Very Flat, Norfolk

The greatest 1/3 of a play in the 20th century is Act I of Noël Coward’s Private Lives. 

The scene is adjoining terraces of a high-class hotel in Deauville, France, where, unbeknownst to each other, a divorced couple have checked in with their new mates. (What would drama be without coincidences?) Elyot and Amanda, the divorcees, were originally played by Coward and Gertrude Lawrence. In the Youtube link below, the actors are Alec McCowen and Penelope Keith.

“Very flat, Norfolk.”

The most famous line in the play is spoken by Amanda. The inflection is as flat as the Norfolk landscape itself. However, the whole power of the play is in those three words—power that is belied by the flatness of the utterance. Amanda—and Elyot—underneath their cool, unemotional dialogue—are burning with passion for each other. 

Their divorce five years before freed them from having to try living with each other, but we see that it hasn’t freed them from their sexual attraction for each other. And at the end of the act, they give in to the fire burning inside them and run off to Paris, leaving their new spouses behind.  

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The joke goes: There are two kinds of people in the world—those who divide people into two categories and those who don’t. 

KCM belonged to the group who doesn’t understand how divorced persons could re-unite for sex. “But they’re divorced,” she once proclaimed. “They separated. They can’t have those feelings for each other!” She obviously would not understand Private Lives. 

What she did understand was this: A friend of hers who was about to get married announced that she was going to have one last sexual fling before getting hitched. No alarms bells went off when KCM heard this. Quite the opposite, as she saw nothing strange about it.

I, on the other hand, was quite taken aback to hear about the friend’s intention. I, who completely understand the fact that passion (i.e., sexual attraction) does not disappear concurrently with the appearance of a court decree, cannot fathom a situation like this—how someone who has declared her love, her desire to be joined to another for life, can blithely go to bed with a different person. But I fully understand Amanda and Elyot.

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So, in compliance with the old joke, I have here divided the world into two categories of people: the KCM people and the HG people. 

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I started this post by praising Act I of Private Lives. The play consists of two more acts, in which we see Amanda and Elyot struggle to actually live together—which, of course, they hadn’t been able to do five years before. The two acts complete a raucous comedy, a first-rate comedy, to be fair. But Act I, standing alone, offers something deeper than comedy—insight into the irrational power of passion, which can surprisingly erupt, as if there was a volcano underneath the flat landscape of Norfolk. 

Musical Chairs

A week or so ago, a story appeared online about a woman who refused to change her first-class airline seat so that a family could be seated together.* She stated that she had paid full-fare and that the other party should have planned ahead in order to stay together.

The majority of TikTokers who commented on the issue sided with the refusenik. Much as I hate to be associated with a pile of TikTokers, I have to admit that I agree with the woman’s stance, for I was once in a similar position.

I was flying on Copa Air to Panama City (where I would connect with a flight to Buenos Aires) when I was approached by a rather pushy fellow who asked me to change seats with him so that he could sit next to his friend. As I was seated in the bulkhead aisle seat of business class (there was no first class on that flight)—a seat I had purposely selected—I declined to move. The fellow then had his friend change seats to sit farther back with him. And I got to have a nice companion—a woman travel agent from north Jersey—to converse with on the trip.

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On the other hand . . .

About 18 or 19 years ago, when I was attending a recital by the pianist Richard Goode at Avery Fisher Hall, I was asked by a woman if I would switch seats with her so that she could sit next to her friend. Her own seat, she explained, was on the aisle and closer to the stage. I willingly moved from Z102 to the other seat, up front and across the aisle on the left.

During the intermission, the two persons in front of me—a young woman and an older man—turned and began a conversation with me. The man introduced himself as (I thought) Maxwell Cox and explained that he was Richard Goode’s recording engineer. I told him that I had several of Goode’s recordings (especially of Bach), and he was amused when I admitted losing track of what I had bought and had added duplicates to my collection. 

(Let me break off here to reveal that “Maxwell Cox” was a mishearing on my part. I discovered sometime later, when reading the liner notes of a recording on RCA by the quartet Tashi, that the recording engineer was Max Wilcox.** A mishearing like “Maxwell Cox” for “Max Wilcox” is known in language circles as metanalysis.)

Wilcox told me that he was involved with the selection of the winner of the prestigious Gilmore Artist Award, which is presented to 

an exceptional pianist who, regardless of age or nationality, possesses profound musicianship and charisma and who sustains a career as a major international concert artist.***

Wilcox, I later learned, was the favorite recording engineer of the great Artur Rubenstein and was known, I read somewhere, as the “golden ears of RCA Victor.”

I met Wilcox again in September 2004 at a recital given by the young woman, Julie Mech, who had attended the Goode concert with him. He was, once more, a delight to talk to, explaining how the Gilmore Award judges operated; they never revealed to the artists they were listening to that their playing was under scrutiny. It was a completely secretive process. And a successful one, considering that among the recipients of the Award were Igor Levit, Ingrid Fliter, Piotr Anderszewski, and Leif Ove Andsnes.

 

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Several years later, I was at Carnegie Hall for a recital by the renowned pianist Murray Perahia. At the intermission, a patron in the row ahead of me turned to his friend and said,

Perahia is not the best American pianist; he’s not even the best pianist from the Bronx.

I took him to be referring to Richard Goode.

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[Goode's] discs rank among the least-hyped and most beautifully made of all piano recordings, the bulk of them produced by Max Wilcox, who was Arthur Rubinstein’s partner in the studio.****

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* https://dailyhive.com/vancouver/woman-refused-first-class-seat

** https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/31/arts/music/max-wilcox-dead.html

*** https://www.kronbergacademy.de/en/artists/person/kirill-gerstein#:~:text=Kirill%20Gerstein%20is%20the%20sixth,a%20major%20international%20concert%20artist.

****  https://www.steinway.com/news/features/richard-goode-balancing-act