Poetry

Christina Rossetti’s In The Bleak Midwinter (1872)

4 Comments

Giv­en the sea­son, it’s fair to assume that at some point soon you will be hear­ing a ren­der­ing of Christi­na Rossetti’s In The Bleak Mid­win­ter. For me, it was last Sun­day evening, at our local church’s Christ­mas car­ol con­cert, and of all the car­ols we know and love (or at least tol­er­ate despite the overkill of decades’ worth of rep­e­ti­tion), this is one I can tru­ly get behind, due in no small mea­sure to Gus­tav Holst’s fit­ting musi­cal set­ting.

Rossetti’s poem was first pub­lished (as A Christ­mas Car­ol) in the Jan­u­ary 1872 issue of Amer­i­can lit­er­ary peri­od­i­cal, Scribner’s Month­ly (thus just miss­ing Christ­mas, iron­i­cal­ly), and it presents her unique ver­sion of the nativ­i­ty sto­ry. It was set to music in 1906 by Gus­tav Holst (the com­pos­er of The Plan­ets suite), and again by Harold Darke in 1911. Darke’s ver­sion has become a sta­ple of the BBC’s Car­ols From King’s pro­gramme, which airs each year on Christ­mas day, but it’s Holst’s that brings the poem to life for me.

Here is the famous first stan­za of the poem:

In the bleak mid­win­ter
Frosty wind made moan,
Earth stood hard as iron,
Water like a stone:
Snow had fall­en, snow on snow
Snow on snow,
In the bleak mid-win­ter,
Long ago.

Ros­set­ti sets the pre-Nativ­i­ty scene unequiv­o­cal­ly: she piles on the snow (on snow, on snow) and the very sparse­ness of the lan­guage builds on the sense of bleak­ness intro­duced in the first line. We get it: it was a bleak land­scape (sur­pris­ing­ly, giv­en that the area is sub-trop­i­cal and snow only ever falls on the Golan Heights, but let’s not nit­pick).

As the poem con­tin­ues, we are intro­duced to the famil­iar jux­ta­po­si­tion of divine pow­er being cast in the hum­bling cir­cum­stances of the low­ly sta­ble, with its shep­herds and wise men, oxen and ass­es, cheru­bim and seraphim. It is a sim­ple cel­e­bra­tion of the Chris­t­ian faith, a win­ter warmer of an end­ing to thaw out the bleak snows of the first lines. But it is also a cel­e­bra­tion of moth­er­ly love, of the moth­er being the only one able to care for and love her child, despite the pres­ence of heav­en­ly hosts.

But only his moth­er
In her maid­en bliss
Wor­shipped the beloved
With a kiss

Rossetti’s poem is right­ly remem­bered anew each Christ­mas, in part because of its sim­ple lan­guage and mes­sage. With Holst’s tune, a can­dlelit church, and a con­gre­ga­tion of bescarfed car­ollers, it’s guar­an­teed to get a late bloomer into the Christ­mas spir­it. Here’s a won­der­ful ren­di­tion by the choir of Kings Col­lege, Cambridge…Merry Christ­mas!

In the bleak mid­win­ter
Frosty wind made moan,
Earth stood hard as iron,
Water like a stone:
Snow had fall­en, snow on snow
Snow on snow,
In the bleak mid-win­ter,
Long ago.

Our God, heav­en can­not hold him
Nor earth sus­tain;
Heav­en and earth shall flee away
When he comes to reign:
In the bleak mid-win­ter
A sta­ble-place suf­ficed
The Lord God Almighty
Jesus Christ.

Enough for him, whom cheru­bim
Wor­ship night and day,
A breast­ful of milk,
And a manger­ful of hay:
Enough for him, whom angels
Fall down before,
The ox and ass and camel
Which adore.

Angels and archangels
May have gath­ered there,
Cheru­bim and seraphim
Thronged the air -
But only his moth­er
In her maid­en bliss
Wor­shipped the beloved
With a kiss.

