Music

George Frideric Handel’s Arrival of the Queen of Sheba (1749)

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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!

George Frideric Handel
Film, TV, and Theatre

Cosgrove Hall’s Pied Piper of Hamelin (1981)

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Alongside Aardman Animations, those brilliant stop-motion clay animators of Wallace and Gromit fame, another great favourite of the British public was Cosgrove Hall Films. Brian Cosgrove and Mark Hall first met as students at Manchester’s College of Art and Design, and then worked together in television graphics at Granada Television. They left Granada in 1969 to form their first production company, Stop Frame Productions, making TV commercials, public information films and also the opening credits and graphics for TV classic Rainbow in 1972.

The Rainbow work led to Thames Television creating a subsidiary animation studio in Chorlton-cum-Hardy, in Manchester, with Cosgrove and Hall as its lead animators. Cosgrove Hall Films was born. Its first series, Chorlton and the Wheelies, was popular and ran from 1976 to 1979, but it was 1981’s Danger Mouse that spawned their greatest success, running throughout the rest of the eighties and being syndicated around the world. With familiar voiceovers from David Jason as Danger Mouse and Terry Scott as lovable sidekick Penfold, it remains a firm favourite with everyone who lived through that decade.

However, it is Cosgrove Hall’s magical 1981 TV special, The Pied Piper of Hamelin, that I’m looking at today. I remember stumbling across it and being mesmerised by its brilliant animation techniques. It takes the story of the Pied Piper as laid down in the words of the poem by Robert Browning (whose lines are used verbatim) and brilliantly illustrates the strange tale of Hamelin’s plague of rats, the enigmatic piper who offers to rid the town of them, and the dire consequences when the town fails to pay him the agreed amount later.

Here is a clip of the Pied Piper working his magic on the rats, with the narrator’s wonderfully rhythmic rendering of Browning’s poetry driving the story along. Incidentally, whilst you could be forgiven for thinking the Pied Piper story to have come from the imagination of the Grimm brothers (who did indeed tell the tale later), the first reference to the story was in a stained glass window in Hamelin itself, and contemporary accounts make reference to some actual event that led to the town’s children disappearing in the late 1200s. The stuff of legend!

Pied Piper of Hamelin
Literature

Ursula K Le Guin’s A Wizard of Earthsea (1968)

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As a teenager I was intrigued by the prodigious output of science fiction writers that you could find lining the shelves at WH Smiths – Isaac Asimov, Michael Moorcock, Robert A Heinlein, Frank Herbert and so on – often with appealing, other-worldly artwork on their covers. Alongside sci-fi you also had the related genre of science-fantasy, or straight-up “fantasy”, which differs from sci-fi in the fact that, whilst the latter remains technically in a world of scientific possibility, science fantasy allows for violation of the scientific laws of the real world, thus encompassing all the “sword and sorcery” fiction from Tolkien to Robert E Howard’s Conan The Barbarian novels.

Thanks to Tolkien (I first read The Lord of the Rings somewhere in my mid-teens), it was science fantasy to which I leaned, if I had to choose, but even then I wasn’t what you’d call a real fan of the genre. I was too eclectic, I suppose, busy collecting thrillers by the likes of Alistair Maclean or Jack Higgins, or horror fiction by James Herbert, or gritty pulp like Richard Stark’s Parker novels or Don Pendleton’s The Executioner series – more killing bad guys than slaying dragons, shall we say?

However, another name I recall seeing on those book shelves (but which never read until relatively recently) was that of Ursula K Le Guin (1929–2018), an American author known for both science fiction works set in her “Hainish” universe, and science fantasy in her extraordinary Earthsea series. It was the latter I discovered a few years ago when I purchased her Earthsea Quartet on a whim and found myself amazed and thrilled by her story-telling. There is nothing throwaway about Le Guin’s novels, no production-line fantasy, these; they are literary works that weave an extraordinary world which has obviously been taken seriously and comprehensively thought through.

The Earthsea world is one of sea and islands, a vast archipelago meticulously mapped out at the beginning of the book, in which its inhabitants understand that magic is a real thing, an in-built talent common to all though highly-developed only in some, particularly those trained at the school at Roke (Earthsea’s school of wizardry created long before Hogwarts). There are “weather workers” and “fixers”, and various low-level magical specialities…and then there are the cream of the crop, the card-carrying wizards, like the protagonist Ged (also known as Sparrowhawk), who go by the title of “Mage”.

