Charles-Camille Saint-Saëns was born in Paris in 1835 and raised by his widowed mother and his great-aunt, who introduced the young Camille to the piano and gave him his first lessons. The boy was a real prodigy, demonstrating perfect pitch at the age of two and giving his first public concert at five. Over the course of his long life Saint-Saëns was incredibly prolific: after writing his first symphony at 16 he went on to write four more, along with five piano concertos, three violin concertos, two cello concertos and some 20 concertante works.
Nor were his talents limited to music. He was profoundly knowledgeable about geology, botany, lepidopterology, and maths, and his celebrity allowed him to enjoy discussions with Europe’s finest scientists.
Of all Saint-Saëns’ astonishing output, though, the most famous is undoubtedly The Carnival of the Animals, composed in 1886. He hadn’t considered it a serious piece at all and in fact worried that it might damage his reputation. He needn’t have worried. The 13th and penultimate movement of The Carnival of the Animals, The Swan (Le Cygne), became acclaimed worldwide as The Dying Swan after 1905 when it was choreographed for legendary ballerina Anna Pavlova, who performed it about 4,000 times.
The legend of the “swan song” grew from the popular belief among the ancient Greeks that the mute swan is silent until its final moments of life, at which point it sings the most beautiful of all birdsongs. Saint-Saëns captures this idea in the music…and here we see ballerina Uliana Lopatkina effortlessly evoking in dance the gracefulness of the animal (almost entirely en pointe) and the heartbreak of its demise. Beautiful.
Most people are familiar with the 1996 collaboration between Andrea Bocelli and Sarah Brightman, Time to Say Goodbye, since it was a worldwide smash, selling over 12 million copies and making it one of the best-selling singles of all time. However, it was the year before, in 1995, that Andrea Bocelli first performed this sumptuous neo-classical song in its original Italian form, as a solo piece: Con Te Partirò.
The song was written specially for Bocelli by Francesco Sartori and Lucio Quarantotto, and appeared on his second album. Bocelli had already had his big break a few years earlier in 1992 when Luciano Pavarotti heard a demo tape of Bocelli singing Miserere, a song intended for Pavarotti (and co-written by U2’s Bono of all people). Pavarotti was impressed and in the end, he and Bocelli recorded it together. That song became a worldwide hit and catapulted Bocelli into the limelight. At Italy’s Sanremo Music Festival in 1994 he won honours in the newcomers’ category, and success was cemented.
In the following year, Bocelli appeared at Sanremo again. Watch him here, performing his signature piece, Con Te Partirò. His honeyed voice and distinctive timbre, together with the beautiful melody and rich orchestration, produced a masterpiece of emotional strength. Stupendous.
William Harnett (1848–1892) was an Irish-American painter of the nineteenth century, whose fame may not have withstood the passage of time very well but who nonetheless was responsible for some excellent work in the trompe l’œil still life genre. Trompe l’œil, meaning “deceive the eye” in French, is a style of painting that seeks to create a highly realistic, three-dimensional depiction of objects, using perspectival illusionism.
The Old Violin is one of Harnett’s most famous paintings and a superb example of painted realism. The subject is deceptively simple; a violin, rendered in actual size, a sheet of music, a small newspaper clipping, and a blue envelope are shown against a background formed by a green and rusty-hinged wooden door. It created a sensation when first exhibited at the Cincinnati Industrial Exposition in 1886, where viewers were enthralled by the technical virtuosity of the picture. A local newspaper reported that “a policeman stands by it constantly, lest people reach over and attempt to see if the newspaper clipping is genuine by tearing it off”.
Along with other Harnett pictures that convincingly tricked viewers’ perceptions, The Old Violin aroused considerable contemporary debate about the aesthetics of imitative artwork. The genre is hardly unprecedented, however – there’s a great little story in Greek myth about the 5th century BC contest between painters Zeuxis and Parrhasius. The contest was to determine which of the two was the most realistic painter. When Zeuxis unveiled his painting of grapes, they appeared so real that birds flew down to peck at them. But when Parrhasius, whose painting was concealed behind a curtain, asked Zeuxis to pull aside that curtain, the curtain itself turned out to be a painted illusion, and Parrhasius won the contest.