What can I give him,
Poor as I am?
If I were a shep­herd
I would bring a lamb;
If I were a wise man
I would do my part;
Yet what I can, I give him -
Give my heart.

Christi­na Ros­set­ti

Music

Johannes Brahms’s Hungarian Dance no. 5 in G‑minor (1869)

2 Comments

Accord­ing to influ­en­tial con­duc­tor Hans von Bülow, the Ger­man com­pos­er Johannes Brahms was one of the “three Bs” of musi­cal com­po­si­tion along with Johann Sebas­t­ian Bach and Lud­wig van Beethoven (an acco­lade that Brahms him­self would prob­a­bly have reject­ed giv­en his per­son­al ven­er­a­tion for both those com­posers). He was a vir­tu­oso pianist and a pro­lif­ic com­pos­er of sym­phonies, cham­ber music, piano, organ and choral works through­out the sec­ond half of the 19th cen­tu­ry. How­ev­er, it’s his ear­ly expe­ri­ences lead­ing to his series of Hun­gar­i­an dances that inter­est us here.

By the mid­dle of the 19th Cen­tu­ry, scores of Hun­gar­i­an immi­grants and refugees from through­out the Aus­tro-Hun­gar­i­an Empire were flood­ing into Aus­tria – most­ly to Vien­na, but also to many oth­er towns includ­ing Brahms’s home­town of Ham­burg. As a young musi­cian at the begin­ning of his musi­cal career, Brahms had to play light piano music at tav­erns to make mon­ey. He would also occa­sion­al­ly get hired as an accom­pa­nist for a tour­ing musi­cian, and on one evening he had the good for­tune to meet one of Hungary’s great tour­ing vio­lin­ists, Eduard Reményi. Brahms thus learned gyp­sy music in the inti­mate musi­cal com­pa­ny of the great­est gyp­sy vio­lin­ist of the time.

For­ev­er after cher­ish­ing gyp­sy music, Brahms would go on to pub­lish two sets of Hun­gar­i­an Dances for two pianos, 21 pieces in all. To this day, how­ev­er, Hun­gar­i­an Dance No. 5 is prob­a­bly the most beloved of his Dances. And right­ly so, with its enchant­i­ng first theme in a minor key, evok­ing the swag­ger and grav­i­tas of a mus­ta­chioed Slav lover. The first orches­tra­tion of No. 5 was not done by Brahms him­self but by Mar­tin Schmel­ing, but it was this orches­tra­tion of Brahms’s trans­for­ma­tion of gyp­sy music that helped it become one of the most trea­sured pieces in West­ern music’s reper­toire. Enjoy this suit­ably rous­ing ver­sion, appro­pri­ate­ly enough by the Hun­gar­i­an Phil­har­mon­ic Orches­tra.

 

Johannes Brahms
Poetry

John Milton’s Paradise Lost (1667)

Leave a comment

I’m fas­ci­nat­ed by the con­cept of epic poet­ry, a lit­er­ary genre orig­i­nat­ing in the mists of pre-lit­er­ate soci­eties, when bards of the time would com­pose and mem­o­rise tra­di­tion­al sto­ries, and pass them on from per­former to per­former and per­former to audi­ence. The clas­sic epic poems that come down to us from ancient his­to­ry include the Epic of Gil­gamesh (com­posed any­where between 2500 and 1300 BC), Homer’s Ili­ad and Odyssey (8th cen­tu­ry BC), the Mahabara­ta (5th cen­tu­ry BC), and Virgil’s Aeneid (c.20 BC)…whilst from lat­er medieval and ear­ly Renais­sance years, we have the Old Eng­lish Beowulf, the Ger­man Nibelun­gen­lied, the French Song of Roland, Dan­te’s Divine Com­e­dy, Spenser’s Faerie Queene, and John Mil­ton’s Par­adise Lost. All of them mas­sive­ly sig­nif­i­cant in the his­to­ry of world lit­er­a­ture.