In the first book, A Wizard of Earthsea, the young Ged, on the island of Gont, overhears his maternal aunt, the village witch, using “words of power” to attract goats. He tries it himself, to surprising effect, and his aunt recognises Ged’s exceptionalism. By the age of twelve he has learned everything his aunt can teach him, and so the journey begins. I love the nuanced magic: instead of those dramatic electric-bolt battles between Gandalf and Saruman, or Harry Potter and Voldemort, we see Ged using a “mage wind” to power a boat forward when the wind fails. It’s altogether a more subtle kind of magic. A more believable kind, in fact, even if it is just “fantasy”.

The Earthsea Quartet book cover
Ursula K Le Guin
Film, TV, and Theatre

Robert Zemeckis’s Back To The Future (1985)

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Remember the times when a summer blockbuster could just be unashamed fun? In 1985 we got just that with the release of Robert Zemickis’s time-travelling masterpiece, Back To The Future. It’s about fate, destiny, love, bravery, rock ‘n’ roll, the past, present, and future, and all the philosophical conundrums the latter entails. Heavy on action, comedy and a myriad classic memorable scenes, the film delivers great sci-fi, adventure, romance, and sublime humour, all rolled into one. You all know it, unless you’re from another planet (and even then, having lived under a rock): Michael J Fox’s Marty McFly is catapulted thirty years back to 1955, thanks to Christopher Lloyd’s Emmett “Doc” Brown’s time-travelling DeLorean car retrofitted with a flux capacitor, and, well you know the rest…

The novelist L P Hartley (not to be confused with J R Hartley the amateur fly-fisherman) once said: “The past is a foreign country, they do things differently there”. And indeed in Back To The Future, the numerous and fundamental ways in which the 1950s differed from the 1980s are explored to wonderfully comic and chaotic effect when Marty embarks on his great adventure.

A big part of the fun of watching Back to the Future is how much the first act of the movie informs the second. Practically every line of dialogue and character interaction from the 1980s has its 1950s counterpart, and usually as the set-up for a smart joke. Zemickis and his writing partner Bob Gale also have fun in subverting any rose-tinted view of the past we might have had. Their fifties may have looked like Happy Days but it’s far from being depicted as a golden age.

Marty’s mother Lorraine tells her daughter: “I think it’s terrible! Girls chasing boys. When I was your age I never chased a boy or called a boy or sat in a parked car with a boy.” Of course, as the movie progresses we come to realise that this is all fiction and the teenage (and boy-crazy) Lorraine is clearly up for all those things and more: she is neither Doris Day nor Joanie Cunningham. And as for the boys, well, Biff and his sociopathic friends are hardly beacons of respectability, are they? No wonder Lorraine falls for Marty and his before-his-time, un-toxic masculinity.

Anyway, here’s the trailer that must have whetted many an appetite (despite the naff voiceover) when it came out and makes me want to watch the film again now!

Marty McFly and Emmett “Doc” Brown
Art

Grant Wood’s American Gothic (1930)

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Grant Wood (1891–1942) was an American painter best known for his paintings depicting the rural American Midwest, particularly American Gothic (1930), which has become an iconic example of 20th century American art. Wood was born in rural Iowa and received his art training at the Art Institute of Chicago before making several trips to Europe to study Impressionism and post-Impressionism. He always returned to Iowa, however, and had a studio at the house he shared with his mother in Cedar Rapids. He was a major proponent of the art movement known as American Regionalism which arose in the 1930s as a response to the Great Depression, and incorporated paintings, murals, lithographs, and illustrations depicting realistic scenes of rural and small-town America.

It was while driving around the town of Eldon, Iowa, looking for inspiration, that Wood spotted the Dibble House, a quaint small white frame house and considered it just right for his purposes. So why “American Gothic”? Well, the house is built in the so-called Carpenter Gothic style, an architectural style borrowing ideas from Gothic architecture but rendering it in wood. Here’s the Dibble House below, with its arched Gothic style window clearly shown.

The Dibble House

Wood wanted to add figures of people he fancied should live in that house: a farmer and his daughter. He chose for his models his sister Nan Wood Graham and their dentist Dr Byron McKeeby. The woman is dressed in a colonial print apron while the man is adorned in overalls covered by a suit jacket and carries a pitchfork. It’s an odd blend, and some took it initially as a mockery of “the kind of people” who might live in such a house, but this was far from the intent of the artist who wished to simply create an authentic depiction of real people in his home state.

