Film, TV, and Theatre, Poetry

W H Auden’s Night Mail (1936)

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In the 1930s, a group of British filmmakers, led by John Grierson, under the aegis of the GPO Film Unit, was behind an influential output of documentary films that became known as the British Documentary Film Movement. Of the films it produced, the best known and most critically acclaimed was Harry Watt’s and Basil Wright’s Night Mail (1936), featuring music by Benjamin Britten and poetry by W H Auden. Auden wrote his poem especially for the documentary, which follows the London, Midland and Scottish Railway (LMS) mail train from London to Scotland. The poem acts as a sort of verse commentary over the footage of the steam locomotive, and helped to establish the documentary as something of a classic.

Auden’s language is ingenious; glorious use of metaphor and clever rhymes, four-beat lines rhythmically delivered to mimic the pumping of the rods and pistons of the locomotive. You can almost hear the train chugging along. The personified train is efficient, reliable, steadfast, trustworthy – there is a remit, after all, to sell the merits of the postal service, and Auden satisfies the spec. As the pace picks up to match the acceleration of the train, the rhymes become quick and punchy, and become internal rhymes (Letters of thanks, letters from banks) rather than line-end rhymes; a rapper’s delight.

And read along here:

This is the night mail crossing the Border,
Bringing the cheque and the postal order,
Letters for the rich, letters for the poor,
The shop at the corner, the girl next door.
Pulling up Beattock, a steady climb:
The gradient’s against her, but she’s on time.

Past cotton-grass and moorland boulder
Shovelling white steam over her shoulder,
Snorting noisily as she passes
Silent miles of wind-bent grasses.
Birds turn their heads as she approaches,
Stare from bushes at her blank-faced coaches.
Sheep-dogs cannot turn her course;
They slumber on with paws across.
In the farm she passes no one wakes,
But a jug in a bedroom gently shakes.

Dawn freshens, Her climb is done.
Down towards Glasgow she descends,
Towards the steam tugs yelping down a glade of cranes
Towards the fields of apparatus, the furnaces
Set on the dark plain like gigantic chessmen.
All Scotland waits for her:
In dark glens, beside pale-green lochs
Men long for news.

Letters of thanks, letters from banks,
Letters of joy from girl and boy,
Receipted bills and invitations
To inspect new stock or to visit relations,
And applications for situations,
And timid lovers’ declarations,
And gossip, gossip from all the nations,
News circumstantial, news financial,
Letters with holiday snaps to enlarge in,
Letters with faces scrawled on the margin,
Letters from uncles, cousins, and aunts,
Letters to Scotland from the South of France,
Letters of condolence to Highlands and Lowlands
Notes from overseas to the Hebrides
Written on paper of every hue,
The pink, the violet, the white and the blue,
The chatty, the catty, the boring, the adoring,
The cold and official and the heart’s outpouring,
Clever, stupid, short and long,
The typed and the printed and the spelt all wrong.

Thousands are still asleep,
Dreaming of terrifying monsters
Or of friendly tea beside the band in Cranston’s or Crawford’s
Asleep in working Glasgow, asleep in well-set Edinburgh,
Asleep in granite Aberdeen,
They continue their dreams,
But shall wake soon and long for letters,
And none will hear the postman’s knock
Without a quickening of the heart,
For who can bear to feel himself forgotten?

Auden and Britten
Film, TV, and Theatre

Peter Sellers plays Lionel Mandrake in Dr Strangelove (1964)

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Stanley Kubrick’s blackest-of-black comedy film, Dr Strangelove, was conceived as a straight thriller, based on Peter George’s book about the threat of nuclear war, Red Alert. The director, however, increasingly found himself struck, during the writing process, by a persistent comedic thread that suggested itself and which eventually forced him to embrace and run with it. A good thing too…and there could have been no better way to run with this comedic element in the fledgling movie than to engage Peter Sellers’ services.

Kubrick had worked with Sellers on Lolita, and it was probably Sellers’ display of characterisation in that movie that motivated Columbia Pictures to insist on casting him in Dr Strangelove in multiple roles. Sellers plays three characters: US President, Merkin Muffley; wheelchair-bound, ingenious mad German scientist, Dr Strangelove; and – the subject of this blog post – British RAF exchange officer, Group Captain Lionel Mandrake.