What these epic nar­ra­tive poems have in com­mon is great length (the Ili­ad con­tains over 15,000 verse lines; the Mahabara­ta a whop­ping 200,000!), fea­tur­ing vast set­tings and grand, sweep­ing themes, usu­al­ly fea­tur­ing a hero who par­tic­i­pates in a quest or jour­ney, per­forms great deeds, and gen­er­al­ly embod­ies the ide­al traits and moral val­ues of the nation or cul­ture from which the epic emanates. They also have in com­mon the con­straint of poet­ic meter, orig­i­nal­ly to help the bard recall the lines – in ancient Greek and Latin epic poet­ry it was dactylic hexa­m­e­ter that lent itself to the lan­guages (dum-di-di dum-di-di); in Renais­sance Eng­land, iambic pen­tame­ter (di-dum di-dum), beloved of Shake­speare of course.

John Milton’s Par­adise Lost may not have an obvi­ous hero (giv­en that his “heroes”, in his two main nar­ra­tive arcs, are Satan and Adam and Eve), but there’s no doubt­ing the grand theme: Mil­ton tack­les the epic saga of the Fall of Man, the temp­ta­tion of Adam and Eve by the fall­en angel Satan and their expul­sion from the Gar­den of Eden. Writ­ten across 10,000 lines of blank verse in iambic pen­tame­ter, Mil­ton starts in media res (anoth­er char­ac­ter­is­tic of the epic, mean­ing in the midst of the plot with the back­ground sto­ry being recount­ed lat­er) with Satan and the oth­er rebel angels defeat­ed and ban­ished to Hell.

The piece is a mon­u­men­tal and remark­able achieve­ment, par­tic­u­lar­ly giv­en that by the late 1650s, when he start­ed writ­ing Par­adise Lost, Mil­ton had become blind and had to dic­tate the entire work to amanu­enses. Mil­ton saw him­self as the intel­lec­tu­al heir of Homer, Vir­gil, and Dante, and sought to cre­ate a work of art which ful­ly rep­re­sent­ed the most basic tenets of the Protes­tant faith. Like all epic poet­ry, with its length and archa­ic lan­guage, it’s a slog to read through (and I’m not rec­om­mend­ing it), but there’s no doubt­ing its influ­ence down the ages.

Here are the open­ing lines where Mil­ton lays out his inten­tions (to “jus­ti­fy the ways of God to men”):

Of man’s first dis­obe­di­ence, and the fruit
Of that for­bid­den tree, whose mor­tal taste
Brought death into the world, and all our woe,
With loss of Eden, till one greater man
Restore us, and regain the bliss­ful seat,
Sing heav­en­ly muse, that on the secret top
Of Oreb, or of Sinai, didst inspire
That shep­herd, who first taught the cho­sen seed,
In the begin­ning how the heav­ens and earth
Rose out of chaos: Or if Sion hill
Delight thee more, and Siloa’s brook that flowed
Fast by the ora­cle of God; I thence
Invoke thy aid to my adven­tur­ous song,
That with no mid­dle flight intends to soar
Above the Aon­ian mount, while it pur­sues
Things unat­tempt­ed yet in prose or rhyme.
And chiefly thou Oh spir­it, that dost pre­fer
Before all tem­ples the upright heart and pure,
Instruct me, for thou know­est; thou from the first
Wast present, and with mighty wings out­spread
Dove-like satst brood­ing on the vast abyss
And mad’st it preg­nant: What in me is dark
Illu­mine, what is low raise and sup­port;
That to the heighth of this great argu­ment
I may assert eter­nal prov­i­dence,
And jus­ti­fy the ways of God to men.

John Milton
John Mil­ton
Music

The Dave Brubeck Quartet’s Take Five (1959)

Leave a comment

There were two main sub-gen­res of jazz to emerge in post-war Amer­i­ca, mor­ph­ing out of the big band swing era that had dom­i­nat­ed in the 1930s and 1940s: they were bebop and cool jazz. Now, where­as bebop was “hot,” i.e. loud, excit­ing, and loose, cool jazz was “cool,” i.e. soft, more reserved, and con­trolled. In bebop, the empha­sis was on impro­vi­sa­tion; in cool jazz, the empha­sis was on arrange­ment. Bebop was East Coast, night­club-ori­ent­ed; cool jazz was West Coast and took jazz out to the col­lege cam­pus­es. For bebop, think Char­lie Park­er, Dizzy Gille­spie, and Thelo­nious Monk; for cool jazz, think ear­ly Miles Davis, Chet Bak­er and Dave Brubeck.

