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Welcome
John William Tuohy lives in Washington DC

Diana Adams


Diana Adams (March 29, 1926 – January 10, 1993) was a principal dancer for the New York City Ballet from 1950 to 1963 and favorite of George Balanchine, later becoming a teacher at — and dean of — the School of American Ballet. Diana Adams was one of George Balanchine’s “muses” at New York City Ballet and he created roles for her in a series of ballets: Western Symphony, Ivesiana, Divertimento #15, Agon, Stars and Stripes, Episodes, Monumentum Pro Gesualdo, and Liebeslieder Walzer. Balanchine also created roles on her in Tchaikovsky Pas de Deux, Figure in the Carpet, Midsummer Night’s Dream, and Movements for Piano and Orchestra, although she did not dance in the premieres due to illness or injury.

Maceo Parker




Ajax and Cassandra



The painting above is Rape of Cassandra featured in Virgil's Aeneid. Having spurned Apollo's advances, Cassandra is punished to never have her prophecies believed. This leads the Trojans to reject her warning that Troy is in imminent danger from the Greeks. When Troy falls, Cassandra flees to the Temple of Athena where she encounters Ajax. He is later killed by Athena and the sea god Poseidon for his crime.
Ajax is a Greek mythological hero, the son of King Telamon and Periboea, and the half-brother of Teucer. He plays an important role and is portrayed as a towering figure and a warrior of great courage in Homer's Iliad and in the Epic Cycle, a series of epic poems about the Trojan War.
Cassandra was a woman in Greek mythology cursed to utter true prophecies, but never to be believed. In modern usage her name is employed as a rhetorical device to indicate someone whose accurate prophecies are not believed.
Cassandra was reputed to be a daughter of King Priam and Queen Hecuba of Troy. The older and most common versions state that she was admired by the god Apollo, who sought to win her with the gift to see the future. According to Aeschylus, she promised him her favors, but after receiving the gift, she went back on her word and refused the god. The enraged Apollo could not revoke a divine power, so he added to it the curse that though she would see the future, nobody would believe her prophecies. In other sources, such as Hyginus and Pseudo-Apollodorus, Cassandra broke no promise; the powers were given to her as an enticement. When these failed to make her love him, Apollo cursed Cassandra to always be disbelieved, in spite of the truth of her words.
Some later versions have her falling asleep in a temple, where the snakes licked (or whispered in) her ears so that she could hear the future. Cassandra became a figure of epic tradition and of tragedy.


Hans Rott




"A  musician of genius ... who died unrecognized and in want on the very threshold of his career. ... What music has lost in him cannot be estimated. Such is the height to which his genius soars in ... [his] Symphony [in E major], which he wrote as 20-year-old youth and makes him ... the Founder of the New Symphony as I see it. To be sure, what he wanted is not quite what he achieved. … But I know where he aims. Indeed, he is so near to my inmost self that he and I seem to me like two fruits from the same tree which the same soil has produced and the same air nourished. He could have meant infinitely much to me and perhaps the two of us would have well-nigh exhausted the content of new time which was breaking out for music." Gustav Mahler on Hans Rott.



Hans Rott ( August 1 1858 –  June 25 1884) was an Austrian composer and organist. His music is little-known today, though he received high praise in his time from Gustav Mahler and Anton Bruckner. He left a symphony and Lieder, among other works.
Rott was born in Braunhirschengrund, a suburb of Vienna. His mother Maria Rosalia (1840–1872, maiden name Lutz) was an actress and singer. His father Carl Mathias Rott (real name Roth, born 1807, married 1862) was a famous comic actor in Vienna who was crippled in 1874 by a stage accident which led to his death two years later.
Rott began to evidence persecutory delusions. In October 1880, while on a train journey, he reportedly threatened another passenger with a revolver, claiming that Brahms had filled the train with dynamite. Rott was committed to a mental hospital in 1881, where despite a brief recovery he sank into depression. By the end of 1883 a diagnosis recorded "hallucinatory insanity, persecution mania—recovery no longer to be expected." He died of tuberculosis in 1884, aged 25. Many well-wishers, including Bruckner and Mahler, attended Rott's funeral at the Zentralfriedhof in Vienna.
Some of his music manuscripts have survived in the music collection of Vienna's national library. This includes Rott's Symphony in E major, and sketches for a second Symphony that was never finished. The completed symphony is remarkable in the way it anticipates some of Mahler's musical characteristics. In particular, the third movement prefigures the second movement of Mahler's First Symphony.  In his last years, Rott wrote a lot of music, only to destroy what he wrote soon after writing it, saying it was worthless. Other recordings of the symphony have since been issued, and other Rott works have been occasionally revived, including his Julius Caesar Overture, Pastoral Overture and Prelude for Orchestra.

Mae West. A poem by Edward Field

Mae West

She comes on drenched in a perfume called Self-Satisfaction
from feather boa to silver pumps.

She does not need to be loved by you,
though she’ll give you credit for good taste.
Just because you say you love her
she’s not throwing herself at your feet in gratitude.

Every other star reveals how worthless she feels
by crying when the hero says, Marry me,
or how unhoped- for the approval is
when the audience applauds her big number,
but Mae West takes it as her due:
she knows she’s good.

