A few years ago I was fortunate enough to hear Schubert’s Ave Maria being rehearsed for a forthcoming wedding in the glorious surroundings of Ripon Cathedral. The loftiness of the cathedral’s Gothic architecture provided a fitting acoustic resonance to showcase such a lofty piece of music.
Franz Schubert composed the piece in 1825, and actually it wasn’t technically an Ave Maria at all (an “Ave Maria” being music written specifically as a prayer to the Virgin Mary and for use in the liturgy) but was called Ellens dritter Gesang (Ellen’s Song), and was part of his Opus 52, a series of settings based on Sir Walter Scott’s epic poem The Lady of the Lake. It didn’t take long, however, for the composition to develop into the “all-purpose” Catholic piece that’s so popular today (although many conservative Catholics won’t play it at weddings or funerals precisely because it’s non-liturgical).
Anyway, it is popular for good reason. It has a wonderfully lilting refrain and offers the right singer an excellent vehicle with which to approach sonic beauty. It’s been sung by everyone from Shirley Bassey to Beyoncé, but for real fulfilment of its potential, it calls out for a full, round and rich soprano voice. To that end, listen to this version by American soprano, Barbara Bonney. Less of a household name perhaps than Maria Callas, say, or Joan Sutherland, but nevertheless Barbara Bonney exhibits an immaculate artistry on this recording of Ave Maria.
In the 1930s, a group of British filmmakers, led by John Grierson, under the aegis of the GPO Film Unit, was behind an influential output of documentary films that became known as the British Documentary Film Movement. Of the films it produced, the best known and most critically acclaimed was Harry Watt’s and Basil Wright’s Night Mail (1936), featuring music by Benjamin Britten and poetry by W H Auden. Auden wrote his poem especially for the documentary, which follows the London, Midland and Scottish Railway (LMS) mail train from London to Scotland. The poem acts as a sort of verse commentary over the footage of the steam locomotive, and helped to establish the documentary as something of a classic.
Auden’s language is ingenious; glorious use of metaphor and clever rhymes, four-beat lines rhythmically delivered to mimic the pumping of the rods and pistons of the locomotive. You can almost hear the train chugging along. The personified train is efficient, reliable, steadfast, trustworthy – there is a remit, after all, to sell the merits of the postal service, and Auden satisfies the spec. As the pace picks up to match the acceleration of the train, the rhymes become quick and punchy, and become internal rhymes (Letters of thanks, letters from banks) rather than line-end rhymes; a rapper’s delight.
And read along here:
This is the night mail crossing the Border, Bringing the cheque and the postal order, Letters for the rich, letters for the poor, The shop at the corner, the girl next door. Pulling up Beattock, a steady climb: The gradient’s against her, but she’s on time.
Past cotton-grass and moorland boulder Shovelling white steam over her shoulder, Snorting noisily as she passes Silent miles of wind-bent grasses. Birds turn their heads as she approaches, Stare from bushes at her blank-faced coaches. Sheep-dogs cannot turn her course; They slumber on with paws across. In the farm she passes no one wakes, But a jug in a bedroom gently shakes.
Dawn freshens, Her climb is done. Down towards Glasgow she descends, Towards the steam tugs yelping down a glade of cranes Towards the fields of apparatus, the furnaces Set on the dark plain like gigantic chessmen. All Scotland waits for her: In dark glens, beside pale-green lochs Men long for news.
Letters of thanks, letters from banks, Letters of joy from girl and boy, Receipted bills and invitations To inspect new stock or to visit relations, And applications for situations, And timid lovers’ declarations, And gossip, gossip from all the nations, News circumstantial, news financial, Letters with holiday snaps to enlarge in, Letters with faces scrawled on the margin, Letters from uncles, cousins, and aunts, Letters to Scotland from the South of France, Letters of condolence to Highlands and Lowlands Notes from overseas to the Hebrides Written on paper of every hue, The pink, the violet, the white and the blue, The chatty, the catty, the boring, the adoring, The cold and official and the heart’s outpouring, Clever, stupid, short and long, The typed and the printed and the spelt all wrong.
Thousands are still asleep, Dreaming of terrifying monsters Or of friendly tea beside the band in Cranston’s or Crawford’s Asleep in working Glasgow, asleep in well-set Edinburgh, Asleep in granite Aberdeen, They continue their dreams, But shall wake soon and long for letters, And none will hear the postman’s knock Without a quickening of the heart, For who can bear to feel himself forgotten?