The portrayal of Mandrake is a brilliant display of understated comedic acting. The slowly-dawning realisation that his commanding officer, General Ripper (himself brilliantly played by Sterling Hayden), has become unhinged and paranoid and has put in motion a seemingly unstoppable series of events that will culminate in nuclear conflagration; his desperation to extract from Ripper the “recall code” to bring back the nuclear bombers that are swiftly on their way to Russia; and his frantic efforts to contact the President and to avoid nuclear apocalypse when he finds he might hold the only key to do so…Sellers’ duty-bound and stiff-upper-lipped group captain is a performance of sheer genius.

There is such a plethora of superbly written and delivered lines that there are too many to single out. Take ten minutes to enjoy them all – as I guarantee you will – in this montage of Mandrake scenes.

Peter Sellers in Stanley Kubrick’s DR. STRANGELOVE (1964). Credit: Sony Pictures. Playing 5/22-5/28.
Film, TV, and Theatre, Music

Rachmaninoff’s 2nd Piano Concerto, as used in Brief Encounter (1945)

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Sergei Rachmaninoff’s second Piano Concerto in C Minor stands on its own as a masterpiece of the late Romantic period, but what a great idea it turned out to be, to pair it with David Lean’s classic love story of 1945, Brief Encounter.

It was Lean’s collaborator, producer Noël Coward, on whose one-act play the film was based, who insisted on the use of his favourite piece of music, despite there being a composer, Muir Mathieson, waiting in the wings to write an original score. With all due respect to Mathieson and however his score might have turned out, the use of Rachmaninoff, played by Australian pianist Eileen Joyce and the National Symphony Orchestra, raised the film’s emotional level sky-high.

The film is told in flashback, as the lead character of Laura (Celia Johnson) sits in her living room with her husband, staring into space, listening to the Second Concerto and thinking about her time with another man, Alec (Trevor Howard). She remembers the day they met, at the café in the train station. When a piece of grit gets in her eye, Alec, a doctor, removes it, and a bond starts between them, quickly developing into love as they  embark on a series of clandestine assignations.

This love story is doomed, of course, as Laura is a married mother and we are deep in the territory of 1940s middle-class manners. Granted, the strait-jacketed morals and linguistic quirks of the times leave us in no doubt that the film is a period piece, but it rightly remains a hugely popular British movie.

The development, and inevitable demise, of the relationship is subtly underpinned by the repeating strains of Rachmaninoff’s music. The enduring popularity of his piece, meanwhile, is demonstrated by its consistently topping the Classic FM Hall of Fame, firmly securing its status as Britain’s favourite piece of classical music. Watch and listen to a pleasing montage of Brief Encounter to Rachmaninoff’s music below:

Celia Johnson and Trevor Howard
Art

Michelangelo’s Pietà (1499)

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The Virgin Mary has featured prodigiously in Christian art for many centuries. There are numerous genres of her depiction including the familiar Madonna and Child, and the Madonna Enthroned, the Adoring Madonna, the Madonna of Humility, and several others.  One such, the Pietà (Italian for “pity” or “mercy”), is a subject that depicts the sorrowing Virgin Mary cradling the dead Jesus, and is most often found in sculpture. Today’s subject is the Pietà of Michelangelo, completed in 1499 and residing in St Peter’s Basilica, Vatican City.

There is no doubting the sublime genius that created this piece. Carved from a single block of Carrara marble, Michelangelo created, with consummate skill, a coherent and moving piece of art incorporating both Classical and Renaissance tendencies.

The figures are deliberately out of proportion owing to the difficulty of depicting an adult man cradled full-length in a woman’s lap. When designing Mary’s measurements, Michelangelo could not impose realistic proportions and have her cradle her adult son as he envisioned, so he had to make her body oversized. To ameliorate this compromise on her form, Michelangelo carved out cascading sheets of draping garments, camouflaging her true fullness. The result is a triumph of form; observe the monumental drapery, the youthful face of Mary, the anatomical treatment of Christ’s elongated body…

Michelangelo was 24 when he completed this sculpture, and his fame became assured long before he completed his other masterpieces such as his David (completed 1504) and the Sistine Chapel ceiling (completed 1512)

 

Michelangelo’s Pietà
Music

Bob Dylan sings Mr Tambourine Man, Newport Folk Festival (1964)

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Era defining. Voice of a generation. Urban poet. Folk troubadour. No, not Justin Bieber; I’m referring to Bob Dylan and in this post I’m looking at Dylan’s performance of Mr Tambourine Man at Newport Folk Festival in 1964.

Dylan played the influential and long-running festival for three consecutive years from 1963 to 1965.