She expects the best for her self
and knows she’s worth what she costs,
and she costs plenty –
she’s not giving anything away.

She enjoys her admirers, fat daddy or muscleman,
and doesn’t confuse vanity and sex,
though she never turns down pleasure,
lapping it up.

Above all she enjoys her self,
swinging her body that says, Me, me, me, me.
Why not have a good time?
As long as you amuse me, go on,
I like you slobbering over my hand, big boy,
I have a right to.

Most convincing, we know all this
not by her preaching
but by her presence – it’s no act.
Every word and look and movement
spells Independence:
she likes being herself.

And we who don’t
can only look on, astonished.




Edward Field is the recipient of the W.H. Auden award, the Bill Whitehead lifetime achievement award, the Lambda Literary Award, and is the author of ten books of poetry, including After The Fall: poems old and new, in which can be found his poem, “Mae West,” published by University of Pittsburgh Press, © 2007.


Battle of Hohenfriedberg - Attack of the Prussian Infantry and Attack of the Prussian Infantry in the Battle of Leuthen, 1757



Carl Röchling (May 21, 1855 – May 6, 1920) was a German painter and illustrator known for his representation of historical military themes. While in Berlin, he was a pupil of the great master painter Anton von Werner, with whom he participated in the creation of various panoramic paintings such as Der Schlacht von Sedan ("The Battle of Sedan"). Later he became well known for his independent work of historical and military paintings in the turn of the 19th century. He died on May 6, 1920 in Berlin.


Art stolen by the nazi's (most were stored in salt mines) and eventually recovered by the US ARMY

American soldiers discover Manet's painting hidden in the salt mines 1945


The Diego Velazquez Painting Philip IV King of Spain, recovered by the U.S. Army were returned to the rightful owners

Six trucks with part of the half billion dollars worth of Florentine art treasure, which was taken to Bolsano by retreating Germans, arrives at Piazzo Dei Signoria, Florence, Italy


ReichsBank wealth, SS loot, and Berlin Museum paintings that were removed from Berlin to a salt mine vault located in Merkers, Germany. The 3rd U.S. Army discovered the gold and other treasure in April 1945.
German loot stored in church at Ellingen, Germany found by troops of the U.S. Third Army.
Durer engraving, found among other art treasures at Merker
An unknown Rembrandt recovered safe in Munich


Max Roach





Elgar - Cello Concerto


Elgar - Cello Concerto. The only cello concerto that Edward Elgar wrote, and one of the most famous concertos of all time. Cello Concerto in E minor, Op. 85) as well as his last notable work and the cornerstone of the solo cello repertoire. It was composed in the aftermath of the First World War, when his music had already gone out of fashion with the concert-going public. In contrast with Elgar's earlier Violin Concerto, which is lyrical and passionate, the Cello Concerto is for the most part contemplative and elegiac. The first performance was a debacle because Elgar and the performers had been deprived of adequate rehearsal time. The work did not achieve wide popularity until the 1960s, when a recording by Jacqueline du Pré caught the public imagination and became a classical best-seller.



Rosella Hightower


A Worn Path. A short story by Eudora Welty





A Worn Path
A short story

EUDORA WELTY

It was December—a bright frozen day in the early morning. Far out in the country there was an old Negro woman with her head tied in a red rag, coming along a path through the pinewoods. Her name was Phoenix Jackson. She was very old and small and she walked slowly in the dark pine shadows, moving a little from side to side in her steps, with the balanced heaviness and lightness of a pendulum in a grandfather clock. She carried a thin, small cane made from an umbrella, and with this she kept tapping the frozen earth in front of her. This made a grave and persistent noise in the still air that seemed meditative, like the chirping of a solitary little bird.

She wore a dark striped dress reaching down to her shoe tops, and an equally long apron of bleached sugar sacks, with a full pocket: all neat and tidy, but every time she took a step she might have fallen over her shoelaces, which dragged from her unlaced shoes. She looked straight ahead. Her eyes were blue with age. Her skin had a pattern all its own of numberless branching wrinkles and as though a whole little tree stood in the middle of her forehead, but a golden color ran underneath, and the two knobs of her cheeks were illumined by a yellow burning under the dark. Under the red rag her hair came down on her neck in the frailest of ringlets, still black, and with an odor like copper.

Now and then there was a quivering in the thicket. Old Phoenix said, 'Out of my way, all you foxes, owls, beetles, jack rabbits, coons and wild animals! ... Keep out from under these feet, little bob-whites ... Keep the big wild hogs out of my path. Don't let none of those come running my direction. I got a long way.' Under her small black-freckled hand her cane, limber as a buggy whip, would switch at the brush as if to rouse up any hiding things.

On she went. The woods were deep and still. The sun made the pine needles almost too bright to look at, up where the wind rocked. The cones dropped as light as feathers. Down in the hollow was the mourning dove—it was not too late for him.

The path ran up a hill. 'Seem like there is chains about my feet, time I get this far,' she said, in the voice of argument old people keep to use with themselves. 'Something always take a hold of me on this hill—pleads I should stay.'