Back to The Old Violin…note how every element of grain and worn area of the violin is reproduced in impeccable detail. The age of the violin is clearly key; as Harnett himself said: “As a rule, new things do not paint well; I want my models to have the mellowing effect of age”. Well said!
The painting is currently held in the National Gallery of Art, Washington DC, and, although there is no longer a need for it to be guarded from touch by a less credulous audience of modern times, I for one will pay my regards to this charming still life should I ever be passing through Washington.
In 1977, British director, Mike Leigh worked with a small group of actors to develop an idea he had for a play, a comedy of manners, in the form of a suburban situation comedy satirising the aspiring middle class emerging in 1970s Britain. The play was called Abigail’s Party and opened at Hampstead Theatre in April; later that year, in November, a recording was made for the BBC’s Play for Today.
Beverly and Laurence (Alison Steadman and Tim Stern) are holding a drinks party for their new neighbours Angela and Tony (Janine Duvitski and John Salthouse), along with another neighbour, Sue (Harriet Reynolds), whose teenage daughter Abigail (whom we never see) is holding a party next door. Leigh got his actors to build their characters through repeated improvisations and the cast largely constructed their own characters’ back stories themselves. The result is a rich tapestry of characterisation.
Alison Steadman’s aspirational Beverly is the star of the show. She slinks like a cat around her kitsch living room, cigarette and drink in hand, and you just know she’s feeling sophisticated and oh-so-modern. She’s got the latest gadgets in her kitchen but doesn’t know how to use them. She has the rug, the drinks cabinet and built-in record player, the cigarette case on the coffee table, along with a host of other pretensions…in her mind, she has clearly “arrived”, though her Estuary English points perhaps to a different background: a former life as a department store cosmetics demonstrator. She dominates her husband who, though he has clearly made her lifestyle possible by working long hours as an estate agent, is constantly hen-pecked and undermined by Beverly, to the extent that he becomes increasingly neurotic as the play progresses. The cracks in the suburban facade are evident.
The plays is at turns amusing and excruciating, especially to those of us old enough to have had some real-life insight into seventies suburbia. Watch this glorious scene as Beverly, with barely-veiled irritation at her husband’s lack of pliancy, cajoles him to put contemporary crooner Demis Roussos onto the record player (could Mike Leigh have picked a funnier example of an inherently-seventies artiste?).
So please…do you think we can have Demis Roussos on…?
This is one of my wife’s favourite works of literature, and whilst reading it she was intrigued to the point of obsession by its descriptive majesty concerning the whale hunter’s trade. Not that Sal is an adherent of whale killing, you understand, but in Herman Melville’s Moby Dick no stone is left unturned in his descriptions of life at sea for a nineteenth century whaler, and to read the book, as I did myself later, is a fascinating voyage indeed.
D H Lawrence called it the “greatest book of the sea ever written”. It is a sweeping and detailed study of the obsessive quest by the enigmatic one-legged Captain Ahab to track down and kill the elusive white whale that was responsible for his missing limb. The ship that Ahab captains is the Pequod, leaving the Maryland port of Nantucket on a whaling expedition and crewed by veterans of this toughest of careers: expeditions typically lasted six months or more, often years (the longest whaling voyage is believed to be that of the Ship Nile from 1858 to 1869 — eleven years!).
The narrative voice is that of Ishmael (Call me Ishmael…the novel’s famous opening line) and he has signed up with the Pequod amid an array of colourful characters. Nantucketers rub shoulders with Polynesians, American Indians, Africans; harpooneers with boatsteerers; blacksmiths with carpenters…and all of them under the absolute control and command of Ahab. Ishmael may be a “green hand” but he is evidently a widely read man, as the literary and Biblical allusions fly thick and fast, alongside a dizzying array of technical expositions, cetological lore, and abundant nautical vocabulary and seaman’s slang.
Long regarded in the last century as a “Great American Novel”, the book was actually a commercial failure during Melville’s lifetime and had only sold about three thousand copies by the time of his death. Like many works of genius, it perhaps needed the rest of the world to “catch up” with it its broad sweep.
In any event, here’s a pivotal encounter with Moby Dick himself in which Ahab’s demented obsession is starkly manifested.
