Junker Edition

"The Prussian Junker is a kind of glorified peasant who may in some individual cases or even for some generations have acquired the veneer of Western civilization, French or English, but who remains essentially a well-to-do peasant, cunning, grasping, tenacious, and jealous to the death of his traditional privileges."

- The Times, 27 October, 1906

Policing Persia: Swedes Very far From Home

In the early 20th century, some forces in Persia were pushing to modernise the country which had, in regards to organisation and government, changed very little in the past few hundred years.

The Shah of Persia arriving in Ourmiah, 1911 (source: Library of Congress)

In July 1910, the Democrats came to power and one part of their modernisation program was the construction of a national gendarmerie - a sort of paramilitarian force that was part police force and part armed force aimed at keeping the peace by any means necessary. While events soon lead to the program being dropped, the idea of a gendarmerie survived, partly likely because it was in the interest of the two super-powers in the region - Russia and Great Britain - to ensure safe passage through the notoriously dangerous region. As an example, Mr Smart, the British Consul at Shiraz, was attacked in the neighbourhood of Kazerun in December 1912. Grazed by a bullet, and trapped under his wounded horse, he was only saved due to the efficiency of the troop of the Central India Horse that escorted him and the kind care of some of the locals, and the incident led to considerable diplomatic tension. In fact, the Gendarmerie was to be in great part funded by Britain and Russia – for example, in may 1913, the British Government advanced a sum of £100,000 to the Persian government for this purpose, following the Smart-incident.

However, in order to build such a force, Persia needed help from the outside since the country lacked officers with the relevant sort of training. The question was which country to turn to? In 1907, Russia and Great Britain had, much to the outrage of the Persians, divided the country into two speheres of influence; one Russian and one Britain. Naturally, it was unthinkable for either side to allow the other party to organise a national armed Persian force, and they also vetoed Teheran's first choice Italy, because Italy was viewed to be too much of a power in itself.

Sweden, however... Let's face it; while the Russians may once have been trounced by Swedish forces in battles such as Narva, Sweden in the early 20th century was not that impressive. In fact, she had just voluntarily granted Norway independence and was now only a small fraction of the Baltic power she had once been. Nobody needed fear the Swedes – least of all super-powers like Russia and Britain.

Hence, in August 1911, Colonel Harald O. Hjalmarson (helpful tip: 'hj' is pronounced as an English 'y', so he would be 'Yalmarson')  arrived and with the help of several other Swedish officers, began the laborious task of organising a gendarmerie, aimed at maintaining security on the highways and roads. It was called the Persian Central Governemt Gendarmerie (or in Persian, Zhandarmiri-yi Dawlati).

 General Harald Hjalmarson (source: Wikipedia)

The Swedish officers were to a large degree Swedish aristocrats, and the Persian officers were also drawn from the higher social strata and well-educated – many of them spoke French, for instance. At the end of 1912 the Gendarmerie consisted of 21 Swedes and nearly 3,000 Persian officers and men. By the end of 1913, the number of Swedish officers had risen to 36 while nearly 6,000 Persians were employed. According to an article in The Times, around 2,000 of them were mounted, and they were organised in six regiments, or more accurately, nine battalions.

The outbreak of World War I led to a distinct shift in policy. First of all, Sweden recalled all the officers who were on the roll for active duty. Second, Persia was in a very delicate position, finding itself between Germany's ally Turkey and British India. Both sides wooed the Persians, who nominally remained neutral. However, the Gendarmerie had distinct German loyalties. Not only were the Swedish officers by tradition friendly towards their bigger Germanic cousin, but nationalist Persian forces who were still outraged at Russia's and Britain's high-handedness in splitting the country between them, were also in favour of Germany. They accepted subsidiaries from Germany and covertly aided German expiditions, such as the expedition headed by Niedermayer, as well as allowing Wasserman's proslyting among local potentates in southern Persia.

