Three months between error and correction is an awfully long time, and occasionally more than one issue passes before I discover my mistakes, so I’ve decided to use this blog entry to rectify some of the errors I’ve made in the quarterly printed issues of The Threepenny Review.
First, in my article “Great Performances” in the Spring 2014 issue, I wrote that the opera Die Frau Ohne Schatten was “the final collaboration between Richard Strauss and his librettist Hugo von Hofmannstal.” It was not; it was the fourth. (I’ve since corrected this in the online version, so if you’re not one of Threepenny‘s print readers, you’ll just have to take my word for the fact that the error was there.) I discovered my mistake when I went last night to the Met’s current production of Arabella and found out that it was their last collaboration. It’s true that Die Frah Ohne Schatten is a vastly better opera than Arabella, which in plot terms is little more than an operetta; it’s also true that Hofmannstahl died midway through that final collaboration, after completing only Act One of the libretto. Still, none of this excuses my error, which appears to be the result of pure fantasy on my part. I can find no evidence for it in the Met program for Die Frau, which in typical obsessive-compulsive fashion I appear to have saved; and Wikipedia tells me that they completed a fifth opera together, Die ägyptische Helena, in 1927, so I can’t even claim that Die Frau was the final completed one. I was very sorry to discover my silly error last night. I was not at all sorry, though, that I went to see Arabella, despite the fact that it is basically a piece of fluff, because the performances were so fine—particularly that of Michael Volle, the baritone who played Mandryka, Arabella’s love interest. If all good opera singers could act as well as Volle, every opera performance would be a delight: he lit up the stage with both his voice and his manner every time he appeared.
My second mistake appeared in the article “Smaller Spaces,” which ran in the Fall 2013 issue of The Threepenny Review. In singling out the virtues of New York’s smaller performance spaces, I mentioned a dance concert I had seen in “the fourth-floor studio space” of the Mark Morris Dance Center. The choreographer himself recently sent me a friendly note of correction. The studio, as it turns out, is located on the fifth floor, not the fourth, and it is a fully outfitted 140-seat theater called the James and Martha Duffy Performance Space—not, as I had implied, simply a rehearsal studio with bleachers dragged in on special occasions. I appreciate the gentleness of the correction (“for the future,” Morris’s note suggested) and apologize for the inaccuracies.
The third mistake is one I did not make personally, except insofar as the editor is responsible for all errors that appear in her magazine. In Winter 2014 we ran a very intense article about homelessness by Howard Tharsing; then, in the Spring issue, we ran a letter that included a minor correction of it. Now I find that the correction itself was wrong. But let me offer the final clarification in the form it reached me—an email headlined “Third time’s the charm?” that ran, in full:
“In your Winter 2014 number, Howard Tharsing’s chilling account of underclass America, ‘The Visible and the Invisible,’ mentions a PBS NewsHour story reported by ‘Paul Solomon.’ Then, in the next issue, a letter to the editor laments your copy editing and notes that my name is actually spelled ‘Paul Solmon.’ But according to my birth certificate, the personalized pencils I got when I was seven and my Social Security checks, among other sources, I am,
Sincerely,
Paul Solman”
Thanks, Paul, for your humorous understanding of our fallibility. And now I hope that’s enough apologizing for one day. Onward to the next error!