A new presenter for COTW

[Serial_Apologist]

I wasn't getting at you Old Grumpy, as you have a perfect right to repeat what people write about themselves, without needing to fact-check it.

[ As I write, I think Ms Molleson has skated over thinner ice on this morning's Record Review. She just called out Poulenc's and Cocteau's understanding (in La voix humaine) of what it was like for a woman to be ditched by a man. She even suggested that perhaps they benefitted from the input of Denise Duval, the work's first singer. Perhaps she doesn't realise that Poulenc and his librettist had spent their lives being ditched by men. A case of feminism trespassing on LGBT territory, I think - potentially offensive, and certainly opaque. Allyson Devenish, notably, wasn't having any of it! ]

Are you suggesting a gay person would be as likely to know what it can be like being ditched by a man as would a woman?

[Ein Heldenleben]

I'm afraid I have to agree with you. KM needs to watch this tendency, which could get her into trouble. Too often she slips into a kind of soapbox preachiness which substitutes wishful thinking for truth. Her remarks on Poulenc this morning were certainly "inappropriate" in the current, as well as classic, sense.

Good thing you didn’t hear the trigger warning (given twice ) on COTW by her before the very briefly told story of Tailleferre’s mentally ill husband threatening the pregnant composer with a gun. The two trigger warnings took almost as long as the anecdote. R3 now goes in for competitive wokery with R4. I think R4 edges it because it has more opportunities.

[Master Jacques]

Are you suggesting a gay person would be as likely to know what it can be like being ditched by a man as would a woman?

I'm suggesting that if KM had bothered to refresh her memory about the piece's inception before she'd subjected it to hard-line feminist critique, she'd have understood that Cocteau wrote it originally as a disguised homosexual monologue. Everyone in Paris at the time would have been aware that La voix humaine was creatively rooted in same-sex experience - not least Poulenc of course, when he set it for his "muse", Denise Duval. Her own stormy love life of course played its part in developing the character of Elle, but not because it was different in kind - that's where the nonsense came in this morning.

It's also worth remembering that many of the behaviours we see in the piece - the drugs-and-drink aspect, for example - precisely mirrored the composer's own experiences, following amorous disasters. KM's implication that he and Cocteau could not have understood Elle's experience, simply because they were men, is bald presentism, however you cut it.