Endnotes Extra

Posted on July 13, 2022 by leslie

St James the Great, credit Wikipedia

Endnotes Extra

by Stuart Millson

50 Years of the East Malling Singers

One of Southern England’s most ambitious amateur choral societies celebrated its half-century, with a concert on Saturday 9th July of mainly British choral-orchestral music – a programme which also paid tribute to Her Majesty the Queen’s Platinum Jubilee. Charismatic conductor Ciara Considine raised her baton before a packed St. James the Great Church (a large performance space in the heart of Kent) – her performers numbering over sixty: a fifty-strong choir and orchestra of some 13 players, with the highly-gifted organist, Nick Bland, providing a magnificent, fortifying, reverberant backdrop to the voices.

Vaughan Williams’s wartime Hymn of Freedom, with words by Canon Briggs of Worcester Cathedral, set the tone of the concert: that sense of national ardour and purpose emerging strongly, from a composer who served in the First World War and who sought, at the age of 68, a meaningful role in the Second. Parry’s Jerusalem of 1916 appeared at the end of the concert, but the Vaughan Williams hymn seemed to be a more modern mirror-image of that more famous work: a ‘Jerusalem’ for the era of the Blitz and blackouts, and the welfare state and United Nations which emerged from the ruins in 1945. Continue reading →

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Ars Poetica, Remembering A. E. Housman, 2

Posted on July 11, 2022 by leslie

Antinous Mondragone, credit Wikipedia

Ars Poetica, Remembering A.E. Housman, 2 

By Darrell Sutton

III

The prolongation of the Great War did not hinder Housman’s scholarly duties. Volume 3 in his series on Manilius was issued in 1916. He offered advise to aspirant poets. He evidently believed his private judgments to be of considerable value. On April 9th 1917, he sent Edmund Gosse a cursory missive of corrections for future editions of The Life of Algernon Charles Swinburne.[i] He supplied similar notes on The Letters of Algernon Charles Swinburne which had been edited by Gosse and T.J. Wise in 1918.

He was not a recluse but he avoided certain social gatherings. Some dinner parties were attended, various invitations were declined,[ii] except for periodic summons to specific scholarly bodies whose constituents desired to hear of, and were fascinated by, the rigorous analysis of texts. He was opposed to writing ‘literary criticism’ upon demand,[iii] but he attended meetings of classical scholars.[iv] From 1915-1922, Housman’s text-critical labors were tied to several projects linked to the Roman poet Ovid.[v] He published his views in full and their grounds. Continue reading →

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Endnotes, July 2022

Posted on July 6, 2022 by leslie

King Henry V at the Battle of Agincourt, by John Gilbert, credit Wikipedia

Endnotes, July 2022

In this edition: a glimpse into the lost musical world of English composer Walter Leigh, by Stuart Millson

From the astringent elegance of Peter Warlock’s songs and orchestral dances, based upon tunes from antiquity, to the early-morning garden scene in Elgar’s Starlight Express – “We shall meet the morning spiders, the fair-cotton riders”, the fleeting sunshine and shadow of lyrical English miniaturist music is one of the enchanting characteristics of our musical tradition.

Lovers of romantic music may also think of the wistful tale of an imaginary kingdom in Roger Quilter’s Where the Rainbow Ends, yet the musical establishment seems to have forgotten the name of a young Englishman who composed some of the 20th-century’s most graceful, finely-crafted and intriguing music of this genre: Walter Leigh.

Leigh’s output was comparatively modest: there were no symphonies or cantatas, and he at no time sought to emulate Vaughan Williams or Walton – although he composed, in 1935, a twelve-minute-long overture of dazzling dramatic effect, on the saga of Henry V. Yet there were small masterpieces: a Concertino for Harpsichord and String Orchestra (written in 1934, when he was just 29 years old, and recorded on the Lyrita label by the baroque specialist, Trevor Pinnock), Music for Strings (1931-2) and – my personal favourite, especially in the grand overture and exciting “Entry of the Mechanicals” – incidental music from 1936 to A Midsummer Night’s Dream, written for an open-air concert in Weimar; and an interpretation of Shakespeare very much in the spirit of Mendelssohn’s music.

Leigh graduated as an organ scholar from Cambridge in 1926, having been taught by the organist-composer, Harold Darke; and soon after left his native land for Berlin, studying (as did his contemporary, Arnold Cooke) with Hindemith – that remarkable giant of inter-war German modernism, noted for his Kammermusik (eight bare-boned, astringent chamber-sized mini-concertos), and his Mathis der Maler, a symphony and opera and the surging Symphony in E Flat of 1940, the conclusion of the first movement resembling a similar part of Walton’s First Symphony.

