Dickens the Showrunner: A Cold Open for Hard Times

As a historian who frequently teaches works of literature, I am particularly attentive to historical context. I am also known for my emphasis on genre—one of my favorite sayings is “not every book is a novel.” At the same time, I am occasionally struck by literary techniques that might seem both anachronistic and a-generic. Some authors seem to have been born in the wrong century and to have worked in the wrong genre. Vergil, for example, should have been a screenwriter, as the Aeneid displays a cinematic imagination (a subject for another blog entry). Whereas Charles Dickens, if he were alive today, might be a showrunner, working in television.

Photograph of Charles Dickens
Charles Dickens in 1858

Of course, many of Dickens’ works have already been adapted for TV, especially his biggest hits like David Copperfield and Oliver Twist (not to mention adaptations for stage and screen). But I’ve noticed that one of his lesser-known novels, one that has had very few adaptations, uses a technique that is common in television writing. I’m talking about his 1854 industrial novel Hard Times.

Hard Times famously begins with a schoolroom scene in which Mr. Gradgrind, the owner of the school; Mr. M’Choakumchild, the teacher; and an unnamed government inspector berate the hapless student Sissy Jupe, daughter of a circus clown, for being unable to define “horse” and for expressing a preference for wallpaper with pictures of horses and for flowered carpets. I have previously written about this scene and its connection to the ideas of Henry Cole, one of the designers of the 1851 Great Exhibition and first director of what would become the Victoria and Albert Museum. But today I want to discuss how in this scene Dickens is using a technique more commonly associated with TV: the cold open.

The term “cold open” refers to a TV show jumping right into the action, instead of beginning with the opening titles and theme music (which are delayed until later), in hopes of grabbing the audience’s attention before the first commercial break. Some shows that use the cold open include The Office, Brooklyn Nine-Nine, and Saturday Night Live.

Like most Dickens novels, Hard Times was originally published serially, a few chapters at a time, in a magazine called Household Words. Dickens therefore shared with TV writers the need to capture his readers’ attention so they would come back for the next instalment. Chapters 1-3 of Hard Times were published together, followed the next week by chapters 4 and 5.

Opening of Hard Times from Household Words
The opening of Hard Times as it appeared in Household Words, 1854

So what makes the beginning of Hard Times a cold open? The very first words of the novel are spoken by an unnamed character, with no introduction:

“‘Now, what I want is, Facts. Teach these boys and girls nothing but Facts.  Facts alone are wanted in life. Plant nothing else, and root out everything else. You can only form the minds of reasoning animals upon Facts: nothing else will ever be of any service to them. This is the principle on which I bring up my own children, and this is the principle on which I bring up these children. Stick to Facts, Sir!'”

This utterance simply ends, with not even a “he said.” The next paragraph reads like stage directions:

“The scene a plain, bare, monotonous vault of a schoolroom, and the speaker’s square forefinger emphasized his observations by underscoring every sentence with a line on the schoolmaster’s sleeve.”

The paragraph continues with a physical description of the speaker, who is still unnamed:

“The emphasis was helped by the speaker’s square wall of a forehead, which had his eyebrows for its base, while his eyes found commodious cellerage in two dark caves, overshadowed by the wall. The emphasis was helped by the speaker’s mouth, which was wide, thin, and hard set. . . . The speaker’s obstinate carriage, square coat, square legs, square shoulders—nay, his very neckcloth, trained to take him by the throat with an unaccommodating grasp, like a stubborn fact, as it was—all helped the emphasis.”

Only when we turn the page to chapter 2 do we discover that this square lover of facts is named Thomas Gradgrind, as the narrative continues with the interrogation of Sissy Jupe.

The setting for the opening events is finally identified in chapter 5 as Coketown. Dickens introduces Coketown with a musical metaphor:

“Let us strike the key-note, Coketown, before pursuing our tune.”

There follows a lengthy description of Coketown.