After she got to the top, she turned and gave a full, severe look behind her where she had come. 'Up through pines,' she said at length. 'Now down through oaks.'

Her eyes opened their widest, and she started down gently. But before she got to the bottom of the hill a bush caught her dress.

Her fingers were busy and intent, but her skirts were full and long, so that before she could pull them free in one place they were caught in another. It was not possible to allow the dress to tear. 'I in the thorny bush,' she said. 'Thorns, you doing your appointed work. Never want to let folks pass—no, sir. Old eyes thought you was a pretty little green bush.'

Finally, trembling all over, she stood free, and after a moment dared to stoop for her cane.

'Sun so high!' she cried, leaning back and looking, while the thick tears went over her eyes. 'The time getting all gone here.'

At the foot of this hill was a place where a log was laid across the creek.

'Now comes the trial,' said Phoenix. Putting her right foot out, she mounted the log and shut her eyes. Lifting her skirt, leveling her cane fiercely before her like a festival figure in some parade, she began to march across. Then she opened her eyes and she was safe on the other side.

'I wasn't as old as I thought,' she said.

But she sat down to rest. She spread her skirts on the bank around her and folded her hands over her knees. Up above her was a tree in a pearly cloud of mistletoe. She did not dare to close her eyes, and when a little boy brought her a plate with a slice of marble-cake on it she spoke to him. 'That would be acceptable,' she said. But when she went to take it there was just her own hand in the air.

So she left that tree, and had to go through a barbed-wire fence. There she had to creep and crawl, spreading her knees and stretching her fingers like a baby trying to climb the steps. But she talked loudly to herself: she could not let her dress be torn now, so late in the day, and she could not pay for having her arm or her leg sawed off if she got caught fast where she was.

At last she was safe through the fence and risen up out in the clearing. Big dead trees, like black men with one arm, were standing in the purple stalks of the withered cotton field. There sat a buzzard.

'Who you watching?'

In the furrow she made her way along.

'Glad this not the season for bulls,' she said, looking sideways, 'and the good Lord made his snakes to curl up and sleep in the winter. A pleasure I don't see no two-headed snake coming around that tree, where it come once. It took a while to get by him, back in the summer.'

She passed through the old cotton and went into a field of dead corn. It whispered and shook, and was taller than her head. 'Through the maze now,' she said, for there was no path.

Then there was something tall, black, and skinny there, moving before her.

At first she took it for a man. It could have been a man dancing in the field. But she stood still and listened, and it did not make a sound. It was as silent as a ghost.

'Ghost,' she said sharply, 'who be you the ghost of? For I have heard of nary death close by.'

But there was no answer, only the ragged dancing in the wind.

She shut her eyes, reached out her hand, and touched a sleeve. She found a coat and inside that an emptiness, cold as ice.

'You scarecrow,' she said. Her face lighted. 'I ought to be shut up for good,' she said with laughter. 'My senses is gone. I too old. I the oldest people I ever know. Dance, old scarecrow,' she said, 'while I dancing with you.'

She kicked her foot over the furrow, and with mouth drawn down shook her head once or twice in a little strutting way. Some husks blew down and whirled in streamers about her skirts.

Then she went on, parting her way from side to side with the cane, through the whispering field. At last she came to the end, to a wagon track where the silver grass blew between the red ruts. The quail were walking around like pullets, seeming all dainty and unseen.

'Walk pretty,' she said. 'This the easy place. This the easy going.' She followed the track, swaying through the quiet bare fields, through the little strings of trees silver in their dead leaves, past cabins silver from weather, with the doors and windows boarded shut, all like old women under a spell sitting there. 'I walking in their sleep,' she said, nodding her head vigorously.

In a ravine she went where a spring was silently flowing through a hollow log. Old Phoenix bent and drank. 'Sweet gum makes the water sweet,' she said, and drank more. 'Nobody know who made this well, for it was here when I was born.'

The track crossed a swampy part where the moss hung as white as lace from every limb. 'Sleep on, alligators, and blow your bubbles.' Then the cypress trees went into the road. Deep, deep it went down between the high green-colored banks. Overhead the live oaks met, and it was as dark as a cave.

A big black dog with a lolling tongue came up out of the weeds by the ditch. She was meditating, and not ready, and when he came at her she only hit him a little with her cane. Over she went in the ditch, like a little puff of milkweed.

Down there, her senses drifted away. A dream visited her, and she reached her hand up, but nothing reached down and gave her a pull. So she lay there and presently went to talking. 'Old woman,' she said to herself, 'that black dog come up out of the weeds to stall you off, and now there he sitting on his fine tail, smiling at you.'

A white man finally came along and found her—a hunter, a young man, with his dog on a chain.

'Well, Granny!' he laughed. 'What are you doing there?'

'Lying on my back like a June bug waiting to be turned over, mister,' she said, reaching up her hand.

He lifted her up, gave her a swing in the air, and set her down. 'Anything broken, Granny?'

'No sir, them old dead weeds is springy enough,' said Phoenix, when she had got her breath. 'I thank you for your trouble.'

'Where do you live, Granny?' he asked, while the two dogs were growling at each other.

