{"id":296,"date":"2014-04-08T07:20:42","date_gmt":"2014-04-08T14:20:42","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/threepennyreview.com\/lesserblog\/?p=296"},"modified":"2014-04-08T15:52:51","modified_gmt":"2014-04-08T22:52:51","slug":"oops","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/threepennyreview.com\/lesserblog\/oops\/","title":{"rendered":"Oops"},"content":{"rendered":"

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<\/em>.<\/p>\n

First, in my article “Great Performances<\/a>”\u00a0in the Spring 2014 issue,\u00a0I wrote that the opera\u00a0Die Frau Ohne Schatten<\/em> was “the final collaboration between Richard Strauss and his librettist Hugo von Hofmannstal.” It was not; it was the fourth. \u00a0(I’ve since corrected this in the online version, so if you’re not one of Threepenny<\/em>‘s print readers, you’ll just have to take my word for the fact that the error was there.) \u00a0I discovered my mistake when I went last night to the Met’s current production<\/a> of Arabella<\/em> and found out that it<\/em> was their last collaboration. \u00a0It’s true that Die Frah Ohne Schatten<\/em> is a vastly better opera than Arabella<\/em>, 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. \u00a0Still, none of this excuses my error, which appears to be the result of pure fantasy on my part. \u00a0I can find no evidence for it in the Met program for Die Frau<\/em>, which in typical obsessive-compulsive fashion I appear to have saved; and Wikipedia tells me that they completed a fifth opera together,\u00a0Die \u00e4gyptische Helena,\u00a0<\/em>in 1927, so I can’t even claim that Die Frau<\/em> was the final completed one.\u00a0 I was very sorry to discover my silly error last night. I was not at all sorry, though, that I went to see Arabella<\/em>, despite the fact that it is basically a piece of fluff, because the performances were so fine\u2014particularly that of Michael Volle, the baritone who played Mandryka, Arabella’s love interest. \u00a0If 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<\/em> his manner every time he appeared.<\/p>\n

My second mistake appeared in the article “Smaller Spaces,” which ran in the Fall 2013 issue of The Threepenny Review<\/em>. \u00a0In 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<\/a>. \u00a0The choreographer himself recently sent me a friendly note of correction. \u00a0The studio, as it turns out, is located on the fifth<\/em> floor, not the fourth, and it is a fully outfitted 140-seat theater called the James and Martha Duffy Performance Space\u2014not, as I had implied, simply a rehearsal studio with bleachers dragged in on special occasions. \u00a0I appreciate the gentleness of the correction (“for the future,” Morris’s note suggested) and apologize for the inaccuracies.<\/p>\n

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. \u00a0In Winter 2014 we ran a very intense article about homelessness by Howard Tharsing<\/a>; then, in the Spring issue, we ran a letter that included a minor correction of it. \u00a0Now I find that the correction itself was wrong. \u00a0But let me offer the final clarification in the form it reached me\u2014an email headlined “Third time’s the charm?” that ran, in full:<\/p>\n

“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,<\/p>\n

Sincerely,
\nPaul Solman”<\/p>\n

Thanks, Paul, for your humorous understanding of our fallibility. \u00a0And now I hope that’s enough apologizing for one day. \u00a0Onward to the next error!<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[186,65,13,183,184,185],"class_list":["post-296","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-the-lesser-blog","tag-arabella","tag-mark-morris","tag-metropolitan-opera","tag-michael-volle","tag-paul-solman","tag-threepenny-review"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/threepennyreview.com\/lesserblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/296","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/threepennyreview.com\/lesserblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/threepennyreview.com\/lesserblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/threepennyreview.com\/lesserblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/threepennyreview.com\/lesserblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=296"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/threepennyreview.com\/lesserblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/296\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":301,"href":"https:\/\/threepennyreview.com\/lesserblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/296\/revisions\/301"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/threepennyreview.com\/lesserblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=296"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/threepennyreview.com\/lesserblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=296"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/threepennyreview.com\/lesserblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=296"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}