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

By Doug Briscoe

September 27 brings us just five artists’ birthdays and another opera house anniversary.
French King Louis XIII was born on this date in 1601 (d. 14 May 1643). He is one of those monarchs who dabbled in music as a composer. But not only did he write the music for his Ballet de la Merlaison, he also penned the libretto, designed the costumes, and danced in it, a sort of 17th-century Woody Allen. Like many Royals, he had instruction in music from an early age and played the lute from the age of 3, but apart from the ballet and a psalm setting, all his other musical compositions are apparently lost. By the way, Louis is credited with introducing the fashion of wearing wigs among men that held sway in Europe for nearly two hundred years. The Chadian stamps, issued between 1971 and 1973, come from a series depicting French royalty. The French one is of the Tapestry of Saumur, representing Louis XIII on horseback. As for the Monaco stamp, it’s one of a pair commemorating the painter Philippe de Champaigne.

Just a word or two for the Austrian priest and bibliographer Michael Denis, known as Sined the Bard (27 September 1729 – 29 September 1800). Though the minisheet from Mali recognizes him for his important work as a lepidopterist, he also wrote poetry in the manner of Klopstock, translated Ossian, and prepared a number of invaluable literary bibliographies. Late in life he was appointed chief librarian of the royal court at Vienna.

September 27 is also the birthday of preeminent 19th-century caricaturist Thomas Nast (1840 – December 7, 1902), whose work, much more than merely diverting, was highly influential in American national politics. He was born in the Rhineland in Germany and came to America after his father, also a man of strong political beliefs, left Bavaria, first to join the French navy and then to serve on an American ship. While he was thus occupied, he sent his wife and children to New York City, and that’s where young Thomas grew up. Keen at drawing from early years, he was a contributor to Harper’s Weekly from the age of 18. Among his early assignments was accompanying Garibaldi’s campaigns, and during the Civil War his work led Abraham Lincoln to call him “our best recruiting sergeant.” His opposition to Lincoln’s successor Andrew Johnson marked his first significant work as a satirical cartoonist, but his most effective campaign was against Tammany Hall’s “Boss” Tweed. After Tweed’s arrest, which owed much to Nast’s effect on public opinion, and conviction “Boss” fled the country but was apprehended by Spanish officials who identified the fugitive using Nast’s cartoons! Of course, Nast’s most enduring contribution to American culture was his representation of Santa Claus, as seen on a US Christmas stamp from 2000. He also created the Republican elephant, but not the Democratic donkey, which, however, he did much to popularize. Nast was fiercely anti-Catholic and ridiculed the Irish; though he was a firm supporter of emancipation, his later drawings of blacks tended to the stereotypical.

German painter Otto Nagel (27 September 1894 – 12 July 1967) was a conscientious objector in World War I and was imprisoned for his beliefs. It was not to be the last time: as an activist Communist he was held in Sachsenhausen and elsewhere in 1936-37; his work was “entartete“, and he was forbidden to paint. After the war he held administrative positions in the DDR, including the presidency of the Academy of Arts in Berlin (1956-62). The country honored him with a portrait stamp in 1969 and two reproductions of his paintings, Forest Worker Scharf’s Birthday (1935) and Portrait of a Girl (1948/55).

Edvard Kocbek (27 September 1904 – 3 November 1981) has earned the reputation of being one of the finest writers in the Slovene language in both poetry and prose. As a young fellow he played organ in church and learned German and French. He was Catholic, if anticlerical, and Marxist. His first poetry collection, a celebration of the quiet, rural life, appeared in 1935. He condemned the Spanish clergy for their support of Franco and founded an influential magazine, Dejanje (The Action), in 1938. During the war he joined the partisans and ended up siding with the Communists though he deplored the authoritarian aspects of their movement. He held some meaningless positions in the government and published a short story collection, Fear and Courage (Strah in pogum), which was even-handed in its treatment of partisan factionalism and thus gave the hardliners the excuse to force him into private life. During these years he mostly worked on private poetry and translations, Balzac, Maupassant, Saint-Exupéry, and Max Frisch among them. Somewhat “rehabilitated” in 1964, he was again attacked in 1975 for having condemned an appalling Communist mass slaughter of Slovenes that had taken place late in World War II but was only publicly discussed thirty years later. He escaped prosecution largely as a result of the intervention of Heinrich Böll, but underwent interrogations and was kept under surveillance for the remaining six years of his life.

Budapest’s Hungarian State Opera House opened to the public (as the Hungarian Royal Opera House) on 27 September 1884. Ferenc Erkel conducted the first act of his own opera Bánk Bán, the overture to his László Hunyadi, and the first act of Wagner’s Lohengrin on that gala occasion. The 1958 air mail stamp comes from a set showing airliners flying over various Hungarian landmarks. The three 1984 stamps and souvenir sheet were issued for the theater’s centenary. At bottom is a 1964 stamp honoring Miklós Ybl (1814–1891), the building’s architect.

I must mention the centenary today of American novelist Louis Auchincloss (September 27, 1917 – January 26, 2010). Other worthies who share this birthday but have no stamps as of yet are director Arthur Penn (September 27, 1922 – September 28, 2010), jazz pianist Bud Powell (September 27, 1924 – July 31, 1966), and theater director Peter Sellars (born 1957).

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.