'Away back yonder, sir, behind the ridge. You can't even see it from here.'

'On your way home?'

'No sir, I going to town.'

'Why, that's too far! That's as far as I walk when I come out myself, and I get something for my trouble.' He patted the stuffed bag he carried, and there hung down a little closed claw. It was one of the bobwhites, with its beak hooked bitterly to show it was dead. 'Now you go on home, Granny!'

'I bound to go to town, mister,' said Phoenix. 'The time come around.'

He gave another laugh, filling the whole landscape. 'I know you old colored people! Wouldn't miss going to town to see Santa Claus!'

But something held Old Phoenix very still. The deep lines in her face went into a fierce and different radiation. Without warning, she had seen with her own eyes a flashing nickel fall out of the man's pocket onto the ground.

'How old are you, Granny?' he was saying.

'There is no telling, mister,' she said, 'no telling.'

Then she gave a little cry and clapped her hands and said, 'Git on away from here, dog! Look! Look at that dog!' She laughed as if in admiration. 'He ain't scared of nobody. He a big black dog.' She whispered, 'Sic him!'

'Watch me get rid of that cur,' said the man. 'Sic him, Pete! Sic him!'

Phoenix heard the dogs fighting, and heard the man running and throwing sticks. She even heard a gunshot. But she was slowly bending forward by that time, further and further forward, the lids stretched down over her eyes, as if she were doing this in her sleep. Her chin was lowered almost to her knees. The yellow palm of her hand came out from the fold of her apron. Her fingers slid down and along the ground under the piece of money with the grace and care they would have in lifting an egg from under a setting hen. Then she slowly straightened up; she stood erect, and the nickel was in her apron pocket. A bird flew by. Her lips moved. 'God watching me the whole time. I come to stealing.'

The man came back, and his own dog panted about them. 'Well, I scared him off that time,' he said, and then he laughed and lifted his gun and pointed it at Phoenix.

She stood straight and faced him.

'Doesn't the gun scare you?' he said, still pointing it.

'No, sir, I seen plenty go off closer by, in my day, and for less than what I done,' she said, holding utterly still.

He smiled, and shouldered the gun. 'Well, Granny,' he said, 'you must be a hundred years old, and scared of nothing. I'd give you a dime if I had any money with me. But you take my advice and stay home, and nothing will happen to you.'

'I bound to go on my way, mister,' said Phoenix. She inclined her head in the red rag. Then they went in different directions, but she could hear the gun shooting again and again over the hill.

She walked on. The shadows hung from the oak trees to the road like curtains. Then she smelled wood smoke, and smelled the river, and she saw a steeple and the cabins on their steep steps. Dozens of little black children whirled around her. There ahead was Natchez shining. Bells were ringing. She walked on.

In the paved city it was Christmas time. There were red and green electric lights strung and crisscrossed everywhere, and all turned on in the daytime. Old Phoenix would have been lost if she had not distrusted her eyesight and depended on her feet to know where to take her.

She paused quietly on the sidewalk, where people were passing by. A lady came along in the crowd, carrying an armful of red, green, and silver-wrapped presents; she gave off perfume like the red roses in hot summer, and Phoenix stopped her.

'Please, missy, will you lace up my shoe?' She held up her foot.

'What do you want, Grandma?'

'See my shoe,' said Phoenix. 'Do all right for out in the country, but wouldn't look right to go in a big building.'

'Stand still then, Grandma,' said the lady. She put her packages down on the sidewalk beside her and laced and tied both shoes tightly.

'Can't lace 'em with a cane,' said Phoenix. 'Thank you, missy. I doesn't mind asking a nice lady to tie up my shoe, when I gets out on the street.'

Moving slowly and from side to side, she went into the big building, and into a tower of steps, where she walked up and around and around until her feet knew to stop.

She entered a door, and there she saw nailed up on the wall the document that had been stamped with the gold seal and framed in the gold frame, which matched the dream that was hung up in her head.

'Here I be,' she said. There was a fixed and ceremonial stiffness over her body.

'A charity case, I suppose,' said an attendant who sat at the desk before her.

But Phoenix only looked above her head. There was sweat on her face, the wrinkles in her skin shone like a bright net.

'Speak up, Grandma,' the woman said. 'What's your name? We must have your history, you know. Have you been here before? What seems to be the trouble with you?'

Old Phoenix only gave a twitch to her face as if a fly were bothering her.

'Are you deaf?' cried the attendant.

But then the nurse came in.

'Oh, that's just old Aunt Phoenix,' she said. 'She doesn't come for herself—she has a little grandson. She makes these trips just as regular as clockwork. She lives away back off the Old Natchez Trace.' She bent down. 'Well, Aunt Phoenix, why don't you just take a seat? We won't keep you standing after your long trip.' She pointed.

The old woman sat down, bolt upright in the chair.

'Now, how is the boy?' asked the nurse.

Old Phoenix did not speak.

'I said, how is the boy?'

But Phoenix only waited and stared straight ahead, her face very solemn and withdrawn into rigidity.

'Is his throat any better?' asked the nurse. 'Aunt Phoenix, don't you hear me? Is your grandson's throat any better since the last time you came for the medicine?'