At first, the music of Hindemith’s young English pupil seems far removed from what we associate with Weimar Germany, but in the Overture and Dance to The Frogs, a 1936 composition about Dionysus embarking on a visit to the underworld and in the Concertino, some of the characteristics of Hindemith can be discerned – namely, the occasionally abrupt phrase or “stammer” at the ending of a line, and that pared-down economy of style which bespeaks Hindemith’s sound-world and of continental music of that time.

Shades of modernism and ethno-musicology appeared in a percussive score to a film entitled Song of Ceylon, a documentary commissioned by the Empire Marketing Board, which explained to its mid-1930s’ audience the mysteries of tea production and the customs of the land which kept England’s teapots filled. However, the film – commissioned by John Grierson (a pioneer of the documentary movement) and directed by Basil Wright, garnered great critical acclaim, winning not just first prize in the Documentary Class but The Prix du Gouvernement for the “Best Film in All Classes” at the 1935 Brussels International Film Festival. Belonging to that well-intentioned, patrician era, when colonial sentiment was still strong, the magnificently-filmed Song of Ceylon with its mountains, idols and native peoples can be viewed at the following website: www.colonialfilm.org.uk

The beauty of Walter Leigh’s careful, tuneful, baroque-fresh works is another of the unsung, undiscovered treasures of English music. And we can only speculate about Leigh’s career and where his creative talents might have led him, had his life not ended during active service in the Second World War. Killed in action in the North African campaign of 1942, the fate of this modern craftsman and neo-romantic has echoes of the tragic life of composer George Butterworth, who fell on the Western Front in 1916. What gems and masterpieces might these men have created, had these 20th-century world wars not happened.

Recording details:

Walter Leigh, Overture, Agincourt, BBC National Orchestra of Wales/Rumon Gamba, Chandos, 10898.

Leigh, Harpsichord Concertino etc, LPO/Braithwaite/Pinnock. Lyrita, LY0289

Stuart Millson is the Classical Music Editor of The Quarterly Review

 

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Die tote Stadt

Posted on July 4, 2022 by leslie

In Bruges

Die tote Stadt

Music composed by Erich Korngold, opera directed by Carmen Jakobi, Saturday 25th June 2022, at Longborough Festival Opera, Moreton-in-Marsh, Gloucestershire, reviewed by David Truslove

You know that you have witnessed something special when a rapt audience withholds its applause, before roaring its approval. Such was the case following Erich Wolfgang Korngold’s Die tote Stadt, given by Longborough Festival Opera. A similar reception reportedly greeted the work’s joint premiere in Hamburg and Cologne in 1920, when the precociously talented composer (already hailed a genius by Mahler) was barely 23. Performances ran for over a decade, reaching more than 80 stages worldwide before the composer fell out of favour. The work only received its first professional outing in Britain in 2009, at the Royal Opera House, prompting The Times to ask “How can it have taken almost 90 years for Die tote Stadt to get a staged performance in the UK?”. But even after this long overdue appearance, Michael Tanner of The Spectator grudgingly characterised the work as an “almost impressive opera”. Continue reading →

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Go North, Young Man

Posted on June 29, 2022 by leslie

Paul von Joukowsky, design for a set of Parsifal, 1882

Go North, Young Man

Parsifal, Stage Consecration Festival Play in three acts, music and libretto by Richard Wagner, based on the poem Parzival by Wolfram von Eschenbach, Opera North Orchestra and Chorus conducted by Richard Farnes, directed by Sam Brown, concert performance at London’s Royal Festival Hall, 26th June 2022, reviewed by Leslie Jones

When Richard Wagner presented his wife Cosima with the second prose draft of Parsifal, she wrote in her diary, on 28th February 1877, “This is bliss, this is sublimity and devotion!…The redeemer unbound!”. Numerous other critics have endorsed this judgment. According to Frankfurt School social theorist Theodor Adorno, “Wagner’s criticism of the opera carries great weight”. Wagner, he contended, considered opera as “childish” and that music should “finally come  of age” (see ‘Wagner’s Relevance for Today’, an essay based on a lecture delivered in 1963). Adorno discerned both “progressive” and “negative [nationalistic] traits” in the composer’s oeuvre. He agreed that the familiar, showy forms of Italianate opera, notably the aria, the recitative, the ensemble, were superannuated. Stephen Moss, in similar vein, recalls that Wagner envisaged opera as a “gesamtkunstwerk”’ or “total art work”. He thereby ushered in a much needed revolution in opera (‘A to Z of Wagner; G is for Gesamtkunstwerk’, the Guardian, April 18, 2013). –

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Cattle and Copper

Posted on June 22, 2022 by leslie

 

Sedona Arizona, hiking above Oak Creek

Cattle and Copper, by “Wild” Bill Hartley

The owner of Rancho Mirago advised us against parking on the grass. This was nothing to do with a gardener’s pride, since the grass was brown and withered by the high temperatures and lack of rainfall. He was making a point about wildfires and explained that anything outside the firebreak, which surrounded his ranch house, was likely to be incinerated. There have been four such fires already this year, the last of which consumed 10,000 acres of Southern Arizona.