“It was a town of red brick, or of brick that would have been red if the smoke and ashes allowed it; but as matters stood it was a town of unnatural red and black like the painted face of a savage. It was a town of machinery and tall chimneys, out of which interminable serpents of smoke trailed themselves for ever and ever, and never got uncoiled. It had a black canal in it, and a river that ran purple with ill-smelling dye, and vast piles of building full of windows where there was a rattling and a trembling all day long, and where the piston of the steam-engine worked monotonously up and down like the head of an elephant in a state of melancholy madness. It contained several large streets all very like one another, and many small streets still more like one another, inhabited by people equally like one another, who all went in and out at the same hours, with the same sound upon the same pavements, to do the same work, and to whom every day was the same as yesterday and to-morrow, and every year the counterpart of the last and the next.”

What does this make chapter 5? It makes it the title sequence, complete with its theme music. Can’t you imagine the camera panning over whatever British industrial city is chosen to play the part of Coketown as the theme music plays?

Perhaps we should expand the adjective “Dickensian” to refer to this narrative technique. Then TV critics could write sentences like this:

In its deft use of the cold open, The Office is a Dickensian look at the early twenty-first century workplace.

HIP Enough for You? A Historian’s Approach to the Vivaldi G Minor Violin Concerto

Portrait of Antonio Vivaldi
Antonio Vivaldi

Recently, as a result of a casual mention in conversation, I found myself thinking about the Vivaldi G Minor violin concerto (Opus 12, no. 1; RV 317).1 My violinist readers may recall that this concerto is found in Suzuki Book 5. I learned it in high school, from the Suzuki book, and even used it as an audition piece for a summer music camp. 2 When it came up in conversation, I remembered that I had enjoyed playing it back when I was a teenager and decided I would take it up again. I realized, however, that I was hearing it in my head the way I remembered playing it, the way I was taught to play it—in a rather Romantic style, very legato. It occurred to me that this didn’t sound particularly Baroque; it is not what would now be considered a Historically-Informed Performance, or “HIP.” Wanting to test my hypothesis, I went on to youtube to hear some examples.

Photo of Mischa Elman
Mischa Elman in 1916

I found that the recordings show a surprising amount of variation, in both tempo and character. For the most part, the older recordings are more like the way I remember learning it—slow and smooth. This makes sense, since my violin teacher, Mr. Gordon, was an older man who would himself have learned a Romantic style of playing. The oldest youtube recording I found was by Mischa Elman.

Advance the recording to 1:52. Hear that slide from the low note to the higher one? That’s called a “portamento,” and it’s very characteristic of late 19th– and early 20th-century violin playing; Elman was especially known for his portamento. But that’s probably not the way Vivaldi taught the concerto to his students at the Ospedale della Pietà in Venice.3

Photo of Tivadar Nachéz
Tivadar Nachéz

If you look on the International Music Score Library Project (usually referred to as “imslp”) for the music to the Vivaldi G minor, you will find an edition by Tivadar Nachèz, first published in 1912 and still available for purchase.4 Nachèz (1859-1930) was a Hungarian violinist, composer, and arranger. His own compositions (also available on imslp) include two violin concertos and a set of Gypsy Dances, but he is more well-known today as an arranger of Baroque works, including several by Vivaldi. The Nachèz edition of the G minor concerto is dedicated to Mischa Elman, and this is the version that he recorded. Nachèz also did an edition of the Vivaldi A minor concerto (Opus 3, no. 6; RV 356).

Photo of Shinichi Suzuki
Shinichi Suzuki

The Nachèz editions of these two Vivaldi concertos, A minor and G minor, are the ones included in the Suzuki repertoire (A minor in Book 4, G minor in Book 5). Suzuki and Elman were near contemporaries (Elman was born in 1891; Suzuki in 1898), so I suspect that it was the Elmanesque style of playing that got transmitted in Suzuki pedagogy. Furthermore, Suzuki’s biography claims that he was inspired to learn the violin as an adult after hearing a recording of Elman playing the Schubert Ave Maria.

In addition to Elman’s performance, another Romantic-sounding interpretation of the Vivaldi G minor concerto is that of Itzhak Perlman. I even found a fairly recent example of this style, by Boris Kuschnir. But for the most part, newer recordings are fast and crisp, such as this one by Sarah Chang. Finally, here is a period-instrument performance by violinist Julien Chauvin with the Concert de la Loge.

