The Question of Unworthy Life

Posted on November 30, 2024 by leslie

Alfred Ploetz, credit Wikipedia

The Question of Unworthy Life: Eugenics and Germany’s Twentieth Century; Dagmar Herzog, Princeton University Press, Princeton & Oxford, 2024, 302pp, reviewed by Leslie Jones

According to Dagmar Herzog, the history of racial hygiene (a term coined by biologist Alfred Ploetz) is essentially Manichean. It has its heroes and its villains, and she provides vignettes of both. One of the purposes of her book is to honour those individuals who challenged the de-humanization of the disabled, such as Swiss physician Johann Jakob Guggenbühl (1816-1863). Abendberg, his residential school for “children with cognitive challenges’, was a watchword for “love and kindness”. His guiding principle was the dignity and equality of all God’s creatures endowed with an immortal soul. Then, in stark contrast, we have lawyer Karl Binding and psychiatrist Alfred Hoche, authors of Permission to Annihilate Life Unworthy of Life (1921), a blueprint for the subsequent Nazi programme of coercive ‘euthanasia’. They highlighted the financial and psychological cost of caring for those whom Hoche called “ballast-existences”. Many people in Germany, subject to a high death rate and food shortages during the war, were receptive to this argument. According to Binding and Hoche, the death of so many of the disabled during the war due to malnutrition had made possible the survival of the fit.

In Permission to Annihilate, Binding criticised the Christian churches for opposing “assisted suicide”, a position which he deemed “contra-selective”. During the 1880’s and beyond, it was Christian authors, including some engaged in Protestant Church welfare work under the auspices of the Inner Mission, who questioned the depiction of the disabled as a “dead weight burdening a struggling society” (Herzog, p51). Heinrich Matthias Sengelmann, the founder of the Alsterdorfer in Hamburg, published a guidebook for disability care tellingly entitled Idiotophilus or Lover of Idiots (1888). Lutheran pastor Friedrich von Bodelschwingh, likewise, the founder in 1867 of the famous Bethel institution, challenged the view that disability sprang from moral turpitude, especially from sexual profligacy. He instructed his staff to “Keep company with those at the bottom; the lowliest path is the safest, the most blessed path”. Von Bodelschwingh believed that serving the most helpless was a privilege and beneficial to the carer. Herzog underlines the “radical theological egalitarianism” inherent in his vision (Herzog p52).

But what the author calls the ‘hierarchizing’ of the disabled into distinct groups, a hierarchy in which capacity to work was the pivotal factor, dated back to the 1880’s and became increasingly prevalent. Those professionals responsible for the disabled, notably Protestant leaders but also, remedial teachers and psychiatrists, “intensified antidisability animus ” (Herzog, p 66). In due course, the views of Guggenbühl and his epigones became passé.

Why was the Protestant church in Germany complicit in the Nazi programmes of sterilisation and “euthanasia”? It transpires that some of Binding and Hoche’ s Christian critics were themselves ambivalent about caring for severely disabled individuals. Witness Pastor Friedrich Lensch, who succeeded Sengelman at the Alsterdorfer. He referred candidly to “those who stand before this abyss of misery… [and] ask…if one cannot, if only for the sake of the ill ones themselves, liberate them from this life…” For Lensch, there were humanitarian objections to keeping the severely disabled alive. And in The Problem of Abbreviating Life ‘Unworthy’ of Life (1925), Evald Meltzer, a doctor and the director of the Katharinenhof in Saxony, compiled the opinions of some Protestant religious leaders who endorsed killing the seriously disabled. One such, a religious educator in Auerbach, opined that “abbreviating” life was moral if done out of “benevolence”. In similar vein, Berlin professor of theology Arthur Titius maintained that killing the severely disabled was compatible with “full love of God and genuine humanitarianism”.

At a meeting in May 1931 of leading figures in the Inner Mission, eugenics and “euthanasia” were on the agenda. The upshot was the “Treysa Resolution”, which proposed “differential care” for those disabled individuals unable to undertake productive labour. In addition, sterilization was accepted in principle to protect “the coming generation” and the Volk. According to the “Treysa Resolution”, 60 percent of “mental infirmities” are attributable to heredity.

Leaders in Protestant welfare work welcomed the coercive Nazi sterilisation law which came into effect in January 1934 and the hospitals and charitable institutions they administered carried out regular sterilisations. But, once again, certain individuals bucked the trend. In a lecture in April 1933, Lutheran theologian Paul Althaus (University of Erlangen) rejected killing the disabled and programmes of mass sterilisation. The hereditary transmission of “feeble-mindedness” was not scientifically established, in his judgement. Contra Binding and Hoche, Althaus distinguished between “worth” and “dignity”, which “has no gradations”. Protestant physician Karl Stoevesandt was another trenchant critic of eugenics. The latter was a world view not a science in his estimation. In 1934, however, Stoevesanndt, under pressure, recanted.

Pastor Ludwig Schlaich, who from 1930 ran the Stetten asylum, was another member of Herzog’s band of righteous individuals. Although he authorised sterilisation, Schlaich drew the line at murder and in Autumn 1940 he strenuously opposed the transportation of his charges to a T4 gas chamber in Grafeneck. In Lebensunwert? Unworthy of Life? (1947), he described the victims of T4 as “persecutees of the Third Reich”. Unhappily it was only later that the German state adopted this position. In 1950-51, physician Walther Schmidt, director of the Eichberg institution, received staunch public support when facing prosecution in 1950-51 for murdering inmates. The West German government refused to compensate the victims of sterilisation on the grounds that eugenics was a science, and that sterilisation was morally acceptable. Psychiatrist Helmut Ehrardt, an expert witness at a meeting of the reparations committee of the Bundestag in 1961, claimed that the heritability of such conditions as “feeble-mindedness” and “schizophrenia” had been established. The Finance Ministry gratefully concurred.

Professor Herzog (Professor of History at the City University, New York) invariably cites the environmental and class factors supposedly driving disability. Her position on this issue, ironically, is close to that of the SED regime in the former German Democratic Republic. Note, however, that she acknowledges that for all their fine words, the treatment of the severely disabled was in practice no better in the GDR than in West Germany. Like the Nazis, communists have a problem with those unable or unwilling to work. Herzog maintains that rather than address the poverty that caused the unfavourable environmental conditions encouraging disability, the goal of racial hygiene was always “the eradication of disability through selective breeding and targeted killing” (Herzog, p38). Thus, in ‘The Reciprocal Relationships Between Mental Inferiority and Social Misery’ (1915), Martin Breitbarth, the rector of a remedial school in Halle, inverted the putative relationship between poverty and disability. Parents, he averred, may make bad choices of living conditions. He concluded that the poverty of many disabled children was attributable, through heredity, to the “mental and moral inferiority of their parents”.

The Federal Reparations Law of 1956 only acknowledged Nazi crimes motivated by “race, religion, or political world view”. Herzog therefore gives immense credit to historian Gisela Bock for demonstrating, in Zwangssterilisation im Nationalsozialismus (1986), that Nazi racial hygiene directed against the mentally deficient or unstable (the “deficient insiders” of the Volk) complemented the racism which targeted the “outsiders”, notably Jews, Poles, Roma etc. Both sets of victims were excluded from the so-called master race. In 1966, sociologist Theodor Adorno observed that “The inability to identify with others was unquestionably the most important psychological [pre] condition for…Auschwitz”. Adorno pointed out bitterly that there was resistance to “euthanasia” in Germany of non-Jewish members of the Volk (as, for example in the famous 1941 sermon of Clemens August Graf von Galen, Cardinal and Bishop of Münster) but not to the extermination of German Jews.

The focus of this review has been on the baneful influence of racial hygiene on the treatment of disabled people. But there is more to The Question of Unworthy Life than this. The author chronicles the long but mainly successful struggle to establish the equality and dignity of the disabled despite the persistence of anti-disability prejudice. There were campaigns to integrate disabled children into mainstream education and to dismantle or reform residential institutions. Some of the physically disabled themselves played an important role in this struggle, as in the Cripple-Movement of the 1980’s. We commend Professor Herzog’s authoritative and at times moving account.