Rancho Mirago is in Cochise County: miles of harsh but beautiful prairie, desert and mountains, much of it open range. Once off the tarmac and onto the dirt roads, then cattle take precedence. The Southern Arizona Cattle Growers Association likes to remind visitors of its role in the food chain. A sign outside the entrance to one ranch read, ‘this ranch feeds 1600 American families’.

Cattle ranching is a tough business. The University of Arizona cites drought as one of the major problems and believes that small family run operations are the most vulnerable. Some of these small ranchers need other jobs to augment their income. Rancho Mirago provides accommodation. Perhaps the most eccentric example was Winn Bundy (1930-2020). Several miles up an isolated dirt road, she ran a bookshop at the Singing Wind Ranch. Continue reading →

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Matches, made in Hell

Posted on June 20, 2022 by leslie

Enrique Ponce, in his traje de luces (suit of lights)

Matches, made in Hell

Carmen, an opera in four acts, music composed by Georges Bizet, libretto by Henri Meilhac and Ludovic Halévy, new production by Opera Holland Park, directed by Cecilia Stinton, City of London Sinfonia and Opera Holland Park Chorus conducted by Lee Reynolds, 14th June 2022, reviewed by Leslie Jones

Carmen is an example of opéra comique, a musical genre in which numbers were inserted into a spoken libretto. Sections of the text, drawn from Prosper Mérimée’s novella Carmen (1845), accordingly, are recited not sung. Acting, as well as singing, was at a premium in opéra comique. The question “can you dance” was as important as “can you sing and act” (See Carmen Review – Dance of Death, Quarterly Review, November 2018).

In Mérimée’s novella Carmen, the story is told from the perspective of besotted soldier Don José. He recalls that Carmen “walked, swaying her hips like a filly from a Cordoba stud farm”. But in Bizet’s opera, it is told from that of Carmen herself. Carmen (Kezia Bienek) considers herself a free spirit, confiding that she has “suitors by the dozen”. Love, she observes in the Habanera, Act I, is “un oiseau rebelle” (“a rebellious bird that no one can tame”), an “enfant de bohème il n’a jamais connu de loi” (“a gypsy child that has never heard of law”). The premiere of Carmen on 3 March 1875 was consequently received as “a gross assault on the senses and sensibilities of an audience accustomed to submissive heroines…” (Official Programme, ‘Introducing Carmen’). When librettists Henri Meilhac and Ludovic Halévy presented their plans to the directors of the Opéra-Comique, one of the latter, Adolphe de Leuven, pointedly interjected,

Carmen? Mérimées Carmen? Isn’t it her who’s killed by her lover? And among thieves, gypsies and cigar-girls? At the Opéra-Comique, the family opera, the theatre for marriage interviews!…You’ll drive the public away…it’s impossible!

Don José (tenor Oliver Johnson), in contrast to Carmen, is a weak willed individual, torn between his passion for her and a code of honour which entails loyalty to regiment and to family, in particular to his ailing mother. After a faltering start in the first act, Johnson was genuinely moving in the second, when telling Carmen how the flower that she threw him outside the tobacco factory “sustained his love during the long weeks in prison” (Official Programme, ‘Synopsis’). If you can move the audience as he did, all else is forgiveable. Continue reading →

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Janáček, The Excursions of Mr Brouček

Posted on June 18, 2022 by leslie

Peter Hoare as Brouček

Janáček, The Excursions of Mr Brouček

Thursday 9th June, 2022, Grange Park Opera, The Theatre in the Woods, West Horsley Place Surrey, directed by David Pountney, reviewed by David Truslove

With certain exceptions, Janáček’s operas are not often chosen for country house presentation. In the twenty-five years of Grange Park Opera’s endeavours, only two of the Czech composer’s stage works, namely Jenufa and The Cunning Little Vixen, have been staged. This year, festival director Wasfi Kani opened her season with the satirical and eccentric romp that is The Excursions of Mr. Brouček – a Cinderella amongst Janáček’s operas. First heard in the UK at Edinburgh in 1970 and later presented by English National Opera in the 1980s and 90s, its madcap invention makes ideal summer entertainment, even if its absurd lunacies defy comprehension and fail to make a satisfying narrative sequence. If you’re not a fan of its surreal, Pythonesque fantasy, you may be won over by strong performances and not least by Marie-Jeanne Lecca’s costumes and Leslie Travers’s super-size toytown sets (superbly lit by Tim Mitchell) which will surely engage your inner child.

