"Ariadne" and "Orpheus" in Melbourne (ca. 1960)
It was fine to have a family, but of course there were drawbacks—with two small children to care for it was no longer easy for Jean and me to attend music events and theater. We solved this problem by rotating baby-sitting detail with long-time friends Harry and Lorrie Gardner.
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Harry and Lorrie Gardner
Harry was a chemistry major a few years ahead of me at the Uni. I remember the first time I saw him: he had just parked an ancient motor cycle and was walking meditatively to the chemistry building, meanwhile drawing off outsize leather gauntlets of a type favored by World War I dispatch riders. "That’s Harry Gardner," someone told me, and he went on to laud Harry as a wizard of the chemical arts, the master hand regularly called upon to tame the vagaries of something called the mercury-drop potentiometer. I recalled this bane of my second-year chem lab as a grungy bottle with a mercury reservoir on top. Instead of doing what it was supposed to do, I forget what, in my hands it just sat on the bench, inscrutable as a present-day personal computer at its most intransigent. My estimation of Harry’s abilities jumped from "don’t know" to ten out of ten.
Harry got his PhD in America, at Rensselaer Poly, and he married an American girl, Lorraine Niedeck.
A decade later Harry and I worked in the same laboratory near Melbourne. As scientists we could hardly have been more different—Harry still the patient stickler for the kinds of detail that must be attended to for a chemistry experiment to work, I the vague dabbler with big ideas and not a clue how to realize them. But with American wives and small children, we had plenty in common. And we shared an interest in music as well, Harry’s interest much more informed than mine since he had had a solid training in music and he played the violin well.
At the time we first knew the Gardners, Lorrie was casting about for a way to entertain her son Henry and his friends on the occasion of his third birthday. She hit on a puppet show, and she put her idea into practice with a few hand puppets and an orange crate for a stage. The curtain—an old dishtowel—had gone up on what was to become Lorrie’s long-running educational and commercial venture, "Mrs Gardner’s Puppet Theater."
Here is a sample scene from one of Lorrie’s recent shows for kindergartners: Three puppets representing fish undulate across the stage, a small fish followed by a larger one with its mouth open ready to gulp, and a still larger fish ditto. The second fish eats the first, the third fish the second. Exit fish. The children follow this scene of gluttony in rapt silence—until a loud offstage URP! defuses the tension to great audience approval.
The Gardner’s son Henry grew up to be a doctor and a fine amateur musician, and I have a pleasant memory of Harry and Henry presenting a concert of six of Bartòk’s duos for violin and viola, just for us. Another example of great sound in a living-room setting.
In retirement now, Harry with his violin helps Lorrie with her children’s entertainment ventures, and he is also active in preserving Australian folk songs of the colonial era.
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In Melbourne in 1962, Harry and I attended a performance of Richard Strauss’ "Ariadne auf Naxos," with New Zealand soprano Joan Hammond (1912-96) bringing a secure and sturdy voice to the name role. This performance was my first taste of the violently colored, faintly decadent idiom of the Bavarian master. I found the Commedia dell’Arte drollery sweetly touching, as where the troupers tote outsize lorgnettes in their search for Zerbinetta. And the final duet with the stars blinking on above the immortal lovers—here was a magic moment of opera.
We and our friends once managed to attend a show as a foursome. It was Offenbach’s "Orpheus in the Underworld." In enjoying this light-hearted operetta, with its exuberant can-can number, and dialog such as
"Which composer do you most admire?"
"Often, Bach,"
I completed the expansion of my taste in opera from the magnificently silly—"Tristan," for example—to the just plain silly.
I recall as well an odd bit of off-stage business just before that performance of "Orpheus." Running late, Jean and I were obliged to bolt up the several flights of stairs to join the Gardners before the show started. Along the way I spotted a pearl earring on the steps. With the movement I had learned playing Australian Rules football [see "My Life as a Sportsman Manqué"], I scooped the earring into my pocket and kept running.
We made it just as the curtain was going up, and there was Harry on hands and knees looking for something underneath the seats. "I lost one of my pearl earrings," Lorrie explained….