Dave Brubeck was one of the most active and pop­u­lar musi­cians in the jazz world from the late 1940s for­wards. Hav­ing served in Patton’s army in Europe dur­ing the Sec­ond World War, he enrolled at Mills Col­lege in Oak­land, Cal­i­for­nia to study com­po­si­tion with French com­pos­er, Dar­ius Mil­haud. It was Mil­haud who encour­aged him to pur­sue a career in jazz and to incor­po­rate jazz ele­ments into his com­po­si­tions, and this cross-genre exper­i­men­ta­tion with like-mind­ed Mills stu­dents led to the for­ma­tion of the Dave Brubeck Octet in 1947.

It was, how­ev­er, the small­er incar­na­tion formed in 1951 that would become the “clas­sic” Brubeck out­fit — the Dave Brubeck Quar­tet — fea­tur­ing Brubeck on the piano, the leg­endary Joe Morel­lo on drums, Eugene Wright on bass, and long-time Brubeck col­lab­o­ra­tor Paul Desmond on alto sax. In 1959 they released the album Time Out, fea­tur­ing the song that would become a jazz stan­dard and the biggest-sell­ing jazz sin­gle ever, Take Five. Writ­ten by Paul Desmond, Take Five rapid­ly became Brubeck’s best-known, and sig­na­ture, tune, famous for its dis­tinc­tive, catchy sax melody and use of the unusu­al 5/4 time from which its name is derived. It’s been used in count­less movies and tele­vi­sion sound­tracks, so if you think you don’t know it, I’m pret­ty sure you will!

Here’s a won­der­ful record­ing of the quar­tet play­ing Take Five live in Bel­gium in 1964. Enjoy these mas­ter musi­cians on top of their game…it’s cool, man!

Art

Édouard Manet’s A Bar at the Folies-Bergère (1882)

Leave a comment

Édouard Manet is thought of as a lead­ing light of the Impres­sion­ists, but actu­al­ly, although he was asso­ci­at­ed with them and was admired by Mon­et and Renoir, he nev­er actu­al­ly exhib­it­ed at any of the Impres­sion­ist Exhi­bi­tions in Paris. He was more of a pre­cur­sor to the new era of artis­tic impres­sion­ism, and still had a foot plant­ed firm­ly in real­ism. His ear­ly work was, how­ev­er, con­tro­ver­sial, and he scan­dalised crit­ics and pub­lic alike, most notably with Le Déje­uner sur l’herbe and Olympia (both 1863), but even these were mod­elled on old clas­si­cal mas­ter­pieces: Giorgione’s Pas­toral Con­cert (1509) and Titian’s Venus of Urbino (1538) respec­tive­ly. Let’s have a quick look and see if you can spot, in the mind of a nine­teenth cen­tu­ry purist, the ele­ments of Manet’s work that trans­formed ele­gant clas­si­cism into lewd mod­ernism:

How­ev­er, the sub­ject of this blog is actu­al­ly the Manet that is arguably the most recognisable…the cel­e­brat­ed A Bar at the Folies-Bergère. The Folies Bergère was the most famous of Paris’s café-con­cert halls and was not­ed at this time for its new-fan­gled elec­tric lights. We see the frontal image of a bar­maid look­ing out at us from behind her counter, and behind her a huge mir­ror in which we see reflect­ed the back of the bar­maid along with the scene that she her­self is observ­ing. There are the mem­bers of the audi­ence, watch­ing the show, and indeed an ele­ment of the show itself: the legs of the trapeze artist which appear in the very top-left cor­ner of the pic­ture.