Suddenly the waters around them slowly swelled in broad circles; then quickly upheaved, as if sideways sliding from a submerged berg of ice, swiftly rising to the surface. A low rumbling sound was heard; a subterraneous hum; and then all held their breaths; as bedraggled with trailing ropes, and harpoons, and lances, a vast form shot lengthwise, but obliquely from the sea. Shrouded in a thin drooping veil of mist, it hovered for a moment in the rainbowed air; and then fell swamping back into the deep. Crushed thirty feet upwards, the waters flashed for an instant like heaps of fountains, then brokenly sank in a shower of flakes, leaving the circling surface creamed like new milk round the marble trunk of the whale.
“Give way!” cried Ahab to the oarsmen, and the boats darted forward to the attack; but maddened by yesterday’s fresh irons that corroded in him, Moby Dick seemed combinedly possessed by all the angels that fell from heaven. The wide tiers of welded tendons overspreading his broad white forehead, beneath the transparent skin, looked knitted together; as head on, he came churning his tail among the boats; and once more flailed them apart; spilling out the irons and lances from the two mates’ boats, and dashing in one side of the upper part of their bows, but leaving Ahab’s almost without a scar.
While Daggoo and Queequeg were stopping the strained planks; and as the whale swimming out from them, turned, and showed one entire flank as he shot by them again; at that moment a quick cry went up. Lashed round and round to the fish’s back; pinioned in the turns upon turns in which, during the past night, the whale had reeled the involutions of the lines around him, the half torn body of the Parsee was seen; his sable raiment frayed to shreds; his distended eyes turned full upon old Ahab.
The harpoon dropped from his hand.
“Befooled, befooled!”–drawing in a long lean breath–“Aye, Parsee! I see thee again.–Aye, and thou goest before; and this, THIS then is the hearse that thou didst promise. But I hold thee to the last letter of thy word. Where is the second hearse? Away, mates, to the ship! those boats are useless now; repair them if ye can in time, and return to me; if not, Ahab is enough to die–Down, men! the first thing that but offers to jump from this boat I stand in, that thing I harpoon. Ye are not other men, but my arms and my legs; and so obey me.–Where’s the whale? gone down again?”
But he looked too nigh the boat; for as if bent upon escaping with the corpse he bore, and as if the particular place of the last encounter had been but a stage in his leeward voyage, Moby Dick was now again steadily swimming forward; and had almost passed the ship,–which thus far had been sailing in the contrary direction to him, though for the present her headway had been stopped. He seemed swimming with his utmost velocity, and now only intent upon pursuing his own straight path in the sea.
“Oh! Ahab,” cried Starbuck, “not too late is it, even now, the third day, to desist. See! Moby Dick seeks thee not. It is thou, thou, that madly seekest him!”
Fairytale of New York by the Pogues and Kirsty MacColl is an Irish folk-style ballad and Christmas song, written by Jem Finer and Shane MacGowan. It was released in November 1987 after two years in the making and – although it never quite made the number one slot in the UK Singles Chart (it was kept off it by the Pet Shop Boys’ Always on my Mind) – has proved enduringly popular, consistently topping polls of the “nation’s all-time favourite” Christmas songs.
The opening lines make it evident that this is no typical Christmas song: it’s Christmas Eve in a New York City drunk tank, with an Irish immigrant in inebriated reverie about the song’s female character, and their hopes and dreams, destined to be crushed by alcohol, drugs and circumstance. No bells jingling and children playing here.
The famous call-and-response duel between Shane MacGowan and Kirsty MaColl is doubtless the element that stamps its mark on the listener’s consciousness, with its amusing tirade of abuse in words only just on the right side of the radio censor (in fact, Radio 1 did ban the words “slut” and “faggot” on 18th December 2007, only to reverse the ban later in the same day due to criticism from listeners, the band, and Kirsty MacColl’s mother!). I might add, incidentally, that “faggot” is Irish slang for a lazy, no-good person, so need not be confused with the pejorative word for “gay”.
