Gloria

 This morning Radio 3 noted the 65th anniversary of the first performance of Francis Poulenc's Gloria, in Boston, by the Boston Symphony Orchestra. The ever chirpy Tom McKinney marked the occasion by playing the first two movements of the great work (the second of which, 'Laudamus Te', was inspired, according to Poulenc, by the sight of monks playing football). Poulenc was happy with the Boston premiere – 'very good, very fine, a success' – but had found the final rehearsal even better, indeed 'sublime'. That is certainly the word for the final movement, 'Qui sedes ad dexteram Patris', surely one of the most beautiful pieces of 20th-century sacred music. Here's a link, to a performance by the same orchestra, with Kathleen Battle the soprano soloist...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=41VpR9QqHyM&list=RD41VpR9QqHyM&start_radio=1

Whiskers Then and Now

 One of the minor regrettable features of modern life (and there are plenty of major ones, heaven knows, but I'm not going there) is the prevalence of whiskers on men's faces: from the full-on righteous hipster beard to carefully curated (or not) permanent stubble, by way of every possible form of facial hair display – though Piccadilly Weepers seem to be out of favour. When did this inexorable spread of face fungus begin?  When did it become acceptable for pillars of the establishment such as BBC director generals and UK attorney generals to appear in public with stubble all over their faces? (Never, in my book.) What are they trying to tell the world? That they can't be bothered to shave? More likely, alas, that beneath that formal suit lurks a rebel soul, a pretty hip kind of guy. Where did this madness come from, and when? There's probably material for a semiological thesis there...
  With the Victorians, it seems, there's a simple answer (at least according to Richard Holmes – yes, I'm still reading The Boundless Deep, but I am reading other stuff, and I've very nearly finished). We tend to think of nearly all Victorian men as bearded, or at least extravagantly whiskered – but it was not always so: before the 1850s Tennyson, Darwin, Dickens, Charles Lyell, Edward Lear and Thomas Carlyle, to name but a few leading lights, were all clean-shaven. In 1847 there was only one bearded member of the House of Commons, and the majority of male visitors to the Great Exhibition of 1851 were not bearded. There were signs of a coming change of fashion in the early 1850s, and one of the factors driving it was that in 1850 the army had officially permitted beards and moustaches. By the mid-1850s, beards had become virtually obligatory in the fighting regiments, and the photographs that came back from the Crimean War – the first of their kind – showed our soldiers bearded to a man. It was the impact of these photographs, Holmes argues, that led the hitherto clean-shaven English to grow beards. As for Tennyson's beard, this began with an experimental prototype in 1851 (to the alarm of his long-suffering wife), then reappeared in more luxuriant form in 1853, and finally became the wondrous and fearful thing on display in Julia Margaret Cameron's literally iconic photograph, the one the poet himself described as 'the Dirty Monk'. As with so many beards, one rather wishes he hadn't...

The Corvine Ascendancy

 Every morning these days, when I stare blearily out of my bedroom window – which commands a wide view of the trees all around – I see dozens of crows, lined up ominously on every branch, as if auditioning for Hitchcock's The Birds. There is no mistaking the fact that, at least around here, crows are very much in the ascendant, along with their pied brethren the magpies, their spivvy cousins the starlings, and the less obtrusive (so far) jackdaws. Like Kay Ryan, I have a soft spot for crows, but they do seem to be having a depressing effect on the local population of smaller, sweeter-voiced birds. So far this winter in the garden – despite some proper cold snaps – I have seen none of the visitors to the feeders that I've had in previous years here: no greenfinches, chaffinches or even goldfinches, no blackcaps, no siskins. The sparrows and robins are thriving as ever, the tits are at least getting a look in – and of course wood pigeons are still waddling proprietorially around the lawn – but really it does seem to be the case that the more there are of crows, the less there is of anything else. Goldfinches – our 'proud tailors' – used to be everywhere, but I see far fewer these days, and I miss them.
Talking of which, there is a lovely little goldfinch poem by the great Russian poet Osip Mandelstam – 

My goldfinch, I'll toss back my head—

let's look at the world, you and I:

a wintry day, prickly as stubble,

is it just as rough on your eye?