The woman behind the bar was actu­al­ly a real per­son, known as Suzon, who worked at the Folies Bergère dur­ing the ear­ly 1880s, and whom Manet paint­ed in his stu­dio. The gen­tle­man at the bar was Manet’s neigh­bour. The bot­tles, fruit and vase of flow­ers arranged on the counter are repli­cat­ed with all the pre­ci­sion of a still life paint­ing, and inter­est­ing to note – for such a French-feel­ing paint­ing — the bot­tles of British beer: yes, Bass Pale Ale of all things! The loose British con­nec­tion is main­tained: this famous paint­ing is held not in Paris but at the Cour­tauld Gallery, Lon­don.

Édouard Manet
Music

Giacomo Puccini’s Madama Butterfly (1904)

Leave a comment

Last year my fam­i­ly and I went to see Puccini’s Madama But­ter­fly per­formed at the Roy­al Opera House. I should men­tion I sup­pose that it was the live stream­ing we attend­ed, at Leeds’s Cot­tage Road Cin­e­ma, rather than the actu­al event, lest you think your blog­ger can actu­al­ly afford to ponce about in the cap­i­tal, with fam­i­ly in tow, and attend operas at £175 a tick­et. Any­way, attend the live stream­ing we did, and a com­fort­able and rel­a­tive­ly uncost­ly affair it was.

Operas are not exact­ly unknown for their explo­ration of trag­ic themes, but you would be hard pressed to find a more per­fect exam­ple of tragedy as expressed in music than Puccini’s mas­ter­piece. Indeed, it was a per­son­al favourite of the com­pos­er him­self who described it as ‘the most felt and most expres­sive opera that I have con­ceived’. This pro­duc­tion was direct­ed by Anto­nio Pap­pano (who first appeared on my radar in 2015 when I caught his excel­lent TV series about opera singers, Clas­si­cal Voic­es) and fea­tured Alban­ian sopra­no Ermonela Jaho in the star­ring role.

Madama But­ter­fly is set in Japan at the start of the twen­ti­eth cen­tu­ry, and tells the tale of the teenage geisha Cio-Cio San (“But­ter­fly”) and her doomed mar­riage to Pinker­ton, an Amer­i­can naval lieu­tenant. To Pinker­ton, the mar­riage is one of con­ve­nience and short­ly after the wed­ding he leaves Japan. Three years lat­er, But­ter­fly is still wait­ing for him, and despite her maid Suzu­ki endeav­our­ing to con­vince her that Pinker­ton is not com­ing back, But­ter­fly won’t listen…and just that dogged belief alone, against all ratio­nale, is enough to break your heart. We know only too well, as does Suzu­ki, that he’s not com­ing back.

Actu­al­ly Pinker­ton does come back, but not to But­ter­fly. Instead, he is – cru­el blow! — with his new Amer­i­can wife, and from this point on, Puc­ci­ni focus­es ever deep­er on the heartache that cul­mi­nates in But­ter­fly com­mit­ting sui­cide.

I have select­ed the elec­tri­fy­ing Un bel dì vedremo (One fine day we’ll see) to show­case Ermonela Jaho’s (and Puc­cini’s) for­mi­da­ble artis­tic skill. Jaho, as But­ter­fly, deliv­ers this rav­ish­ing and pathos-filled solo from a deep well of emo­tion. As she stead­fast­ly sings of her belief that Pinker­ton will return to her, we can hard­ly watch, know­ing that tragedy awaits! It’s a great per­for­mance…

Ermonela Jaho
Poetry

Percy Bysshe Shelley’s Ozymandias (1818)

2 Comments

I first heard the clas­sic phrase from Per­cy Bysshe Shelley’s famous son­net – “Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair” – dur­ing one of Stu­art Hall’s typ­i­cal­ly overblown foot­ball com­men­taries in the sev­en­ties, some­how man­ag­ing to tie Shelley’s sub­lime lines to a grit­ty encounter between Ever­ton and Spurs. The real deal, I found out lat­er, con­cerns the fates of his­to­ry, the rav­ages of time and the fol­ly of hubris, rather than what was in fact a fifth con­sec­u­tive nil-nil draw at Good­i­son Park (hence Hall was employ­ing a cer­tain degree of irony).