Bishop Clemens August Count von Galen, credit Wikipedia

Dr Leslie Jones is the Editor of Quarterly Review

 

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Romance to Realities

Posted on November 12, 2024 by leslie

William McTaggart, The Storm, credit Wikipedia

Romance to Realities, The Northern Landscape and Shifting Identities, an exhibition reviewed by William Hartley

This is the second exhibition held at Newcastle’s Laing Art Gallery in 2024. Romance to Realities is a ticketed event which chronicles two hundred years of landscape painting in the north of England and Scotland. It covers town and country, land and sea and how these have changed. The aim is to illustrate the displacement of communities and shifting identities. Done in partnership with the Fleming Collection which holds the largest collection of Scottish art outside a public institution, the exhibition contains work by artists some of whom may be less well known south of the border.

Entering the gallery the Scottish theme is established early on with George Blackie’s magnificent study Tantallon Castle, Caithness, one of the country’s more obscure fortresses.The theme is sustained by John Wilson Carmichael’s Country House in the Highlands, illustrating the move to a less defensive style of living in those parts. A return to the past comes via Walter Hugh Paton’s Craigmillar Castle: another romantic ruin softened by a pastoral scene in the foreground.Viewing these pictures it is easy to understand the Victorian fascination with all things Scottish and how this was to grow throughout the nineteenth century.

The Lake District isn’t overlooked: some works displayed here seem more like the Alps, with sheep on vertiginous crags and climbers who appear to have reached the top of the world. How the Victorians must have loved taking the train north, to experience at first hand what had previously been achievable only by a long and laborious journey.

The older works in the exhibition are not by any means focussed exclusively on the uplands. For instance, there is a water colour on display by Thomas Scott entitled Border Landscape.This depicts an agricultural scene, with not a single peak or crag in sight. Here we see the harvest being laboriously gathered by hand and a reminder that Northumberland and the Borders are rich farming country. Similarly, there is John Richie’s A Border Fair painted in 1865. It is believed to represent the long vanished Stagshaw Bank Fair and is a picture so teeming with life and multiple activities that it probably needs a second viewing to fully appreciate the artist’s achievement.

Then the visitor is brought up to date via a living artist. Peter Howson emerged in the 1980s; his pictures often explore working class lives with themes of violence and inner turmoil. The Brink is a bold, dark, imagined landscape with a female figure in the foreground; a disturbing picture which demands close attention. Howson, a former war artist, painted the picture in 1992 and it shows that this exhibition is not all dreamy landscapes tinged with sentimentalism.

Another picture with the power to disturb is William McTaggart’s Machrihanish Bay. Ostensibly it is a fine seascape but on closer examination possesses an eerie quality. McTaggart was clearly capable of capturing the moods of sea and sky in a style influenced by the Impressionists. However, in this painting the figures in the foreground are superimposed in a semi-transparent way which creates a transient, almost supernatural presence, quite unlike any other people-on-a-beach picture. Amidst so many attractive and rather more standard paintings, this may be the one which stays in the visitor’s mind after they have left the gallery. In a way it anticipates the change from nineteenth century Romanticism and a good example would be William Crozier’s Edinburgh From Castle Street. This is a bold, sharper edged work, definitely lacking any hint of glowing softness. Painted as recently as 2013 and done in the Cubist style, it is every bit as good a piece of townscape as any of the Victorian examples in the exhibition.

The landscape is depicted in a starker, more expressionistic fashion by John Bellamy. The Ettrick Shepherd is an arresting piece of work; the subject standing behind his flock glares warily out of the picture. During the course of his career Bellamy had visited the Buchenwald concentration camp, which was said to have had a profound effect on him. This is a haunting picture: the shepherd and his tiny flock standing on an anonymous Highland hilltop.

The urban scene isn’t neglected. Some of the works on display have captured people caught in the grimness of northern industrial labour. Of particular interest is a painting by an anonymous artist entitled A Pit Backworth. This is a primitive piece of work which actually helps to show the operation of a colliery. It depicts a point just before the use of steam power became widespread in the mining industry. In the foreground horses are at work moving the coal wagons, a reminder that mining is another form of resource exploitation, just like agriculture, with which it remained closely allied, until it expanded and became an industry in its own right.

Perhaps no modern artist had a greater feel for the urban-industrial landscape than LS Lowry. An example of his work also appears in the exhibition, entitled River Scene. Whilst the location is unknown, Lowry did visit the North East. Certainly, the cotton mills that characterise so much of his work are absent from the picture. This is a river where a colliery headframe is present in one corner, suggesting that the inspiration was the Tyne.

Again going forward in time there is Carol Rhodes’ 2001 painting Trees and Woods depicting those forgotten areas, places around the fringes of airports and reservoirs. Elsewhere James Bateman’s picture The Lime Burner reinforces the one time link between the industrial and agricultural. Lime was needed for fertilizer to be spread on the fields. In order to boost productivity it had to be available in quantity and so coal was required for this purpose.

The final section of the exhibition looks at how 20th century landscape painting sees the interplay of traditional ideals and contemporary art. This is an exhibition which has something for everyone. Romance to Realities takes the visitor through the pastoral and then on into the darker realities of industrial life.

William Crozier, Edinburgh From Castle Street, credit Wikimedia Commons

Romance to Realities is at the Laing Gallery Newcastle until 26th April 2025

William Hartley is a Social Historian

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Endnotes, November-December 2024

Posted on November 1, 2024 by leslie

“Gathering Winter Fuel”, Good King Wenceslas, 1904, credit Wikimedia Commons

Endnotes, November-December 2024

In this edition: Walter Braunfels, ‘lost’ Germanic romanticism * Bruckner from SOMM * Symphony No. 4 by Matthew Taylor * Christmas music from Albion, reviewed by Stuart Millson

The Dutton Epoch label is one of those enterprising record companies, unafraid to take a chance on composers who, for whatever reason, have sunk into obscurity — quite undeserved in the case of Walter Braunfels (1882-1954), an admirer of Wagner and early-20th century opera composer who fell foul of the Third Reich’s artistic policy because of partial Jewish ancestry. The ban on Braunfels was the German public’s loss, as in his music we find solace, sentiment, drama, depth and direction: such as in the Sarabande of his Orchester–Suite e–Moll fur grosses Orchester, op. 48 (written between 1933 and 36); and the lyrically ‘fresh-air’ sense of meditation at the opening of his Hebridentanze, op. 70 (a Scottish-influenced divertimento for piano and orchestra, written post-war, and seemingly untainted by conflict or bitterness).

The latter piece sees pianist Piers Lane (who has championed such works as the Delius concerto) working his magic alongside and above the warm strings and fluttering woodwind of the BBC Concert Orchestra conducted by Austrian maestro, Johannes Wildner. If you are seeking music that is, purely and simply, a pleasure — a tonal, accessible, seemingly unclouded delight, the music of Braunfels could not be a better recommendation. Also on the programme is the intriguing concerto-combination of violin, viola and two French horns in the Sinfonia Concertante, another post-war work by Braunfels, but this time offering tense, gloomier orchestral vistas; the excellent soloists and orchestra alike, sounding deep, dark, heartfelt in the generous, warm acoustic of the Watford Colosseum (the soloists being: Ernst Kovacic, violin; Thomas Selditz, viola; and horn-players, Tim Thorpe and Tom Rumsby).

Walter Braunfels, credit Wikipedia

German romanticism of an earlier period is served up, courtesy of SOMM Records, in the fourth part of their Bruckner retrospective for the composer’s commemorative 200th birthday year. The Fifth Symphony — beautifully austere in its grand, mysterious half-light — is conducted in a vintage performance by Christoph von Dohnanyi and the Berlin Radio Symphony Orchestra. ‘Bruckner 5’ shares a similar outlook to the relentless Sixth and Ninth symphonies: the composer seems to have little time for even glimpses of radiance, charting, instead, a long course of nervy exploration through craggy mountains, but at least giving us a touch of the ‘Austrian vernacular’ in an earnest, sometimes gallumphing ländler-type scherzo. In the slow movement, there is a sense of Wagner’s Parsifal or Lohengrin drifting in the background, with a truly sacred pause preceding a moment of intensity just two or three minutes in, as if we are all to bow our heads in reverence. Brass chorales in the last movement — like fanfares from a distant Gormenghast — set us up for a finale of monumental proportions; a great exhaling of the pent-up energy from the earlier sections, with brass thundering out like multiple cathedral organs.