Stanley Kubrick’s blackest-of-black comedy film, Dr Strangelove, was conceived as a straight thriller, based on Peter George’s book about the threat of nuclear war, Red Alert. The director, however, increasingly found himself struck, during the writing process, by a persistent comedic thread that suggested itself and which eventually forced him to embrace and run with it. A good thing too…and there could have been no better way to run with this comedic element in the fledgling movie than to engage Peter Sellers’ services.
Kubrick had worked with Sellers on Lolita, and it was probably Sellers’ display of characterisation in that movie that motivated Columbia Pictures to insist on casting him in Dr Strangelove in multiple roles. Sellers plays three characters: US President, Merkin Muffley; wheelchair-bound, ingenious mad German scientist, Dr Strangelove; and – the subject of this blog post – British RAF exchange officer, Group Captain Lionel Mandrake.
The portrayal of Mandrake is a brilliant display of understated comedic acting. The slowly-dawning realisation that his commanding officer, General Ripper (himself brilliantly played by Sterling Hayden), has become unhinged and paranoid and has put in motion a seemingly unstoppable series of events that will culminate in nuclear conflagration; his desperation to extract from Ripper the “recall code” to bring back the nuclear bombers that are swiftly on their way to Russia; and his frantic efforts to contact the President and to avoid nuclear apocalypse when he finds he might hold the only key to do so…Sellers’ duty-bound and stiff-upper-lipped group captain is a performance of sheer genius.
There is such a plethora of superbly written and delivered lines that there are too many to single out. Take ten minutes to enjoy them all – as I guarantee you will – in this montage of Mandrake scenes.
Peter Sellers in Stanley Kubrick’s DR. STRANGELOVE (1964). Credit: Sony Pictures. Playing 5/22–5/28.
Sergei Rachmaninoff’s second Piano Concerto in C Minor stands on its own as a masterpiece of the late Romantic period, but what a great idea it turned out to be, to pair it with David Lean’s classic love story of 1945, Brief Encounter.
It was Lean’s collaborator, producer Noël Coward, on whose one-act play the film was based, who insisted on the use of his favourite piece of music, despite there being a composer, Muir Mathieson, waiting in the wings to write an original score. With all due respect to Mathieson and however his score might have turned out, the use of Rachmaninoff, played by Australian pianist Eileen Joyce and the National Symphony Orchestra, raised the film’s emotional level sky-high.
The film is told in flashback, as the lead character of Laura (Celia Johnson) sits in her living room with her husband, staring into space, listening to the Second Concerto and thinking about her time with another man, Alec (Trevor Howard). She remembers the day they met, at the café in the train station. When a piece of grit gets in her eye, Alec, a doctor, removes it, and a bond starts between them, quickly developing into love as they embark on a series of clandestine assignations.
This love story is doomed, of course, as Laura is a married mother and we are deep in the territory of 1940s middle-class manners. Granted, the strait-jacketed morals and linguistic quirks of the times leave us in no doubt that the film is a period piece, but it rightly remains a hugely popular British movie.
The development, and inevitable demise, of the relationship is subtly underpinned by the repeating strains of Rachmaninoff’s music. The enduring popularity of his piece, meanwhile, is demonstrated by its consistently topping the Classic FM Hall of Fame, firmly securing its status as Britain’s favourite piece of classical music. Watch and listen to a pleasing montage of Brief Encounter to Rachmaninoff’s music below:
The Virgin Mary has featured prodigiously in Christian art for many centuries. There are numerous genres of her depiction including the familiar Madonna and Child, and the Madonna Enthroned, the Adoring Madonna, the Madonna of Humility, and several others. One such, the Pietà (Italian for “pity” or “mercy”), is a subject that depicts the sorrowing Virgin Mary cradling the dead Jesus, and is most often found in sculpture. Today’s subject is the Pietà of Michelangelo, completed in 1499 and residing in St Peter’s Basilica, Vatican City.
There is no doubting the sublime genius that created this piece. Carved from a single block of Carrara marble, Michelangelo created, with consummate skill, a coherent and moving piece of art incorporating both Classical and Renaissance tendencies.