Per­cy Bysshe Shel­ley first pub­lished his son­net in a Jan­u­ary 1818 issue of The Exam­in­er, a peri­od­i­cal that hap­pened to be a cham­pi­on of the young Roman­tic poets like Shel­ley, Keats and Byron. Shel­ley had writ­ten the poem in friend­ly com­pe­ti­tion with his friend and fel­low poet Horace Smith. The two had spent Christ­mas 1817 togeth­er along with Shelley’s wife, Mary, when a son­net-writ­ing con­test broke out, the sub­ject being an Ancient Greek text which cit­ed the inscrip­tion on a mas­sive Ancient Egypt­ian stat­ue:

“King of Kings Ozy­man­dias am I. If any want to know how great I am and where I lie, let him out­do me in my work.”

So both Shel­ley and Smith wrote a poem called Ozy­man­dias and in fact Smith’s poem was also pub­lished in The Exam­in­er, a few weeks after Shel­ley’s son­net. Both poems explore the themes I men­tioned above and how the lega­cies of kings are fat­ed to decay into obliv­ion.

In antiq­ui­ty, Ozy­man­dias was a Greek name for the Egypt­ian pharaoh Ramess­es II. Shel­ley began writ­ing his poem in 1817, soon after the announce­ment of the British Muse­um’s acqui­si­tion of a large frag­ment of a stat­ue of Ramess­es II from the 13th cen­tu­ry BC. The 7.25-ton frag­ment of the stat­ue’s head and tor­so was expect­ed to arrive in Lon­don in 1818 and it’s a fair infer­ence to assume that Shel­ley and Smith were inspired by this. So here’s Shelley’s famous poem, fol­lowed, should you wish to com­pare, by Horace Smith’s less well-known offer­ing.

Inci­den­tal­ly, you will per­haps have twigged that this wasn’t the only time that an evening with the Shel­leys spent con­coct­ing lit­er­ary chal­lenges would lead to a famous lit­er­ary work: the pre­vi­ous win­ter, a sim­i­lar evening spent dis­cussing ghost sto­ries led to Mary Shel­ley writ­ing Franken­stein.

I met a trav­eller from an antique land
Who said: “Two vast and trun­k­less legs of stone
Stand in the desert … Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shat­tered vis­age lies, whose frown,
And wrin­kled lip, and sneer of cold com­mand,
Tell that its sculp­tor well those pas­sions read
Which yet sur­vive, stamped on these life­less things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed:
And on the pedestal these words appear:
‘My name is Ozy­man­dias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!‘
Noth­ing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colos­sal wreck, bound­less and bare
The lone and lev­el sands stretch far away.”

And Horace Smith’s poem…

In Egyp­t’s sandy silence, all alone,
Stands a gigan­tic Leg, which far off throws
The only shad­ow that the Desert knows:-
‘I am great OZYMANDIAS,’ saith the stone,
‘The King of Kings; this mighty City shows
’The won­ders of my hand.’- The City’s gone,-
Nought but the Leg remain­ing to dis­close
The site of this for­got­ten Baby­lon.
We wonder,-and some Hunter may express
Won­der like ours, when thro’ the wilder­ness
Where Lon­don stood, hold­ing the Wolf in chace,
He meets some frag­ment huge, and stops to guess
What pow­er­ful but unrecord­ed race
Once dwelt in that anni­hi­lat­ed place.

 

Film, TV, and Theatre

Mike Myers and Dana Carvey as Wayne and Garth in Wayne’s World (1992)

2 Comments

Writ­ing my last blog about Jimi Hen­drix at Wood­stock put me in mind of the hilar­i­ous scene from the movie Wayne’s World, where­in the char­ac­ter Garth, prone as he is to day-dream­ing, envi­sions him­self invei­gling a beau­ti­ful woman to the sound­track of Hendrix’s Foxy Lady. I chuck­led so much sole­ly from its rec­ol­lec­tion that I just had to find it and fea­ture it (along with sev­er­al oth­er scenes from the movie) this week!