For the Berlin Radio Symphony Orchestra on the 8th December 1963 (their live, stereo broadcast performance forming the first part of SOMM’s two-disc set), Bruckner was natural repertoire. But the ensemble does more than just take the 1878 symphony in its stride: here we find inspirational playing — measured, even slow, in tempo (especially in the cavernous opening moments) — that transcends any mere studio or routine concert performance. Bravo to Siva Oke and technical recording specialist, Lani Spahr, for tracking down these electrifying performances from radio archives and making them available to us.

Disc two comprises the String Quintet in F major (dated a year after the Fifth Symphony) and the delightful, lighter Intermezzo, both works remastered from old mono records made in 1956. The QR discussed another, more modern performance of the Quintet recently, so we will not go into enormous detail about this performance — apart from saying that it is one of complete Brucknerian authenticity, with beautiful playing (even in mono sound) by the Vienna Konzerthaus Quartet — Ferdinand Stangler playing the second viola. A must for any Bruckner enthusiast and an essential album for those in love with vintage and classic performances.

English composer, Matthew Taylor, born 1964, studied under senior modern British composer, Robin Holloway, at Cambridge in 1983 — also attracting the attention of Leonard Bernstein who invited the budding young musician to participate in the famous Schleswig-Holstein Music Festival. Thanks to the Nimbus label, supporters of resolutely tonal contemporary music can enjoy Taylor’s impressive orchestral works, especially the outgoing Symphony No. 4, Op. 54 — framed as it is by two Giubiloso passages, reminiscent in their full-flowing power of the music of Carl Nielsen. Played with emphatic, sit-up-and-go energy by the BBC National Orchestra of Wales conducted by Kenneth Woods, the performance is captured in a wide, full-fathom sound by the Nimbus recording team; bringing out, too, the attractive lower-register tone of the BBC Welsh orchestra in a nearly-12-minute long slow movement, in which structure and direction do not flag. The project forms part of the Nimbus 21st Century Symphony Project — a major rebuttal to those modernists, convinced that the symphonic form is outmoded. The Fifth Symphony also appears on the disc – a darker piece, with sometimes a more ‘chamber’ feel, and tense adagio sections and harsh fanfares. The English Symphony Orchestra gives a deeply-felt performance. And the CD cover artwork, a scene of the South Wales coast, helps to make this an eye-catching release.

Finally, as wintry candlelight and Yuletide thoughts enter our consciousness, what could be finer, more spiritual accompaniments to the season than A Christmas Fantasia and Ralph Vaughan Williams — Carols from Herefordshire, both issued by Albion Records and featuring the Chapel Choir of the Royal Hospital, Chelsea, under William Vann. The Christmas Fantasia disc takes us to an almost imaginary (or in parts of the land, wholly real) traditional English December landscape of frost and snow; of huddled congregations in mediaeval churches, where the ethereal sounds of Holst, Howells, Ireland, Finzi, Maconchy, Vann and Vaughan Williams awake the mind’s-eye to the stable’s ‘Little Door’ (Howells), where farm animals keep watch over The Holy Boy (Ireland). There is a warming Wassail Song from Vaughan Williams reminding us that the fireside of a country inn is part of Christmas, too. The album concludes with the composer’s famous Fantasia on Christmas Carols, with organist Jamie Andrews and Ashley Riches, bass-baritone, weaving their magical qualities into what is a deeply evocative seasonal patchwork of music that could only come from Albion’s own shores.

Carols from Herefordshire offer us a similar atmosphere, with such pieces as God Rest You Merry Gentlemen, Dives and Lazarus and The Angel Gabriel performed not only by William Vann’s Chapel Choir, but in recital-type versions by Derek Welton, bass-baritone, and piano accompanist, Iain Burnside. Delightful and heartwarming in every respect, and a tribute to the work of the Vaughan Williams Society (whose dedication to the music of these islands knows no bounds), surely the two CDs are the perfect Christmas gift.

CD details:

Braunfels, Orchester suite etc., Dutton Epoch, CDLX 7355.
Bruckner from the Archives, Vol. 4, Symphony No. 5, String Quintet, SOMM ARIADNE 5031-2.
Matthew Taylor, Symphony No. 4 etc., NIMBUS ALLIANCE, NI 6406.
A Christmas Fantasia, ALBION RECORDS, ALBCD063.
Ralph Vaughan Williams, Carols from Herefordshire, ALBCD064.

Stuart Millson is the Classical Music Editor of The Quarterly Review.

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Bloody Gori

Posted on October 12, 2024 by leslie

Joseph Stalin Museum, Gori, credit Wikipedia

 Bloody Gori, by Bill Hartley

There is a museum dedicated to Stalin in his birthplace, the Georgian town of Gori. It doesn’t contain many items which actually belonged to him, since Stalin wasn’t the acquisitive sort, at least in the personal sense. They do have his private railway carriage on display. Of course, in the first half of he twentieth century no self-respecting dictator would have been without one. There is also the log cabin in which the local lad was born and grew up. It resembles one of those garden cabins they advertise in country living magazines, though the carpentry isn’t as good.

Arriving at Tblisi airport a traveller may notice the occasional dog lying around on the concourse. Usually a dog in an airport comes with a handler and is there for security purposes. Not so in this case. Georgia’s capital has a large collection of feral dogs roaming free. These are far from being emaciated specimens. Here it is considered a sort of civic duty to keep them fed. The local authorities play their part too. All the dogs carry a yellow ear tag confirming their vaccination status and they interact quite amicably with the human population. At a café with tables outdoors, it’s not unusual to be sharing space with a sleeping dog.

Georgia is a small country in a state of transition. It was once annexed by the Tsars, briefly regained its independence following the Russian revolution and did so once more in 1991, after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Subsequently Georgia lost some territory after Russia saw an opportunity to exploit ethnic divisions. First was South Ossetia, where a separatist movement took on central government. Russian ‘peace keepers’ came in and the territory is now an independent republic recognised by Russia, Syria and Venezuela. The rest of the world disagrees. Even so South Ossetia has a president and a prime minister governing a population of 56,000. It is as if Cumbria had seceded from England.

Another piece of territory in the northwest was lost following the Russia-Georgia war of 2008. This became the so-called Republic of Abkhazia and the outcome was the displacement of many thousands of Georgians. It seems unlikely they’ll get it back since the Russians are building a new base for their Black Sea fleet; presumably hoping it is beyond the reach of Ukraine. To the south is the city of Anaklia where the Georgian government has come to an agreement with the Chinese for the construction of a deep-water port. This will be of great strategic significance along a route shipping goods between Europe and Asia.

Approaching the capital Tblisi, it is easy to see why a financial journalist in Moneyweek recently went so far as to describe Georgia as the ‘Switzerland of the Caucasus’. With a Black Sea coast and lying on the old Silk Road, it is a place through which trade has flowed for centuries. Georgia has a young, well-educated population which unlike its seniors prefers English as a second language, rather than Russian. The corruption endemic in other post Soviet republics has been largely eliminated. In part this was achieved when the entire police force was sacked. Modern multi lane roads run into the capital, alongside which new apartment blocks are going up near their grim Soviet era predecessors.

