Monthly Archives: March 2017

Poetry

Robert Browning’s How They Brought the Good News from Ghent to Aix (1845)

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In 490 BC, the Athen­ian army defeat­ed the invad­ing Per­sian army in a bat­tle on the plain of Marathon, rough­ly 26 miles north of Athens. Accord­ing to leg­end, and brought down to us via the writ­ings of Herodotus, Lucian and Plutarch, the Athe­ni­ans then ordered the mes­sen­ger Phei­dip­pi­des to run ahead to Athens and announce the vic­to­ry to the city. Phei­dip­pi­des raced back to the city in the intense late sum­mer heat. Upon reach­ing the Athen­ian ago­ra, he exclaimed “Rejoice! We con­quer” and then col­lapsed dead from exhaus­tion.

This trope, of the long dis­tance chase to deliv­er vital news, we see again in Hen­ry Wadsworth Longfellow’s Paul Revere’s Ride (1860). This told the (high­ly embroi­dered) tale of Paul Revere’s valiant ride to Con­cord to warn the mili­tia that the British were com­ing, thus pro­mot­ing him in Amer­i­can cul­ture to the sta­tus of hero and patri­ot of the Amer­i­can Rev­o­lu­tion.

In the same spir­it – though this time whol­ly imag­i­nary – is Robert Browning’s How They Brought the Good News from Ghent to Aix. The poem is a first-per­son nar­ra­tive told, in breath­less gal­lop­ing meter, by one of three rid­ers, only one of whose hors­es, the nar­ra­tor’s brave Roland, sur­vives to ful­fil the epic quest. The mid­night errand is urgent — “the news which alone could save Aix from her fate” — but what that good news actu­al­ly is, is nev­er revealed. The sequence of towns flash­ing by between Ghent and Aix-la-Chapelle is true to life, though they are char­ac­terised only by the asso­ci­at­ed times of night, dawn, and day (also a fea­ture of Paul Revere’s Ride) as the nar­ra­tor charges through them.

This poem is one of my ear­li­est mem­o­ries of poet­ry, from school­days, and its rol­lick­ing move­ment and sense of adven­ture res­onates with me now as it did then. There is a record­ing of Brown­ing him­self recit­ing the poem on an 1889 Edi­son cylin­der, but it’s far too crack­ly for our pur­pos­es, and besides, he for­gets the lines and gives up after the first verse (“I’m ter­ri­bly sor­ry but I can­not remem­ber me own vers­es”) so instead I offer this more mod­ern and pro­fes­sion­al ver­sion!

 

Robert Brown­ing
Dance, Music

Camille Saint-Saëns’ The Swan (1886)

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Charles-Camille Saint-Saëns was born in Paris in 1835 and raised by his wid­owed moth­er and his great-aunt, who intro­duced the young Camille to the piano and gave him his first lessons. The boy was a real prodi­gy, demon­strat­ing per­fect pitch at the age of two and giv­ing his first pub­lic con­cert at five. Over the course of his long life Saint-Saëns was incred­i­bly pro­lif­ic: after writ­ing his first sym­pho­ny at 16 he went on to write four more, along with five piano con­cer­tos, three vio­lin con­cer­tos, two cel­lo con­cer­tos and some 20 con­cer­tante works.

Nor were his tal­ents lim­it­ed to music. He was pro­found­ly knowl­edge­able about geol­o­gy, botany, lep­i­dopterol­o­gy, and maths, and his celebri­ty allowed him to enjoy dis­cus­sions with Europe’s finest sci­en­tists.

Of all Saint-Saëns’ aston­ish­ing out­put, though, the most famous is undoubt­ed­ly The Car­ni­val of the Ani­mals, com­posed in 1886. He hadn’t con­sid­ered it a seri­ous piece at all and in fact wor­ried that it might dam­age his rep­u­ta­tion. He needn’t have wor­ried. The 13th and penul­ti­mate move­ment of The Car­ni­val of the Ani­mals, The Swan (Le Cygne), became acclaimed world­wide as The Dying Swan after 1905 when it was chore­o­graphed for leg­endary bal­le­ri­na Anna Pavlo­va, who per­formed it about 4,000 times.

The leg­end of the “swan song” grew from the pop­u­lar belief among the ancient Greeks that the mute swan is silent until its final moments of life, at which point it sings the most beau­ti­ful of all bird­songs. Saint-Saëns cap­tures this idea in the music…and here we see bal­le­ri­na Uliana Lopatk­i­na effort­less­ly evok­ing in dance the grace­ful­ness of the ani­mal (almost entire­ly en pointe) and the heart­break of its demise. Beau­ti­ful.