Wood’s models: his sister and dentist

American Gothic became one of the most familiar images of American art and has been widely parodied in American popular culture. Exuberant it ain’t, but it somehow captures a steadfast spirit befitting of the context in which it was painted.


Grant Wood
Poetry

A E Housman’s A Shropshire Lad (1896)

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Alfred Edward Housman (A E Housman) was a lifelong classical scholar at University College London and Cambridge University, right up until his death in 1936. He was also a gifted poet whose primary work, A Shropshire Lad, a cycle of 63 poems, was published in 1896 and became a lasting success. The collection struck a chord with many English composers, among them Arthur Somervell, Ralph Vaughan Williams, and Ivor Gurney, all of whom set his poems to music.

The collection’s various melancholy themes, including dying young and being separated from an idealised pastoral childhood, ensured that it accompanied many a young man to the trenches in the Great War. Housman had always had a young male readership in mind and as W H Auden said: “no other poet seemed so perfectly to express the sensibility of a male adolescent“. Equally, George Orwell remembered that, among his generation at Eton College in the wake of World War I: “these were the poems which I and my contemporaries used to recite to ourselves, over and over, in a kind of ecstasy”.

There’s a phrase Housman used that I have always found striking: “blue remembered hills”, three simple words that exemplify the melancholic tone of poem number XL, Into my heart an air that kills. It consists of just two quatrains that reflect on the passage of time and the futility of longing for a long-gone land and age. The speaker, in a distant land, recalls the hills and spires of his homeland. He recognises that, whilst he was happy when he lived there, he cannot return there now he is older and has left that land behind.

Into my heart an air that kills
From yon far country blows:
What are those blue remembered hills,
What spires, what farms are those?

That is the land of lost content,
I see it shining plain,
The happy highways where I went
And cannot come again.

Surprisingly, Housman wasn’t actually from Shropshire, he was from Worcestershire, and hadn’t even visited Shropshire until after he had started writing the poem cycle. It is not Housman who is the Shropshire lad, but a literary construct. Be that as it may, here’s another punchy short poem from the cycle, again referencing the passage of time but this time evoking a carpe diem urgency about the here and now. Funnily enough, as I write this in view of my garden, my own cherry tree is hung with snow, its ‘winter blossom’ as implied by this poem.

Loveliest of trees, the cherry now
Is hung with bloom along the bough,
And stands about the woodland ride
Wearing white for Eastertide

Now, of my threescore years and ten,
Twenty will not come again,
And take from seventy springs a score,
It only leaves me fifty more

And since to look at things in bloom
Fifty springs are little room,
About the woodlands I will go
To see the cherry hung with snow

A E Housman
Art

Diego Velázquez’s Las Meninas (1656)

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The Spanish Golden Age of flourishing arts and literature in Spain coincided with the Spanish Empire’s political and military dominance in the 16th and 17th centuries, roughly during the reigns of the Habsburg monarchs Charles V, and the Philips II, III and IV of Spain. In literature, Cervantes was writing Don Quixote de la Mancha (1605) and Lope de Vega was knocking out about 500 plays and 3000 sonnets between the 1580s and 1630s. In art, El Greco, Francisco de Zurbarán and Bartolomé Murillo flourished, as well as the leading artist of them all, Diego Velázquez, who worked under the patronage of King Philip IV between the 1620s and 1650s.

Velázquez’s earliest works are bodegones, kitchen or pantry scenes with prominent still-lifes and domestic activity such as his Woman Frying Eggs (1618) which I remember being taken with many years ago during a visit to the National Gallery of Scotland in Edinburgh. However, it was when he took to portraiture that he gained the attention of King Philip and was invited to become court painter. Diego was able to thrive under Philip’s wing for the rest of his life. He provided portraits for the court (he painted Philip himself over thirty times) and for luminaries of the time such as Pope Innocent X, but was also given the freedom to paint less prominent personalities such as Juan de Pareja, a former slave and fellow painter in his workshop.

His magnum opus, however, was Las Meninas (The Ladies-in-waiting or Maids of Honour). Painted in 1656 and now residing in the Museo del Prado in Madrid, Las Meninas depicts the 5 year old Infanta Margaret Theresa surrounded by her entourage of maids of honour, chaperone, bodyguard, two dwarfs and a dog. Just behind them, Velázquez portrays himself working at a large canvas and looking outwards towards the viewer. In the background there is a mirror that reflects the upper bodies of the king and queen themselves. Given the expectation that a court painting would be a formal affair, Las Meninas’ complex and enigmatic composition surprises us and creates an uncertain relationship between us and the figures depicted. Because of its unusual nature, Las Meninas has been one of the most widely analysed works in Western painting, and it’s one of “the greats” that I hope to visit one day.