With a general election due on 26th October of this year, the political temperature is beginning to rise. On a Saturday afternoon in late September a procession and rally took place in Tblisi, organised by one of the opposition parties. Many of those marching were wrapped in the national colours and at the head of the procession an EU flag was being carried. The ruling Georgian Dream party is seeking a record fourth term in office and unlike the main opposition is reputedly pro Moscow. A few months ago it enacted what is known locally as the ‘Agent’s Law’. This law requires organisations receiving more than 20% of their funding from abroad to register as ‘agents of foreign influence’ and is seen by many as a way for the government to suppress its opponents. The Kremlin enacted similar legislation back in 2012. It seems unlikely that Georgia’s application to join the EU will make much progress whilst the law remains in force.

Politics also find their way into the pulpit. The deeply conservative Georgian Orthodox church has close ties with the Russian Orthodox, the latter being widely seen as subservient to the Kremlin. Religious observance can be strong. On a Saturday morning at a church close to Tblisi’s old town there was standing room only, with proceedings being broadcast to those outside. Archbishop Jakob of Bodbe recently posted online a sermon he had preached at the Church of the Mother of God. The translation wasn’t very good, making it difficult to determine if he was pro Moscow or pro EU. At times he seemed to be hostile to both. During the sermon he also accused one politician of ‘speaking like a woman’. This seemed insensitive since most of the congregation appeared to be female. It remains to be seen if Georgian Dream gets another term, of if the Western orientated United National Movement prevails.

Perhaps it is the old town district of Tblisi which most reflects Georgia in transition. Architectural styles vary across the country depending on available materials. In the old town there are many brick and timber buildings with characteristic balconies, extending living space over the street below. The old town lies on both sides of the Kura river where it runs through a steep sided valley. House building up the slopes has resulted in a rather dramatic townscape. In addition, every promontory seems to have a church or chapel. These tend to have a conical dome built above a drum shaped tower, with the building below laid out as a cross.  The old town is on a World Monuments Watch list as being endangered. There is a plan dating back to 2010 to make the buildings and cobbled streets more attractive to tourists but progress has been patchy at best. Getting along a pavement can be something of an assault course, avoiding deep potholes and various other trip hazards. Some houses have been beautifully restored and new ones built in the traditional style (the Italian ambassador lives in one). Others are in a dangerous state of near collapse. Sometimes it is only by looking into a courtyard to find clothes drying that one realises that this dangerously unstable dwelling is in fact still inhabited. Out on the pavements street sellers of vegetables and the local wines interact amiably with passers by. There are tiny traditional grocer’s shops interspersed with small supermarkets. Looming over the old town is the golden dome of the Holy Trinity Cathedral, looking as if it has always been there but in fact was only completed in 2004.

Georgia is likely to be in the news in the coming weeks as the election approaches. The result may help determine whether this small republic in the Caucasus will turn westwards or accept the influence of its giant neighbour to the north.

William Hartley is a Social Historian and globetrotter

   

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Our Tailor-Made Parliament

Posted on October 4, 2024 by leslie

Sir Henry ‘Chips’ Channon, dapper diarist &  MP for Southend West, credit Wikipedia

Our Tailor-Made Parliament

Richard Wendorf

There has been much gnashing of teeth about the clothing allowance that has recently been bestowed upon members of the Labour cabinet, but the real outrage is not that Lord Alli and others have quietly (and literally) padded the wardrobes of our leading politicians, but that the recipients of this largess continue to dress as badly as they used to. Who in the world chose the Emperor’s (strike that! the Prime Minister’s) new clothes? Why does he look no better after tens of thousands of pounds sterling have been splashed out on his behalf? Is there no alternative to the uniform that almost all of our male politicians wear?  The answer is yes, as I will suggest below, but that may not strike some as an appealing sartorial alternative.

So first, the uniform. A two-piece suit, almost invariably dark navy except when it occasionally transforms itself into a somewhat lighter, iridescent shade of blue. A white shirt, usually without cufflinks, and with the points of the collar so short that they don’t quite make it to the suit’s lapels. Ignoring the sage advice that a gentleman should button his suit jacket when he stands, most of our Parliamentarians choose to display even more of their shirt front – and often their bulging abdomens. And the ties! Usually dull; sometimes navy or black; rarely colourful; only occasionally striped or patterned. And, the worst part of all, rarely tied so that they actually cover the buckle on an MP’s belt. Ah, yes: those large black belts. Rarely a pair of trousers without them, and rarely a pair of trousers that doesn’t dramatically pool on top of the de rigueur black cap toe shoes. Westminster lies only a few metres from Jermyn Street and Savile Row, and yet these baggy suit jackets and seemingly unhemmed trousers look as if they’ve been pulled off the rack at M&S with nary a thought about suitable alterations.

This is not to say that our politicians dress uniformly, even if they usually wear the same uniform. I suggest that there are at least four variations on our central theme. First, ‘The Ragamuffin,’ an intentional effort to accentuate everything that is already amiss in Parliamentary dress. Think, at the extreme end of the spectrum, of Boris Johnson, unleashed: the knot of the tie hanging in the neighbourhood of (but not close to) the top button of the shirt, the shirt bursting at its seams and with its tails occasionally visible beneath the vents of the jacket, trousers spilling onto scuffed shoes, hair immaculately tousled. I think that the right word for this affront to the tradition of British tailoring is ‘bedraggled.’

Second, and at the other end of the spectrum, ‘The Undertaker.’ And not just he with the double-barreled name, for there is a tendency, especially among the few Tories left on the green benches, to dress as if they have just attended a funeral. Dark suit, sometimes double-breasted; white shirt – or sometimes with a delicate blue or back stripe; sombre tie, largely hidden by a suit jacket that is rarely unbuttoned; black shoes, polished, but still hard to detect under the cascade of trouser fabric. A po-faced countenance to complete the look, unless our Member has decided to show his discontent with the arch of a furry eyebrow.

Third, borrowing from feminine culture, what I would describe as ‘Mutton Dressed as Lamb.’ Forget almost everything I have said so far. The suit is still dark blue but it is worn as tightly as possible – and several inches too short in front and back. The points of the shirt have almost disappeared.  The tie is not only short, it is half the width of a normal tie. The trousers are also worn tight, ending more than a few inches above the obligatory black shoes. (Trousers this short are called ‘floods’ in America.) The overall effect is intended, one supposes, to suggest discipline, tidiness, and even youthfulness. A pair of dazzlingly white Adidas could be substituted outside the corridors of power, although cartoons and headlines will quickly follow.

Finally, what I would call the ‘In Your Face’ wardrobe. It will be interesting to see if it makes its way into the Palace of Westminster, but it is now ubiquitous in the walk-about, on the doorsteps, at the hustings. Think chunky country clothing that has been pushed to the limit: pattern upon pattern, tweed upon suede, heavy cotton tattersalls, ties that take no prisoners.  Reddish-brown brogues and gaudy socks. Add a pint and a fag and you know what (and whom) I mean.

But wait! There is a chameleon-like sea change to this get-up from the Cotswolds (or, more precisely, Essex). Our crusader on behalf of Reform, when city push comes to rural shove, is arguably the best-dressed politician in the country today. Consider his choice of suit, shirt, and tie when he is not rubbing shoulders with his adoring followers. If his political tastes were as sure-footed as his sartorial ones, we would indeed be in good hands.

It has been said, and perhaps with some justice, that the British are supremely good at four things: acting, soldiering, tailoring, and being sick in public. Perhaps we will soon need to strike out one of those encomia, at least in the halls of Westminster.

Professor Richard Wendorf began selling men’s clothing the day he turned sixteen. His most recent book is ‘Chesterfield: The Perils of Politeness’ (forthcoming).

