There’s nothing quite as Germanic as a Wagner opera, and nothing quite as epic as his magnum opus, Der Ring des Nibelungen (The Ring of the Nibelung). The full cycle of the four parts of The Ring lasts fifteen hours and although pragmatism these days generally means that just one of the parts is performed, I do like the idea of watching it in its entirety. A bit like reading Proust’s In Search Of Lost Time in its 1.2 million word entirety (see my blog on that here). Neither challenge have I yet undertaken, I should say, but back in 1876, it must have been some spectacle to have attended the famous Bayreuth Festival, when the full cycle was performed for the first time, over four days: Das Rheingold (The Rhinegold), Die Walküre (The Valkyrie), Siegfried, and Götterdämmerung (Twilight of the Gods)
The opera is loosely based on characters from Germanic and Norse heroic legend and centres around the eponymous magic ring that grants dominion over the world and how it is fought over by generations of gods, heroes and mythical creatures, until the final cataclysm at the end of the Götterdämmerung. The complexity of the epic tale is matched by the increasing complexity of the music as it progresses, and Wagner wrote for such a gargantuan orchestra that a special purpose-built theatre was built at Bayreuth.
The piece that we all know is the Ride of the Valkyries from Die Walküre, containing that rousing leitmotif as the Valkyrie sisters of Norse mythology (“choosers of the slain”) transport the fallen heroes to Valhalla. The music was used in Apocalypse Now (1979) where it was played on helicopter-mounted loudspeakers during the American assault on Vietcong-controlled villages. And just recently, in the excellent and grittily honest TV documentary film, Our Falklands War: A Frontline Story, it was revealed that it was similarly played loudly over the tannoy as 2 Para were getting into the landing craft in preparation for their first assault on the Falkland Islands.
Here’s a version from the BBC Proms, best enjoyed from a sofa rather than a landing craft.
Readers of my generation may recognise the following common social trope from teenage gatherings and house parties. As music plays, ring-pulls are released from cans of lager, and friendly banter fills the room, in a dim-lit corner, a long-haired layabout is skinning up a joint on the nearest album cover, which always seems to be Pink Floyd’s The Dark Side of the Moon. It perhaps wasn’t always The Dark Side of the Moon, but as a meme it fits pretty well into this snapshot of thematic memory. Mind you, in the era I was attending teenage gatherings, at the start of the eighties, the album was already getting quite old (it had been released in 1973) but it had turned into an enduring and perpetually high-selling album that everyone (the lads anyway) seemed to relate to.
It was the Floyd’s eighth studio album, conceived and developed over years as a concept album exploring varied themes such as conflict, greed, time, death and mental illness, and largely inspired by the band’s arduous lifestyle and the growing mental health problems suffered by former band member Syd Barrett (who left the group in 1968). Primarily developed during live performances, the band added new material during two sessions in 1972 and 1973 at Abbey Road Studios in London.
It’s highly experimental: the group incorporated multitrack recording, tape loops, analogue synthesisers, and snippets from interviews with the band’s road crew and various philosophical quotations. The engineer was Alan Parsons, and he was responsible for much of the sonic feel to the album (not least by recruiting the singer Clare Torry, who appears on The Great Gig in the Sky). It works extraordinarily well, as a whole as much as its individual parts. This actually takes me back to another teenage meme, that of bodies lying around a darkened room, in a pleasant fug, and listening to the album in its entirety.
Here’s the intro to the album put effectively to video by a fan (credit: Marc-André Ranger)…enjoy! Now, where are those Rizlas?
Pink FloydThe iconic album cover, by Storm Thorgerson
Glen Campbell started his career as a guitarist with the Wrecking Crew, that loose collective of session musicians that contributed to thousands of studio recordings in the 1960s and 1970s (and who were also Phil Spector’s de facto house band). The list of artists whose recordings he played on is a who’s who of the American sixties music scene (he was best mates with Elvis, too), and all this was before he became a successful solo artist in his own right. His first real hit, in 1965, was a version of Buffy Saint-Marie’s Universal Soldier, and in 1967 he scored hits with Gentle On My Mind and By The Time I Get To Phoenix.
That last song was written by Jimmy Webb and, buoyed by its success, Glen Campbell had phoned Webb and asked him if he had any other “geographical” songs to follow it up. He hadn’t, but he wrote one anyway: Wichita Lineman. Webb’s inspiration for the lyrics came while driving westward on a straight road through Washita County in rural south-western Oklahoma. Driving past a seemingly endless line of telephone poles, he noticed in the distance the silhouette of a solitary lineman atop a pole. In Webb’s own words:
It was a splendidly vivid, cinematic image that I lifted out of my deep memory while I was writing this song. I thought, I wonder if I can write something about that? A blue collar, everyman guy we all see everywhere – working on the railroad or working on the telephone wires or digging holes in the street. I just tried to take an ordinary guy and open him up and say, ‘Look there’s this great soul, and there’s this great aching, and this great loneliness inside this person and we’re all like that. We all have this capacity for these huge feelings’.