Inspired by the novels of Svatopluk Čech, this up-to-date English translation by director David Pountney contains sardonic attacks on artistic philanthropy, lockdown parties and the latest “Boris balls-up”. Even music critics get a derisory mention. Brouček (its central character taken by the excellent Peter Hoare) is Janáček’s most uneven work. Conceived over nearly 10 years and completed in 1918, no fewer than eight writers were involved in the libretto which the composer fashions into two, hour-long single acts linked only by the presence of the time-travelling Mr Brouček. Continue reading →

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Belles Lettres

Posted on June 17, 2022 by leslie

 

Nicholas of Russia and Elizabeth of Hesse, as Eugene and Tatyana, credit Wikipedia

 Belles Lettres

Eugene Onegin, composer Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, based on Eugene Onegin (1823-31) by Alexander Pushkin, libretto by Tchaikovsky and Konstantin Shilovsky, Opera Holland Park, 11th June 2022, a new production directed by Julia Burbach, City of London Sinfonia and Opera Holland Park Chorus conducted by Lada Valešová, reviewed by Leslie Jones

Tatyana, played by British-Armenian soprano Anush Hovhannisyan, is something of a sentimentalist, one of those avid female readers of novels unable, according to Denis Diderot, to distinguish between fiction and reality (see Belinda Jack, ‘Tatyana’s Bookishness’, Official Programme). She confides that she saw Onegin before she saw him, i.e. that he was a fantasy or projection. Tatyana’s mother, Madame Larina (Amanda Roocroft) confirms that she too was once intoxicated by Samuel Richardson’s A History of Sir Charles Grandison and was ‘dreaming of another’ who ‘pleased her more in heart and mind’ than her eventual husband. But habit, as Madame Larina and the nurse Filippyevna (Kathleen Wilkinson) aver, is ‘heaven’s gift to us, sent as a replacement for happiness’. Contrary to romantic fiction, ‘there are no heroes in real life’. Tatyana, in due course, will draw similar conclusions.

Feminists and neo-Freudians have had a field day interpreting Tatyana’s personality. One widely held opinion is that she is a sexually frustrated victim of a repressive patriarchal social order. Upper class Russian women had no option but to prepare for marriage and motherhood. And given that the plot partly focuses on two men, the influence on the opera of Tchaikovsky’s homosexuality is hard to avoid. Indeed, it transpires that when he was composing it, he received a fateful letter from Antonina Milyukova, declaring her love for him. Bizarrely, the composer’s disdain for Onegin’s offhand treatment of Tatyana led him to encourage Antonina, since “to behave like Onegin would be heartless and quite impermissible on my part”. The upshot was his disastrous marriage, in July 1877 (see ‘Looking for Lensky’, Philip Ross Bullock, Official Programme). Continue reading →

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Ars Poetica, Remembering A.E. Housman, 1

Posted on June 9, 2022 by leslie

View from Wenlock Edge

Ars Poetica – Remembering A.E. Housman, 1

By Darrell Sutton

The history of classical Greek and Roman philology is replete with names of distinction. The list extends over 2300 years. It is an intellectual tradition containing poets, prose writers, their interpreters, grammarians, and textual critics. In the last seven decades, the issuance of private letters, extracts from diaries, and reminiscences by friends and family members, has bolstered the fame or infamy of a select group of men and women who made their living studying Greco-Roman literature. Arnaldo Momigliano (1908-1987) firmly established the history of historiography by conducting extensive biographical studies of ancient and modern figures of importance in classical scholarship. He asked the right questions and he provided insightful answers that were founded on new interpretations of extant evidence.

Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff (1848-1931), arguably a better Hellenist than anyone before or since, was once known in English classrooms only by pupils who had studied under him. Through the herculean efforts of William Calder III, Wilamowitz’ name, if not his specific publications, is known today within wider fields of classical studies. Deploying philological gifts that are better suited in translation for paraphrase than exactness, students owe much to Anthony Grafton for his broad studies of the history of ideas, Renaissance classical traditions, and analyses of Joseph J. Scaliger (1540-1609). Likewise, Christopher Stray’s interests have reshaped how one views the educational contexts of British classical studies in the last two hundred years. Disclosures  regarding the careers and temperaments of Richard Jebb (1841-1905) and Eduard Fraenkel (1888-1970) have been enlightening. Granted, the subjects Stray treats did not require him to engage in philological criticism, yet his literary frameworks help separate fact from fiction apropos some notable figures and institutions.

British classical scholarship, in  a ‘specialist’ sense, began with Richard Bentley (1662-1742), who possessed a unique aptitude for critical studies of Greek and Latin texts. During the century and half following his death, Bentley’s legacy endured. Of English classicists at work one hundred years ago, few rivaled Mr. Housman in scholarly precision or in scholarly contempt for one’s peers. Aggressive and audacious, his emendations of texts were prodigious, he poured forth vitriol in abundance on German classicists; and he was hailed by a few of them as the best Latinist of the day, the best Bentleian textual critic since Bentley. Continue reading →

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