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Deconstruction Time

Posted on September 30, 2024 by leslie

Napoleon 111, by Jean Hippolyte Flandrin, credit wikipedia

Deconstruction Time

Don H Doyle, The Age of Reconstruction; How Lincoln’s New Birth of Freedom Remade the World, Don H Doyle, Princeton University Press, Princeton & Oxford, 2024, hb, 369pp, reviewed by Leslie Jones

In Garibaldi, Invention of a Hero, Lucy Riall recalls how nuns in a Sicilian convent in 1860 became so excited by Garibaldi’s “resemblance to ‘our Lord’ that they queued up to kiss him on the lips”.[i] As Professor Doyle observes, “secular heroes in the nineteenth century”, especially those who were ‘martyred’, attracted a quasi- religious devotion and sense of obligation from their admirers.[ii] Thus, news of Lincoln’s assassination (quickly spread by telegraph networks, “the internet of its day”) turned him into “a global hero and martyr to the cause of human freedom”.[iii] In due course, messages of condolence poured into US diplomatic outposts from around the world. Secretary of State William H Seward subsequently published a selection of these missives in Tributes of the Nations to Abraham Lincoln (1867), “a handsome large-format leather-bound volume” sent to  members of Congress and various foreign governments. Seward considered this document a useful adjunct of American foreign policy.

One of the letters in the State Department’s Tributes was signed by Parisian journalist Sainte-Suzanne Melvil-Bloncourt and 150 of his fellow Guadeloupeans. Melvil-Bloncourt was of mixed-race and a veteran abolitionist. The Emancipation Proclamation of 1863 and the subsequent Union victory in the Civil War revived the anti-slavery movement. The Comité Français d’émancipation was established in early 1865. Its target now was “the remaining bastions of slavery in the empires of Brazil and Spain”. [iv] In Cuba, which had remained loyal to Spain, “white fears of black domination sustained slavery”, [v] the basis of the lucrative sugar plantation system. Enslaved Afro-Cubans looked to Lincoln as a potential liberator. The Emancipation Declaration and the defeat of the Confederacy “cast a heavy shadow”[vi] over slavery in Cuba. Seward’s adhesion in 1862 to Britain’s campaign to suppress the slave trade led inexorably to its extinction.

The American Civil War enabled Napoleon 111 to conquer Mexico and install Maximilian as Emperor as part of his Grand Design (or gran pensée) to promote French military and commercial influence in central America. In an 1864 article ‘The Key of a Continent’, Massachusetts clergyman Joshua Leavitt (author of The Monroe Doctrine) surmised that Napoleon’s ultimate objective was “to make France the master of global commerce by building a canal across Mexico or central America…” Opposing republicanism and upholding the influence of the Catholic Church and of conservative landed interests was central to this policy. But the victory of the North sealed the fate of these ambitious plans.

Napoleon’s ultimately abortive intervention in Mexico was a godsend for the French left. Maximilian, a member of the House of Habsburg-Lorraine and the brother of Emperor Franz Joseph 1 of Austria, was executed on June 19th,1867. Many of Europe’s reigning princes were related to Maximilian and had gathered in Paris at the Exposition Universelle, intended as a showcase of the revival of Bonapartism. The New York Times reported that the execution of Maximilian “hangs like a black cloud over all these splendours of royalty”.

Execution of Maximilian, Edouard Manet, credit Wikipedia

The French Empire’s internal critics, such as Adolphe Thiers, attributed Maximilian’s downfall to Napoleon 111’s “personal government”. The introduction of the ‘Liberal Empire’ was a belated attempt to buy time for the dynasty. But the new press law engendered a plethora of often critical new journals like Rappel, Tribune and Réforme. Public meetings were now permitted and at one such meeting, Édouard Laboulaye made invidious comparisons between the American republic and the Second Empire. Américomanie, eulogising Lincoln, was prevalent in French republican circles at this juncture. The radical journalist Edouard Portalis, author of Les États Unis, le self-governement et le césarisme, who had travelled extensively in the US, depicted  democracy as a motor of progress. Georges Clemenceau, likewise, wrote a pseudonymous column entitled Nouvelles des États-Unis for the republican Parisian paper Le Temps. Clemenceau had participated in a demonstration in Paris following Lincoln’s demise. The demonstrators presented an address to John Bigelow, US minister to France, at the US legation. It called for the establishment of a “true democracy”. Clemenceau considered the impeachment of President Andrew Johnson, in 1868, as “unimaginable in France at that time” and a model for how to deal with “a tyrannical head of state”. [vii] Historian Jules Michelet, in similar vein, saw America as “…the pride, the hope, the salvation of the world…”. [viii]

If, in death, Lincoln was the “unimpeachable embodiment of government elected by the common people and the prophet of world democracy”,[ix] Pope Pius IX, conversely, was for American Protestant opinion the inveterate enemy of the US republic. He had reportedly sympathised with the South and supported France’s Mexican adventure. Mary Surratt and her son John were devout Catholics and allegedly Lincoln assassination conspirators. When the Pope banned American Protestant Church services in Rome, the New York Times denounced this “corrupt, dying remnant of despotic rulership…’. [x]

Professor Emeritus of History at South Carolina, Doyle contends that Lincoln’s assassination rejuvenated the democratic movement not only in France but also in Great Britain.[xi] Although the author acknowledges that Lincoln’s death “…did not cause the wave of democratic reforms…” [xii] after 1865, the sub-title of his book belies this contention. In an article for the Fortnightly Review in October 1870, entitled ‘England and the War’ , the distinguished Liberal statesman John Morley averred that the North’s victory in the Civil War “was the force that made English liberalism powerful enough to enfranchise the workmen”. (In fact, the Conservative Party enfranchised the workers, in 1867). At a mass meeting at St James Hall, in London, in March 1863, leading Liberals, notably John Stuart Mill and John Bright, lambasted the Tories for supporting the slaveocracy. Another speaker, the historian and leading Positivist Edward Beesly, compared the British proletariat to black slaves, a Marxist trope. Professor Doyle makes the dubious claim that “British workers admired Lincoln” not just for winning the war and ending slavery but because, in the words of The Bee-Hive, “he was the first President elected from the working classes…” He also endorses Marx’ assertion that the British workers stopped the “ruling classes” from supporting the Confederacy. Professor Doyle evidently has a stereotypical view of Britain’s governing classes in the 19th century.

On February 12, 1866, Lincoln’s birthday, the distinguished Harvard historian and diplomat George Bancroft addressed Congress. Author of the History of the United States of America (1834-1874), Bancroft had studied at Heidelberg, Göttingen and Berlin. He approached history, accordingly, from a nationalist perspective à la Treitschke. Bancroft  considered slavery incompatible with the republican tradition and an adjunct of aristocracy. He trenchantly criticised Britain’s ‘aristocratic’ government and Napoleon 111 for granting belligerent rights to the southern states. Ditto the latter’s attempt to install a monarchy in Mexico. For Bancroft, America was “the advance guard of democracy and republicanism”. [xiii]

In 1865, the US had a standing army of one million men. In July of that year, Seward sent a veiled threat of the use of force to Foreign Minister Drouyn de Lhuys unless France withdrew its troops from Mexico. The French duly departed in early 1867. It transpired, however, that Seward’s goal after the Civil war was “national security and peace, not territorial aggrandizement or imperialist conquest”. [xiv] The Union, accordingly, disarmed. The author highlights Seward’s “Pan-American commitment to independent republics in solidarity against European imperialism”.[xv] Yet United States Minister to France John Bigelow put it to Seward that because the population of Mexico were of a different race and religion, they were incapable of self-government. Napoleon 111, in similar vein, regarded republicanism as a unique product of Anglo-Saxon culture. The ‘Latin Race’, in his estimation, required hereditary monarchy and Catholic discipline. Note also that, republican principles notwithstanding, cordial relations with autocratic Russia facilitated Seward’s purchase of Alaska in 1867. Unlike France and Britain, Russia posed no threat. Alexander 11’s emancipation of the serfs in February 1861 was naively depicted by the American press as a step towards modern democracy.

The Age of Reconstruction is ambitious and wide-ranging and the author skilfully combines the history of ideas with that of international relations. Dr Doyle is clearly a supporter of democracy and equality. He implicitly criticises President Trump for “…undoing…the civil rights gains accorded blacks and other minorities” and views this as part of “a more ominous international movement against racial equality and democracy”. Unlike such luminaries as Marx, Michels and Mosca, Professor Doyle takes western democracy at face value. This caveat aside, we commend his labours.