Webb delivered what he regarded and labelled as an incomplete version of the song, warning that he had not completed a third verse or a middle eight. Campbell soon nailed the lack of a middle eight section with some of his Wrecking Crew pals (adding a baritone guitar interlude as well as the orchestrally arranged outro known to British Radio 2 listeners as DJ Steve Wright’s theme music!). Webb was surprised to hear that Campbell had recorded the song when he ran into him:
‘I guessyou guys didn’t like the song.’
‘Oh, we cut that’
‘But it wasn’t done! I was just humming the last bit!’
In May 1942, soon after the United States had entered World War II after Pearl Harbor, F D Roosevelt’s Vice President James A Wallace delivered the speech of his life, in which he cast a future world peace as meaning “a better standard of living for the common man, not merely in the United States and England, but also in India, Russia, China, and Latin America–not merely in the United Nations, but also in Germany and Italy and Japan”
“Some have spoken of the “American Century”. I say that the century on which we are entering—the century which will come into being after this war—can be and must be the century of the common man.”
As well as being translated into 20 languages and millions of copies being distributed around the world, the speech also inspired the leader of the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra, Eugene Goossens, to commission a fanfare. He asked American composers to submit patriotic pieces to support the war effort, reprising a similar initiative during World War I and each one to precede the CSO’s orchestral concerts. A total of eighteen fanfares were submitted, including Fanfare for Paratroopers, Fanfare for the Medical Corp, Fanfare for Airmen, and one that became very famous, Aaron Copland’s Fanfare for the Common Man.
The fanfare is written for four horns, three trumpets, three trombones, tuba, timpani, bass drum, and tam-tam, and is as stirring a piece of brass soundscape as one can imagine. It captures wonderfully the spirit of Wallace’s optimistic theme of ushering in a just future world. Below, let’s watch this dramatic rendering by the Dutch Radio Philharmonic Orchestra, and then listen to the brilliant prog rock version released in 1977 by Emerson Lake and Palmer (and which was my first exposure to Copland’s music).
The injustices endured by enslaved African Americans in the United States between the 17th century right up until the Thirteenth Amendment abolishing slavery in 1865, but then also the residual racism and segregation that simmered after its abolition well into the twentieth century, makes for difficult reading. A podcast I have been listening to about the history of slavery in the US opens with a slave song, I’m Goin’ To Tell God All O’ My Troubles, sung by Paul Robeson in that famous baritone of his, and it’s worth looking at the life of the man Paul Robeson, whose story is really about how you can’t keep a good man down, against all the odds.
Robeson was both an academic and an athlete, and won a scholarship to Rutgers College in 1915, the only black man there at the time. He excelled for the Rutgers football team, the Scarlet Knights, although at one point he was benched because a Southern football team refused to take the field because the Scarlet Knights were fielding a negro. But he kept going and flourished both athletically and academically, ending up finishing university with flying colours and accepted into the prestigious honour societies Phi Beta Kappa and Cap and Skull.
He went on to study law at Columbia University, whilst simultaneously playing professional American football for the Milwaukee Badgers and promoting his fine singing by acting in off-campus productions. After graduating, he became a figure in the Harlem Renaissance with performances in the Eugene O’Neill plays The Emperor Jones and All God’s Chillun Got Wings, and gave up both his football and his fledgling law career. He was later to find worldwide fame from performances such as his “Joe” in Show Boat at London’s Drury Lane Theatre, featuring the benchmark song Ol’ Man River, and as Othello in three separate productions of that play.
Robeson soon found himself welcomed and courted by elite social circles, but this did not turn his head, and he was to become a prolific political activist for civil rights and other social justice campaigns throughout his life, as well as supporting the Republican cause in the Spanish Civil War. His sympathies for the Soviet Union and communism caused him to be blacklisted during the McCarthy era, but his reputation as a strong and respected voice for justice had already been sealed, and he never gave up.
Between 1925 and 1961, Robeson recorded and released some 276 distinct songs, spanning many styles, including spirituals, popular standards, European folk songs, political songs and poetry. I’m Goin’ To Tell God All O’ My Troubles was released as the B‑side to Deep River in 1927, and is a deeply felt expression of life under the yoke.
