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That last week’s opening night of the Metropolitan Opera presented Medea (an Italian revision of Cherubini’s Médée) reminds me of a wonderful story that Hugo Weisgall told. Leonard Bernstein had a brilliant success at La Scala conducting the work with Maria Callas in the title role. As a result, the theater gave him a generous contract that was cancelled after he conducted Puccini’s La Boheme. He was lamenting this fact to some colleagues, saying that he couldn’t understand the change of attitude by the opera company and the public. To which Virgil Thomson suggested: “Lenny, they KNOW La Boheme.”

Nine years ago today, I was on my last visit to Catalonia before I moved here permanently. I took this photo from my lunch table in old Girona. It remains a favorite moment.

The way home

Lately, books that I read with pleasure in the 1970s have figured prominently in my reading. Yesterday it was this book that I took up, which is interesting but not one of my favorites. In fact, Lewis later disowned aspects of it. (He felt that he misused the term Romanticism, on which the book is largely based.) But, as we all know, he and Tolkien loved imaginary lands and their maps. The endpapers of this book thus include this map of the pilgrim’s progress (or, rather regress) through Romanticism.

When people express interest, amazement, or just questions about my cultural, national, or political ecclecticism, I can always point to these two not-so-remote ancestors as an excuse. I of course never knew my great-grandfather “Jeff Davis,” as he was called by his friends—named, of course, for the President of the Confederate States of America—who died when his granddaughter, my mother, was a child; but I knew his widow, my great-grandmother Susannah Duncan Fraley very well and, of course, his daughter, my grandmother Dora Fraley Davis.

Ulysses S. Grant “Doll” Bunton, I did encounter a few times when I was a little child, since he was the brother of another great-grandmother, maternal grandmother of my father, who sometimes lived with us, Nancy Jane Bunton Norris.

If the parents of Jeff Davis and Ulysses Grant had met during the 1860s, at least, they might have been inclined to shoot each other or call someone else authorized to do so. I appeal to this fact when people find me inconsistent—this, and the fact that my family also fought on both sides of the Revolutionary War. (My great-grandmother Nancy Norris—known as “Aunt Nan” to most who knew her, but “Mammy” to me—told me stories of marauding homeless “rebel” soldiers, as she, a Unionist and Lincoln Republican, called them, whom she remembered in the decades after the Civil War. Her mother threatened some with a shotgun when they attempted to raid her smokehouse for food that they were probably desperate for, supposedly saying, “If you had asked me for it, I’d have given you some. But I won’t have you stealing.”)

As for their forbears, the web gets even more tangled. The name Fraley had been Fraelich, since they had come, like the majority of my ancestors, from Germany, despite the Welsh surnames of both my parents’ fathers. But what could be less German than the Buntons (sometimes spelled Bunting and Bunten), who had originally been Benjamins, Jews who came to North Carolina from Toledo (in Spain, not Ohio) after a few centuries in Windsor?