William H Seward, 1849, credit Wikipedia

ENDNOTES

[i]  Garibaldi…Yale University Press, 2007, p282
[ii] Doyle,p16
[iii]Ibid., p17, 15
[iv] Doyle,p 233
[v] Doyle, p152
[vi] Doyle, p155
[vii] Doyle, p243
[viii] Ibid., p243
[ix] Doyle, p16
[x] Doyle, p272
[xi] Doyle, chapter 7
[xii] Doyle, p16
[xiii] Doyle, p45
[xiv] Doyle, p61
[xv] Doyle, p98

Dr Leslie Jones is Editor of QR

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Endnotes, October 2024

Posted on September 27, 2024 by leslie

St Mary Harrington, Lincolnshire, credit Wikipedia

Endnotes, October 2024

In this edition: more Bruckner from the archives * Dvorak from the Czech homeland * contemporary music from England and America, reviewed by Stuart Millson

SOMM Records continues to open its vast treasury of vintage Bruckner recordings, in this, the 200th anniversary year of the great Austrian composer’s birth. And our thanks must go to SOMM, not just for championing Bruckner, but for bringing into the limelight almost-forgotten (or, at least, neglected) conductors, such as Hans Schmidt- Isserstedt, a supreme interpreter of Beethoven, as those who know his Decca cycle of the nine symphonies will testify. For Beethoven, Schmidt-Isserstedt had the Vienna Philharmonic under his baton, but here in SOMM’s Bruckner (the Third Symphony in the 1878 Oeser Edition) we are treated to the equally magnificent playing of German Radio’s NDR Symphony Orchestra.

Originally recorded at the Musikhalle Hamburg in the December of 1966, the NDR players give us a version of a Bruckner symphony that many view as the first of the truly mature part of his cycle (which, like Beethoven, consisted of nine symphonies). The misterioso atmosphere of the opening movement — underpinned by a tense, Wagnerian forest-murmur feel in the NDR strings — sets the stage for the great panorama of struggle, action and nostalgia that is to come. And what must already have been a clear, ahead-of-its-time radio archive recording has now transferred to CD (thanks to sound restoration and remastering by recording specialist, Lani Spahr) to give dazzling, full-blooded Brucknerian sound.

The scherzo movement of the Third brings us out of the mainly gentle reflection of the Adagio, gripping the listener with a torrent of agitation, often verging on terror, as an intense, attacking volley of sound from the strings and battering brass cascades onward. Again, the NDR players capture the authentic Teutonic tread of Bruckner, bringing the symphony to a glorious conclusion with a radiant, unstoppable affirmation of earlier themes from the work.

Also on Somm’s CD is a 1958 Bavarian Radio ‘tape’ of the Munich Philharmonic conducted by Volkmar Andreae in Bruckner’s Symphony No. 4, ‘Romantic’ — possibly the most often played of the cycle, due, no doubt, to its more simple pastoral atmosphere and fairytale hunting-horn scherzo. A fine, bracing performance of the work awaits the listener, especially in the stormy, fiery interpretation of the first movement; and in a dreamy approach to the gentle heartbeats of the second — ending, with pizzicato and delicate timpani, as if a distant country procession has just disappeared out of view.

Still in the glades of Middle Europe, Pentatone has just issued a stunning set of the last three Dvorak symphonies, the partnership of Semyon Bychkov and the Czech Philharmonic proving itself as among the greatest in the world today. The seventh, eighth and ninth symphonies (again — nine — that hallowed number for composers) are performed with a sense of utter conviction: a love for every note, a passion for every great tune, as if the Czech players are carefully setting down on record for posterity their personal family history. This recording is a testament to Bohemian romanticism; and to the patriot, Antonin Dvorak, the architect of that soulful, yet ebullient style, the musical magus of the Czech people.

The folkish, dance-like romp of colour that is the Eighth Symphony works well on this recording — almost like a 40-minute-long Slavonic dance. The more famous Ninth, subtitled ‘From the New World’, is a glorious fusion of the Czech homeland and the wide-open spaces of North America (surely the composer expresses a home-sickness in this work?) a land where Dvorak found himself feted at the end of the 19th century. But what is particularly interesting is the performance of the Symphony No. 7 (arguably the best, and the more enigmatic of the three) — a work that echoes Bruckner in its sense of struggle, of venturing forth into a dark landscape; allusions and feelings that are suggested in the mighty monoliths, ‘clenched-fist’ brass and grand gestures of the first movement, the rushing third-movement scherzo and the noble, brass-dominated, chorale-like ending. A real affirmation in music, but somehow not glorious, but firm, serious, stoical. Whatever your own personal response to Dvorak’s music, you probably won’t find a better-recorded set than by Bychkov and the Czech Philharmonic.

Contemporary British composer, Peter Seabourne — a musician who rejected the extreme atonalism of many of his peers and immersed himself in a personal quest for artistic individuality and integrity — has issued an eighth volume of his Steps piano pieces. Subtitled, ‘Nineteen Album Leaves Caught by the Wind’, this latest chapter in Seabourne’s odyssey takes the listener into an almost freeze-framed autumnal sequence — a meditation of memories and impressions, sometimes hazy and valedictory, at other times with an intensity brewing just beneath the surface.

With titles such as: Oh, lift me as a wave, a leaf, a cloud — and After Autumn, Winter — the composer has created a new landscape of English pastoral music; but not an England of Edwardian twilight, instead the slanting light and chilly winds blowing across his own Lincolnshire horizon, interwoven with the deepest personal responses to the seasons of his own life.

Anyone seeking something of our own time, distilled into sound and made immediately relevant to life today, should listen to Peter Seabourne’s surprising and atmospheric music. Another recommendation for the CD is the quality of the piano-playing and recording: Michael Bell gives a masterclass for the instrument, while the Sheva contemporary label captures the piano at a perfect autumnal ‘temperature’ — always just a little less in the foreground, the piano never stark or clanging. The remainder of the album is given over to Seabourne’s settings of Emily Dickinson, with soprano, Karen Radcliffe, joining Michael Bell in a wonderfully woven cycle that, again, brings the listener into that lonely fenland.

Finally, to the work of two United States composers, not well known in Britain, but whose compositions deserve the attention of all who seek concert programmes enlivened by music that has something to say. Randall Svane continues to carve a reputation in the churches of the East Coast with a religious fervour not usually found in our nihilistic times. Although not yet appearing on CD, Quarterly Review has been fortunate to hear his Gloria — a setting that could easily be used as an alternative to similar works by Walton, Britten or Rutter — and which record producers, church music directors or those planning concert programmes should consider.

Likewise, New York composer Stanley Grill, offers music that continues where Britten’s War Requiem and other pacifist works left off. The composer writes of his own youthful anti-war zeal, and how with the onset of the years the radical tends to become the mellower sage, looking with the eye of a seasoned outsider on the vicissitudes of our turbulent times. Nonetheless, Grill remains loyal (as Walt Whitman would have put it) — ‘to thee, old cause…’ and informs us that his work may be found on the following platform:

https://stanleygrill.bandcamp.com/album/against-war

CD details: Bruckner from the Archives, Vol. 3. SOMM ARIADNE 5029-2.
Dvorak, Symphonies 7, 8, 9. PENTATONE, PTC 5187 216.
Peter Seabourne, Steps, vol. 8, Sheeva contemporary SH 326.

Stuart Millson is Classical Music Editor of Quarterly Review

 

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An Arbitrary Colourist

Posted on September 19, 2024 by leslie

An Arbitrary Colourist, Van Gogh, Poets & Lovers

Exhibition at the National Gallery, 14 September 2024 – 19 January 2025, press preview 11 September; Catalogue of the exhibition, Cornelia Homburg, featuring the essay ‘Art of the Future’; reviewed by Leslie Jones

Le Christ sur le lac de Génésareth, Delacroix, credit Wikipedia

The art critic Paul Mantz described how Eugène Delacroix, in Christ Asleep during the Tempest (1853), achieved a “terrifying” symbolic effect by using blue paint to distinguish Christ’s raiment. In ‘Art of the Future’, likewise, Cornelia Homburg, the curator of this exhibition, observes how Van Gogh used “heightened colour” to “express the intensity, imagination and emotion he wanted to convey in his art”*. “The Provençal landscape, with its intense light and beautiful weather”, was ideally suited to this end and in February 1888, he moved from Paris to Arles. Van Gogh’s objective in moving to the south of France was to set up a studio in the Midi. Other sympatico artists, such as Bernard, Signac and Seurat, would hopefully follow. However, his dream of a “Studio of the South”, a colony of like-minded artists, remained just that.