Gabriel Fauré (1845 – 1924) was one of the foremost French composers of his generation, and his name sits comfortably amongst those of his near-contemporaries Berlioz, Debussy and Saint-Saens. It is said that his career straddles the gap between Romanticism and modernism: when he was born Chopin was still composing and by the time of his death jazz had arrived. Among his best-known works are his Pavane, Requiem, Sicilienne, and his nocturnes for the piano but I’m going to look at an interesting collection of pieces for piano duet that Faure composed called the Dolly Suite, Op. 56.
The Dolly Suite consists of six short pieces written between 1893 and 1896, to mark the birthdays and other events in the life of the daughter of the composer’s mistress, French singer Emma Bardac (who went on to become Claude Debussy’s mistress, too; she clearly had a thing for composers!). Each piece has its own title: Berceuse, Mi-a-ou,Le Jardin de Dolly, Kitty-valse, Tendresse, and Le Pas Espagnole, and the complete suite takes about fifteen minutes to perform.
The best-known piece is Berceuse (French for “lullaby”), which in the UK became famous as the play-out tune to the BBC radio programme for very young children, Listen with Mother, which broadcast from 1950 onwards, and which will likely be recognised by many a baby boomer. The Berceuse has been arranged for several combinations of instruments over the years but below we’ll listen to it in its original piano duet form, played by Dutch brothers Lucas and Arthur Jussen. Are you sitting comfortably?
I don’t recall now how I actually discovered Be-Bop Deluxe and came to be the owner of their 1976 album Modern Music. Possibly I heard the album’s single Kiss of Light on the radio, since it is that song that slots into my memory as “the first”. Equally, I may have been introduced by schoolmates Rocky Collier or Chris Hobbs, since they too were big fans and indeed the latter was there with me at my first ever gig: Be-Bop Deluxe at Leeds Grand Theatre, February 1978. However, own the album I did, and my overriding memory is the feeling of reverence I had for it. The themes and concepts conjured up by band leader and guitar genius Bill Nelson were thrilling and otherworldly; I recall at the foot of the back cover a line that summed it up simply but effectively: “Music and lyrics written by Bill Nelson to enchant”.
Modern Music was the band’s fourth album, so I had discovered them late (to be fair, I was only thirteen) and only retrospectively educated myself in the band’s evolution from glam rock pretenders to sophisticated art rockers. The band had formed in Wakefield in 1972 and had started out playing the West Yorkshire pub scene, one regular venue being the Staging Post in Whinmoor, Leeds. Several personnel changes had ensued by the time I had got into them, with my definitive line-up being Simon Fox on drums, Charlie Tumahai on bass and Andy Clark on keyboards, an ensemble that understood Nelson’s vision and was eminently capable of helping him manifest it.
The track listing itself gives hints of the fantastical nature of that vision: Orphans of Babylon, The Bird Charmer’s Destiny, Honeymoon on Mars, The Dance of the Uncle Sam Humanoids. To the uninitiated, such titles might smack of prog-rock concept-album pretension but the melodies, the textures, the hooks, and the overall musical splendour argue against such a simplistic appraisal. It is certainly conceptual, and indeed Nelson can get away with making the whole of side B a suite of short tracks merging into one another, but pretentious it ain’t. Too much quality.
The album cover shows the band besuited and un-rock star like, with Bill presciently sporting a “TV-watch” (or smartwatch, as we’d call it today, albeit without the antennas!). This was nothing like their glam rock origins, nor anything like the punk nihilism that was bursting onto the scene at around the same time (in the same month as the album’s release, September 1976, the 100 Club was hosting a two-day punk festival featuring the Sex Pistols, the Clash and the Damned). Modern Music represented a unique sound and vision, and although the band would only release one more album and disband before they could achieve lasting fame, it stands as a monument to Bill Nelson’s considerable musical abilities.
Here is the title track, which gives but a flavour of the music though I would recommend immersing oneself in the whole album to get the proper Be-Bop experience.
Léo Delibes (1836–1891) was a French Romantic composer, best known for his ballets and operas. His works include the ballets Coppélia (1870) and Sylvia (1876), both of which were key works in the development of modern ballet and remain core works in the international ballet repertoire, and the opera Lakmé (1883), which includes the well-known “Flower Duet”. I say “well-known”; it’s possible that you know it without knowing you know it (although you may need to wait for the 1.05 minute mark before it clicks). Although Delibes’ name may be less famous today than other contemporary French composers such as Berlioz, Debussy or Ravel, the melody he has bequeathed is a gem.