We could say that these latter two recordings have a more Baroque character—that they are more HIP. As I listened to them, however, I discovered that Sarah Chang and the musicians of the Concert de la Loge weren’t just playing in a different style than the earlier recordings; they were sometimes playing different notes. Nachèz rewrote some passages in his edition to make them more virtuosic—taking some phrases up an octave, for example. Laurie Niles has written about how much more virtuosic (and therefore difficult to learn) the Nachèz edition of the A minor concerto is than Vivaldi’s original and how she uses these differences in her teaching. Jian Yang, on the faculty of the Shanghai Conservatory, uses the Vivaldi A minor as a case study to explore the pedagogical implications of using the Nachèz edition rather than an original edition.

It turns out that Nachèz was quite open about his revisions. Not only did he not claim to have produced a faithful edition; he explicitly stated that he had created something new. On the back cover of the Nachèz edition of the G minor concerto (published by Schott in 1912) is a statement of originality in three languages; here is the English version:

This Concerto is freely treated from old Manuscripts and constitutes an original work. Any kind of rearrangement of this Edition will therefore constitute an infringement of Copyright. When played in public, Nachèz’s name must be mentioned in the programme. [underlining in the original]

A similar statement (in more idiomatic English with less-Germanic capitalization) was included in a newer American reprint of the Schott publication of the A minor concerto:

NOTICE: This edition is freely derived from original manuscripts and constitutes an original work. Programs for public performance of this Concerto must include the name of Tivadar Nachèz.

Nachèz was participating in a centuries-old custom of re-imagining classic works for present-day purposes, going at least all the way back to Vergil’s reworking of Homer. In Nachèz’s time, flashy virtuoso technique was expected and valued, so when he didn’t find enough of it in Vivaldi’s works he put it in. Disturbingly, Suzuki books 4 and 5 did not include any attribution to Tivadar Nachèz until 2008 (the composer is now identified as A. Vivaldi/T. Nachèz). That means that before 2008, Suzuki students and their teachers, like me and Mr. Gordon, were not informed of the history behind this work and could not therefore make historically-informed choices regarding their performances.

What would be really helpful would be an Urtext edition of the concerto to compare to the Nachèz edition. “Urtext” refers to a scholarly edition of a musical composition based on original manuscripts (if available) and early printed editions, aiming to recreate as closely as possible what the composer actually wrote. Curiously, the only one I could find for the Vivaldi G minor was a Ricordi edition from 1968; I assume Vivaldi scholarship has advanced since then.5 The Ricordi version is the one that the HIP performers are using.

So which edition am I using as I try to re-learn this concerto? Am I using the familiar Suzuki/Nachèz edition that I played in high school, or the one presumably closer to what Vivaldi actually wrote? Which interpretation am I modeling my playing on—the Elman-era Romantic approach that I was originally taught, or the more recent attempt to recreate an authentic Baroque style? As a historian, I am naturally attracted to the idea of Historically-Informed Performance (as I frequently tell my children, I’m a HIP mom). I always consult an Urtext edition if one is available and make an effort to use my technique to recreate the style of the period in which a piece was composed. But does that mean that I reject other interpretations and consider Elman, Perlman, and Kuschnir to be playing it wrong? I do not.

I like to make an analogy to Shakespeare. Shakespeare’s plays can be performed in period costume in a replica of the Globe Theatre, or they can be performed in modern dress in a black-box theatre, or any other configuration that a director dreams up. They’re all Shakespeare. What counts is not how historically accurate the production is or isn’t; what matters is how good the performance is, how successful it is on its own terms.

I think we should approach musical performance the same way. The world is enriched, not diminished, by allowing space for multiple interpretations, for Elman as well as Chang, modern instruments as well as gut strings and Baroque bows. The advantage of a HIP approach is that it need not be confined to the performance practice of only one moment in history–the moment of the piece’s original composition. If I choose to play the Nachèz version of RV 356, my Historical knowledge of the early twentieth century can Inform my Performance. And I’ll try to become sufficiently skilled that I can choose either approach to the G minor concerto and produce a beautiful result.