Gauguin, The Wine Harvest. Human Misery, credit Wikipedia

From 23rd October to 23rd December 1888, Gauguin and Van Gogh lived and worked together in the ‘Yellow House’, the afore mentioned “Studio of the South”, with a guest room decorated with The Sunflowers (1888). Van Gogh agonised at this time how to incorporate memory and imagination into his art rather than merely observe or copy nature. Something of a philosopher manqué, he wrote to Émile Bernard, “imagination is a capacity that must be developed … that enables us to create a more exalting and consoling nature than what just a glance at reality … allows us to perceive” (letter 596, Vangoghletters.org)). Gauguin, who had contemporaneously created The Wine Harvest. Human Misery (1888) entirely from memory, urged Van Gogh to follow suit. In The Sower, accordingly, although he incorporated sketch work of the walled fields visible from his room in the private Maison de Santé in Saint-Rémy-de-Provence (which he entered voluntarily in May 1889), the figure of the sower (indebted to Jean-François Millet, like Delacroix another painter he admired) was drawn from imagination/memory in the studio. And in Memory of the Garden of Etten (Ladies of Arles) (1888), the figures are his mother and sister Willemien, whom he had not seen for years but transposed to a Provençal landscape.

Van Gogh, The Sower, credit Wikipedia

Collaboration with Gauguin evidently helped to free Vincent from the thumb of “vulgar resemblance”. He said of The Sower, “There are many touches of yellow in the soil…but I couldn’t care less what the colours are in reality” (June 1888, quoted in The Guardian, Jonathan Jones, ‘Poets and Lovers review, a riveting rollercoaster ride from Arles to the stars’). As Jones contends, his transformative art tore up the Impressionist rulebook

This is the “first major exhibition devoted to Van Gogh in the National Gallery’s history”. As such, it bears comparison with the 2010 exhibition at the Royal Academy, entitled The Real Van Gogh; the Artist and his Letters (see Quarterly Review, spring 2010, ‘Van Gogh, by himself’, Leslie Jones). Notwithstanding a “bleak narrative”, involving his notorious act of self-mutilation and the falling out with Gauguin, and repeated mental breakdowns requiring hospitalisation, paradoxically Van Gogh’s “southern sojourn” produced “some of the most astonishing paintings of the modern era” (Rachel Spencer, Financial Times, ‘Poets and Lovers review, burning visions from beyond reality’).

Van Gogh, Sunflowers (1888), credit Wikipedia

Each stage of Van Gogh’s chequered career before becoming an artist in 1880, to wit, junior apprentice at international art dealer Goupil & Cie, trainee teacher, would be evangelist etc was a search for his god given calling or Beruf, as posited by Luther and subsequently analysed by Weber in The Protestant Ethic & the Spirit of Capitalism. Ernest Renan maintained that “Man is not placed on the earth merely to be happy…he is here to accomplish great things through society, to arrive at nobleness and to outgrow the vulgarity in which the existence of almost all individuals drags on”. Van Gogh concurred. (Quotation from Renan, letter to Theo dated 8 May 1875,  vangoghletters.org, letter 33).

In Wheat Field with Reaper at Sunrise (September 1889), Van Gogh saw “the image of death, in the sense that humanity would be the wheat being reaped…But in this death nothing sad” (letter 800, to Theo 5 & 6 September 1889). Although the suffering and transience bound up in human existence are recurrent themes in Van Gogh’s mature work, he also offered “something consoling, like a piece of music” (letter 673).

______________________________________________________________

[* (as in Portrait of a Peasant (Patience Escalier) (1888), with its enhanced colours of gold and orange to suggest harvest time). The “painter of the future”, Van Gogh proclaimed, “is a colourist such as there hasn’t been before”, quoted by Emily LaBarge, ‘A New perspective on Van Gogh’s Final Flowering’, New York Times, Sept 13]

Dr Leslie Jones is Editor of Quarterly Review

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Endnotes, September 2024

Posted on August 31, 2024 by leslie

Nude statue of Mars, wall painting, Pompeii, credit Wikipedia

Endnotes, September 2024

In this edition: The Man from the Sky; orchestral music by Gerard Schurmann; wood nymphs, country songs and planets at the Proms; two ‘lost’ works by Vaughan Williams, reviewed by Stuart Millson

British composer Gerard Schurmann (1924-2020) was known chiefly for his richly orchestrated and exciting film scores, such as those which accompanied the WW2 commando story, Attack on the Iron Coast, and the historical drama, starring Patrick McGoohan, as the Napoleonic era Kent parson-turned-smuggler, Dr. Syn – Alias The Scarecrow. Schurmann also composed the score for the 1957 film, The Man in the Sky, with the much loved actor Jack Hawkins (often cast in war films) as a peacetime era test-pilot charged with flying a new type of aircraft — the music perfectly complementing the theme of the noble, obsessive aviator soaring to high altitudes; culminating in a decisive orchestral fortissimo, evoking the sheer force of human application and will. Captured on a new Chandos CD, with the BBC Philharmonic and conductor Ben Gernon in technicolor form at their state-of-the-art recording centre at MediaCity, Salford, the full power of film music — presented in its own right — gives us an opportunity to re-appraise the scintillating, sharp-edged scores of Gerard Schurmann.

Another dimension to this overlooked composer is displayed on his disc: the early 1970s’ Piano Concerto, originally written for that other ‘man of the sky’ — the brilliant John Ogdon, an artist who achieved not just a huge reputation for his playing, alone, but for the tribulations of this obsessive, psychologically tortured artist.

This season at the Proms, that other John Ogdon speciality, the half-romantic, half-20th-century Busoni Piano Concerto, was given a rare Royal Albert Hall outing. How fitting to hear the Ogdon dedicated Schurmann concerto; a work only about half the length of the Busoni, but which stands in the category of quirky concerto pieces. From its curiously, shadow-filled, slow and understated opening solo (beautifully played by Xiayin Wang — who champions this score) the work seems to function, in part and at times, as a spiky piano sonata with orchestral interventions. Judging by a remarkable photograph in the CD booklet, capturing Schurmann and Ogdon poring over the manuscript, both composer and soloist took particular pleasure in bringing the piece to life. And now that we have this fine new recording on CD, let us hope that orchestras in this country and abroad bring the Schurmann concerto into their programmes.

Meanwhile, at the Proms, unfamiliar music (‘novelties’ as the season’s founder conductor, Sir Henry Wood, described them) continue to make an appearance. Alongside the Nordic supernaturalism of Sibelius’s infrequently heard The Wood Nymph (1894-95) – a composition evoking not just the shimmering play of water that you find in The Oceanides and the forest murmurs of En Saga, but also the most delicate, dreamy orchestral cello solo – the Royal Albert Hall audience on the 25th August enjoyed Songs from the Countryside (Laulat maaseudulta) by the young Finnish-American composer, Lara Poe. Her new piece continues the Sibelian-Mahlerian tradition of rural evocation in music (in this case, the spirits and characters of farm animals as remembered by the composer’s grandmother and transcribed by Lara Poe into a completely original ‘libretto’). But it is a work conjuring a peculiar atmosphere, tinged with a surrealism every bit as beguiling and elusive as the Northern Lights, and made all the more poignant by a sharp-lined, Schoenberg like 21st-century, but completely accessible style. There is a countryside storm (an echo of Sibelius’s The Tempest) and a deeply-affecting portrait of a horse, afraid to cross bridges – a reaction caused by the animal’s reaction to seeing a bridge being destroyed in war. Sung with elemental force by Anu Komsi, soprano, it was played with total commitment and sensitivity by the combined forces of the Royal College of Music and Sibelius Academy Symphony orchestras conducted by Sakari Oramo. [Editorial note: re ‘Songs from the Countryside’, your po-faced editor begs to differ].