In 1916, the force split; some siding with the nationalists, actively fighting the Russians, while parts of the first and second regiments in Teheran remained neutral along with their Swedish officers. The troops who had remained neutral would later form the nucleus for the reconstructed Gendarmerie, which took part in the campaigns against the Bolsheviks in the Caspian provinces and the Kurdish rebellion in Azerbaijan, as well as keeping up its police duties of guarding the roads.

After the coup d'état in 1921, the Gendarmerie formed the core for the new national Iranian army together with the the Iranian Cossack Division and the remaining Swedish officers returned home. Harald O. Hjalmarson would later head the Swedish Brigade in the Finnish Civil War, and died in 1919, only 51 years old.

And that is how, bizarrely, a few Swedish officers actively aided Germany's overtures to the Muslim World during World War I.

Sources:

"The Unrest In Southern Persia." Times [London, England] 5 Apr. 1912: 3. The Times Digital Archive. Web. 28 July 2012.

"British Officer Killed In Persia." Times [London, England] 12 Dec. 1912: 6. The Times Digital Archive. Web. 28 July 2012.

"Policing Persia." Times [London, England] 27 Dec. 1913: 5. The Times Digital Archive. Web. 28 July 2012.

"Indian Soldiers Attacked in Dangerous Pass: The Consul Smart Incident." The Straits Times, 26 January 1912, Page 2

Cronin, Stephanie, Gendarmerie, Encyclopaedia Iranica www.iranica.com, online edition, 28 July 2012 (available at http://www.iranica.com/articles/gendarmerie)

Hopkirk, Peter, On Secret Service East of Constantinople: the plot to bring down the British empire, J. Murray, London, 1994

Wikipedia; entry on Swedish Gendarmerie in English, and on Harald Hjalmarson in Swedish.

(This post was originally posted on my old blog)

British Courts in India: Perpetuating Power Or Challenging It?

Bombay High Court, 1902 (source: The National Archive, Catalogue Reference: Part of CO 1069/179)

Having spent the some time reading about the administration and legal system of British India, I came across the following statement by Gandhi:

"Do you think it would be possible for the English to carry on their Government without law courts? It is wrong to assume that courts are established for the benefit of the people. Those who want to perpetuate their power do so through the courts."

Pretentious as it might seem, I couldn't help asking myself if Gandhi was right. Did law ultimately serve the purpose of upholding or undermining the structures of Victorian England, especially when seen in a colonial perspective?

First, law can obviously both be a reflection of society as it is, or as we would like it to be when we make laws trying to accomplish social change (as when established legal systems reflecting the existing social order have been replaced in one fell swoop through Communist revolution in traditional societies, for example). But I would argue that even when "conservative", as in constructed to uphold the existing structures, law will always potentially threaten the very structures it is designed to protect.

Why? Because law is about expressing power in a logical and structural way, and that in turn makes it vulnerable to structured arguments based on logic. While power is hidden, unexpressed and implicit, it cannot really be addressed except through violence. But when it is explained and structured, it is stripped of its almost magical abilities. In that sense, law is to power what exposing a marked deck is to magic.

You might compare it to theology, which is really all about structuring faith in a logical fashion. While theology is more or less necessary in order to justify and uphold a complex belief system, it also makes that belief system vulnerable to attack. Look at Christianity, for example. The most successful attacks on the religious status quo are all founded on what are ultimately theological arguments – for example, Luther's and Calvin's Reformation are both "legal" revolutions in that they use the language and arguments of theology to challenge the tenets of that same theology. Thereby it made the justification for the existing beliefs the very foundation for the questioning of status quo. The same thing could be said for the challenge of science. It would be much harder to attack for science to call faith into question if it had not implicitly tried to justify itself by logic; i.e. through a carefully structured belief system that is rationalised through rational argument (and the truth is that modern scientific thought to a large extent is dependent on the rules for argument that was originally designed within a religious context, such as the tomistic logic).

