WELLESNET MESSAGE BOARD

WELLES AND STRAVINSKY ALMOST WORKED TOGETHER:

Tomorrow is the 100th anniversary of the first performance - with it's legendary riot - of Igor Stravinsky's "Le Sacre Du Printemps" ("The Rite of Spring"), in it's original form as a score for the Ballet Russe. Stravinsky's music has become one of the most renowned orchestral pieces of the 20th century, but Vaslav Najinsky's choreography was all but forgotten until scholars began to piece it together from photos and various recollections from those that worked on it. Here's a good, albeit speculative, recreation of what that first audience saw and heard:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BryIQ9QpXwI

Serge Diaghelev was the owner of the Ballet Russe, and Norman Lloyd once compared his relationshp with Najinsky to John Houseman's relationship with Orson Welles. I suppose in that analogy Bernard Hermann would have been their Igor Stravinsky. In 1943, Stravinsky actually prepared music for Welles's film of JANE EYRE, but 20th Century Fox went instead with Bernard Hermann, who wrote a great score of his own. Stravinsky recycled some of the music he had prepared into a short orchestral suite called ODE:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rjtfyVMQls4

2013 was also the Bicentennial of the births of both Giusseppe Verdi and Richard Wagner. Here's an excerpt from MY LUNCHES WITH ORSON:

OW: Rene Clair used to say to me: "You know, there has never been a movie which isn't out of fashion after fifteen years. It's like journalism where you write on sand. It disappears; it's nothing."…He made some commercial movies at the end, which were not "Rene Clair" movies. So that hastened the deterioration of his reputation…You couldn't tell the difference between those movies and any other well-made films.

Gilles Jacob: …some directors have only ten years, fifteen years before they're finished. Don't you think so?

OW: Directors are poor fellows who come in with only our overnight bags, and go out with nothing. There are names in those old lists of the greatest movies that have totally vanished, you know? Now, when my career is only a memory, I'm still sitting here like some kind of monument, but the moment will come when I'll drop out of sight altogether…I'd prefer a Verdi ending.

HJ: What's that?

OW: Verdi did great work when he was young. Very early. Highly acclaimed. Spent his middle years overseeing productions of his music, orchestrating his earlier work. Trivialities. Then in old age, one day someone came and told him, "Wagner is dead." He lit up. Did his greatest work in the following years, after decades of nothing.

HJ: Who would your Wagner be?

OW: I'm not going to answer that.

From a memo by Orson Welles (in the "Book of Prophecy" file in his research files at the Lilly Library):

'No wonder the colonies of 1776 chose the truncated pyramid as their emblem on the obverse of the seal of the newly-founded republic, bearing the motto "Annuit Coitus" ("He prospers our beginnings") where the rejected headstone bearing the all-seeing eye is suspended above the pyramid. The commitee of The Great Seal that Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson and John Adams formed on July 4th 1776, could hardly have known then even a hundredth of the secrets devoted researchers have since found hidden in it's stones.

'In any case, the choice of such an emblem for the seal of the newly-born republic is sufficiently strange and curious to arrest the attention of virtually every pyramid student and commentator. And not less curious is the sudden announcement by the Secretary of the Treasury on June 15 1935, that this obverse side of the seal, "The Pyramid", would henceforth be printed for the first time, as it now appears, upon American paper money.