Back in 1987, on a Cana­di­an vari­ety show called It’s Only Rock & Roll, an aspir­ing com­ic called Mike Myers was try­ing out a new char­ac­ter in a brief seg­ment called Wayne’s Pow­er Minute. The char­ac­ter of teenage heavy met­al fan Wayne Camp­bell with his pup­py-like exu­ber­ance and love­able-air­head phi­los­o­phy was pret­ty much ful­ly formed even back then.

It was a cou­ple of years lat­er that Myers joined the Sat­ur­day Night Live cast and intro­duced Wayne to a wider audi­ence, in the form of the Wayne’s World sketch­es, now with side­kick Garth Algar (Dana Car­vey). The premise of Wayne’s World was that it was a pub­lic-access tele­vi­sion show broad­cast from Wayne’s base­ment, and char­ac­terised by its chaot­ic pro­duc­tion style, the anar­chic school­boy humour of its hosts, and their obses­sion with “babes” and rock music.

Myers and Car­vey record­ed 27 episodes dur­ing its 1989–1992 hey­day and in 1992 filmed the first Wayne’s World movie, the per­fect vehi­cle for Wayne and Garth to get involved in antics and exploits in the wider world. The movie was an instant crit­i­cal and com­mer­cial suc­cess. Catch­phras­es abound, and many of them have become col­lo­qui­alisms: “Par­ty on!”, “Good call!”, “I am not wor­thy”, “Excel­lent!” (when intoned in the cor­rect way), “No way…way!”, and of course “…not” (as in “Sure, it’s a great movie…not!”).

Let’s view a mon­tage of some of their hilar­i­ous­ly juve­nile move­ments, fol­lowed by that mes­meris­ing Foxy Lady mat­ing dance of Garth’s. Excel­lent!

 

Wayne’s World base­ment
Music

Jimi Hendrix performs the Star-Spangled Banner at Woodstock (1969)

Leave a comment

In August of next year we will reach the fifti­eth anniver­sary of Wood­stock Fes­ti­val, that three-day con­cert (which rolled into a fourth day) involv­ing lots of sex, drugs, rock ‘n roll and mud, and which became an icon of the 1960s hip­pie coun­ter­cul­ture. Held at Max Yasgur’s dairy farm in Bethel, New York State, the Wood­stock Fes­ti­val, billed as “three days of peace and music”, fea­tured a roll-call of big acts of the day: Joan Baez, San­tana, Canned Heat, the Grate­ful Dead, Cree­dence Clear­wa­ter Revival, Janis Joplin, the Who, Jef­fer­son Air­plane, Cros­by, Stills and Nash, and Jimi Hen­drix (it’s inter­est­ing to read the roll-call of can­celled acts and declined invi­ta­tions too, but that’s anoth­er sto­ry).

When Hen­drix stepped onto the stage, it was 9 o’clock on the morn­ing of the fourth day — tech­ni­cal and weath­er delays had caused the fes­ti­val to stretch into Mon­day morn­ing. The organ­is­ers had giv­en Hen­drix the oppor­tu­ni­ty to go on at mid­night, but he opt­ed to be the clos­ing act (by 1969 he had earned the tra­di­tion­al headliner’s posi­tion). The morn­ing light made for excel­lent film­ing con­di­tions, which may be part of the rea­son this par­tic­u­lar Hen­drix per­for­mance is so well known. In any event, Hen­drix embarked upon an unin­ter­rupt­ed set last­ing near­ly two hours, one of the longest per­for­mances of his career. It con­clud­ed with a long med­ley that includ­ed the solo per­for­mance of The Star-Span­gled Ban­ner that would become emblem­at­ic not only of Wood­stock, but of the 1960s them­selves.