With her hands on her knees, the old woman waited, silent, erect and motionless, just as if she were in armor.

'You mustn't take up our time this way, Aunt Phoenix,' the nurse said. 'Tell us quickly about your grandson, and get it over. He isn't dead, is he?'

At last there came a flicker and then a flame of comprehension across her face, and she spoke.

'My grandson. It was my memory had left me. There I sat and forgot why I made my long trip.'

'Forgot?' The nurse frowned. 'After you came so far?'

Then Phoenix was like an old woman begging a dignified forgiveness for waking up frightened in the night. 'I never did go to school—I was too old at the Surrender,' she said in a soft voice. 'I'm an old woman without an education. It was my memory fail me. My little grandson, he is just the same, and I forgot it in the coming.'

'Throat never heals, does it?' said the nurse, speaking in a loud, sure voice to Old Phoenix. By now she had a card with something written on it, a little list. 'Yes. Swallowed lye. When was it?—January—two—three years ago—'

Phoenix spoke unasked now. 'No, missy, he not dead, he just the same. Every little while his throat begin to close up again, and he not able to swallow. He not get his breath. He not able to help himself. So the time come around, and I go on another trip for the soothing-medicine.'

'All right. The doctor said as long as you came to get it, you could have it,' said the nurse. 'But it's an obstinate case.'

'My little grandson, he sit up there in the house all wrapped up, waiting by himself,' Phoenix went on. 'We is the only two left in the world. He suffer and it don't seem to put him back at all. He got a sweet look. He going to last. He wear a little patch-quilt and peep out, holding his mouth open like a little bird. I remembers so plain now. I not going to forget him again, no, the whole enduring time. I could tell him from all the others in creation.'

'All right.' The nurse was trying to hush her now. She brought her a bottle of medicine. 'Charity,' she said, making a check mark in a book.

Old Phoenix held the bottle close to her eyes, and then carefully put it into her pocket.

'I thank you,' she said.

'It's Christmas time, Grandma,' said the attendant. 'Could I give you a few pennies out of my purse?'

'Five pennies is a nickel,' said Phoenix stiffly.

'Here's a nickel,' said the attendant.

Phoenix rose carefully and held out her hand. She received the nickel and then fished the other nickel out of her pocket and laid it beside the new one. She stared at her palm closely, with her head on one side.

Then she gave a tap with her cane on the floor. 'This is what come to me to do,' she said. 'I going to the store and buy my child a little windmill they sells, made out of paper. He going to find it hard to believe there such a thing in the world. I'll march myself back where he waiting, holding it straight up in this hand.'

She lifted her free hand, gave a little nod, turned around, and walked out of the doctor's office. Then her slow step began on the stairs, going down.



There's a lot going on here, in the scene with the colors, but it capturing isn't it?

Boulevard de la Madeleine, Edouard Cortes



Edouard Léon Cortès (1882–1969) was a French post-impressionist artist. He is known as "Le Poète Parisien de la Peinture" or "the Parisian Poet of Painting" because of his diverse Paris cityscapes in a variety of weather and night settings.


Although Cortès was a pacifist, when war came close to his native village he was compelled to enlist in a French Infantry Regiment at the age of 32. Sent to the front lines, Cortès was wounded by a bayonet, evacuated to a military hospital, and awarded the Croix de Guerre. After recovery he was reassigned to use his artistic talent to sketch enemy positions. Later in life his convictions led him to refuse the Légion d'Honneur from the French Government.  
His wife died in 1918, and the following year he married his sister-in-law, Lucienne Joyeuse. Cortès lived a simple life amid a close circle of friends. He died on November 26, 1969.

Eros Sleeping (Greek 3rd-2nd Century B.C.).

Eros was the Greek god of love, or more precisely, passionate and physical desire. Without warning he selects his targets and forcefully strikes at their hearts, bringing confusion and irrepressible feelings or, in the words of Hesiod, he ‘loosens the limbs and weakens the mind’ (Theogony, 120). Eros is most often represented in Greek art as a carefree and beautiful youth, crowned with flowers, especially of roses which were closely associated with the god.


From A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1935)



The Elephants of Thula Thula



Lawrence Anthony was an acclaimed conservationist, best-selling author and environmentalist. He was the founder and owned and ran the Thula Thula Exclusive Private Game Reserve in Zululand, Kwazulu Natal.

In 1999, he was asked to accept a herd of wild elephants and he did. The herd elephants would have been killed if he didn’t accept them because they were difficult and had escaped from other enclosures “leaving a trail of havoc across KwaZulu Natal. “
Anthony said that “by treating the elephants like children, trying to persuade them with words and gestures, showing them that they shouldn’t misbehave and that they could trust me.”
He focused his attention on the leader of the herd, Nana. “I’d go down to the fence and I’d plead with Nana not to break it down,’ he said. ‘I knew she didn’t understand English, but I hoped she’d understand by the tone of my voice and my body language what I was saying. And one morning, instead of trying to break the fence down, she just stood there. Then she put her trunk through the fence towards me. I knew she wanted to touch me. That was a turning point.”
There are two elephant herds at Thula Thula Game Reserve and according to Anthony’s son Dylan, both herds arrived at the house after Anthony’s death. ‘They had not visited the house for a year-and-a-half. It had taken them about 12 hours to make the journey. “They all hung around for about two days before making their way back into the bush” said Dylan.
In their mourning, the elephants remained outside Anthony's home for two days and two nights without any food. The next morning, they left as mysteriously as they came and began their journey back home. According to his wife, Françoise Malby-Anthony and several journalists. the elephants, his devoted friends, have since returned every year since his death. On the same day, March 7.