Tail like a boat, black and gold plumage,

dipped in paint from the beak down—

are you aware, my little goldfinch,

what a goldfinch dandy you are?

What air there is on his forehead:

black and red, yellow and white—

he keeps a sharp lookout both ways,
won't look now, he's flown out of sight.   

Life

 Life, in twelve short lines, by the wonderful (and still with us) Dick Davis –

A Mystery Novel

Alone and diffident
You enter what is there:
The world that does not care
For your predicament,

For mysteries of who
You must become, or what
Your place is in the plot
To which you have no clue.

Turn pages; suffer time:
And, look, you are the thread
Unravelling from the dead;
The clue; the plot; the crime. 

Tennyson's Oestrus

 Edward FitzGerald (who's appeared on this blog before) was a staunch friend and supporter of Tennyson, but he was not initially much impressed by In Memoriam. Writing to Tennyson's brother Frederick, he declared that 'it seems to be with him now, at least to me, the Impetus, the Lyrical oestrus is gone...' Richard Holmes (yes, I'm still reading, and enjoying, The Boundless Deep) thinks this is 'a curiously biological term for Fitzgerald to use, as the oestrus (from the Latin) means the period of sexual receptivity in specifically female creatures. It is the time when they are capable of being made pregnant. For FitzGerald, Tennyson's real lyrical gift was in some profound sense feminine. It was a brilliant imaginative fertility.' Well, maybe, but surely it is more likely that FitzGerald was using the word in its non-biological sense. The root is the Greek oistros, a gadfly (a word Socrates used to describe himself), from which something that stings or goads one on, a stimulus, a strong impulse, and hence on to its biological meaning. Vivaldi was using the word (in its Italian form) to describe a creative impulse when he called his great collection of concerti L'Estro Armonico – and surely FitzGerald was thinking along those lines when he used it of Tennyson.  In the entry for 'oestrus' in the OED, the second citation is 'The Impetus, the Lyrical oestrus, is gone – E. FitzGerald'. In our more relaxed times, he might have said he thought Tennyson had lost his mojo. He hadn't, of course.

Guess the Author

 So, who wrote this? 

'O that we might, for one brief hour,
Forget that we are bound apart,
And lie within each other's arms,
Mouth pressed on mouth, and heart on heart.
For just one hour, from all our life,
To sink unchained through passion's deep
And, cast upon the farther shore,
To lie entwined in tender sleep!'

It has a nineteenth-century sound, this lament of a yearning lover separated by social convention ('bound apart') from the object of his/her love. But it was written well into the twentieth century, by the same hand as this, modelled on the popular Victorian song, 'After the Ball'  –

After the Bomb

After the Bomb had fallen,
After the last sad cry,
When the Earth was a burnt-out cinder
Drifting across the sky,

Came Lucifer, Son of the Morning,
With his fallen-angel band,
Silent and swift as a vulture
On a mountain-top to stand.

And he looked, as he stood on the mountain
With his scarlet wings unfurled,
At the charnel-house of London
And the cities of the world.

And he laughed..........

And as that mocking laughter
Across the heavens ran,
He cried 'Look!' to the fallen angels –
'This is the work of Man
Who was made in the image of God!'

Both this apocalyptic protest poem and the love lyric above were in fact written by one of the unlikeliest poets of the 20th century – Mary Wilson, Baroness Wilson of Rievaulx (born on this day in 1916), who survived 55 years of marriage to the pipe-smoking, Gannex-wearing prime minister Harold Wilson, and lived on to the ripe old age of 102, which made her the longest-lived of all PMs' spouses, and the only centenarian. The Wilsons' was not a straightforward marriage, and Mary might well have sought consolation – or at least yearned for it – without its bounds. Who could blame her? 
  Her Selected Poems (1970) was the fastest-selling book in Britain on its release, and ended up selling an astonishing 75,000 copies. In 1976 she was one of the three judges for the Booker Prize, flanked by Walter Allen and Francis King. The winner was Saville by David Storey.