Lakmé was Delibes’ attempt at a serious opera, having composed several light comic opérettes in the 1850s and 1860s. The opera combines many orientalist aspects that were popular at the time: an exotic location (similar to other French operas of the period, such as Bizet’s Les pêcheurs de perles and Massenet’s Le roi de Lahore), a fanatical priest, mysterious Hindu rituals, and “the novelty of exotically colonial English people”. The stuff that would probably discomfit modern sensibilities but which in 1883 was firmly de rigueur.
The opera includes the Flower Duet (“Sous le dôme épais”) for soprano and mezzo-soprano, performed in Act 1 by Lakmé, the daughter of a Brahmin priest, and her servant Mallika. Here we see it performed by soprano Sabine Devieilhe and mezzo-soprano Marianne Crebassa.
Incidentally, have you ever wondered how foreign language poems still rhyme when translated into English? Of course, this is where translation has to be creative in its own right. The Flower Duet provides a case in point. See how Theodore T Barker, in 1890, turned the original French lyrics into singable English, preserving the form and rhyme:
French lyrics Viens, Mallika, les lianes en fleurs Jettent déjà leur ombre Sur le ruisseau sacré qui coule, calme et sombre, Eveillé par le chant des oiseaux tapageurs
Literal English Come, Mallika, the flowering lianas already cast their shadow on the sacred stream which flows, calm and dark, awakened by the song of rowdy birds.
Singable English Come, Mallika, the flowering vines Their shadows now are throwing Along the sacred stream, That calmly here is flowing; Enlivened by the songs of birds among the pines.
The German-born George Frideric Handel moved to London in 1712 and remained there until his death in 1759. My first memory that involves Handel was a piece of music called Water Music, possibly from some sheet music my grandma had but equally possibly not (it’s one of those early “not sure where” memories). It was composed in 1717 in response to a request from King George I for a concert on the Thames. Handel was obviously well in with the Court; ten years after Water Music he was commissioned to write four anthems for the Coronation ceremony of King George II. One of these, the glorious Zadok the Priest, has been played at every British coronation ceremony since.
Another notable composition of Handel’s was Music for the Royal Fireworks in 1749, written for a “party in the park” to celebrate the end of the War of the Austrian Succession. Mozart called it a “spectacle of English pride and joy”. A year later, Handel arranged a performance of his famous Messiah to benefit Thomas Coram’s Foundling Hospital in London. The performance was considered a great success and was followed by annual concerts that continued throughout his life – an early forerunner of our “benefit concerts” today.
It is, however, Handel’s piece from his great opera Solomon, namely the opening instrumental of Act III, Arrival of the Queen of Sheba, that I’m showcasing today. If you don’t already know it from its name, you will instantly recognise it when you play it below. It has been used extensively for anything that could benefit from some vivacious “processional” music (including the 2012 London Olympics opening ceremony in which the music accompanies Daniel Craig’s James Bond as he meets the Queen at Buckingham Palace) and you can hear why: it’s a joyous romp of violins and oboes.
The wider piece, Solomon, was widely recognised by commentators of the day as a eulogy for Georgian England, with the just and wise King Solomon representing King George II, and the mighty, prosperous kingdom of Israel reflecting the similarly happy state of England at the time of the work’s premiere. Also, since it was in English (Handel had written his operas in Italian up until Messiah in 1742), it became hugely popular with the public. So put some sandals on, grab your palm, and welcome the Queen of Sheba as she disembarks!
You could call this a “two for one” this week in that the poem that inspired Ralph Vaughan Williams’ masterful piece for violin and piano, The Lark Ascending, is itself a masterpiece. Written by poet George Meredith in 1881, and having the same title, it was a paean to the skylark and its song. Siegfried Sassoon called it “a sustained lyric which never for a moment falls short of the effect aimed at, soars up and up with the song it imitates, and unites inspired spontaneity with a demonstration of effortless technical ingenuity…one has only to read the poem a few times to become aware of its perfection”. For those whose appetite is whetted by Sassoon’s praise, the poem is at the foot of this blog; however, today let’s look at the beautiful music it inspired.
Vaughan Williams was one of England’s great composers. Influenced by Tudor music and English folksong, he composed everything from operas, ballets and choral pieces to chamber music and symphonies, spread over sixty years, and is a staple of the British concert repertoire. He continued to compose in his seventies and eighties, producing his last symphony months before his death at eighty-five in 1958.
Vaughan Williams loved poetry and was a keen reader of the great Victorian poets. The composer’s second wife, Ursula, herself a poet, wrote that in The Lark Ascending Vaughan Williams had “taken a literary idea on which to build his musical thought…and had made the violin become both the bird’s song and its flight”. It’s not hard to detect the allusion in the music.