The melodious voice of MacColl fits in perfectly with MacGowan’s rough drawl, though the involvement of MacColl only came about due to a fallout between the band and the original choice for the female voice, bass player Cait O’Riordan. When O’Riordan left the band in October 1986, producer Steve Lilywhite suggested letting his wife (MacColl) lay down a new guide vocal for the song, simply with a view to helping future auditions. When they heard it, the band of course loved it and realised that this was the voice for the song. As MacGowan was quoted later: “Kirsty knew exactly the right measure of viciousness and femininity and romance to put into it”.
Backed by the consummate musicianship of the Pogues, the song’s vocals and lyricism add up to a very rounded, meaningful and bittersweet piece of music that has unarguably captured the imagination of a nation. Merry Christmas!
It was Christmas Eve babe In the drunk tank An old man said to me, won’t see another one And then he sang a song The Rare Old Mountain Dew I turned my face away And dreamed about you
Got on a lucky one Came in eighteen to one I’ve got a feeling This year’s for me and you So happy Christmas I love you baby I can see a better time When all our dreams come true
They’ve got cars big as bars They’ve got rivers of gold But the wind goes right through you It’s no place for the old When you first took my hand On a cold Christmas Eve You promised me Broadway was waiting for me
You were handsome You were pretty Queen of New York City When the band finished playing They howled out for more Sinatra was swinging, All the drunks they were singing We kissed on a corner Then danced through the night
The boys of the NYPD choir Were singing “Galway Bay“ And the bells were ringing out For Christmas day
You’re a bum You’re a punk You’re an old slut on junk Lying there almost dead on a drip in that bed You scumbag, you maggot You cheap lousy faggot Happy Christmas your arse I pray God it’s our last
The boys of the NYPD choir Still singing “Galway Bay“ And the bells were ringing out For Christmas day
I could have been someone Well so could anyone You took my dreams from me When I first found you I kept them with me babe I put them with my own Can’t make it all alone I’ve built my dreams around you
The boys of the NYPD choir Still singing “Galway Bay“ And the bells are ringing out For Christmas day
During a work visit to Scotland some years ago, I took the opportunity to visit Edinburgh’s National Gallery of Scotland. It has some excellent artworks and is well worth an afternoon’s tarriance. It houses the subject of today’s blog, Sir James Guthrie’s A Hind’s Daughter.
The Glasgow School was a circle of influential artists and designers that began to coalesce in Glasgow in the 1870s, and flourished from the 1890s to around 1910. Dubbed the Glasgow Boys, these men had a passion for realism and naturalism, as well as a distaste for the Edinburgh oriented Scottish art establishment, which they viewed as oppressive (cf. the Impressionists). Driven and motivated by naturalistic ideals, they embraced change, created masterpieces, and became Scottish icons in the process.
James, later Sir James, Guthrie was one of the leading lights of the Glasgow Boys. He focused on the life and landscape of rural Scotland for his oeuvre; the land and its inhabitants provided a rich resource for Guthrie and none typifies his artworks of this period more than A Hind’s Daughter (a hind being a skilled farm labourer). The small girl has just straightened up after cutting a cabbage and looks directly and arrestingly at the viewer, as if she has just spotted you. It’s a quintessentially Scottish scene, with girl and landscape inextricably merged.
Guthrie painted the picture in the Berwickshire village of Cockburnspath. The warm earth colours and distinctive square brush strokes demonstrate the influence of French realist painters such as Jules Bastien-Lepage, who similarly sought inspiration from the peasant farmers of rural France. I love it.
Some music is made for playing whilst cruising down the highway or getting ready to go out on the town. And some music is made for playing whilst wearing slippers, sipping coffee and glancing at the Sunday papers. Spiegel im Spiegel is most definitely in the latter category.
Written by Arvo Pärt in 1978, in his native Estonia, Spiegel im Spiegel is a minimalist piece in the so-called tintinnabular style of composition (a term coined by Pärt himself, from the Latin tintinnabulum, “bell”), wherein a melodic voice operating over diatonic scales, and a tintinnabular voice, operating within a triad on the tonic, accompany each other. The effect is calming and meditative.
The piece was written for a single piano and violin, and here is a beautiful version featuring Nicola Benedetti on violin and Alexei Grynyuk on piano. The piano plays rising crotchet triads and the violin plays slow, sustained notes, alternately rising and falling, and of increasing length.