The figures are deliberately out of proportion owing to the difficulty of depicting an adult man cradled full-length in a woman’s lap. When designing Mary’s measurements, Michelangelo could not impose realistic proportions and have her cradle her adult son as he envisioned, so he had to make her body oversized. To ameliorate this compromise on her form, Michelangelo carved out cascading sheets of draping garments, camouflaging her true fullness. The result is a triumph of form; observe the monumental drapery, the youthful face of Mary, the anatomical treatment of Christ’s elongated body…
Michelangelo was 24 when he completed this sculpture, and his fame became assured long before he completed his other masterpieces such as his David (completed 1504) and the Sistine Chapel ceiling (completed 1512)
Era defining. Voice of a generation. Urban poet. Folk troubadour. No, not Justin Bieber; I’m referring to Bob Dylan and in this post I’m looking at Dylan’s performance of Mr Tambourine Man at Newport Folk Festival in 1964.
Dylan played the influential and long-running festival for three consecutive years from 1963 to 1965.
His first appearance in 1963 was as a guest of Joan Baez, and though little known outside Greenwich Village, he was taken to heart by the folkies. That year saw the beginnings of international success with Dylan’s breakthrough second album, The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan, which he had completed that May. Its combination of traditional folk with a personal and authentic edge and a social message, proved a hit with an ever-widening demographic of music fans.
Skip forward to 1965. His final year at Newport gave us the great Electric Controversy, when Dylan walked on stage clutching a Fender Stratocaster guitar and backed by a full electric band, shocking the folk purists in the audience, and provoking bewilderment, consternation and an iconic place in musical history. Incidentally, that guitar sold at auction a couple of years back for just short of a million dollars!
But we return to the year of his second appearance at Newport, 1964, when the young Dylan was now established as a fully-fledged “protest singer”, his rising star in momentous upward trajectory and the new darling of the festival goers. Here, we watch some delightfully informal and upfront footage of his rendition of Mr Tambourine Man, listened to by a politely enthralled audience (and a bizarrely poker-faced guy, stage-left).
The song is gentle and dream-like, flowing repetitively through the same three major chords, so typical of Dylan. Lyric-wise, it’s replete with another Dylan trait, the multiple rhymes that somehow pull together coherently despite what should be the increasing implausibility and diminishing returns of stringing so many rhymes together (take note, rappers of the world). What’s it about? Death, musical inspiration, drugs, weariness, doubts about the efficacy of the protest movement to change the world, a “tambourine man”…take your pick, or just let the music take you to a nice corner of your mind! Here’s the boy from Duluth himself, having been announced as the “boy who ran away from home seventeen times and got brought back sixteen”…
Without any doubt the most popular song of the Second World War was Lili Marlene. Recorded by Danish cabaret artiste Lale Andersen in 1939 under the title Das Mädchen unter der Laterne (“The Girl under the Lantern”), the song sold a mere 700 copies on release and faded into obscurity.
There it might have remained had not a soldier, working for the German forces radio station in occupied Belgrade, been sent to scour Vienna for some records to broadcast to General Rommel’s Afrika Korps. One of the records he found in Vienna was Lale Andersen’s recording of Das Mädchen unter der Laterne, and it was first played over the air on 18th August 1941.
It became an instant favourite with Rommel’s men, and for the next three years Radio Belgrade played it almost every night at 9.57pm, as the closing record. It also became a huge hit throughout Nazi-occupied Europe and was soon picked up by the British Eighth Army in the desert. It also soon assumed its simple alternative song title, Lili Marlene (sometimes spelled Lili Marleen, Lilli Marlene etc).
In his memoir, British soldier Fitzroy Maclean describes the song’s effect in the spring of 1942 during the Western Desert Campaign: “Husky, sensuous, nostalgic, sugar-sweet, her voice seemed to reach out to you, as she lingered over the catchy tune…”
The next year, Maclean was parachuted into the Yugoslav guerrilla war, and the song once again played its part:
“Sometimes at night, before going to sleep, we would turn on our receiving set and listen to Radio Belgrade. For months now, the flower of the Afrika Korps had been languishing behind the barbed wire of Allied prison camps. But still, punctually at ten o’clock, came Lale Andersen singing their special song, with the same unvarying, heart-rending sweetness that we knew so well from the desert…Belgrade was still remote but, now that we ourselves were in Yugoslavia, it had acquired a new significance for us. It had become our ultimate goal, which Lili Marlene and her nostalgic little tune seemed somehow to symbolise. ‘When we get to Belgrade…’ we would say. And then we would switch off the wireless a little guiltily, for the Partisans, we knew, were shocked at the strange pleasure we got from listening to the singing of the German woman (sic) who was queening it in their capital.”
It’s not hard to imagine the Tommies, and Jerries alike, crowded round their “receiving sets”, smoking fags and dreaming of Lili Marlene…
Lale Andersen
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