In the same way, when power is called into question in such a way that it feels it must defend itself by rational argument (as it increasingly did in Britain over the centuries), it also becomes vulnerable to being questioned on the very same premises it uses to legitimise itself. Law forces power to explain itself and no matter if it does so by positivism (it is the law because I say so and I am the power) or by utilitarianism (it is the law because it is the best for the majority) or any other mechanism (it is the word of God, for example), the explicit justification makes it possible to question it. Thereby, it is possible no only to call into question not only the ultimate cause for justification, but also that this justification makes the application of power (law) reasonable in an individual case. By laying claim to rationality, power can be questioned by rationality, and not just in legal theory but in its practical application in courts.

Undoubtedly, British law and legal practices in the 19th century was an expression of power over an underprivileged majority by a fairly small and privileged group of white males, but in order to justify this order, British law and legal practices had long used the application of a set of principles that ultimately allowed its opponents to argue against those same inequalities.

This is also evident in the ambivalence in 19th century British justification for its colonial ventures. The idea of British superiority, which was what was often considered to ultimately give Britain the right to occupy foreign countries such as India, also gave Britain an obligation to act in a "superior" manner and gave her a certain responsibility towards "inferior" cultures, which she had to shoulder if she was going to be able to successfully maintain her right to govern these people. In short, if Britain acted in a cruel, arbitrary and "uncivilised" manner, then the basic tenants underlying British legal thought disqualified her from laying claim to her colonies, unless she was to accept the collapse of the mental cosmology that had been created over several centuries. Since that was clearly intolerable, these principles had to be upheld in the laws and the courts, which in turn made it possible to question inequality before the law and the power of the privileged group over the disfranchised such as women, the poor and the colonial groups.

Just, then, as the very carefully constructed theology of the Church in the Middle Ages, made it possible for Luther to call its tenets into question, the theories of rights and power that ultimately justified the British constitutional and legal order made it possible for the American colonialists to call it into question, and for the tea coolies of Assam to demand equality before the law. You might say that whenever the authorities applied the governmental power in an arbitrary on unjust way, they actually called the entire system into question and to do so too openly would necessarily have lead to its collapse. Therefore, in order to survive, it had no choice but to allow itself to be attacked on the grounds of being unfair and unjust.

By providing both a monopoly on violence and a justification for that monopoly, you could say that the law, and the faith in the law by the oppressed, did serve to uphold the basic unfairness underlying the colonial order, and that if the oppressed had refused to acknowledge this order, they might have hastened its demise. But then, the almost sacrosanct status of the law and courts in the British mind also opened it up for a revolution from within – the demands of the oppressed became not a foreign power trying to force its will on the British, but made them an inevitable consequence of the system itself, which may ultimately have been a greater threat to it. In that context, peaceful protests and British violence in response to it, was a much greater threat to the existing order than separatist violence since the British could very well justify violence in the face of violence, but it was much harder justify violence applied in direct opposition of the justification for the monopoly of violence for the state.

I would therefore argue that all justification for power, and its open and rational expression through laws and legal theories, necessarily makes it vulnerable to challenge, but the form of a successful challenge will vary depending on what that rationale is. In that sense, you could say that all belief systems are vulnerable their own kryptonite. The very different challenges faced by Russia in Central Asia, I think, serves to pinpoint this. Russia had a very different rationale underlying its social order, and thus, it was less vulnerable to protests based on fairness and the rights of the governed people, but was ultimately more vulnerable to open revolution, since the autocratic system could not be justified once it failed to apply its will successfully on the people. 

And thus, I would also argue that British law in India, while striving to uphold the social order actually, ultimately, undermined it. On the other hand, the fact that it contained the mechanisms for challenging it built into the system likely helped the fundamental social order in Britain to survive even the cataclysm of the social change of the 20th century, and survive well into the 21st.

The modern Western law, then, I would say, is a double-edged sword that can be used both as a weapon against inherent unfairness in the system and as a shield to defend those very structural inequalities against radical change. The awareness of this somewhat contradictory nature of Western legal thought is, I think, helpful when discussing the role of law in oppressing and/or liberating marginalised groups in the past. I would be curious to hear if anyone agrees with me, or if I'm coming across as completely spaced out (or just repeating an argument that has been made many times before).

Thoughts?