Although completed in 1914, the premiere of The Lark Ascending wasn’t until 15th December 1920 at the Shirehampton Public Hall (given by leading British violinist of the time Marie Hall and the pianist Geoffrey Mendham). Rather like the Edwardian era itself, as viewed retrospectively from the other side of the Great War, it seems to reflect nostalgia for a partly mythological lost age of innocence.
Although most performances these days are orchestral versions, some have recreated the original version for violin and piano only, including this exquisite performance by Finnish violinist Kreeta-Julia Heikkilä, with Jaan Ots on the piano, at the Helsinki Chamber Music Festival 2019.
The Lark Ascending by George Meredith
He rises and begins to round, He drops the silver chain of sound Of many links without a break, In chirrup, whistle, slur and shake, All intervolv’d and spreading wide, Like water-dimples down a tide Where ripple ripple overcurls And eddy into eddy whirls; A press of hurried notes that run So fleet they scarce are more than one, Yet changingly the trills repeat And linger ringing while they fleet, Sweet to the quick o’ the ear, and dear To her beyond the handmaid ear, Who sits beside our inner springs, Too often dry for this he brings, Which seems the very jet of earth At sight of sun, her musci’s mirth, As up he wings the spiral stair, A song of light, and pierces air With fountain ardor, fountain play, To reach the shining tops of day, And drink in everything discern’d An ecstasy to music turn’d, Impell’d by what his happy bill Disperses; drinking, showering still, Unthinking save that he may give His voice the outlet, there to live Renew’d in endless notes of glee, So thirsty of his voice is he, For all to hear and all to know That he is joy, awake, aglow, The tumult of the heart to hear Through pureness filter’d crystal-clear, And know the pleasure sprinkled bright By simple singing of delight, Shrill, irreflective, unrestrain’d, Rapt, ringing, on the jet sustain’d Without a break, without a fall, Sweet-silvery, sheer lyrical, Perennial, quavering up the chord Like myriad dews of sunny sward That trembling into fulness shine, And sparkle dropping argentine; Such wooing as the ear receives From zephyr caught in choric leaves Of aspens when their chattering net Is flush’d to white with shivers wet; And such the water-spirit’s chime On mountain heights in morning’s prime, Too freshly sweet to seem excess, Too animate to need a stress; But wider over many heads The starry voice ascending spreads, Awakening, as it waxes thin, The best in us to him akin; And every face to watch him rais’d, Puts on the light of children prais’d, So rich our human pleasure ripes When sweetness on sincereness pipes, Though nought be promis’d from the seas, But only a soft-ruffling breeze Sweep glittering on a still content, Serenity in ravishment.
For singing till his heaven fills, ’T is love of earth that he instils, And ever winging up and up, Our valley is his golden cup, And he the wine which overflows To lift us with him as he goes: The woods and brooks, the sheep and kine He is, the hills, the human line, The meadows green, the fallows brown, The dreams of labor in the town; He sings the sap, the quicken’d veins; The wedding song of sun and rains He is, the dance of children, thanks Of sowers, shout of primrose-banks, And eye of violets while they breathe; All these the circling song will wreathe, And you shall hear the herb and tree, The better heart of men shall see, Shall feel celestially, as long As you crave nothing save the song. Was never voice of ours could say Our inmost in the sweetest way, Like yonder voice aloft, and link All hearers in the song they drink: Our wisdom speaks from failing blood, Our passion is too full in flood, We want the key of his wild note Of truthful in a tuneful throat, The song seraphically free Of taint of personality, So pure that it salutes the suns The voice of one for millions, In whom the millions rejoice For giving their one spirit voice.
Yet men have we, whom we revere, Now names, and men still housing here, Whose lives, by many a battle-dint Defaced, and grinding wheels on flint, Yield substance, though they sing not, sweet For song our highest heaven to greet: Whom heavenly singing gives us new, Enspheres them brilliant in our blue, From firmest base to farthest leap, Because their love of Earth is deep, And they are warriors in accord With life to serve and pass reward, So touching purest and so heard In the brain’s reflex of yon bird; Wherefore their soul in me, or mine, Through self-forgetfulness divine, In them, that song aloft maintains, To fill the sky and thrill the plains With showerings drawn from human stores, As he to silence nearer soars, Extends the world at wings and dome, More spacious making more our home, Till lost on his aërial rings In light, and then the fancy sings.
George MeredithRalph Vaughan Williams
Commentaries on excellence in art, music, film, and literature