Secrets, Rumors, and Lies: Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No. 6, Pathétique




(From the Houston Symphony presents Tchaikovsky)
Tchaikovsky’s final symphony: few other pieces of music have provoked as much speculation with regard to secret meanings, autobiographical resonances, and authorial intent. In part, this is a result of Tchaikovsky’s own elusive statements, though the circumstances of his life and his historical context have also played significant roles. Above all, however, this powerful and tragic work—perhaps without parallel in the symphonic tradition—seems to demand explanation. How could a person come to write such music?


SECRET PROGRAMS
A grandson of Tsar Nicholas I, Konstantin Konstantinovich Romanov (1858–1915) was an interesting character. Though married with nine children, he seems to have been more-or-less secretly bisexual. Gifted with an artistic disposition, he moonlighted as a poet, publishing under his initials “K.R.” to considerable acclaim. He first befriended Tchaikovsky in 1880, and even invited him to take a trip around the world together (an offer Tchaikovsky politely declined).
From the late 1880s they maintained a correspondence that is remarkable for the insights it gives into Tchaikovsky’s artistic opinions and creative process. Tchaikovsky set a few of the Grand Duke’s poems to music, notably his Opus 63 romances.
In 1889—only a year after completing his Fifth Symphony—Tchaikovsky wrote to his friend, the Grand Duke Konstantin Romanov, that “I want terribly to write a somewhat grandiose symphony, which would crown my artistic career… For some time I have carried in my head an outline plan for such a symphony… I hope that I shall not die without carrying out this intention.” Tchaikovsky seems to have begun sketching this ambitious project in 1891, and by April 1892, he wrote to the pianist Alexander Ziloti that “I am already thinking of a new large composition, that is, of a symphony with a secret program.”

Such “secret programs” were nothing new for Tchaikovsky. To put this statement in context, his previous two symphonies both seem to have had similar—even related—“outline plans.”
In a letter, Tchaikovsky revealed that his Fourth Symphony was inspired by an individual’s struggle with fate—a struggle that is left unresolved by the symphony’s conclusion. Sketches for the Fifth Symphony suggest that it was similarly concerned with “Total submission before fate, or, what is the same thing, the inscrutable designs of Providence.” In each symphony, there is a motif that seems to be associated with this inscrutable “fate” that recurs in multiple movements. While the Fourth Symphony’s “fate” motif remains malevolent throughout the work, the Fifth Symphony’s comparable musical idea transforms from an ominous force to a positive one over the course of the piece and brings the work to a triumphant ending.

THE MUSIC
The symphony begins with a slow, tenebrous introduction: a bassoon solo emerges above a descending chromatic bassline—a musical pattern that has served as a traditional symbol of mourning since the baroque:
This soon gives way to faster music as the bassoon solo is transformed into a nervous theme in the violins. Interwoven with descending scales, the theme develops until it is punctuated by violent fanfares in the trumpets. The music then fades to silence, and muted violins and cellos begin a second theme marked “tenderly, very singing, expansively.
” This melody bears a striking resemblance to Don José’s “Flower Song” from Bizet’s Carmen (one of Tchaikovsky’s favorite operas). Both melodies begin with a falling, triadic line, and when the melody leaps up to a descending scale, it recalls the phrase when Don José sings “Car tu n’avais eu qu’à paraître,/Qu’à jeter un regard sur moi,/Pour t’emparer de tout mon être” (“For you had only to appear,/Only to cast a glance at me,/To take hold of all my being”). Tchaikovsky marks this part “incalzando”—which can mean “urging” or “pressing.” A delicate interlude for woodwinds leads to a passionate reprise of the singing melody, which fades to an impossibly quiet pppppp.
Suddenly, the orchestra erupts. The nervous first theme returns, fragmented and developed in a fugue marked “feroce” (“ferocious”), until the trumpets intervene with powerful descending scales. The music becomes quieter, and above the anxious perpetual motion of the strings, the brass intone a quotation of the Russian Orthodox chant “With thy saints, O Christ, give peace to the soul of thy servant,” a traditional prayer for the dead. As if pleading, the strings respond, swelling and fading away again until only a Morse code-like pulse remains in the horns. Fragments of the nervous first theme appear above it, building to a powerful reprise.
Despite its vehemence, the return of this theme fails to sound like an arrival point—the momentum of the preceding development continues until the music collapses. A searing climax based on simple, descending scales follows. After this crisis subsides, the singing second theme returns, marked “con dolcezza” (“with sweetness”). The movement fades away with a coda: a tranquil variant of the once anxious motif that opened the symphony appears above the pizzicato strings’ descending scales.
The cellos open the second movement with one of Tchaikovsky’s loveliest melodies. Reminiscent of the composer’s ballet music, this theme would seem to be a waltz, except that it is in 5/4 rather than the usual three-quarter time. Some commentators have poetically suggested that this is a waltz “missing a beat,” but while its meter is unusual, the melody sounds utterly complete as it is. Forgetting the vicissitudes of the first movement, the music seems to simply delight in the beauty of sound itself—until a contrasting central episode appears. Marked “con dolcezza e flebile” (“faintly and with sweetness”), a sighing melody based on a descending scale appears in the violins and cellos above an ominously pulsing bass pedal. After a reprise of the main theme, descending scales in the woodwinds initiate a coda in which echoes of the sighing middle section return.
The third movement begins with a light, scherzando character: a fragmentary march emerges from the continuous background of the strings as if from a distance. Other melodic ideas follow, until forceful downward scales in the strings lead to more hints of the march in the brass, as if it is coming closer. At last, the march arrives in full in the clarinets and horns. Taken together, the impression is of some public ceremony or military parade. After the march appears, the music cycles back through the movement’s other ideas. When the march returns, it is now a bombastic fortississimo. The symphony’s recurring downward scales return in an overpowering coda.