His first appearance in 1963 was as a guest of Joan Baez, and though little known outside Greenwich Village, he was taken to heart by the folkies. That year saw the beginnings of international success with Dylan’s breakthrough second album, The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan, which he had completed that May. Its combination of traditional folk with a personal and authentic edge and a social message, proved a hit with an ever-widening demographic of music fans.

Skip forward to 1965. His final year at Newport gave us the great Electric Controversy, when Dylan walked on stage clutching a Fender Stratocaster guitar and backed by a full electric band, shocking the folk purists in the audience, and provoking bewilderment, consternation and an iconic place in musical history. Incidentally, that guitar sold at auction a couple of years back for just short of a million dollars!

But we return to the year of his second appearance at Newport, 1964, when the young Dylan was now established as a fully-fledged “protest singer”, his rising star in momentous upward trajectory and the new darling of the festival goers. Here, we watch some delightfully informal and upfront footage of his rendition of Mr Tambourine Man, listened to by a politely enthralled audience (and a bizarrely poker-faced guy, stage-left).

The song is gentle and dream-like, flowing repetitively through the same three major chords, so typical of Dylan. Lyric-wise, it’s replete with another Dylan trait, the multiple rhymes that somehow pull together coherently despite what should be the increasing implausibility and diminishing returns of stringing so many rhymes together (take note, rappers of the world). What’s it about? Death, musical inspiration, drugs, weariness, doubts about the efficacy of the protest movement to change the world, a “tambourine man”…take your pick, or just let the music take you to a nice corner of your mind! Here’s the boy from Duluth himself, having been announced as the “boy who ran away from home seventeen times and got brought back sixteen”…

 

Bob Dylan
Music

Lale Andersen sings Lili Marlene, 1939

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Without any doubt the most popular song of the Second World War was Lili Marlene. Recorded by Danish cabaret artiste Lale Andersen in 1939 under the title Das Mädchen unter der Laterne (“The Girl under the Lantern”), the song sold a mere 700 copies on release and faded into obscurity.

There it might have remained had not a soldier, working for the German forces radio station in occupied Belgrade, been sent to scour Vienna for some records to broadcast to General Rommel’s Afrika Korps. One of the records he found in Vienna was Lale Andersen’s recording of Das Mädchen unter der Laterne, and it was first played over the air on 18th August 1941.

It became an instant favourite with Rommel’s men, and for the next three years Radio Belgrade played it almost every night at 9.57pm, as the closing record. It also became a huge hit throughout Nazi-occupied Europe and was soon picked up by the British Eighth Army in the desert. It also soon assumed its simple alternative song title, Lili Marlene (sometimes spelled Lili Marleen, Lilli Marlene etc).

In his memoir, British soldier Fitzroy Maclean describes the song’s effect in the spring of 1942 during the Western Desert Campaign: “Husky, sensuous, nostalgic, sugar-sweet, her voice seemed to reach out to you, as she lingered over the catchy tune…”

The next year, Maclean was parachuted into the Yugoslav guerrilla war, and the song once again played its part:

“Sometimes at night, before going to sleep, we would turn on our receiving set and listen to Radio Belgrade. For months now, the flower of the Afrika Korps had been languishing behind the barbed wire of Allied prison camps. But still, punctually at ten o’clock, came Lale Andersen singing their special song, with the same unvarying, heart-rending sweetness that we knew so well from the desert…Belgrade was still remote but, now that we ourselves were in Yugoslavia, it had acquired a new significance for us. It had become our ultimate goal, which Lili Marlene and her nostalgic little tune seemed somehow to symbolise. ‘When we get to Belgrade…’ we would say. And then we would switch off the wireless a little guiltily, for the Partisans, we knew, were shocked at the strange pleasure we got from listening to the singing of the German woman (sic) who was queening it in their capital.”

It’s not hard to imagine the Tommies, and Jerries alike, crowded round their “receiving sets”, smoking fags and dreaming of Lili Marlene…

Lale Andersen
Poetry

Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s Charge of the Light Brigade, 1854

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It’s 25th October 1854, and the Battle of Balaclava, one of the pivotal battles of the Crimean War, is in full flow. Lord Raglan, commander of the British forces, has sent a message ordering the approximately 600 horsemen of the British light cavalry (the “Light Brigade”) to pursue and harry a retreating Russian artillery battery. Disastrously, however, due to a miscommunication in the chain of command, the Light Brigade is instead sent on a frontal assault against a different artillery battery, one very much well-prepared and defended.

