Monthly Archives: February 2025

Poetry

Edward Thomas’s Adlestrop (1915)

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In the course of my work, I am occa­sion­al­ly called upon to vis­it the vil­lage of Ment­more in Buck­ing­hamshire, ser­viced by the near­by rail­way sta­tion of Ched­ding­ton. I have board­ed and alight­ed trains here on per­haps a dozen occa­sions (the lat­est being just a cou­ple weeks ago) and on not one occa­sion have I ever met anoth­er soul on its plat­forms. I guess it’s because I trav­el there off-peak and it’s no doubt total­ly dif­fer­ent at rush-hour when the com­muters leave and return to their rur­al homes, but it puts me in mind of the poem Adle­strop by the poet Edward Thomas (1878–1917), one of the Dymock poets whom we last vis­it­ed when I wrote about Rupert Brooke’s The Sol­dier here.

The poem is based on a rail­way jour­ney on the Cotswold line Thomas took on 24th June 1914, dur­ing which his train briefly stopped at Adle­strop in Glouces­ter­shire (a sta­tion long closed down, one of the many vic­tims of the Beech­ing cuts in the six­ties). Thomas record­ed the occa­sion in his note­book, writ­ing that the train, from Padding­ton to Malvern, had stopped at Adle­strop at 12:15. He record­ed his obser­va­tions of the grass, the wild­flow­ers, the black­birds and the silence inter­rupt­ed only by the hiss of steam at the stop. The poem itself was writ­ten a few months lat­er. Since then, the poem has become a pop­u­lar sym­bol­ic piece due to its sim­ple ref­er­ences to a peace­ful era and loca­tion just before the out­break of the Great War.

Adle­strop Sta­tion

Thomas enlist­ed the fol­low­ing year, and was killed soon after he arrived in France, at the Bat­tle of Arras, in 1917. His poem was pub­lished in the New States­man, just three weeks after his death. One hun­dred years to the day after the orig­i­nal jour­ney, an “Adle­strop Cen­te­nary Spe­cial” Cotswold Line train was arranged, car­ry­ing 200 pas­sen­gers from Oxford to More­ton-in-Marsh and stop­ping at Adle­strop in the place where the sta­tion for­mer­ly stood. Adle­strop vil­lage also held a cel­e­bra­tion to mark the cen­te­nary, with a pub­lic read­ing of the poem by actor Robert Hardy. The old rail­way sign can still be seen in the village’s bus-stop.

Here is Thomas’s sim­ple but ele­gant poem; know­ing it was writ­ten just before the war that changed every­thing might qui­et­ly break your heart.

Yes. I remem­ber Adle­strop—
The name, because one after­noon
Of heat the express-train drew up there
Unwont­ed­ly. It was late June.

The steam hissed. Some­one cleared his throat.
No one left and no one came
On the bare plat­form. What I saw
Was Adlestrop—only the name

And wil­lows, wil­low-herb, and grass,
And mead­owsweet, and hay­cocks dry,
No whit less still and lone­ly fair
Than the high cloudlets in the sky.

And for that minute a black­bird sang
Close by, and round him, mist­i­er,
Far­ther and far­ther, all the birds
Of Oxford­shire and Glouces­ter­shire.

Edward Thomas
Music

Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concerto No. 1 (1875)

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Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky (1840–1893) is often hailed as Russia’s great­est com­pos­er (from a strong field), and his works epit­o­mise the emo­tion­al depth for which Russ­ian music is known. You might say he was some­thing of a Russ­ian Beethoven, with the same genius for dra­mat­ic inten­si­ty and emo­tion­al range, and indeed Tchaikovsky deeply respect­ed and acknowl­edged Beethoven. Although his true love was in fact Mozart, it is Beethoven’s influ­ence that is evi­dent in his com­po­si­tions, par­tic­u­lar­ly his lat­er sym­phonies such as his Sixth Sym­pho­ny, the Pathé­tique, with its explo­ration of melan­cho­lia. Today, how­ev­er, I’m high­light­ing his remark­able Piano Con­cer­to No. 1 in B♭ minor, Op. 23.

It’s one of those tunes from the world of clas­si­cal music which you instant­ly recog­nise when you hear it even if you don’t nec­es­sar­i­ly know it from its title. It was com­posed dur­ing the sev­er­al months lead­ing up to Feb­ru­ary 1875 and first per­formed in Octo­ber of that year, in Boston, by pianist Hans von Bülow. It was to become one of the best known piano con­cer­ti of all time and in a nut­shell it is a sub­lime piece of music. Strange then, that it should have been so round­ly slat­ed by the man who Tchaikovsky had orig­i­nal­ly want­ed to play it before approach­ing von Bülow, name­ly Niko­lai Rubin­stein.