This super-ensemble returned in part two for Holst’s great astrological pageant, The Planets, a piece composed on the eve of the Great War. The snarl and menace of Mars, The Bringer of War brought us to the very frontline wire on the Western Front, but the orchestra then returned to the dreamy purity associated with serene Sibelian country landscapes, in Venus, The Bringer of Peace. Echoing through the great spaces of the Royal Albert Hall, the monumental, infectious rhythms of Jupiter, The Bringer of Jollity gave the orchestra a chance to show off its youth and elan, before slowly bowing out into the mysteries of distant realms and constellations in the offstage-voice-accompanied dreamscape that is Neptune, The Mystic. A ghostly, almost icy contribution here from high up in the Hall’s Gallery, sending us on our way into outer space, from the superb RCM Choir. A memorable night at the Proms – and how magnificent it was to hear the Royal Albert Hall organ – sheer granite power and weight deployed in Uranus, The Magician – played by Ben Collyer.

In concert programme notes and Vaughan Williams record sleeves of old, there were often tantalising mentions of a lost, or discarded fifth movement intended for A Sea Symphony — RVW’s first symphony. Now, thanks to the Dutton Epoch record label and the painstaking musicological restoration work of conductor, Martin Yates, that movement has emerged from the shadows and now stands as a newly-revealed section of the great English composer’s seascape. Except that the music isn’t quite a depiction of the ocean, but rather a symbol of the great quest which mankind finds himself on.

In The Steersman, Vaughan Williams again sets the North American romantic poet, Walt Whitman, whose themes of transcendence give the listener a sense of the soul breaking free above the tides and attaining glory in some unconjectured region:

‘But O ship, the immortal ship! O ship aboard the ship! Ship of the body, ship of the soul, voyaging, voyaging, voyaging.’

However, it is unlikely that this movement (sung on the CD by Jacques Imbrailo, baritone) will ever be played as part of A Sea Symphony. As Dutton Epoch’s fascinating CD booklet notes suggest, The Steersman is, in part, stylistically different from the rest of the symphony, the composer sensing, perhaps, that it was not a true part of the whole. It represents a meditation, much akin to the symphony’s second movement, On the Beach at Night Alone.

Just as we disappear into eternity at the end of Holst’s The Planets, so we find a similar escape in this ‘new’ music by Vaughan Williams, which is given that deep, dark orchestral and choral sound so necessary to its life by the BBC Symphony Orchestra and Chorus conducted by Martin Yates — among the foremost interpreters of our time of English music. With a particularly apocalyptic cover picture, and which also features a Matthew Arnold setting from 1908, The Future (with soprano, Lucy Crowe) and Andrew von Oeyen playing the solo part in the Fantasia for Piano and Orchestra, this is a CD for anyone questing for the soul of English music.

CD details:
Gerard Schurmann, orchestral works, CHAN 20341.
Vaughan Williams, The Steersman, The Future etc. Dutton Epoch. CDLX 7411

Stuart Millson is the Classical Music Editor of The Quarterly Review

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Flying Blind

Posted on August 16, 2024 by leslie

Flying Blind

Challenger: A True Story of Heroism and Disaster, Adam Higginbotham, Simon and Shuster, pp 576, reviewed by Bill Hartley

Governments can’t resist projects on a gargantuan scale and when they go wrong the disaster is of a magnitude to match the distorted ambition. Author Adam Higginbotham has already covered this ground to great effect with his 2019 book Midnight in Chernobyl. In Challenger, Higginbotham turns his attention to the Space Shuttle disaster of 1986. The image of the booster rockets separating from the craft is one of the indelible pictures of the last century. Told at a rapid pace, the reader is taken inexorably to the awful conclusion. Despite the story being well known, there is no sense of anti climax.

People of a certain age will recall the US – Soviet battle for supremacy in space. With the USSR being first to get a man into orbit, President Kennedy laid down the challenge (and the budget) to reach the moon before the end of the decade. NASA had been used to gobbling up huge sums of American taxpayer’s money but following the moon landing the public grew tired of space travel and TV networks were no longer routinely covering launches. NASA needed something (and someone) to recapture the imagination of the public.

With politicians beginning to wonder if space travel involving humans was worth the money, NASA came up with its new idea, the reusable spacecraft or shuttle. Unfortunately, the concept was born amidst something the organisation had never dealt with before, a limited budget. Higginbotham humanises the story. Space travel is inherently dangerous and the job was originally entrusted to dashing former test pilots like Colonel John Glenn. These men were put through all the rigours of pre-flight training, such as sensory deprivation tanks which involved hours underwater and the ghastly centrifuge which treated them like ingredients in a blender.

Amidst the wealth of technical detail presented in a readable way, what stands out is the development of the booster rockets, essential for getting the shuttle off the launch pad and into orbit. Budget cuts meant they were to be powered by solid fuel. Wehrner Von Braun, no less, had considered them too dangerous to be used for putting humans into space but they were cheaper than liquid fuelled rockets. The downside was that they couldn’t be turned off. This is the thread which runs through the story: cost cutting whilst working at the frontiers of technology. For example, the rockets were never tested vertically, again to save money. Crammed with volatile fuel they weighed 590 tons and presented incredible engineering challenges.

The author juxtaposes the engineering problems with the public relations aspect. Inevitably what captured the interest of the media was the crew. Previous NASA astronauts were from much the same background. Now word went out that the Shuttle’s crew would be more diverse. Higginbotham effectively sketches in the back stories of the people chosen. These are individuals the reader gets to know; the minutiae of their lives and relationships add a special poignancy to the story. They weren’t earning much either. An estate agent told one house hunting astronaut ‘a welder makes more than that’.

The Shuttle was the most complex machine ever built and perhaps chief among the many problems faced by its designers was the question of the heat shield tiles, there to protect the ship from the high temperatures to be encountered on re-entry. Each was unique, since flat tiles wouldn’t stick to the curved surfaces of the Shuttle. Failure of only one could have led to the immolation of the ship.

With talk of space travel now being within reach of ordinary people, the task of recruiting a new breed of astronaut sought to reflect this. The author describes the selection process and how, in a PR coup, schoolteacher Christa McAuliffe was chosen. The NASA test pilot old guard had their doubts about a woman among the crew with no special qualifications. She had been chosen to live out the daydreams of the many people who’d written to NASA. Kids love space travel, so what could be better than having a teacher present lessons from up there?

As NASA moved towards launch, delays and cancellations prompted media scepticism. With an eye on the political paymasters, management pressure from the top began to override the concerns of engineers. A Germanic hierarchical management structure bequeathed by Von Braun made it difficult for them to be heard. Arrogance, bullying and mismanagement weren’t the exclusive province of a Soviet totalitarian regime, revealed after Chernobyl. Ultimately the decision to launch was a dangerous compromise. As a NASA boss said, ‘otherwise we’re going to lose the programme’.

The author’s description of the final days before launch unfolds like a tragedy. Engineers from the company which built the booster rockets bravely opposed the decision to launch, often against the wishes of their own senior management, anxious to keep the contract. NASA officials applied further pressure to secure an agreement that it was possible to go ahead in icy temperatures (a supposedly once in a 100 year meteorological phenomenon which had nearly destroyed a mission the previous year). Higginbotham succeeds in creating an emotional experience, despite the reader being aware of what is to come.

Ultimately technical failures caused the loss of the Shuttle but Christa McAuliffe and her crew mates were sacrificed by flawed management and bad decision making. The final part of the book covers the aftermath and there is much to tell. Higginbotham maintains the interest post disaster, as the reader discovers what happened to the families of the crew and the engineers who had to live with the guilt. As someone noted after the inquiry, ‘reality must take precedence over public relations’.

William Hartley is a Social Historian

 

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