The movement’s grandiose finale frequently provokes applause from audiences, and many hear this music as an uncomplicated expression of joy; however, like the outwardly jovial third movement of Brahms’ Fourth Symphony, its position within an overall tragic narrative suggests an underlying irony—the necessary false triumph before the final peripeteia. For some listeners, passing shadows hint at an underlying anxiety beneath the music’s decorative, balletic surface; at times, the music can also seem artificial, mechanical, and repetitive, as if going in circles. It is perhaps worth noting that in his later years, the famously shy Tchaikovsky had ambivalent feelings about his own celebrity; while he was gratified by success, he dreaded being feted at official occasions and felt that he had to don “a mask” with strangers. He was also well aware of his exceptional talent for writing stirring, celebratory finales. Perhaps the end of this movement is a form of self-parody, just subtle enough that most take it for the real thing; in an 1890 letter to the composer Alexander Glazunov, he wrote, “Something is happening inside me, which I don’t understand: some sort of weariness from life, a sense of disappointment. At times I’m madly homesick, but even in those depths I can look forward to a new relish for life; instead it’s something hopeless, final, and even, as finales often are, banal.”
The actual finale is among Tchaikovsky’s most original conceptions; in place of the expected fireworks (evoked in the previous movement) is a long, slow adagio in B minor. Marked “lamentoso” (“lamenting”), the opening melody is the culmination of the many descending scales that pervade the symphony. Tchaikovsky created a uniquely labored sound by dividing the melody between the first and second violins—they play each note of the descending scale in alternation.

Dying away, a bassoon solo leads to a contrasting section; a long crescendo begins, the winds marked “con espressione” (“with expression”) and the violins “con lenezza e devozione” (“Lenezza,” interestingly, is not a standard Italian word. Some believe it is a misspelling of “lentezza”—“slowness”—although others have suggested that it might be an obscure, literary variant of “lenità”—“soothing.” “Devozione” means “devotion” or “piety,” carrying a religious connotation). Slowly the music rises, full of intense yearning, until reaching a thundering climax built on descending scales. Like the climactic moment of the first movement of Tchaikovsky’s Fourth Symphony, this climax seems a negation.
A rush of descending scales leads to a pause, after which the main, lamentoso theme returns. This time, it builds to an anguished passage, obsessively returning to an intensified version of the main theme’s descending scale over a pedal in the timpani. A tamtam sounds, and the “con devozione” music returns, slowly fading to nothing.

“LET THEM GUESS”
Soon after the premiere, Tchaikovsky contracted cholera—St. Petersburg was in the midst of an outbreak of the disease, although the worst of it had seemed to be past. Ignoring the threat, Tchaikovsky drank unboiled water, both at home and when dining out. Often plagued by stomach aches, he ignored the first symptoms with disastrous results—by the time doctors were called, it was too late to save him. The disease destroyed his kidneys, and he died soon after.
The public reaction was one of shock. Tsar Alexander III himself ordered a state funeral for the composer who had enjoyed his official patronage. Thousands thronged Nevsky Prospect to bid farewell to the national hero as his funeral cortege passed. Twelve days after his death, a memorial concert was given which featured his Sixth Symphony, which now appeared with the subtitle that Tchaikovsky had intended to be printed in the published score: Pateticheskaya, a literary Russian word meaning “full of pathos, impassioned, passionate, emotional.” In the West, it is usually translated as the French Pathétique.

Warning: the remainder of this post includes discussion of self-harm and homophobia.
In contrast with the premiere, when the symphony met with “bewilderment,” the work now made a profound impression. As the final movement faded away, it seemed to many that Tchaikovsky had written his own requiem. Immediately, rumors and conspiracy theories began to spread that Tchaikovsky had committed suicide and that the cholera diagnosis was a cover-up.
In fact, the evidence suggests that nothing could be further from the truth, as Tchaikovsky biographer Alexander Poznansky has convincingly demonstrated. Tchaikovsky did suffer from depressive episodes throughout his life–the one he experienced during the winter of 1892–93, when he began composing his Symphony Pathétique in his head is a prime example. In this case, however, it seems that composing the symphony helped Tchaikovsky purge these negative emotions. Surviving letters and memoirs from friends and family who actually knew Tchaikovsky intimately suggest that the months leading up to the premiere were happy ones during which Tchaikovsky was busy making plans for the future.