Incidentally, Spiegel im Spiegel in German literally means “mirror in the mirror”, representing, I suppose, the idea of an infinity of images reflected by parallel plane mirrors: the tonic triads are endlessly repeated with small variations, as if reflected back and forth. In any event, if, like me, you cherish an occasional calm and still environment in a hectic world, this is for you. I recommend just putting the piece on at a quiet time and, rather than concentrating on it, simply let it fill the room with its serene quality whilst you do something else. You will be spiritually refreshed without even realising it!
I first properly heard this classic example of chanson française at the funeral of a friend’s dad, who had evidently loved the song and elected to mark his crossing with it: La Mer by French singer, Charles Trenet. The song positively drips with gallic nonchalance and romance. Legend has it that Trenet wrote a first version of the song when he was just 16, but La Mer as we know it was born in 1943, during a train trip in the South of France. Trenet, along with singer Roland Gerbeau and pianist Léo Chauliac, was travelling from Montpellier to Perpignan, along the beautiful French coast. Inspired by the scenery, Trenet wrote La Mer before the journey was over, and he and Chauliac performed the song that very evening.
At first, Trenet didn’t like the final version of La Mer, for some reason, so in fact it was Roland Gerbeau who first recorded it, in 1945. But a year later, Trenet’s record company boss convinced Trenet to have a go at the song as well. The music was rearranged and the song began its journey proper to chanson classic, becoming a huge success and a jazz standard.
By the time of Trenet’s death in 2001, over 70 million copies of La Mer had been sold and 4000 different versions recorded. The song has been translated successfully into multiple languages (hence Beyond the Sea, Il Mare, De Zee, Das Meer etc), and covered by a multitude of artists, of whom I think Rod Stewart does a particularly good version. But it is Trenet’s charmingly polished original in the French that irresistibly captures the imagination.
Listen here:
La mer Qu’on voit danser le long des golfes clairs A des reflets d’argent La mer Des reflets changeants Sous la pluie
La mer Au ciel d’été confond Ses blancs moutons Avec les anges si purs La mer bergère d’azur Infinie
Voyez Près des étangs Ces grands roseaux mouillés Voyez Ces oiseaux blancs Et ces maisons rouillées
La mer Les a bercés Le long des golfes clairs Et d’une chanson d’amour La mer A bercé mon cœur pour la vie
The Hudsucker Proxy is a 1994 fantastical comedy film by Ethan and Joel Coen. Sidney J Mussberger (Paul Newman), the new head of the hugely successful corporate monolith, Hudsucker Industries, in Fifties-era New York, comes up with a brilliant plan to make a lot of money: appoint a moron to run the company. When the stock falls low enough, Sidney and his friends can buy it for pennies, then take over and restore it to its former fortunes. They choose Norville Barnes (Tim Robbins), who has just started in the mail room, but soon, tough reporter Amy Archer smells a rat and begins an undercover investigation of Hudsucker Industries.
The Coens’ sense of the aesthetic is supreme, their knowing references witty to the extreme, and their style all their own. This movie, despite being a box office flop, is packed with delicious highlights but today’s blog focuses on the brilliant performance by Jason Jennifer Leigh. Leigh plays Amy Archer, the hardnosed reporter willing to do anything to get a good story, even going undercover to gain the trust of the über-naïve Norville. In the newsroom, she’s bold, sassy, and will inform anyone listening about her Pulitzer Prize. In a man’s environment, she’s the most capable of the lot and, as we’ll see, she can simultaneously talk on the phone to the chief, type a story, solve crossword puzzles, and fence fellow reporter Smitty with smart, fifties-hip wordplay.
If the concept of the quick-tongued, ace female reporter feels familiar, it should; in the great tradition of newspaper movies, Leigh is channelling a cross between Jean Arthur in Mr Deeds Goes to Town and Katharine Hepburn in Woman of the Year. In this scene, she has inveigled herself into Norville’s office and contrives to win his trust, playing the vulnerable maiden in distress and pretending to be “a Muncie girl”. Then cut to tough Amy in the newsroom, multi-tasking spectacularly and mocking the patsy, Norville. You can be sure her heart will soften in the end, but for now Leigh nails the stereotype character with aplomb.
Jennifer Jason Leigh as Amy Archer
Commentaries on excellence in art, music, film, and literature