RIP

 Sad to hear that Bob Weir, co-founder, with Jerry Garcia, of the Grateful Dead, has gone to join the great celestial jam session. There is now only one member of the original line-up alive – drummer Bill Kreutzmann, who will be 80 this year. Among other things, Weir co-wrote with lyricist Robert Hunter the jaunty love song 'Sugar Magnolia', which – fact fans – became the second most-played song of the Dead's live career (596 performances), behind only 'Me and My Uncle'... 

An Unexpected Hallelujah

 L'Arpeggiata's CD of improvisations on Purcell, Music for a While, ends with a bonus track – not another Purcell, but, rather surprisingly, Leonard Cohen's 'Hallelujah', given a very distinctive treatment by alto Vincenzo Capezzuto and members of the company. I can't say that I like Capezzuto's voice very much (he also sings ''Twas Within a Furlong', 'Wondrous Machine' and 'One Charming Night'), but the overall sound of this 'Hallelujah' is, I think, rather lovely...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CWHsJhwC4So&list=RDCWHsJhwC4So&start_radio=1

Why 'Hallelujah'? Well, Purcell's music is not short of Hallelujahs – the beautiful sequence at the end of the Evening Hymn, for example. And consider this, from a commemorative Ode (by Henry Hall) in the Orpheus Britannicus collection of Purcell's songs – 

'What art thou? From what causes dost thou spring,
O Music, thou divine, mysterious thing?
Let me but know, and knowing give me voice to sing.
Art thou the warmth in Spring that Zephyr breathes, 
Painting the meads and whistling through the leaves?
The happy season that all Grief exiles,
When God is pleased, and the Creation smiles?
Or art thou Love, that mind to mind imparts
The endless Concord of agreeing Hearts?
Or art thou Friendship, yet a nobler flame,
That can a clearer way make souls the same?
Or art thou rather, which does all transcend,
The Centre where at last the Blest ascend,
The Seat where Hallelujahs never end?'

 

Wheatley's Letter

 Dennis Wheatley (born on this day in 1897)was a phenomenally successful and prolific novelist, one of the world's best-selling writers from the 1930s through to the 1960s – after which his star sank swiftly below the horizon. He specialised in thrillers with occult themes, of which The Devil Rides Out is perhaps the only one anyone has heard of now (and maybe The Haunting of Toby Jugg). His books were still everywhere when I was a boy; I vaguely remember trying to read one and finding it unreadable. A staunch conservative, to put it mildly, Wheatley wrote in 1947, by hand, 'A Letter to Posterity', which he sealed in a bottle and buried in the foundations of his country house, Grove Place, in Hampshire. He envisaged it lying undiscovered for generations, waiting to be found and recognised as a startlingly prescient warning of things to come. But events didn't quite work out that way: after Wheatley sold Grove Place, it was demolished and, in the process, the Letter to Posterity was discovered, a mere 22 years after it had been buried. 
  Wheatley wrote the Letter on the day of Princess Elizabeth's wedding to Philip Mountbatten, pointing out, rather unnecessarily, that Elizabeth was the heir apparent, therefore in line to become Queen Elizabeth II. 'Yet,' Wheatley continues, 'our present monarch being just over 50 and in good health with a normal prospect of another 25 years of life, many people would lay heavy odds against his daughter, or any other member of his family, ever being crowned at Westminster.' So much for Wheatley's prescience (the King was dead and Elizabeth on the throne within five years). But his main purpose in writing the Letter was to warn of the consequences of socialism, a creed he heartily loathed. A Labour government was in power, and Wheatley felt that the threat of communism was growing, and that a future of subjection to leftist totalitarianism was on its way, aided by political control of the mass media. He predicted the abolition of the monarchy, national bankruptcy, and an altogether deplorable state of affairs in which all were subject to socialist planning, the 'lazy' working class were 'pampered', and the enterprising few obliged to devote their lives to making things easy for the rest. He was even appalled at the prospect of the school leaving age being raised to 16, and a five-day working week being introduced in many industries. It is perhaps just as well he's not around to see what's going on today...