Diego Velázquez, detail from Las Meninas
Literature

Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol (1843)

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Charles Dickens is widely regarded as the greatest writer of the Victorian era, and he certainly came up with some enduring fictional characters. As an aside, I recall the menu at the Outside Inn bistro in my home town as being a rich source of these: I used to get the Bill Sykes burger (smothered in chilli) but there was also a Mr Micawber, a Tiny Tim (served with salad rather than chips), a Treble Bumble and so on. Everyone has seen the 1974 film version of Oliver Twist on numerous occasions of course, but it’s remarkable just how often Dickens’ novels have been made into films; David Copperfield, for example, has been filmed eight times (in 1911, 1913, 1922, 1935, 1969, 1993, 1999 and 2000). Similarly, there are six film versions each of Great Expectations, The Old Curiosity Shop and A Tale of Two Cities.

When it comes to A Christmas Carol, however, its enduring popularity hits the stratosphere: there are no less than thirteen ‘straight’ film versions (as in, named A Christmas Carol), as well as six or seven more featuring the name ‘Scrooge’ in some form or another, and numerous spin-off and parody versions from the Smurfs to the Muppets (the latter is surprisingly excellent, incidentally). It is therefore highly unlikely that you will need the following synopsis; nonetheless, for the sake of newly-arrived extra-terrestrial readers of this blog:  A Christmas Carol recounts the story of Ebenezer Scrooge, an elderly miser who is visited by the ghost of his former business partner Jacob Marley and the spirits of Christmas Past, Present and Yet to Come. After their visits, Scrooge is transformed into a kinder, gentler man.

Dickens wrote A Christmas Carol during a period when the country was exploring and re-evaluating its past Christmas traditions, including carols and newer customs such as Christmas trees. He was influenced by the experiences of his own youth and by other writers including Washington Irving and Douglas Jerrold. He was particularly inspired by a visit to the Field Lane Ragged School, one of several establishments for London’s street children. The treatment of the poor and the ability of a selfish man to redeem himself by transforming into a more sympathetic character are of course the key themes of the story.

Published on 19 December 1843, the first edition sold out by Christmas Eve, and it has never been out of print since. Dickens even began performing public recitations of the story at various venues throughout London, which proved to be a big hit with the public. The novella thus captured the zeitgeist of the mid-Victorian revival of the Christmas holiday and helped create the archetypes that were handed down to later generations, like family gatherings, seasonal food and drink, dancing, games and a festive generosity of spirit.

Here is a nice montage from the 1951 film, Scrooge, featuring Alistair Sim (making a second appearance in this blog; see An Inspector Calls) as Ebenezer Scrooge. Rather than the curmudgeon, let’s see the redeemed Scrooge as the Christmas spirit finally takes hold within him. Sim captures the pathos masterfully: prepare for a warm feeling!

To all my readers, Merry Christmas!

Charles Dickens
Film, TV, and Theatre

Sean Connery in You Only Live Twice (1967)

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Who is your favourite James Bond? My formative years coincided with the Roger Moore era so I tend to regard him as my favourite Bond, with Live And Let Die my favourite Bond movie. However, the definitive Bond, the one with the correct measure of roguish charm and cool sophistication, rugged masculinity and sex appeal, but also gifted by the stylistic elements of the Sixties (was there a cooler car than the 1964 Aston Martin DB5 driven by Bond in Goldfinger?), has to be the recently-deceased Sean Connery.

Connery made seven Bond movies beginning with 1962’s Dr No but today I’m looking at the fifth in the series, 1967’s You Only Live Twice, which particularly thrilled me as a kid (despite connoisseurs generally comparing it less favourably to its predecessors). With screenplay by one Roald Dahl, it is the first James Bond film to discard most of Ian Fleming’s plot, using only a few characters and locations from the book as the background for an entirely new story. In the film, Bond is dispatched to Japan after American and Soviet crewed spacecraft disappear mysteriously in orbit, each nation blaming the other. The Secret Service suspects a third party, however, and Bond travels secretly to a remote Japanese island to find the perpetrators. He comes face-to-face with Blofeld (Donald Pleasence), the head of SPECTRE, which is working for the government of an unnamed Asian power to provoke war between the superpowers.