LOVE THAT DARE NOT SPEAK ITS NAME?
Nevertheless, the rumors persisted, and especially in the wake of Oscar Wilde’s very public downfall in England less than two years later, they began to link the composer’s alleged suicide with his homosexuality. Specifically, people began to suspect that Tchaikovsky had committed suicide because he was tortured by his sexuality.
That Tchaikovsky was gay was a more or less open secret in Russian musical circles and high society during his life. Though sex between men was officially illegal, attitudes toward homosexuality seem to have been surprisingly tolerant in 19th century Russia, at least among the upper classes. A number of Tchaikovsky’s gay friends even lived openly with lovers, and after Tsar Alexander III awarded Tchaikovsky official honors and a state-funded pension, he had virtually nothing to fear in terms of legal prosecution or exposure in the press within Russia (although it seems unlikely that the Tsar’s patronage could have protected him from scandal outside of Russia–perhaps explaining his dislike of traveling abroad). Tsar Alexander III in all likelihood was aware of and unconcerned by Tchaikovsky’s sexuality, as he was of that of other gay men at his court.
Though Tchaikovsky struggled to come to turns with his sexuality earlier in his life, in the aftermath of his disastrous marriage, he seems to have found self-acceptance. At the same time, it is difficult to imagine that he was completely happy with the society in which he lived. He was out to his brothers (though not his parents or sisters) and his close friends and professional colleagues, but that was as open as he wanted to be. A passage from Tolstoy’s 1899 novel Resurrection gives some idea of contemporary attitudes on the topic, ranging from disgust to amusement. After becoming embroiled in a homosexual scandal, an official is punished not with prison, but by being made governor of a distant town in Siberia:
The cover of the first US edition of Tolstoy’s “Resurrection.” The novel included one of the earliest explicit discussions of homosexuality in Russian fiction, albeit as a minor subplot. The first Russian novel to focus on gay characters and themes was Mikhail Kuzmin’s “Wings,” published in 1906. Had Tchaikovsky not contracted cholera, he might have lived to have read it.
Meanwhile the Senators rang and ordered tea, and began talking about the event that, together with the duel, was occupying the Petersburgers.
It was the case of the chief of a Government department, who was accused of the crime provided for in Statute 995.
“What nastiness,” said Bay, with disgust.
“Why; where is the harm of it? I can show you a Russian book containing the project of a German writer [likely Karl Heinrich Ulrichs], who openly proposes that it should not be considered a crime,” said Skovorodnikoff, drawing in greedily the fumes of the crumpled cigarette, which he held between his fingers close to the palm, and he laughed boisterously.

“Impossible!” said Bay.
I shall show it you,” said Skovorodnikoff, giving the full title of the book, and even its date and the name of its editor.
“I hear he has been appointed governor to some town in Siberia.”
“That`s fine. The archdeacon will meet him with a crucifix. They ought to appoint an archdeacon of the same sort,” said Skovorodnikoff. “I could recommend them one,” and he threw the end of his cigarette into his saucer, and again shoved as much of his beard and moustaches as he could into his mouth and began chewing them.
While tolerated by some, homosexuality was clearly not widely accepted or considered to be respectable. Could Tchaikovsky’s feelings regarding his sexuality have played a role in the genesis of his Sixth Symphony? It is impossible to know, and there is no direct evidence to suggest that they did. Certainly Tchaikovsky experienced many other hardships throughout his life that could have provided fodder for a tragic symphony. The death of his sister in 1891, as well as the passing of other close friends, might have been an alternative stimulus for the work’s tragic mood.
Many have criticized the need to search for autobiographical interpretations at all, arguing that to do so implicitly belittles the power of Tchaikovsky’s imagination. After all, does anyone look for autobiographical interpretations of, say, Strauss’s Salome? Clearly Strauss did not need to perform a striptease in order to write the Dance of the Seven Veils. Furthermore, interpretations of the symphony as a “gay suicide note” play into many unfortunate tropes and stereotypes that have long dogged the representation of LGBTQ people in media, namely the tendency of writers to kill off LGBTQ characters and the implication that it is impossible to be LGBTQ and happy at the same time.
Nevertheless, it is important to remember that the symphony was often interpreted as a specifically homosexual tragedy within the gay community itself. In 1913-14, 20 years after the premiere of Tchaikovsky’s symphony, E. M. Forster penned Maurice, a novel with explicitly gay characters and themes. Tchaikovsky’s Pathétique (and its speculative interpretations) play a notable role in the novel, which demonstrates just how widespread the rumors were even in the symphony’s first decades. No one will ever know what Tchaikovsky’s “secret program” was, and the symphony is open to as many interpretations as it has listeners.