Five Years Ago

Five years ago today – on the very day of Epiphany – I got up in the morning and found myself apparently unable to see with my left eye. I say 'apparently' because, when I covered my right eye, I found I could see perfectly well with my left; the problem, as I soon discovered, was with my brain. In fact, I had had a transient ischaemic attack (which my doctors have ever since referred to, unhelpfully, as a 'stroke'). It felt weird at the time, but only for an hour or two, and I was back in rude health by the next morning. 
As it happens, that day was also the day on which the third nationwide 'lockdown' of the Covid epidemic began. Our government, doggedly following 'The Science' (i.e. Chris Whitty and Patrick Vallance, the Pet Shop Boys of public health), continued to propel the nation down the slippery slope to social and economic ruin – and if Starmer had had his way, there would have been yet more lockdowns. All of this was, as we now know, to no good effect whatsoever. How long ago it seems – or does it? I am pretty sure that if the right virus came along now, the whole grisly shebang would kick off again, with lockdowns, masks, social distancing and tiers (remember tiers?). We got a whiff of it earlier this winter, when various medical experts were barely able to contain their excitement as they declared that the new 'superflu' variant would crash the NHS unless drastic measures were taken. Oddly, this did not come to pass. 

'Mystery's toys'

 It's Epiphany Sunday today. Here is something typically chastening from our best religious poet of recent times, R.S. Thomas – 

Epiphany

Three kings? Not even one
any more. Royalty
has gone to ground, its journeyings
over. Who now will bring

gifts and to what place? In
the manger there are only the toys
and the tinsel. The child
has become a man. Far

off from his cross in the wrong
season he sits at table
with us, with on his head
the fool’s cap of our paper money.


And here is an Epiphany poem by Geoffrey Hill (the setting of which is the grand parish church of Kidderminster, the largest in Worcestershire) – 

Epiphany at Saint Mary and All Saints

The wise men, vulnerable in ageing plaster,
are borne as gifts
to be set down among the other treasures
in their familial strangeness, mystery's toys.

Below the church the Stour slovens
through its narrow cut.
On service roads the lights cast amber salt
slatted with a thin rain doubling as snow.

Showings are not unknown: a six-winged seraph
somewhere impends – it is the geste of invention,
not the creative but the creator spirit.
The night air sings a colder spell to come.

This evening, having been obliged to miss all Christmas services, I shall be making my way to the cathedral for the Epiphany carol service. I look forward to being duly asperged...

Mystery Pheasant

 Well, here's a little Christmas mystery. Looking out of the window this frosty morning, I saw a scatter of white feathers on the lawn, and an avian corpse of some kind – a pigeon, I assumed, fallen victim to one of Lichfield's ubiquitous sparrowhawks. But no – when I went out to investigate, I found that what I had taken for a dead pigeon was actually an oven-ready, or almost oven-ready, pheasant. It was clearly not a bought one, as it was only partially plucked, and the weird thing was that it seemed to be pretty much untouched by crow or magpie or any carrion eater.  Perhaps, I thought, it was from someone's freezer, and was still frozen hard, the morning being so cold – I didn't care to investigate too closely, but it certainly felt hard. But how did that partially-plucked bird get from that freezer onto my lawn? Did someone throw it out? They certainly couldn't have lobbed it into my garden, even if, for some bizarre reason, they had wanted to. I don't think any bird could have carried it – maybe a fox? But why would it bother lugging a solid, uneatable bird some distance, then leaving it exposed on a lawn for any passing carrion-eater to peck at? Anyway, I moved the corpse into a more sheltered spot, where I'll keep an eye on it and see what happens next.

In other news, I saw my first snowdrops of the year yesterday – the first day of the year. This was rather more cheering than finding a frozen pheasant on the lawn.

Happy New Year

Happy New Year to all who browse here (and no, I've no idea what's going on in this image – something deeply French, no doubt). I managed to see 2026 in, despite relapsing into prostration more than once during the day. My first wish of the new year is for this cold/flu/whatever to go away and leave me in peace. As for resolutions, I just saw a rather good one online: 'This year I resolve to be less condescending (condescending means talking down to people).'