Great War memorial at Jeparit – close up of the sculpured figure of a woman
ENDNOTES, April 2019
by Stuart Millson
In this edition: musical meditations on death and national decline
From Chandos records, come two less-frequently-performed masterpieces by the doyen of English music, Sir Edward Elgar: The Music Makers (written in 1912) and The Spirit of England, a choral-orchestral heroic lament from the First World War. Both pieces exhibit all of the qualities of a composer still at the height of his power – and yet the music, for all its glories, transmits a sense of unease, valediction and of greatness, slowly ebbing away. The Music Makers sets the words of a 19th-century poet, Arthur O’ Shaughnessy:
“We are the music makers,
And we are the dreamers of dreams,
Wand’ring by lone sea-breakers,
And sitting by desolate streams;
World-losers and world forsakers…”
After a brief orchestral introduction which establishes an immediate mood of stately melancholy – yet underpinned by a tide of turbulence – the choir (on this recording, the BBC Symphony Chorus) sings O’Shaughnessy’s lonely testament of all poets and artists: “…Yet we are the movers and shakers/Of the world forever, it seems…” In this work, Elgar followed a motif which surfaced time and again through his composing career: a desire to escape the life of an artist, as much as to create – and the idea that his works were sometimes failures; that he had failed to find that celestial high-note, that “God was against art”. The Music Makers unfolds as a memory-album of Elgar’s past triumphs: famous themes from works that made his name – the First Symphony, the Enigma Variations, Sea Pictures arise from the mournful depths, and it seems that we are listening to an Elgar requiem. Continue reading
The Moral of the Mueller Inquisition
The Moral of the Mueller Inquisition
by Ilana Mercer
One among many, former CIA head honcho John Brennan had famously asserted that President Trump was “treasonous” and “in the pocket of Putin.” It was “beyond a shadow of a doubt [that Trump] sought to…collude with the Russian government…to undermine and influence our elections,” seconded wonder boy Beto O’Rourke.
And that’s just a humdrum smattering of the folly force-fed to Americans for the two years of the Mueller Inquisition, from “respectable” TV megaphones, including legions of Never Trump Republicans. The same characters, in their many interchangeable iterations, will remind you that the omniscient Mueller had equivocated over the matter of obstruction of justice. Over this, the second part of his eponymous report, Mueller declined to prosecute Trump. The first part of Robert Mueller’s report “cleared Donald Trump of having conspired with Russia.”
Let us unpack the obstruction-of-justice aspect of the ongoing farce: in the course of defending his reputation against silly, but gravely serious, smears—that he was a “Russian asset,” in the words of former acting FBI Director Andrew McCabe—the president forcefully and publicly berated the Mueller proceedings and his turncoat attorney, Michael Cohen (who, though a hostile witness, testified that there was no collusion). Continue reading →
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