The Light Brigade comes under withering fire from three sides, is badly mauled, and is forced to retreat in chaos. The assault ends with very high British casualties, no decisive gains, and the event goes down in history as one of the most woeful of military blunders…

Just six weeks after the event, Alfred, Lord Tennyson published his narrative poem “The Charge of the Light Brigade”. Its lines emphasise the valour of the cavalry in bravely carrying out their orders, regardless of the obvious outcome. The poem bequeaths to us the famous phrase:

Theirs not to reason why,
Theirs but to do and die

Nowadays, we casually use the phrase “ours not to reason why” to shrug away a dubious managerial decision. In the poem, however, we are left in no doubt as to what the soldiers were committing themselves to:

Cannon to the right of them,
Cannon to the left of them,
Cannon in front of them
Volley’d and thunder’d;
Storm’d at with shot and shell,
Boldly they rode and well,
Into the jaws of Death,
Into the mouth of Hell
Rode the six hundred

The metrical scheme of the poem lends itself to the desperate charge of the horsemen, the breathlessly short lines, drummed out like hoof-beats, creating a dramatic immediacy. Phrases like “jaws of Death” and “mouth of Hell” vividly depict the hopelessness of the assault.

Read it in full (as you listen to it here)

 

The Charge of the Light Brigade

I
Half a league, half a league,
Half a league onward,
All in the valley of Death
Rode the six hundred.
‘Forward, the Light Brigade!
Charge for the guns!’ he said:
Into the valley of Death
Rode the six hundred.

II
‘Forward, the Light Brigade!’
Was there a man dismay’d?
Not tho’ the soldier knew
Someone had blunder’d:
Theirs not to make reply,
Theirs not to reason why,
Theirs but to do and die:
Into the valley of Death
Rode the six hundred.

III
Cannon to the right of them,
Cannon to the left of them,
Cannon in front of them
Volley’d and thunder’d;
Storm’d at with shot and shell,
Boldly they rode and well,
Into the jaws of Death,
Into the mouth of Hell
Rode the six hundred.

IV
Flash’d all their sabres bare,
Flash’d as they turn’d in air
Sabring the gunners there,
Charging an army, while
All the world wonder’d:
Plunged in the battery-smoke
Right thro’ the line they broke;
Cossack and Russian
Reel’d from the sabre-stroke
Shatter’d and sunder’d.
Then they rode back, but not
Not the six hundred.

V
Cannon to right of them,
Cannon to left of them,
Cannon behind them
Volley’d and thunder’d;
Storm’d at with shot and shell,
While horse and hero fell,
They that had fought so well
Came thro’ the jaws of Death,
Back from the mouth of Hell,
All that was left of them,
Left of the six hundred.

VI
When can their glory fade?
O the wild charge they made!
All the world wonder’d.
Honour the charge they made!
Honour the Light Brigade,
Noble six hundred!

Tennyson
Painting by Richard Caton Woodville, 1894

 

Survivors of the charge
Art

Ilya Repin’s Barge-haulers on the Volga (Volga Boatmen) (1873)

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Just as in France where painting and sculpture were controlled and influenced by the Salon, in 19th century Russia, the equivalent was the Imperial Academy of Arts in St. Petersburg. And just as in France, where the Impressionists rebelled against the conservatism of the Salon, in Russia a group of artists who became known as the Peredvizhniki (Itinerants or Wanderers) rebelled against the Academy’s classical tendencies. Instead of the mythological theme proposed for the annual painting competition in 1863 (“The entrance of Odin into Valhalla”), the Peredvizhniki were far more interested in exploring themes of real life in Russia: the Russian peasantry, the Russian landscape, the Russian clergy. Thus, the Itinerants broke away, created their own group, and painted as they pleased.

A leading member of the Peredvizhniki was Ilya Repin (1844-1930), and here we look at his sublime masterpiece, the Volga Boatmen. Repin takes the physical labour and fatigue of the common man as his subject, and it’s hard to imagine a more physically demanding and oppressive labour than that carried out by burlaks, the men (and women) who hauled barges along the river Volga.

The eleven figures in the group have been called metaphors for Russia itself, and there is allegory aplenty for art scholars, but the piece is powerful enough on a straightforward reading: Life for the downtrodden is tough; and there is no hope…

…or is there? In the middle of the dark and beaten-down figures of the haulers, a young man has lifted his head and is staring off out of the picture. His is the only visage to be illuminated. The meaning is clear: he is raising his head in an act of defiance, a symbol of hope and the promise of a better future.  With the benefit of hindsight it might even be seen as a foreshadowing of the Revolution that would free the proletariat nearly fifty years later.