As the sto­ry is relat­ed, Tchaikovsky invit­ed Rubin­stein to the Moscow Con­ser­va­to­ry to demo his com­po­si­tion, just three days after com­plet­ing it. Full of antic­i­pa­tion and hope that Rubin­stein would be blown away and agree to play it, Tchaikovsky sat at the piano and played the first move­ment. To Tchaikovsky’s cha­grin not a sin­gle word was spo­ken and after a peri­od of silence he could stand it no more: “Well?” he said, to which Rubinstein’s tact­less and rather bru­tal response is described in Tchaikovsky’s own words:

“It turned out that my con­cer­to was worth­less and unplayable; pas­sages were so frag­ment­ed, so clum­sy, so bad­ly writ­ten that they were beyond res­cue; the work itself was bad, vul­gar; in places I had stolen from oth­er com­posers; only two or three pages were worth pre­serv­ing; the rest must be thrown away or com­plete­ly rewrit­ten.” Rubin­stein went on to say “that if I reworked the con­cer­to accord­ing to his demands, then he would do me the hon­our of play­ing my thing at his con­cert. ‘I shall not alter a sin­gle note,’ I answered, ‘I shall pub­lish the work exact­ly as it is!’”.

You can only imag­ine the indig­na­tion Tchaikovsky must have felt at that cut­ting cri­tique. And that’s why Tchaikovsky approached von Bülow to play it…

Post­script: Rubin­stein changed his opin­ion of the piece and became a big fan (you know what it’s like, you some­times need to hear an album three or four times before prop­er­ly appre­ci­at­ing it), and final­ly even played it, with gus­to, in Moscow, St Peters­burg and Paris, in 1878.

Let’s hear the open­ing four min­utes as played by the sev­en­teen-year-old prodi­gy Evge­ny Kissin, under the direc­tion of Her­bert von Kara­jan and the Berlin Phil­har­mon­ic Orches­tra, Salzburg 1988.

Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky
Music

Kate Bush’s Cloudbusting (1985)

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Kate Bush is noth­ing if not inno­v­a­tive. She burst onto the scene in 1978, aged nine­teen, with her debut sin­gle Wuther­ing Heights. Whilst the rest of the charts were pop­u­lat­ed either by the new gen­er­a­tion of punk and new wave or the old gen­er­a­tion of dis­co and soft rock, here was Kate singing the­atri­cal­ly about a Vic­to­ri­an nov­el and danc­ing ethe­re­al­ly on Top of the Pops. The nation was strange­ly hooked and it went to num­ber one (and no doubt Emi­ly Brontë’s Wuther­ing Heights expe­ri­enced a boost in sales at the same time).

Kate had been writ­ing songs for years, hav­ing grown up in a music-lov­ing house­hold in Kent, and had record­ed a bunch of them on demo tapes. One of these tapes found its way into the hands of Pink Floyd’s David Gilmour who imme­di­ate­ly recog­nised the song-writ­ing tal­ent and oth­er-world­ly vocals. He encour­aged Floyd’s label EMI to sign her up, which they duly did. She was six­teen and still at school so she con­tin­ued her stud­ies, honed her craft, learned inter­pre­tive dance under chore­o­g­ra­ph­er Lind­say Kemp, and in the inter­ests of good research read Wuther­ing Heights (she had writ­ten the song before actu­al­ly read­ing the book, hav­ing caught the back end of a BBC TV adap­ta­tion of it). And the rest, as they say, is his­to­ry — she went on to record nine stu­dio albums all of which reached the UK Top 10, and recent­ly enjoyed some­thing of a renais­sance fol­low­ing the use of her song Run­ning up that Hill in the Net­flix block­buster series Stranger Things.

Cloud­bust­ing remains my favourite Kate Bush song. If the record-buy­ing pub­lic thought that the sub­ject mat­ter of Wuther­ing Heights was some­what quirky, it hadn’t seen noth­ing yet. The song took inspi­ra­tion from the 1973 mem­oirs of Peter Reich (Book of Dreams), writ­ten about his close rela­tion­ship with his father the psy­chi­a­trist and inven­tor Wil­helm Reich, at their farm named “Orgonon”, in Maine. Wil­helm Reich had been exper­i­ment­ing with a cos­mic ener­gy which he termed orgone, and had built devices called orgone accu­mu­la­tors which he claimed could cure can­cers and pro­mote health. Lat­er he would build a rain-mak­ing machine called a cloud­buster and father and son would spend hours on their farm point­ing it at the sky and try­ing to make rain. Like all pro­mot­ers of fringe ideas (ask Niko­la Tes­la), Reich even­tu­al­ly fell foul of the author­i­ties, was impris­oned, and had his inven­tions and ideas sup­pressed.

Kate’s musi­cal inter­pre­ta­tion of the sto­ry is out­stand­ing. It is at once mes­mer­ic with its mantra-like back­ing vocals and hyp­not­ic cel­lo strokes, and a mas­ter­class in sto­ry-telling with its set­ting of the scene from the very first line “I dream of Orgonon”. That line, with that word, had such an intrigu­ing feel to it, long before I dis­cov­ered its true back sto­ry. The video accom­pa­ny­ing the sin­gle, is genius: a mas­ter­stroke cast­ing of Don­ald Suther­land as the father, and Kate her­self with a pix­ie cut to stand in for the son. The “cloud­buster” itself, designed by the same peo­ple who designed the “xenomorph” for Rid­ley Scott’s Alien, is a won­der­ful steam-punk inven­tion. After Reich’s arrest, we see Kate/Peter tak­ing over the reins and achiev­ing suc­cess with his father’s inven­tions – I don’t know how true this is, but at least Kate was grat­i­fied that the real Peter Reich hailed the video and said it cap­tured the sit­u­a­tion and the emo­tion per­fect­ly. Watch and enjoy here…

Kate Bush