An Arts Fuse regular feature: the arts on stamps of the world.

By Doug Briscoe

My yoke is easy and my burden is light. I could find only three artists represented on stamps of the world for today’s piece. Surely the greatest of them was Spanish poet Federico García Lorca (5 June 1898 – 19 August 1936). Again, given his fame and my predilection for classical music, I focus today on the settings of his works by prominent composers rather than on biographical details. García Lorca’s poems have particularly struck a chord with George Crumb; besides his Madrigals and “Ancient Voices of Children”, Crumb has recently returned to García Lorca for his “Spanish Songbook” (2008ff). The late Einojuhani Rautavaara not only wrote a choral Lorca Suite in 1973, but was said to be working on an opera (!) based on García Lorca’s texts just prior to his death. Other notable composers who have set García Lorca’s poetry have included Shostakovich (14th Symphony), Poulenc, Castelnuovo-Tedesco, Górecki, Leon Kirchner, Bernard Rands, Lennox Berkeley, Eric Whitacre, and Wilhelm Killmayer, as well as many Spanish-speaking composers such as Chávez, Revueltas, Montsalvatge, and Mompou. Among the countries, besides Spain, to have honored him on stamps are Mexico, Italy, Equatorial Guinea, Colombia, Albania, and Cuba.

A Chinese writer who specialized in what we might today call Tales of the Unknown, Pu Songling (5 June 1640 – 25 February 1715) wrote or collected stories which he put together into volumes with titles like Strange Stories from a Chinese Studio (Liaozhai zhiyi, 1679), likely the best known of his books, published posthumously in 1740. These stories were translated into English as early as 1880, and several other editions of his work have appeared since. (Actually, the titles of almost all of his anthologies begin with the words “Strange Tales from…”) He was the child of a poor merchant of Mongolian ancestry from Shandong province and worked most of his life as a tutor there, earning little recognition. Both the People’s Republic of China and Macao have recently issued lovely sets of stamps offering illustrations of his tales.

June 5 is the birthday of operetta composer Ralph Benatzky (1884 – 16 October 1957). Born in Moravia, he became a student of both Antonín Dvořák in Prague and the renowned conductor Felix Mottl in Munich. His most famous operetta was Im weissen Rössl (White Horse Inn, 1930). Although not Jewish himself, he married two Jewish women (the first died in 1929), and, like so many others, he relocated several times in those troubled years: from Berlin (fled 1933) to Paris to Vienna (fled 1938) to the US (Hollywood: he contributed songs for the movies, but wrote no full film scores). After the war, he went back to Europe. Benatzky wrote more than fifty light works for the stage and at least two libretti, besides adapting Porgy and Bess into German.

Well, if there is a shortage of bestamped artists today, there is a goodly number of those unbestamped born on this date to compensate: Ivy Compton-Burnett (1884 – 27 August 1969), director Tony Richardson (1928 – 14 November 1991), Irish painter and author of My Left Foot (1954) Christy Brown (1932 – 7 September 1981), Margaret Drabble (born 1939), and Spalding Gray (1941 – January 11, 2004).

A graduate of the University of Massachusetts with a B.A. in English, Doug Briscoe worked in Boston classical music radio, at WCRB, WGBH, and WBUR, for about 25 years, beginning in 1977. He has the curious distinction of having succeeded Robert J. Lurtsema twice, first as host of WGBH’s weekday morning classical music program in 1993, then as host of the weekend program when Robert J.’s health failed in 2000. Doug also wrote liner notes for several of the late Gunther Schuller’s GM Recordings releases as well as program notes for the Boston Classical Orchestra. For the past few years he’s been posting a Facebook “blog” of classical music on stamps of the world, which has now been expanded to encompass all the arts for The Arts Fuse.