For a little extra atmosphere, how about listening to this 1936 recording of Russian opera singer Feodor Chaliapin singing the dirgy folk song, Song of the Volga Boatmen?

Repin, Self-portrait
Music

Canteloube’s Baïlèro, sung by Victoria de los Ángeles (1969)

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Chants d’Auvergne (English: Songs from the Auvergne) is a collection of folk songs from the Auvergne region of France, arranged for soprano and orchestra by French composer and musicologist Joseph Canteloube in the 1920s. The songs are in the local language, Occitan (also known as Langue d’Oc, hence the name of the former province of southern France, Languedoc). Canteloube’s family had deep roots in the Auvergne region, and his arrangements are a labour of love borne from an eagerness to immortalise the folklore and beauty of his home region.

The best-known of Canteloube’s collection is Baïlèro, and this recording, by the Spanish soprano, Victoria de los Ángeles, is surely the most beautifully delivered version of it.

The song is achingly wistful. It evokes a sense of longing, for what – homeland, lost love, lost youth? – it matters not. Victoria de los Ángeles speaks directly to the heart of the listener and perhaps her Catalan background, connected as it is with the peasant traditions of the wider area sometimes known as Occitania, lends itself to the rustic charm.

I heard it years ago on a compilation CD and fell for it instantly. I feel the sense of landscape, of affinity with one’s roots, of being connected to one’s environment, and at the same time the plaintive feeling of separation and yearning that pervades the piece. It all adds up to a wellspring of emotional power.

I only recently looked up the Occitan words and their English translation; they are pastoral in tone (unsurprising given that they are peasant folk-songs), and feature a call-and-response pattern between the singer and her shepherd love.  Of course, it doesn’t matter what the lyrics are; it is the feel of the music and the voice that count, but to some extent the sense of longing and separation is corroborated by the lyric:

Pastré couci foraï,
En obal io lou bel riou
Dio lou baïlèro lèrô…

Shepherd, the water divides us,
And I cannot cross it,
Sing baïlèro lèrô…

I am presenting the music here with some imagery of the mountains, lakes and cascades of the Auvergne, but really you are as well to listen with eyes closed, feet up, in a quiet, pleasant environment, and a large glass of wine in hand. Enjoy…

 

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Occasional Glimpses of the Sublime

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Greetings, and welcome to my blog!

Here’s where I introduce the theme of my blog, following which, depending upon whether or not your curiosity is sufficiently whetted to continue reading, I will meet you again at the end of the week with my first post proper!

So, what’s it all about, and what’s with the title? Let me explain…

In the history of aesthetics, the idea of “the sublime” has a long pedigree, and its meaning has been debated throughout the centuries by generations of artists, writers, poets, musicians and critics. These days, however, the word “sublime” has a pretty straightforward definition; in everyday language it simply means “excellent” or “exceptional” and can be applied to almost anything that can be refined to the highest point…such as a perfectly executed goal in football, or an exquisitely cooked meal.

In this blog, I will take as my lead this modern sense of “exceptional”, and apply it to the varied worlds of art, music, film, television, theatre, opera, and literature (anything you can see or hear and which I can embed or link to, basically). I will choose examples that I think stand out from the crowd (“occasional glimpses”) by virtue of their excellence or cultural significance, and write about them, hopefully in an interesting way, and by so doing, share them with you.

To give you an idea, here are, in no particular order, some sublime creations slated for upcoming posts: Barbara Bonney’s rendering of Schubert’s Ave Maria; the use of Rachmaninoff’s 2nd Piano Concerto in Brief Encounter; Jan Van Eyck’s Ghent Altarpiece; Tennyson’s poem The Charge of the Light Brigade. However, the sublime is represented in popular culture, too: also upcoming are pieces on Jack Nicholson’s portrayal of Badass Buddusky in The Last Detail; Jimi Hendrix’s influential performance of The Star Spangled Banner at Woodstock; and Cook and Moore’s comedy sketch Pete and Dud at the Zoo!

Of course, such things are subjective and you are under no obligation to agree with me! We all have our individual opinions and tastes, after all. However, my selections will most usually be tried and trusted gems of high artistic quality that are widely admired or acknowledged. Join me in my “occasional glimpses of the sublime”, and see if you agree…

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