Director Lewis Gilbert, producers Cubby Broccoli and Harry Saltzman, production designer Ken Adam, and director of photography Freddie Young spent three weeks in Japan searching for locations, with SPECTRE’s extinct volcano headquarters being a particularly good find. The group was due to return to the UK on a BOAC Boeing 707 flight on 5th March 1966, but cancelled at the last minute after being told they had a chance to watch a ninja demonstration. That flight crashed 25 minutes after take-off, killing all on board: such a lucky decision for the party and their families, and also for the entire future Bond franchise.

John Barry produced the score, and (as is typical with John Barry) the result was sensational: the incidental theme music, and Nancy Sinatra’s stunning main theme song, knit the elements together so well. Those elements include all the usual tropes: car chases, fights, assassination attempts, love action and glamorous Bond girls (notably the beautiful Kissy Suzuki, played by Mie Hama), gadgets and gismos (including bullet-firing cigarettes and a heavily-armed gyrocopter), and witty one-liners. However, the movie is also having an obvious love affair with Japan, and so as well as a whole lot of ninja action, we get some sumptuous Japanese landscapes and ceremonies.

The whole thing is of course majestically absurd but stonkingly good fun. Here is a nice montage of clips from the movie alongside Nancy Sinatra’s winning theme song.

Bond, Tiger Tanaka, and Kissy Suzuki
Poetry

Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s The Rime Of The Ancient Mariner (1798)

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Although I am a confirmed land-lubber, the sea holds a fascination for me. There’s something quite horrifying about being in the middle of the ocean, with no land visible in any direction and untold depths below, and being in a vessel whose fortune is dictated by the forces and whims of Nature. Of course, my own experiences of being in the middle of the sea have been limited to very safe, reliable and generally nature-defying cruise ships, so I’m not claiming any real experience of the above. I’m really thinking about those incredible sea adventurers of yore, like Cook or Magellan, or those gnarly men who would go to sea for years on end in pursuit of whales (see my blog about Moby Dick here). Or the man depicted in Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.

Coleridge’s epic poem was published in 1798 in Lyrical Ballads, the poetry collection in which he collaborated with William Wordsworth (and which marked the beginning of British Romantic literature). For a volume that represented a new modern approach to poetry, it is ironic that this particular poem seems pre-modern in its gothic setting, archaic spelling and supernatural mood; perhaps he thought it was just too good not to be included.

The narrator is accosted at a wedding ceremony by a grey-bearded old sailor who tells him a story of a voyage he took long ago. The wedding guest is at first reluctant to listen, as the ceremony is about to begin, but the mariner’s glittering eye captivates him, and he simply has to listen. The mariner’s tale begins with his ship departing on its journey. Despite initial good fortune, the ship is driven south by a storm and eventually reaches the icy waters of the Antarctic. An albatross appears and leads the ship out of the ice jam in which it was getting stuck, but even as the albatross is fed and praised by the ship’s crew, the mariner shoots the bird with his crossbow.

Oh dear: bad luck! The crew is angry with the mariner, believing the crime would arouse the wrath of the spirits, and indeed their ship is eventually blown into uncharted waters near the equator, where it is becalmed.

Day after day, day after day,
We stuck, nor breath nor motion;
As idle as a painted ship
Upon a painted ocean.

Water, water, every where,
And all the boards did shrink;
Water, water, every where,
Nor any drop to drink.

The sailors blame the mariner for the torment of their thirst and force the mariner to wear the dead albatross about his neck.

Frontispiece by William Strang, 1903

The mariner endures a fate worse than death as punishment for his killing of the albatross: one by one, all of the crew members die, but the mariner lives on, seeing for seven days and nights the curse in the eyes of the crew’s corpses, whose last expressions remain upon their faces.

Eventually, this stage of the mariner’s curse is lifted and he begins to pray. As he does so, the albatross falls from his neck and his guilt is partially expiated. It begins to rain and his own thirst is slaked. The bodies of the crew, now possessed by good spirits, rise up and help steer the ship home, floundering just off the coast of the mariner’s home town. The mariner is rescued but as penance, and driven by the agony of his guilt, he is now forced to wander the earth, telling his story over and over. His current rapt listener, the wedding guest, is just one in a long line…

If you have a spare half an hour, and you haven’t yet heard the full Ancient Mariner story, you could do worse than listen to Ian McKellen recite the entire thing here!

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