When most peo­ple think of Hen­drix and Wood­stock, it is this per­for­mance of the nation­al anthem that comes to mind. It was not the first time Hen­drix had per­formed it (in fact, there are near­ly 50 live record­ings of Hen­drix play­ing it, 28 made before Wood­stock) but no oth­er ver­sion is so icon­ic. The idea of incor­po­rat­ing the sounds of bombs and jets and cries of human anguish into his country’s nation­al anthem was bril­liant. As a protest against the Viet­nam War it was unam­bigu­ous and pow­er­ful: raw, jar­ring, soar­ing, and dis­com­fort­ing in equal mea­sure (though in fact per­formed in front of a rel­a­tive­ly small crowd since so many peo­ple had left Wood­stock to return to work or col­lege that Mon­day morn­ing!). So 49 years on, and from the com­fort of your mud-free arm­chair, here is Hen­drix’s gui­tar-tor­tur­ing ren­di­tion of the Star-Span­gled Ban­ner. It’s not com­fort­able to lis­ten to, frankly, but its cul­tur­al impact is clear­ly under­stand­able. It’s fol­lowed by an inter­est­ing snip­pet of Hen­drix dis­cussing the per­for­mance on the Dick Cavett chat show a year lat­er.

Jimi Hen­drix, Wood­stock
Music

Felix Mendelssohn’s Violin Concerto in E minor, Op. 64 (1845)

Leave a comment

As musi­cal genius­es go, you don’t get much more genius than Felix Mendelssohn. Born into a wealthy Jew­ish fam­i­ly in Ham­burg in 1809, Felix was deeply involved in music from an ear­ly age; by the time he was four­teen, he had writ­ten twelve string sym­phonies. In 1821 his piano teacher, Carl Zel­ter, intro­duced the eleven year old Felix to the writer Johann Wolf­gang von Goethe, who was then in his sev­en­ties. Goethe was great­ly impressed by him, lead­ing to a mem­o­rable con­ver­sa­tion between Goethe and Zel­ter com­par­ing Felix with the young Mozart, whom Goethe had also wit­nessed, many years before:

“Musi­cal prodigies…are prob­a­bly no longer so rare; but what this lit­tle man can do in extem­po­ris­ing and play­ing at sight, bor­ders the mirac­u­lous, and I could not have believed it pos­si­ble at so ear­ly an age.”

“And yet you heard Mozart in his sev­enth year at Frank­furt?” said Zel­ter.

“Yes”, answered Goethe, “…but what your pupil already accom­plish­es, bears the same rela­tion to the Mozart of that time that the cul­ti­vat­ed talk of a grown-up per­son bears to the prat­tle of a child.”

The grown-up Mendelssohn had a good friend and col­lab­o­ra­tor in vio­lin vir­tu­oso and com­pos­er, Fer­di­nand David. The two had met as late teenagers in the late 1820s in Berlin where Felix was already an accom­plished com­pos­er and Fer­di­nand was a vio­lin­ist in the orches­tra at the Königsstädtis­ches The­atre. In a remark­able coin­ci­dence, it was dis­cov­ered that the two had been born in the exact same house in Ham­burg, a year apart!

A few years lat­er, in the sum­mer of 1838, Mendelssohn wrote to his friend: “I should like to write a vio­lin con­cer­to for you next win­ter. One in E minor runs through my head, the begin­ning of which gives me no peace.” In the end, it took him anoth­er six years to com­plete it, reg­u­lar­ly con­sult­ing David about vio­lin tech­nique. Ever the per­fec­tion­ist, Mendelssohn con­tin­u­al­ly made minor adjust­ments to the con­cer­to, right up to its pre­miere in Leipzig on March 13, 1845. The con­cer­to became an instant clas­sic and remains one of the cor­ner­stones of the reper­toire, being the most fre­quent­ly per­formed vio­lin con­cer­tos in his­to­ry.

So I give you Felix Mendelssohn’s Vio­lin Con­cer­to in E minor, Op. 64, per­formed by Ray Chen and the Gothen­burg Sym­pho­ny Orches­tra, and if you can free up the twen­ty nine min­utes required to wal­low in its total glo­ry, you will find it a worth­while expe­ri­ence, believe me.

 

Felix Mendelssohn

Commentaries on excellence in art, music, film, and literature